Abstract
This chapter introduces the topic of young people and the Far Right, pointing out that it is not the young raging Neo-Nazi that dominates the ranks of the Far Right movement, but rather ordinary young people, especially young white men, who are drawn in by the forceful propaganda. Although women are certainly present, the Far Right is more popular with men. I first provide some definitions for critical analysis: discourse and subject position. Four important themes are then discussed: Youth, class, masculinity, and race. The politics of hate speech are considered using the lens of necropolitics from philosopher Achille Mbembe. Finally, the Far Right is examined as an example of a social movement, one that may pull in young people rather like a subculture.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Geeinte deutsche Völker und Stämme.
References
Adam, B. (2019). Global anti-LGBT politics. In W. R Thompson (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of politics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1213
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
Blee, K. (2002). Inside organized racism: Women in the hate movement. University of California Press.
Blee, K. (2007). Ethnographies of the far right. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36(2), 119–128.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). Sociology in question. Sage.
Bowles, N. (2020, January 5). Right-wing views for Generation Z, five minutes at a time. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us/politics/dennis-prager-university.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage. Accessed 5 Feb 2020.
Buckby, J. (2020). Monster of their own making: How the far left, the media, and politicians are creating far-right extremists. Bombardier Books.
Byrd, D. (2020). “Islamic colonization” and the coming European “wretched”: On the ideology of alt-fascism. In D. Byrd (Ed.), The critique of religion and religion's critique (pp. 279–313). Brill.
Camus, R. (2018). You will not replace us! Chez l’Auteur.
Caiani, M., & Della Porta, D. (2018). The radical right as social movement organisations. In J. Rydgren (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the radical right (pp. 327–347). Oxford University Press.
Condis, M. (2018). Gaming masculinity: Trolls, geeks and the battle for online culture. University of Iowa Press.
Connell, R. (1991). Live fast and die young. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 27(2), 141–171.
Connell, R., & Messerschmidt, J. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society, 19(6), 829–859.
Dao, J., & Kovaleski, S. (2012, August 7). Music style is called supremacist recruiting tool. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/us/hatecore-music-is-called-white-supremacist-recruiting-tool.html. Accessed 11 Apr 2020.
Davies, B. (1990). The problem of desire. Social Problems, 37(4), 501–516.
Davies, B. (2000). A body of writing. Rowan & Littlefield.
Deem, A. (2019). The digital traces of #whitegenocide and alt-right affective economies of transgression. International Journal of Communication, 13, 3183–3202.
De Koster, W., & Houtman, D. (2008). Stormfront is like a second home to me: On virtual community formation by right-wing extremists. Information, Communication & Society, 11(8), 1155–1176.
Della Porta, D., & Diani, M. (2006). Social movements: An introduction. Blackwell.
Dennison, J., & Geddes, A. (2019). A rising tide? The salience of immigration and the rise of anti-immigration political parties in Western Europe. The Political Quarterly, 90(1), 107–116.
DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility. Penguin
Dyck, K. (2017). Reichsrock: The international web of white-power and Neo-Nazi hate music. Rutgers University Press.
Eatwell, R., & Goodwin, M. (2018). National populism: The revolt against liberal democracy. Pelican.
Ebner, J. (2017). The rage: The vicious circle of Islamist and far-right extremism. B. Tauris & Co.
Essed, P., Farquharson, K., Pillay, K., & White, E. J. (2019). Preface part I: Racism and the normativity of European whiteness. In P. Essed, K. Farquharson, K. Pillay, & E. J. White (Eds.), Relating worlds of racism (pp. v–x). Palgrave Macmillan.
Farrugia, D., Threadgold, S., & Coffey, J. (2018). Young subjectivities and affective labour in the service economy. Journal of Youth Studies, 21(3), 272–287.
Foucault, M. (1990). History of sexuality—An introduction (Vol. 1). Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.
Fry, D. (2016). Kāfir pride: An examination of the recent apparent rise in Australian anti-Islamic activity and the challenges it presents for national security. Journal for Deradicalization, 6, 105–131.
Furlong, A., & Cartmel, F. (1997). Young people and social change. Oxford University Press.
Ganesh, B. (2020). Weaponizing white thymos: Flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right. Cultural Studies, 34(6), 892–924.
Gest, J. (2016). The new minority: White working class politics in an age of immigration and inequality. Oxford University Press.
Ging, D. (2017). Alphas, betas, and incels: Theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere. Men and Masculinities, 22(4), 638–657.
Graff, A., Kapur, R., & Walters, S. D. (2019). Introduction: Gender and the rise of the global right. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 44(3), 541–560.
Grant, J., & MacDonald, F. (2020). The “alt-right”, toxic masculinity and violence. In F. McDonald & A. Dobrowolsky (Eds.), Turbulent times, transformational possibilities? Gender and politics today and tomorrow (pp. 368–388). University of Toronto Press.
Hage, G. (2000). White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Routledge.
