ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. Class is not dead, but has been buried alive under the increasing weight of cultural politics. The specter of the rightist working class was the well-deserved byproduct of the theoretical narrow-mindedness of all those political sociologists who have been overly loyal to the class theory of politics. The book focuses on countries in which, judged from the electoral successes of new-rightist populist parties, right-authoritarian issues have become highly salient. It demonstrates that economic egalitarianism can no longer simply be equated with solidarity with the unemployed. Although Inglehart's influential analysis of the left-libertarian "silent revolution" and of "new politics" as essentially "left-libertarian politics" thus adequately represented the political climate in the 1960s and 1970s, the coexistence of new-leftist and new-rightist politics since the 1980s is difficult to reconcile with his theory of a gradually unfolding left-libertarian political culture.
