Authoritarian Contagion

Analyzing the shift to the far right: the Austrian case

“…Although far-right populist parties often call for more ‘direct democracy’, new legislation is quickly implemented without accounting for transparency, expert opinions, minority rights and opposition, and so forth. In fact, Luke Cooper ( 2021 , 7) argues that “once authoritarian forces gain a foothold, they are hard to dislodge. Financial resources can be raised from supporters and access to the mainstream media assured (Wodak 2022 ).…”

“…Both Marcuse and Adorno were referring to the US-politics and media during the Vietnam War, thus to phenomena pertaining to postwar democratic systems and not to the totalitarian regimes and their leaders as originally analyzed by Löwenthal and Guterman ( 2021 /1949). Nevertheless, these poignant insights remain relevant to scholars who are investigating the ‘(shameless) normalization’, ‘recontextualization’, ‘contagion’, and ‘mainstreaming’ of far-right and extreme-right tropes, arguments, topics, and agendas in liberal democracies (e.g., Cooper 2021 ; Fielitz and Marcks 2019 ; Fuchs 2018 ; Krzyżanowski 2020 ; Mondon & Winter 2021 ; Rheindorf and Wodak 2019 ; Wodak 2019 , 2021 ).…”

“…Slogans that call for ‘cracking down’ or ‘getting tough’ to ‘move’ people to take on jobs resonate widely (ibid.). Accordingly, such attitudes reflect the impact of neoliberal policies as well as rising inequality, both of which support the shameless normalization of the far right, widely disseminated by traditional and social media, and frequently drawing on traditional antisemitic stereotypes that imply some form of Jewish world conspiracy, e.g., on anti-Sorosism (e.g., Wodak 2021 , 139–140; Cooper 2021 , 34).…”

“…Quite like Viktor Orbán’s regime (e.g., Cooper 2021 , 102), Kurz and his followers assisted wealthy supporters when buying (parts of) relevant media, especially tabloids. This strategy necessarily guarantees friendly reporting: For example, René Benko, one of the richest men in Austria, bought a 49 percent stake in the WAZ Holding GmbH which owns 50 percent of the tabloid with the largest outreach, Neue Kronen Zeitung , and almot 50 percent of Kurier , the most government-friendly newspaper.…”

Shameless normalization as a result of media control: The case of Austria

“…In recent scholarship, the interdependency of (traditional) forms of propaganda, populism, mediatization, and the subsequent normalization of far-right agendas has been frequently emphasized. In many countries, ‘discursive shifts’ (Krzyżanowski, 2020), ‘shameless normalization’ (Wodak, 2021a), ‘radicalization’ (Scheppele, 2020a), ‘contagion’ (Cooper, 2021; Cooper and Aitchison, 2020), ‘mainstreaming’ (Mondon and Winter, 2021), and ‘transformations’ (Ther, 2019) have occurred, leading to widespread and growing normalization of far-right policies. The boundaries of the ‘sayable’ are being shifted, traditional norms and rules of political culture, of negotiation and deliberation, are violated by continuous provocations, disseminated via the media, supported by mainstream conservatives, and thus normalized (Wodak et al, 2021).…”