Making a far-right activist

Far-right supporters of CasaPound

How can we understand some of the factors that lead to the development of far-right beliefs and worldview in young people? Why do a certain number of people in their teens and twenties develop a political fascination with neofascism, anti-immigrant extremism, and a range of racist ideas? Is this an expression of psychopathology just waiting for a trigger? Is it the “politics of cultural despair” re-emerging in the democratic west? Is it economic hopelessness and anger?

Polish-born ethnographer Agnieszka Pasieka has spent the first years of her research career doing in-person ethnography to try to get a better understanding of this issue. Her recent Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe presents some of her findings. Here are a few short descriptions that she offers concerning the challenges presented to ethnographers who undertake to study far-right organizations and activists.

Transnational ethnography is not easy either. And neither is a (transnational) ethnography of the far right. This book is an attempt to come closer to an understanding of the ideas and practices driving the varied forms of far-right activism that have been unfolding in recent years, both locally and transnationally. It strives to problematize the very ideas of the “local” and the “transnational,” demonstrating, on the one hand, how ethnographic knowledge can help to unpack these notions and, on the other, how research of this sort is a lesson in humility, prompting us to recognize the limits of our ability to define and capture the nature of “here” and “there.” It similarly strives to unpack the notions of the “far-right activist” and the “far-right movement” by juxtaposing common assumptions about who they are and what they represent with the activists’ own understandings. For me, anthropology is the language that mediates this process. (22)

One point that she emphasizes throughout her work is the heterogeneity of paths, beliefs, and worldviews that the activists she studies have experienced. She does not suppose that there is a single pathway or set of causes that lead a young person from adolescent daily life to a political affinity with the far right.

It took time to see through the label “far-right activism” and begin to discover a complex landscape made up of individuals and community, coercion and choice, violence and friendliness, conformism and revolt. It was a journey during which I learned how to get close to and yet keep a distance from people I had previously not even considered talking to, and how to create a respectful research relationship (at times close to friendship) despite the fact that I could not, to say the least, respect some of their claims and actions. It is important to emphasize that although I was accepted as a travel companion, I remained a stranger, sometimes even a suspect one. (22)

Here she articulates two problems that almost any ethnographer must confront: to avoid easy generalizations, and to negotiate the relationship between one’s role as an investigator and the personal rapport that is required in order to gain understanding of the other person’s journey.

Pasieka’s 2022 article, “‘Tomorrow belongs to us’: Pathways to Activism in Italian Far-Right Youth Communities” (link), provides a compact exposure to her style of research and some of her central findings about far-right youth activism. She offers a short historical context of fascist ideology in Italy, and her account focuses on the orientation towards the future that she finds in the language and “grammar” of the fascist and neo-fascist movement. The ethnographic content of the article involves her profiles of three young Italian activists, each with a very different story about their route to what amounts to a neo-fascist set of political commitments. Here is the future-orientation of the fascist/neo-fascist ideology that she describes:

When analyzing their agenda, it appears clear that activists like to present themselves as drawing first and foremost on the “fascism-movement” period as opposed to the “fascism-regime” one (de Felice 1997[1975]). In providing this distinction, Renzo de Felice highlighted the vitality and the revolutionary character of the“fascism-movement,” its emphasis on rebirth and orientation toward the future (ibid.: 28–29). Present-day activists eagerly embrace this vocabulary, particularly the need to adhere to revolution and build a New Man, a new society, and a new civilization. Further, as the“fascism-movement” era was also the one in which the socialist component was accentuated, it corresponds with the view of far-right movements that they are the “true” defenders of the interests of their working-class compatriots. (158)

She describes Leo’s earliest interest in neo-fascist politics in these terms:

Leo explained that he had been an active member of Forza Nuova since late high school, when he joined a meeting after a short encounter with an FN member. Prior to that, he neither held views close to those of FN nor knew much about the group. The first thing he appreciated about it, and at the same time found to be most crucial, was the community’s desire to “break the mold” (uscire dagli schemi): to believe in and create a political alternative. (160)

