Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 16, Issue 4, 2017

In recent years and months, new information about the rise of right-wing populist parties (RWPs) in Europe and the USA has dominated the news and caused an election scare among mainstream institutions and politicians. The unpredictable successes of populists (e.g. Donald Trump in the USA in 2016) have by now transformed anxieties into legitimate apprehension and fear. This Special Issue addresses the recent sudden upsurge of right-wing populism. It responds to many recent challenges and a variety of 'discursive shifts' and wider dynamics of media and public discourses that have taken place as a result of the upswing of right-wing populism (RWP) across Europe and beyond. We examine not only the nature or the state-of-the-art of contemporary RWP but also point to its ontology within and beyond the field of politics and argue that the rise and success of RWP is certainly not a recent or a momentary phenomenon.

In this paper I discuss, critically, the literature on populism and the extent to which it applies to the contemporary radical right-wing parties in Europe. These parties are often – and increasingly – referred to as populist parties. I argue that it is misleading to label these parties ‘populist parties’, since populism is not the most pertinent feature of this party family. These parties are mainly defined by ethnic nationalism, and not a populist ideology. In their discourse they are primarily preoccupied with questions pertaining to national identity and national security – and their ‘negative’ doubles immigration, multiculturalism, Islamist threat – and they consistently pit ‘the people’ mainly against elites that they view as responsible for a cultural and political threat against their idealized image of their nation state. The ethnic nationalism of European radical right-wing parties is more important for their discourse and tends to influence the populist elements.

The article compares market fundamentalism and right-wing populism on the basis of its core patterns of thinking and reasoning. Based on an analysis of the work of important founders of market fundamental economic thinking and the arguments brought forward by leading right-wing populist we find many similarities of these two concepts in their "inner images". Thus, we develop a scheme of the similar dual social worlds of right-wing-populism and market fundamentalism and offer some recent examples of market fundamentalism and right-wing populism mutually reinforcing each other or serving as a gateway for each other. We then apply our scheme for the analysis of the recent political developments and its ideological roots in the US under Donald Trump. The main conclusion of this article is that market fundamentalism and right-wing populism together must be seen as two mutually reinforcing threats to democracy in the 21st century.

Much research has sought to map the spread of extreme and populist political ideologies across Western Europe. Despite this, it often fails to explain how these ideologies move from the political fringes to positions of influence, subverting the traditional cordon sanitaire around extreme views. As a result of recent successes by populist actors, a more nuanced understanding of this process is required.

This paper posits an explanation for this success, suggesting that the growing pluralisation of the online media environment and the impact of social media content sharing are key to understanding how fringe political actors avoid both overt and implicit barriers to popularising extreme positions. Using data from the British Election Study, this paper offers a quantitative test of this approach, finding an inconsistent relationship between social media use and extreme political opinions. Potential explanations for this are discussed alongside possible directions for future research.

‘Populism’ constitutes one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary politics and academia. The concept is used to describe a series of heterogeneous phenomena: on the one hand, Donald Trump, BREXIT supporters and the European Far Right in government or in opposition; on the other, Bernie Sanders, the so-called Pink Tide of left-wing populist governments in Latin America and inclusionary populisms in the European South. Recent developments have undoubtedly generated significant research material and a new impetus to the scope and impact of populism research. However, major challenges have also been created, requiring urgent attention. This paper discusses three such challenges (reflexivity, definition, typology) from a discursive perspective. Starting from a double hermeneutic focus on the interaction between academic theorization and political orientation, it highlights the importance of discourse theory in populism research and concludes by formulating a crucial theoretico-political dilemma populism researchers are increasingly facing today.

Extending Laclau’s (2005) claim to the importance of ‘populism’ for a democratic politics, I argue that the ‘we’, when issued from a left-wing position around ‘empty signifiers’, must be informed by an inclusionary logic. In my critical study of the Hungarian Government’s right-wing populist discourses, I show that their billboard campaign in 2016 against the European Union’s migrant quota articulates the ‘we are not like them’ exclusionary distinction of ‘against and over’. Through Judith Butler’s category of vulnerability and Mary Matsuda’s relative distinction between immediate and indirect targets of exclusion, I explore the inclusionary logic of the campaign by the Two-Tailed Dog Party. I demonstrate that a non-identitarian collective subject "from below" in their alternative left-wing populism is made possible by the power of irony that may sidestep the mobilising force of fear that should legitimise the Government’s agenda.

