Exploring the crucial role that mainstream actors play in creating favourable conditions for far-right politics to thrive, this open access book addresses this underexplored yet fundamental component of the mainstreaming process. Providing much-needed clarity on the relationship between the mainstream and far right, and offering a conceptual framework for mainstreaming, Katy Brown delves deeper into the specific role played by mainstream political discourse in normalising far-right ideas.
Taking the Brexit referendum campaign as a case study, Brown illustrates how mainstream actors may seek to outwardly distance themselves from the far right, yet the number of shared discourses between them underscores the dangers of taking this claim at face value. By examining the overlap across a range of areas, including colonial nostalgia/amnesia, racism, masculinity and populism, this work emphasises the need to centralise the role of the mainstream in normalising far-right discourse: putting the mainstream in mainstreaming.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a e.g. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the UKRI.