The New Class

Although the radical right varies significantly from country to country and its underlying ideological framework is not always articulated in formal principles, Abrahamsen and her coauthors aim to identify a “core concept” that gives unity and coherence across the movements in different nations. Their approach is grounded in the work of the political theorist Michael Freeden and in particular his influential 1998 study, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. This theoretical framework enables the authors to recognize “family resemblances” across various radical right movements, rather than asserting that all movements share the same set of concepts. This flexibility is helpful for Abrahamsen and her coauthors to find what is common within the global radical right without reducing all varieties to a single rigid model.

At the core, then, of the different national versions of the radical right is an account of what Abrahamsen and her coauthors call “global managerialism.” For thinkers on the radical right, Abrahamsen et al. contend:

the essence of contemporary world politics is not the age-old story of realist power politics, the liberal tale of progress through institutions, or the corrosive spread of neoliberal capitalism. It is instead the rise to power of a global liberal managerial elite, the so-called New Class of experts and bureaucrats. Detached and unmoored from their national identities and cultures, the interests of this elite lie in yet further globalization and liberalization, and work against the interests of traditional national values and local communities.

At the core of the radical right’s theoretical framework is the concept of global managerialism, which underpins both its critique of contemporary politics and its mass electoral appeal. As Abrahamsen and her coauthors explain, viewing politics through the lens of global managerialism allows the radical right to make a series of characteristic claims, usually directed at domestic liberals or the wider liberal international order. A central feature of these claims is the identification of a class enemy: the New Class, which includes corporate elites, civil servants, journalists, lawyers, engineers, therapists, academics, consultants, and various bureaucrats.

The radical right argues that the material interests of the New Class are not rooted in the ownership of production but in knowledge, expertise, and the reproduction of a globalized economy that privileges cultural capital, education, connections to cosmopolitan networks, and progressive values more widely. Unlike left-wing commentators who might identify this group as the professional-managerial class (or PMC) or the new petty bourgeoisie, the radical right is much more likely to point to the fact that the New Class’s power derives from its position in global networks and highlight its disconnection from the local, the traditional, and above all, the nation.

The Right’s Class War

The insight that it is this class-based critique that is core to the radical right is an important one. As World of the Right explains, this critique grounds the radical right’s appeal in a set of material interests — those of the “people” who oppose the globalization that benefits the New Class. It also links this class analysis to the radical right’s political prescription: a turn against the global in ideology and practice. The radical right constructs this new ruling class — they are notably unafraid to use the term “ruling class” — as incompetent, culturally radical, and out of touch with the mass of the population. Movements and thinkers on the radical right are then able to define themselves as against global managerialism and the global elite — an important part of the explanation of how figures like Donald Trump or Victor Orbán are able to position themselves as anti-elite.

While global managerialism and the New Class are key concepts for understanding the radical right, they do not provide a complete account of its ideological structure. Depending on the national context, other concepts — such as focus on tradition, a defense of “Western values,” and opposition to the Enlightenment — may be more prominent. A defense of the family, in particular, is considered central to debates with political representatives of the New Class, often framed as a key example of what needs to be defended against their rampant progressivism.

These concepts, along with the belief that the liberal international order is fundamentally failed and irreparable, unite different national radical right movements. As Abrahamsen and her coauthors point out, the radical right’s opposition to liberal globalism serves both as a unifying concept and as a mobilizing tool. Railing against faceless bureaucrats in the United Nations, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Health Organization is a characteristic feature of their political positioning, but it also provides a core plank for organizing cross-national National Conservative (NatCon) conferences, fostering an international network of radical right thinkers.

Stealing From Gramsci

In addition to establishing a working model of the conceptual structure of the radical right, Abrahamsen et al. also examine some of the leading strategies it deploys to spread its ideas: the promotion of a radical right publishing industry and radical right educational institutions. Focusing on the publishing house Arktos Media in the former case and a globally networked set of educational institutions aiming to produce a new illiberal global elite in the latter, Abrahamsen and her coauthors make a good case for the essential seriousness of the project of the radical right.

Education of a new cadre of civil servants, diplomats, and public intellectuals is a generational process that requires patience and long-term investment. The reader is left with the hope that further development of the emerging research agenda developed here will include not just further conceptual modeling but also more empirical research into the practical strategies of education, publishing, and wider movement building explored in the book. If Abrahamsen et al. are correct that the academy remains suspicious of engagement with the radical right, then the sooner this suspicion is overcome and replaced with active interest, the better. More empirical detail of the development and political activities of the contemporary radical right is urgently needed.

