Understanding Far-Right Movements in America

This piece is part of the 2026 Election War Room, my running file on voter suppression, the Trump coalition, the far-right, and the fight for the 2026 election.

The Ideology Is Writing the Far-right Policy

Wayne Ince

On January 23, 2026, Patriot Front members walked into the National March for Life in Washington D.C. and began recruiting openly. Not outside. Inside. Among the marchers. That is not a protest. That is a movement that no longer needs to operate at the margins, because it does not live there anymore.

Over the first two decades of this century, far-right movements migrated from the edge of democratic politics into its center: parliaments, cabinets, executive orders. The United States has been no exception. If anything, it has been the accelerant.

Trump’s second term made that clear in the first week. Immigration raids, DEI rollbacks, the deliberate erasure of federal civil rights infrastructure, none of it was improvised. It had been written down. The staff that wrote it has its own history, and that history runs through the white-nationalist movement like a load-bearing wall.

Two proposals from this administration affect you directly, whether or not you have noticed: the attempt to end birthright citizenship and the sustained assault on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. Both carry legal consequences that reach into hiring, education, and the legal standing of American-born children. Both carry longer ideological roots. Understanding those roots is not optional if you intend to defend against what is growing.

The global far-right context, and one important exception

The pattern is worldwide. Since 2010, far-right or hard-right populist parties have entered parliament in at least twenty European nations. As of spring 2026, they simultaneously lead polling in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, the three largest economies in the European orbit. Giorgia Meloni governs Italy. Geert Wilders governs the Netherlands. In France, Marine Le Pen was barred from running for president after a conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds, but her protege Jordan Bardella, 31, now carries the Rassemblement National and polls at roughly 33 percent ahead of the 2027 French presidential race. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has led most British national polling since April 2025.

In the United States, the Trump White House spent the first months of 2026 posting content drawn directly from white-nationalist iconography. A White House social media account posted an image captioned “Which way, Greenland man?”, a riff on the phrase “Which Way, Western Man?”, a foundational white-nationalist text. The Department of Labor posted “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”, language structurally similar to Nazi propaganda formulas. An ICE recruitment ad used the phrase “We will have our home again,” the title of a Proud Boys anthem. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Caleb Kieffer called this signaling to white-nationalist groups that their policy goals were being “actualized.” That is not an overstatement. It is a description of an official communications strategy.

The unraveling

Political scientist Cas Mudde calls the current period the fourth wave of far-right politics since World War II. That framing is useful because it places the present in a lineage, not as an anomaly. These movements share a common vocabulary of economic grievance, cultural threat, and ethnic nationalism. They feed each other. They conference together. CPAC was held in Budapest in 2024 and Poland in 2025, hosted under the institutional umbrella of Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

Which brings us to the one significant exception of 2026. On April 12, Orban lost. Handily.

After sixteen years of uninterrupted rule, Hungary’s parliamentary election delivered Orban’s Fidesz party 55 seats against the 138 won by the opposition Tisza Party, led by Péter Magyar. Tisza took 53.6 percent of the vote. Orban conceded the same night, calling the result “clear” and “painful.” Magyar, 44, is a former Fidesz insider and ex-husband of the former justice minister. He ran on restoring judicial independence, rejoining EU institutional frameworks, and ending what he called “propaganda and corruption.” He won the largest mandate in a free Hungarian election, on the highest turnout since Hungary’s post-Communist transition.

The lesson

Even the most entrenched illiberal system can be beaten at the ballot box when an opposition consolidates, turnout is high, and voters have had enough. Whether that transfers to Washington depends on choices not yet made by the American electorate.

In any case, Orban’s defeat removed the primary institutional patron of the European far-right network. His Mathias Corvinus Collegium had funded transnational conferences, right-wing think tanks, and political infrastructure across the continent. Chatham House analysts note that Fidesz remains embedded in local government and captured media. Orbanism will not disappear overnight. But its international funding vehicle is heading into opposition.

