Understanding the Far Right as a Constellation

Scholars, activists, monitoring and law enforcement agencies, and commentators in many parts of the globe have remarked on the eruption of far-right extremism after periods in which it appeared to all but disappear. These eruptions are often described as unexpected, as catching mainstream societies off-guard and ill-prepared to counter the rising threat. In our new book, Out of Hiding: Extremist White Supremacism and How It Can Be Stopped (Routledge, 2024), we propose a constellation approach to explain how and why the far-right seems to episodically vanish and reappear. The specific focus of our book is extremist white supremacism in the United States, a movement we trace to the first Ku Klux Klan which used racial terrorism to ensure the continuation of white power in the Southern states after the Civil War. But we hope that the constellation framework also will be useful for understanding how far-right parties and movements operate in other places and times.

In our book, we argue that a dynamic constellation of practices, ideas, and emotions that support white, male, and Western supremacy has been a core characteristic of U.S. extremist white supremacism for more than a century. We came to use the analogy to a celestial constellation because we found it more helpful in interpreting this type of extremism than its standard depiction as a collec­tion of fragmented and sporadically organized people, groups, networks, and organizations. 

Practices, ideas, emotions

Our analysis of white supremacism focuses on the centrality of a specific set of practices, ideas, and emotions. Its core practices are actions strategically directed to solidify domination by white racist and misogynist men, including support for violence and a terroristic “race war” against their perceived enemies.  A highly opportunistic movement, this white supremacism has an uneven relationship with electoral ambitions. The massive Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s avidly sought electoral power in various states and locales.  By the late 20^th century, however, many extremist white supremacists had soured on electoral politics although discussions about its potential viability remained part of their strategy and culture.

The core ideas of extremist white supremacism consistently center on the biological and cultural superiority of the white race and the inferiority of persons they define as “non-white,” a category that encompasses persons they regard as Jewish, those with ancestry from the continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, LGBT+ persons, feminists, white race traitors such as white women who resist their racial obligation to bear and raise many white children, “globalists” (code for “the international Jew”), and a nebulous group they label as “antifa.”  They describe those they designate as “non-white” persons as enemies of the white race, evil, non-­human, animalistic, infectious, and even as descendants of Satan, and they describe the fed­eral government as “ZOG” (Zionist Occupied Government).

And extremist white supremacy operates with a set of core emotions – especially negatively-expressed emotions of rage, fear, anger, sadness, resentment, and indignation and positively expressed emotions of racial pride and a feeling of collective solidarity—which support an agenda of white domination. Such emo­tions permeate white supremacists’ messages to followers, potential recruits, and racial targets and are strategically deployed in offline gatherings and online communities. Emotions of extremist white supremacism are evident in displays of hypermasculine thuggery that make aggressive action, even violence, appear to be a necessary response to perceived threats.

Benefits

We see three main benefits of studying the far-right as a constellation of practices, ideas, and emotions rather than as a set of people, groups, networks, and organizations.

One benefit is that a constellation approach makes it easier and more accurate to trace the persistence of the far right, both when it is highly visible and when it is more hidden. We can pinpoint its characteristics when the names, labels, memberships, and structures of its groups and networks are stable as well as when they fluctuate and change.  To return to the U.S. example, extremist white supremacism communicates its ideas, expresses emotions, and engages in practices differently in different political moments. In periods when adherents perceive the public as less accepting of overt racism and extremism, it tends to suppress and hide its commitments by subtly – and often covertly – burrowing into public spaces, including political parties, media ecosystems, music scenes, and online communities, while cultivating membership more openly in private settings like families and close-knit networks. White supremacists also hide by shifting their rhetoric and outward appearance to help make their ideas and emotions more palatable to people who might balk at more overt, stigmatized extremist forms. They seek to dissociate themselves from extremism through self-identification as “alt-rightists,” “identitarians,” “patriots,” and “western chauvinists” who shun swastikas and Ku Klux Klan robes in favor of khakis and polo shirts. Such tactics are aimed at the long game as extremist white supremacism navigates the cultural waters, seeking acceptance for its agendas. When the waters are safer to test, such as during Donald Trump’s presidency, racial extremists come out of hiding.

A second benefit of using a constellation framework is the focus on recognizing the unity of purpose of a movement (or party) that extends across a fluctuating set of organizational forms – including informal groups, structured organizations, online communities, adjacent scenes, and highly insular terroristic cells – that are working toward common goals.  Using a constellation approach to study the U.S., we identified a capacious extremist white supremacism that stretched across the political field that scholars label as right-wing extremism, right-wing pop­ulism, white nationalist, racist extremism, and white power. Focusing on core practices, ideas, and emotions of the far right provides a means of identifying spillover across groups and networks in the broader political field. For example, we identified the reach of extremist white supremacism into communities and networks that share anti-government sentiments, general opposition toward racial and gender equality, and radically conservative social values such as manosphere communities, Christian nationalism, anti-abortion and anti-transgender activism, and conspiracy networks like QAnon.

A third benefit is that a constellation approach attends to the cultural, as well as the political, aspects of the far right. Understanding the cultural operations of the far right provides insight into its ability to persist, in spite of internal conflicts, battles among leaders, and factionalism, and without, in many cases, relying on an effective centralized command structure. Rather, it is held together by a common culture that adherents embrace and share and that provides a means through which they attract new adherents, socialize them into their practices, ideas, and emotions, and sustain them over time. The cultural foundation of the constellation approach also highlights a critical, but too often overlooked, principle about how the far right forms (and re-forms) over time. Far-right movements (and sometimes far-right parties) enter popular conscious­ness through public rallies and demonstrations, so observers tend to look for identifiable groups and leaders to assess their strength. But public actions, including “fighting in the streets” often come later in the pro­cess of movement or party formation. Focusing on the far-right only when it operates in public misses the critical cultural processes involved as people identify their commonalities and who they oppose, form a shared sense of purpose and belonging, and translate their cohesiveness into action. Rather than a starting point, public protest actions are a vapor trail flowing from longer, prior efforts to build and integrate individuals and networks into a relatively cohesive block and to coordinate their willingness to act.

We think that a constellation approach offers some important analytic advantages for understanding extremism. But we also recognize that this approach would benefit from further development, especially by assessing whether it is useful for analyzing far-right extremisms whose forms and operations may be quite different from those of the U.S. extremist white supremacism which is the focus of our book. These are our next steps, and we invite others to take them with us.