Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics

We live in an age in which in most societies there is a moral abhorrence of racism, albeit that in most, bigotry and discrimination still disfigure the lives of many. We also live in an age saturated with identitarian thinking and obsessed with placing people into racial boxes. The more we despise racial thinking, the more we seem to cling to it.

This paradox is at the heart of my new book. Not So Black and White is a retelling of the history both of the idea of race and of the struggles to confront racism and to transcend racial categorisation, a retelling that challenges many of the ways in which we think both of race and of antiracism.

These struggles expanded the meaning of equality and universality. There has developed in recent years an impassioned debate about the Enlightenment, which both supporters and critics present as a peculiarly European phenomenon. For the one, it is a demonstration of the greatness of Europe; for the other, a reminder that its ideals are tainted by racism and colonialism. Both miss the importance of the non-European world in shaping many of the ideas we associate with the Enlightenment. It was through the struggles of those denied equality and liberty by the elites in Europe and America that ideas of universalism were invested with meaning. It is the demise of that radical universalist tradition that has shaped the emergence of contemporary identity politics.

The embrace of identity politics by the left has ironically opened the door for the reactionary right to reclaim its original inheritance, allowing racism to be rebranded as white identity politics. We have come full circle: the politics of identity that began as reactionary claims about a racial hierarchy has been regrasped by the reactionary right in the name of cultural difference.

The following edited extract from my new book shows how the far right remade itself in the postwar world and how it has exploited the language of identity to pursue its aims. It shows, too, how mainstream conservatives have allowed far-right tropes to seep into our culture.

As reactionary organisations, which had enjoyed the limelight in the prewar years, were pushed into the shadows in the post-Holocaust world, many on the far right were forced to rethink their views of race, identity and difference. Alain de Benoist became a key figure in this rethinking, the founder of the Nouvelle Droite in France, and a philosophical mentor of the contemporary far right.

Benoist cut his political teeth within the traditional fascist milieu, most notably through the far-right opposition to Algerian independence. In the 1960s, after the French defeat in Algeria, he recognised the need to move beyond discredited arguments rooted in biological racism, and to engage in a cultural war to reclaim intellectual ground. In 1968, Benoist helped found GRECE, the Research and Study Group for European Civilisation, a thinktank to school the far right.