What does it mean when scholars say the far right has been "mainstreamed" in policy?
From Trump's deportation orders to attacks on the Treaty in Aotearoa, exclusionary politics is no longer at the fringe — it is writing the legislation. A culture-centered guide to how it happened, and what it means.
By Mohan J. Dutta
10 May 2026
When a Deputy Prime Minister tells a public broadcaster how to do its journalism, when a coalition partner runs ministerial portfolios on a platform of disestablishing the Treaty principles, when an Australian senator announces from the Senate floor that the country is being "replaced," when an Indian Home Minister describes Muslim migrants as "termites," when a US administration designates "antifa" as a terrorist movement while pardoning the Capitol rioters — we are not looking at fringe phenomena. We are looking at the architecture of contemporary government. The far right is no longer banging on the door of the political mainstream. It has been let in, pulled up a chair, and started rewriting the legislation.
This is what scholars now call mainstreaming. And as I want to argue here, drawing on the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) that has anchored two decades of my work, the mainstreaming of the far right is not simply a story about parties or personalities. It is a story about how policy frameworks themselves have been remade — through communicative inversions, manufactured grievances, and strategic ambiguity — to render hierarchical, racialised, exclusionary politics into the unmarked common sense of the state.
What does "the far right" mean?
The term far right is, as Pirro (2023) puts it, an "umbrella concept." It does important conceptual work precisely because it gathers together a family of overlapping but distinct phenomena: the radical right, which works within the constitutional democratic order while attacking liberal pluralism; the extreme right, which rejects democracy outright; and the various populist, nativist, authoritarian and reactionary formations that orbit between them. Golder (2016), reviewing the European literature, identifies the family of features that recur across the far right: nativism, authoritarianism, populism, anti-egalitarianism, and a politics of cultural and ethnic homogeneity.
Kopeček (2007) and Anievas and Saull (2023) extend the analysis beyond Europe, situating the far right within the longue durée of capitalist crisis, imperial decline and racial ordering of the world system. Short (2017) reminds us that the "subject" of far-right politics is not pre-given; it is produced — through discourse, through media, through institutions — as a particular kind of imagined people defined against constructed enemies. Miller-Idriss (2019) makes the same point about the symbolic field: a flag, a haircut, a hand sign, a meme becomes "far right" not by inherent property but through the work of meaning-making within networks that signal hierarchy and exclusion.
In settler-colonial contexts the literatures sharpen further. Hutchinson (2021), McSwiney (2024), Lentini (2019), Dean, Bell and Vakhitova (2016) and Busbridge, Moffitt and Thorburn (2020) map an Australian far right that runs from organised neo-Nazi cells to "Cultural Marxism" conspiracism dressed up as mainstream conservative critique. In Aotearoa, Ford (2020), Comerford, Guhl and Thomas (2021), Spoonley (1981), Donovan (2020) and Harris-Hogan (2026) trace a national landscape that the Christchurch atrocity did not produce but did make undeniable: a far right that has long operated in proximity to electoral conservatism, anti-immigrant populism and the cultural defence of white settler hegemony.
What unites these diverse traditions is a politics organised around the production of an authentic, threatened, hierarchical "people," and the identification of those who must be excluded, expelled, surveilled, disciplined or eliminated to restore that people to its rightful place.
What does "mainstreaming" mean?
For most of the post-war period, far-right politics was theorised as a fringe phenomenon — pathological, marginal, contained by the cordon sanitaire of liberal democratic norms. Herman and Muldoon (2018), in their introduction to Trumping the Mainstream, mark the moment when this assumption collapsed. From Trump to Bolsonaro to Modi to Orbán to Meloni, the question is no longer whether the far right can win but how thoroughly it has reshaped the field on which all politics is now played.
Brown, Mondon and Winter (2023) offer the most precise heuristic. They distinguish three intersecting processes. First, mainstreaming by the mainstream: legacy media, centrist parties, universities and policy elites pull far-right ideas, framings and personnel into legitimate discourse — through platforming, "balance," strategic borrowing of immigration rhetoric, and the treatment of nativist talking points as reasonable concerns. Second, mainstreaming of the mainstream: established centre-right and even centre-left actors absorb far-right positions to "neutralise" them, with the predictable effect of normalising rather than defeating the underlying politics. Third, the mainstream becoming far right: the centre of gravity of the political field shifts so that what was once extreme is now the operating consensus.
