THE RIGHT POLITICS TO COME 35 population mobilised for war, but a central role for the state, and the new supra-national institutions being fashioned under the supervision of the US, in the management of capital accumulation. Similarly, the present period of transition and the form the right takes at the end of it will have to answer to certain fundamental changes in the terrain on which the right must operate and the challenges, however diminished, it must face. Understand:ng what these are will be crucial for any emerging left if it is to be more canny this time around about the exact nature and orientation of the right in the 21st century. Scholarship on the politics of the Right is, compared to that on the left, relatively sparse. Topicality is, after all, governed by criterion of concern: in a culture dominated by institutions favouring the order, the acceptable is unquestioned and unexamined while attention focusses on what appears troubling, namely the left, as the voluminous literature on it indicates. But while this applies to the mainstream of the academic establishment, not to mention intelligence agencies, what of leftist and liberal scholars? I think the root of the problem is that the politics of the right is fundamentally uncreative and therefore based on a correspondingly unremarkable political understanding and strategy. Of course, this is also mainly what J.S. Mill was complaining about when he said that the Conservative party of his country was the "stupid party". Left parties, by contrast, have to be creative. Their public debates over the analyses of situations, and corresponding ones over doctrines and policy, their organizational forms and innovations, the relationships with the mass base, and the creative experiments and failed promises of Left governments themselves form a huge corpus of the self-consciousness of the left and its penetration is a crucial determinant of then effectiveness of the actions on which it expends its sparse resources. Right politics has no real counterpart to this. Indeed, the most penetrating analyses of the right have been produced precisely in the context of these Left debates and not, on the whole, in the academic study of right politics. The weakness of the left over much of the last 50 years, and its defeat today, have put the understanding of the dynamics of contemporary right politics in even more dire straits than before. Particularly after the Fall of Communism, it is being conducted, on the whole, in ignorance or evasion of the most penetrating Left analyses of the last century and a half. Just when the need for a higher level of penetration becomes more and more acute, at the moment of its pervasive triumph, just when the extreme right is also rising again, the analysis of it, and its