My piece endeavours to explain why the new far right is likely here to stay, in Europe, by focusing on its fundamentalist, racist understanding of culture. My argument is that the far right’s culturalist conception of politics circulates well beyond these parties’ immediate constituencies. Indeed, it is sedimenting into a new culturalist common sense, a form of everyday racism. I want to draw attention to the far right’s basic idea that functioning political communities are based on solid ethno-religious-cultural peoples, with a solid, shared cultural heritage. Its corollary is that cultural differences, multiculture, lead to political antagonism and destroy the social bond.

Despite being a prominent feature of right-wing populism, this use of culture and the vicious cultural racism that accompanies it have gone largely ignored by scholars of populism and heritage. Anthropologists like Verena Stolcke and Douglas Holmes, Philomena Essed and Mahmoud Mamdani spotted this early on. Given anthropology’s subject and the increased political urgency of the topic, this (mis)use of culture should be of primary concern to us today. Yet, studying it poses problems for a discipline predicated on localised, in-depth intersubjective research. How are we to study a discursive formation so ubiquitous and tentacle-like, so mundane, pervasive and multifaceted, as this culturalist conception of politics? How are we to grasp the accelerated circulation of this conception at multiple scales and the complex processes through which it is becoming vernacular in diverse locales and political cultures?

I was compelled to research far-right populist culture by the lack of engagement with it in studies of populism (and heritage), combined with an acute sense that ideas of culture and heritage play a distinct and hugely significant role in populist ideology. To investigate this, I teamed up with a group of sociologists led by Ayhan Kaya, who conducted over 80 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with supporters of right-wing populist parties across Europe (De Cesari and Kaya 2019). I was struck by the common-sensical quality of what the interviewees said – the fact that populists’ ideas of culture and cultural heritage have slipped into everyday common sense. To a significant extent, their simplistic, Manichean, but undoubtedly compelling cultural theory of politics has ossified into the taken for granted.

The interviewees made multiple references to multiculturalism – seen as a ‘dead end’ – and ‘foreign cultures’ threatening national and European ‘norms and values’. Openly racist interviewees stated explicitly what their peers had alluded to: that ‘Blacks and Arabs’ or just ‘Muslims’ are the invading cultural others. They largely understood culture as cultural heritage, involving deep-seated, quasi-biological inherited traits that one cannot easily dispense of, if at all. The interviewees articulated a set of assumptions that underpin right-wing theories of culture such as ethnopluralism: that people are naturally rooted in their birth culture, that cultures are isomorphic with specific territories and that incommensurable cultures are destined to clash in the context of a Huntingtonian culturalised geopolitics. This emphasis on culture, though not new, is a central feature of today’s forms of racism, especially Islamophobia, in that it allows racists to deny that they are racist on the grounds that they favour the separation of cultures, not of races. Ironically for anthropologists, this notion of culture resembles the old anthropological idea of a people’s unique way of life. Having long lost its legitimacy in the discipline, it is now gaining widespread traction in public culture and policy.

Here we espy the seeds of a racism that is as vicious to the same extent that it appears trivial, even benign in the guise of common sense. Denunciations of racism resurgent, often in rhetorics asserting the exclusivity of cultural identities and heritages, date back to the 1990s if not earlier. Such rhetoric is now extremely widespread, not least in the language of opposition to immigration and politicians’ talk of the ‘failure of multiculturalism’. It also pervades everyday parlance. The populist far right construes the us/them distinction around profoundly racialised cultural divides. A glaring example of this rhetoric is found in the current EU commission’s practical imagination of Europe, which overlaps with the populists’. One of its priorities for 2019–2024 is ‘Promoting our European way of life: Protecting our citizens and our values.’ A specific commissioner is dedicated to this project, which centres on policing and securitising ‘strong borders’ and migration.

The world’s deadliest border (along which ‘Blacks and Arabs’, as our interviewees called them, are left or made to die while attempting to cross the Mediterranean) has been erected under the banner of protecting liberal Europe’s values and way of life. This scandalous necropolitics is the flip side of our interviewees’ cultural biopolitics. It is the deadly effect of a creeping racism disguised as the studious culturalisation of geopolitics and citizenship.

