The Metapolitics of Crises: How the New Right Weaponises Narratives to Mainstream Far-Right Ideology

Abstract Far-right ideology is often analysed as a reaction to political and societal crises. In this paper, I flip this argument and investigate how political and societal crises are narratively constructed to push far-right ideology. Drawing on the case of the New Right, which is primarily invested in a metapolitical struggle for cultural hegemony, I propose two approaches that help to make sense of the normalisation and mainstreaming of the far right. First, I offer a framework towards new-right metapolitics that comprehends metapolitics as strategic and deliberate work to implement specific narratives as hegemonic cultural knowledge. The resulting emergence of narrative communities — collectives whose sense-making draws on the same narratives — is a precondition for mainstreaming discourses. In a second step, drawing on an analysis of new-right periodicals in the scope of the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD), I will outline the three essential and intertwined crisis narratives and introduce a heuristic scheme that contains the narrative core of most far-right discourses. I argue that the New Right aims to foster a distinctive worldview through ad nauseam repetition of thematically different but structurally identical stories of decline. Debunking their patterns and tracing their genealogy may demystify far-right discourses as a limited and stereotypical set of stories that is adjusted to any given event.