The Longue Durée of the Far-Right Quotes

“the politics of the far-right – what it is, the social constituencies from which it tends to draw its support and the ideological devices it uses – are intimately connected to the type of society, politics and conflicts, and insecurities bequeathed by capitalist development.”
― Richard Saull, The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An International Historical Sociology

“the far-right is also against the spread of the principles and practices of (cosmopolitan) liberalism and the wider left in these domains, largely because such developments are seen as external to and corrupting and subversive of what the right, in general, considers as natural and organic to the nation. Both the conservative and far-right also combine a romanticization of the past – anchored in fixed or ‘natural’ social hierarchies – with a despondency as to the prevailing cultural trends of the present (Mudde 2000: 11).”
― Richard Saull, The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An International Historical Sociology

“The definitional attributes of the far-right relate to enduring political and ideological qualities as well as those social layers produced by capitalist development most drawn to the far-right style of politics. The key appeal is to ‘the people’, understood as a racially-defined demos, premised on a gendered social hierarchy and obscuring the class cleavages associated with capitalist development. This is significant as it reflects an acceptance, indeed, an embrace of the possibilities of mass-democracy and particularly through the way in which this political form enables a censoring of elites, whether traditional, liberal-cosmopolitan or otherwise. 4 Further, in appealing to a people through language and symbols that both reify and fetishize particular qualities and attributes associated with the cultural identity of ‘the people’, the far-right not only articulates those values and institutions that it sees as key to the identity of a people (e.g. race/ethnicity, culture rooted in fixed narratives and symbols, history, masculinity, etc.), but also seeks to erase and obscure those other qualities – notably the socio-economic – that are, arguably, central to the material and lived reality of concrete individuals within capitalist societies.”
― Richard Saull, The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An International Historical Sociology