Donald Trump, the anti-Muslim far right and the new conservative revolution

Abstract

This article explores the “counter-jihad”, a transnational field of anti-Muslim political action that emerged in the mid-2000s, becoming a key tributary of the recent far-right insurgency and an important influence on the Trump presidency. The article draws on thematic analysis of content from counter-jihad websites and interviews with movement activists, sympathizers and opponents, in order to characterize the counter-jihad’s organizational infrastructure and political discourse and to theorize its relationship to fascism and other far-right tendencies. Although the political discourses of the counter-jihad, Trumpian Republicanism and the avowedly racist “Alt-Right” are not identical, I argue that all three tendencies share a common, counterrevolutionary temporal structure. Consequently, like “classical” Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, they can be seen as historically and contextually-specific forms of “revolutionary conservatism”.