Rothut, Schulze, Rieger and Naderer (2024), in their systematic review, propose mainstreaming as a meta-process — an interlocking dynamic across media systems, political parties, policy regimes and civil society in which radical positions migrate, get laundered, get repeated, and finally get institutionalised. Katsambekis (2023) sharpens the political-theoretic stakes: what is being mainstreamed is not just the far right but authoritarianism itself — the gradual hollowing out of pluralism, judicial independence, minority rights and dissent under the cover of democratic legitimation.
Mondon (2025) shows how this works in real time around the "immigration issue": public opinion is not a pre-existing reservoir of nativist sentiment that politicians regrettably must respond to; it is constructed through the very act of treating immigration as the issue, with elite media, polling firms, think tanks and politicians collectively producing a "reactionary people" whose imagined demands then licence the policy turn. Mondon (2023) names the epistemological scaffolding that holds this in place: an epistemology of ignorance in far-right studies that obscures racism and whiteness behind the more comfortable analytics of "populism," "anxiety" and "left-behind" voters. Pertwee (2020) and Mirrlees (2022) document the same dynamic in the Anglo-American case: the "alt right," anti-Muslim networks and white nationalist intellectual entrepreneurs were not a Trumpian aberration but the conservative movement's own long-prepared infrastructure, finally given executive power. Parmar and Furse (2023) read the Trump administration as the geopolitical expression of this convergence — a far-right turn in world politics, not a domestic anomaly.
Mainstreaming of the far right in policy: what does it actually look like?
To say the far right has been mainstreamed in policy is to say something more specific than that its ideas circulate. It is to say that the legislative, regulatory, fiscal and infrastructural apparatus of the state has been retooled around its core commitments. From the work above, and from comparative observation across the Trump, Modi, Orbán, Meloni, Milei and Coalition-government cases, six recurring features stand out.
First, immigration and border policy as constitutional politics. Detention without trial, mass deportation operations, the criminalisation of asylum, the militarisation of borders, citizenship-stripping powers, "remigration" rhetoric edging into legislative ambition. The "immigration issue," as Mondon (2025) demonstrates, becomes the master signifier through which a reactionary "people" is built and a new policy common sense is enforced.
Second, the dismantling of equality, anti-discrimination and Indigenous rights frameworks. Treaty principles attacked as "race-based privilege." Affirmative action gutted. Anti-racism training banned in the federal workplace. Indigenous data sovereignty rolled back. The very vocabulary of structural inequality recoded as "woke" overreach.
Third, the policy targeting of trans and queer life. Amery and Mondon (2025) read organised transphobia as a paradigmatic reactionary strategy: othering, "peaking," populist appeal to a threatened majority, and the moral panic. Bathroom bills, sports bans, gender-affirming care prohibitions, "parental rights" curricula — these are not isolated culture-war flourishes; they are the construction of a disciplinary policy field.
Fourth, the reconstruction of the public sphere. Defunding or capturing public broadcasters. Disciplining universities through funding levers, accreditation regimes and "viewpoint diversity" mandates. Criminalising protest. Reframing journalism as activism. As I have argued in Dutta (2021), the disciplining of universities and the surveillance of dissenting academics is not incidental to far-right governance; it is constitutive of it.
Fifth, infrastructural populism. Beveridge, Naumann and Rudolph (2024) name a critically under-appreciated dimension: the far right increasingly governs through infrastructure. Roads, dams, water, housing, transport, urban renewal — these become sites where exclusionary politics are materialised, where "the people" are rewarded with concrete (literally), and where racialised others are spatially expelled or contained. Policy here is not just discursive; it is poured.
Sixth, the platformisation of governance. Digital platforms become both the campaigning infrastructure and the governance tool of the far right. As I argue in Dutta (2025), in my analysis of the Leicester violence, Hindutva networks deploy platform logics — virality, algorithmic amplification, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, disinformation cascades — to manufacture communal violence and then to policy-launder it as "community grievance." The same architecture is visible from Brasília to Budapest to Washington.
A culture-centered reading: why policy mainstreaming requires communicative analysis
The Culture-Centered Approach — developed across two decades of community-led research at CARE — insists that any account of power must hold three terms together: structure, culture and agency. Structures are the material configurations of resources, rules and institutions. Culture is the meaning-making through which structures are inhabited, contested and reproduced. Agency is the capacity of communities, especially subaltern communities, to voice and to remake the conditions of their lives, as Dutta (2023) elaborates in the Southern strategies of anti-racism.
