The rise of the radical populist right has been linked to fundamental socioeconomic changes fueled by globalization and economic deregulation. Yet, socioeconomic factors can hardly fully explain the rise of new right. We suggest that emotional processes that affect people's identities provide an additional explanation for the current popularity of the new radical right, not only among low-and medium-skilled workers, but also among the middle classes whose insecurities manifest as fears of not being able to live up to salient social identities and their constitutive values, and as shame about this actual or anticipated inability. This link between fear and shame is particularly salient in contemporary capitalist societies where responsibility for success and failure is increasingly individualized, and failure is stigmatized through unemployment, receiving welfare benefits, or labor migration. Under these conditions, we identify two psychological mechanisms behind the rise of the new populist right. The first mechanism of ressentiment explains how negative emotions-fear and insecurity, in particular-transform through repressed shame into anger, resentment, and hatred towards perceived "enemies" of the self and associated social groups, such as refugees, immigrants, the long-term unemployed, political and cultural elites, and the "mainstream" media. The second mechanism relates to the emotional distancing from social identities that inflict shame and other negative emotions, and instead promotes seeking meaning and self-esteem from aspects of identity perceived to be stable and to some extent exclusive, such as nationality, ethnicity, religion, language, and traditional gender roles.
Research on the phenomenology of agency for joint action has so far focused on the sense of agency and control in joint action, leaving aside questions on how it feels to act together. This paper tries to fill this gap in a way consistent with the existing theories of joint action and shared emotion. We first reconstruct Pacherie's (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 13, 25-46, 2014) account on the phenomenology of agency for joint action, pointing out its two problems, namely (1) the necessary trade-off between the sense of self-and weagency; and (2) the lack of affective phenomenology of joint action in general. After elaborating on these criticisms based on our theory of shared emotion, we substantiate the second criticism by discussing different mechanisms of shared affect-feelings and emotions-that are present in typical joint actions. We show that our account improves on Pacherie's, first by introducing our agentive model of we-agency to overcome her unnecessary dichotomy between a sense of self-and we-agency, and then by suggesting that the mechanisms of shared affect enhance not only the predictability of other agents' actions as Pacherie highlights, but also an agentive sense of we-agency that emerges from shared emotions experienced in the course and consequence of joint action.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.