The origins and persistence of the far- right: capital, class and the pathologies of liberal politics

2014 ◽  
pp. 33-55
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 958-978 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lewis ◽  
Philip Pond ◽  
Robin Cameron ◽  
Belinda Lewis

The concept of ‘social cohesion’ has become an orthodoxy in governmental and academic discourse, augmenting the complex of progressive and liberal politics that have formed around the modern, multicultural and globally engaged nation-state. The reinvigoration of far-right politics is challenging this orthodoxy, at least inasmuch as these politics appear to be gaining traction through the strategic manipulation of increasing insecurity within these democratic states. This article examines these challenges conceptually and through an empirical case study. The case study examines the appearance in 2016 of Senator Elect Pauline Hanson on the ABC’s Q&A television programme. The article examines Twitter discourses that were generated around the far-right senator’s appearance on the broadcast programme. The article concludes that ‘social cohesion’ and its role in electoral, participative and deliberative democratic processes is a largely inadequate discursive buttress to the complex of language wars within which the concept is besieged.


Author(s):  
Jean-Francois Drolet ◽  
Michael Williams

Challenges to the liberal international order have tended to focus on the politics of populism most often traced to reactions against economic dislocation and mass migration. Parts of this portrait are undoubtedly true, but it also risks being deeply misleading. To fully understand the nature and depth of contemporary far-right movements, we need to examine more closely the distinctive ideological movements that inform and animate them. This article explores one specific articulation of these movements: US paleoconservatism. Although relatively unknown in the mainstream media, this anti-establishment strain of radical conservatism has provided intellectual ammunition to a wide range of agents and ideological forces challenging the prevailing liberal order nationally and internationally, including important parts of the anti-liberal politics of foreign policy under President Donald Trump.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (188) ◽  
pp. 487-494
Author(s):  
Daniel Mullis

In recent years, political and social conditions have changed dramatically. Many analyses help to capture these dynamics. However, they produce political pessimism: on the one hand there is the image of regression and on the other, a direct link is made between socio-economic decline and the rise of the far-right. To counter these aspects, this article argues that current political events are to be understood less as ‘regression’ but rather as a moment of movement and the return of deep political struggles. Referring to Jacques Ranciere’s political thought, the current conditions can be captured as the ‘end of post-democracy’. This approach changes the perspective on current social dynamics in a productive way. It allows for an emphasis on movement and the recognition of the windows of opportunity for emancipatory struggles.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-226
Author(s):  
Soner Tauscher

Avrupa ülkelerinin alışık olduğu düzenli işçi göçü ve kontrollü sığınmacı alımı Suriye iç savaşının üst düzeye ulaştığı 2013/2014 yılından itibaren önemli bir değişim göstermektedir. Avrupa Birliği, kuruluşundan bu yana en yoğun mülteci göçüyle karşılaşmaktadır. Yaşanan bu kontrolsüz ve zorunlu göçe Avrupa toplumları ve devletleri hazırlıksız yakalanmıştır. Mülteci krizini ekonomik olarak fırsata çevirmek isteyen Almanya ise göçmenler için 2015 yazından itibaren açık kapı politikası uygulamaya başlamıştır. Ancak uygulanan açık kapı politikası Alman toplumunun azımsanmayacak bir kesiminde mültecilere ve Müslümanlara yönelik ağır ve şiddetli bir karşı kampanya ortaya çıkardı. Mülteciler ve Müslümanlar aşırı sağ toplumsal hareketlerin gösterilerinde “tecavüzcü”, “işgalci”, “kriminal dolandırıcılar” vb. sıfatlar ile birlikte anılmakta, medya da bu söylemlerin taşıyıcılığını yaparak kamusallaşmasını sağlamaktadır. Böylece aşırı sağı desteklemeyen, apolitik, ya da sığınmacılara karşı hoşgörülü davranan toplum kesimlerinde kamuoyu oluşturularak sığınmacı ve göçmenlere karşı olumsuz algı gündemde tutulmakta, politik olanın merkezine yerleştirilmektedir. Bu çalışmada öncelikle göçmenlere karşı aşırı sağ toplumsal hareketlerin oluşturduğu olumsuz söylemin McCombs ve Shaw’un Gündem Belirleme Kuramı (Agenda Setting Function) bağlamında medya tarafından siyasetin merkezine nasıl oturtulduğu tartışılacaktır. Ayrıca gündemde tutulan mültecilere yönelik olumsuz söylemin gerçeği yansıtıp yansıtmadığı, göçmenlerin ve sığınmacıların biyolojik Almanlardan daha çok suça meyilli olup olmadığı oluşturulan soyut söylemlerden ziyade Almanya İçişleri Bakanlığı’nın yıllık olarak yayınladığı Emniyet Suç İstatistikleri temel alınarak incelenecektir.ABSTRACT IN ENGLISHFar right movements in Germany and evaluation of media discourse of criminal immigrant in the light of official documentsFlows of regular worker migration and regular asylum seekers, of whom European countries are familiar, have significantly changed since 2013/2014 when the civil war of Syria reached its peak. The European Union face probably the most intensive refugee migration since its establishment. European societies and states have not been prepared for this uncontrolled and compulsory immigration. Germany seem to want to turn the refugee crisis into an economic opportunity as evident in their open door policy since the summer of 2015. However, implementation of open-door policy has led a substantial part of German society to a strong campaign against the refugees and Muslims. Refugees and Muslims are referred to as “rapists”, “invaders”, “criminal fraudsters”, and so on in demonstrations of far right movements and media has helped disseminating these discourses. Hence, this manipulated and hateful discourse tries to gain support from the segment of society wh normally does not support far right and often apolitical, or tolerant towards asylum seekers. In this study, the ways in which the negative discourse of far right social movements against immigrants is brought to the centre of the political agenda by media is analysed using the agenda setting framework by McCombs and Shaw. Then, the claims that immigrants are involved in crime, or they are prone to be criminals are analysed and contrasted with the data obtained from the annual Crime and Safety Reports of the German Ministry of the Interior.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-551
Author(s):  
Jacqui Miller

