Reactionary vanguards and the social question (or, contemporary vulnerability politics between Left and Right decontestations)

This article explores the sources of contemporary reactionism in the light of progressive political theories of vulnerability. Building on arguments set out in my The Ideology of Political Reactionaries, it asks do ideological recruits to a range of contemporary hard-right formations have a plausible claim to being subjects of vulnerability? And if so, are the vanguards which aim to articulate their interests and/ or act for them in any way justified? The discussion proposes that they are not, primarily because reactionary vanguardists disseminate self-victimising ideas and tropes which are heavily implicated in blaming other likely victims. However, popular support does not start out from nothing; it is aspects of real-world experience that enable such political messaging. While two accounts are familiar already – that popular recruits to reactionism suffer cultural repression (by ‘wokeism’) or economic exploitation (such as in welfare provision stretched thin by migration or in undercut employment wages) – the discussion shifts the emphasis of vulnerability to three more subtle conceptions which progressive theorists have detected: marginalisation, humiliation, and complex violence. To consider these conceptions, the article turns to representations of recruitment to right-wing belief within fiction, foremost to try to profit from an interpretive virtue of empathy in the course of appraising motivations.