The far right today Open Access

Cas Mudde’s book The Far Right Today is a valuable and accessible guide to the state of far-right politics in a global perspective. Combining elements of a state-of-the-art research overview with an introductory volume for a general audience, the book features a number of strengths that stand out to academic and non-academic readers alike. Firstly, the book is truly global in scope, going beyond the European or North American ‘usual suspects’ and incorporating insights on far-right actors from Brazil and Chile to the likes of Israel, India, and Japan. Secondly, and in a related vein, the book draws on an impressive array of both wide-ranging and in-depth case knowledge across countries, something that remains unfortunately rare in the field of comparative politics more generally and research on the far right more specifically. The latter has, in recent years in particular, seen a veritable boom in broad-brush large-N studies on the one hand and qualitative contributions with area-studies foci on the other, pointing to a need for cross-regional perspectives that are sensitive to context-specific analysis as well as wider patterns. Thirdly, the book displays a welcome awareness of the double hermeneutics of how academic and media discourses are intertwined with the far right as a contemporary political phenomenon that lives off its disproportionate, often sensationalised coverage in journalistic reporting and public affairs commentary as a serious (if not the main) challenger to the political establishment. Here, a productive intersection can be seen with recent discursive scholarship that has highlighted the problematic construction of far-right parties in public discourse as ‘parties of the (white) working class’ (e.g. Mondon, 2017).

Related to this point is perhaps the main contribution of Mudde’s latest work: namely, the emphasis on the mainstreaming of the far right as the defining characteristic of the ‘fourth wave.’ In chapter 1, Mudde draws on Klaus von Beyme’s earlier work to present a periodisation of post-World War II far-right politics (pp. 11–23): from ‘neo-fascism’ (first wave, 1945–55) to ‘right-wing populism’ (second wave, 1955–80) to ‘radical right’ (third wave, 1980–2000) and, finally, the far right today (fourth wave, 2000-present), which has gained increasing acceptance as coalition partners, confidence-and-supply providers, and/or agenda setters by mainstream political parties. One aspect of this development is the adoption of nativist elements of far-right parties’ agendas in particular by established centre-right parties (e.g. ÖVP, UMP/Les Républicains), but also the transformation of previously mainstream conservative parties into radical right ones (e.g. Fidesz, PiS), which have in turn pursued a mainstreaming of extreme right-wing forces (e.g. ONR, Jobbik prior to the latter’s strategic de-radicalization) from an established or dominant position within the party system. Even in countries where such large-scale mutations have not occurred, however, the deeper problem remains that profit-driven mass media tend to ‘inflate the importance of the far right’ and end up ‘push[ing] the agenda’ of, or even endorsing outright in some cases, far-right forces by providing a constant platform for their demands to be aired (pp. 108–109). In the UK context, one need only think of Nick Griffin’s controversial 2009 appearance on Question Time or Nigel Farage’s recognisable status as one of the most frequent guests on the same programme long before the Brexit cause was mainstreamed into the forefront of the political agenda (with the support of major right-wing print media) by a divided Conservative Party in government.

There is further potential here for extending these considerations onto a critical reflection of how academics, too, talk about the far right so as to indirectly legitimise or reproduce its narratives. One example of this tendency can be seen in the argument made by a growing number of academics that far-right parties fundamentally represent the ‘losers’ of globalisation against ‘progressive’ or ‘cosmopolitan’-minded ‘winners’. The notion that contemporary societies are defined by a division between ‘cosmopolitan elites’ and ‘communitarian masses’ is not only something that could have come straight from the mouth of a Viktor Orbán or a Tom Van Grieken, but also an argument made in these very terms in a recent Cambridge University Press volume on new forms of political conflict in the twenty-first century (de Wilde, Koopmans, Merkel, Strijbis, & Zürn, 2019). Mudde himself suggests that a more differentiated view is needed in his discussion of the ‘economic anxiety’ and ‘cultural backlash’ explanations for far-right voting: while both explanations locate ‘the root cause’ for far-right support in the same phenomenon – namely ‘neoliberal globalisation’ – it is far-right narratives and their transmission belts in the mainstream media that produce a link between the cultural and economic dimensions of neo-liberal globalisation by telling voters that mass immigration is precisely what is causing perceived economic hardships (pp. 100–101). In this vein, one could go further and argue that the communitarianism/cosmopolitanism dichotomy is deeply problematic: not only does it reproduce the far right’s own narratives about cultural and economic underdogs revolting against ‘cosmopolitan elites’ (these being, of course, political constructions that can hardly be taken at face value); it does so in an empirically short-sighted manner, overlooking how certain public attitudes might also be an effect of decades of far-right messaging as well as ‘nativist narratives in the political and public debates’ (p. 101). One is reminded of Sartori’s (1990[1968]) critique of an ‘objectivist bias’ in the social sciences that always looks for deeper-lying explanations for political phenomena on the level of ‘objective’ societal factors, without considering how the political (far-right messaging in this case) itself directly intervenes into the social (the attitudinal and socio-structural positionings of so-called ‘communitarian masses’).

