Deglobalization and the political psychology of white supremacy

Ontological (in)security and the fantasy of white supremacy

Even if globalization has assisted in bringing back notions of bounded cultures, ethnic resilience, and the reemergence of powerful nationalistic sentiments, deglobalization grievances cannot be understood only in terms of their global connections. Rather, they pertain as much to symbolic value-laden issues, including cultural domination and humiliation, as to material exploitation through global economic mechanisms. This is where the concept of ontological security—understood as a structural and psychological process focused on feeling secure in a changing world—materializes. In the sociologist Anthony Giddens’ (1991) terminology, ontological security suggests a “security of being” as opposed to a “security of survival.” It is about having a sense of trust and confidence that the world is what it appears to be, and that routines help the individual in feeling secure (Kinnvall, 2004; Mitzen, 2006). The original use of the term is usually attributed to the psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1965), who refers to ontological security as the ability to experience oneself as “real, alive, whole, and in a temporal sense, a continuous person” (p. 39), while ontological insecurity entails the experience of extreme anxiety that threatens the individual’s entire existence. Hence, Laing’s focus is on the individual level, while Giddens brings his analysis to bear on the social level.

However, both Laing (1965) and Giddens (1991) have remained uncertain about a radical decentering of the subject as envisaged in much psychoanalytical and postcolonial thought, and they both end up claiming significant space for agency and autonomy of the individual subject; Laing by criticizing the Freudian model of the subject (ego, id, and superego) in favor of a model of integral selfhood and personal identity, and Giddens by emphasizing individual reflexivity and broad assumptions that social agents are in command of some implicit knowledge and self-understanding regardless of their social and political context (Kinnvall & Mitzen, 2020). In both there is limited incorporation of unconscious processes, with the consequence that multiple subjective identifications, as spelt out in much psychoanalysis in terms of unconscious fantasy and repressed desire, are largely ignored. In response, ontological security scholars have turned to Lacan, whose take on subjectivity begins with the notion of a nonreductionist and sociopolitical conception of subjectivity, expressed through images, fantasies, and desires (see, e.g., Browning, 2019; Cash, 2020; Eberle, 2019; Kinnvall, 2018). Scholars have also resorted to postcolonial and gender analysis to account for how cultural norms, patriarchy, social practices, and other forms of cultural and institutional power are not fully accounted for in either Giddens’ or Laing’s notions of integrated selfhood or reflexive self (Agius et al., 2020; Untalan, 2020; Vieira, 2018). From a psychoanalytical perspective, the focus has been on multiple ways of attachments and unconscious ties related to the formation of self and others, especially as manifest in fantasy and subjective relationships. Meanwhile, postcolonial and feminist perspectives have focused on how such fantasies are intrinsically linked to gendered and postcolonial power structures.

The focus on fantasy and fantasy narratives emphasizes how any search for ontological security is always a story—a fantasy—that can never be fulfilled, regardless of how powerful and real such stories can feel in terms of sense-making. In concrete terms, it means that individuals, groups, and even states respond to ontological insecurity by temporarily closing down categorical identifications. In Stavrakakis’ (1999) terms, it is a form of banal representational fantasy that works to defend against emotional anxieties and traumatic experiences. Imagination, Martin (2016) says, is about seizing desire, and seizing desire is about fantasy or, more concretely, about responding to the question che vois? (“what do you want?”) through certain scenarios or narratives (Lacan, 1977; Žižek, 1989). Desire ties together what Lacan refers to as the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real (objet petit a) through images, language, and enjoyment (jouissance; Burgess, 2017; Lacan, 1988). “To overcome uncertainty, or lack in Lacan’s terminology, the subject engages in fantasies and imaginations to ‘alleviate anxiety and fend off the threat of fragmentation’ and to conceal the ‘traumatic split or tear within the subject’s being’” (Ruti, as cited in Kinnvall & Svensson, 2022, p. 532).