In spite of her desire not to reach premature generalizations, she closes “Tomorrow belongs to us” by identifying “three key factors” in the appeal of neo-fascist organizations to Italian young people:

My analysis suggests three key factors. The first is the kind of community the far-right promises: this community is presented, and experienced, as having an educational and ethical mission, as focused on“doing,” as providing members with an unconditional support and, fundamentally, as a community that transcends here and now. It is a community grounded in some ideas from the past and simultaneously constituting a model for the future. This aspect best explains people’s fascination with fascism as a movement, such as Codreanu’s grassroots activism. The second factor is that the actions of this community address “injustice”—taking care of neglected co-nationals or forgotten Christians—and speak to the injustice militants claim they too experience. As I indicated, this relates to their experiences of and with ethno-religious diversity and migration which lead them to reevaluate the importance of being rooted in and valuing “national culture.” The community is thus a vehicle which recasts social solidarity in terms of cultural particularism (Feischmidt 2020). The third factor is a lofty vocabulary marking the community discourse: the weight given to altruism and sacrifice, and on their heroic mission and arduous path. Such a rhetoric further reinforces the value of belonging to the community and, by extension, helps to “identify” political opponents (as individualistic, disregarding hierarchies, and lacking any broader vision). (175)

And in Living Right she offers a similar diagnosis:

During a conversation with an Italian activist in which we discussed what made their project special, my interlocutor affirmed: “It is simple. We want people to fall in love with our view of the world. We want to reenchant the world.” Reenchantment—which is necessarily related to the experience of disenchantment and the experience of liberal modernity—opens up numerous interpretative possibilities. It encourages us to discuss the radical nationalist project against the background of a long tradition of antimodernist and anti-Enlightenment critique; to consider it as a kind of Occidentalist narrative; and finally—and perhaps unsurprisingly—to ask whether the process of disenchantment and reenchantment is what radical nationalist activists find most inspiring about the fascist project. (41)

The movements I have been researching are often dubbed fascist or neofascist. These terms are used in political speech meant to cast them as intransigent opponents as well as in scholarly work that tries to make sense of ongoing developments. I acknowledge the importance of the historical dimension both as a source of comparisons for scholars and also, perhaps more critically, as a source on which far-right activists flexibly draw in their interpretations of history, as well as in their activism, to bring about desired futures. While their use of “fascist” grammar and vocabulary is obvious, the ways they are deployed are less so. Rather than assuming activists’ relationship to the past, I ask: What do they do with the past, broadly conceived, to make it speak to the future? (41)

This seems to present a rather idealistic and forward-looking view of the appeal of the ideology of neofascism. And while Pasieka does not ignore the explicit racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Muslim language that is also associated with the Italian neofascist groups she studies, the issue of racism and xenophobia does not enter this closing diagnosis in an explicit way. She refers to “cultural particularism” in this summary, but the motivation of background religious and racial hatred and prejudice does not enter into her summary of the attraction of these parties to young people. We are left here with an impression of “idealistic young people” who are dissatisfied with “politics as usual” and want a new start. But this doesn’t seem to capture the core of neofascist politics and the appeal of these parties and activists.

Pasieka’s somewhat benign view of the motivations of young far-right activists seems to contrast fairly sharply with the findings of other ethnographic researchers of the far right, including Kathleen Blee and Cynthia Miller-Idriss. See in particular the virulent racism that Blee describes in her ethnography of the KKK and the emphasis on racism and violence offered by Blee and Creasap in their review article, “Conservative and Right-Wing Movements” (link). 

