Against the current—stemming the tide: the nostalgic ideology of the contemporary radical populist right

Abstract

Since the 1980s, a growing number of radical right‐wing populist parties have managed to establish themselves permanently in the party systems of advanced liberal capitalist democracies. Initially dismissed as ephemeral reflections of a general debasement of politics in recent years, they represent today one of the most serious challenges to liberal democracy in Western Europe and elsewhere. Unlike the traditional postwar radical right, the contemporary populist right has developed an ideology that, albeit fundamentally anti‐liberal, is compatible with the basic formal principles of democracy. Radical right‐wing populist ideology is anti‐elitist, appealing instead to the common sense of ordinary people; exclusionary, appealing to the right to cultural diversity and identity; and openly discriminatory, appealing to the right to ‘national preference’. The larger goal behind the radical right‐wing populist political project is to halt and reverse the erosion of the established patterns of ethnic political and cultural dominance.