Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right. Edited by Don Kalb and Walden Bello. Pluto Press, 2026.

There is a kind of political book in which the identity of the enemy is settled before the inquiry begins, and the inquiry consists of explaining why the enemy has not yet disappeared. Backlash, a collection of essays edited by Don Kalb and Walden Bello, belongs largely to this category. Its contributors are disturbed by the success of movements they variously describe as radical right, authoritarian, or fascist. They wish to understand that success so that it can be reversed. They are less interested in establishing whether any of the people responsible for it might have something worth saying.

This is not a complaint that the book has a point of view. Every political argument begins somewhere, and a declared commitment is preferable to the pretence of having risen above all commitments. Nor is it a demand that opponents of the Right should become its public relations agents. The objection is that, before dismissing a body of opinion, a writer ought to explain what it is and why an intelligent person might believe it. An account of the social conditions under which a belief becomes popular is no substitute for an examination of its truth.

The appropriate standard was set out by John Stuart Mill in Chapter II of On Liberty, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion.” The passage is long, but it deserves the space because it describes an intellectual duty that this book repeatedly evades:

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

Measured against this standard, Backlash has a substantial problem. Its general mode of argument is for Leftist writers to quote other Leftist writers about the origins and functions of a set of doctrines that is seldom explained in the form in which an able defender would present it. There is much about what the Right supposedly expresses. There is much less about what it argues.

I should make the necessary qualifications before proceeding. It would be false to say that no right-wing person is quoted, or that every authority cited is a Marxist. The book contains statements by Orbán and Duterte, and a substantial extract from a speech by J. D. Vance. There are quotations from a South African party manifesto. David Brooks, expressly identified as a centre-right columnist, receives approving attention. Some contributors have also spent years talking to ordinary people whose political choices they dislike. These are real merits, and a review which concealed them would reproduce the fault it was written to expose.

The most useful exception is Julia Soul’s chapter on Argentina. On page 208 she distinguishes Javier Milei’s market individualism from the protective nationalism found elsewhere on the Right. She writes that his discourse rests on “the universal and natural character of ‘marketized relationships,’ the oppressive character of collectives, and the corrupt character of their leaders.” On page 210 she explains the liberal-conservative account of inflation as the consequence of irresponsible monetary policy. Her subsequent discussion connects self-sufficiency and the value of individual effort with popular willingness to endure austerity.

Here we are at least dealing with recognisable propositions. There are reasons why people may believe that political interference has made them poorer, and why they may prefer the uncertainties of a market to the known disappointments of government. Soul does not endorse those reasons. She does, however, allow enough of them onto the page for a reader to understand that support for Milei need not begin and end in a supposedly diseased attachment to hierarchy.

Benoît Coquard’s French chapter also contains material that resists the book’s more habitual abstractions. His informants describe a world in which dependable friends provide practical assistance and wider solidarities seem to offer little. A Le Pen voter tells him, “She [Marine Le Pen] is right. Everyone looks out for themselves, anyway” (p. 116). The political conclusion may be disputed, but the man is making a judgment about the world he inhabits. Coquard has taken enough trouble to listen that the judgment remains visible beneath the commentary.

These exceptions establish what the book could have done more consistently. They do not dispose of the central objection.

The difficulty begins with the category itself. In his introduction, Kalb explains that terms including the radical right, illiberalism and fascism are used “loosely.” They perform “descriptive work at a subordinate level” (p. 1). The governing category is counterrevolution, understood through a history of capitalism and its transformations. This gives the collection a common framework. It also allows differences between its subjects to be subordinated before their importance has been established.

On page 29, Bello offers the helpful clarification that a “‘far-rightist’ is a fascist who has not yet seized power.” There is an administrative neatness here. Once the preliminary label has been attached, the more serious diagnosis can await only the opportunity for confirmation. But a reader looking for distinctions between a nationalist who favours a large protective State and a libertarian who wishes to dismantle much of it is entitled to expect something more exact.

Soul recognises this difference in the Argentine case. Its implications ought to trouble the framework of the whole book. If the proposed remedies differ so sharply, the common category must be justified by more than the fact that its members offend the same academics. Similarities of political manner may be worth studying. They do not make differences over the proper scope of coercion intellectually subordinate.

There is nothing illegitimate about class analysis. I am scarcely in a position to object to an inquiry into the interests behind public doctrines. Nor do I dispute that the language of markets can conceal privileges which would not survive a free market, or that politicians can flatter national loyalties while serving interests indifferent to the nation. These possibilities should be investigated wherever they arise. The trouble comes when an explanation of interests is allowed to perform the work of a refutation. A person’s circumstances may help explain why he becomes receptive to a proposition. They do not tell us whether the proposition is true. An academic’s salary and professional friendships may help explain his attachment to a particular account of capitalism. We should still have to read his argument before deciding whether to reject it. The same courtesy is due to a factory worker who thinks his country is being misgoverned.

