Heterodox Protest, the Conservative Right, and the Law

Abstract This paper suggests that the conservative-populist backlash that liberal democracies are facing can be understood as part of heterodox protest movements which react to the liberal-legal hegemony, and, in alliance with populist movements and parties, move into the political centre. Here, I understand the illiberal, or better anti-liberal, reaction to liberal democracy, constitutionalism, and human rights as the result of a long-term mobilization of different counterforces around a dissensus on liberal democracy and its main constitutional and legal approach and mindset. In recent years, an initially rather marginal or peripheral, but now forceful, set of protest and protest movements has been able to move to the political centre, attacking the liberal-constitutional hegemony head on. The paper will discuss the heterodox critique of the liberal-legal consensus, subsequently identifying five key components (including the sacred and the profane, leadership, intolerance, impure universalism, and a turn to the past), particularly derived from Eisenstadt’s analysis of sectarian and heterodox movements. In the second part, I will apply these components to, first, a discussion of intellectual, theoretical justifications for the conservative-heterodox project, to then turn to more practically oriented documents, using a similar analysis of the five components. I conclude by arguing that the heterodox project contains a strong totalizing dimension, by combining a range of positions of charismatisation, closure, and fundamentalism, and which prioritizes the primordial and the sacred, to the detriment of the civic.