Harsin, J. (2020). Toxic White masculinity, post-truth politics and the COVID-19 infodemic. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 23(6). https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420944934.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Hopkins, P. (2016). Gendering Islamophobia, racism and white supremacy: Gendered violence against those who look Muslim. Dialogues in Human Geography, 6(2), 186–189.
Horgan, J. (2008). From profiles to pathways and roots to routes: Perspectives from psychology on radicalization into terrorism. ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 618(1), 80–94.
Inglehart, R., & Norris, P. (2017). Trump and the populist authoritarian parties: The silent revolution in reverse. Perspectives on Politics, 15, 443–454.
Jackson, P. (2020). Transnational Neo-Nazism in the USA, United Kingdom and Australia. George Washington Program on Extremism. https://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/12703/1/Jackson_Paul_2020_GWU_Transnational_neo_Nazism_in_the_USA_United_Kingdom_and_Australia.pdf. Accessed 10 July 2020.
Kalish, R., & Kimmel, M. (2010). Suicide by mass murder: Masculinity, aggrieved entitlement and rampage school shootings. Health Sociology Review, 19(4), 451–464.
Kelly, A. (2017). The alt-right: Reactionary rehabilitation for white masculinity. Soundings, 66, 68–78.
Kimmel, M. (2007). Racism as adolescent male rite of passage: Ex-Nazis in Scandinavia. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36(2), 202–218.
Kimmel, M. (2018). Healing from hate: How young men get into and out of violent extremism. University of California Press.
Koslowski, M. (2019, January 11). How Australia’s far-right were divided and conquered—By themselves. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/how-australia-s-far-right-were-divided-and-conquered-by-themselves-20190108-p50qcb.html. Accessed 3 Jan 2020.
Krämer, B. (2017). Populist online practices: The function of the internet in right-wing populism. Information, Communication & Society, 20(9), 1293–1309.
Krasteva, A. (2016). Re/de/constructing far-right youth: Between the lost generation and contestatory citizenship. In G. Lazaridis & G. Campani (Eds.), Understanding the populist shift: Othering in a Europe in crisis (pp. 150–178). Routledge.
Land, N. (2017, May 25) A quick-and-dirty introduction to accelerationism. Jacobite. https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/. Accessed 5 Dec 2020.
Lewis, R. (2018). Report: Alternative influence: Broadcasting the reactionary right on YouTube. Data & Society. https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/DS_Alternative_Influence.pdf. Accessed 30 July 2020.
Lewis, J., Pond, P., Cameron, R., & Lewis, B. (2019). Social cohesion, twitter and far-right politics in Australia: Diversity in the democratic mediasphere. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 22(5–6), 958–978.
Love, N. (2017). Back to the future: Trendy fascism, the Trump effect, and the alt-right. New Political Science, 39(2), 263–268.
MacDonald, R. (2016). Precarious work: The growing précarité of youth. In A. Furlong (Ed.), The international handbook of youth and young adulthood (2nd ed., pp. 156–163). Routledge.
Maffesoli, M. (1995). The time of the tribes. Sage.
Mannheim, K. (1972 [1936]). The problem of generations. In P. Altbach & R. Laufer (Eds.), The new pilgrims: Youth protest in transition (pp. 101–138). David McKay.
Marantz, A. (2019). Antisocial: Online extremists, techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation. Viking.
Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics (L. Meintjes, Trans.). Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40.
Mbembe, A. (2016). The society of enmity (G. Menegalle, Trans.). Radical Philosophy, 200, 23–35.
McHendry, G. F. (2018). White supremacy in the age of Trump. Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 8(1/2), 1–5.
Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the present. Hutchinson.
Messerschmidt, J. (1993). Masculinities and crime. Rowan & Littlefield.
Miller-Idriss, C. (2017). Soldier, sailor, rebel, rule-breaker: Masculinity and the body in the German far right. Gender & Education, 29(2), 199–215.
Miller-Idriss, C. (2018). Youth and the radical right. In J. Rydgren (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the radical right (pp. 348–365). Oxford University Press.
Miller-Idriss, C. (2020). Hate in the homeland: The new global far right. Princeton University Press.
Miller-Idriss, C., & Graefe-Geusch, A. (2021). Studying the peripheries: Iconography and embodiment in far right youth subcultures. In S. D. Ashe, J. Busher, G. Maclin, & A. Winter (Eds.), Researching the far right: Theory, methods and practice (pp. 324–341). Routledge.
Mondon, A., & Winter, A. (2020). Reactionary democracy: How racism and the populist far right became mainstream. Verso.
Moses, A. D. (2019). “White genocide” and the ethics of public analysis. Journal of Genocide Research, 21(2), 201–213.
Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Mudde, C. (2014). Introduction: Youth and the extreme right: Explanations, issues, and solutions. In C. Mudde (Ed.), Youth and the extreme right (pp. 1–18). IDebate Press.
Mudde, C. (2019). The far right today. Polity.
Müller, J-W. (2016). What is populism? University of Pennsylvania Press.
Nagle, A. 2017. Kill all normies. Zero Books.
Nicholas, L., & Agius, C. (2018). The persistence of global masculinism. Palgrave Macmillan.
