The Extreme Gone Mainstream

Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany

Cynthia Miller-Idriss

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400888931
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

How extremism is going mainstream in Germany through clothing brands laced with racist and nationalist symbols The past decade has witnessed a steady increase in far right politics, social movements, and extremist violence in Europe. Scholars and policymakers have struggled to understand the causes and dynamics that have made the far right so appealing to so many people—in other words, that have made the extreme more mainstream. In this book, Cynthia Miller-Idriss examines how extremist ideologies have entered mainstream German culture through commercialized products and clothing laced with extremist, anti-Semitic, racist, and nationalist coded symbols and references.Drawing on a unique digital archive of thousands of historical and contemporary images, as well as scores of interviews with young people and their teachers in two German vocational schools with histories of extremist youth presence, Miller-Idriss shows how this commercialization is part of a radical transformation happening today in German far right youth subculture. She describes how these young people have gravitated away from the singular, hard-edged skinhead style in favor of sophisticated and fashionable commercial brands that deploy coded extremist symbols. Virtually indistinguishable in style from other popular clothing, the new brands desensitize far right consumers to extremist ideas and dehumanize victims.Required reading for anyone concerned about the global resurgence of the far right, The Extreme Gone Mainstream reveals how style and aesthetic representation serve as one gateway into extremist scenes and subcultures by helping to strengthen racist and nationalist identification and by acting as conduits of resistance to mainstream society.

1 TRYING ON EXTREMISM

Material Culture and Far Right Youth

The fight against right-wing extremism is also always a fight about symbols.

—Thorsten Fuchs

In a recent essay titled “The Neonazi Next to Me,” the German author Thorsten Fuchs recounted his discomforting experience when a moving company employee showed up at his front door dressed in a style that suggested far right affinity. Describing his struggle to decide whether to speak up or remain silent, Fuchs ultimately concludes, as the epigraph above notes, that fighting far right symbols means fighting the normalization of “clothing, symbols, sentences or words” that are eventually “regarded as normal” if they remain uncontradicted in daily life.¹ Like Fuchs, scores of social scientists have started to attend more seriously to the consequential nature of many of the aesthetic and material dimensions of social life. This recent “iconic” turn in the social sciences has shed light on the symbolic and visual dimensions of phenomena ranging from HIV statistics and September 11 to brands and to what Daniel Miller simply calls “stuff.”² In this chapter, I argue that understandings of the far right commercialization phenomenon ought to be situated within this visual turn and in light of other recent work emphasizing the symbolic in studies of the nation and the relationship between aesthetic style, performance, and political identities.³

This approach differs from mainstream scholarship on the far right, which has predominantly focused on formal, political engagement through organized social movements and parties, rather than on cultural and aesthetic dimensions. There are good reasons for focusing on formal groups and political parties, of course. The recent electoral successes of far right parties and movements across Europe merit serious attention. And the official nature of parties and movements has some empirical advantages when compared to the shifting nature of subcultural scenes. The boundaries, agendas, and ideologies of official far right movements and parties, as well as electoral, polling, and survey data on voters, can be analyzed and compared across national contexts in ways that are often more challenging for subcultural settings.

The focus on formal, organized social movements and political parties, however, means that we know more about the motivations of citizens who vote for the far right at the polls than we do about individuals who engage in the far right in less formal or organized ways. My intention in this book is not to diminish the importance of studying the far right as a political movement, but rather to emphasize the need to also assess the far right as a site of cultural and subcultural engagement, particularly for youth. Far right youth subcultures are critical to understand, both because they can lead to later political engagement (through marching at demonstrations, for example) and because they are heavily associated with violence, whether through spontaneous, drunken hooligan soccer-match brawls or through premeditated violence, firebombings, or attacks on asylum seekers’ homes. Perhaps most significantly for this work, the fluid nature of subcultures that I discussed in the introduction means that youth who move in and out of them can also be conduits of extremist rhetoric, ideology, views, and attitudes, bringing far right ideology back into the mainstream with them as they engage with younger siblings, classmates, or peers. The deployment within far right iconography, lyrics, or symbols of humor; game-playing codes; and clever historical and contemporary references thus have the potential to impact not only consumers of far right culture but also the broader mainstream with whom they may interact, helping desensitize observers to racism, xenophobia, and historical atrocities and helping dehumanize victims. In this sense, culture matters, rather significantly.

