Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with 'Boring White People' and how do anthropologists studying populist, extremist, and neo-fascist support base need to pay attention to social-cultural patterns and particularities instead of paying too much attention to political-economic perspectives.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with 'Boring White People' and how do anthropologists studying populist, extremist, and neo-fascist support base need to pay attention to social-cultural patterns and particularities instead of paying too much attention to political-economic perspectives.

The studies of workers, peasants, and others who have become the social-economic representatives of radical politics are fairly covered by anthropological inquiries, often depicted with great sympathy and solidarity. Studying 'the people we don't like' therefore also means that anthropologists study those whom they like to study very much and about whom they have substantial knowledge and whom some of anthropologists even contributed to imagine as political actors.

The present paper therefore aims to open the discussion on particular post-socialist basis of radicalization I understand as emerging from 'post-peasant' setting developed via communist modernization. On the example of the rise of support base of Slovak neo-fascist party that successfully entered national parliament in 2016 and continues to perform well in national polls and the performance of its leader I wish to illustrate the mainstreaming process of radicalization in Slovakia and eventually in other countries of the region. The basic premise of the paper reflects upon culturally intimate features of radical right derived from Douglas Holmes' (2017) observation that 'one of the dangers posed by fascism is to imagine oneself immune to its seductions.'