Against Mainstreaming

“Mainstreaming” has, since at least 2000, been the core metaphor in researchers’ attempts to comprehend the ‘rise of the far right.’ Efforts to understand the 21st century’s apparent rightward shift and purportedly increasingly normalized atmosphere of political violence are highly invested in portraying these developments as aberrations. Aberrations from an otherwise inclusionary liberal democracy; aberrations from an otherwise pluralistic public sphere; all aberrations from a mainstream. In this contribution I aim to coalesce recent critiques of the “mainstreaming” metaphor and move towards what I call a movement against mainstreaming. This article first takes stock of the emerging body of work critical of the notion of mainstreaming (Mondon and Winter 2020; Tetrault 2024). This literature review is followed by my own reflections of ethnographic fieldwork with far right activists in Sweden. Following Gillespie’s call for researchers to consider “their relationship to, and perhaps their investment in, both the objects they purport to be studying, and the very distance they posit between themselves and those objects” (2024, p. 16) this article theorizes my own encounters in the field with violence, nativism, and masculinity as empirical sites through which to critique the mainstreaming metaphor.