The transatlantic far-right alliance, which once appeared unified, has been showing cracks. Trump’s annexationist rhetoric about Greenland alienated Weidel, Bardella, and Farage publicly. His Iran campaign created friction with European national-conservatives who campaign on non-interventionism. The January 2026 ECFR polling found that only 16 percent of EU citizens still considered the United States an ally. Nearly 30 percent in France, Germany, and Spain now described the U.S. as a rival or enemy.

None of this means the movement is dying. It means it is distributed, competing with itself in some regions while advancing in others, and that its American version operates now from inside the executive branch rather than outside it.

Stephen Miller and the architecture of the agenda

Trump’s Chief of Staff has not made public comments about the volume of executive orders that have bypassed Congress. Silence on that point is itself a choice. The orders are not accidental. They are written by people who know exactly what they are writing.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the principal architect of his immigration policy across both terms, has documented ties to white nationalist organizations. During his time in the White House, emails surfaced through the Southern Poverty Law Center showing Miller shared content from VDARE, a white nationalist website founded by Peter Brimelow, with Breitbart editors. VDARE traffics in Great Replacement theory, among other race-based immigration arguments, and has been designated by the SPLC as a white nationalist organization.

The paper trail is not ambiguous. When the man designing immigration enforcement policy circulates material from a white nationalist publication, the ideology is not lurking behind the policy. It is writing it.

Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship

The Fourteenth Amendment is not ambiguous. Ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, it states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States. It was written specifically to overturn the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which had ruled that Black Americans could not be citizens. The amendment’s purpose was to make citizenship a constitutional guarantee, not a political one. That protection was written in the blood of reconstruction.

Trump has called birthright citizenship a “magnet for illegal immigration” and used the term “anchor babies” to describe American-born children of undocumented parents. Both characterizations are deliberate misreadings. The amendment was not designed as an immigration policy. It was designed to ensure that citizenship could not be stripped from someone based on who their parents were or where their parents came from.

The legal record on this is settled. In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that children born on American soil to non-citizen parents are citizens under the 14th Amendment. Constitutional scholars across the political spectrum, including conservative legal theorists like John Yoo, have maintained that altering birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment: two-thirds approval in both chambers of Congress, ratification by three-fourths of the states. Also, an executive order cannot do it.

Constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe described Trump’s proposed measure as “a direct assault on the text, history, and meaning of the 14th Amendment.” What such a policy would produce, if somehow enforced, is a tiered citizenship: American-born children without status, or with ambiguous status. The arrangement would resemble what the amendment was written to replace.

The white supremacist lineage

The campaign to restrict birthright citizenship did not originate with Trump. It has a lineage that runs through the organized white-nationalist movement.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) renewed pressure on birthright citizenship in the 1980s and 1990s. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies FAIR as an anti-immigrant hate group. The goal of groups in that network has been explicit in their own documentation: to preserve a white demographic majority through immigration restriction.

Historian Kathleen Belew describes attacks on birthright citizenship as “the politics of racial anxiety,” policies constructed to respond to the perception of white demographic threat. The reframing of birthright citizenship as an immigration concern, rather than a constitutional principle, is how the racial argument gets made without being stated as one. Change the vocabulary, change who hears the alarm.

The assault on DEI

Trump came into his second term having promised to eliminate all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in federal agencies, educational institutions, and private businesses. He followed through. DEI offices were shuttered across the federal government. Funding for diversity initiatives was cut. Federal contractors were pressured to abandon their own programs. Target, among other large corporations, followed without being asked.

Trump called DEI programs “reverse discrimination” in his first term and repeated the charge in his campaign. The phrase is a political inversion. DEI programs were created in direct response to documented discrimination in hiring, lending, housing, education, and contracting, enforced by law for generations before civil rights legislation created limited remedies.

