The Great Replacement and Other Conspiracy Narratives: Intersectional Antidemocratic Features of Authoritarian Populism and the Far Right

The aim of this article is to parse the antidemocratic potential of conspiracy narratives in a political context, including their intersectional and gender dimensions. It seeks to contribute to a better understanding, from a democratic theory and intersectional perspective, of: 1) how authoritarian populism and conspiracism are related and what composes their respective antidemocratic impetuses and 2) how this relationship might play out in processes of ‘mainstreaming’ far right content on the one hand and in processes of radicalisation via conspiracy narratives on the other. I pursued the thesis that conspiracism takes some of the most essential antidemocratic features of authoritarian populism to the extreme, exacerbating its antidemocratic impetus. I use illustrative examples from the Great Replacement conspiracy narrative (and those closely connected to it, such as Eurabia, Soros and white genocide conspiracism) in online media platforms. The illustrative examples also demonstrate that antidemocratic features cannot be understood without considering their intersectional dimension. Focusing more closely on this dimension of far right and authoritarian populist strategies, I suggest the term ‘strategic intersectionality’. Finally, I show how the shared structural characteristics of authoritarian populism and conspiracism, including its gendered, intersectional nature, might facilitate both the normalisation of far-right content and radicalisation.