Approaching the far right as not only a political but also a cultural space, however, would mean that we need to pay closer attention not only to youth political attitudes and views, but also to what draws youth into the cultural aspects of the far right—what attracts them to far right music, festivals, or consumer products? We also know relatively little about the material and visual dimensions of the far right more generally. While there has been some qualitative and ethnographic work on the subcultural dimensions of the far right, scholars have pursued traditional fieldwork ethnographies that generally have not attended in depth to visual and material culture.⁴ There has been some recent work on visual culture in Middle East politics and in terrorism more generally, as well as limited applied work (for example, pedagogical pamphlets on far right symbols designed for educators and law enforcement), but to date, there has been no systematic scholarship on the visual and material dimensions of far right youth culture.⁵ In the following sections, I explain some of the prevailing arguments about extremist youth engagement in order to situate the discussions of symbol deployment in the remainder of this book.

Why Do Youth Engage in the Far Right?

It is impossible to pin down a single, definitive explanation for far right youth engagement. Much like school shootings in the United States or global terrorist violence, a broad cluster of individual and social factors contributes to extremist radicalization, and the resonance of any particular factor varies from case to case, depending on individuals’ personal background and susceptibility. Across the bevy of research on youth violence and the far right, however, there are certain factors that appear repeatedly.

One of the factors that appears to have an impact is economic stress. Scholars hypothesize that youth become more susceptible to far right radicalism and extremism when they experience economic strain or “relative deprivation”—that is, a failure to achieve anticipated success. Some research has suggested that poor life trajectories, unmet expectations, and comparisons with peers’ success may contribute to resentment and anger against perceived competitors, especially immigrants—and this may be especially true for working-class men, who are especially vulnerable to the decline of manual labor jobs in the postindustrial economy.⁶ But it is also likely that economic strain plays a role because it creates opportunities for the far right to mobilize, since economic crises are often accompanied by developments like growing distrust of institutions, challenges to political legitimacy, or increasing political fragmentation.⁷ Far right groups use economic crises to mobilize youth (and others) by using language about immigrants “stealing” jobs or “abusing” the social welfare system, or drawing on metaphors about “floods” of migrants and communities that are “overrun” or at a “breaking point.”⁸ There is some evidence showing that economic strain plays a bigger role when demographic change is taking place through immigration; Lauren McLaren’s research in the 1990s in Germany, for example, showed that increasing unemployment affects right-wing violence only if the number of foreigners in the country is also increasing.⁹

The economic threat thesis is quite contentious, however. Although youth who express economic fears, insecurity, or worries are more likely to hold right-wing attitudes,¹⁰ several scholars have argued that “cultural” threats are a stronger predictor of far right preference than are “economic” threats.¹¹ And there is evidence that unemployment itself is not related to far right engagement—although growing up with an unemployed parent does have an effect.¹² Thus, although economic threats and relative deprivation are frequently discussed as major contributors to xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and far right preference in general, the empirical data shows a complicated relationship.¹³ It is clear that economic conditions alone cannot explain far right engagement.

Another factor is the extent to which people feel threatened by perceived changes in social norms, values, and beliefs. For example, far right rhetoric about social and legal changes such as same-sex marriage, rising single parenthood, public attention to transgender identity, the increasing percentage of Muslim citizens and residents, or globalization’s impact on growing cultural and religious diversity positions such changes as a threat to local, cultural, national, or religious identity. The anti-EU rhetoric of some French farmers and periodic negative community reactions to the building of mosques or the use of nonnational or native languages on street signs are examples.¹⁴ Whether youth are susceptible to far right rhetoric on social change, however, depends to some extent on what else is happening in the broader political and national context. Local, national, and global factors such as legal bans on symbols and organizations, domestic crime, terror attacks, migration and refugee crises, and the growth and visibility of far right political parties have an impact. Durso and Jacobs show, for example, that hate group presence increases when street crime increases, because racist groups have “successfully harnessed” the public’s resentment against minority group criminal activity.¹⁵ The rise in Islamophobia following incidences of Islamist terrorism or the rise of racism and antigovernment “Patriot Groups” after the election of the first African American president in the United States in 2008¹⁶ and the rise in antimigrant, antirefugee, and Islamophobic rhetoric in Germany following the mass sexual assaults in Cologne and other German cities are other recent examples. In other words, the right wing becomes more attractive to individuals when the broader social and political environment is saturated with anti-immigrant or Islamophobic rhetoric. Others have shown that the presence of extreme right wing parties at the national level increases antiforeigner sentiment in individuals; this appears to be particularly true when the rhetoric of those parties espouses “culturally” racist views as opposed to “classical” racist views, as Wilkes and colleagues have argued.¹⁷