Diversity programs had genuine bipartisan support from the 1970s through the 2000s. Republicans and Democrats disagreed on methods but shared the premise that structured inequality required structured response. That consensus was not broken by evidence. It was broken by a coordinated political campaign, funded and sustained by organizations whose opposition to diversity is ideological, not empirical.

The Supreme Court’s role

The 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard eliminated race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities. The conservative majority, including Trump’s three appointees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, ruled that considering race in admissions was unconstitutional. The decision was the culmination of a legal strategy that began after affirmative action was first upheld in the 1970s.

With a supportive Congress and a cooperative federal court system, the conditions were in place for substantially expanded challenges to diversity programs in hiring, government contracting, and other fields. Those challenges have come. Civil rights organizations have filed countersuits; some lower court rulings have held specific Trump DEI policies unconstitutional. The litigation is not resolved, and it will not be resolved quickly.

Economic and social costs

Stripping diversity programs out of institutions has costs that extend beyond the political argument.

McKinsey and Company has documented across multiple studies that companies with substantial gender and ethnic diversity outperform less diverse competitors. A 2020 study found that companies in the top quartile for workforce diversity outperformed their competitors in profitability by 36 percent. That is not a social justice argument. That is a business outcome, documented in the companies’ own financial results.

Schools are where people first encounter difference at scale. Sociologist Robert Putnam’s research on what he calls “parallel societies” found that reduced contact between groups at formative ages intensifies polarization. When educational environments become homogenous, whether racially, economically, or culturally, students develop social frameworks that have no room for people unlike them. The downstream consequences are not abstract. They show up in hiring decisions, in jury deliberations, in political choices.

Dog whistle politics and deliberate ambiguity

Trump’s racial politics are not accidental in their vagueness. They are engineered for it.

“Stand back and stand by,” directed at the Proud Boys during a 2020 presidential debate, meant different things to different listeners. “Very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville in 2017 drew outrage from some and performed neutrality for others. Neither statement required Trump to say anything explicitly racist. Both communicated exactly what they needed to communicate to their intended audience.

This is what political scientists call dog whistle politics: language calibrated to signal to one audience while maintaining plausible deniability for another. The people who understand the signal understand it. Everyone else hears an immigration speech.

The Great Replacement Theory, a white-nationalist conspiracy arguing that nonwhite immigration is a deliberate effort to replace the white population, has moved from far-right message boards into congressional floor speeches and mainstream cable news. Tucker Carlson, who hosted the most-watched cable news program in the country for years on Fox, ran versions of the theory as regular programming without meaningful factual pushback from his producers or his employer. His audience was not small. His content was not accidental.

That theory was cited by the gunmen in Pittsburgh in 2018, El Paso in 2019, and Buffalo in 2022. When it travels from the forum thread to the prime-time monologue to the manifesto, the route is not complicated.

Economic anxiety and who voted for whom

When economic conditions deteriorate, far-right movements gain. That relationship is documented. The International Monetary Fund has found a consistent historical pattern: economic instability moves populations toward extremist political options, including those offering explicitly ethnic explanations for material problems.

The 2008 financial crisis, the economic dislocation of COVID-19, and the widening gap between working-class wages and corporate profits created the conditions. Far-right movements across the United States and Europe did not solve those problems. They gave them a target: immigrants, minorities, international institutions. And a story in which the target was the cause.

In 2024, a meaningful percentage of voters who would have benefited from Kamala Harris’s economic agenda voted against it. Her platform included expanded capital access for small businesses in underserved communities, targeted programs for minority and women-owned enterprises, and clearer regulatory pathways for new business formation. Some Black voters, as a protest against Democratic Party politics they found unresponsive, voted for Trump. They voted against programs designed for their specific economic benefit.

Some of that frustration is understandable. The Democratic Party has given Black voters decades of reason to feel taken for granted. That is real. And it does not change what happened next: the programs those voters needed disappeared. The small business capital access. The targeted enterprise funding. The regulatory pathways for new business formation. Gone. Not because a Republican argued against them in principle, but because the people those programs were built to serve helped elect the man who ended them. That is not a political observation. That is a wound. And it is going to be a while before it closes.

