This interview is based on Liam Gillespie’s article ‘On the proximity of the far right and the misuses of the ‘mainstreaming’ metaphor‘ published in Identities (2024).
The interview was conducted by Alex Yates.
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Why should people interested in understanding reactionary politics read your article?
One can’t help but notice that we’re living through a time of apparent far-right resurgence. Donald Trump has retaken the US presidency, and figures like Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei, and Geert Wilders – to name a few – have all achieved recent electoral success by mobilising reactionary politics (whether through racism, ethnic nationalism, xenophobia, misogyny, transphobia or, more likely, some combination thereof). In the eyes of many, the success of these figures shows that a ‘mainstreaming’ of reactionary politics has occurred, whereby previously ‘extreme’ ideas, practices, and persons are now not only accepted into the mainstream, but are increasingly elevated within it. This idea has come to dominate the field of far-right studies.
My recent article for Identities is motivated by my belief that the very concepts through which we think about reactionary politics are themselves discursive sites of struggle that frame precisely what it is we imagine ourselves to be struggling against (or with, as the case may be). In it, I therefore aim to critically reflect on some of the ontological, epistemological, and political implications to which the mainstreaming lens can potentially lead. My hope is that such reflection will not only be of use to people interested in understanding reactionary politics, but to those hoping to resist it as well.
In the article you express some concerns regarding the metaphor of far-right ‘mainstreaming’. Why can this metaphor be problematic when studying the far right?
In my article I identify a paradox, which is that in its very attempt to explain how reactionary politics has become un-exceptional, the mainstreaming explanation can potentially exceptionalise far-right violence. To understand what I mean, a quick but very incomplete overview is necessary.
While much work on mainstreaming is vital, some critical scholars have already identified potential pitfalls. Katy Brown, Aaron Winter, and Aurelien Mondon (2021), for example, have observed that the framework can reify the mainstream as a neutral and passive entity that is merely acted upon by the far right. In turn, this can obscure the extent to which the mainstream itself is implicated in the normalisation of reactionary politics. From this, some then conclude that we need to examine how influence flows in multiple directions – not just from the far right to the mainstream, but vice versa as well.
While I undoubtedly agree with this, my article identifies another possible pitfall, which is that when drawn upon injudiciously, even this more nuanced position can potentially work to discursively ontologise the far right and the mainstream as distinct and separable entities. Indeed, this is implied by the notion that influence could flow from one to the other (in either direction), as well as by the verb form of the term ‘mainstreaming’, which implies a process – and therefore a temporality – through which one thing has come to influence or inhabit another. The paradox then, is that even as the mainstreaming explanation attempts to account for the presence of the far right in the mainstream, it can subtly render the former at least originally or ontologically exceptional to the latter. This, I argue, risks obscuring the proximity the allegedly ‘far’ right has always had to anything that could be called ‘the mainstream’.
To make this argument, I draw from the work of critical scholars such as Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter (and their concept of ‘reactionary democracy’), Charles W. Mills (the ‘racial contract’), and Dylan Rodríguez (‘white reconstruction’). I argue that whereas liberal mythology typically attempts to invisibilise reactionary politics by confining it to the past – as something society has overcome – that by contrast, the mainstreaming explanation can work in an inverse way by instead confining reactionary politics to the present, effectively portraying it as a ‘new’ problem that has supposedly only recently arisen (via mainstreaming). I argue that to follow this line of thought is to fail to appreciate the continuities and conditions of possibility that have allowed reactionary politics to seemingly ‘re-emerge’, but which have always been proximate to, and latent within, quote-unquote ‘liberal society’.
How can we analyse the contemporary far right’s relationship with the ‘mainstream’ without circumscribing, and artificially separating, both of these categories?
I’m sure there is no way to completely avoid this as we are all fallible both in and to language. However, a good practice is to examine any terms upon which we find ourselves relying to make sense of any phenomena we wish to understand.
Within the field of far-right studies, we often seem to turn to terms that invoke distance. We talk, for example, of the ‘far’ or ‘extreme’ right, fringe actors, and marginal ideas. Such terms can render distant the objects they purport to signify. And as I articulate in my article, sometimes even when we attempt to account for the proximity of such phenomena – such as through the mainstreaming explanation – alterity is again surreptitiously introduced.
With that said, while the mainstreaming discourse can obscure the a priori link between reactionary politics and the mainstream, I don’t think it necessarily has to do so by default. To avoid this, rather than relying on invocations of distance, those working in the field might instead counter-archive our present moment by recognising the resonance between reactionary logics and those of the liberal multicultural west. This would entail remaining sensitive to the ontologising (yet simultaneously obscuring) function of language. It would also involve critically analysing one’s objects of study, and reflecting on one’s relationship to those objects. More than this, it might also involve interrogating one’s own investment – surreptitious or otherwise – in the position from which those objects are examined.
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Liam Gillespie is a member of the RPRN and researches far-right political violence, nationalism, racism, and white supremacy, with a focus on street-based protest movements. He is currently completing projects on far-right conspiracy theories and Sovereign Citizens.
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