Metapolitics: Acceleration, Appropriation and Agitation in the New Right's Culture Wars

media release:  2025 George L. Mosse Lectures with Johannes von Moltke

February 25, 2025 - February 27, 2025, Pyle Center (702 Langdon St. Madison, WI)

““Metapolitics”: Acceleration, Appropriation, and Agitation in the New Right’s Culture Wars”

In this series of talks, Johannes von Moltke sheds light on the New Right’s mobilization of arts and ideas in today’s culture wars: its media strategies, identity politics, conspiracy theories, and efforts to shift the very language of public discourse to the right – or what the New Right calls its “metapolitics.” Situated outside the socio-political institutions and structures typically analyzed by the social sciences, the cultural formations of “metapolitics” call for humanities-based approaches that can supplement the important insights gleaned in political science and sociology. Drawing his guiding questions and methods from Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, von Moltke analyzes the New Right’s “metapolitical” maneuvers on both sides of the Atlantic to better understand the antidemocratic appeals made in the name of ethnonationalist, “identitarian” visions of the future. To this end, he defines the Right-Wing project of “metapolitics” and identifies its “accelerationist” dimensions (Lecture I); he analyzes the New Right’s conceptual poaching, or “appropriation” of progressive vocabularies (Lecture II); and he traces the antecedents of right-wing “agitation” in earlier forms of fascist propaganda, drawing on its theorization by the Frankfurt School (Lecture III): Taking a cue from Theodor W. Adorno, who described fascism as the “wounds, or scars, of a democracy that until today fails to live up to its concept,” von Moltke hopes to contribute to our understanding of right-wing cultural politics as the scar tissue of an unfinished democratic project.

I. Making the World Glow: Right-Wing “Metapolitics” and the Accelerationist Impulse

Chair: Ofer Ashkenazi

February 25, 4:00PM

II. The Identitarian Reflex: “Metapolitical” Strategies of Appropriation and Projection

Chair: Mary Hennessy

February 26, 11:45AM (boxed lunches provided with RSVP to etulley@wisc.edu)

III. Prophets of Deceit: Genealogies of Agitation and the Critical Theory of “Metapolitics”

Chair: Brandon Bloch

February 27, 4:00PM

Sponsored by:

The George L. Mosse Program in History

Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence for Populism and Global Economy

German, Nordic, and Slavic+

Department of History

Center for German and European Studies

Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies