The yearnings that take young Europeans into the far Right | Aeon Essays

In embracing ultranationalist and ultrareligious rhetoric, they consider it a response to a globalised world in which distinct cultural communities and congregational religious life disappear. However, first and foremost they see in community a response to liberalism and its ‘extreme individualism’. In the activists’ understanding, liberalism is a system that destroys communitarian life and communitarian values at every level: political, economic, cultural, moral.

‘Liberalism is a suicidal system,’ Leonardo, an Italian activist told me once, shaking his head. ‘How can one believe in nothing?’ Far-Right militants’ embrace of the discourse of community is tantamount to a rejection of liberal modernity, and the wish to – in Leonardo’s words – ‘re-enchant the world’. The way they construe liberalism and liberals as opponents may sound like caricature, yet in fact is a key to understanding the appeal of far-Right visions of community – and, in the second step, of the appeal of community at large.

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A statement shared with me by Ula, one of my Polish research participants, helps to shed light on this issue. In explaining what the ‘far-Right community’ means, she emphasised that it merges three other forms of community: a religious renewal movement, a scout association, and a martial-arts group. All three put emphasis on order, hierarchy and discipline.

Don't agree with everything here but this perspective on collapse and the groups responding to it is worth considering.