Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism (original) (raw)
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American manufacturing continues its long death spiral. Development policy favors burgeoning, urban, creative classes. A racist, misogynist, Christian and/or heteronormative political class lashes out against the perceived gains of women and minorities. The Democratic Party now privileges urban elites with presumed intellectual superiority. These narratives would be but a few on an over-long list of common diagnoses of a tide of alleged populism across rural America. While these claims may have purchase, they also require urgent interrogation, as many contribute to an Othering discourse that renders the country as backwards, hick, redneck, uneducated or mystified by religion. In this context of toxic and divisive politics, this paper looks for ways to scale what can be understood as a political "empathy wall" (Hochschild 2016). Building upon literatures including rural sociology and political science, this paper details a mixed methods project that began in a quasi-autobio...
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2018
This paper suggests that one way of understanding the explosion of ‘authoritarian populist’ political formations from 2016 onwards is to explore their relationship to an underlying crisis in the organisation of transnational politics. It argues that an important role has been played for the last three decades by an assemblage of discourses, institutional arrangements that are linked to the project of ‘neoliberal’ or ‘late liberal’ developmentalism. The paper sketches out some key characteristics of ‘neoliberal developmentalism’ and identifies some of its implications for the scope of emancipatory politics in the last three decades. It suggests that the authority, hegemony and coherence of this assemblage is currently being challenged, and asks what this might mean for the prospects, and indeed the possibility, of emancipatory politics in the future. ERPI 2018 International Conference Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World
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ERPI 2018 International Conference Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World, 2018
The political events of 2016 acted as a wake-up call to many international organizations, not least rights-based NGOs that were directly affected by the result of the Brexit referendum and the subsequent election of Donald Trump as President of the US. The irruption of right-wing populism in the global north posed – and continues to pose – a major challenge to international NGOs, one which has existential as well as strategic and tactical dimensions. This is especially so for organizations whose historical focus has been on tackling the causes and consequences of poverty and social injustice in the rural and rapidly urbanising global south. Authoritarian populism in these contexts has typically been viewed as a problem at the national level and addressed at that scale. Today’s realities indicate the need to treat populisms as an interconnected global phenomenon with deep social and economic roots and far-reaching impacts. This paper takes as its starting point Oxfam’s study of The Rise of Populism and its Implications for Development NGOs (Galasso et al., forthcoming), in which we interrogated the entangled web of demand- and supply-side factors that explain the rise of right-wing populism, and outlined their consequences for the overall positioning of INGOs, their domestic and other programmes, and for the ways in which they undertake advocacy, campaigning, and public engagement. In this paper, we will both summarise and extend that analysis, examining its wider applicability to authoritarian and progressive populisms in both north and south, and asking what this means for the participation of INGOs in an emancipatory rural politics. What roles can and should INGOs play in contexts of shrinking civil society space and in the face of growing restrictions upon what they can say and do? Should they confine themselves to humanitarian responses and other forms of mitigation and amelioration? Should they be actively resisting, organising and mobilising – and if so, how? How politically engaged can they be? Should they focus on the development of alternative social and economic visions to the current rural and world disorder? Or is there no place for them in this uncertain future?
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The 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president came as a surprise to many people – but generally not to farmers and rural communities. In this paper, we interrogate the politics of rural places in generating both support for and struggle against authoritarian populism. We ask: Why do the politics of the rural US seem so regressive at this current moment? What explains the rise and growth of white supremacist language, organization, action, and power? Looking to histories of small farmer and farm labor organizing in two key agricultural regions – California and the Midwest – we find some answers. California, we show, has been a principal site for honing the discourses, strategies, and tactics of consolidating right-wing power in the US. From 'Associated Farmers' front groups of the 1930s through Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, we follow the roots of authoritarian rural populism now re-emergent with Trump. The Midwest, in turn, sheds light on a rich tradition of rural organizing. Though often considered a bastion of right-wing sentiment, Heartland politics have successfully linked rural peoples to contest low crop prices, exploitative labor conditions, and regional disinvestments. In synthesizing lessons across cases, we provide a functional lens through which to understand contemporary prospects for emancipation. How can Othering and similar racialized constructs that have long been used to divide the working class and undermine rural organizing be dismantled? Can we meaningfully confront authoritarian rural populism without confronting the political-economic foundations of its development: notably, capitalism, its current manifestation in hegemonic neoliberalism, and failed approaches for reform? From these kernels of inquiry, we build towards a second paper focused on contemporary efforts to define and practice emancipatory change.
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Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020
This paper applies an anarchist lens to agrarian politics, seeking to expand and enhance inquiry in critical agrarian studies. Anarchism's relevance to agrarian processes is found in three general areas: (1) explicitly anarchist movements, both historical and contemporary; (2) theories that emerge from and shape these movements; and (3) implicit anarchism found in values, ethics, everyday practices, and in forms of social organization – or ‘anarchistic’ elements of human social life. Insights from anarchism are then applied to the problematique of the contemporary rise of ‘authoritarian populism’ and its relation to rural people and agrarian processes, focusing on the United States. Looking via an anarchist lens at this case foregrounds the state powers and logics that underpin authoritarian populist political projects but are created and reproduced by varying political actors; emphasizes the complex political identities of non-elite people, and the ways these can be directed towards either emancipatory or authoritarian directions based on resentments towards state power and identifications with grassroots, lived moral economies; and indicates the strategic need to prioritize ideological development among diverse peoples, in ways that provide for material needs and bolster lived moral economies. The paper concludes with implications for the theory and practice of emancipatory politics.
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