The proximity of the ‘far’ right

Blog post by Liam Gillespie, University of Melbourne, Australia
 
It is often said that we are living in a period characterized by the ‘main-streaming’ of the far right. The idea is that the previously unacceptable ‘fringes’ of society – the literally ‘far’ right – have come to increasingly occupy and influence the mainstream or ‘centre’ of society, effectively becoming part of it. Commonly cited indicators for this idea include the return – and indeed in some cases the re-election – of political figures like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei and Geert Wilders, all of whom have successfully tapped into and normalized racism, ethnic nationalism, xenophobia, misogyny, transphobia (and more) to achieve political success.
 
Consequently, research on the far right is booming, and much of the emerging literature now attempts to understand how and why the far right has come to be mainstreamed and normalized.

While much of this work is vital, in my Identities article, ‘On the proximity of the far right and the misuses of the ‘mainstreaming’ metaphor’, I critically analyze some of the (unintended) effects of the mainstreaming explanation. I suggest that the mainstreaming framework can sometimes work ideologically to obscure the very conditions of possibility that have allowed the far right to seem to emerge.
 
I suggest that the mainstreaming explanation can paradoxically work to render the far right distant and divorced from the everyday structures of the nation even as it attempts to account for the presence of the former in the latter. This is because even critical appraisals of the mainstreaming phenomenon, which generally examine not only the role of the far right, but that of the mainstream as well, can nevertheless unintentionally produce the two as distinct and separable entities. Indeed, this is conveyed implicitly by the very term ‘mainstreaming’ itself, insofar as its verb form denotes a process through which one distinct thing comes to influence and/or inhabit another (regardless of which is to ‘blame’, and to what extent).
 
I argue that when researchers of the far right ontologize the far right and mainstream in this way, they run the risk of not only failing to see, but of actively obscuring how the underlying structures of the liberal west have not only allowed far right phenomena to thrive, but have produced them. Thus, although generally well intentioned, I argue such accounts can produce a politics of innocence that covertly purifies the mainstream by portraying the far right as something that originates outside of the ‘centre’ of society, and has supposedly only now come to pervert it. In essence, such readings posit an anterior scene when ‘the far right’ wasn’t always already proximate.
 
My argument, therefore, is that through its very attempt to explain how far-right violence has become un-exceptional, the mainstreaming explanation can paradoxically exceptionalize far-right violence by portraying it as a deviation from, or aberration to, the liberal societies from within which it is understood as merely occurring, rather than originating.
 
To unpack this argument, I draw from the frameworks of ‘reactionary democracy’ (Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter), the ‘racial contract’ (Charles W. Mills), and ‘white reconstruction’ (Dylan Rodríguez). I argue that whereas liberal mythology typically attempts to minimize white supremacy by confining it to the past, as something society has supposedly already ‘overcome’, that by contrast, the mainstreaming explanation can work in an inverse way by instead confining white supremacy to the present, such as by depicting it as a ‘new’ problem that has supposedly only recently arisen.
 
I argue that to follow this line of thought, and diagnose white supremacy as entering the mainstream only with the return of figures like Donald Trump, Pauline Hanson, the Proud Boys, and so on, is to deny the larger and longer histories that have functioned as their conditions of possibility, and which can be traced back to the very formation and maintenance of the ‘liberal’ settings within which they have seemed to ‘emerge’.
 
My article concludes by considering its implications for those of us working in the field of ‘far-right studies’ (as loosely defined). If ‘the far right’ is not so far away at all, but rather, is and has always been proximate to the everyday structures of the liberal democratic nation, then we may need to reckon with the extent to which we ourselves are implicated, if indeed we are.
 
Acknowledgement:
The author thanks those who attended Criminology’s Barry Symposium at the University of Melbourne in 2023, where an earlier version of this article was presented. Thanks in particular to Sahar Ghumkhor for providing feedback on an earlier draft, and to the editor and reviewers for their generous insights.

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Image credit: Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
Gillespie, Liam. (2024). On the proximity of the far right and the misuses of the ‘mainstreaming’ metaphor. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2442197   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

Whiteness, populism and the racialisation of the working class in the United Kingdom and the United States
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Post-homophobic imaginaries amongst the far-right in Germany and Switzerland

Rethinking ‘nativism’: beyond the ideational approach   OPEN ACCESS