Fantasies are thus about longing (desire) for something that can never be obtained. In the narratives of the far-right, this desire is filled by the fantasmatic (fictional, simulated, virtual) object of the “other” (e.g., the immigrant, feminists, elites, leftists), who prevent “our” desires from being fulfilled. The fantasmatic thus works as an emotional and discursive container that embodies experiences of disgust, horror, and fear. The fantasy of homogenous identities—the conviction that we somehow possess unitary selves—is perhaps the most fundamental of such desires. Here, desires are different from needs: while needs can be satisfied, desires cannot (Martin, 2016). Instead, desires are materialized in imaginations and fantasies of closure (satisfying an imaginary ontological security) which, in the language of white supremacy, also rely on a myth of redemptive violence (Severino & Morrison, 1999; Wink, 1999)—that of rewarding or upholding violence as a virtue against the essentialized “evil other.”

White supremacy is a vague discourse centered around a fantasy in which White people and culture are intrinsically superior to those of other ethnicities and races. It implies a narrative in which common (fantasmatic) pasts and values are shared, and where White people are entitled to design, operationalize, and ontologically secure (e.g., through traditions, policies, and laws) their survival, safety, and prosperity to the detriment of other genders, ethnicities, and races—often through violent means (Oesteraas, 2022; Vander Zanden, 1959; Wu & Li, 2020). While far-right movements and parties have been established around (and share) some of these core beliefs, they tend to espouse them less explicitly as they traverse into the more “mainstream” political arenas (Mudde, 2017; Wodak, 2020). Hence, white supremacy constitutes a considerably more primordial and narratively visceral ideology or belief system that informs and influences the larger civilizational fantasies of contemporary far-right and white nationalist movements. White supremacy does not necessarily determine the discursive strategies of far-right and white nationalist groups, since such strategies may be deemed detrimental for electoral purposes. Instead, the core pillar of white ethnocentric fantasies represents an overlap between these different strands of far-right ideologies (white supremacy and white nationalism). The stabilization of these fantasies, however, requires the setup of emotional regimes by contesting political actors, involving attempts at establishing “rules of feelings” and acceptable behaviors (Zembylas, 2022)—what we refer to as emotional governance.

Ontological (in)security and emotional governance

Emotional governance denotes the mechanisms by which actors and discourses govern emotions at the individual, group, and societal levels through the manipulation, surveillance, and molding of the “everyday” and “commonplaces” in the public sphere (Richards, 2007, 2018). This governance relies on the generation and stabilization of fantasies as intelligible yet ambiguous signifiers that provide a sense (of self, of identity) and a “footing” into the interpretation, negotiation, and internalization of such “everyday.” Here, the “normal” and the “accepted” are not given but rather heavily disputed spaces, or what Koschut (2019) labels “affective sites of contestation.” To Koschut, it is not enough to think of the state as a political regime to capture the complexities of how power is enacted and performed in affective terms. Instead, Koschut proposes that political actors (within and beyond the state) should also be understood as emotional regimes—regimes that discursively and rhetorically compete for the fixing of meaning, affective norms, and the boundaries of acceptable societal behavior. In this sense, emotional governance works as affective heuristics, simplifying the complexities of sociopolitical reality into compartmentalized frames of ontological security that attempt at providing an ultimately impervious sense and purpose to our behaviors.

Through attempts to demarcate the “normal” and “acceptable” in affective communities (Ahmed, 2014), emotional governors weigh in the formation of individual and group identities and behaviors (Richards, 2018; see also Kinnvall & Svensson, 2022). Building on Hinderliter et al. (2009), Zembylas (2022) elaborates on such attempts at fixing meaning, identity, and behaviors and argues that affective communities (or “communities of sense”) are intrinsically fragile and ephemeral in their ontological togetherness as “shared experience of affective intensities . . . do[es] not necessarily have a lasting coherence” (Zembylas, 2022, p. 27). This dimension of impermanence is also picked up by Eroukhmanoff (2019), who argues that emotional governance has been used for political mobilizations following terror attacks rather than solely in the context of the “everyday.” Eroukhmanoff makes a connection between the ephemeral and the “sensational” (in Deleuze’s terms, the cliché of the “given” in societal commonplaces) in addressing the side-effects of contemporary “reactive” emotional governance. The deployment and normativity of affective technologies (e.g., memes, posts) that afford and operationalize discourses and rhetorics spectacularize and sensationalize emotions in a consumerist fashion rather than enabling affect to engage with larger political projects (Eroukhmanoff, 2019).

