THE CLAIM THAT NATIONALISM IS JUST LOCALISM...:

In Germany, Heidegger's popularity in the far right is linked to the ways his philosophy legitimises the far right's regional environmentalism, populism and cultural racism. His vision of a national Dasein, a particular collective being based on a shared spirit, tradition and local embeddedness, provides the contemporary German far right with the vision for a white identity uniting 'the people' and 'the elites' on the basis of an attachment to the local, the 'common folk' and its glorification via the racialisation of an inferior cultural and religious 'Other'.

First, drawing on Heidegger allows the movement to intellectually embed its vision of a meaningful environmental protection movement as part of defending the homeland, or Heimat, as a union of local nature, culture and heritage against globalisation. This is shown by the above-mentioned magazine Die Kehre. Here, Heidegger's spiritually founded opposition against rationalism and technocracy as well as his notion of a locally rooted thinking underpins the far right's attempt to claim environmentalism.

A central part of this strategy is to label the Green party and leftist environmental protection movements as technocrats driven by a narrow scientific rationalism that focusses on climate change. Drawing on a long tradition of tradition of Heimat protection, the far right aims to counter this by portraying itself as the defender not of the environment, but nature as a meaningful part of local traditions, heritage and essential part of a white national identity. Global environmental protection movements are here portrayed as the expression of what Heidegger called the Gestell - a purely rationalistic reading of nature and the world as something transformable by humans.

Secondly, drawing on Heidegger allows far right intellectuals to embrace populism and develop the ideal of a populist intellectual: an ideal type of an intellectual who is rooted in 'the people' and, by being in touch with 'the common folk', closer to an authentic philosophy of being that Heidegger sees necessary to overcome modernity's nihilistic rationalism. Heidegger here provides a philosophy of populism that attempts to overcome the antagonism between 'the people' and 'the elites' and that reflects how, against much of what the literature on far right populism suggests, educated bourgeois intellectualism and populism in the far right are deeply intertwined.

Finally, and most importantly, in a context where racism in Germany is still largely equated with Nazism and biological racism, Heidegger's philosophy of an essentialised collective being 'rooted' in history provides the movement with a philosophy of cultural racism that claims to have overcome biological racism. Thus, Heidegger's notion of Dasein is used to reformulate an exclusive, essentialised idea of white nationhood in the context of a liberal democratic political language in which closeness to national socialism, racist nationalism and anti-Semitism is socially questionable and legally banned.

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