World of the right: radical conservatism and global order

Alongside President Donald Trump serving a second term in the United States, far-right leaders including Javier Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Narendra Modi in India are at the helm of their respective national governments. These political figures' vision for a radical conservative future brought them to national prominence. However, their political ambitions are hardly confined within the limits of their national borders. On the contrary, they consider their national ambitions as an integral facet of a globally interconnected political and cultural alliance, committed to charting an illiberal and radically conservative future for the world. Notably, World of the right does not treat the radical right as reactionary or simply as an outgrowth of socio-economic and cultural alienation that relies on social media for its dissemination (p. 110). Rather, the authors take the international political sociology of the radical right seriously, paying attention to its aspiration of establishing the ‘intellectual, ideological, cultural, and institutional foundations’ of an illiberal global order (p. 37).

To this end, the authors convincingly demonstrate that the appropriation of the works and ideas of Antonio Gramsci is central to the radical right's intellectual contours and political machinations. The radical right uses Gramsci's ‘cultural hegemony’ to frame and explain how the ideology of the liberal elite filters through various cultural institutions, shaping the cultural norms of the present day (p. 43). To be sure, this critique is not directed against an amorphous hegemonic class. Rather, the radical right views the cultural hegemony of liberalism as being owed to a clearly identifiable global nexus of powerful individuals and institutions that together constitute and practise a form of liberal managerialism. Ostensibly, this managerial class declares its commitment to the liberal ethos of equality, rights and justice—an ethos that, the radical right would claim, is premised on denigrating all values and norms that are rooted in ‘local traditions, inherited institutions, and shared values’ (p. 77). Equally, this powerful, dominant and hegemonic managerial class is viewed as able to control ‘both the parameters of acceptable discourse and the key decision-making organisations’ without ever advocating any form of structural change or reform that would undermine its own privilege (pp. 75–7).

In a quest to unravel the hegemony of this managerial class, the authors propose that the radical right consciously adopts a Gramscian ‘war of position’, wherein its activists reimagine themselves as ‘intellectuals and ideological entrepreneurs’ whose motivation is greater than electoral success (pp. 40–1). Rather, a quest to alter the ‘cultural zeitgeist’ powers them, in an effort to keep the ‘values, norms, perceptions, beliefs, sentiments, and prejudices’ that would underpin the workings of the illiberal order (p. 36). Equally, the radical right seeks to train and educate a new, illiberal intelligentsia and a global elite. As the book demonstrates, this aspiration is reflected in the radical conservatives' aversion of the perceived wokeism of higher education. Similarly, the radical right invests in an assortment of fellowships, think tanks and research institutions, able and willing to promulgate the radical-right vision for an illiberal international order (pp. 124–5).

The authors are right to conclude that the liberal international order is in crisis (pp. 144–82). This crisis is not a just consequence of the emergence of an active and aware social, cultural and political class committed to an illiberal future. Rather, the power of the radical right lies in its ability to build a global alliance, across the North/South divide, whereby a commitment to a conservative socio-political and cultural ethos and a revulsion for the liberal cultural Zeitgeist binds them together. This alliance presents itself as an archetype of a truly multipolar world that recognizes the contributions of the North and the South in the makings and workings of the (illiberal) global order. Of course, the counter-hegemonic impulse of the radical right project should not be misconstrued as a subaltern struggle. The radical right is cultivating its own brand of hegemony. And it is unlikely to speak for the multiplicity of marginalized peoples and communities that the liberal order has overlooked, despite its stated commitment to the ethos of equality, rights and justice.

As we witness the sharp tilt to the right in global politics, this book provides an authoritative primer and conceptual toolbox for understanding the emergence of an active socio-political class and its ‘transnational revolutionary impulse’ to remake the liberal international order (p. 3).