This relationship between sensationalism, spectacularization, and emotional governance can be traced to the increased secularization and commodification of social life experienced during the expansion of neoliberal globalization. As an affective and ontological vacuum, it is not only filled with diverse counter-hegemonic discourses (like white supremacy), but also with affective practices and norms for governing reality and community-building. While emotional governance itself is not new, the contemporary political and technosocial context generates affordances for its exploitation by increasingly polarized identitarian projects. The affective complexities that generate, modulate, and perpetuate the manifestations of the white supremacist belief system (e.g., in memes, the Capitol storming, or passing voter suppression laws) can hence be read in relation to deglobalization and emotional governance at individual, group, and societal levels.

Deglobalization as enacted in white supremacist discourses and fantasies is intrinsically tied to fantasmatic postcolonial, postimperial, and patriarchal/gendered power structures. While postcolonial and patriarchal power structures have been widely addressed regarding their harmful effects on minority groups, civil rights, and democratic institutions (Allen, 2001; Beliso-De Jesús & Pierre, 2020; Vander Zanden, 1959), white supremacist and far-right discourses repurpose these structures in the rhetoric of what Ruth Wodak (2020) labels “victim–perpetrator reversal.” Under this framework, white supremacists produce a fantasy in which the postcolonial, postimperial, and postpatriarchal “order” (i.e., the international liberal order) robs them of—and increasingly replaces—their traditions, culture, values, and “rightful” places in history and society. White supremacy, thus, can be understood as a political ideology, a heuristic mechanism, and an emotional governance tool that allows for the containment and mitigation of ontological insecurity, stemming from the “theft” of (white) identity, self, culture, community, and—ultimately—of jouissance. This “theft” is manifest in the ongoing “fall” and outright rejection of colonial, imperial, and patriarchal (read: traditional or “heritage”) hegemonies, a process co-constitutive with that of globalization and the “globalized” identities it generates.

Postcolonialism and (global) white supremacy

Paradoxically, the broader concept of white supremacy is tightly bound up with the colonial dimension of globalization which, since the 15th century, fostered the imposition of European “whiteness” as the social, aesthetic, cultural, and political norm and civilizational aspiration (Beliso-De Jesús & Pierre, 2020). While the conception of white supremacy that we use here is more specifically tied to contemporary white nationalist and far-right discourses—that is, dealing with nativism, nationalism, authoritarianism, and racism—it is nonetheless inextricably linked to the historical process of globalization and colonialism. At its core, white supremacy historically refers to a global system stemming from colonial and imperial structures that benefit Whites and disempowers non-Whites, their cultures, norms, and institutions (Allen, 2001; Beliso-De Jesús & Pierre, 2020). This postcolonial structure of global white supremacy is constituted by five dimensions, according to Allen (2001): (a) the racialization of the world in European terms, (b) the construction of civilization as inherently white, (c) the naturalization of the “nation-state” as spaces for the reproduction of white (supremacist) ideals of order, (d) the localized instantiation of whiteness (and white bodies) as the standard for human interaction, and (e) the negation of white supremacy as constitutive of white group membership. We can see the interplay between these dimensions when Vander Zanden (1959, p. 397) quotes white supremacist Henry W. Grady espousing an Anglo-Saxon variant of this belief system incarnated in the “Manifest Destiny” discourse to justify the system of transatlantic slave trade and colonialism in the US. Grady frames the power, superiority, destiny, and righteousness of Anglo-Saxons in the US in terms of nature (“Anglo-Saxon blood”) and natural order in contrast to the conquered, tamed, alien, and ultimately inferior other—Native Americans and Blacks (Vander Zanden, 1959). While illustrative, the scope of postcolonial white supremacy is not reducible or graspable in “fringe” instances like Grady’s or that of contemporary mass shooters, such as Payton Grendon and Dylann Roof, advocating the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory (Gilsinan, 2015; Harriott, 2022). Rather, according to Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre (2020), white supremacy needs to be situated at the core of the postcolonial global power system. According to these authors, the implicit and explicit sustaining of this system through diverse manifestations of violence (from civil rights constraints to cultural conditioning and mass shootings) are not a thing of the past but rather a quintessential characteristic of our contemporary political life: In other words, white supremacy can be understood as “the central organizing logic of western modernity” (p. 67).

