Charismatic Leadership and the Far Right

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Moreover, despite the media narrative of the extreme right being engaged in exciting, clandestine activity, often this is not the case. As Kathleen Blee highlights in her “Democracy in the Making,” the minutia of day-to-day activism at a grassroots level is typified by stretches of time that are quite boring.

When I read through the monthly action reports of a British accelerationist National Action for research, what came through was that most of the activities of this deeply concerning group were quite dull and mundane. Walking in the hills and then giving out some leaflets to people while waiting for the train to go home summarized one day of “action.”

Collective Effervescence

The answers can perhaps be found through better development of qualitative datasets that convey the affective aspect of such activism, the types of material often, but not always, minimized by quantitative, policy-focused approaches. In particular, mood and emotion are central to the ways in which far-right politics makes sense to those drawn to it. Yet while often acknowledged as important, for the most part, not enough attention is given to how an affective dimension shapes such politics.

One notable area of departure here is the work of ethnographers, who often talk about emotion in their studies. Many of those who work on the extreme right highlight that mood and emotion are crucial to why people find an attraction in fringe politics and extremism. Sometimes, these emotive aspects are found in the cultural worlds created by the movement. Other times, the ideas of the movement are less appealing, but emotive aspects of shared engagement in something play a crucial role in holding activism together.

Echoing Emil Durkheim’s notion of the crowd creating a sense of “collective effervescence,” influential researchers like Fabian Virchow have stressed that phenomena such as neo-Nazi marches should be seen as “politico-emotional events.” The intangible sense of atmosphere is crucial to seeing why these spaces may appeal to those drawn to them. Given their public nature, marches as affective occasions are, perhaps, among the most noticeable arenas for considering the politics of emotion within the extreme right.

Emotions are found throughout the movement, as they are in all aspects of life. When activists’ emotions have been discussed through interviews, research can sometimes focus on common and, at times, narrow emotional dynamics of activists. Matthew Goodwin’s use of interviews in his , “New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party,” for example, allowed him to explore a range of activists from the BNP at its height in the 2000s.

Goodwin highlighted that the party was driven by the attitudes of often angry white men and that this anger was a unifying emotion. Such work also helped to show that people were attracted to the movement in the 2000s despite the supposed aura of the party’s leader, Nick Griffin, and often saw their local community groups as giving their activism a sense of purpose.

The work of Hillary Pilkington, featuring interviews with grassroots activists within the English Defence League, has been able to present at a similar but broader sense of the emotional repertoires of political activism. Her excellent “Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League,” interviewees who often expressed more than anger, speaking of pride and passion as their activism allowed them to overcome a feeling of being disempowered. Often, these positive, affirming emotional aspects of engagement could not be sustained, leading to a decline in engagement that could also be rekindled.

Mehr Latif has considered this issue as well. She was the lead author on another fascinating study, an icle in Humanity and Society titled “How Emotional Dynamics Maintain and Destroy White Supremacist Groups.” This analysis examined how the study of emotions provides an analytical bridge between individual cognition among activists and wider group structures. As the title suggests, a better assessment of emotions can help establish an understanding of how specific extreme-right groups stabilize and destabilize over time.

Human Phenomena

Such focus on the role of emotions within the extreme right, among some researchers at least, also raises the important question of what constitutes an emotion. Most people are very aware they have “feelings” and can relate these to seemingly similar feelings expressed by others, but emotions themselves are difficult to fully define. There is a vast philosophical and scientific literature exploring the nature of emotions, whether they are biological phenomena or constructed through cultural practice, and this short article cannot do these debates justice. Yet these debates are relevant to researchers focused on the extreme right.

For example, if I believe in an ideology that proposes that society could be “purer” and “better” somehow, and I also believe that there are forces like corrupt elites guiding phenomena such as immigration to actively prevent this better society from existing, at the very least I am likely to feel a profound sense of disappointment. For philosopher Michael Brady, emotions such as disappointment often involve six elements: perception, evaluation, bodily change and expression, awareness of a “feeling,” motivation to act, and deeper thinking.

With this in mind, whatever else emotions are, they are a human phenomenon that links ways of interpreting the world to bodily perceptions and behaviors. Emotions are also phenomena that are shared through cultures, and specific subcultures develop particular emotive contexts. As many ethnographers have drawn out, extreme-right activism can allow people to feel a shared sense of emotional community in such milieus, something they do not find elsewhere.

Therefore, thinking about how emotions are developed, how they impact extreme-right activists and, indeed, how they often become crucial in shaping perceptions of the very purpose of activism ought to be providing richer pathways for research. Where ethnography has demonstrated the importance of emotions, other areas, such as data analyses of extreme-right social media, historical analysis of past groups, and studies of the dynamics of extreme-right terrorism and violence should pay more attention to the emotional contexts and how these “make sense” to those who are navigating through the emotional spaces of the extreme right.

In sum, there is an “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences, and scholars of the extreme right are likely to find this field of great importance to their work.

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“What was most impressive, on first contact with Codreanu, was his physical appearance. Nobody could pass him by without noticing him, without being attracted by his look, without asking who he was. His public appearance provoked curiosity. This young man seemed a god descended among mortals … Looking at him, you felt dazed. His face exercised an irresistible fascination. He was a ‘living manifesto’, as the Legionaries used to call him.”

Such a description, highlighting an emotive, passionate and even irrational bond between a fascist and his leader, is a typical expression of the charismatic leader dynamic. Though this is an important phenomenon to consider, it can also sometimes be rather lazily used as an essential component of the far right and needs to be used with care.

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When surveying the emergence of terms such as charisma, charismatic leadership and so forth, it is impossible not to start with the founding sociologist Max Weber. He argued that political legitimacy came in three varieties: traditional, legal bureaucratic and charismatic. Traditional authority operates through customs providing validity to a leader’s decisions, such as with a monarchy; legal bureaucratic works through an impersonal system of rules providing authority, such as within a liberal democracy; and charisma, meaning “gift of grace,” sees authority emanating from the extraordinary nature of a leader, as understood by followers. For Sima, Codreanu clearly evoked the latter.

Weber added some further nuances to his concept as well. In particular, he wrote of the sense of mission that a charismatic leader evokes, a cause shared by his or her followers, giving their charisma a sense of purpose. For those who do not share this mission, such leaders are unlikely to hold much charismatic appeal. The leader generates their sense of having special qualities by, effectively, becoming a living embodiment of a passionately held cause. They do this as they, somehow or other, go beyond that of others who share the same sense of mission.

