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They are hostile to “establishment” forms of conservatism, which remain too weak for them by half. Following Stanley Payne, it can be helpful to divide these characteristics into three intersecting categories.įirst, those on the extreme right share common enemies: they are intractably anti-multiculturalist, anti-socialist, anti-cosmopolitan, and anti-feminist. There are competing accounts of what ideas and characteristics need to be present for an ideology or movement to be accurately described as “fascist” or as belonging to the “extreme right”. Your information is being handled in accordance with the ABC Privacy Collection Statement. If we are to combat recruitment into the ranks of the far right, even among the well-educated in our communities, we need to face the uncomfortable fact that forms of right-wing libertarianism, misogyny, ethnonationalism, neo-Nazism, and accelerationism (the desire to “speed up” the purportedly inevitable collapse of the liberal democracies) have powerful appeal among certain groups - especially in periods of distress and social, political, and economic alienation like we face in the era of the global financial crisis, debt and immigration crises in Europe, and now the global pandemic. Many Germans - up to and including philosophers like Alfred Bäumler and Martin Heidegger - were cultural warriors who landed their blows in refined attacks against liberalism, democracy, socialism, feminism, egalitarianism, and cosmopolitanism. Remember, not all Nazis were the romper stomper street fighters of the Sturmabteilung or Brownshirts ( Braunhemden), their shaven heads emptied of all ideas. In both nations, the universities and even the artistic avant-garde contained many enthusiasts taken in by the promised spiritual “regeneration” and forms of “new man” that the extreme right promised. The Italy of Mussolini was the home of the Renaissance, and Hitler’s Germany the land of “poets and thinkers” whose university system was the gold standard of the early twentieth century. But the historical record does not support these self-satisfied claims. In other words, it could never happen here. One barrier to such understanding is a shared sense that, precisely because Nazis and fascists of whatever stripe exalt the rule of force, emotion, and strength and denounce weakness, intellectualism, and “fancy ideas” like social justice, humanitarianism, and equality, the extreme right could never take root in well-educated populations. If we are to prevent the emergence of this violence, and the further mainstreaming of extreme ethnonationalism, we need to understand both the extreme right’s ideas and the sources of their appeal.
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Reports continue to surface in the Australian media about the disturbing rise of neo-Nazi groups and the possible threat of domestic terrorism they pose, as well as the ways these groups have used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext for recruitment.