Contemporary postcolonial power can thus be understood as sustained by white supremacy as both a violent system of control and as one of aspiration and justification—a system of emotional governance marked by an ontological (in)security of whiteness directed at both the in-group (Whites, the conquerors, “Us”) and the out-group (non-Whites, the conquered, “the other”). From this perspective, we argue that contemporary white supremacy rages against a specific form of globalization as Western modernity, yet is inextricably linked to and constituted by its historical predecessor and, crucially, by the ontological security of whiteness. An alternative to this antagonized variant of globalization is only achievable through a counter-hegemonic project of “reactionary internationalism” (cf. Apel, 2021). Under this framework, the deglobalization process pursued by white supremacists can be better understood as re-globalization: a reactionary, counter-hegemonic globalizing project that opposes the values, norms, and institutions guiding the liberal variant, which has been enacted as a (fantasmatic) civilizational threat to global and local white power in myths such as the “Great Replacement.” Deglobalization implies, consciously and unconsciously, a re-globalization of white power, produced, performed, and emotionally governed by white supremacists, nationalists, and far-right politicians and based on shared, but ultimately unfixable, fantasies.

Gender roles and patriarchy under white supremacy

The ontological insecurity of whiteness addressed in postcolonial literature is intrinsically tied to the formation of patriarchal gender relations in the discourse of white supremacists, white nationalists, and the far-right. Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre (2020) elaborate on this linkage, arguing that white supremacist and patriarchal projects on gender roles cannot be separated from their relation with race. These relations manifest in an increasingly explicit fashion around the myths of the “Great Replacement” and “White extinction.” White supremacist discourses internalize and reproduce the ontological insecurities related to these conspiracy theories and localize them in the securitized bodies of White women and non-White immigrants (Goetz, 2021). These embodied threats are fantasmatically enacted in the discourses of the “decomposition of the (white) people”: internally, as caused by low rates of White births (targeting White women); and externally, as caused by “infiltration” and immigration waves (targeting non-Whites; Goetz, 2021, p. 70). In Lacanian terms, the anxiety-inducing interplay between these securitized bodies can be read as a theft of jouissance (enjoyment) which hampers the identity configuration—the fantasmatic self—of its “righteous owner,” the white (male) body. The identity of white supremacist counter-hegemonic projects relies heavily on the submission and securitization of women’s bodies and the adoption of traditional gender roles to the “cause”—that is, that women should foremost be mothers, housemakers, and passive supporters of white (male) power (Apel, 2021; J. Paul, 2021). In line with the logic of reglobalization in white supremacist terms, the end goal is to empower, sustain, or resuscitate white patriarchal systems of privilege and gendered submission. Complementing this approach, Apel (2021) argues that white supremacist power structures, and their “demographic” policy systems (e.g., Jim Crow in the US), are intrinsically tied to these processes of securitization of (White) women’s bodies and exclusion of non-Whites. Citing the cases of Anders Breivik and Donald Trump, Apel maintains that white supremacist discourses rage against the “cultural suicide” of modern white polities, and largely equate “empowered” women (Breivik: European feminists; Trump: congresswomen of color) with crippling and even unnatural societal elements that accelerate national degradation in favor of alleged “globalizing” hegemonies (liberals, feminists, leftists, pro-LGBTQI+ activists, etc.).

