Kristóf Szombati reviews David Ost’s Red Pill Politics (The New Press, May 2026) and Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right, edited by Don Kalb and Walden Bello (Pluto Press, May 2026)
Recent scholarship on the contemporary right has generated an abundant vocabulary: populism, authoritarianism, illiberalism, democratic backsliding. These terms capture real features, but often only one dimension at a time. “Populism” can flatten ideology into style or anti-elite performance; “authoritarianism” and “backsliding” can describe institutional effects without saying much about the wider social energies and historical processes that sustain them. What often drops out is the question of the right’s deeper political form, its social bases, and its conditions of possibility.
Two books appearing this May – David Ost’s Red Pill Politics and Don Kalb and Walden Bello’s edited volume Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right – push back against this fragmentation from different directions. Their simultaneous publication makes reading them in parallel particularly worthwhile. Ost asks what kind of politics the contemporary right actually is. Backlash asks what kind of historical world has made that politics so globally available.
Read together, they do not simply add new labels to an already crowded field; they relocate the analysis of reaction onto different terrain altogether.
Ost’s book is the more tightly argued of the two, and its core intervention is conceptual. He is dissatisfied with the by-now exhausted question of whether the contemporary radical right “is” fascism. That question, he argues, leads nowhere: there are obvious similarities, but there are also obvious differences, and the debate oscillates endlessly between alarmism and minimization while right-wing actors exploit the deniability afforded by the claim “we are not Nazis.” Ost’s solution is not to adjudicate resemblance more carefully but to change the level of analysis. Borrowing a biological metaphor, he asks what political species both classic fascism and contemporary right-wing populism belong to. His answer is “Red Pill politics” (RPP): right-wing, exclusionary nationalist-democratic, populist illiberalism. The label is cumbersome, and Ost knows it; he apologizes for the acronym. But the species concept is analytically useful precisely because it is elastic. It allows fascism and RWP to “interbreed and produce fertile offspring,” as he puts it, without collapsing the present into a simple repetition of the 1930s. What is at stake, in his hands, is not a style of anti-elite rhetoric but a structured political formation that fuses hierarchy, exclusionary nationhood, selective popular appeal, and hostility to liberal pluralism; a formation that may take fascist or post-fascist forms depending on conditions.
One of Ost’s strongest moves is to insist that the right’s danger lies not only, or even primarily, in open violence. He argues that “populism, not violence” is RPP’s most potent and effective tool: its ability to speak directly to nonelites, to recognize them as worthy and deserving, and sometimes to deliver tangible benefits.
Drawing on Michèle Lamont’s work on recognition and Arlie Hochschild’s ethnography of resentment, Ost insists that reactionary politics succeeds in part because it is attractive. In Poland, Law and Justice (PiS) introduced generous child support. In India, Modi has improved housing. In Turkey, Erdoğan has expanded healthcare. The benefits may be partly cancelled by other cuts, but they are concrete, visible, and delivered alongside symbolic acknowledgement of the dignity of “real” members of the nation. This is one of the book’s most important correctives to thinner accounts of right-wing voting that explain it through ignorance, manipulation, or false consciousness.
The chapter on dominant-essence workers (DEW) gives this argument a sharper sociological footing. When dominant power is hard to challenge, dominant-essence workers – those who possess their society’s normative cluster of identity characteristics – can rationally pursue closure against more marginalized groups instead of joining them in class solidarity.
This is the analytical core of Ost’s account of why workers vote for the right: not as a deviation from their interests, but as a strategy of advance through downward exclusion when upward challenge looks futile.
It is a serious, non-moralizing explanation, and it is the place where Ost most clearly outpaces both the cultural-backlash literature and the standard left lament about workers “not understanding their interests.”
Ost’s final chapter draws the political conclusion. The left, he argues, has lost its DEW base partly through the Third Way’s economic centrism and partly through its post-1960s shift toward minorities, women, and college-educated professionals, a shift he treats as necessary but incomplete. His proposed remedy is twofold: a return to economic populism (universal social provision, defense of unions, hostility to free-trade orthodoxy) and a stylistic reorientation he calls, after Steven Fish, dominance. By this he means a politics willing to provoke fights, defend its positions belligerently, and “match the political energy of the best Red Pill politics.”
The civil-society repertoire – rallies, demonstrations, even mass marches – will not topple right-wing populism once it is in power, he insists. Only elections will, and only if the broad democratic left becomes tougher and more populist than it has been for decades.
This is Ost’s clearest political payoff, and it is one we should keep in view, because Backlash‘s political horizon is significantly different.
