This is why today’s nationalists are so nostalgic. It is also why they consistently speak of culture, not race. Indeed, they are often vocal in claiming that race is not their concern. They can do this because the idea of birth-culture inherited from Barrès is already based on race.

As their intellectual pioneer, French philosopher Alain de Benoist, argued in 1999:

Mankind as such does not exist, because their membership within humanity is always mediated by a particular cultural belonging … Biological differences are significant only in reference to social and cultural givens.

Here, race is relevant only insofar as it determines which culture an individual may belong to. Cultural belonging is underpinned by birth, which is why speaking and defending culture, as the New Right does, has powerful racial implications. But conveniently, the emphasis on culture circumvents restrictions on – and public revulsion for – overt racism.

The assumption that cultures are caught in a permanent struggle for survival is liable to tend toward extremes. Many on the alt-right in America and in movements like Génération Identitaire in Europe have already taken these beliefs to their inevitable conclusion: that a global race war needs to be fought to ensure the survival of the white race.

The gunman who attacked a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, like Anders Breivik in Norway in 2011 and the Charlottesville protesters in 2017 in the US, was not only a member of Génération Identitaire, but certain that his actions were the first shots in a struggle over the survival of “Europeans”.

Birth-culture

The New Right, like Barrès before them, purport that culture is biologically mediated rather than socially determined. If one is of the wrong biology then participating in another culture is difficult, if not impossible. The restoration of the nation logically requires the purification of culture and – by implication – race.

By the same token, any assumption of equality among identities is a kind of betrayal of the nation, which undermines its chances of survival. This explains all sorts of very real grievances to voters, from poverty to social frustrations. All of these are attributed to an upending of the natural order that gives equal rights to those who have no “natural” stake in a culture.

The same intellectual mechanism is responsible for the New Right’s fixation with gender. Just as biology determines which culture one may or may not belong and thrive in, biological differences between sexes are seen to determine women’s social and political role.

The liberation of women is viewed as a prime example of how liberal humanist assumptions about equality are unnatural and destroy culture. Women’s control of their reproductive functions is viewed as undermining the nation’s survival in yielding to the selfish caprice of women that refuse to play their nature-given, distinctive, part.

The Brexit referendum campaign and Salvini’s 2017 electoral campaign in Italy are excellent examples of how these ideas can unfold in practice. Leavers like Farage, for example, never argued that migration was to be limited due to racial difference, but demanded the right to “retake control of our borders” in the name of the preservation and prosperity of the nation and its culture. Salvini likewise avoids race and focuses on the right of Italians to prevent migration and ensure Italy’s survival. And, like Vox in Spain, he advocates a rollback of Italian women’s rights, beginning with contraception, to restore “the natural order”.

New Right ideas centre around the claim that nature should determine the structure of society and politics, and so their advocates seek to restore what they see as the natural state – one determined by inequality among identities. This is contrasted against liberal ideas that subvert the natural order of different genders, identities and the struggle among nations.

Truth, red pills and conspiracies

The war against the rights of foreigners and of women takes us to the heart of contemporary nationalist ideas. To betray the “natural order” is a betrayal of one’s own identity and its survival. Their war is against the liberal understanding of equality.

This has implications for how the New Right think about truth. They have determined that mainstream news cannot be believed using an idea sometimes referred to as “the cathedral”. This posits that modern universities, media and cultural institutions function to establish and enforce faith in liberalism, viewed as a kind of new religion. The New Right argue that any rational questioning of liberal beliefs around gender, race or culture becomes heresy. This suggests that the New Right see themselves as the true heirs to the Enlightenment project to free humanity from ignorance and superstition.

New Right politicians prove their credibility through willingness to publicly depart from irrational faith in liberal ideas, so as to represent the legitimate interests of the identity that is “left behind”. This is why Michael Gove, the UK’s Secretary of State for Environment, was able to casually throw scientific expertise out the window in the Brexit referendum and why Trump survives the spectacle of issuing “alternative facts” from the White House.

For this reason, the New Right’s characteristic loathing for political correctness is not just a matter of humour and off colour jokes. It signals to supporters that their leaders are willing to transgress liberal power. Trump’s “grab them by the p*ssy” as well as regular chauvinistic comments from New Right politicians like Nigel Farage and Salvini play so well with supporters because they are read as a promise to return public discourse to a natural state of freedom.

New Right ideas about survival and identity coalesce in the belief that they have seen through an “unnatural” story woven by liberals. Consider the concept of the “red pill”, common in New Right online discussion threads, which refers to a scene from the Matrix in which Neo is asked whether he wishes to see harsh reality or a pleasant illusion. To be red-pilled is to see “the truth”: a world destroyed by liberal assumptions of equality, between genders and national identities, but also between weak and strong, rich and poor, masking the natural condition that rewards strength and punishes weakness.

Going mainstream

Conspiracy theories flourish today. In fact, they are now mainstream. Hitherto the fare of online cranks, frustrated teenagers and professional conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, in the early 2010s New Right ideas began to take off thanks to specific grievances that they claimed to explain.

The online incubation of New Right ideas in the run up to Trump’s election was underwritten by the argument that gains from a millennia of white male leadership are being undermined by “libtards” (“liberal retards”) and “SJWs” (“social justice warriors”) informed by “fake news” and wracked by “white guilt” who give away the achievements of Europeans to others, and even undermine their own survival by losing control of their women.

This way of thinking is used to explain all manner of grievances ranging from shifts in the world of work, loss of control over one’s destiny, hopelessness, and community decay. If one buys into their assumptions, their ideas make sense on their own terms and seem to offer immediate solutions to these problems.

Disparate movements have united around these grievances. So New Right politicians often form strange but powerful electoral alliances. The basic template usually seeks to secure a broader vote by mainstreaming or taking over a party (as with Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party) while retaining the extremist vote through proxies that are neither overtly recognised as allies nor disavowed (the alt-right and even the KKK in Trump’s case).

This system of New Right electoral alliances clearly emerged in the Brexit referendum: despite superficial disagreements, Vote Leave, Leave.EU and UKIP never fully contradicted one another. The same is true of Trump’s Republicans and alt-right “very fine people”; Le Pen’s Front (now Rassemblement) National and Génération Identitaire; and Salvini’s Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, Forza Nuova and Casa Pound. These alliances are mostly leaderless, unstable and scarily undisciplined.

Shapeshifters

This is what makes this new generation of nationalism truly viral. Without a permanent structure, these shapeshifting alliances can dodge attacks by reinventing new coalitions of similar members, as occurred with Farage’s Brexit Party.

These coalitions depend on the continued presence of grievances that directly affect people’s lives, particularly growing poverty even when working, the collapse of stable and safe social identities linked to work, the increasing instability of employment security, and the rapid change of local communities due to emigration, migration, collapsing housing affordability, and redevelopment initiatives that displace communities. These provide precise and urgent electoral rallying points.

They are particularly effective given that so many mainstream politicians ignore these basic grievances. In recent years, the lineup of politicians opposing the New Right – Hillary Clinton, the Remain campaign, Emmanuel Macron and Matteo Renzi – have been unwilling to even recognise these structural problems. This provided the New Right the opportunity to appear credible, simply by acknowledging them. They also appear to offer elegant solutions to these societal issues – all of which are based on a return to the “natural” order.