White extinction or replacement anxiety—and thus, ontological (in)security—comes to the fore here, as the white supremacist discourses of far-right leaders like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán denounce nonconformist or norm-critical women and their systems of belief as foreign, treacherous, “un-patriotic,” and even “beastly” (Agius et al., 2020; Apel, 2021; Gökarıksel & Smith, 2016). This discursive labeling situates this group of women at the interstice of the two dimensions of gender securitization: they represent both an alien threat (external), and a body that should conform to the reproduction imperatives of the white, reglobalizing project (internal; see also Mohanty et al., 1991). The gendered discourse of white supremacists reproduces multidimensional violence against women—in particular, women of color—and further normalizes violent rhetoric and actors as legitimate forms and interlocutors that “valiantly confront” the cultural maladies (e.g., feminism, “wokeness,” “social justice warriors”) of the globalist modernity (Wodak, 2020).

Studying the case of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory in Germany and Austria, Goetz (2021) addresses the issue of gender in white supremacist discourses and their normalization in policymaking. The author argues that while the rhetoric of the “Great Replacement” and “white extinction” are fairly novel, their core content has a long history in Europe. The centrality of the “Great Replacement” has been incarnated into the dog whistle of “agendas of population policy” in the discourse of German far-right “Identitarian” movements as societal issues that mainstream parties or movements do not dare speak of. This quasiparadigmatic appropriation of controversial issues by far-right actors has bolstered and positioned them and their policies as “close to the (White) people”—and thus, we argue, has strengthened their emotional governance over the ontological insecurities of whiteness. In the same vein as Apel (2021) and Bhatt (2021), Goetz (2021) argues that these discursive–rhetoric–policy trifectas of white supremacy on gender roles stem from the fear of White extinction (or Volkstod—“the death of the people”) and replacement (Umvolkung—“ethnicity inversion”) as well as from the internationalization of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory (p. 63). The gender dimension of the white supremacist counter-hegemonic project thus rests on the consolidation of white postcolonial power structures (read: reglobalization through deglobalization) since the threat (i.e., the imagined source of ontological insecurity) stems from the entanglement of the “invading” immigrant “other” with the tarnishing and antipatriotic self-determination of white female bodies.

The reglobalization of white power forces us to take seriously its postcolonial and gendered dimensions to fully apprehend its relation with the ontological (in)security of whiteness and the emotional governance that mediates it. Fantasies of empire, natural superiority, patriarchy, and gender roles are deeply enmeshed in this global system of white power and emotional governance. As a system, it works as a “pushback” against what white supremacists label, among other terms, the “Great Replacement,” “white genocide,” and more recently “Stop the Steal.” White supremacy is a symbolic and fantasmatic device of emotional governance that allows for the negotiation of the ontological insecurity of whiteness stemming from the breakage of “empire” and traditional gender relations and roles. This negotiation is manifest in the fantasmatic loss of (male and white) power prevalent in the preceding white power global order. Expanding on Krzyżanowski’s (2020) temporalities of racist imaginaries, we argue that the conspiratorial myths articulated to interpret the postcolonial, postimperial, and postpatriarchal “liberal” systems of the modern international order center on a fantasmatic construct—a temporal retrotopian ¹ (Wodak, 2020) chain of white grievance and aspiration: an ideal past, a threatening present, and a feared future (Kisić Merino & Kinnvall, 2023). White supremacists, White nationalists, and the far-right—via different technosocial platforms, with diverse rhetoric, and different support networks—feed off and reproduce the ontological insecurities stemming from the fantasmatic and structural weakening of the white supremacist global order.