In this paper, I discuss the attempt by all right-wing populist parties to create, on the one hand, the ‘real’ and ‘true’ people; and on the other, the ‘élites’ or ‘the establishment’ who are excluded from the true demos. Such divisions, as will be elaborated in detail, have emerged in many societies over centuries and decades. A brief example of the arbitrary construction of opposing groups illustrates the intricacies of such populist reasoning. Furthermore, I pose the question why such divisions resonate so well in many countries? I argue that – apart from a politics of fear ( Wodak 2015 ) – much resentment is evoked which could be viewed as both accompanying as well as a reaction to the disenchantment with politics and the growing inequalities in globalized capitalist societies.

This paper explores the connection between the rise of new types of online uncivil discourses and the recent success of populism. While discussions on the upsurge of populism have centred on institutionalised politics and politicians, only limited attention has been paid to how the success of the former and the latter was propelled by developments outside of the political realm narrowly conceived. Our interest is therefore in the rise of uncivil society, especially on the web, and in its ‘borderline discourse’ at the verge of civil and uncivil ideas, ideologies and norms. Those discourses – showcased here on the example of the language on immigration/refugees in Austria and Sweden – have been using civil-to-uncivil shifts in the discursive representations of society and politics. They have progressively ‘normalised’ the anti-pluralist views across many European public spheres on a par with nativist and exclusionary views now widely propagated by right-wing populist politics in Europe and beyond.

At the centre of populism is a problem of meaning. We could simply say it is a semiotic problem, but I would like to go further, and say that it’s a cognitive problem, one intrinsic to the human nervous system. It is a characteristic of our species that becomes highly active and significant in group action at certain social and historical conjunctures. The problem is the meaning of the word people, which on most accounts is centrally important for making out what the phenomenon called “populism” is about. It is unhelpful to say the word is meaningless or vague, because clearly something is going on in the minds of its users and their hearers. That something is not simply about denoting an entity; it is about activating a mental effect.

Donald J. Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 American presidential election requires analysis: what brought it about, and what might it portend? This paper explores these and other questions: how have Trump’s victory and his communicative strategies compromised the culture’s notions of “truth” – via a continuum from “lie” through “post-truth,” “truthiness,” and “alternative facts” to “truth”? Is Trump – judging from his language and other communications – really a populist? And how are we to understand his many idiosyncrasies of discourse, as well as his supporters’ unwillingness to worry about them?

This study explores how U.S. President Donald Trump employs Twitter as a strategic instrument of power politics to disseminate his right-wing populist discourse. Applying the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis, this article analyzes the meaning and function of Trump’s discursive strategies on Twitter. The data consists of over 200 tweets collected from his personal account between his inauguration on January 20, 2017 and his first address to Congress on February 28, 2017. The findings show how Trump uses an informal, direct, and provoking communication style to construct and reinforce the concept of a homogeneous people and a homeland threatened by the dangerous other. Moreover, Trump employs positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation to further his agenda via social media. This study demonstrates how his top-down use of Twitter may lead to the normalization of right-wing populist discourses, and thus aims to contribute to the understanding of right-wing populist discourse online.

This paper focuses on aspects of the discourse of Donald Trump during his campaign for the U.S. Presidency. It argues that, although we can undoubtedly identify aspects of authoritarian populism in his campaign discourse, its appeal rested on more than its content. Indeed, although significant parts of the U.S. public sphere rejected many of his claims as lies, significant portions of the electorate found his words acceptable on some contrasting basis. By developing a comparison between Habermas’s notion of ‘validity claims’ and Aristotle’s distinctions between different kinds of rhetorical appeal, the paper suggests that a discourse of ‘authenticity’ rather than ‘truth’ provided a crucial cornerstone of Trump’s appeal to his electoral base.