The cluster of factors that affect youth’s engagement in the far right also includes some combination of individual personality, family background, parenting styles, peer group characteristics, gender, region of residence within a given country, ancestry, and type of community.¹⁸ For example, in Canada, research has shown that individuals were more likely to vote for the Canadian Alliance if they were from the west of Canada, were men of northern European ancestry, or were rural women.¹⁹ Other scholars have studied the potential role of authoritarian family background, military experience, or time in prison as an entry point for right-wing extremism.²⁰ Childhood experiences with xenophobic or far right parents matter as well. Siedler’s analysis of youth voter behavior in Germany, for example, shows a strong effect among youth living in west Germany whose parents express affinity with a right-wing party: such youth are significantly more likely (35 percentage points higher) to support far right wing parties.²¹ Youth who grew up with a single mother are also more likely than those from two-parent families to support far right wing parties. As Siedler argues, his findings “suggest that family events during childhood such as the experience of life with a single mother or the experience of jobless parents are more important than household income in determining adult children’s far right wing party affinities.”²² However, other research has shown that families play a complicated role in the development of youth political attitudes and engagements. While previous scholars had consistently posited that social marginalization or authoritarian family background underpinned youth engagement in right-wing extremism,²³ more recent work has challenged this premise. For example, Thomas Gabriel’s work tracing the life narratives of far right extremist youth in Switzerland shows clearly that youth’s racist attitudes are not simply passed down across generations. Family background matters, but it appears that growing up in an environment of parental nonattention, absences, and lack of communication interact with parental or family members’ political orientations and attitudes in important ways. As Gabriel writes, the common ground across youth biographies “consists of a lack of significant adults who are visible, and can thus be experienced, through their interaction and affective sympathy for the adolescent.”²⁴

In sum, scholars have identified a cluster of factors that contribute to the appeal of the far right for youth. First, youth who are marginalized from traditional measures of economic success or who are experiencing economic crises or youth unemployment or underemployment, or who grew up with the experience of parental unemployment, may be more susceptible to the rhetoric of radical right parties and leaders. Second, societal insecurity brought on by rapidly changing demographics or societal norms and identity as well as specific global, local, and national events—like 9/11 or the 2015 Paris attacks—serve as catalysts to far right and radical right wing engagement. The broader social climate also plays a role; we see bumps in radical right participation following rises in domestic crime and when far right political parties become more visible and vocal. Finally, scholarship has identified personal and individual characteristics that make youth from certain kinds of social backgrounds more likely to espouse radical right views. For many countries, men, rural youth, youth who experienced authoritarian backgrounds, and youth who were incarcerated or in the military are all at higher risk compared to other groups.

All these factors contribute to environments that can make youth more receptive to radical right rhetoric, but they don’t fully explain youth engagement in the far right. I suggest that in order to fully understand the attractiveness of the far right, we have to situate these more structural conditions within an analysis of cultural factors, especially related to the emotional underpinnings of extremist engagement.

Extremism’s Emotional Pull

Although most analyses of youth engagement in extremist movements globally continue to focus on structural, political, and religious explanations for radicalization and engagement, there is growing awareness that cultural factors play a significant role. The findings I present throughout this book suggest that extremist engagement is driven at least in part by two emotional impulses that young men find especially attractive: the urge to belong and be a part of a group, and the desire to rebel and reject mainstream or adult society.²⁵

On the one hand, I argue that youth are drawn to a sense of belonging and identity that they gain from the group, to the male comradeship and bonding they gain from insider status and the sense that they are contributing to something bigger than themselves. On the other hand, youth are attracted to far right, radical, and extremist groups as a space to express anger, rebellion, and resistance against the mainstream. The valorization of violence is threaded through both push and pull factors; both expressions of male comradeship (expressed for example through a sense that one’s mates or peers “have my back”) and ex...