Right-wing movements in the United States openly and virulently embrace racism, anti-Semitism, and/or xenophobia and promote violence. They include long-standing racist movements such as the KKK; white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and white power skinhead groups; and racialist and violent groups of nationalists and patriots (Gallaher 2004, McVeigh 2009, Zeskind 2009). Their historical orientations vary, with the KKK focused on the Confederacy of the Civil War era, neo-Nazis focused on World War II–era Nazi Germany, and nationalists/patriots focused on the 1776 American Revolution (Durham 2007). Their locations also vary, as the KKK is generally in the South and Midwest, neo-Nazis across the country, and nationalists/patriots in the West and Southwest (Flint 2004a). Most right-wing groups are viciously white supremacist and anti-Semitic, regarding non-whites and Jews as inferior, destructive, and fearsome and seeking to preserve the power and privileges of white Aryans (Blee 2007b, Fredrickson 2002). (Blee and Creasap, 275)

Likewise, Miller-Idriss emphasizes the central part played by racism in mobilization of the far right in the US in Hate in the Homeland. (I should note that Miller-Idriss offers a favorable review of Living Right in Comparative Politics.)

Consider this description offered by Tobias Jones in the Guardian (2/22/2017; link) of the CasaPound movement in Italy. As a piece of documentary journalism it complements Pasieka’s ethnographic research. After describing a covert takeover of an abandoned government office building in Rome, Jones writes:

That building became the headquarters of a new movement called CasaPound. Over the next 15 years, it would open another 106 centres across Italy. Iannone, who had been in the Italian army for three years, described each new centre as a “territorial reconquest”. Because every centre was self-financing, and because they claimed to “serve the people”, those new centres in turn opened gyms, pubs, bookshops, parachute clubs, diving clubs, motorbike clubs, football teams, restaurants, nightclubs, tattoo parlours and barbershops. CasaPound suddenly seemed everywhere. But it presented itself as something beyond politics: this was “metapolitics” , echoing the influential fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who wrote in 1925 that fascism was “before all else a total conception of life”. Until then, fascist revivals had usually been seen, by the Italian mainstream, as nostalgic, uncultured and thuggish. CasaPound was different. It presented itself as forward-looking, cultured, even inclusive. Iannone had been drawn to fascism in his youth because of a “fascination with the symbols”, and now he creatively mixed and matched code words, slogans and symbols from Mussolini’s ventennio” (as his 20-year rule is known), and turned them into 21st-century song lyrics, logos and political positions. In a country in which style and pose are paramount, CasaPound was fascism for hipsters. There were reports of violence, but that – for young men who felt aimless, sidelined, even emasculated – only added to the attraction. Many flocked to pay their €15 to become members.

By the early 2000s, it was no longer taboo for mainstream politicians to speak warmly of Mussolini: admirers of Il Duce had become government ministers, and many fringe, fascist parties were growing in strength – Forza Nuova, Fronte Sociale Nazionale, and various skinhead groups. But where the other fascists seemed like throwbacks to the 1930s, CasaPound focused on contemporary causes and staged creative campaigns: in 2006 they hung 400 mannequins all over Rome, with signs protesting about the city’s housing crisis. In 2012, CasaPound militants occupied the European Union’s office in Rome and dumped sacks of coal outside to protest on behalf of Italian miners. Many of their policies looked surprising: they were against immigration, of course, but on the supposedly “progressive” grounds that the exploitation of immigrant labourers represented a return to slavery.

Like Pasieka, Jones seems to be providing a kind of “progressive populist” interpretation of this resurgence of fascism — something more hip than the old-fashioned dress, language, and symbols of the crude racism of the 1950s that young people can find an affinity with. Ironically, Jones himself seems to share some of the generational cultural discontent that Pasieka’s ethnographic subjects experience as well. Here is the publisher’s description of his book about Italy, Utopian Dreams:

This is a travel book, an account of the year Tobias Jones spent living in communes and amongst unusual dreamers. It is his attempt to retreat from the ‘real world’ – which is making him emptier and angrier by the day – and seek out the alternatives to modern manners and morality. Instead of cynicism, loneliness and depression is it possible to be idealistic, find belonging and companionship? Are there really groups that transcend the opposites of individualism and community, where you can be truly yourself but also part of something else? With his wife and baby daughter in tow, Jones visits unusual orphanages, retirement villages, detox co-operatives and old-fashioned farmyards, and spends time with spiritualists, time travellers, reformed drug addicts and Quakers. He encounters wildly different communities, some more harmonious than others, which lead him to ask the deeply unfashionable question: do groups that place faith at their centre work better than those that don’t?