White supremacy and (de)globalization: Sowing the seeds of entropy

The relationship between white supremacy and (de)globalization is inherently paradoxical, acting as a sort of dark mirror of the liberal international order. While the discourse of white supremacists focuses on denouncing maladies and highlighting grievances caused by globalization—both at the economic level, for example, by chronic downturns for working-class sectors; and at cultural levels, for example, by the expansion of multiculturalism and increase in non-White immigration (T. V. Paul, 2021; Soborski, 2020; Swank & Betz, 2003)—their perplexing influence on domestic and international politics is in great part owed to these same processes (Musharbash, 2021). This paradox, enshrined in concepts like “reactionary internationalism” (Apel, 2021), follows the retrotopian cycle of the ontological (in)securitization of whiteness pursued by white supremacy: that of deglobalization and re-globalization. Deglobalization caters to the reactive and affectively “negative” outpouring of individual, local, and national grievances and aspirations directed at emotionally governing the “threatening” (postcolonial, postimperial, postpatriarchal) present; while re-globalization implies an active and “positive” manufacturing of an international and global white power civilizational project to bring “back” the ideal past and prevent the “feared” future.

Globalization has thus allowed white supremacists and far-right parties to gain significant relevance in the public sphere even beyond their home countries (Grumke, 2013; Swank & Betz, 2003). But the “explicit” or reactionary form of white supremacy that we address in this study is also embedded in this postimperial and postcolonial global power system and contemporary neoliberal globalization. A system born of the reverberations of historical white supremacy has thus also provided space for the expansion of other cultural and political legitimacies, found in the contestations of those who claim to be “left behind” (Allen, 2001) in this alleged paradigm shift in world power balances: white supremacists, white nationalists, and far-right parties.

Hence, white supremacist, white nationalist, and far-right fantasies—expressed, for instance, in Viktor Orbán’s discourse on the civilizational threat of a “mixed-race world” and the need to maintain “ethnic homogeneity” (Than, 2022)—are incarnations and drivers of these grievances and aspirations, and operate in two co-constitutive yet highly tense “bottom-up” affective sites of contestation (Koschut, 2019). First, in the reactive and “negative” site of deglobalization, white supremacy challenges the liberal international order which has allegedly absconded the “rightful” enjoyment (jouissance) away from White people (specifically, men) and their societies. Second, in the active and “positive” site of reglobalization, white supremacists (and particularly, increasingly “mainstream” far-right parties) position themselves as saviors and defenders of another contested and fantasmatic affective site: their retrotopian Weltanschauung of tradition, white values, and white power. The core tension between deglobalization and re-globalization lies in the nature of the second site’s civilizational proposals since they are ambivalent in terms of temporality (e.g., focusing on different versions of an “ideal” or mythologized past) and spatiality (e.g., Dylann Roof’s personal views on ethnic cleansing may not resonate with those of the MAGA-Republican Party at a national level), all of which threatens the stability of the “recovered” jouissance—pertaining to the first site of contestation.

Deglobalization is thus aided by the internationalization of white supremacy, white nationalism, and the far-right (Musharbash, 2021), as ontological security-seeking practices and discourses. Contrary to their European ultranationalist predecessors, modern white supremacist and far-right movements are attached to support and “solidarity” systems created and maintained via social media, and enhanced by artificial intelligence. Instead of being solely performed at the local or domestic levels, the fight against the liberal order, multiculturalism, “the left,” progressives, feminists, and other political groups is—most crucially—performed at the international level. Here, the global enemy is generated in the imaginaries of far-right and white supremacist discourses, and can only be challenged by international collaboration and networking between diverse white supremacist and far-right groups and parties (Musharbash, 2021). In line with the logic of affective technologies (Eroukhmanoff, 2019), these fights or purported civilizational struggles manifest in, for instance, social media technologies and influencer logics, have been used to expand and normalize white supremacist discourses (Åkerlund, 2020; Askanius, 2019). However, white supremacists also tend to utilize political strategizing that has traditionally characterized far-right movements: civil unrest (e.g., the 2017 Charlottesville riots or the 2021 US Capitol storming) and electoral pressure (Halikiopoulou & Vasilopoulou, 2014). We can see the outcomes of these strategies in the advancement of the Sweden Democrats as the second largest political party in Sweden after the 2022 general elections, or the far-right turn of the Republican Party in the US.

