The Two Faces of the ‘Global Right’: Revolutionary Conservatives and National-Conservatives

Studies of the Global Right usually trace its intellectual underpinnings to the revolutionary conservative New Right and its ideas claiming to defend an ‘ethno-pluralist’ European identity from the multiculturalist threat of a ‘Great Replacement’ through immigration. A second lineage, which we refer to as ‘national-conservative’, is less explored and is more concerned with threats to moral order and the loss of moral bearing due to liberalism’s relativism. These two intellectual lineages, and corresponding political alignments, engender different political projects of the Global Right, which is not that coherent as it seems. Taking a long-term historical-ideational perspective that underlines the power of ideologies as templates, we argue that a closer look at the different intellectual traditions of the Global Right can help explain the contrasting political preferences for socio-economic action, institution-building and transnational cooperation.

Accounting for Rapallo

The outbreak and aftermath of the Second World War meant that Ezra Pound’s political allegiances became undeniable, and writers who had been in Rapallo felt compelled to account for their proximity to Pound and their presence in Italy during Mussolini’s regime. This chapter interrogates the way that the poets of Rapallo represented Pound and Rapallo’s importance to their development, and it challenges critics’ convenient acceptance of these narratives. This chapter places particular importance on the lives of George Yeats, Dorothy Pound, and Brigit Patmore, challenging Virginia Woolf’s idea of the “totalitarian man” by showing the multifarious political alignments of Rapallo’s women.

National/European identities and political alignments

Reflecting on the articles in this special issue of European Union Politics, this essay first asks whether EU scholarship has sufficiently conceptualized and measured what it means to identify with the European Project and/or the European Community. The evidence in this special issue indicates that many citizens now have attachments to Europe, albeit in uncertain depth. European attachments also exist in combination with or as an alternative to national identities. European/national identities also now overlap with partisan attachments, potentially forming a new basis of political cleavage. The research in this collection demonstrates a rich portfolio of methods to examine this important topic, and yields new evidence of how geographic identities are related to public opinion on issues such as immigration.

Publicity and Transparency

Publicity and transparency are two foundational ideas about the proper structure of democratic communication. In a context of utterly transformed public discourse, it is time to rethink the value of these concepts and especially their relationship to one another. This special issue aims to test prevailing assumptions about these terms as they are reshaped in the present era of organized promotional culture. To begin, the present introduction recasts the concepts of publicity and transparency as tools for analyzing and organizing communicative power rather than as normative ideals in their own right. To this end, we present three core arguments for rethinking transparency and publicity today. First, all acts of transparency entail a redistribution of communicative power but not an inherently egalitarian or democratic one. Second, publicity is the central means by which transparency distributes communicative power. And third, scholars must analyze transparency, like publicity, as a professionalized and industrialized field. By centering questions of power and practice, this special issue aims to animate a research agenda attentive to the relational character of both transparency and publicity in hopes of foregrounding the ways the concepts might be used in service of more equitable political alignments.

Pluralistic Collapse: The “Oil Spill” Model of Mass Opinion Polarization

Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting little evidence of mass polarization, previous studies assume polarization is evidenced via the amplification of existing political alignments. This article considers a different pathway: polarization occurring via social, cultural, and political alignments coming to encompass an increasingly diverse array of opinions and attitudes. The study uses 44 years of data from the General Social Survey representing opinions and attitudes across a wide array of domains as elements in an evolving belief network. Analyses of this network produce evidence that mass polarization has increased via a process of belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs. Further, the increasing salience of political ideology and partisanship only partly explains this trend. The structure of U.S. opinion has shifted in ways suggesting troubling implications for proponents of political and social pluralism.

Are There Lessons for Us to Learn?

This chapter draws eight conclusions from previous chapters for contemporary use. The first is that a kind of “blockage” has occurred, whereby powerful interest groups grow stronger and defend their wealth and privileges by blocking essential change and innovation. The second conclusion points out that it is possible to overcome a crisis if there are strong institutions that can be used by a self-aware political elite capable of understanding that change is necessary. The third is that moderate liberals usually emerge in the early stages of revolution, but are apt to be marginalized later on. The fourth adds that people from other political alignments also fall into the same trap. The fifth argues that wars invariably enhance the power of the radicals. The sixth reminds us that we all need to pay attention to what political leaders write and say, and never assume that what sounds like extremism is just opportunistic exaggeration. The seventh remarks on how ideas were also shaped by cultural and intellectual elites who were not identical to political ones. Finally, the eight: if you want a revolution, beware of how it might turn out.