Charismatic bonds between leader and follower are not created by a leader alone but are a phenomenon that emerges from the shared, affective dimension between leaders and followers. As Ann Ruth Willner : “[C]harisma is defined in terms of people’s perceptions of and responses to a leader. It is not what the leader is but what people see the leader as that counts in generating the charismatic relationship.”

The Duce

Charisma has been a term applied to many fascist leaders. Emilio Gentile, in Modern Italy in 1998, uses Weber’s approach to examine Benito Mussolini’s charisma as emanating from his political mission. He concludes that the Duce experienced periods of greater and lesser charismatic appeal: Firstly as a socialist leader before the First World War, then as a leader of a new radical nationalist movement urging Italy to enter the war, and then once again his charisma grew during the rise of the fascist movement in Italy. Charisma was not a constant, but something that could grow and wane.

Of course, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich has been a particular focus for charismatic leadership. John Breuilly, in Nations and Nationalism in 2011, states that charismatic leadership was not typical of all nationalist movements, but was common in fascists such as Codreanu, Mussolini and particularly Hitler. The interwar German conditions were unique. As he explains, in modern-day contexts, “it is the product of massive breakdowns of impersonal forms of modern authority that opens up a particular space, although there has to be someone capable of filling that space and, in Hitler’s case, a unique sequence of events leading to charismatic power.”

Aristotle Kallis, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions in 2006, also critically engages with Weber’s model and explains the need to differentiate between the leadership cults of movements and regimes, and their ability to foster of a genuine charismatic community. The former did not guarantee the latter, and an authentic charismatic community was only partially developed even in the Third Reich. Even here, Kallis stresses that Weber’s other forms of authority — traditional and legal — continued to hold some influence.

Roger Eatwell developed another influential analysis of fascist charismatic leadership, building critically on Weber’s model. Writing in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right in 2018, he that as well as mission and personal presence, charismatic leaders promote a Manichean division of the world to help legitimize their emotive bonds with followers. Moreover, he stresses the need to consider the role of charismatic leadership at the level of the coterie, focusing on how the phenomenon helps bind together radical political groups.

The question regarding the continued importance of charismatic leadership in more recent populist parties has also been much discussed. Duncan McDonnell an essay in Political Studies that explores charisma at the level of the coterie, focusing on perceptions of charisma amongst populist party members, both elected officials as well as grassroots activists. His approach urges care in applying the term, while by examining interviews with party coteries, he helpfully exemplifies how charisma needs to be studied through assessing the interactions between leaders and followers. As well as concluding that Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Switzerland’s Christoph Blocher were partial charismatic leaders, he concludes that Umberto Bossi was an archetypal charismatic leader of the Northern League — yet this meant his downfall caused the Italian party much damage as a consequence.

Whether charismatic leadership is an essential component of populism has also been debated. Takis S. Pappas, in the Routledge International Handbook of Charisma, states that “populism and charismatic leadership are inescapably interrelated and should always be studied conjoinedly.” Contrastingly, in The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership, Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasse that populism is a complex, variegated phenomenon with many forms of leadership; charismatic leaders are one among various styles among populists, which can even include no leader at all. The latter point seems to echo the cautionary use of the term among historians of fascism. Notably, Roger Griffin resisted using charisma as a defining aspect of fascism in his influential model of the ideology.

The Short Shelf Life of Charisma

Nevertheless, some of the most striking figures in recent years in the far right have been charismatic in their style. Donald Trump, the former US president, powerfully unleashed a form of charismatic leadership as he generated an affective bond between himself as a leader and a wider following through a shared sense of mission. However, even this mission does have a shelf life and will not last forever, as his election defeat in 2020 suggests.

I wrote a short for The Guardian in 2019 reflecting on Trump as a charismatic leader and predicted a decline in his charismatic appeal over time. Some waning of his charisma has clearly occurred since then, although the study of charisma shows us the phenomenon can ebb and flow. Trump, after all, retains great influence within the Republican Party and continues to enjoy a widespread aura of infallibility among a largescale movement that supports his mission and sees him in emotive, superlative ways.

As a historian, I leave it to others to predict where this may go in the next few years, but more widely, the relationship between the populist and fascist right and charismatic leaders is both complex and ongoing. For those studying this in the coming years, it is important to focus on the limits of the charisma model as well as its strengths, and it is unhelpful if used to try to explain everything. It is also crucial to consider how people project onto leaders a perception of them as charismatic. After all, charisma does not come from a leader alone — it is projected onto him or her by others. Without this atmosphere, such leaders often have little else to offer. 

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In Britain alone, there is already a spectrum of responses, each created separately but also forming, in a way, a collective, extreme-right stance. For example, Nick Griffin has tweeted his strident opposition to the lockdown, and the British National Socialist Movement has been uploading fascist memes to its Telegram page, including one arguing the Nazi salute is the most hygienic form of greeting during this health crisis.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, has created a video where he confronts a group of men of color after they allegedly coughed at an elderly white couple. There has also been a rise in conspiracy theories alleging that the 5G networks are really responsible for the coronavirus, as espoused by groups such as the Hundred Handers.

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The manner in which these and many other nodes within the extreme-right space are making politics separately but around a common theme during this crisis is illustrative of groupuscular dynamics. But what does such an obscure terminology really mean? In sum, this represents a conceptual approach that highlights that the extreme right is not a single entity but rather is a highly diverse, polycratic movement set across countless small organizations, or groupuscules.

Conceptual Toolbox

The terms groupuscule (a small group), groupuscules (a number of small groups) and groupuscular (a dynamic created by small groups) entered into the conceptual toolbox of researchers around 20 years ago. The terms drew on the French word groupuscule, or small political group, and were given greater conceptual focus by Roger Griffin and Jeffrey Bale, among others. They have become a frequent, albeit at times awkward, aspect of the analytical language of extreme-right studies. This language remains useful for thinking about the peculiar dynamics of the extreme right today and in the future.

In 2004, Roger Griffin explained, in an for the German journal Erwägen Wissen Ethik, that since the end of the Second World War, fascism had adapted. It was akin to slime mold, “a slug-like entity that forms from countless single cells in … conditions of extreme damp … [t]hough it has no central nervous system, it has the mysterious property of forming a brainless, eyeless super-organism that somehow moves purposefully like a mollusc animated by a single consciousness.”

