Governmentality, Populism, and New Right Thought: Disaggregating Far-Right Authoritarian Mainstreaming

Drawing on a genealogical analysis of governmentality and counter-conduct, this contribution offers a novel perspective on the contemporary political and ideological struggles that are driven by the far right. Highlighting key insights produced in this special issue, this article unpacks New Right thought and populist conceptual modulations as historically specific, alternative sets of savoirs , self-making practices, and sources of legitimacy that fundamentally rearrange political relations. Crucially, this approach moves beyond the assumed incompatibility between (neo)liberalism and authoritarianism that underlies much of the debate on far-right mainstreaming by advancing an alternative theoretical lens to understand this multifaceted relationship. In particular, the contribution develops an original theorisation that disaggregates far-right mainstreaming into various ruptures, recombinations, capillary shifts, and sites of ‘resistant’ self-fashioning that are shaped by a wide array of actors and competing, previously marginalised knowledges. Ultimately, this casts light on the developing variety of productive entanglements and contingent, complex, and messy political formations and modalities of (self-)government that build upon anti-egalitarian, anti-statist, supremacist, acclamatory-democratic, or conspiracist thought traditions.