Nilan, P. (2019). Far-right contestation in Australia: Soldiers of Odin and True Blue Crew. In M. Peucker & D. Smith (Eds.), The far-right in Australia (pp. 101–126). Palgrave Macmillan.
Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press.
Oppenheimer, M. (2018, March/April). Inside the right-wing YouTube empire that’s quietly turning millennials into conservatives. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/inside-right-wing-youtube-turning-millennials-conservative-prageru-video-dennis-prager/. Accessed 5 Apr 2020.
Perry, B., & Scrivens, R. (2016). Uneasy alliances: A look at the right-wing extremist movement in Canada. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 39(9), 819–841.
Peucker, M., & Smith, D. (2019). Far-right movements in contemporary Australia: An introduction. In M. Peucker & D. Smith (Eds.), The far-right in contemporary Australia (pp. 1–18). Palgrave Macmillan.
Piketty, T. (2020). Capital and ideology (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Pleyers, G. (2010). Alter-globalization: Becoming actors in the global age. Polity.
Reich, R. B. (2020). The system: Who rigged it, how we fix it. Picador.
Roberts, S. (2018). Young working class men in transition. Routledge.
Roose, J. (2016). Political Islam and masculinity: Muslim men in Australia. Palgrave.
Roose, J. (2021) The new demagogues: Religion, masculinity and the populist epoch. Routledge.
Roose, J., Flood, M., & Alfano, M. (2020). Challenging the use of masculinity as a recruitment mechanism in extremist narratives. Department of Justice and Community Safety.
Rushkoff, D. (2013). Present shock. Penguin.
Rydgren, J. (2013). Introduction: Class politics and the radical right. In J. Rydgren (Ed.), Politics and the radical right (pp. 1–9). Routledge.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon.
Simi, P., & Futrell, R. (2015). American swastika: Inside the white power movement’s hidden spaces of hate, second edition. Rowman & Littlefield.
Sprinzak, E. (1995). Right-wing terrorism in a comparative perspective: The case of split delegitimization. Terrorism & Political Violence, 7(1), 17–43.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat. Bloomsbury.
Stern, A. M. (2019). Proud Boys and the white ethnostate. Beacon Press.
Storm, I., Pavlovic, T., & Franc, R. (2020, March 20). Report on the relationship between inequality and youth radicalisation from existing European survey datasets. DARE—Dialogue About Radicalisation and Equality. https://www.dare-h2020.org/uploads/1/2/1/7/12176018/d4.3.pdf. Accessed 25 Sept 2020.
Thulin, E., & Vilhelmson, B. (2019). More at home, more alone? Youth, digital media and the everyday use of time and space. Geoforum, 100, 41–50.
Tilly, C. (2003). The politics of collective violence. Cambridge University Press.
Tufail, W., & Poynting, S. (2016). Muslim and dangerous: “Grooming” and the politics of racialization. In D. Pratt & R. Woodlock (Eds.), Fear of Muslims? International perspectives on Islamophobia (pp. 79–92). Springer International.
Turner, B. S. (2001). The erosion of citizenship. British Journal of Sociology, 5(2), 189–209.
Veilleux-Lepage, Y., & Archambault, E. (2017, April 11). Soldiers of Odin: The global diffusion of vigilante movements. In Political Studies Association Annual Conference. Strathclyde University. https://www.psa.ac.uk/sites/default/files/conference/papers/2017/Soldiers%20of%20Odin%20-The%20Global%20Diffusion%20of%20Vigilante%20Movements.pdf. Accessed 20 Nov 2018.
Van der Valk, I., & Wagenaar, W. (2010). The extreme right: Entry and exit. Anne Frank House.
Vieten, U. M., & Poynting, S. (2016). Contemporary far-right racist populism in Europe. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 37(6), 533–540.
Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory (2nd ed.). Blackwell.
Wendling, M. (2018). Alt-right: From 4chan to the White House. Pluto Press.
Williams, J. (2018). Stand out of our light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy. Cambridge University Press.
Winlow, S., Hall, S., & Treadwell, J. (2017). The rise of the right: English nationalism and the transformation of working class politics. Policy Press.
Wodak, R. (2015). The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. Sage.
Woodman, D. (2019). Continuity and change in attitudes to job security across two generations of young Australian adults. Labour & Industry, 29(3), 273–288.
Yuval-Davis, N. (2018). Autochthonic populism, everyday bordering, construction of “the migrant”. In G. Fitzi, J. Mackert, & B. S. Turner (Eds.), Populism and the crisis of democracy (pp. 65–74). Routledge.
Zagórski, P., Rama, J., & Cordero, G. (2019). Young and temporary: Youth employment insecurity and support for right-wing populist parties in Europe. Government & Opposition. https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2019.28.
Zúquete, J. P. (2018). The identitarians: The movement against globalism and Islam in Europe. University of Notre Dame Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nilan, P. (2021). Youth and the Far Right. In: Young People and the Far Right. Alternatives and Futures: Cultures, Practices, Activism and Utopias. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1811-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1811-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-16-1810-9
Online ISBN: 978-981-16-1811-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)