A recurring theme in the book is that some of the most influential thinkers for the radical right are not the traditional figures typically associated with it, such as Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, or perhaps Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Instead a much more eclectic collection of thinkers emerges: Vladimir Lenin and Carl Schmitt on the role of enmity and antagonism, James Burnham on managerialism, and above all, Antonio Gramsci on counterhegemonic strategies. Abrahamsen and her coauthors go as far as to call the radical right “the Gramscian Right,” contending that just as Karl Marx looked to turn Hegelian idealism “on its head,” so the radical right has inverted Gramsci.

Central to their reading of Gramsci is the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right), particularly its main ideologue, Alain de Benoist. In 1968, Benoist founded the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (Groupement de recherché et d’etudes pour la civilization européenne, or GRECE). By the 1970s and ’80s, he developed a reading of Gramsci’s thought that removed his communist politics — and the central role of the Communist Party — focusing instead on the cultural aspects of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Perhaps the most succinct summary of right-wing Gramscianism is Andrew Breitbart’s dictum, influential among the alt-right, that “politics is downstream of culture.” Abrahamsen and her coauthors trace some of the intellectual history here, charting the influence of Benoist and other “Right Gramscians” from the 1970s and ’80s through the 1990s and 2000s to the present day.

Rightward Momentum

The political stakes for engaging with the radical right, as laid out here, are high. As Abrahamsen and her coauthors point out, the radical right has been successful in developing an opposition between a global managerial elite and diverse “people” in multiple geographical locations — often achieving considerable electoral success. Their book makes it plain that it is possible to speak of a global radical right — something much more identifiable at present than a coherent “global left,” particularly after the decline of left populism around the turn of the decade.

Moreover, the radical right has successfully identified two important weaknesses of the current global capitalist regime. First, managerial liberalism’s “hedonistic ethics, relativistic values, and therapeutic social practices” (as Abrahamsen et al. put it) are inherently fragmented, inhibiting collective action and furthering atomization. Second, liberal managerialism — of the last decade in particular — has relentlessly attacked the economic and social positions of those who refuse to adapt to the demands of globalization: the “left behinds” and “basket of deplorables” who are routinely portrayed as irrecoverably racist and bigoted. Dismissing the criticisms of the radical right, as many on the Left seem keen to do, can be perceived as papering over real problems and defending the status quo — a trap the British left fell into in its defense of the European Union during the years of the Brexit crisis.

Indeed, Abrahamsen and her coauthors provocatively conclude that the radical right’s most significant challenge lies less in its policy positions than in its largely successful reconfiguration of political life as “an all-consuming conflict between those who wish to deepen the infrastructures that grew out of the geopolitical transformations of the twentieth century and those who wish to dismantle these infrastructures to the profit of nativist and neo-traditionalist alternatives.” As Abrahamsen and her coauthors note, it is now the radical right that occupies the terrain of opposition to the status quo. Although it may make for uncomfortable reading, the book’s characterization of the Right as the contemporary force for change seems difficult to deny.

It is the book’s understanding of the disruptive force of the radical right that makes the World of the Right an illuminating analysis of the historical moment of demoralization and disorientation in which the Left finds itself today. As one of the authors of the book recently framed it, the radical right recognizes that this is its historical moment. The ultimate origins of the contemporary radical right in the French New Right of late 1960s and their reading of Gramsci are instructive in this regard. The French right’s turn to Gramsci was born of electoral defeats in the 1960s and driven by a necessity to look beyond existing resources in a fundamentally self-critical project of renewal. It was this experience of defeat that led to the development of a wholly new approach to politics that came to bear fruit decades later. The task facing the contemporary left is a daunting one, but Abrahamsen et al. offer a picture of the radical right that is compelling, thoroughly researched, engaging, and useful in tackling this challenge.

To confront the radical right’s contemporary success requires acknowledging past failures and engaging in self-criticism — exactly the process the French New Right and others were prepared to undertake in the ’60s. Whether the Left is willing and able to engage in a similar process, rather than simply dismissing the radical right and overlooking detailed analyses like the one presented in World of the Right, is at present an open question.