The Political Right as Experience: Right-Wing Politics and Belonging

Abstract

This article approaches right-wing politics as a form of collective action and meaning-making that gives social actors an experience of belonging. The political right is usually analyzed through concepts like misinformation and radicalization, as well as abstract analytical categories like fascism, authoritarianism, and populism. This article argues for a shift in analytical approach in the study of right-wing movements to the lived experience of belonging that the political right crafts for its participants. As opposed to starting from predetermined categories of analysis, I emphasize the politics of belonging and its underlying practices of identification as powerful mechanisms for creating meaningful and authentic experiences of self and community. My argument is that the lived experience of belonging creates a sense of self/other, emotional bonds, and communal relations for social actors. To belong in, on, and to the political is thus a “style of life” that is meaningful to many. When the political right is understood in terms of lived experiences of belonging and everyday practices of identification, threats to democracy appear to have deeper social foundations than is usually conveyed by labeling politicians authoritarians or fascists.

Introduction

Unlike the twentieth century, when the question of political power was “who governs? “ (Dahl, 1963), now, it might well be “who belongs?” (see Yuval-Davis, 2006, 2011). This is prominently dramatized on the world stage. Globally, climate change, war, and corporate-led poverty have displaced over 120 million people, according to UNHCR estimates. Such figures do not include those displaced by livelihood-destructive economic policies (such as structural adjustment programs and neoliberalism). Meanwhile, ethnoracial nationalist parties that promote violent and exclusionary forms of belonging are becoming increasingly dominant. Their goals include restricting citizenship rights, expulsion of populations deemed undesirable through denationalization and deportation, and suspension of legal and civil rights through criminalization and incarceration (see Paik, 2016; Walia, 2021). According to Saskia Sassen (2014) expulsion has become the primary political tool for creating and reproducing inequalities. Even in societies that until recently had committed themselves to forms of state multiculturalism, such as the United States (U.S.), South Africa, or India, expulsion is being promoted by right-wing forces because it provides the dramatic spectacle, narratives of self/other, and legitimating discourses of governance that draw the line between belonging and non-belonging.

How do we frame, theorize, and investigate the ways that people are made to (un)belong when belonging is the defining politics of society? And specifically, what motivates right-wing politics, which are at the forefront of expulsion, displacement, and dehumanization? When attempting to answer such questions, a familiar set of terms, such as mis/disinformation, propaganda, and radicalization, are used to describe the rise of the political right. Alternatively, such politics is approached through a set of pre-constituted categories and abstractions: “fascism,” “populism,” and “authoritarianism.” Those concepts and theories explain aspects of the political right, but they do not always address how right-wing politics create emotional attachments, intense forms of exclusive solidarities, and new narratives of self /other. In short, the practices that materialize belonging on, in, and to the political right is treated as a symptom or by-product of those larger political processes and abstractions. I first discuss those conventional explanations and briefly elucidate their logics; I then theorize the rise of the political right as a problematic of belonging. Specifically, I argue for a conceptualization of the political right as lived experience of belonging i.e., how it creates emotional, social, and political attachments for its participants.

Analyzing the Political Right

Public and academic discourse about the political right is regularly framed around concepts such as misinformation/disinformation or radicalization. A study of over 50 right-wing monitoring organizations reveals that they conceptualize the political right through a limited set of concepts (Ward, forthcoming). These include extremism, domestic terrorism, mis/disinformation, propaganda, and radicalization. The work of monitoring organizations contributes substantially to framing a discourse about the political right: they conduct research, publish public-facing reports, hold webinars and conferences, and distribute information on social media. Furthermore, the mainstream media often quotes them when discussing the political right. In addition, they receive federal funding and provide counterterrorism expertise to law enforcement. Thus, they influence public debate as well as set agendas for analysis of the political right. Yet, at the basis of notions such as misinformation or radicalization is a psychologization and individualization of the problem: radicalization occurs when isolated and anomic individuals gradually embrace right-wing ideas and disinformation that offer palliative and simple explanations for political problems (Kundnani, 2012). Such an explanation presumes a normative citizen who is pluralist and tolerant before the onset of radicalization. This characterization brackets out the problem of belonging. It fails to ask whether this normative citizen is not him/herself constituted through exclusionary forms of belonging. And, by presuming an isolated and anomic individual who has gone down the rabbit hole, it does not question whether the political right is offering an experience of belonging, one that matches liberal or socialist (and everything in between) forms of solidarities (see Mogelson, 2022).

