“Somewhere between a Martin Scorsese film and a scene from the heyday of the Third Reich”: Trump and Farage’s blossoming populist union (original) (raw)

Two-Track Fascism: Notes on the Collusion of Far-Right Demagogues Like Trump with Street-Level Fascists

PublicAutonomy.org, 2018

In the marxist tradition, fascism has typically been understood in terms of a vulnerable ruling class seeking recourse to a populist 'strong man' in the face of the threat posed by the organizational power and grassroots militancy of the working class. In the context of a weak and unstable liberal democratic constitutional regime, which limits its capacity to crack down on dissent, capital resorts to an emergency terror, carried out by a demagogic proxy regime, in order to break the resistance of working-class movements (labour and socialist parties, trade unions, workers' councils, feminist, anti-racist, and national liberation movements, and so on). The aim is to restore capitalist hegemony on the back of a superficially 'anti-establishment' but de facto pro-capitalist reign of terror. This approach to understanding fascism, which obviously takes the "völkisch" fascism of Weimar Germany that culminated in the Third Reich as its paradigm or prototype, is rooted in the analysis of right-wing populist 'strongman' crackdowns developed by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. However, the conemporary far-right resurgence is best understood as a response, not to the vulnerability of capital’s hegemony to a militant challenge from the far-left, but to the collapse of popular legitimacy of the political ​parties​, the political ​assumptions​, and the political ​institutions ​of contemporary “bourgeois” (liberal-democratic, pro-capitalist) electoral politics, brought on by decades of neoliberal policy consensus within official party politics. This legitimation crisis — recently expressed in the USA by such insurgent protest movements as the Tea Party on the right and the Occupy Movement on the left — has weakened the grip of mainstream ‘centrist’ parties over popular political activity across all classes other than big business. The epochal convergence of labour, liberal, and conservative political parties toward an​​“extreme centre” of consensus neoliberalism​, entailing as it does the rupture of continuity of contemporary social democracy with the Keynesian version of welfare-state politics on the one hand, and the downplaying of ethnocentric nationalism and patriarchal ‘family values’ by establishment conservatism on the other hand, has severed the ties binding the masses on both the(mostly working-class) left and the (​mostly middle-class​) right to the official political process and its parties. This has opened up spaces to the left and to the right of the ‘extreme centre,’ for forms of political engagement rooted in the revulsion of the broad masses toward the centrist neoliberal project as a whole.The pervasiveness of this revulsion makes it impossible to win broad public approval for open,self-declared neoliberalism. There has to be an anti-establishment cloak of some kind, some promise of a fundamental rupture, for neoliberalism to gain a hearing. And figures like Trump, Bolsonaro and Erdogan take this as their starting-point.

The great moving Boris show: Brexit and the mainstreaming of the far right in Britain

This article argues that the Brexit campaign and subsequent rise of Boris Johnson to Prime Minister has seen campaigns and assumptions (such as anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism) that were previously associated with far-right groups and parties enter the mainstream political discourse. It suggests that this has been due to an organic crisis that has been prevalent within British political civil society since the Brexit vote. A crisis that has seen socialist, free market and popular nationalist projects all stake claims to develop competing visions of post-Brexit Britain and which has been intensified by the success of Celtic nationalism. This article will suggest that Boris Johnson's government is attempting to co-opt such right-wing forces by engaging with much of its rhetoric as he attempts to construct his own post-Brexit reality that is fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions.

Creating Boris: Nigel Farage and the 2019 election

UK Election Analysis 2019: Media, Voters and the Campaign, 2019

Short analysis of Nigel Farage and the 2019 General Election in UK Election Analysis 2019: Media, Voters and the Campaign, Eds. Daniel Jackson, Einar Thorsen, Darren Lilleker and Nathalie Weidhase

Trump the antisemantic, and the boundaries of populism

Safundi, 2020

In this article I consider Donald Trump as an "antisemantic" president, and link antisemanticism to broader forms of populism. Drawing on Stuart Hall's analysis of Thatcherism, I explore the political and discursive domains as intrinsically linked in the Trumpian moment. Second, I turn to a theory of the antisemantic, showing its difference from the Orwellian universe. Where the Orwellian model depends on the inversion of meanings, the Trumpian paradigm ("Truth isn't truth") attacks the foundations of meaning itself. In the Trumpian age the internet also acts as a dark multiplier, thinning out meaning through its distortions and profusion. As counterpart to these patterns, I show how the antisemantic rests on certain symbolic fixities, especially around boundaries and the "uber" symbol of the wall. I end with some notes on how to reconstruct a sense of accountability in meaning, and to think of boundaries that are transitive and generative rather than singular and walled.

Populism: A Transatlantic Perspective (Presentation for MacMillan Center Seminar Series at Yale University, September 2017)

What do we talk about when we talk about ‘populism’? However banal, overheated, and repetitive the question might seem, the quibble on the exact meaning of the ‘p-word’ persists. Most of the time, defining ‘populism’ simply seems to be a matter of taste. Culinary preferences differ, and so do the opinions of the academic community on the definition of ‘populism’. Just as different ingredients taste differently to different people, words mean different things in different contexts. The same holds for those providing intellectual nourishment in our society: writers and speakers adapt their vocabularies to their audiences, and try to cater for different needs. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of 'populism'.

‘Beauty and Truth’: The Rhetoric of Populist Discourse

2019

The “beauty and truth” in the title reminds one of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” That is not only a great Romantic poem, but also a highly sophisticated rhetorical discourse. In it, the interwoven voices of the speaker, of the Urn, and of Keats himself as an implied author, exploit the ambivalence and ambiguity of the pronoun “we” in creating speakers and listeners, performers and audiences. The current article explores the rhetoric of populist discourse in one of Nigel Farage’s recent (May 4th, 2019) speeches. The speaker appeals to emotion rather than reason, systematically using anaphoric and epiphoric triads and other rhetorical devices to hammer his messages home. The article undertakes to examine the inconsistency in the speaker’s development of the antagonism between “ordinary,” “patriotic,” “honest” people seen as the vast majority of the British population (far more than the 52% who voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum) and the remaining tiny minority, including t...

Love, Fear, Anger: The Emotional Arc of Populist Rhetoric

2017

Why, at the present historical moment, are divisive nationalist narratives more powerful than inclusive ones seeking to advance transnational integration? This essay examines four case studies of “nationalist storytelling”: the rhetoric of Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) during the Leave campaign leading up to the Brexit referendum of June 2016 in the United Kingdom, the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump in the United States, the 2017 campaign of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands, and the 2017 campaign of Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France. In each of these countries, populist leaders have deployed rhetoric that traces a three-stage emotional arc, emphasizing love for the homeland, fear of the foreigner, and righteous anger against corrupt elites who have endangered the nation’s well-being. The powerful emotional response aroused by this rhetoric has been a key factor in these movements’ recent electoral success.