If Ost reconstructs the political form of reaction, Backlash reconstructs its historical terrain. Kalb’s introduction provides the volume’s conceptual center: the present, he argues, should be understood as a global “counterrevolution within and against” the earlier neoliberal counterrevolution.
Drawing on David Harvey, Quinn Slobodian, Melinda Cooper, and Nancy Fraser, he relocates the story away from the liberal narrative that dates everything from 1989. Neoliberalism itself was already a counterrevolution against twentieth-century mass democracy, prepared in the Mont Pelerin Society and rolled out from the 1970s through privatization, deindustrialization, indebtedness, welfare retrenchment, and class polarization. The current backlash is not an aberration from liberal capitalism but a distorted, reactionary response to the social wreckage neoliberalism itself produced. That is why Kalb insists this is “not just a culture but also a class story.” Culture war becomes intelligible as a way of deflecting deeper political-economic contradictions onto immigrants, minorities, feminists, and “wokeness.” His conceptual through-line is double devaluation: the simultaneous economic and cultural devaluation of working- and lower-middle-class lives. This framework informs several contributions, including the chapters by Scheiring and Csathó on Hungary, Edelman on the United States, and Coquard on the French periphery.
But the volume is not unified, and its internal disagreements are among its most useful features. Bello’s opening chapter offers a five-feature definition of fascism (anti-democratic disdain, tolerance of violence, mass base, scapegoating, charismatic leadership) and uses it without flinching to describe Trump, Modi, Orbán, Bolsonaro, and Duterte. Ewald Engelen’s chapter on the Netherlands explicitly disagrees, and in doing so takes aim at the dominant political-science framing of populism associated with Cas Mudde and Jan-Werner Müller: in the Global North, he argues, the rhetoric of fascism – and the thin-ideology accounts of populism that often travel alongside it – functions as “a paint bomb,” alienating already-angry voters by tarring them with moral abuse, while obscuring the spatial and class character of the actual revolt. Marc Edelman, while titling his chapter “Fascism USA,” ends by wondering aloud whether the language of fascism still has any resonance in what he calls the “historically amnesiac” atmosphere of contemporary America. The volume thus stages a genuine debate about whether the F-word is the right concept, a debate that the introduction softens but does not close.
The most structurally pointed contribution comes in Don Nonini’s closing chapter, which makes one of the volume’s clearest causal-structural arguments. On his reading,
the Trump-MAGA alliance is not only an insurgent populist movement from below but a class alliance with specific fractions of US capital
– fossil fuels, finance, and Silicon Valley platform capital – mediated by Trump and his closest allies. What unites these capitalist fractions is, Nonini argues, both a shared interest in resisting the stranding of fossil assets that the energy transition would impose and a broader revanchist project against US labor and progressive social movements going back to the 1980s.
This is the argument that political-science accounts of populism most struggle to assimilate, because it specifies which factions of capital are doing what, rather than treating capitalism as a homogeneous backdrop. It is also the argument with which Ost’s framework, despite its clear left-wing commitments, has the least direct engagement.
The Scheiring-Csathó chapter on Hungary is where the two books converge most clearly. Their argument is that Orbán’s consolidation of power cannot be understood through institutional hijacking alone but must be traced to deindustrialization, mortality shocks (“deaths of despair”), and the failure of left-of-center liberalism to shelter people from those shocks. Against the Norris-Inglehart cultural-backlash framework, which they explicitly critique as ahistorical and as effectively blaming the victims of capital accumulation, they insist that socio-economic shocks and cultural dynamics are intertwined, and that the political afterlife of the 1990s shock therapy explains the timing of the illiberal breakthrough after 2008. Ost cites Scheiring’s earlier monograph approvingly; Scheiring and Csathó in turn use Kalb’s notion of double devaluation. Hungary is the case where political morphology and political economy are most visibly doing the same explanatory work.
The two books, however, also have different centers of gravity. Ost is sharpest on parties, movements, voters, and electoral coalitions. Capital and accumulation appear mainly as background to the political contest he wants to analyze. Backlash, by contrast, foregrounds class formation, fractions of capital, and the lived structures of feeling of devaluation, but has comparatively little to say about parties, electoral strategy, or the intra-left arguments that animate Ost’s final chapter. Each book’s strengths track these emphases — and so do its silences.