Another important and enduring strand of analysis of right-wing movements is reflected in the works of scholars who analyze the current moment through abstract categories and political forms that threaten democracy. Since the first presidency of Donald Trump, analyses of “fascism” (Stanley, 2018), “populism” (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017), “white nationalism” (Belew & Gutiérrez, 2021), or “authoritarianism” (Brown et al., 2018) have saturated public and academic discourse. Such analyses are structured by an authoritarianism/democracy dichotomy, a tendency that can be traced back to the work of Frankfurt School theorists, and especially in the pioneering study, The Authoritarian Personality. This unquestioned dichotomy silently structures knowledge production about the political right. Yet, as Cedric Robinson (2019) argued, “Black Radical Theorists” long understood that fascism and authoritarianism, embedded in racist practices, could coexist with and even co-constitute democracies. A related tendency, especially in the United States (but with cognates elsewhere), is to resort to pre-established identity categories, e.g., the white working class, whiteness, or white supremacists, to explain the rise of right-wing politics. While it is undeniable that racism and whiteness shape the political right, researchers should ask not only how and under what conditions do people on the right understand themselves in terms of whiteness, but also through what practices do they come to embody and display—perform—such identities. That is, the problematic here is not one of identity but of identification (see Butler, 1997; Hall, 1981/2021). In neglecting to ask how identity categories are constituted through quotidian and contradictory processes of identification, analysis obscures the experience of belonging to the political right.

By contrast, to understand how the political right has become a global force, I argue that it is important to understand its politics of belonging and how it involves complex practices of identification along multiple and contradictory axes. Drawing on empirical research conducted over the last three years, as well as the works of anthropologists (Holmes, 2000) and historians (McGirr, 2001; McRae, 2018; Miller, 2015), I theorize the political right as lived experience. The political right, I argue provides social actors meaningful experiences of self and collectivity. Such experiences constitute, not a political form per se, but rather a “style of life” (Holmes, 2000, p. 8) that can be quotidianly experienced through socio-cultural practices of meaning-making and belonging in an authentic community. As such, the experience of authentic self and communal life becomes an important analytical starting point. The political right is a collection of practices—including collective action and organizational belonging, processes of exclusion and expulsion (i.e., “othering”), self-making or self-fashioning, and communal meaning-making—through which this style of life is experienced. Such practices are political because they occur at sites of identification, most notably, public spaces where the experience of belonging can be relationally validated. This explains the dizzying number of issues that have come under attack from the political right: education policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, masking and vaccination policies, school curricula, etc. These issues share the quality of publicness i.e., where belonging is experienced and identification is practiced.

Belonging in, on, and to the Right

To belong in, on, and to the political right means more than party/movement affiliation or ideological alignment; such a politics consists of processes of identification and a lived experience of belonging. In that regard, Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) proposes an analytical distinction between belonging and the politics of belonging. The former refers to the dynamic process through which a) people belong to a particular social location (i.e., how their social identity is located within and constructed through the power relations that exist in a particular society), b) people develop their sense of self through identification with and emotional attachment to a collectivity c) people use “ethical and political value systems” to “judge their own and others’ belonging/s.” The politics of belonging, on the other hand, refers to the process of maintaining the boundaries between in- and out-groups. Therefore, the politics of belonging involves defining who can belong, under what conditions, and when members of a group can be expelled because they have been deemed outsiders or threats. Belonging and the politics of belonging, though analytically distinct, are nevertheless related—boundary work occurs within every process of social location, identification, and the construction of value systems.

Hence, we can speak of belonging in, on, and to the political right—as collectivity, network, principle, and practice—as a lived experience of social and political life. One belongs in community with others through camaraderie, solidarity, and other practices of affiliation. One belongs on the political right, in the way that one identifies with individuals, groups, and networks that share similar social practices and political principles. To belong on the right is to socially position oneself in contradistinction or opposition to others. One belongs to the political right through commitment i.e., by “taking sides” and participating in social struggles. All three dimensions of belonging contain an experiential quality. In other words, the political right creates a lived experience of belonging for social actors. Thus, it is from this perspective—the lived experience of belonging—that I am arguing that the political right must be understood today. Rather than approaching the right through pre-constituted identity or political categories or through abstractions and pre-determined political forms, there is a need to identify and understand practices and processes of identification that create the emotional bonds, communal relations, and social positioning that make the political right a “style of life.”