Unpacking this obscure metaphor, Griffin stressed before the Second World War, fascists had been able to generate enough support to become large, impactful organizations, while after 1945, most remained tiny, fragmented, yet in some ways also able to act collectively. While much more marginal, fascists and the wider extreme right had found ways to modify their organizations after 1945 and collectively were more significant than the sum of their parts.

In other articles, Griffin expanded further. In 1999, he the concept in a study of the tiny French organization, the Groupe d’Union et de Défense (GDU). Here, he stressed that, though the GDU was tiny, it was crucial to understand the role of this groupuscule in the “circuit board” of the wider French extreme right, which was able to function in a more potent way due to the GDU’s presence. In another from 2003, Griffin defined groupuscules as a “small political (frequently meta-political, but never primarily party-political) entities formed to pursue palingenetic (i.e. revolutionary) ideological, organizational or activist ends with an ultimate goal of overcoming the decadence of the existing liberal democratic system.”

This key article set out some further definitional features. It distinguished between “monocratic” and “polycratic” movements, highlighting the extreme right was usually polycratic in nature. Monocratic movements were cohesive and relatively coherent phenomena, while polycratic movements were much more diverse, made up of many competing and contrary parts and so lacked clear, singular leadership.

To help flesh out the theme, he reflected on the distinction set out by poststructuralist philosophers between arboreal and rhizomic structures. Arboreal structures resemble trees, with a taproot, a main trunk and smaller branches reaching out to form a wider canopy. In a way, mass political parties chime with this dynamic. Rhizomic structures are true grassroots networks and lack a single taproot. They form messy, tangled networks, lacking clear beginnings and ends, like the roots of grass.

For Griffin, this distinction was crucial. Monocratic, arboreal organizations could emerge from rhizomic, groupuscular networks. For example, in interwar Germany, the NSDAP was a singular (monocratic, arboreal) mass party that grew from the more amorphous (polycratic, rhizomic) Völkish movement. The extreme-right networks that developed after the Second World War that have been far more marginalized have remained largely rhizomic. They not only lack a strong, singular organizational structure but also some at least thrive without this.

Central Characteristics

In the early 2000s, networks such as the neo-Nazi Blood & Honour movement exemplified the tendency. Set across multiple discrete groups and found in many European countries as well as developing competing divisions in America, Blood & Honour epitomized the decentralized, rhizomic, polycratic nature of much of the extreme right. The Christian Identity movement was another clear case in point for Griffin. Again, this was a movement set across a range of “churches,” each with differing interpretations of the Christian Identity faith.

Other scholars picked up on Griffin’s core assertions. highlighted there could be four central characteristics that extreme-right groupuscules developed: political parties, as they sought wider support; pressure groups, as they could attempt to influence the political process using direct action; terrorist organizations, as they were political and violent; and armies, as they incorporated paramilitary aspects and drew on a culture of discipline. Bale stressed that groupuscular cultures were not static either and changed dramatically over time. Individual organizations came and went, but the groupuscular dynamic meant the movement could adapt to changing conductions to survive.

focused on the Canadian organization the Heritage Front, which she argued developed over time into an increasingly groupuscular structure, moving away from being a larger more arboreal style organization. She noted how it could find advantages by adapting to a smaller size. This allowed its political messages to become more ambiguous, incorporating a range of seemingly incompatible views, from the endorsement of Christian Identity ideas to the promotion of the anti-Christian World Church of the Creator. She also argued being smaller helped it outmaneuver attempts by the state and antifascists to limit its activities.

Picking up on this theme of the benefits of groupuscularity, studied the German Freie Kameradschaften movement through this type of conceptual modeling. Focusing on Aktionsbüro Norddeutschland, he stressed that the rhizomic nature of this movement allowed it to develop a range of cells that could offer different ideas to different audiences, from elements steeped in the ideas of Julius Evola to others based around white-power music. The network could develop different components that could attract people from different classes and ages. Moreover, because it was not grounded in a single arboreal structure, if one small element disbanded, there were always other places for those attracted to the movement to go. And finally, he concluded that “the fact that the movement consists of a great number of mostly small or even virtual groups with little or no formal hierarchy or rigid organizational matrix makes it practically unbannable.”

To highlight just some of the others who have used the framework since these early discussions, has drawn on the concept to explore the ideas and networks developed by Troy Southgate. used the terms for assessing the history of the early postwar fascist group the European Liberation Front. have drawn on this vocabulary to critically assess Estonian extreme right groups, and has developed the terminology to examine the dynamics of Russian organizations such as the National Bolshevik Party.

Groupuscular Dynamics

What helps to unite all these and other critical engagements with the groupuscular dynamics of the extreme right is stressing the point that understanding these small groups and their networks is vital. Individually, they may be tiny and of little consequence, but many seemingly insignificant groups interact and work collectively to create, maintain and develop anew the overall extreme-right milieu. Groupuscules are not trying to be mass parties or large organizations and instead revel in the amorphous dynamics found within the networks their collective activities generate. They are often savvy to the benefits of being small, even unnoticed. Their importance usually only becomes more obvious when such small groups — perhaps with just a handful of activists — pose a clear security threat.

In his article from 2003, Griffin concluded that in the future the extreme right could become ever more entrenched through rhizomic networks of small groups. Each would advocate its own variant of cultural, racial or national “purity,” while collectively they would attack the liberal, global order. For Griffin, this “dark matter” on the fringes of liberal democracy would mean “the centre of gravity of western democracies stays firmly on the right, an invisible counterweight to visions of a shared humanity and social justice for all.”

This seems a fairly accurate projection of the ways extreme right networks have developed. These now include, among others, counter-jihad activists, the neo-Nazi extreme right, the more ambiguous and amorphous alt-right, its less extreme variant the alt-light, the more philosophical Traditionalists and wider variants of Identiarians. Each is spread across various organizations and has developed complex networks using online tools. Whether the coronavirus crisis can provide opportunities for any of these overlapping polycratic networks to generate groups that can move beyond the rhizomic fringes of being groupuscular and develop a larger arboreal presence remains to be seen.

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Evocations of a new type of heroic man arising to save society, such as this one, was an often-repeated trope in interwar fascist discourses. In a similar vein, a cartoon from the satirical magazine Kladderadatsch from 1933, depicts Hitler as “Germany’s sculpture.” He smashes up a messy knot of the degenerate, pre-fascist masses and transforms them into a new, idealized male figure.

