Vox qualis populi? The location of the radical populist right within the far right
Keywords:
Far-right, fascism, populism, radical right, VoxAbstract
This paper attempts to dispel with a breath of conceptual fresh air the dense terminological fog that still shrouds discussions of different types of contemporary "right" in the media and social networks, and that also obscures analyses of "populism" in some specialised academic studies. First, it emphasises the now conventional ideal-type distinction between fascism as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism, and the radical right, which encompasses illiberal forms of "right-wing populism", as a non-revolutionary force. He then emphasises how the "metapolitical turn" in the New Right has allowed ostensibly non-fascist, non-racist and non-violent variants of ultra-nationalism to have a major impact on the "radical populist right" in its calls for a restored "identity" and its conjectures about an ethnically differentiated "people". This evolution has allowed radical populism to serve "entryist" neo-fascists as a vehicle for infiltrating democratic politics, either through alliances or by forming covert extremist factions within populist movements. What emerges here is a set of premises for analysing the subtle relationship between fascism and illiberal democratic populism in movements such as Spain's Vox with a level of taxonomic consistency and sophistication. The "moral" is that radical right-wing populism should not be equated with fascism, even if it shares with it porous membranes both historically and in its post-war permutations. These membranes allow it to act as a means to infiltrate fascism and accommodate a fascist electorate that would otherwise be "helpless": in this way, both populism and fascism contaminate "liberal democracy".
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