The January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol, when examined through the self-characterizations of the participants, offer insight into how the experience of belonging shapes political identity on the right. ¹ What might appear to be an uncontested truth—a shocking case of “insurrection” or even a “coup,” as described by the January 6 Congressional Committee (2022)—is, in fact, more complex. Attempts to explain the event through a singular narrative often pass through the distorting lenses of “post-truth politics” or “polarization,” contributing to a broader sense of political and social disorientation (see Wodak 2020). By turning to the rhetoric and self-characterizations of the ordinary citizens involved in the Capitol breach, researchers can better understand the practices through which these individuals constitute their sense of self and style their political identities. Focusing analytically on the experience of belonging offers a pathway to understanding how ordinary people come to support the political right and engage in shocking actions (such as the Capitol breach) that threaten democracy (see Dalsheim & Starrett, 2021; Valayden et al., 2024).

Those who breached the Capitol on January 6 displayed a striking sense of exuberance and joy, reveling in the feeling of participating in a historic moment. As they entered the legislative chambers, protestors posted on social media with celebratory or ironic messages: “We took the Capitol and it was glorious,” “Lol they can come and get me; I did not break or vandalize anything,” and “Outside Pelosi's Office… Nothing to see here.” These expressions of joy and communal pride—especially the triumphant “We took the Capitol”—suggest that the experience of belonging to something larger than themselves outweighed concerns about the consequences of their actions. For many, the event seemed to be about the experience itself. As one participant put it, “This will be the most historic event of my life.” Yet, this joyful sense of belonging carried a darker undertone: a feeling of impunity and entitlement, as if the law did not apply to them. Such a perception becomes possible when internalized as a kind of habitus—shaped through the routines and practices of everyday life that confer a sense of impunity—where belonging to the political right functions as a style of life. At the Capitol, it was this particular style of life that was being experienced, now on the world stage.

My argument is that approaching the political right through the lens of lived experience reveals how ordinary individuals—those not affiliated with formal organizations or extremist groups—come to participate in actions that threaten the foundations of democratic governance.

Conclusion

As I’ve argued above, attempts to conceptualize right-wing politics through a set of abstract political categories might obscure ordinary and quotidian practices that create and reproduce enduring experiences of belonging. Hence, beyond categories such as authoritarianism or fascism and psychological explanations such as radicalization, we find a range of practices of identification that create an experience of belonging on the political right. Such practices of identification are embedded in the social narratives that proliferate online and offline, in which people tell stories about self/other, identify with certain characters and “personalities,” and in some cases participate in role-playing (e.g., the QAnon phenomenon). Those social milieux are where the experience of belonging in, on, and to the political right is developed, as I have argued above. The political right's power comes from the sense of community and authenticity it provides its adherents. Furthermore, the experience of belonging in, on, and to the political right means that it also allows space for cross-over from “the left” or other alternative styles of life e.g., the connection between the wellness movement and the right (Lugar, 2022). To make sense of the present, researchers should approach the political right as a set of experiences: of belonging, of authentic selves, of empowerment.

While the concept of lived experience is typically associated with theories and methodologies focused on social justice, these same theoretical frameworks can be applied to understanding belonging on the political right. By adopting an analytic of belonging and exploring the political right in terms of the experiences it offers to potential adherents, researchers can uncover the everyday practices and beliefs that underpin a style of life. Future research could, therefore, reveal how “threats to democracy” don’t solely arise from the electoral success of far-right parties or the actions of extremist organizations, but also from the lived experiences created by everyday practices of exclusivist belonging.

Though my focus here has been on the United States, the practices described earlier may not be easily transferable across geographies. As such, future research should also consider how situated practices might resonate in different settings and at scale. In the context of the rise of the political right, the relationship between knowledge production and democratic renewal is more crucial than ever. One key question for future inquiry is whether efforts to understand the embrace of exclusivist forms of belonging could also help foster a new, more inclusive democratic subjectivity, one that is more attuned to the challenges of our time.