Ten Theses For The Fight Against Right-Wing Populism Who is drawn to right-wing populism and why is it so dangerous (original) (raw)
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Ten Theses For The Fight Against Right-Wing Populism
Who is drawn to right-wing populism and why is it so dangerous? 1. The real danger of right-wing populism lies in its ability to forge broad societal alliances 2. The role of white supremacists is to shock the elite 3. The Alt-right offers reassurance in a world seemingly out of control Why is right-wing populism so successful in almost every Western society? 4. Right-wing populism gives reassurance in the vertigo of change 5. Right-wing populism promises to restore lost privileges 6. Right-wing populism promises protection for the losers of globalization How can we wage a more successful struggle against right-wing populism? 7. End the lack of alternatives through a political paradigm shift 8. Don’t step into the framing traps of the Right 9. Progressives need to offer a collective identity narrative 10. Only a broad societal alliance can stop right-wing populism
Mainstreaming of Right-Wing Populism in Europe
Milena Dragicevic and Jonathan Vickery (eds.). Cultural Policy Yearbook 2017-2018: Cultural Policy and Populism. Istanbul: İletisim Yayinları. C, 2018
This paper aims to portray theoretical debates to better understand the current state of the populist movements and political parties in the European Union, which is hit by various kinds of social-economic and financial difficulties leading to the escalation of fear and prejudice vis-à-vis ‘others’ who are ethno-culturally and religiously different. The main premise of this paper is that the ongoing social-political-economic-financial change in the EU resulting in fear against the unknown such as Islam, Muslims, refugees and migrants is likely to be turned by individual agents into cultural/religious/civilizational reification and political radicalization in order to overcome fear. The findings of this paper derive from a qualitative fieldwork held within the framework of a Horizon 2020 Research Project called “Critical Heritages (CoHERE): performing and representing identities in Europe”. The fieldwork was held the research team in Dresden, Toulon, Rome, Rotterdam, Athens and Istanbul between March and May 2017. The main premise of this work in progress is to claim that pathologizing right-wing populism is not scientifically and politically productive. Rather than being the cause of the current state of political crisis in many European Union countries, right-wing populism should be interpreted as one of the symptoms of the long-neglected structural problems augmented by neo-liberal forms of governmentality. In this regard, one of the most important claims of this paper among some others is that right-wing populism of the contemporary world is very different from its predecessor, far-right, or extreme right political parties. Today’s right-wing populist parties have rather become mainstream political parties appealing to not only working-class, or unemployed social groups but also to women, LGBTI, middle-class and upper-middle-class secular groups who feel threatened by radical Salafi Islam. The paper will start with the elaboration of the contemporary acts of populism from a theoretical perspective to lay the ground for finding a set of theoretical tools to compare the six counties with regard to the growing incidence of populism. The paper will continue to elaborate on the ways in which the right-wing populist parties mainstream their movements by underlining welfare policies, Islamophobia, environmental issues, unresolved historical cleavages, critic of multiculturalism, diversity, unity and Europeanization. The use of the fieldwork data will be limited with the findings from Dresden as the rise of the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) in the general elections in Germany (September 2017) triggered the public fear against the populist threat. Due to the lack of space and time, this work in progress will not be able to go deeper to define the notions of European heritage that circulate broadly in the public sphere among the populist political parties and movements, and to investigate how the ‘politics of fear’ relates to these notions of European heritage and identities.
Through a mix of discourse analysis and psychoanalysis, this article argues that the seemingly irresistible rise of the 'populist right' has acted as a political logic, wherein their disproportionate coverage as the alternative to the status quo has pre-empted the contestation of some troubling norms animating the regimes of liberal representative democracy and political economy. By doing so, the hype around right-wing populism has impoverished democratic discussion, leaving no space for the essential reassessment of the system itself, instead aligning the debate along a rather stale and unproductive divide between a liberal human rights elite and loosely-defined middle class on the one hand, and a reactionary 'people' subject to authoritarian passions on the other.
Why the Left Must Change: Right-Wing Populism in Context
In recent years right-wing populism has risen significantly across the west. In 2017, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, came very close to winning the French presidential election. She eventually lost out to Emanuel Macron, a man dedicated to maintaining the neoliberal consensus but smart enough to voice the usual progressive liberal platitudes during his election campaign. If this was a victory for liberalism over an increasingly virulent and regressive nationalism, it rang rather hallow. The huge strides made by the National Front under Le Pen, quite clearly, do not augur well for the continuation of liberal values in Europe. However, it seems quite important to ask why a representative of the dominant yet ailing politico-economic order was presented to the electorate as the alternative to the ethnocentric nationalism currently pulling France to the right. Is it feasible that Macron's unmitigated neoliberalism can assuage the anger and anxiety that underpin the new French nationalism? Does the invidious choice between Le Pen and Macron not tell us something about the parlous state of liberal democracy and the chains that have been placed upon our collective political imagination? Might the continued dominance of neoliberal capitalism – which has throughout the west concentrated wealth in the hands of an oligarchic elite and permeated economic insecurity throughout the rest of the population – have in some way influenced the development of this new right-wing populism? Could the current crisis in fact be an outcome of neoliberalism's continued political dominance? And perhaps more to the point, shouldn't we be asking searching questions about why the political right has been the principal beneficiary of post-crash economic insecurity, stagnating wages, declining lifestyles, austerity and the gradual breakup of the west's welfare states? Why has there not been a resurgence of interest in traditional left-wing politics rooted in political economy and committed to advancing the interests of the multi-ethnic working class? Why have we not seen a new generation of strident leftist politicians, keen to control the brutal excesses of market society, bursting onto the stage? There is no doubt that the new right has prospered in the vacuum created by the traditional left's decline. Focusing on 'Brexit Britain', the task we have set ourselves here is to identify why the historical relationship between the working class and left-wing politics has become fragile, strained and at risk of coming to an end altogether.
Right-wing populism in Europe & USA Contesting politics & discourse beyond 'Orbanism' and 'Trumpism'
In recent years and months, new information about the rise of right-wing popu-list parties (RWPs) in Europe and the USA has dominated the news and caused an election scare among mainstream institutions and politicians. The unpredictable successes of populists (e.g. Donald Trump in the USA in 2016) have by now transformed anxieties into legitimate apprehension and fear. This Special Issue addresses the recent sudden upsurge of right-wing populism. It responds to many recent challenges and a variety of 'discursive shifts' and wider dynamics of media and public discourses that have taken place as a result of the upswing of right-wing populism (RWP) across Europe and beyond. We examine not only the nature or the state-of-the-art of contemporary RWP but also point to its on-tology within and beyond the field of politics and argue that the rise and success of RWP is certainly not a recent or a momentary phenomenon.