Discussion
These are movements fueled by the grievance of – predominantly white, male – people who are consumed by a feeling of having been deprived of their rightful place at the top, of being under siege, who demand society be reordered in accordance with their sensibilities.
“The Civil Rights Act was the Treaty of Versailles for white people,” MAGA personality Jack Posobiec blurted out in January 2024.
That’s utterly ridiculous - but it just perfectly captures the sentiment that is driving the revanchist project of both MAGA and the AfD.
Equality for people who are not white men is perceived as an outrageous injustice; “We” have been robbed by “Them,” the sinister forces of “leftism”; “We” must reclaim what is rightfully “ours” – not lost territory this time, but status and power in politics, society, and culture.
Those who are “deserving” - “real Americans” and “biological Germans” (a term the AfD uses) – must finally restore dominance across all spheres of society, just as “the West” must impose supremacy around the world. That is the project.
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There is nothing “conservative” about either MAGA or the AfD, certainly not in the colloquial understanding of the term. They are at war with the very idea of a democratic society of equals, devoted to a fundamentally anti-pluralistic, anti-egalitarian project that is best described as a kind of aggrieved revanchism.