White women voted for Trump in substantial numbers despite his documented legal record. A convicted felon with decades of alleged sexual misconduct, credibly accused of fraud, ran against a qualified Black woman prosecutor. A significant share of white women chose the felon. Some of that was fear. Fear that a Black female president would not serve white interests first. That fear was stoked deliberately, and it worked.

The Condoleezza Rice question and what it cannot answer

Critics of systemic racism frequently point to successful Black conservatives as evidence that structural barriers are not the real obstacle. Clarence Thomas now sits on the Supreme Court and vacations with billionaires. By that argument, the system clearly works.

Condoleezza Rice is a more complicated example. I met her at a conference in Washington D.C. and have some respect for her trajectory. She grew up under racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father worked at the University of Denver, which is how she attended it. There she took a course taught by Madeleine Albright’s father, which launched her interest in international affairs and Soviet studies. George H.W. Bush hired her, and his son George W. Bush hired her again. Her doctorate, her intellect, and her institutional connections all contributed to her ascent.

Her path was not random. Her father’s position at a university gave her access most Black children in Alabama, segregated or otherwise, did not have. Her connection to Albright’s father led directly to her field. She switched her party registration from Democrat to Republican over disagreements with Carter’s foreign policy, a principled choice, clearly reasoned. She is exceptional in the exact sense of the word: an exception that the rule produced in spite of itself.

The argument that because Rice and Thomas succeeded, structural barriers are not the primary obstacle cannot explain why Cleavon Little, who starred in Blazing Saddles, one of the most commercially successful comedies in Hollywood history, was never again offered a lead role in a major film after that performance. Little was talented. The film was a hit. And he faded into what critics call obscurity, never achieving the career his performance suggested was possible. The industry opened a door, saw who walked through it, and quietly closed the door again. That is not self-imposed limitation. That is the room deciding who gets to stay.

What this adds up to

The policy agenda being executed in Washington in 2026 is not primarily about immigration enforcement or merit-based college admissions. Attacking birthright citizenship assaults the constitutional architecture of post-Civil War America. Eliminating DEI programs attacks the limited remedies built to address documented discrimination. The staffers writing the orders have documented relationships with white-nationalist organizations. The administration’s own social media accounts circulate white-nationalist iconography.

While the economy weakens, while Smithsonian museum programs are cut, while HHS fires public health employees, far-right groups are moving into position. Patriot Front members showed up at the National March for Life on January 23, 2026, in Washington D.C., recruiting openly. The Proud Boys, energized by the January 6 pardons and the Justice Department’s April 2026 decision to vacate their leaders’ seditious conspiracy convictions, have returned to street activity in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. On March 8, Patriot Front members appeared in Sheboygan and Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

These groups are not fringe ornaments. They are the visible edge of a movement that now has institutional representation at the highest levels of the federal government.

Orban’s defeat in Hungary on April 12 shows what is possible when an electorate is organized and turnout is high. Magyar’s Tisza Party took 138 of 199 parliamentary seats. Orban conceded the same night. Sixteen years of illiberal rule ended because enough Hungarians decided they wanted something different. That is the counterweight to everything else in this chapter.

Whether it is transferable depends on what Americans decide to do with the information they have, which is extensive, well-documented, and being ignored in places where it should not be.

The code is not especially hard to break. The harder question is what you do once you’ve broken it.

Fighting back at the ballot box: Far-right movements target voting access as their first line of attack. Read our comprehensive guide to Voting Rights in America: Key Issues for 2026 Elections to understand what’s at stake and how to protect your vote.

Related Reading

• He Laid His Hands on the Image of God. The Image Was Fake.
• When “Fake News” Becomes a Weapon Against You
• Trump’s Second-Term Firings and the Cost of Loyalty-First Leadership
• Voting Rights in America: Key Issues for 2026 Elections