Authoritarianism and whiteness: contemporary ultra-rights in the West

Abstract

The present text aims to contribute to the ongoing discussions around the emergence of new ultra or extreme right-wing movements around the world, in general, and in the West, in particular, recovering, on the one hand, the contributions made by materialist readings (non-metaphysical) of modern culture and racism, from the rescue of Marx's critical discourse by American social thought, and on the other, the theorizations formulated by social philosophy about the forms that modern authoritarianism takes within the margins of reproduction of contemporary capitalism. In this sense, the following exhibition is divided into three sections. In the first, the purpose is to lay the foundations of the ongoing discussion on the re-emergence of extreme and ultra-right-wing phenomena in the West, identifying, above all, how the memory of European fascism and National Socialism, typical of the first decades of the twentieth century, makes its appearance in the collective debate to designate characters, movements, and political, historical, and cultural dynamics that are so diverse, heterogeneous, and even divergent from one another. In the following section, the aim is to open the discussion on a non-moralizing reading of the historical and contemporary rights and, likewise, to situate their concrete space-time specificities. To conclude, a proposal is made for a reading of these new rights, refocusing the discussion around the concept of whiteness, developed by the Mexican philosopher Bolivar Echeverria.

In expository terms, it is important to point out that the text is composed of a permanent dialogue between two levels of analysis (not only because of the nature of the problem itself, but also due to the necessary recognition of the dialectical link between both levels). Namely, the strictly analytical-philosophical one, in which the elementary ideological contents that nourished the old rightists and distinguish the new ones from them are exposed; and the historical-political one, in charge of historically situating (historicizing) both phenomena (the old rightists and the new ones) not only as ideological projects, but also as differentiated political programs. This explains why, throughout the document, there are passages with a strong reflective content of a theoretical-conceptual type, in which the categorical instruments necessary to approach the problem in question are clarified, articulated with historical-expositional passages, tending to differentiate rather than homologate contemporary phenomena with those of the past.