Performative and ideological populism: The case of charismatic leaders on Twitter

Abstract

Taking Donald Trump’s and Jeremy Corbyn’s use of Twitter as paradigmatic case studies, this article demonstrates that the charismatic leader features as a distinct mode of the performativity of populism. Particularly, the leader is performed as a persona, such as Trump’s ‘defiant’ and Corbyn’s ‘ordinary’ persona, which authentically embodies the mission to save the people from their own enemies, in this case, the mission of national palingenesis (#MAGA and #DrainTheSwamp) and moral vindication (#ForTheMany), respectively. Central to charismatic performances is an affective dynamic which both renders the claim to authenticity convincing and allow for ‘the people’ to be enacted as a concrete political subject. It does so, however, not in an ahistorical and presupposition-less manner, as some post-ideological approaches to performativity imply, but through discursively patterned emotions with profound ideological ramifications. Therefore, populism is better understood as a performative ideology which deserves our close analytical attention if we are to understand its progressive-democratic or reactionary-undemocratic potential.

Populism in Estonia and Slovakia: Performances, Transgressions, and Communicative Styles

“…While we share the general analytical premises with many of those studies, we contribute to the debate by broadening the empirical focus both by shifting it to Central and Baltic Europe, and by including other dimensions of analysis. For instance, while we certainly agree that charismatic leaders have been "a distinct mode of the performativity of populism", 30 empirically our analysis transcends the idea of populism as a one man show, expanding to elements of performativity that are found in group actions and representations and do not necessarily hinge on a charismatic individual.…”

Public Sphere and Misinformation in the U.S. Election: Trump’s Audience and Populism Indicators in the COVID-19 Context

“…In modern democratic societies, populists, both on the left and on the right, pretend to adopt empathy with the people, whom they theoretically represent (Moffitt and Tormey 2014). However, this connection with society, with voters, can be stylistic and rhetorical (Kissas 2019) and can also be ideological, in that it focuses on the content of the messages sent with a political and/or propagandistic character. In this line, Donald Trump represents this combination of traits that define him as an influencer and macro-strategist of political marketing (Pérez-Curiel and Limón-Naharro 2019).…”

“…The direct consequences are related to the instability of representative democracy (Mounk 2018) and of constitutional rights in a pandemic context, which favors the increase of misinformation (Salaverría et al 2020). In this context, the rise of fake news in social networks (Van Der Linden et al 2020) has occurred in parallel with the primacy of extreme political populism (Román-San-Miguel et al 2020;Kissas 2019).…”

The People and The Nation: The “Thick” and the “Thin” of Right‐Wing Populism in Canada

“…Thin populism thus consists of “the enactment of the political subjectivity of the people through the emotionally driven recontextualization of certain, pre‐existing meanings of a people and its enemies” (Kissas, 2020:269). This can help to explain why populist leaders often have little in common with their supporters, aside from their rhetoric and emotive style (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007; Oliver and Rahn, 2016).…”

“…This conceptualization-the "ideational approach" to populism-argues that there is little ideological grounding to populism, which is merely appended to existing "thick" ideologies, such as neoliberalism, nativism, or libertarianism. Populism is thus a tool used by leaders to create in-groups and out-groups and situate themselves in opposition to entrenched elites and attempting to evoke strong emotional responses among their followers (Kissas, 2020;Peetz, 2019). The adoption of "thin populism" can serve as a way for those with elite backgrounds to lead movements seemingly against their own interests (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007;Oliver and Rahn, 2016).…”