Suchergebnisse

Boris Johnson's electoral victory and the 2020 culmination of Brexit are accelerating Britain's shift towards the right and towards open criticism of technocracy in the UK and EU. Since 2016 the UK's political atmosphere has polarised into hostile extremes. The continuation of this toxicity beyond Brexit, the dominance of nationalist narratives as Britain's new 'politics of everything' (Valluvan 2019). While the Conservative Party remains traditionally centre-right and the Brexit Party has ceased to be relevant, the UK continues to witness the growth of the far right and what is called here the 'Radical Right', which have been accelerating since 2016, rapidly gaining influence (Norris and Inglehart 2019: 443-472), and 'mainstreaming' (Miller-Idriss 2017) in the Conservative majority elected in December 2019. The past four years have seen growing British contempt for technocracy in London and Brussels, while the Leave vote has been represented as a "Will of the People" antithetical to a Remain/Revoke/Second Referendum position, often portrayed as an anti-democratic scheme by "the elite" to frustrate the will of "the people". This 'us and them' populist narrative is deepening as the UK's volatile political environment moves away from the political procedures and economic values by which the UK has operated since 1945. Since early 2020, this narrative has been significantly accelerated by Covid-19 countermeasures, with anti-EU parties and narratives on the left and right becoming anti-lockdown or anti-vaccine parties and narratives. This paper approaches the radical right as emblematic of British politics' shift from centrism towards polarised factions defined not by party but by support or contempt for technical governance. In this paper we propose a new explanatory basis for studying the populist radical right not as a temporary phenomenon in response to specific political events and conditions, but as a fluid, amorphous, and heterogeneous set of groups, parties, and narratives whose strategies, appeal, and narratives make them extremely adaptable, and significant as a force with substantial influence of politics into the future.

Abstract
Much research has sought to map the spread of extreme and populist political ideologies across Western Europe. Despite this, it often fails to explain how these ideologies move from the political fringes to positions of influence, subverting the traditional cordon sanitaire around extreme views. As a result of recent successes by populist actors, a more nuanced understanding of this process is required.
This paper posits an explanation for this success, suggesting that the growing pluralisation of the online media environment and the impact of social media content sharing are key to understanding how fringe political actors avoid both overt and implicit barriers to popularising extreme positions. Using data from the British Election Study, this paper offers a quantitative test of this approach, finding an inconsistent relationship between social media use and extreme political opinions. Potential explanations for this are discussed alongside possible directions for future research.

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. Much research has sought to map the spread of extreme and populist political ideologies across Western Europe. Despite this, it often fails to explain how these ideologies move from the political fringes to positions of influence, subverting the traditional cordon sanitaire around extreme views. As a result of recent successes by populist actors, a more nuanced understanding of this process is required. This paper posits an explanation for this success, suggesting that the growing pluralisation of the online media environment and the impact of social media content sharing are key to understanding how fringe political actors avoid both overt and implicit barriers to popularising extreme positions. Using data from the British Election Study, this paper offers a quantitative test of this approach, finding an inconsistent relationship between social media use and extreme political opinions. Potential explanations for this are discussed alongside possible directions for future research.

Ten essays on the nature of fascism by a leading scholar in the field, focusing on how to understand and apply fascist ideology to various movements since the twentieth century, Mussolini's prophesied 'fascist century'. Includes studies of fascism's attempted temporal revolution; Nazism as extended case-study; and fascism's postwar evolution.

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part 1 Ezra Pound, Modernist and Fascist -- 1. An Ideologue's Journey: Ezra Pound from Tradition in Italian Fascism to the Postwar Fascist Tradition -- 2. The 'Pound Case' in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview -- 3. Ezra Pound and Ernst Kantorowicz: From Medieval to Modern Autocracies -- 4. Make it Crude: Ezra Pound's Antisemitic Propaganda for the BUF and PNF -- 5. Reappraising the 'Pound Case', 1940-45 -- 6. Ezra Pound's Political Faith from First to Second Generation -- or, "It is 1956 Fascism" -- 7. 'Penny-wise…': Ezra Pound's Posthumous Legacy to Fascism -- 8. "Fascism for the Third Millennium": An Overview of Language and Ideology in Italy's CasaPound Movement -- Part 2 War and Empire: The Fascist Way and the Liberal Way -- 9. The Holocaust in the NDH: Genocide between Political Religion and Religious Politics -- 10. Showing the 'Unshowable'?: A Generation of "Mainstream" Films on the Shoah -- 11. "Intellectual" Discourses on the Radical Right: From Double-Speak to Holocaust Denial -- 12. On Radical Right Mainstreaming in Europe and the US -- 13. On 'Lone Wolf' Terrorism -- 14. Terrorist 'Radicalising Networks': A Qualitative Case Study on Radical Right Lone-Wolf Terrorism -- 15. Choose Definitively Between Hell and Reason -- 16. 'It became Necessary to Destroy the Town to Save it': The United States Between Liberalism and Warfare before Donald Trump -- 17. A Failed Just War in Iraq -- Part 3 Ends and Odds -- 18. Between 'Geist' and 'Zeitgeist': Martin Heidegger as Ideologue of Metapolitical Fascism -- 19. Hate Globally, Act Locally: A Case Study of Universal Nazism Online -- 20. A Case Study in Soviet Political Religion: Modernism and the Construction of a Stalinist Utopia -- 21. Samuel Beckett's Nominalist Politics and the Pitfalls of 'Presentism' -- Sources List.