We didn't start the fire: Ressentiment, the far right, and the Capitol Hill insurrection

Abstract

The far-right phenomenon continues to function within the logics of ideological modernity. As such, there is a necessity to examine and understand the foundations, the political and social logics and origins, of the original matrices, for it is within these that the fundamental elements rest to make sense of contemporary ideological fields and grasp developments such as democratic backsliding, ideological radicalisation, and the events of January 6. Nevertheless, scholarship on the influence of Nietzschean thought within the American far right has largely been scant. However, within the contemporary discourse of the American far right is a Nietzschean paradox, the simultaneous mobilisation of language which echoes Nietzsche's critique of slave morality in discussing the Left and their own diction which is symptomatic of the very ressentiment that Nietzsche afflicts to Christianity and liberal modernity. In observing this paradox and locating it within the ongoing developments of the far-right phenomenon, notably its structural and ideological convergences, and the gaps within existing explanations for the 'essence' and 'evolution' of the phenomenon, this paper deploys an interdisciplinary methodology rooted both in New Historicism and discourse analysis to evidence both Nietzsche's role as an...