Read together, the two books also point in different directions on what is to be done, even if neither stages the disagreement explicitly. Ost’s prescription is a tougher, more populist social democracy operating within the institutional shell of liberal democracy: reactivate the FDR–LaGuardia register, deliver economic populism, defend popular policies belligerently, win elections. He is well aware that today’s business elites are less amenable to such a program than their postwar predecessors were, but his political horizon remains recognizably reformist. Backlash, especially in Kalb’s introduction and Nonini’s closing chapter, gestures toward something more fundamentally transformative: a “left populist ecological socialism” that confronts the contradictions of late capitalism head-on, including the planetary emergency that an FDR-style program cannot address.
Both books converge on the diagnosis that the Third Way’s progressive neoliberalism opened the door for the right. The question of how far back the response has to reach – to a renewed social-democratic settlement, or to something that challenges the broader framework of accumulation – is one each book answers differently, and the contrast surfaces most clearly when they are read alongside each other.
Neither book is fully sufficient on its own, and naming their shortcomings sharpens what each contributes. Ost’s species concept is, by design, capacious: it covers Mussolini, Le Pen, Modi, Likud, and Marcus Garvey’s UNIA. The capaciousness is the point, but it comes at a cost in analytic precision. When one concept covers movements as different as interwar Italian Fascism and contemporary Hungarian illiberalism, what work is the concept doing beyond licensing the comparison? Ost’s geography is also asymmetric: Poland and the United States dominate, with Hungary and France as supporting cases, while India, Brazil, the Philippines, Russia, and South Africa are mentioned but rarely analyzed in depth. His prescriptive register, finally, can read as optimistic about the left’s organizational resources at a moment when union density, party institutions, and the media ecology have all shifted in ways that may be more obdurate than the strategy of “matching dominance” allows. Backlash’s shortcomings are different. The double devaluation framework is capacious enough to accommodate most cases, but at some cost: when devaluation stretches from material immiseration to status anxiety and cultural displacement, it risks becoming difficult to falsify, since it can absorb cases (well-off Trump voters, comfortable Brexit retirees, professional-class Alternative for Germany supporters) that do not fit a strict economic-dislocation story without much friction. Furthermore, the volume gives surprisingly little systematic attention to gender – the manosphere, anti-feminism, anti-trans politics – despite its centrality to MAGA, the Alternative for Germany, and Trumpism, and despite Petra Rethmann’s chapter pointing toward how this could be done. Its prescriptive horizon, while more radical than Ost’s, is also thinner: a gesture toward ecological socialism is not yet a strategy.
What these books make visible, then, is not simply that the contemporary right is “more than populist” or “more than authoritarian.” It is that thinner descriptors often isolate one feature of a broader formation. Ost shows that terms like populism or illiberalism become misleading when they describe the right’s surface traits without grasping its ideological structure and governmental strategy: hierarchy, exclusion, majoritarian nationhood, selective social protection, and hostility to pluralist contestation. Backlash, by contrast, shows how institutional or attitudinal vocabularies become inadequate when they fail to explain why such politics became plausible and durable in the first place. Its insistence on political economy, class decomposition, and global unevenness restores historical depth to debates that too often remain presentist and methodologically nationalist.
The difference in emphasis – Ost on political morphology, Backlash on historical causation – is real, but so is the deeper divergence in what each book takes the right to be a political form of: a movement-and-party phenomenon for which voter coalitions and electoral strategy are central (Ost), or a class-and-capital phenomenon for which the question is which fractions of capital are aligning with which fractions of the popular classes (Backlash).
The intellectual stakes are clearer once these tensions are named.
The problem with much recent scholarship is not that its categories are simply wrong. “Populism,” “illiberalism,” and “authoritarianism” all capture something real. The problem is that they often remain fragmentary, leaving underdeveloped the relation between political form, social base, and historical process. Ost and Backlash matter because each, in a different register, refuses this fragmentation.
Ost reconstructs the contemporary right as a coherent reactionary politics rather than a bag of symptoms. Backlash shows that reaction cannot be understood apart from the neoliberal transformations through which it has been incubated. That neither book is fully sufficient on its own, and that they pull in different directions when it comes to capital and to political strategy, is exactly why reading them together is generative. One names the form of reaction more clearly; the other restores the world that has made reaction plausible; and the gap between them maps the open question of where the left should go next.
If the contemporary right is to be understood adequately, it must be approached not only through its rhetoric or its institutional effects but through the deeper reactionary logics, historical dislocations, and class realignments that have made it popular, plausible, and durable. In that sense, Ost and Backlash do more than refine our vocabulary. They help reorient the analysis of the contemporary right itself. And they expose, by their very divergences, the strategic dilemmas that any opposition to it will have to confront.
Kristóf Szombati is Editor of the ‘Political Economy and Inequalities’ section.
