Creeping racism: a cultural conception of politics

My piece endeavours to explain why the new far right is likely here to stay, in Europe, by focusing on its fundamentalist, racist understanding of culture. My argument is that the far right’s culturalist conception of politics circulates well beyond these parties’ immediate constituencies. Indeed, it is sedimenting into a new culturalist common sense, a form of everyday racism. I want to draw attention to the far right’s basic idea that functioning political communities are based on solid ethno-religious-cultural peoples, with a solid, shared cultural heritage. Its corollary is that cultural differences, multiculture, lead to political antagonism and destroy the social bond.Despite being a prominent feature of right-wing populism, this use of culture and the vicious cultural racism that accompanies it have gone largely ignored by scholars of populism and heritage. Anthropologists like Verena Stolcke and Douglas Holmes, Philomena Essed and Mahmoud Mamdani spotted this early on. Given anthropology’s subject and the increased political urgency of the topic, this (mis)use of culture should be of primary concern to us today. Yet, studying it poses problems for a discipline predicated on localised, in-depth intersubjective research. How are we to study a discursive formation so ubiquitous and tentacle-like, so mundane, pervasive and multifaceted, as this culturalist conception of politics? How are we to grasp the accelerated circulation of this conception at multiple scales and the complex processes through which it is becoming vernacular in diverse locales and political cultures?