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This article explores a contemporary problem pertaining to the progressive political projects of anti-racism, feminism, gay rights and green politics. It tackles the complex and conflicted situation whereby these once thoroughly oppositional projects now appear to occupy a hegemonic position, and suggests that this has paradoxically led to the demise of radical subject positions. I consider how progressive discourses have effectively become 'detached' from participatory social movements that once served as both their progenitors and guarantors, and address the problem of conceptual inertia, whereby discourses appropriated and modified by the political right and mainstream continue to signify an 'original' meaning, thus serving to bolster the moral legitimacy of their self-declared champions and defend them against critique. Rather than dismiss this mainstreaming as simply a betrayal, I stress that it describes a new terrain of political struggle that cannot be predicated on a nostalgia for radical subjects as we have historically tended to imagine them.

This article takes Brexit and Nigel Farage's right-wing populism as a starting point to consider the populist politics of racism and antiracism. I demonstrate how two key figures of right-wing populist discourse -the "white working class" and the "liberal elite" -have come to describe a political grammar with a widespread influence and explanatory resonance across the political spectrum, and which have as a result formed a racial common sense in Brexit Britain. Rather than accept the terms of a debate that has been set by the populist right, I draw on Ernesto Laclau to describe a rival politics of antiracist populism. Although it is far from straightforward to navigate, engagement on the terrain of the popular is not optional if we are to counter a fatalistic tendency to conceive of antiracism as a minority or elite concern.

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