The “New Right”
Nazis in pinstripes
Thuringia’s AfD leader Björn Höcke (l.) and the right-wing extremist activist Lutz Bachmann at a demonstration in Chemnitz in 2018. The New Right ranges from intellectuals to parliamentary parties.
© Paul Sander / Imago Images
The days of bomber jackets and combat boots are over. Right-wing extremists today present themselves as intellectual, modern and civil. Who are the New Right – and what goals do they pursue?
“Cultural Revolution from the Right”: How the New Right wants to anchor its ideology in the middle of society
Neo-Nazis in bomber jackets and combat boots shaped the appearance of the extreme right in the 1980s and 1990s. They were and are ideologically closely linked to the National Socialism of the Third Reich. The New Right, on the other hand, appears in a different guise. Basically, the New Right is understood as a heterogeneous, right-wing extremist intellectual movement. It bases its ideology less on the principles of Hitler’s Germany than on the “Conservative Revolution” of the Weimar Republic. At first glance, the only thing they have in common with the “Old Right” is the primary goal of overcoming the democratic state.
The New Right focuses on the cultural level: the goal is to restore supposedly lost virtues and values: God, nation, national community, race and order. Folkish nationalism and so-called “ethnopluralism” should serve as orientation. This refers to a “racially pure population”. Although the New Right does not directly express the plan to divide people according to ethnic groups, it does represent the conviction that people of one ethnic group should stay among themselves and that they should not be “mixed”. But this could only happen through ethnic cleansing. Ideas that the New Right cannot implement in a pluralistic and/or democratic state.
This belief also comes from the Weimar Republic, in which pioneers of the “Conservative Revolution” such as Edgar Julius Jung and Carl Schmitt clearly spoke out in favor of an authoritarian dictatorship.
The biggest difference between the New and Old Right is the way a revolution should take place. While neo-Nazis are convinced that an overthrow of democracy can be achieved by force of arms if necessary and that the opponent can be subjugated, the New Right operates from a different tactic: the focus of the strategy is the so-called “cultural revolution from the right”.
The New Right wants intellectual change to pave the way for political change
New right-wingers are convinced that system change can only be successful if the way for it is paved first. “What this means is the following basic assumption: an intellectual change must precede a political change,” explains the political scientist and sociologist Armin Pfahl-Traughber in an article for the Federal Agency for Civic Education. There has been talk of the “battle for minds” since the late 1990s, when right-wing extremist parties like the NPD tried to present themselves with a new image. Even back then, anti-fascists warned about “Nazis in pinstripes.”
The New Right doesn’t just rely on demonstrations or rallies. Rather, she tries to implicitly anchor her messages in society through magazines, lectures or social media campaigns. An example of this is the right-wing extremist think tank “Institute for State Policy” and its long-standing figurehead Karlheinz Weißmann. The journalist is considered an influential pioneer of the New Right in Germany and coined the term “political mimicry”, i.e. the attempt to push the limits of what can be said further and further to the right without outing oneself as a right-wing radical. Weißmann was of the opinion early on that a revolution from the right could not be achieved with a “sledgehammer”, but rather through colored educational work and publications that quietly and over a longer period of time carried individual points of view of the extreme right into society.
The “Institute for State Policy” is part of a network at the center of which is the AfD-affiliated Desiderius Erasmus Foundation. You can read about the institutions and actors the foundation is otherwise connected to here:
The network extends from fraternities to the AfD
What is striking is the broad network of the New Right. This extends from right-wing extremist fraternities to cadre groups such as the “One Percent Association” to the parliamentary arm of the movement, the AfD.
Even though the contacts are numerous and the ideological beliefs are ultimately very similar, the New Right distances itself from neo-Nazi groups. Partly out of vanity, because it sees itself as the “intellectual elite” of the movement, but even more so because it does not consider the Old Right’s strategy of bringing about a system overthrow to be promising. Even during the Weimar Republic, New Right actors kept their distance from Hitler’s followers because they didn’t want to have anything to do with “simple-minded SA thugs,” as Pfahl-Traughber explains. This still applies today.
A special position is occupied by the “Identitarian Movement” (IB), whose leading leader Martin Sellner, according to research by “Correctiv”, presented a so-called “master plan” for the deportation of foreigners at a conspiratorial meeting with AfD members and financially strong entrepreneurs in November . The star reported. Although the IB’s ideology is based on the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar Republic, according to Pfahl-Traughber, they can be seen more as a “new right on the street” because their action-oriented activism does not fit into the strategy of the new right.
Even if there are different views on strategy between the New Right, neo-Nazis and groups like the IB, they ultimately stand together behind the plan to abolish democracy and introduce a ethnic dictatorship.
Sources:Federal Agency for Civic Education, Lecture by Armin Pfahl-Traughber