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The following is an edited transcript of a panel held on February 21 at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House on the forthcoming book World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and the Global Order (Cambridge University Press). The discussion, moderated by Sam Adler-Bell, features three of the book's co-authors—Rita Abrahamsen, Srdjan Vucetic, and Michael C. Williams—and concludes with questions from the audience at the event.

In the months since October 7, people around the world have looked on in horror as Germany has wielded the memory of the Holocaust to silence criticism of Israel's war on Gaza. The German government's response to the conflict itself has not been all that different from that of the United States: both have increased their supply of weapons to Israel and supported Israel against South Africa in the International Court of Justice. But Germany has gone much further than the United States in persecuting protesters, artists, and intellectuals expressing sympathy for and solidarity with the Palestinian people. It wields its responsibility for a barely distant genocide as a kind of moral authority.

Frantz Fanon's stature swelled in the late 1950s as he crisscrossed the nascent Third World, winning support for the Algerian nationalist cause. As a member of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the party fighting a war of independence against Algeria's French colonial rulers, Fanon held a dizzying number of responsibilities: he provided psychiatric treatment to FLN fighters; he helped produce the party's official newspaper; he delivered lectures on philosophy and history to soldiers at the front; and he traveled across the African continent as a formal ambassador for the provisional Algerian government-in-exile, raising political and financial capital for the revolutionary movement.

A photograph of Sita Valles dressed in a paisley blue miniskirt with a hand on her hip, leaning against a glossy red car, has made the young revolutionary an icon. It appears on book covers, posters, and a mural in Panjim, the capital of Goa, India. In Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), a film by the Goan-American artist Suneil Sanzgiri recently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, Sita's brother Edgar Valles, a lawyer living in Portugal, tells her story.

For a party that often accuses foreign media of conniving with the domestic opposition, Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy is oddly hungry for good reviews in the U.S. press. Even incidental positive remarks about the Italian prime minister are routinely broadcast across the party's Instagram and twitter accounts, while more critical notes get lost in translation. When Meloni visited President Joe Biden last July, the Washington Posttermed her a "rising star of the far right"; the pro-government Secolo d'Italiareworded it to "international rising star." Her colleagues were particularly enthused in February when CNN's Fareed Zakaria issued a four-minute homage to "Meloni's moment" as a European political heavyweight. Despite grim forecasts upon her election, Zakaria claimed, Meloni had achieved a "remarkable turnaround," proving herself as a stable Western ally, backing Ukraine, and even filling a leadership vacuum in the European Union left open since Angela Merkel's resignation as German chancellor in 2021. Brothers of Italy trumpeted his message far and wide.

Write about politics for long enough and you'll put some arguments into the world you come to regret. This issue's special section on the global right has me reconsidering a long piece on American conservatism that ran here in Dissent in 2019. That's before Joe Biden steamrolled over a primary field that was supposed to be the future of the Democratic Party, barely scraped together a victory over Donald Trump in an election that was supposed to signal the arrival of a new progressive majority, and then pre sided over an administration that was supposed to mark the end of neoliberalism. It's also before the summer of George Floyd, when the largest protests in American his tory were supposed to launch a reckoning that would transform the country.

While we are paying a lot of attention to U.S. conservatives this election year, it is also an auspicious time to publish a special section on the global right. Just under a decade ago, we passed through a "populist moment," so-called because of Brexit, Trump's election, and the rise of Marine Le Pen as a serious contender for the French presidency, all in rapid succession. It seemed like the beginning of a new era of politics, one emerging from the dashed hopes and profound failings of the neoliberal order—and in many ways it has been. T he terrain on which political struggle now takes place has been deeply altered by the right, with less educated voters, many of them from the working class, leaving their ancestral political parties and supporting the forces of reaction over issues like immigration, national identity, and "law and order." But in electoral terms, the right's record has been hit or miss, and it's worth learning from their failures as well as their successes.

In 2014, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party captured national power in the world's largest democracy. Under its controversial new leader, Narendra Modi, the BJP established India's first single-party majority government since 1984 and became the only party besides the Indian National Congress to accomplish this feat since the country won independence, in 1947. In the 2019 general election, despite a disappointing economic record, growing communal strife, and disruptive policy decisions, the BJP increased its vote share and seats in Parliament. The victory emboldened the party to further its longstanding agenda to transform India's secular constitutional democracy into a de facto Hindu nation. Modi remained popular throughout India's terrible pandemic. Now, with a return of high economic growth and the unity of opposition parties in question, most observers expect him to win the 2024 general election, which concludes in June.

An academic journal article on the technicalities of tax data is not usually cause for much excitement. Yet at the end of last year, one such publication in the Journal of Political Economy set #Econtwitter afire with debate, and prompted a full column in the Economist. The paper, by Gerald Auten and David Splinter, took aim at the famous studies on rising inequality conducted by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. If one employs different assumptions, Auten and Splinter argued, post-tax income inequality in the United States appears not to have risen much since the 1960s. While Piketty and his collaborators systematically challenged the findings, their detractors were quick to the draw. "The Piketty and Saez work is careless and politically motivated," sniped James Heckman, a Nobel-winning Chicago School econometrician.

At Easter time in 2022, Craig Romney took his family to Washington, D.C., to see the sights. Craig's father, Mitt Romney, the junior senator from Utah, joined them for a trip to the White House that Mitt had arranged. Joe and Jill Biden appeared mid-tour to show the guests around, patiently bringing them to the swimming pool and the bowling alley and letting everyone pose for pictures at the Steinway grand piano. As they departed, the youngest Romney grandchild offered his thoughts on the president: "I thought he would be less old."