Right-Wing Politics

While God may have rested on the seventh day, we suspect that this series will run for at least one more day, and probably two or three, the subject has been documented so well by other sources.

"Right-Wing Politics

'The far-right (also known as the extreme right) refers to the highest degree of rightism in right-wing politics. Far right politics involves support of strong or complete social hierarchy in society, and supports supremacy of certain individuals or groups deemed to be innately superior who are to be more valued than those deemed to be innately inferior.[1]

'The far right's advocacy of supremacism is based on what its adherents perceive as innate characteristics of people that cannot be changed.[2] This stands as a point of difference with the centre-right's attribution of behaviours, such as laziness or decadence, as the primary sources of social inequalities.[2] The centre right—unlike the far right—claims that people can end their behavioural inferiority through changing their habits and choices.[3]

'The original far right, which emerged in France after the French Revolution, refused to accept the French Republic and supported a counter-revolution to restore the French monarchy and aristocracy.[4] The far right is commonly associated with persons or groups who hold extreme nationalist,xenophobic, racist, religious fundamentalist or reactionary views.[5] The most extreme-right movements have pursued oppression and genocide against groups of people on the basis of their alleged inferiority.[6]"



Sound familiar?  Read on:

"Far-right politics commonly includes authoritarianism, anti-communism, and nativism.[7] Often, the term "far right" is applied to fascists and neo-Nazis,[8][9][10][11][12] and major elements of fascism have been deemed clearly far right, such as its belief that supposedly superior people have the right to dominate society while purging allegedly inferior elements, and — in the case of Nazism— genocide of people deemed to be inferior.[13]Claims that superior people should proportionally have greater rights than inferior people are sometimes associated with the far right.[14]The far right has historically favoured an elitist society based on belief of the legitimacy of the rule of a supposed superior minority over the inferior masses.[15]Far-right politics usually involves anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are deemed inferior and undesirable.[16]Concerning the socio-cultural dimension (nationality, culture and migration), one far-right position could be the view that certain ethnic, racial or religious groups should stay separate, and that the interests of one’s own group should be prioritised.[17]

"There is disagreement among academics concerning the most appropriate way of defining the ideologies of right-wing extremist parties.[18] Within this debate different scholars disagree as to the number and combination of ideological features that qualify a party as right-wing extremist as well as the different typologies used to distinguish between parties within this family. According to Christina Liang, this 'academic field is especially peculiar about its terminology. Each label carries with it a specific understanding of this family of political parties as well as a particular set of assumptions regarding their origins and electoral success'.[19]In an extensive survey of the literature, academic Cas Mudde found 26 definitions of right-wing extremism that contained 57 different ideological features.[20] Alongside the theoretical debate concerning the nature of these parties there is also an empirical debate concerning who speaks for right-wing extremist parties and how to measure their ideology given that many reject the right-wing extremist label being applied to them.



"One issue when it comes to terminology is whether parties should be labelled "radical" or "extreme",[21] a distinction that is made by the German Federal Constitutional Court when determining whether a party can be banned. Another question is the what the label "right" implies when applied to the extreme right, given that many parties labelled as right-wing extremist tended to advance neo-liberal and free market agendas as late as the 1980s but can now advocate economic policies more traditionally associated with the left, such as anti-globalisation, nationalisation and protectionism. One approach, drawing on the writings of Norberto Bobbio, argues that attitudes towards equality are what distinguish between left and right and therefore allow these parties to be positioned on the right of the political spectrum. There is also debate about how appropriate the labels fascist or neo-fascist are. According to Cas Mudde, 'the labels Neo-Nazi and to a lesser extent neo-fascism are now used exclusively for parties and groups that explicitly state a desire to restore the Third Reich or quote historical National Socialism as their ideological influence'. [21]

"Jurgen Falter and Siegfried Schumann define right-wing extremism with reference to ten ideological features which they believe constitutes a core extreme right ideology, including hyper-nationalism, ethnocentralism, anti-communism, anti-parliamentarianism and anti-pluralism.[22]

"Cas Mudde identified five key features – nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy and the belief in a strong state – based on the fact that they appear in 50% of the definitions of the extreme-right that he surveyed.[23] However, in later writings he revisited his earlier assessment and argued in favour of a definition based upon three features: authoritarianism, populism and nativism.



"According to Elizabeth Carter, the two defining features of a right-wing extremist party are: a rejection of fundamental human equality, which she asserts is what makes the party right-wing,[24]and a rejection of the fundamental democratic values of the state, which makes it extremist.[25]

"Proponents of the horseshoe theory interpretation of the left-right spectrum identify the far-left and far-right as having more in common with each other as extremists than each have towards moderate centrists."[26]

"A new report out Thursday finds that right-wing extremists on Twitter are 'highly engaged' with the mainstream conservative movement and the Republican Party and highlights the role the GOP has to play in countering their more violent fans.

"The report— titled 'Who Matters Online: Measuring influence, Evaluating Content and Countering Violent Extremism in Online Social Networks' — originally sought to examine the way that extremists use social media to interact among themselves, in this instance focusing on white nationalists’ use of Twitter. But throughout their investigation, the study’s authors, International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation associate fellow J.M. Berger and Bill Strathearn, inadvertently discovered something interesting.

"They began with 12 'seed' Twitter accounts for their unambiguous status as white nationalists. The authors then created a dataset of 3,542 Twitter users who interacted with those 12 seed accounts, of which 44 percent self-identified as white nationalists. After analyzing the interactions between the 3,542 users and the 12 seed accounts, the authors identified the 200 top-scoring accounts, of which 83 percent self-identified as white nationalists (for the top 400, the self-ID rate was 74 percent).

"The real surprise came almost accidentally, when studying the content of the tweets members of the dataset sent out, with a substantial amount of it linked to the conservative movement in the United States and the Republican Party. Among the most popular hashtags used by those featured in the dataset included '#tcot,' or top conservatives on Twitter; '#teaparty,' and '#gop.' The study also looked at the links these users sent out, categorized into mainstream, content-neutral, alternative, and extremist categories. More than half of the alternative links these users sent out were also to conservative websites, such as World Net Daily and Brietbart.com.