The role of political education in social progress

Stephen Esquith has spent much of his career observing, teaching, and engaging in “conflict societies”, and trying to develop an understanding of how best to move from high-violence to low-violence societies. In particular he has spent a great deal of time in Mali in west Africa. He has come to emphasize the importance of “political education” as a critical ingredient of building an enduring and peaceful community. Here are several passages from his recent book Everyday Peacebuilding through Democratic Political Education where he expresses what he means by “political education”.

To achieve everyday peace between neighboring communities at odds with each other, democratic political education must lead to a dialogue, not just a ceasefire or a peace accord. Demobilization, development, and reintegration will have to be regularly renegotiated, and to do this will require a democratic political education that addresses the emotionally charged nature of this process. I have argued that the arts and humanities can prompt such a radically poised dialogue. (240)

Radical poise can do this collectively through a process of democratic political education that prepares citizens, prospective citizens, and conditional citizens to coordinate their antipodal abilities for self-restraint, resistance, humility, political respect for dignity, and protest. (230)

When appropriately cultivated through a democratic political education in the arts and humanities, radical poise in theory and radically poised processions in practice together have the potential to limit negative political emotions such as anger, hatred, and fear and to coordinate a countervailing set of political virtues (self-restraint, resistance, political respect, humility, and protest) necessary for everyday peacebuilding. [It is] the process of making of liberal citizens. (1,3)

We might paraphrase the idea of political education as “the cultivation, formal and informal, of the attitudes, beliefs, norms, and practices of members of society as they interact with other citizens”.

Esquith has the view that these processes can be facilitated by the arts and humanities, and that the arts and humanities can contribute significantly towards the development of expectations and attitudes that facilitate more peaceful inter-group interactions and cooperation.

Esquith criticizes the tradition of liberal political thought for its tendency to present the problem of political education as one of formulating convincing “theories of justice” based on independent purposive individuals, and for a parallel tendency to reduce citizenship to a purely formal status of individuals within a system of law. The moral status of citizens is reduced to the categories of clientelism and consumerism, in place of a richer phenomenology of inter-personal emotions, obligations, and loyalties. It becomes a transactional conception of citizenship.

In place of this abstract and flat conception of the “citizen” as rational and mutually disinterested individuals, Esquith advances a new conception of democratic social practice that he formulates as radical poise. This virtue is thought to be “capable of (1) coordinating the constituent political virtues and emotions of self-restraint, resistance, humility, political respect for civic dignity, and protest to counter the political violence that fuels forced displacement and (2) constituting a more inclusive demos that embodies these coordinated political virtues and emotions in the exercise of political power with one another, not over others” (Everyday Forms, 4-5). “To be radically poised in such moments of political vertigo is to be actively and imaginatively committed to expanding a diverse demos peacefully even when it seems to be splintering further apart.” (5).

The ideal that Esquith has in mind for a transition to a more peaceful Mali or other existing conflict societies is a powerful one. The goal is to help citizens to a new way of thinking about their society and their neighbors:

That is, to imagine a form of politics that is not a zero-sum competitive contest for power over others but rather a collaborative search for power with one another to constitute a political society, a demos, appropriate in scale and more inclusive in active membership that is capable of resisting and overcoming those forms of anger, fear, and hatred that stereotype and exploit forcibly displaced persons, refugees, immigrants, and fugitives and on which further political violence feeds. (13)

Esquith describes his own strategy in these terms:

My focus is on the prior democratic political education needed to limit negative political emotions and cultivate collective political virtues and the concomitant emotions that orient citizens, prospective citizens, and conditional citizens—the emergent demos—toward alternative conceptions of power so that changes in resource availability and the opportunities to use them can be realistically imagined as part of what I call a radically poised procession. (16)

And later:

To be more effective than the procedures for peacekeeping and peacebuilding that have focused primarily but with inadequate success on liberal state-building and retribution, a process of everyday hybrid peacebuilding through political education must be able to counter negative political emotions, cultivate positive political virtues, and reorient citizens and prospective citizens toward democratic conceptions of political power with mutual trust, imagination, and realistic hope. (87)

