Studying the far right today: Thinking with and beyond Mudde

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 stateof-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 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 is 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 explosion of broad-brush large-N studies on the one hand and qualitative contributions with area-studies foci on the other, pointing to a need for crossregional perspectives that are sensitive to contextspecific 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 approaches that have highlighted the problematic construction of categories such as ‘the (white) working class’ as a supposedly core constituency of the far right. 

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.’ Mudde presents a periodisation of post-World War II far-right politics, drawing on Klaus von Beyme’s earlier work (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 rightwing forces (e.g. ONR, Jobbik prior to the latter’s strategic de-radicalisation) 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 heard (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. As Mudde and others have rightly pointed out elsewhere, there is a problematic tendency in social-science research to conflate populism with the far right; arguably no less problematic, however, is the notion peddled by a growing number of social scientists 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 2019 Cambridge University Press volume on new forms of political conflict in the 21st century. 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 farright support in the same phenomenon – namely ‘neoliberal globalization’ – it is far-right narratives and their transmission belts in the mainstream media that themselves 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). If this is the case, one ought to 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 on shoddy empirical grounds, 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 here of Sartori’s 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 (farright messaging in this case) itself directly intervenes into the social (the attitudinal and socio-structural positionings of so-called ‘communitarian masses’). 

In sum, this is an important and timely book that is well worth a read not least for the potential that it offers for critical reflection on public discourse and academic research practices alike on the topic.