In addition to these strengths and potentials for critical reflection, there are a number of questions left largely unelaborated in Mudde’s book that are worth examining especially in light of recent developments both in research and in political practice. I would like to address two of these issues here, which are particularly of interest from the standpoint of ongoing scholarly debates: firstly, Mudde’s continued use of the concept of nativism in characterising the ideology of the far right; secondly, new forms of far-right organisation that have been discussed in the literature, such as the notion of ‘radical right movement parties’ (Caiani & Císař, 2019).

In his earlier book on the ‘populist radical right,’ Mudde (2007, p. 26) referred to nativism as ‘the ultimate core feature of the ideology of this party family’. At the time, Mudde’s argument in favour of using the concept of nativism, rather than nationalism, was that the latter is fraught with indeterminacy, as seen in the sheer ‘plethora of subtypes’ in use in the literature – from ethnic to liberal or even ‘multicultural nationalism’ (Mudde, 2007, pp. 16–17). The obvious counterargument here would be that this is because nationalism is a thin-centred ideology, as Freeden (1998) has argued – a notion that Mudde, of course, drew on in his theory of populism, which is geared precisely toward allowing for the identification of a wide range of subtypes. With nationalism, too, there is potential for nuanced analysis in identifying different subtypes within the universe of far-right politics (from ethnic and irredentist for Jobbik to liberal and anti-Islam for Fortuyn, etc.). If nativism, however, is conceptualised as ‘a combination of nationalism and xenophobia’, as Mudde reaffirms in chapter 2 of his 2019 book (p. 27), it, too, essentially becomes reduced to a subtype of nationalism, raising the question what the distinct value of the concept ultimately is. This is compounded by the fact that Mudde’s definition of nativism as the idea that ‘states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group’ (p. 27) comes close to classic definitions of nationalism such as Gellner’s (1983, p. 1), in which nationalism is understood as ‘a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’. An alternative approach here would be to conceptualise nativism in narrower terms as opposition to (actual or would-be) immigration – which can take on nationalist or other forms of expression, such as classist, regionalist, or indeed ‘civilizationist,’ as Brubaker (2017) has argued in the case of far-right appeals to ‘European civilization’ against specifically Muslim immigration in the context of the so-called refugee crisis.

A second set of questions arises in relation to (new forms of) political organisation. In chapter 3, Mudde distinguishes between three broad forms of far-right organisation: political parties, social movement organisations, and subcultures. This is followed by an illuminating discussion of CasaPound Italy as an example that ‘brings all three types of organization together’ (pp. 68–70), as can be seen in its distinctive combination of social centres, self-help organisations, and electoral candidacies. The implication here is that while the boundaries between party, movement, and subculture can certainly be crossed, it is necessary to analytically establish to what extent elements of one or more of these forms are indeed anchored in the organisational structure of a far-right group. A problematic tendency in recent scholarship is arguably the inflationary use of the notion of ‘movement party’ – including those of the ‘radical right’ (Caiani & Císař, 2019) – to describe a dual orientation toward protest and institutional activity, often without looking deeper into the interplay of party and movement forms on the level of organisational structures. This can be particularly problematic in cases like the Alternative for Germany (AfD), where Björn Höcke has taken up the notion of ‘movement party’ on a rhetorical-performative level (as he did in a 2017 speech to youth wing activists), even though the designation hardly applies to the party in an organisationally meaningful sense (e.g. in terms of integrating extra-parliamentary movements via platforms within the party). Here, too, it is worth emphasising the double hermeneutics of how academics might end up reproducing the far right’s own narratives without always thinking through the conceptual and analytical (let alone practical-political) implications of their research.

In sum, Cas Mudde has written an important and timely book that is well worth a read for interested researchers not least for the wealth of potential for critical reflection and further debate that it offers, even where this is not explicitly spelled out within the context of an accessible introductory book for a general audience.