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This trope of a new, heroic male is often summarised using the term “new man,” which has often been used to point to the idea of a strong male redeemer figure who would lead the nation through a period of transformation and into a new era. This ideal was found across interwar fascism and is one that still resonates among contemporary fascists and the wider extreme right today. While fascism was driven by a myth of rebirth, the new man ideal was particularly important as it was he who was supposed to be the agent driving this transformation. In a similar vein, has also written about the “anthropological revolution” of fascism, driven by the “new Italian man.”

The Birth of the Fascist Man

As , the key figure within fascism studies who helped focus attention on the importance of the new man myth was George Mosse. His highly influential Journal of Contemporary History from 1966, “The Genesis of Fascism,” argued the new man talked about by fascists was crucial for the cultural, rather than economic, revolution that fascists aspired to achieve. Mosse explained how fascists saw the new man as redemptive, a “man made whole once more … an activist in that he was not afraid to join in a revolution which would make society correspond to the longings of his soul. These longings were for unity with the group, for the recapturing of those virtues which were being submerged in the modern world.”

Mosse returned to the theme at length in his , “The Image of Man,” which included a chapter on “The New Fascist Man.” He surveyed a wide range of fascist evocations of the new man and highlighted how the new man was idealized by many influential figures during the First World War. In Italy, this included Giovanni Papini, who combined Nietzschean ideals with nationalism — contrary to Nietzsche himself — to argue the war was a spiritual and redemptive event, and soon the new, brutalized soldiers would have the courage to complete Italian unification. Following Papini, Mussolini and other fascist visions of the new man regularly drew on memories of the war and from it saw society as being in a constant state of war.

Exploring some of the ways that memories of the First World War became central to the new man mythology created by interwar fascists, Bernd Hüppauf’s , “The Birth of Fascist Man From the Spirit of the Front: From Langemarck to Verdun,” focused on the use of memory of the First World War within German national socialism. He highlighted how two mythologies of “First World War men” were articulated by the Nazis, among others in Germany. The first recalled the early days of the war, and gravitated around a romanticized vision of battles around Langemark in the summer of 1914, with men typically remembered as young, fearless and idealistic Germans.

This more innocent and romantic ideal was exploited to a degree by Hitler’s movement but, once in power, another type of memory took over. This recalled the Battle of Verdun and presented a much darker image of fully-grown men fighting, with death ever-present. The sense of these soldiers in an existential conflict, either fighting their enemies to the death or being destroyed by them, and of the modern soldier as a cog in the fighting machine, became a core aspect of the (male) sense of mission at the heart of Nazi institutions.

Hüppauf adds that similar tropes of the new man as modern soldier could also be found in Ernst Jünger’s work, such as “Storm of Steel.” As Jünger himself explained in “The Worker” in 1932, a new elite, a new type of man had emerged from the war. Though small in number, Jünger too believed they would transform all of humanity.

Male Fantasies

Probing further into the impact of the First World War on interwar German masculinities is Klaus Theweleit’s two-volume “,” seen by some as an and by others, such as , as fascinating — if questionable — speculation. Theweleit focuses on the pre-fascist group the Freikorps, assessing a range of novels diaries and other writings linked to those active in, or related to, the movement. His analysis includes discussion on people like Jünger. Rejecting Freudian psychoanalysis as flawed, he draws on a wide range of theorists, from Gilles Deleuze to Michel Foucault.

The book highlights that it was the ways these Germans grew up and became men that was significant in creating a fascist masculinity steeped in war and violence to resolve seemingly intractable problems. His opening chapter, for example, explored how seven men, including the later commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, saw only two types of women. The first were “white,” who they tended to idealize in an a-sexual way but could not express emotions toward, even if they married them, and “red” women, who they saw as dangerous, potentially armed and degenerate, and whom they wanted to kill and smash into a bloody pulp. Freikops killed others too, but it was red women they were thinking about.

In the , Theweleit described the new man as someone terrified and terrifying, a man

“sired in the drill (the drill as organized battle of the old men against himself) [who] owes allegiance only to the machine that bore him. He is a true child of the drill-machine, created without the help of a woman, parentless. His associations and relationships bind him instead to other specimens of the new man, with whom he allows himself to be united to form the macromachine troop. All others belong only ‘under’ him — never alongside, behind, or in front.”

The new man, he added, was “a man with machinelike periphery, whose interior has lost its meaning (the technocrat is his contemporary manifestation).”

New men might be seen as hardened soldiers, but they could be many other things too. For example, has explored the fascist fascination with aviation. Flying was often deemed as a way out of the crisis of modernity. “Aviation stood for the dawn of an eternal order,” Esposito explains. “The aviator, not least because of his boldness, love of danger, indomitable will and Faustian power, was the new man … Flying thus became a metaphor for fascism itself.”

Embody the Image

The ideals of the new man could also be conveyed by those who embodied its image. Leaders themselves could be the new man, and so body language and performance were crucial. For example, Mussolini’s jutting chin and striking poses were supposed to exemplify the new man and communicate a sense of willpower.

Indeed, Mussolini’s public image was always supposed to idealize the fascist new man. News of his personal frailties was certainly not reported, but depictions of him working in fields or exercising were recurrent themes, evoking a sense of virility. Often depicted as youthful and macho in fascist propaganda, the development of such myth-making even extended to the lights being left on in his empty office late at night, to suggest to onlookers in the Piazza Venezia that Il Duce was working all hours.

Hitler was less clearly the personal evocation of the new man, but the regime was not short of materials evoking the ideals of a new masculinity. Artists such as the sculptor Arno Brecker created many public works for the Nazi regime. This includes the sculptures “The Party” and “The Army,” which featured idealized male nudes. While public nudity was often frowned upon by the Nazis, faultless, depersonalized nudity in such artistic representations was central to the Nazi vision of the new man and the Aryan-dominated future to come. The actual new man may not have been fully created yet, such works suggested, but they gave powerful visualizations of the goals of the fascist revolution.

In recent times, work by a range of historians is helping to further develop the critical application of the term “new man.” Griffin, among others, has rightly highlighted that there is an ambiguity with the way “man” has been used in the past by historians and fascists themselves. In German, “neuer Mensch,” for example, is often translated as “new man,” but is not necessarily gender specific. Some care should be given to older studies that take the use of the word “man” in interwar contexts too literally — sometimes it refers to the creation of a new type of fascist person, male or female, other times to a new type of fascist masculinity.

