Introduction

Theodor W. Adorno, in his Aspekte des Neuen Rechtsradikalismus (Aspects of New Right Extremism, 2019), explains the growing successes of the right extremist National Democratic Party of Germany (NDP) in 1960s Germany. He points out that the propaganda technique used by new rightwing extremist parties and movements to capture followers, which aims at certain formal aspects and isolated contents, ‘is based on a relatively small and repeated standardized and completely objectified tricks, which are very poor and thin, but which on the other hand because of their permanent repetition win a propagandistic value for these movements’ (Adorno, 2019: 43–4). Fascist agitators used the same standardised tricks during the National Socialist regime and ‘little new has been added to the old repertoire’ (Adorno, 2019: 37).

This chapter draws on Adorno's psychoanalytically inspired work and on psychoanalytic theory to expose how current right extremist leaders utilise fears and anxieties around the COVID-19 pandemic in their psychologically oriented propaganda tricks. I show that these tricks activate deeper and unconscious fears of castration anxieties in capitalist societies on economic, interpersonal and bodily levels, which the pandemic has heightened. People fall for the tricks of the right extremists because they quell their castration anxieties.

To support my theoretical argument, I analyse how Donald Trump, the extremist right president of the United States, utilised his COVID-19 infection as a means to appeal to voters. I also analyse an interview with the current leader of the extremist right Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (Freedom Party Austria, FPO), Norbert Hofer, in the so- called Sommergespräche from August 2020, in which he discusses the Freedom Party's response to the pandemic.

While the tricks current right extremist leaders use are psychologically oriented, I am not suggesting that the emergence of new global extremist right can be reduced to a psychological problem only. As Adorno rightly points out, ‘right extremism is not a psychological and ideological problem but a highly real and political one. But the falseness and untruth of its own substance forces it to operate with ideological and propagandistic means’ (Adorno, 2019: 54).