A cornerstone narrative of white supremacy is that of defending, upholding, or pushing for a “natural way of life.” This is a relational concept entangled with fantasies of “naturalness” of racially and culturally essentialized “others,” thus providing an immutable sense of ideological and identity cohesion (Vander Zanden, 1959). In the case of white supremacy, such “ways of nature” are intrinsically linked to the alleged superiority of the “White race” in comparison to other intersectional identities, thus generating a justifying system for legitimizing and perpetuating inequalities (Liu, 2017). Political and progressive changes at the domestic level (e.g., the expansion of civil rights) have gradually attempted to shift the borders of these “ways of life,” thus determining which narratives and practices become socially and culturally accepted. In turn, these shifts threaten the perceived status quo that upholds the traditions and structures of white power (Apel, 2021), thus increasing the likelihood that attachments to a greater, more “sinister” and pervasive cluster of actors and agendas emerge. Under the white supremacist narrative of the “ways of life,” deglobalization then becomes a fight against fantasies of the unnatural, the corrupt, and the alien.

The alleged “challenges” to the white “way of life” in the context of globalization have paved the way for the enactment of another core white supremacist fantasy narrative, myth, and conspiracy theory into the public sphere: that of the “Great Replacement,” as discussed earlier. According to this “theory,” globalist, progressive, liberal, and socialist movements and actors have long been surreptitiously conspiring to demographically (read: racially), socially, and culturally replace and eradicate Whites in white-majority industrial countries (Cosentino, 2020; Ekman, 2022; Obaidi et al., 2021). This “upper layer” narrative (which builds on deeper narratives and myths, such as “ways of life” and “the global enemy”), is deemed particularly dangerous due to its capacity to incite and normalize online and offline violence and hate speech against both immigrant and non-White “beneficiaries” and perceived defenders of the globalist, elitist system (Obaidi et al., 2021). By enacting emotional governance via hybrid media (combining “old” and “new” media technologies and related practices), this “outright violence” can be tempered, refashioned, and repurposed to the benefit of more mainstream far-right, anti-immigration, and antimulticulturalism politics, actors, and discourses (Ekman, 2022). The “Great Replacement” myth could perhaps be easy to dismiss from the political mainstream, but that is to ignore its trickle-down effects in terms of far-right fantasies of unwanted others as preventing jouissance, thus hindering an “authentic” (albeit unattainable) ontological security to occur.

White supremacy and white nationalism as reified deglobalization: The case of Sweden

The ontological insecurity stemming from the fear of ethnic replacement or “white genocide” (Charlton, 2019) acts as a powerful motivator and discourse for justifying the fringe system that produces white supremacists (De Oliveira & Dambrun, 2007), as well as their actions against non-White individuals and perceived counter-hegemonic projects (i.e., globalization). This ontological insecurity is emotionally governed by political leaders, experts, and pundits in the more “mainstream” far-right. In their search for quenching the ontological insecurity that the “Great Replacement” theory produces, the more “explicit” violence of white supremacy is subdued in favor of more subtle ways of performing violence against the plethora of globalist-tied minorities and ideologies. The civilizational projects of white nationalists and the far-right—for instance, Richard Spencer’s and the Proud Boys’ proposals to create territories in the US where ethnic homogeneity is enforced (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2022; Stern, 2019)—attempt at distancing themselves from more explicit forms of violence. Instead, they seek to propose somewhat “peaceful” processes of ethnic cleansing in Europe, North America, and elsewhere (Anti-Defamation League, 2019; Bhatt, 2021; Taylor, 2017), thus effectively curbing the multicultural “agenda” of globalization and its supporters.

