Intellectual Post-fascism?: The Conservative Revolution, Traditionalism and the Challenge to Liberal Democracy

Is the world facing creeping fascism? And if so, how is it configured in contemporary circumstances? A wide-ranging debate has developed in recent years among scholars increasingly worried by the weakness of liberal democracy, and the growing electoral power of national populist movements in Europe. In this account, the rise of the current wave of populism was preceded, and is now accompanied by an important theoretical elaboration, initiated in the 1970's in France by the intellectuals of the Nouvelle Droite and continued by Russian, American and Latin-American intellectuals and political strategists. The theoretical goals of this meta-political elaboration is a reformulation of the values of cultural diversity, identity politics, and post-colonialism, a process which in this Element the author defines as the attempt to decolonize the 'postcolonial Western mind'.