Meanwhile, Richard Shorten, in “Modernism and Totalitarianism,” that the new man concept should be seen as central to all illiberal totalitarian projects. For Shorten, the anthropological revolution of totalitarianism requires a vision of the new man. As he explains: “Utopian thought pictures the new man in harmony and concord with the ‘perfected’ community; scientism provides the knowledge that makes the New Man possible (and also clarifies exactly who he is); and revolutionary violence gives him final shape, enabling him to emerge reborn from struggle and conflict.”

Other totalitarian regimes, most notably the Soviet Union, clearly produced their own visions of new men — and new women. The Stakhanovite movement in the 1930s is one particularly evocative example, and comparisons with other forms of the illiberal new man ideal can prove fruitful in various ways.

Ideals of Masculinity

Reflecting on the similarities and differences between the new man in communist and fascist contexts, Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck have on “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.” Here, they also explore the ways the ideal of the new man was constructed by a wide range of social forces well before the 20^th century. It was not simply imposed from above through propaganda, as some of the scholarship has implied. Their survey located the emergence of myths of a new man in previous revolutions, especially the French Revolution.

They also note the sense of technological transformation after the First World War, as well as its memory, driving the search for the new man: “Modern technology in the 1920s arguably served as a vast metonym for war itself. The constant iterations of the ‘New Man’ or the ‘new type,’ the athlete, the race-car driver, and the aviator to which popular magazines introduced readers, can be seen as civilian projections of the new warrior.” Moreover, totalitarian regimes were not the only ones looking for new ideals of masculinity in this period.

While systematic surveys of the new man in interwar and wartime fascism remain limited, new directions in this field have been developed in a major edited by Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman and Paul Stocker, “The ‘New Man’ in Radical Right Ideology and Practice.” Here, as well as studies of the new man in Nazi art by Gregory Maertz, the Croatian Ustasha by Rory Yeomans and the Romania Iron Guard by Roland Clark, chapters included Jeanette Baxter’s analysis of British fascism and its ideals of the new man. Again, for her, artists were at the core of projecting the vision of the fascist new man. She assesses the influence of the Wyndham Lewis, among others, on the image of the fascist man in the British Union of Fascists. Modernism and fascism were powerfully interlinked here — and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Joan Tumblety, in the conclusion to her essay on fascist new men in interwar France, argues for an expansion of the concept to move beyond seeing fascism only as a political religion that promotes an anthropological revolution. She stresses that the new man concept allows us to see how masculine ideals that were widespread in society could be developed by fascist groups for their own purposes, raising questions about just how different fascists really were. Roy Stars and Aristotle Kallis, meanwhile, explore the theme beyond Europe, in Japan and Brazil respectively.

The New Man in Contemporary Culture

While the focus on new men and masculinities in interwar and wartime fascisms is at least developing, the study of masculinity and the extreme right in contemporary contexts is another area requiring more research. One leading voice among few here is Michael Kimmel, whose recent , “Healing from Hate,” examines the gendered dynamics of contemporary extreme-right culture. From interviewing white nationalists and neo-Nazis in Europe and the US, he stresses most people miss the full extent of the gendered nature of the culture. As he continues:

“These young men feel entitled to a sense of belonging and community, of holding unchallenged moral authority over women and children, and of feeling that they count in the world and that their lives matter. Experiencing threats to the lives they feel they deserve leads these young men to feel ashamed and humiliated. And it is this aggrieved entitlement — entitlement thwarted and frustrated — that leads some men to search for a way to redeem themselves as men, to restore and retrieve that sense of manhood that has been lost. Joining [a group] is a form of masculine compensation, an alternate route to proving manhood.”

Similarly, Cynthia Miller-Idriss has focused on how hypermasculinity is developed through extreme-right culture, especially clothes and the body. In “The Extreme Gone Mainstream,” she how extreme-right youth culture requires a sense of masculine ideals to help develop its attraction. For her, “The hypermasculine nature of much of the far right and its idealised notions on manhood and what a ‘real man’ does for the nation are key to far right and right-wing extremist scenes and groups.”

Such a quest for a new sense of masculinity can be found widely in the materials produced by such groups. For example, the Australian neo-Nazi group Antipodean Resistance has written of its . In sum, they should reject the mainstream notion of “Alpha Males,” whom they see as degenerate figures that pursue multiple sexual partners and often drink too much. Instead, men should be strong and monogamous. Their ideal for the alpha male therefore “embraces hardship as a challenge, and readily prepares for fixing even the worst situations when they arise. All of the Alpha Male’s characteristics, skills and qualities are preparing him for his ultimate goal of finding a mate, continuing his blood and progressing his race.” Echoing Theweleit, here women are reduced to playing a subservient role in allowing the alpha male to achieve his full realization. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they cite the Nazi regime as a central influence.

Meanwhile, the now proscribed British neo-Nazi group National Action saw the emergence of the new man as part of their revolutionary project. In their 44-page document outlining the need for a Nazi-inspired revolution, “,” the group explained: “Out of the catharsis will come a new type of man who doesn’t flinch — whether it is a soldier or a politician. We do not need ‘intellectuals’, what we need are brutes who can form the lines hard. Moral men who can rise above fear so they can both take and dish out punishment.”

There is much work to do to bring a new focus on the radicalized masculinities driving contemporary extreme-right activism. The historical vision of the new man as a nebulous yet potent ideological marker for the goals of fascist movements still animates many neo-fascist and neo-Nazi organizations that are rooted in the legacies of fascism. Such groups continue to play with the vision of powerful men imposing clarity and order on a world that seems chaotic. These people need to be understood if they are to be tackled, and this includes understanding their masculinities.

Mosse concluded his 1966 article helping to introduce the term “new man” with the following: “The ‘new man’ of whom fascism had dreamed went down to defeat … The dream turned out to be a nightmare.” However, for some at least, the dream of the fascist new man continues, and they certainly do not see the fascist past as a nightmare.

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How seriously should we take the risk of violent extremism emanating from the extreme right? The UK has seen a notable rise in . Its most serious extreme-right incidents in the past few years include the murder of the parliamentarian in June, attacks by —convicted in 2015 of attempted murder and linked to the group National Action—and , an avid reader of who was imprisoned for 40 years in 2013 for a murder and planting a series of bombs at mosques.

In America, gunmen such as and can also be cited as particularly evocative, recent examples of men radicalized by extreme-right ideas. The USA too has also seen a rise in and other types of hate crime in 2016. Looking to the future, what sorts of terrorist threat does the extreme right pose? How important is this issue when compared to other forms of political violence? Is enough being done to tackle violence form the extreme right?