Billy Elliot (2000) has been widely recognised as an important British film of the post-Thatcher period. It has been analysed using multiple disciplinary methodologies, but almost always from the theoretical frameworks of class and gender/sexuality. The film has sometimes been used not so much as a focus of analysis itself but as a conduit for exploring issues such as class deprivation or neo-liberal politics and economics. Such studies tend to use the film's perceived shortcomings as a starting point to critique society's wider failings to interrogate constructions of gender and sexuality. This article argues that an examination of the identity formation of some of the film's subsidiary characters shows how fluidity and transformation are key to the film's opening up of a jouissance which is enabled by but goes beyond its central character.


2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-86
Author(s):  
Jocimar Dias

When Bacurau (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) was released in Brazil, it was mainly received as a left-wing critique of the rise of the far right in the country’s political landscape. But some critics argued that the feature’s insistence on graphic violence was actually a celebration of barbarism, equating the oppressed villagers to their genocidal oppressors. This article refutes this view, borrowing from the analysis of science-fiction revenge fantasies and also following Foucault’s genealogical perspective. It argues that Bacurau actually reenacts Brazil’s foundational colonial violence through its complex temporality, in order to rediscover the forgotten past of real struggles that remain surreptitiously inserted in all levels of society, perhaps in the hope that new ways of resistance may flourish from its spectatorial experience.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Blake

By examining folk music activities connecting students and local musicians during the early 1960s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this article demonstrates how university geographies and musical landscapes influence musical activities in college towns. The geography of the University of Illinois, a rural Midwestern location with a mostly urban, middle-class student population, created an unusual combination of privileged students in a primarily working-class area. This combination of geography and landscape framed interactions between students and local musicians in Urbana-Champaign, stimulating and complicating the traversal of sociocultural differences through traditional music. Members of the University of Illinois Campus Folksong Club considered traditional music as a high cultural form distinct from mass-culture artists, aligning their interests with then-dominant scholarly approaches in folklore and film studies departments. Yet students also interrogated the impropriety of folksong presentation on campus, and community folksingers projected their own discomfort with students’ liberal politics. In hosting concerts by rural musicians such as Frank Proffitt and producing a record of local Urbana-Champaign folksingers called Green Fields of Illinois (1963), the folksong club attempted to suture these differences by highlighting the aesthetic, domestic, historical, and educational aspects of local folk music, while avoiding contemporary socioeconomic, commercial, and political concerns. This depoliticized conception of folk music bridged students and local folksingers, but also represented local music via a nineteenth-century rural landscape that converted contemporaneous lived practice into a temporally distant object of aesthetic study. Students’ study of folk music thus reinforced the power structures of university culture—but engaging local folksinging as an educational subject remained for them the most ethical solution for questioning, and potentially traversing, larger problems of inequality and difference.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Sabina Magliocco

This essay introduces a special issue of Nova Religio on magic and politics in the United States in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The articles in this issue address a gap in the literature examining intersections of religion, magic, and politics in contemporary North America. They approach political magic as an essentially religious phenomenon, in that it deals with the spirit world and attempts to motivate human behavior through the use of symbols. Covering a range of practices from the far right to the far left, the articles argue against prevailing scholarly treatments of the use of esoteric technologies as a predominantly right-wing phenomenon, showing how they have also been operationalized by the left in recent history. They showcase the creativity of magic as a form of human cultural expression, and demonstrate how magic coexists with rationality in contemporary western settings.


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