The treatment of immigration provides a particularly clear example. On page 35, Bello quotes Orbán warning against the transfer of Hungary to people who do not share its language or way of life. The quotation is substantial enough to disclose an argument about the continuity of a political community. A critic could ask what kind of continuity matters, what rights follow from membership, and under what circumstances immigration strengthens or weakens the institutions which existing citizens wish to preserve. Instead, on the following page, we are given a passage from Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes suggesting that white nationalists fear immigrants will assimilate too successfully. Successful assimilation would supposedly expose the shallow foundations of their cherished identity. The passage includes the revealing qualification, “Subconsciously, we can speculate.”

We can indeed. Once speculation about the subconscious has been admitted, the critic acquires a considerable advantage over the person criticised. The latter’s stated reasons need no longer govern the inquiry. His fear that newcomers will not assimilate can be treated as evidence that he fears they will. It becomes difficult to imagine what he could say that would count against the diagnosis.

This is the difficulty Mill identifies. The opponent has appeared, but his teachers have accompanied him and explained what he really means. We have not been required to encounter his case in its strongest form. We have been offered a means of dismissing it without that inconvenience.

The distinction is equally important in the discussion of Vance. On pages 235–236, Marc Edelman quotes his appeal for a leader who is “not in the pocket of big business” and who answers to “the working man, union and nonunion alike.” The passage goes on to attack the political influence of multinational corporations and Wall Street. These are not obscure claims. They concern the relationship between economic power and representative government. They might be dishonest claims. They might conceal policies which would achieve the opposite of their announced purpose. A serious critic should compare the argument with the programme, and the programme with what its advocates do. But Edelman introduces Vance’s autobiography as “maudlin” and “blaming-the-victim,” presents the speech as the deployment of tropes previously associated with the Left, and proceeds to discuss Republican “posturing.” The possibility that a rival has identified a real problem is absorbed into an account of how he has borrowed the language properly belonging to someone else.

There is a revealing possessiveness in this. Working people may have grievances, but the conceptual ownership of those grievances appears to remain with the Left. If they adopt another account of their position, the task is to explain the defection. Whether they have reconsidered the merits of the original account receives less attention.

The treatment of right-wing intellectual sources is thinner still. Schmitt and Ilyin are named in the Russian chapter, and Schmittian sovereignty is discussed through another scholar’s interpretation. Mussolini’s Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions is cited on page 233, where it is described as a “soporific 300-page tome.” This establishes that the book exists and that the contributor did not find it entertaining. It gives the reader little opportunity to assess its reasoning. No one needs to admire Mussolini to recognise the inadequacy of this approach. If fascism is the explanatory term to which so much of the collection returns, its doctrines deserve more than a dismissive reference to their length. Nor does quotation of a threat by Duterte, however revealing of his approach to government, discharge the obligation to explain the varied intellectual positions gathered beneath the same heading.

The book’s vocabulary often assists this avoidance. “Social reproduction” and “structures of feeling” can name useful objects of inquiry. Used without sufficient discipline, however, they permit movement away from propositions that can be tested towards explanations that can accommodate almost any result. A man who objects to government may be defending property, or he may be expressing an anxiety about his social position. Both may be true. The second does not answer the first.

To its credit, the collection contains a contributor who sees part of the difficulty. Ewald Engelen’s chapter on the Netherlands questions the indiscriminate application of “fascism” and examines weaknesses in Bello’s definition. He calls for greater curiosity about the people whose votes have offended the educated classes. On page 183 he urges the Left to stop insulting culturally conservative voters over their unwillingness to adopt the latest linguistic fashions of elite universities.

This is sensible advice. It also makes the habits of the surrounding discussion harder to excuse. Engelen demonstrates that the choice is not between surrender to the Right and the continued circulation of hostile descriptions. It is possible to oppose a political movement while acknowledging that denunciation has become a substitute for understanding it.

I do not ask that Backlash should have reached conclusions agreeable to me. Some of the people discussed in it favour powers I would not entrust to any government, and their use of patriotic language supplies no reason to suspend judgment. A defence of national independence can be used to protect the independence of rulers from their own people. Claims about the market can disguise favours to established wealth. These are good reasons for examining specific proposals and holding their advocates to their stated principles.

They are poor reasons for treating a loose collection of opponents as an already understood historical pathology. The duty of a critic is to make distinctions more exact, especially where political excitement encourages their abandonment. A better book would select the strongest statements of the doctrines under attack and give their defenders enough room to become troublesome. It would explain the arguments for national obligation and private property before deciding that these were expressions of resentment or instruments of class power. Where a programme contradicted its principles, it would demonstrate the contradiction. Where the principles themselves were mistaken, it would explain why.

Backlash contains useful observations and some worthwhile research. Its greater ambition is impaired by the confidence with which its contributors move from knowing where their opponents stand to supposing that they know what their opponents think. Readers already persuaded that the so-called far right is a manifestation of capitalist crisis will find ample material for repeating the conclusion. They will be much less well equipped to defend it against someone who has read the other side.

Mill’s remedy remains available. Before arranging the defeat of these opinions, allow their ablest defenders to explain them. If the opinions are as bad as the contributors believe, this should strengthen the case against them. The reluctance to undertake the exercise is not evidence that it has become unnecessary.