Looking the Wrong Way

When talking about political violence, it is not unusual for reports from respected organizations to warn that threats posed by the extreme right need to be taken more seriously. They often include statements noting such findings are needed in order to correct a perceived lower level of threat from extreme-right terrorism, compared to Islamist violence—a misconception found among the public and policymakers alike.

For example, in 2015, the (SPLC) published an analysis of lone-wolf terrorism that highlighted most of America’s domestic terrorists since 2009 are not linked to larger organizations. It also stressed that “half of the attacks during the period apparently were motivated by the ideology of the antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement, including ‘sovereign citizens,’ whose movement has been described by the FBI as ‘domestic terrorist.’ A little more than that (51%) came from ideologies of hate, ranging from white supremacy to misogyny to radical Islamism.”

Meanwhile, another recent study of lone-actor terrorism, by the (RUSI) and focused on Europe, highlights that, when compared to religiously inspired perpetrators, those influenced by the extreme right in Europe were actually more likely to be deadly. It also stated that “33 per cent were classified as right-wing extremists, while 38 per cent were religiously inspired,” suggesting that each threat represents a similar level of concern. Recognizing the extreme right was one among a range of threats in Europe, their assessment tellingly stated that “Rightwing extremists represent a substantial aspect of the lone actor threat and must not be overlooked.”

While it would be too much of a leap to conclude from such reports arguing for greater awareness of extreme-right terrorism that states and security services simply ignore the issue, it is clear that it can often be deemed of secondary importance. This is a misconception supported by the much greater intensity of media reporting on Islamist-inspired terrorism compared with other types of threat. As such, people often know very little about what underlying ideas drive political violence from the extreme right.

Scavenger Ideology

To comprehend the threat posed by the extreme right, it is crucial to understand its core ideology. In the UK, the , part of the country’s counter-terrorism policy framework focused on counteracting extremist perspectives, rightly stresses that “radicalisation is driven by an ideology which sanctions the use of violence.” Like other terrorists, extreme-right activists are often motivated by more than mere hate, and do consider themselves driven by a set of ideas. Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting on what “ideology” actually means in extreme-right contexts.

Ideas about politics and society matter for the extreme right, but perhaps not in the same way as they matter for those of a more moderate political persuasion. For those within the extreme right, strong opinions on political and social issues are often used primarily as ways to give meaning to action, from sustaining a diverse subculture to licensing political violence.

It is also perhaps surprising that, on close inspection, there are countless variants of radical and extreme-right ideas, many of which are not really compatible with each other. Yet this does not stop activists within the movement from holding views that clash with each other. For the uninitiated, this is often confusing and, at times, quite bewildering. coined the term “scavenger ideology” to describe the way such extremisms annex various, ultimately incompatible ideas from across the political and cultural spectrum, and retool them for their own purposes and to inspire action.

Extreme-right ideology usually evokes the idea of a once “pure” society facing impeding doom. In particular, extreme-right ideologues like to argue that society is in a state of undisclosed civil war, and often claim that white people are victims of a hidden genocide.

For the extreme right at least, ideology does not necessarily need to be a rich, nuanced and complex political worldview (though some examples of extreme-right ideology can be surprisingly sophisticated). Usually, though, what is really being talked about in terms of extreme-right ideology is an evocative set of themes, or tropes, given added depth by some quite basic writings all too easily available online. These core, underlying tropes come to form elements of a worldview that can be strung together to make people who subscribe to variants of extreme-right ideology think they are engaged in an exciting, even momentous, battle to save a society from total destruction.

Core Elements of Extreme Ideologies

Some of the standout, recurrent tropes within extreme-right ideas include the following: an us versus them mentality; conspiracy theories; the idea of society facing an existential threat; and the need for a revolution. These ideas can be articulated and developed in numerous ways, from crude white supremacist websites to engagement with philosophers such as Martin Heidegger.

Us versus them: One way or another, extreme-right ideologies are framed around the idea of a heroic few fighting against a political and social system that is designed to ensure they remain suppressed. A language of marginalization, and being outsiders, is quite typical of the extreme right.

Of course, all political ideologies have a sense of identifying friends and enemies. However, the extreme right frames this in a highly-polarized manner and tends to view swathes of wider society as either “traitors,” complicit in keeping their movement down, or “idiots” unable to see through lies and propaganda. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarck has written about this Manichean element to the extreme right in his book .

Conspiracy theories: Linked to this sense of marginalization and victimhood is usually a conspiracy theory of some sort or another. In Europe, the often focuses on the theme of cultural Marxism—an idea Anders Behring Breivik explored at great length in his manifesto. Neo-Nazis on the other hand tend to focus on the idea of a Jewish plot to control the world, derived from Nazi and other interwar forms of anti-Semitic conspiracism created by earlier generations of fascists. Other conspiracy theories include the ideas of the . The conspiracy theory is crucial, as it explains why their movement is so marginalized. , among others, has examined this element of the extreme right in some considerable depth.

An existential threat facing society: The rhetoric of the extreme right usually does not simply consider the forces of suppression to be content with marginalizing their movement either. Extreme-right ideology usually evokes the idea of a once “pure” society facing impeding doom. In particular, extreme-right ideologues like to argue that society is in a state of undisclosed civil war, and often claim that white people are victims of a .

If believed, these ideas can be quite powerful, helping those who wish to carry out violence think about their actions as not, ultimately, aggressive, but rather as defensive—no matter how paranoid this may seem. Also, this defensiveness helps fuel the particularly visceral racism of the extreme right, seeing those who are not white as not merely “other” but also posing some sort of existential threat to an extreme ideal of racial “purity.” The role of existential threats is extreme-right and fascist propaganda has been discussed at length by , who sees this element as crucial for licensing political violence.

Revolution: Finally, while the present day is seen through the lens of a society falling into a state of corruption and decay, at the hands of both conspirators and a hapless wider public, the extreme right likes to think the future could be radically different. Typically, extreme-right fantasy novels such as The Turner Diaries articulate a narrative of revolution. Moreover, texts such as this, as well as non-fiction material such as Breivik’s manifesto, project into the future a trajectory setting out the “purification” of society, achieved through revolutionary violence. In this imagined future, those deemed “traitors” will be eliminated, those deemed not racially “pure’ will be expunged in one way or another, and those deemed to be duped by the “propaganda” of the current system will be liberated and thankful.