What the CCA brings to the analysis of far-right mainstreaming is the insistence that policy is a communicative artefact. Policy frameworks are not neutral instruments selected from a menu of technical options. They are the materialisation of meaning-making. They encode whose lives count, whose grievances are legible, whose voices are heard, whose suffering is rendered invisible. The mainstreaming of the far right in policy is therefore, at base, a communicative phenomenon — a remaking of the meaning structures through which the state recognises the human.
Three CCA concepts are doing particularly heavy lifting in this moment.
Communicative inversion
Communicative inversion names the discursive operation through which the actual material relations of power are flipped on their head in public discourse. The dominant becomes the persecuted. The coloniser becomes the victim. The state's violence becomes the citizen's defence. The far-right policy field is saturated with communicative inversions. Mass deportation is reframed as "humanitarian." The dispossession of Indigenous peoples is reframed as "equality." The censorship of dissent is reframed as "free speech." The persecution of trans people is reframed as "child protection." The surveillance of Muslims is reframed as "social cohesion." Pertwee (2020) traces this inversion in the anti-Muslim far right: a global majority becomes, in the discourse, an existential threat to a beleaguered "Judeo-Christian" civilisation. Busbridge, Moffitt and Thorburn (2020) trace the same operation in the "Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory, which inverts the empirical record of right-wing institutional dominance into a fantasy of left-wing capture.
Inversion of grievance
Closely related, but worth naming separately, is the inversion of grievance. Subaltern grievances — about racial injustice, colonial dispossession, climate breakdown, gendered violence, economic exploitation — are systematically delegitimised, while the imagined grievances of dominant groups (white, male, Christian, settler, upper-caste, heteronormative) are elevated to the status of urgent policy crises. Mondon (2023) shows how the entire scholarly and policy infrastructure of "left-behind" analysis performs precisely this inversion: the structural reality of racism and whiteness is rendered invisible, and a fictive white working-class grievance is treated as the politics that must be respected. Mondon (2025) traces the same move in the construction of public opinion on immigration. The CCA reads this as a profound communicative violence: the voices of those most harmed by structural arrangements are silenced, while the resentments of the structurally advantaged are amplified into governing common sense.
Equivocation and doublespeak
Far-right policy frameworks are characterised by a distinctive linguistic register: equivocation (saying something that can be plausibly read in two or more ways) and doublespeak (saying the opposite of what one means in order to neutralise resistance). "Family values." "Parental rights." "Border integrity." "Community standards." "Common sense." "One law for all." Each of these phrases operates simultaneously as a benign democratic appeal and as a coded directive to the base. Brown, Mondon and Winter (2023) and Rothut et al. (2024) both describe how this dual register is constitutive of mainstreaming: it is precisely the equivocal phrasing that allows far-right content to be picked up by mainstream actors who can then deny the underlying politics. Katsambekis (2023) reads this register as the linguistic signature of mainstreamed authoritarianism, in which the forms of democracy are preserved while the substance is hollowed out.
What is at stake
To say the far right has been mainstreamed in policy is not to say all is lost. The CCA insists, in its core commitments, that subaltern agency is irreducible. Wherever structures of dispossession operate, communities make meaning, organise, refuse, voice. The infrastructures of solidarity that have always sustained anti-racist, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous and working-class struggle are not abolished by the policy turn we are living through; they are rendered more necessary.
But to organise effectively, we have to name accurately. The far right is not a fringe to be contained; it is a governing project that has restructured the policy fields of the contemporary state. It operates not only through legislation and institutions but through the communicative remaking of common sense — through inversions, the seizure of grievance, and the strategic ambiguity that lets exclusion travel in democratic clothing.
A culture-centered politics responds, as it always has, by centering the voices of those whom the policy framework has been designed to render invisible. It refuses the invitation to argue on the terrain of the manufactured "people." It insists that the test of any policy is not whether it satisfies a constructed reactionary majority, but whether it expands the capacity of the most marginalised to live, speak and remake the structures that bear on their lives.
That is the ground from which the work of unmaking the mainstreamed far right has to begin.
Mohan J. Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor in Communication and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand.