What Counts the Far-rights: Histories, Politics, and Their Variations

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Partisanship (Table 14)

Abstract

Which components, or sets of components, constitute the underlying characteristics of the far-right? Since the U.S. election in 2016, the Trump administrations and subsequent rise of conservative political parties around the world have stimulated a new round of debate over populism, conservatism, and far-right politics. Contemporary scholarship has offered diverse explanations based on identity, gender, class, digital media, and demographic shifts across both North American and European contexts. However, studying far-right social and political organizations in the U.S. and Canada indicates a particular inconsistency: in cases of far-right movements, especially on their extreme ends of white supremacism, male supremacism, and Neo-Nazi organizations, they do not necessarily adhere to their own proclaimed ideological principles. In facing countermovement and collective actions problem, these organizations tend actively modify, discard, and even act in self-contradictory ways regarding their own radical notions, such as violent disruptions, harassing racial minority, and overt displays of neo-Nazi insignia. We argue that explaining such an inconsistency requires an identification of tension between the instrumentality of mobilizational repertoires and their inherent capacity to regulate organizational ethos. It reveals a theoretical uncertainty during the cultural turn in social movement theory, which has contributed to the rise of a relational approach to contentious politics. In this paper and the broader project on far-right in North America, we offer an alternative paradigm based on classical and contemporary social movements theories to reshape the understanding of far-right with three critical focus: 1) tensions between far-right as a reactionary movement and state-society interactive dynamic outcome; 2) tensions between far-right as a structurally confined contention and countermovement within a liberal democratic setting; 3) tensions between far-right as an durable force against democracy and community space building efforts.

Authors

• Zitian Sun, McGill University

• Alessandro Giuseppe Drago, University of Notre Dame