For the activists who want to turn their beliefs into some form of action, the fantasy of the violent protagonist as some form of “hero,” a man of destiny, a plucky underdog taking on the forces of perceived oppression in the name of freedom, is common identity. The ways that terrorists can perceive themselves as self-styled “heroes,” believing they are characters uniquely infused with powers to carry out an acts genuinely capable of changing the world, has been explored by Roger Griffin in his book , among others.

What About Mental Health?��

While extreme-right ideologies can take many forms, they do tend to manifest elements of the underlying themes, or tropes, discussed above, in order to create exciting, dynamic scenarios justifying violence. These ideas are refreshed by a highly variegated, complex wider extreme-right milieu too, which consists of myriad specific groups, networks and websites.

Extreme-right activists who are about to turn to violence are particularly difficult to spot, as they undergo less obvious behavioral changes than Islamist terrorists, but still may disclose their intentions online.

It would be a mistake, then, to see the ideas used to justify extreme-right political violence as simply the product of some form of psychosis. Nevertheless, research into the mental health of extreme-right protagonists who carry out violence does often point to some form of mental health vulnerability. Does ideology or mental health issues, then, “explain” extreme-right violence?

While it is unhelpful to generalize about what will trigger someone to step over the line and carry out acts of political violence, it is clear that those individuals and small groups who do so from the extreme right tend to have a mental health concern of some description. This may be depression, as in the case of , who killed three people in 1999 but was still found guilty. This issue was also a feature of the trial of , who suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder but was still deemed legally responsible for his actions.

In other words, care needs to be taken with discussions on mental health and political violence. It is important not to explain away violent extreme-right protagonists by identifying mental health issues. These can play a part, but so does the ideology promoted by the wider extreme-right movement. Moreover, while mental health issues are important, figures such as highlight their role varies from case to case, and mental health vulnerabilities tend not to absolve violent protagonists.

Monitoring the Fringes

Extreme-right ideas will continue to circulate, and in the era of social media the extreme-right’s core activists are finding their ideas are easier to spread than ever. Moreover, the rise of impactful, populist political movements in Europe (UKIP, Front National, Party of Freedom, etc.) and America (the Tea Party movement and now Donald Trump) are only helping to popularize watered-down versions of more extreme agendas, normalizing many extreme-right themes.

To help deal with this threat, there certainly needs to be renewed efforts to monitor the extreme right by security services. Extreme-right activists who are about to turn to violence are particularly difficult to spot, as they undergo less obvious behavioral changes than Islamist terrorists, but still may disclose their intentions online. Greater monitoring of groups and their online spaces is crucial to keeping on top of this issue.

Moreover, the clunky approach to discussing sub-categories of terrorist threat that basically pits the extreme right against Islamist-inspired political violence for resources needs to be challenged. We live in an era where the media reporting can simplify, but this needs to be resisted. Threats of terrorism do not come from either Islamism or the extreme right. Rather they come from both of these areas (and others), and in the future will do so in unexpected ways.

Finally, politicians need to pay much greater attention to serious reports from organizations such as the SPLC and RUSI that repeatedly highlight the significant levels of threat posed by the extreme right. One effective answer would be to make sure all potentially risky extreme-right groups, networks and organizations are carefully monitored. Rather than seeing security risks as a zero-sum game competing for resources, and in an era of rising hate crimes, if this requires governments to invest more into investigating extreme-right threats, to bring this to a level of parity with Islamist ones, then this needs to happen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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There is a complacent narrative in the United Kingdom that likes to think that the British public are immune from far right ideologies and perspectives. It stresses that the UK’s “first past the post” voting system keeps out any such extremists, who are too disorganised to pose any real political threat anyway. The few “native” far right politicians the country has – such as the British National Party’s Nick Griffin or the English Defence League’s Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – are experienced as occasional curios. They are demonised in the press, and encountered infrequently, perhaps near election time; or after recent atrocities such as the Anders Breivik case; or as the topic of occasional, edgy, documentaries exploring how racism still affects parts of the country. As such, the far right is mostly seen in an arms-length, mediated manner: it is something that exists on the margins in the UK, but it is also presented as an “other”, occurring elsewhere. It is almost always framed as a profoundly negative force. Hostile experts will condemn far right views, but ultimately audiences are not encouraged to register a connection between the far right and mainstream attitudes in Britain.

What’s wrong with this view? After all, the country does not host any far right MPs, and never has done. Nor does Britain have a history of generating mass far right organisations on the scale of the interwar fascist movements that emerged in Europe. More recently, the efforts of Britain’s National Front in the 1970s or the British National Party in the 2000s look insignificant when compared to the achievements of Europe’s postwar far right organisations – such as the Italian Social Movement or the French National Front. What’s to be concerned about?

The Far Right and the Mainstream

What is intriguing about this tendency to see far right cultures as, somehow, “other”is that, concurrently, many of the themes such far right populists regularly engage with via their electoral agendas, and expansive online worlds, are given a lot of mainstream coverage too. Far from being “other”, the arguments of the British far right merely radicalise many “mainstream”concerns. Far right politicians and organisations may be condemned, but its successful messages are grounded in themes regularly rehearsed by sections of Britain’s mainstream too.

The conveniently baggy issue of “immigration” tends to offer mainstream media and politicians a space for engagement with populist, ultra-patriotic issues. Discussion of immigration-related topics regularly offer coded messages implying, among other things, that there is an erosion of an “authentic” British culture, an unfair allocation of state resources in favour of non-white migrants, and that ethnic minorities tend to be a more threatening presence – in recent times this latter theme has been elaborated via sustained Islamophobia. Indeed, the populist discursive field critiquing immigration also implies an alternate, “perfect” Britain: one where minority races and cultures are not part of the social community.

To give some examples of the more hyperbolic stories that generate this milieu, aside from regular implications that Muslims are somehow “closer” to terrorism, one often finds suggestions that nursery rhymes, piggy banks, or even Christmas, have been banned by politically correct local councils, in fear such practices may offend Muslims and other minorities. At its height, the EDL capitalised on the latter urban myth and threatened local councils with demonstrations if they were to “ban Christmas”. Moreover, in stories where Muslim men have genuinely become sexual threats to British women, the media framing tends to veer into deeply uncomfortable generalisations about all Muslim men being closet rapists or paedophiles. As Nick Griffin once put the connection between Islamophobia and the far right: “With millions of our people desperately and very reasonably worried by the spread of Islam and its adherents, and with the mass media…playing “Islamophobic” messages like a scratched CD, the proper choice of enemy needn’t be left to rocket scientists.”