我的文章试图通过关注其对文化的原教旨主义和种族主义理解来解释为什么新极右翼可能会留在欧洲。我的论点是，极右翼的文化主义政治观念远远超出了这些政党的直接选区。事实上，它正在沉淀成一种新的文化主义常识，一种日常种族主义的形式。我想提请注意极右翼的基本思想，即运作良好的政治社区基于坚实的民族宗教文化人民，具有坚实的共同文化遗产。其推论是，文化差异、多元文化会导致政治对抗并破坏社会纽带。

尽管是右翼民粹主义的一个显着特征，但这种对文化的使用以及随之而来的恶性文化种族主义在很大程度上被民粹主义和遗产学者所忽视。Verena Stolcke 和 Douglas Holmes、Philomena Essed 和 Mahmoud Mamdani 等人类学家很早就发现了这一点。鉴于人类学的主题和该主题日益增加的政治紧迫性，对文化的这种（错误）使用应该是我们今天主要关注的问题。然而，研究它给以本地化、深入的主体间研究为基础的学科带来了问题。我们如何研究一个如此普遍、触手般、如此平凡、普遍和多面的话语结构，作为这种文化主义的政治概念？我们如何把握这个概念在多个尺度上的加速传播以及它在不同地区和政治文化中变得本土化的复杂过程？

由于在民粹主义（和遗产）研究中缺乏参与，我被迫研究极右翼民粹主义文化，再加上一种敏锐的感觉，即文化和遗产的思想在民粹主义意识形态中扮演着独特而重要的角色。为了对此进行调查，我与 Ayhan Kaya 领导的一组社会学家合作，他们对欧洲右翼民粹主义政党的支持者进行了 80 多次深入的半结构化访谈（De Cesari 和 Kaya，2019 年）。我对受访者所说的话的常识性感到震惊——民粹主义者的文化和文化遗产观念已经融入日常常识。在很大程度上，他们简单的、摩尼教的、但无疑令人信服的政治文化理论已经僵化为理所当然。

受访者多次提到多元文化主义——被视为“死胡同”——以及威胁国家和欧洲“规范和价值观”的“外国文化”。公开的种族主义受访者明确说明了他们的同龄人所暗示的：“黑人和阿拉伯人”或只是“穆斯林”是入侵的文化他人。他们在很大程度上将文化理解为文化遗产，涉及根深蒂固的准生物遗传特征，如果有的话，人们无法轻易摆脱这些特征。受访者阐述了支持民族多元主义等右翼文化理论的一系列假设：人们自然地植根于他们的出生文化，文化与特定领土同构，不可通约的文化注定会在亨廷顿主义的背景下发生冲突。文化地缘政治。这种对文化的重视，虽然不是新的，但却是当今种族主义形式的一个核心特征，尤其是伊斯兰恐惧症，因为它允许种族主义者以他们赞成文化分离而不是种族分离为由否认他们是种族主义者。对人类学家来说具有讽刺意味的是，这种文化概念类似于人们独特生活方式的古老人类学观点。长期以来，它在该学科中失去了合法性，现在在公共文化和政策中获得了广泛的关注。

在这里，我们窥探了种族主义的种子，这种种族主义的恶毒程度与看似微不足道的程度相同，甚至以常识为幌子是良性的。对种族主义复兴的谴责，通常是在宣称文化身份和遗产的排他性的修辞中，可以追溯到 1990 年代，如果不是更早的话。这种言论现在非常普遍，尤其是在反对移民和政客谈论“多元文化主义的失败”的语言中。它也普遍存在于日常用语中。民粹主义极右翼围绕着深刻的种族化文化鸿沟来解释美国/他们的区别。当前欧盟委员会对欧洲的实际想象与民粹主义者的想象重叠，就是这种言论的一个明显例子。其 2019-2024 年的优先事项之一是“促进我们的欧洲生活方式：保护我们的公民和我们的价值观”。

世界上最致命的边界（我们的受访者称之为“黑人和阿拉伯人”，在试图穿越地中海时被遗弃或被迫死亡）是在保护自由欧洲价值观和生活方式的旗帜下竖立起来的。这种可耻的亡灵政治是我们受访者文化生活政治的另一面。这是伪装成地缘政治和公民身份的刻意文化化的蔓延种族主义的致命影响。