TOPIC: Reading the Far Right Beyond Self-Righteousness
My intellectual project is anchored in the power of self-reflection, understood as a theoretical and affective praxis. I have explored this theme in my work on the politics of political science in the Americas (Ravecca 2019; Ravecca, Rossello and Seri, 2025), narrative and autoethnography (Ravecca and Dauphinee 2018), attachments to innocence (Ravecca and Dauphinee 2022), and far-right politics (Ravecca et al. 2023; Ravecca 2024). Building from this trajectory, this talk reflects on what it means to study the far right beyond self-righteousness. Both journalistic commentary and much scholarly work tend to approach the far right as an abnormality—as the radical Other of democracy, liberalism, the liberal order, globalization, and modernity. This move not only mirrors the “populist” scapegoating so forcefully rejected by liberals and progressives, but also rests on a series of historical and intellectual inaccuracies. Against this complacency, I argue that the rise of the far right constitutes a powerful opportunity to exercise radical critique and self-critique. I examine how key elements of liberalism, neoliberalism, political science’s conventional conceptions of democracy, and identity politics are appropriated, reworked, and weaponized by far-right actors. Moreover, these reactionary forces have already reshaped mainstream conversations around immigration, inequality, minority rights, and related issues. In this sense, the far right is not—nor has it ever been—external to “our” institutions and subjectivities.