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Paper short abstract

The paper examines how experiences of failure, resulting from lost elite status, are processed through AfD membership. The far-right party functions as a moral collective, allowing members to reinterpret failure and identify as a counter-elite through ritualized denigration of the liberal order.

Paper long abstract

Actors describe “failure” as situations in which intended goals are not achieved. This panel contribution examines how, amid systemic transformations, experiences of failure arise from actors’ inability to realize an “imaginative” identity (cf. Bohnsack 2017) of elite membership, and how these experiences are addressed through joining the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Based on 17 life-story interviews, I identify latent biographical issues that lead individuals to join the party. In this panel, I present a preliminary type of cases whose central concern is social and symbolic status loss following the systemic transformations of 1945 or 1989/90. Prior to these transformations, the cases belonged to social or cultural elites. The systemic changes altered the symbolic order, producing a mismatch between the actors' aspired and attainable status, experienced as a failure to live up to claims of elite membership.

Drawing on the interviews, I show how these status-related experiences of failure are processed through AfD membership. Rather than abandoning their orientation toward elite identity, actors reinterpret and erase their failure by portraying liberal society as corrupt, unfair, and doomed – a context in which climbing the social ladder is not only impossible but also undesirable. Practically, the AfD functions as a “moral collective” (Pettenkofer 2019) that, through the ritualized denigration of liberal elites as “naïve” or “corrupt,” makes it plausible for members to self-identify as prophetic counter-elites.