Author Meets Critics: "Contesting the Far Right"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book (forthcoming in April 2024 with Columbia University Press, New Directions in Critical Theory), Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift.

Claudia Leeb’s Contesting the Far Right examines right-wing recruitment tactics in the United States and Austria, where people discontented with the status quo have turned to far-right parties and movements that further cement capitalism’s adverse effects. Leeb contends that Freudian psychoanalytic theory and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory provide analytical tools to explain this apparent contradiction in psychological terms. Living under precarity capitalism generates feelings of failure and anxiety, which people experience as non-wholeness, because it has become difficult if not impossible to live up to economic, interpersonal, and bodily success standards, and the far right preys on such feelings. Its psychologically oriented propaganda tactics produce the illusion of wholeness and a positive sense of self while leaving the socioeconomic conditions that cause people’s suffering intact. At the same time, they remove the inhibitions that keep people’s repressed aggression and racist and sexist attitudes in check. To demonstrate the workings of this process, Leeb compares cases including Trump and the alt-right in the United States and the Freedom Party and the identitarian movement in Austria. At once theoretically rich and politically engaged, this book also offers ways to resist the far right and counter the psychological appeal of its propaganda techniques.

This panel brings together scholars from political theory and political science in various academic settings and from different theoretical perspectives in the United States and Europe to assess the book critically.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Claudia Leeb Washington State University

Presenters

• Patricia Moynagh Wagner College

• Robert Michael Pallitto Seton Hall University

• Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera George Mason University

• Claudia Leeb Washington State University

• Candice K Travis Quinnipiac University

• Veronica Zebadua-Yanez Spelman College