Here I would like to extend this line of thought by suggesting a parallel with the problem of moving from a society in which there is a high degree of racism and inter-group antagonism to one in which these negative social emotions have been replaced by more tolerant and respectful ideas about members of other groups. In particular, can the cultural strands of hate and racism that persist in the United States and other liberal democracies through some of the same mechanisms of education that Esquith considers for conflict societies? In my view, the parallel is a deep one. Consider this point about political respect as a democratic virtue:

I will use the word “respect” to refer to a particular kind of respectful political attitude toward others. To treat others with political respect is to respect their rights and responsibilities as equal citizens and to recognize their role in the generation and control of power. (118)

This understanding of respect is directly supportive of a deep conception of equality, and it is flatly incompatible with racism. So when processes of political education succeed in cultivating attitudes of political respect for one’s fellow citizens, these processes are also doing the work of dissolving racist attitudes and behaviors.

Esquith uses the concept of demos throughout the book. The concept requires some explication. He is explicit that the demos is the people of a state, and it is heterogeneous in multiple ways: norms, nationalities, ethnicities, and sometimes legal status (citizen, fugitive citizen, non-citizen). As in classical Greek political philosophy, the demos is distinctly different from the concept of the polis. The polis is held together by a civic culture and shared values; whereas the demos is the people of the nation without any assumption of bonds of loyalty, civic identity, or shared values.

An emergent demos of citizens, conditional citizens, and potential citizens—whatever their formal legal status—must learn to limit the negative political emotions of fear, anger, hatred, and resentment (their own as well as those of others) that drive the cycles of political violence in rich and poor countries alike. (9)

We might say that the role of political education is to find effective institutions, arrangements, and practices through which a demos is transformed into some version of a polis — a political community in which most or all citizens regard each other with respect and value each other’s dignity and freedoms. And this begins to sound more like the vision that Martin Luther King, Jr., described in his vision of a post-racist society, a beloved community.

Affirming democracy

If you are concerned about the fate of our democratic institutions, the rise of xenophobia and hate, and the rule of law, please consider visiting affirmingdemocracy.org — an ongoing group blog aimed at affirming our democracy and opposing the racism, lawlessness, and authoritarianism we now face.

This group blog describes its goals in these terms —

We are a small group of friends and neighbors who reject the turn to authoritarianism, racism, and lawlessness shown by the current Federal administration. This site will serve as a hub for sharing stories and discussions about the realities facing our country and our many communities.

We support a just and equal multicultural democracy, governed by law and constitution, and we want to work together to return our country to these values. In Rousseau’s words, we support a “free community of equals”.

We have many thoughts and fears about the policies and actions of our government today. We do not have a shared credo, but we are united in our love of freedom, equality, constitution, mutual respect, and civil community.

In particular, many of us notice many of the same things:

• We condemn the assault on immigrants and the cruel and lawless enforcement regime the Federal government has enacted.
• We are horrified at the assault on Medicaid and the likely effects these policy changes will have on millions of people in our country.
• We reject the administration’s attack on scientific and medical research, universities, and academic freedom across the country.
• We fear for the future of our country when we consider the ongoing assault on medical research and sound public health planning.
• We condemn the current administration for its lawlessness and its contempt for both Constitution and the Federal judiciary.
• We abhor the administration’s efforts to censor and dictate the museums, libraries, parks, and collections that document our country’s history and share its art, music, and literature.
• We are ashamed of our government’s desertion of Ukraine and the president’s embrace of a bloody-handed dictator, Vladimir Putin.
• We are horrified at the embrace of white supremacy and racial resentment that is encouraged by the current government.
• We reject the government’s war on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, with full awareness of how far our society must go in order to achieve real justice.

Readers of Affirming Democracy are encouraged to find their own ways of supporting peaceful protest and advocacy in support of our shared democratic values and institutions. There is power in collective protest and shared support for our constitutional system.