Right-Wing Extremism and Official Politics: The Configurations of Relationship Under the Conditions of Post-Ideology and the Internet

Abstract

The article examines population, discursive and network approaches in political sociology to build more realistic models for describing the political field, which includes a complex of new relations between extremists and legitimate political actors in the context of the observed right turn in the functioning of political systems in many countries. The case study method was used to study the relationship between right-wing extremist communities and legal participants in the political field under the aforementioned conditions. To formulate the cases, we selected real situations associated with heterogeneous drivers of the right turn: a) right-wing populist parties, b) a bloc of right-centrist parties, c) the ruling conservative state-party alliance. Based on the materials of the generated cases, the social-constructionist, discursive nature of the concepts of (right-wing) extremism is shown, manifested in the desire of the dominant political forces to fix the categorizations of opponents that are beneficial to them and in the practices of resistance to imposed nominations as practices of liberation from stigmatization. The role of mutual transitions of political cultures and subcultures in the mechanism of functioning of liberal democracy is described. The typification of the configurations of the transmission of right-wing extremist opinions and sentiments into official political forms and into mass culture is carried out. According to sociological studies of the activity of Russian right-wing extremist online groups and their members, it has been established that under the conditions of the soft regime of state countering extremist propaganda, these opinions and sentiments are localized in online groups, and in the case of harsh prohibitive measures, they "creep" across politically neutral sites and groups. In practical terms, this creates a danger for the ruling alliance to remain on the extreme right flank of the political spectrum face to face with the growing radicalization of the mass of the population, and in aspect of the theory, it creates a problem of developing a model of political equilibrium in the era of post-ideology and the Internet.