“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)
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.
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.
Nigel Farage: Celebrity Everyman
UK Election Analysis 2015: Media, Voters and the Campaign (eds. Daniel Jackson and Einar Thorsen, Bournemouth: PSA and Bournemouth University, 2015)., 2015
An every man, not for every woman: Nigel Farage and the radical right gender gap
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties
Support for the populist radical right (PRR) has surged across Europe. Existing studies on female support for the PRR are mostly cross-national in nature and have found that neither social-demographic nor attitudinal differences satisfactorily explain the gender gap in PRR support. Here we focus on the gender gap in support for UKIP and the Brexit Party, two parties that have significantly shaped British politics. Using data covering two European Parliamentary and three General Elections, we show that a gender gap exists in PRR support, but that it varies over time. In line with comparative studies, we find little evidence to suggest that social-demographic or attitudinal differences explain the gender gap in PRR support. Instead, we show that party leadership is crucial. Women in the British electorate hold negative opinions on Nigel Farage and this explains the gender gap in PRR support in Britain.
From ‘Brexhaustion’ to ‘Covidiots’: the UK United Kingdom and the Populist Future
Journal of Contemporary European Research, 2021
Boris Johnson’s electoral victory and the 2020 culmination of Brexit are accelerating Britain’s shift towards the right and towards open criticism of technocracy in the UK and EU. Since 2016 the UK’s political atmosphere has polarised into hostile extremes. The continuation of this toxicity beyond Brexit, the dominance of nationalist narratives as Britain’s new ‘politics of everything’ (Valluvan 2019). While the Conservative Party remains traditionally centre-right and the Brexit Party has ceased to be relevant, the UK continues to witness the growth of the far right and what is called here the ‘Radical Right’, which have been accelerating since 2016, rapidly gaining influence (Norris and Inglehart 2019: 443-472), and ‘mainstreaming’ (Miller-Idriss 2017) in the Conservative majority elected in December 2019. The past four years have seen growing British contempt for technocracy in London and Brussels, while the Leave vote has been represented as a “Will of the People” antithetical t...
Shooting the fox? UKIP's populism in the post-Brexit era
West European Politics, 2019
The UK Independence Party (UKIP) has moved from being a single issue party par excellence to a broader party of protest, taking advantage of broader feelings of discontent and disconnection. However, the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the EU fundamentally challenged its development and operation, by removing a core part of the party's rationale and identity, and radically shifting the overall political landscape. This paper considers the re-positioning through the referendum period, both rhetorically and organisationally. Drawing on party press releases and media coverage, the paper argues that UKIP has become caught in a set of multiple transformations, pushing it in the longer term towards a more conventionally populist position, in a way that carries important resonances for other eurosceptic parties across the continent.