Profits of deceit: Performing populism in polarised times

Abstract

The article is an invited contribution to the special issue to mark the anniversary of the publication of Jim McGuigan’s ‘Cultural Populism’. Drawing on work on authoritarian populism produced by the scholars grouped around the Frankfurt Institute of Research during their war-time exile in the Unites States, this article explores the right-wing populist platforms developed by Donald Trump during and after his presidential campaign and by the two Leave campaigns in the British referendum on European Union membership. It argues that understanding their popular appeal requires us to pay particular attention to the performative styles employed and the ways they mobilise motifs from popular media and direct forms of communicative address to connect with lived experiences, articulate anxieties and present policies that benefit the already privileged as true expressions of the popular interest.

A Cultural Approach to Populism

“…Ionescu 1969, 116-118). Under normal circumstances, support for far right movements, for example, tends to remain rather modest, but a deep economic recession increases their popularity because they provide easy enemy images and direct solutions to a difficult situation (see Murdock 2020). For example, the rise of the Nazis from a marginal extremist movement to a ruling political party in 1930s Germany became possible because of a deep depression, when the party was able to provide immediate solutions to the country's weak economic situation and huge unemployment (Hobsbawm 1994).…”

“…Before they became systems that ruled societies totally and controlled people with coercion and fear, they were heads of small protest movements. However, in the particular historical conjuncture with economic recession, an intense feeling of political powerlessness, the spread of fear and insecurity that affect large crowds, these kinds of policies based on hatred, confrontation and the exclusion of others can spread to a nation-wide mood (Hobsbawm 1994;Murdock 2020). Despair feeds authoritarian populism, as in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s.…”

“…The Frankfurt school used an authoritarian personality type to explain the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (Adorno et al 1950). They stressed the importance of systematic upbringing and propaganda in the spread of personality type, but it is clear that the general social climate can also affect the popularity of authoritarian populism (Murdock 2020). In this, media and communication technology play a central role.…”

“…However, it is clear that broader historical currents or conjunctures, such as economic and geopolitical cycles, also frame the local contexts from which populism draws its political resources (Murdock 2020). For example, earlier in the chapter commenting history of populism, the significance of urbanisation, industrialisation and the development of modernisation as backgrounds for various historical forms of populism were presented.…”