Book launch for “Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today’s Far Right, From Fascism to Right-Wing Populism.” By David Ost, to be published by The New Press in May 2026. The book offers an original way of thinking of arguably the biggest political issue of our times: the turn to right-wing authoritarianism. Instead of asking “is this fascism?”, the book argues that both classic fascism and today’s right-wing populism are versions of what it calls “Red Pill Politics.” It uses this alt-right manosphere term as an acronym to identify the political features that are common to both. The book focuses on the question of why workers and non-elites who traditionally support the Left have often turned to the Red Pill Right, and what can be done to turn this around. While of course dealing with Trumpism, the book also looks at the surprising appeal of fascism to dissatisfied workers in the 1930s, and also at the appeal of today’s right-wing populism in Poland, France, India, and Turkey. The book does not focus on current events, but provides the tools for which we can understand and intervene in those events. In short, how can we understand today’s far-right turn in order to reverse it?

BIO: I am a recently retired professor of at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and a resident of Ithaca since 1992. I have written widely on left and right politics, focusing particularly on eastern Europe and Poland. My previous books include Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, Workers After Workers’ States, and The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe.” My articles have appeared in a variety of popular and scholarly journals, such as The Nation, Jacobin, Dissent, In These Times, as well as Politics & Society, and the European Journal of Social Theory. My books have been translated into Polish, and my articles into several languages. In 2005 I was awarded the “25th Anniversary of Solidarity Medal” from the Polish government, personally delivered by former President Lech Wałęsa.

I will have a conversation partner, who will moderate and ask me questions. His name is René Rojas, an assistant professor of sociology at Binghamton University, whose research focuses on the social and political consequences of the neoliberal turn, particularly in Latin America. He is currently completing a book titled Left Shipwrecks, that addresses how changes in capitalist political economy have transformed 21st-century progressive movements in Latin America, comparing their trajectories to those of the Left in the postwar era. Rojas is on the editorial board of Catalyst: a Journal of Theory and Strategy.