Axford / Steger Populism and Globalization

ProtoSociology Volume 37
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-7534-8929-2
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 238 Seiten

The narrative of populism as a "rising tide" has enjoyed currency at least since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the success of the "Leave" campaign in the UK referendum on membership of the EU earlier in that year. And yet, on the eve of what proved to be President Trump's election defeat some four years later, the British journalist Nick Cohen felt able to muse "(w)e're endlessly told why populism works. Now see how it might fail" (October 10, 2020). So, one might be forgiven for thinking that what goes around must eventually come around. However, things are not that simple, and the runes are harder to read.

Barrie Axford isProfessor of Politics and a member of the Centre for Global Politics, Economy and Society (GPES - http://www.social-sciences.brookes.ac.uk/research/gpes/). I serve as a member of the International Editorial Boards of the journals Globalizations, Telematics and Informatics, The International Journal of Electronic Governance and Reinventions. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Global Studies Association. Recent books include 'Theories of Globalization' (Polity, 2013) and 'Cultures and / of Gobalization' (CSP, 2011) edited with Richard Huggins; 'Mere Connection: the World-Making Power of New Media' for Routledge (2018), and the 3rd edition of 'Politics: An Introduction' also for Routledge, with Victoria Browne, Richard Huggins and Rico Isaacs (2019). I have recently co-edited a collection of research papers on "Ideology in the Age of Global Discontent" for Routledge (2018).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Axford, Barrie