Needless to say, mainstream debates on such “immigration” issues are regularly left ambiguous, and are not politicised to the extent that they are clearly “far right” in nature. Yet the media creates a space that allows the far right to present its ideas as “common sense” responses to a growing crisis. There is a clear synergy between a populist mainstream media and the radicalised and politicised views of far right politicians. Britain’s news media, as well as some of its less responsible mainstream politicians, have a sustained ability to normalise the baggy “immigration = bad” messages that the far right then radicalises further.

The “Licence to Hate”

Historian of fascism and the postwar far right, Aristotle Kallis, has written about this phenomenon of “mainstreaming” the far right’s extremist messages under the umbrella of immigration debates. Across Europe, he argues, media discourses have promoted a “cognitive dissonance” between a myth and a reality. The myth suggests an idealised and imagined version of the national community, one where a host of immigration-related issues are resolved by there – somehow – being no immigrants. The contrasting reality is presented as politicians’ inability to offer any real solution to the regularly hyped “problems” raised by all the themes that get discussed in relation to “immigration” (housing, jobs, national identity, political correctness, integration, Islamophobia, terrorism, and so forth). In the interwar years, such tensions between idealised myth and a seemingly crisis-ridden sense of reality eventually fed into a culture that “licenced” extreme violence and even genocide – a very extreme way to resolve such cultures of “cognitive dissonance”. Though we are not close to this scenario now, contemporary immigration debates are drenched in a tenor that implicitly point to the desirability of a mythic monoculture. The heterogeneity of our present circumstance is regularly styled as a crisis, a poor, and frustrating, second – and is a tension that far right politics tries to resolve.

Thus, debates on immigration promote an unsettling cultural framework that endorses hatred, confusion and distrust: what Kallis calls a “licence to fear”. When alarming structural crises hit, such as the economic stresses found in Greece at the moment, one can see a swift radicalisation, developing from an already existent, largely latent, culture “licensing” fearful thoughts and attitudes. So we see breakthroughs of marginal extremists like Golden Dawn becoming all too possible. Indeed, the contemporary Greek case offers a cautionary tale to people elsewhere in Europe who see marginalised, extremist groups as always being doomed to occupy such a position in a nation’s political culture.

“Supply” and “Demand”

Yet we can overhype the threat. To be clear, there is no danger that Britain’s current crop of far right parties is likely to make an immediate breakthrough. In a few years, there may be a different picture – especially if any party improves its capacity to “supply” a far right agenda. The recent dip in far right support is essentially a “supply” issue, not “demand” one. Get the “supply" of far right politics sorted out, as the BNP started to in the mid-2000s, and one would likely find there is a notable “demand” for, in particular, radical Islamophobia. Telling of this dynamic, though the BNP has been in crisis since 2009, the 2010 General Election saw over half a million voters willing to vote for its brand of populist, extreme nationalism. Moreover, despite Nick Griffin’s errors the party retains a latent threat to reflexive liberal values in the UK, while its former activists, including now Andrew Brons, develop new forms for the British far right political party.

Moreover, for those working and developing policy in this area, I argue that we should not wait for a new breakthrough before responding the already latent threat of the far right. Rather than dismissing the far right as marginal and “other”, civil and political society needs to employ a cautionary approach, and be acutely aware that the cultures that generate a “demand” for far right politics are alive and well in Britain.

Indeed, the past ten years has seen the rise of the British far right’s most electorally successful party, the BNP, and also one of Britain’s largest far right street marching movements, the EDL – at its height in 2010 able to muster gatherings into the low thousands. In its extreme right-wing mode, the far right has produced aspirant terrorist organisations, such as the Aryan Strike Force, while older groups such as Combat 18 maintain an online culture promoting extremism. Its White Power Music scene continues to connect British neo-Nazism with an international milieu of extreme-nationalist and biologically racial activism. Finally, the new media revolution has made these worlds of hate all too accessible to the young and the vulnerable – people inherently seeking out clear certainties in a confusing world and for whom the far right can be very appealing.

“Preventing” the Far Right

What to do? It is worth noting that policy thinking is not blind to such issues – at least in principle. The British government launched its Prevent Agenda after the 7/7 attacks, a policy designed to operate in pre-criminal space to tackle all forms of violent extremism. In practice, its focus was very much on tackling Islamism, and Prevent was often rather clumsily implemented, causing much resentment. It was re-launched in 2011, just ahead of the atrocity by Anders Breivik, yet even in its reconfigured format the new Prevent strategy only gave limited scope to tackle the far right.

Prevent was also quite conservative in defining far right activity. The UK’s police have stressed that the EDL is a “right of centre social movement”, limiting the action it can take. Contrastingly, many working on the front line see the EDL as a typically far right organisation – as do many hate crime workers in local councils, not to mention primary and secondary teachers who see EDL themes used as an excuse for Islamophobic bullying in schools. Needless to say, the academic consensus point to the EDL as a far right movement too.

So British policy in regard to tackling the far right remains confused, and often disconnected from the advice of many front line practitioners. It does not seem clear exactly which branches of the state feel it is their responsibility to robustly tackle far right issues that, by definition, threaten a liberal, inclusive and free society. In sum, the far right falls into the gap that exists between “community cohesion” and “counter-terrorism”.

Aside from direct policy interventions, there are a number of non-state organisations working to address racism and far right tendencies in British society too. To highlight just one organisation, the educational charity Show Racism the Red Card provides workshops for young people, and training for adult practitioners such as teachers. Using football as an effective hub to attract young Brits who are becoming vulnerable to the strong pull of the far right, this anti-racism organisation achieves excellent results in shifting British attitudes towards greater inclusivity, especially in the school environment.

This is one among many potential initiatives to shift cultures and promote a more accepting attitude within civil society. By radically enhancing the capacity of such educational charities, as well as improving awareness of far right issues among a wide range of state professionals – from social workers, to probation officers, to those employed to deliver Prevent projects – Britain could foster a much more critically aware culture, one capable of tackling a latent “demand” for the far right. While eradicating clichéd prejudices in the mass media may take longer, building capacity to challenge racism in a robust and pragmatic way offers one strategy to reduce support for far right agendas – especially among an emerging generation coming of age in a new media environment that has itself become infested with populist, far right views.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�'s editorial policy.

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