“Dominating the battlespace”: Right-wing tactical performances and the spatial politics of postdemocracy

In this paper, we argue that the political right is a coherent object of analysis and a powerful presence in US politics, because it possesses a spatially-informed alternative theory and practice of society. We thus propose the concept of battlespace as an analytic to understand the political right’s project. The right constructs its alternative theory and practice of society, we argue, through spatial tactics that seek to generate collective experience around the feeling of embattlement. We then analyze the ways in which this collective experience is constructed for and with participants through tactical performances. We understand tactical performances as a constellation of creative, improvised, and adversarial actions that spatially create shared experiences among participants. We then trace three modalities of action – hostility, frontierization, and validation – that characterize the tactical performances of the political right. What unites the right against racial, gender, and sexual self-determination is its ability to forge a common identity and experience through an alternative vision of society. Tactical performances are enacted to nullify and threaten such heterogeneity and processes of pluralization. Finally, using the concept of postdemocracy, we discuss how these spatial tactics undermine democracy’s conditions of possibility.