Living right: Far‐right youth activists in contemporary Europe By AgnieszkaPasieka. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024. 277 pp.

Notwithstanding a handful of notable exceptions, anthropology has had little to say about the contemporary Far Right and its rise, especially when compared with other social science disciplines. But with the rise to power of Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and various nationalist forces across Europe, anthropological attention has increasingly turned to the far-right resurgence and to using the discipline's strengths to better understand it. Pasieka's Living Right, an ethnographic study of young members of Italian, Polish, and Hungarian far-right organizations, is an important contribution to a growing list of titles that have gradually filled this gap. Pasieka's quest to understand the appeal of these organizations for the young activists at the center of her monograph, “the driving force behind their engagement” (p. 4), rests on rich and nuanced ethnography, evidencing long-term fieldwork and close relationships between the author and her interlocutors. Furthermore, rarely does such ethnographic depth coincide with such a truly transnational perspective as in Living Right, which centers on activists in the Italian Lealtá Azione, the Polish National Radical Camp, and, to a lesser extent, the Hungarian Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement. Beyond usefully comparing and contrasting these cases, Pasieka follows their lively interconnections and collaborations around music festivals, national holidays, anniversaries, and commemorations. It is in and through these practices that the transnational and the national “are mutually constituted and transformed” (p. 5). The book offers an ethnographically informed, critical understanding of transnational nationalism, tracing its constitution and recognizing both its role in the appeal of far-right movements and the limits and tensions that it introduces. The very legacy of fascism (chap. 2) sometimes creates discord, as, for example, when Polish and Italian nationalists clumsily attempt to accommodate each other's revisionist historical narratives. Pasieka largely circumvents the current terminological debate around fascism, which centers on its adequacy for understanding contemporary political processes. Rather than asking whether her interlocutors are fascist (a label they reject), she examines how they mobilize, invoke, and orient themselves in relation to the(ir) histories of fascism—in other words, what fascism means and does for them. Their historical references, she shows, center on fascism as a revolutionary movement rather than as an authoritarian regime. Rather than a totalizing ethical framework, the history of fascism offers them “a flexible repertoire of ideas and practices” (p. 68), on which they draw selectively to construct moral exemplars. Especially in its revolutionary phase, historical fascism signals a decidedly future-oriented political project for Pasieka's interlocutors, whom she describes, using their own vocabulary, as radical nationalists or adherents of “far-right variants that link the nationalist agenda with an anticommunist, antiliberal, and anticapitalist rhetoric, thereby proposing a sort of ‘third way’ socioeconomic order” (p. 25). Pasieka aims to correct the stigma that confines them to the past. On the contrary, she shows, these activists see themselves as strongly oriented toward the future, viewing the political Left as trapped in nostalgia. In this, she aligns with scholars of the Far Right who have highlighted its generative dimensions. Living Right cautions us against underestimating the innovative nature of radical nationalism for its activists, as well as the fun, pleasure, and excitement that revolve around this sense of vanguardism and futurity. It is key to the movements’ success. But it's not all fun for radical nationalists. Pasieka's interlocutors, like many other far-right activists, account for their political commitments with familiar tropes of resentment and victimization. Most of them cannot be counted among the losers of the system that they condemn and fight. Many, in fact, do well for themselves. Their activism owes more to their relatively privileged social positions, which allow them to dedicate significant time and resources to their political engagement, and less to any personal experiences of dispossession. The support of privileged classes for fascist political currents has often been understood as motivated not by real loss but by the fear of it. Pasieka, however, proposes the concept of “vicarious resentment”—“the emotions expressed and actions undertaken on behalf of disenfranchised, excluded, or passive others” (p. 102)—to capture how her interlocutors feel and voice resentment mimetically, a resentment that is not their own but emerges out of solidarity with their marginalized countrymen. Accordingly, while they largely count among the beneficiaries of contemporary capitalism, they articulate anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal, and anti-globalization resentment in the name of others. Their anti-capitalist rhetoric often resonates with that of the (Far) Left, with which they feel they have much in common. Theirs, however, is an emphatically nativist, autochthonous critique of capitalism that emphasizes rootedness, (national) belonging, and conservative, traditionalist values in opposition to moral breakdown and to deterritorialized, uprooted, Jewish capital. Being a communitarian rather than a neoliberal Far Right, they maintain an ambivalent relationship with the Left: they respect the anti-capitalist spirit and commitment to social causes of the “old-style socialist Left” but ridicule the contemporary “global Left” (p. 133) for what they perceive as its ideological hypocrisy, arrogance, and abandonment of the national working class in favor of immigrants. Most anthropologists, one should hope, would rightly disagree with the nativist essentialism and racism of radical nationalists. But not all might sufficiently appreciate the resonances between their own critiques of capitalism and those of Living Right’s protagonists. These resonances are not coincidental. It is perhaps ironic that, while anthropological research is everywhere under attack, increasingly dismissed as irrelevant or gradually defunded, our discipline finds in radical nationalists an enthusiastic public. Some of Pasieka's interlocutors were pleased to meet an anthropologist, hopeful that she, for one, would understand them. Through their words, she confronts us with the complicity of anthropology in offering important inspiration for their ideas of culture, identity, and indigeneity (chap. 4). In agreement with other major scholars, Pasieka exposes their shared anti-liberalism. On the Far Right, she argues, an assault on liberalism serves as common ground for otherwise diverse, sometimes dissonant groups and movements. Radical nationalists find inspiration in anthropology's long-standing celebration of anti-liberal ideas (p. 144). Liberalism, and what Pasieka calls “the liberal question,” stand at the center of the book's concerns. Living Right is also a critique of liberalism, though it is not anti-liberal in the sense against which the book cautions. If Pasieka's central question is about the appeal of radical nationalism, a significant part of her answer revolves around liberal hegemony, its “taken-for-grantedness” (p. 7), which caricaturizes, demonizes, or pathologizes her interlocutors instead of affording them the complexity and three-dimensionality reserved for others. Hence, liberals—a rather broad category here—cannot see Pasieka's interlocutors for who they are, much less understand what makes them tick. This is why liberals are ultimately confounded by far-right successes. Her final appeal, accordingly, is that we take seriously the questions that fascism poses to liberalism, that we listen to those who ask them carefully, and that we recognize the utopianism that drives them. What we need, she controversially concludes, is less anti-fascism and more commitment to a “truly antidiscriminatory (inclusionary) politics,” to “recognize the moral and political gray zones that force us to think beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’” (p. 229)—in other words, to remain more open to the Far Right, rather than to harden our positions against it through confrontation and exclusion. A closer consideration of the reasons—some rather compelling—for excluding and confronting the Far Right, rather than including it, is unfortunately missing. The book is written in clear and accessible prose and would be suitable for university students at all levels. It will be of particular interest, of course, to Europeanists and scholars of nationalism and the Far Right, who will find in it an excellent ethnographic study, and it will be of more general interest to political anthropologists. Individual chapters might also be of interest to scholars of gender (chap. 5), memory (chap. 2), and other topics.