Steger, Manfred

Leseproben

Defining Populism and Fascism
Relationally: Exploring Global
Convergences in Unsettled Times
Paul James Abstract What is the relationship between right-wing populism and contemporary fascism? How has fascism changed since the 1920s? And how do the answers to these questions concern a global shift that can be called the Great Unsettling—including a postmodern fracturing of prior modern ‘certainties’ about the nature of subjectivity, political practice and meaning, deconstructing the consequences of ‘truth’? This essay seeks to respond to these questions by first going back to foundational issues of definition and elaborating the meaning of populism and fascism in relation to their structural ‘moving parts’. Using this alternative scaffolding, the essay argues that right-wing populism and an orientation to postmodern fascism represented by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have converged. The context of this convergence is a globalizing shift that now challenges democratic politics. What rough beast is this thing called ‘populism’? And how, if at all, does it relate to authoritarian nationalist movements and fascisms? If we can immediately say that like those far-right phenomena, contemporary populism gains strength from civic conditions of upheaval and uncertainty, then a further question arises. What are the particular globallocal uncertainties that now give rise to contemporary right-wing populism and fascism? Some commentators have turned back to W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) to register the momentousness of the widening upheaval: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ However, even this slumping evocation does not help directly. Yes, Yeats was writing during the civil chaos of his homeland and in the wake of the first global war, but his primary lament is the modern assault on the stability of tradition, faith and truth. Yes, just as the ontological form of classical fascism was modern, contemporary populism has a modern constitutive layer, but confounding any simple characterization, contemporary populisms at the same time both generate new postmodern uncertainties and speak in the name of rooted values or tradition. They seek both to globalize their cause and to project the enhancement of ‘their’ nation against the world. And they both undermine epistemologies of modern and traditional truth, while claiming to voice matters of deeper verity.1 This essay seeks to define contemporary populism and fascism in the face of these convergences and contradictions, woven around four propositions. First, across the past few years we have been witnessing the consolidation of a new right-wing national populism which has clear associative connections with the content and form of the authoritarian nationalist populism that characterized 1920s to 1930s’ fascism. The concept of ‘associative connections’ is important here. Contrary to Frederico Finchelstein’s argument that ‘Modern populism was born out of fascism’ (2017: xxxiii), I am not suggesting that they have an intertwining historical genealogy except contingently and to the extent that fascism characteristically uses a populist form of address.2 And coming from a different angle, I am certainly not suggesting that contemporary right-wing populism is the soft masking of a deeper continuous history of fascism, even if contemporary populism in some of its guises and expressions can be fascist. Fascism is not a continuous brown thread twisting its way through modern history. Both populism and fascism are sensibilities and practices which arise because of people acting under very particular conditions. The second proposition emphasizes a core temporal change. Despite a family resemblance, the new fascisms and populisms are based on bundling together very different kinds of constituency than either classical fascism of the 1920s–1940s or the populisms of the early twentieth century. This constituency cannot be understood predominantly in terms of the classical modern subjectivities of followership, loyalty and character. Rather they are clusters of persons formed through the tension between modern identity formation and postmodern projective individualism. This constituency of individuals tends to follow leaders contingently rather than with brown-shirt discipline. They think of themselves as informed political actors, often using the Internet to research circumstantial connections (a.k.a. conspiracy theories) that explain the tortured ties that bind their enemies. Third, this changed constituency makes the present ‘fascist turn’ of contemporary right-wing populism more uneven, more jagged and inconsistent than earlier formations, and thus more fragile than classical fascism—though potentially just as dangerous. Fourth, despite its anti-globalization rhetoric, the latest round of populist/fascist expressions have been fueled by intensifying processes of disjunctural globalization. Taking these as points of orientation rather than as propositions to be developed in themselves, the essay is structured around an attempt to set out a list of moving parts of populism and fascism, and to set up useful working definitions. These two tasks are not the same thing, though the second should in theory become easier having explored the first. Nor are these two tasks simple: ‘populism’ and ‘fascism’ are essentially contested terms with countless definitions—most of which have problems. Nevertheless, to begin to discuss how contemporary populism and fascism might relate, it is necessary to at least establish the definitional ground for distinguishing between them. What are the criteria for a good definition? For one, a definition does not operate as an ideal type or pure form. Isaiah Berlin called such an approach ‘the Cinderella complex’: that there exists a shoe—the word ‘populism’—for which somewhere there must exist a foot. There are all kinds of feet which it nearly fits, but we must not be trapped by these nearly fitting feet. The prince is always wandering about with the shoe; and somewhere, we feel sure, there awaits a limb called pure populism. This is the nucleus of populism, its essence (Berlin 1967, 8). In short, a definition does not name a pure essence. However, having identified this definitional problem, it needs to be quickly added that evoking the Cinderella trope has all too often been used to avoid the difficult task of defining this complex constellation of phenomena (Canovan 1981; Fuentes 2020; cf. Tarchi 2013). For example, in a book that is supposed to lay foundational groundwork of understanding two basic phenomena, fascism and the far right, Peter Davies and Derek Lynch (2002) discuss problems of definition, and they include a glossary that seems to define everything else associated with those core concepts, but they perpetually defer defining ‘fascism’ and ‘far right’ as concepts in themselves. More than that, there is consistent confusion in the literature based on conflating the two tasks of definition and characterization: a list of moving parts or orientations (characterization) does not automatically translate into a good definition, and nor should it. We still need to name the foundational features of a phenomenon (definition), if only to distinguish it from other things. In other words, the false reasonableness of invoking the Cinderella complex cannot be used as an excuse for embarking on the path around Kafka’s castle, circling round and round the phenomena without ever settling on what it actually is. All too often, writers fall back on either the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘family resemblance’, using that concept without the care it requires, or alternatively listing a series of characteristics or possible features to stand in for a definition.3 They suggest that when you find enough of these variable features you have found the thing. This has its own problems. For example, David Arter writes: ‘There is general agreement in the comparative literature that populism is confrontational, chameleonic, culture-bound and context-dependent’ (2010, 490). Given that all political phenomena align with at least two of those characteristics— culture-bound and context-dependent—and many with the other two as well, this is not a very helpful list. We certainly need a set of orienting characteristics, but its elements should have meaningful specificity while allow for historical and geographical variation. That is our first task. Working definitions will follow. Here definitional nuance is intended to give us a fine-grained account of two movements within the tangled changes of contemporary globalization. In particular, the essay treats these phenomena within a global shift towards the emergence of a postmodern unsettling (Steger and James, 2019). That is, more than offering (just) a useful and novel exegesis of the concepts, this essay is intended as a contribution to understanding the disjunctures and convergences of our world-in-common. What is Populism?
It does not matter much where we start in our quest to list a basic set of working parts relevant to populism. To begin with an obvious but often overlooked point, the term ‘populist’ in contemporary usage tends to be applied politically and analytically to others, usually by those who are deemed the enemies of ‘good’ populists: journalists,...