The rise of a former (neo)-Nazi party in Sweden, the Sweden Democrats (SD), is a paradigmatic illustration of how a white supremacy movement has left the fringes of the political system to enter the corridors of Parliament. The advice given by the Waffen-SS (Schutzstaffel) Unterscharführer (Junior Squad Leader) and influential member of SD, Ingemar Somberg, in 1998 to “get rid of the uniforms, stop drinking beer and screaming about the slaughter of Jews” (Robsahm, 2020, p. 5; author’s translation), turned out to be highly beneficial for pursuing the Great Replacement myth under a different label. Despite constantly being caught with statements and actions in line with their Nazi past, the Sweden Democrats have succeeded in what Wodak (2020) terms “backstage politics.” This practice involves entering the mainstream via small incremental steps aimed towards the closure of the Swedish nation via an emotional governance that has consistently played on the fear of non-Whites as its main affective narrative fantasy. Via the affordances of the hybrid media system, SD has consistently blurred the frontiers between immigrants, asylum seekers, criminals, and not least Muslim groups and individuals in what Ahmed (2014) has referred to as “sticky associations”—specifically, between “migrants” and “violence” as co-constitutive signifiers. These “sticky associations” also follow the tempering, refashioning, and repurposing of SD’s narrative fantasies of internal and external enemies to also include feminists (by suggesting that men are losing out from equality policies and proposing antiwomen and anti-LGBTQI+ policies, see Lodenius, 2018), journalists (e.g., by threatening media, classifying journalists as enemies, and denying access to its election events, see Reporters Without Borders, 2022), as well as local minority groups, such as Sami and Jewish people (e.g., that Jewish and Sami people are not “true” Swedes as argued by one of SD’s main representatives, Björn Söder, see Klintevall, 2018). These practices manifest in tandem with a constant fascination with increasingly authoritarian states, such as Hungary and Russia, but also towards the US under Donald Trump. The latter case is exemplified by SD’s political leader, Jimmie Åkesson, expressing support for the former President concerning the Capitol storming (Annebäck, 2021).

These reactionary practices have as their foundation emotional fantasy narratives of perceived erosions of “natural ways of life,” led by globalization. Such ways of life, in line with ontological security practices at the heart of deglobalization, are fought through fantasies of the unnatural, the corrupt, and the alien, and normalized through their entrance into the mainstream. In the Swedish case, this normalization manifests in how SD has significantly affected the agenda of the 2022 center-right government and its focus on punitive measures linked to crime, migration politics, and welfare chauvinism, at the same time as it has been rewarded with crucial committee positions even when not taking an actual seat in government. Through a cluster of affective sites of contestation (Koschut, 2019) and the creation of an “affective mood” (Ross, 2013), SD has thus asserted its emotional governance through constructing linkages between fear of replacement, and that of an affective societal climate characterized by anxieties of the Swedish nation being eroded, suspicions of parliamentary democracy, Europhobia, and perceived increased polarization. In so doing, SD has succeeded in normalizing a white supremacy agenda as part of a global weakening or autocratization of democratic rights (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). SD has thus not only set the agenda for the incoming Swedish government but has repeatedly governed through emotional narratives and ontological security-seeking practices aimed at striking an emotional chord with its electorates.

These deglobalization narratives also point to a common “primordial” idea entangling globalization, white supremacy, and the far-right: that white power incarnates the struggle or fight against the maladies of globalization. In other words, under this opaque framework, white supremacy and its derivates are deglobalization reified. In this context, deglobalization should not be understood as a monolithic process or practice, but rather as responding to specific political enactments, affordances, and discourses ascribed to different white ethnocentric ideologies and movements, as well as to domestic political cultures. Here, the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and its underlying myth of redemptive violence, provide fantasmatic narratives of justification, which in turn inform the practice around the reification of deglobalization and ontological security.