Unlikely Bedfellows: Racial and Religious Tokenization in the Far-Right

• In Event: Right-Wing Populism

Abstract

The twenty-first century far-right has been characterized by nativist parties that replace the historical explicit biological racism with an identitarian and civilizationist communication strategy meant to sidestep accusations of racism or fascism. An under-studied aspect of this has been the presence of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in public-facing party roles. More specifically, rather than understand the presence of the Jewish Peter Jakáb in the neo-fascist Hungarian Jobbik or the African-American Herman Cain in the Republican Trump administration as anomalies or flukes, I argue that the inclusion of figures like these is strategic. In fact, these figures are carefully deployed around those issues that could raise the most opposition and allegations of racism or fascism. In Germany, Jewish AfD voices through Juden in der AfD (JAfD) are used to support the most xenophobic and islamophoc policies, strategically distancing the AfD from charges of Nazism. In the United States, the African-American Ben Carson was named Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, tasked with leading the historic bastion of institutionalized racism in America. These strategic choices allow for the escalation of ethno-nationalist, exclusionary policies through using ethnic, racial, and religious minorities as window-dressing. A comparison of far-right party tokenization in France, Germany, Hungary, and the United States demonstrates national patterns of minority deployment to promote the most exclusionary aspects of each far-right party's agenda that reflect a reaction to each country's legacy of institutionalized racism and fascism.

Author

• Emma Rosenberg, New York University