Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines: The Return of Populists and the People 3030550370, 9783030550370

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Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines The Return of Populists and the People Edited by Michael Kranert

Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines

Michael Kranert Editor

Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines The Return of Populists and the People

Editor Michael Kranert Modern Languages and Linguistics University of Southampton Southampton, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-55037-0 ISBN 978-3-030-55038-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book emerged from a conference in the series “Political discourse: Multidisciplinary Approaches”. The conference themed as “New Discourses of Populism and Nationalism” took place at Edinburgh Napier University from 21–22 June 2018 and was kindly supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Brussels office. I am very much indebted to my co-organiser Veronika Koller for her much appreciated meticulous organizational skills, and to Edinburgh Napier’s outreach officer Dawn Smith, as well as Ada-Charlotte Regelmann from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation for their enthusiastic support in organizing a public World Café event on populism and nationalism at the conference. I would also like to thank the scientific committee of the conference who were mainly recruited from my colleagues and friends in DiscourseNet. I would also not have been able to organize the conference without the help of three very engaged, independent, and helpful Master’s students from Edinburgh Napier: Francesca Cecchetto and Steven Thomson from the MsC International Festival and Events Management, who were great organizers and run the

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front of house; and Audrey Barnes from the MsC Intercultural Business Communication, who produced the conference blog (https://pop nat2018.wordpress.com). I would also like to express my thanks to the many anonymous reviewers for the individual contributions—your detailed reading and constructive feedback certainly made this a better book. The final responsibility, of course, lies with the authors and myself. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Cathy Scott and the Palgrave Macmillan team for making the production of this book a smooth and pleasant process.

Contents

Part I 1

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Introduction: Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines Michael Kranert When Populists Call Populists Populists: ‘Populism’ and ‘Populist’ as Political Keywords in German and British Political Discourse Michael Kranert

Part II 3

Populism as an Essentially Contested Concept in Academic and Political Discourse 3

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Populist and Nationalist Discourses: Links and Tensions

The Impossible Totality of Ukraine’s “People”: On the Populist Discourse of the Ukrainian Maidan Olga Baysha

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Sri Lanka Between Triumph and Defeat: Studying Populism and Authoritarianism Within Presidential Rhetoric Anne Gaul

Part III 5

Populist Discourse and the Politics of (Post-)Truth

Trump’s Text Appeal: Vague Language in Post-Truth Politics Natalia Knoblock

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Social Media and the Concept of Interpellation Michael Brandmayr

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Archetypal Populism: The “Intellectual Dark Web” and the “Peterson Paradox” Darren Kelsey

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On the Retreat of Liberal Values and Access to Discourse: Extending Post-Foundational Discourse Theory Nikola A. Venkov

Part IV 9

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Populist Discourse and Discourses of Gender and Sexuality

On Behalf of the Family and the People: The Right-Wing Populist Repertoire in Croatia Katja Kahlina

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Part V 10

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Populist Discourse as Left-Wing and Right-Wing Political Discourse

Populism and Nationalism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Discourse Massimiliano Demata Using Mass and Pop Culture to Dominate Political Discourse: How the Left-Wing Party Podemos Conquered Spanish Living-Rooms with IKEA Sandra Issel-Dombert Republican Populism and Marxist Populism: Perspectives from Ecuador and Bolivia Pierre-Yves Cadalen

13 The (Re) Birth of Far-Right Populism in Australia: The Appeal of Pauline Hanson’s Persuasive Definitions Ben Fenton-Smith Part VI 14

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Populist Discourse Across the Political Spectrum

Caught Between Populism, Elitism, and Pluralism: A Method for Political Discourse Analysis Carola Schoor

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Populism as Mainstream Politicians’ Political Style During the 2012 Greek Election Campaign Argyro Kantara

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Another Populism Is Possible: Popular Politics and the Anticolonial Struggle Nkululeko Mabandla and Ana Deumert

Index

433 461

Notes on Contributors

Olga Baysha is an Associate Professor at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics,” Moscow, Russia. Olga Baysha earned her Master’s in Journalism from Colorado State University and Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Previously, she worked as a news reporter and editor in Kharkiv, Ukraine, then as an editor-in-chief of a documentary production company in Kyiv, Ukraine. Her research centres mainly on political and cultural aspects of globalization with an emphasis on new media and global social movements for justice and democratization. Dr. Baysha is especially interested in analysing inherent anti-democratic tendencies of the discourses of Westernization employed by post-Soviet social movements. Michael Brandmayr, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Educational Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is coordinating the project “Political and Civic Education in the Tyrol” and his research interests are in the fields of sociology of education, discourse theory and social inequality in the education system.

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Pierre-Yves Cadalen currently teaches at Créteil University, France. He recently obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations. His works are mainly related to the relations of power around the Environmental Commons. His former studies, which also included a Bachelor in Philosophy, led him to theorize the new forms of power related to the Anthropocene era. Massimiliano Demata is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Turin. He gained his D.Phil. from Oxford (1999), was a Fulbright Research Scholar at Yale University (1999) and Indiana University (2014), and a DAAD Visiting Researcher at the Center for Border Studies, Saarland University (2020). He has published monographs, journal articles and book chapters on the language of British and American media and politics, Donald Trump’s language, computermediated communication and climate change refugees. His current research focuses on social media and populist language in the context of American politics. Ana Deumert is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research programme is located within the broad field of sociolinguistics and has a strong transdisciplinary focus. Ben Fenton-Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He has a Master of Applied Linguistics and Ph.D., both from Macquarie University. His teaching and research interests extend to discourse analysis (particularly the language of politics), TESOL, and international education. He has published in journals such as Discourse and Society, Journal of Language and Politics, Studies in Higher Education, and Journal of English for Academic Purposes. Anne Gaul completed her Ph.D. on politics in Sri Lanka in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick. Her research interests include nationalist ideologies, peace and conflict studies and critical discourse analysis.

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Sandra Issel-Dombert is a Research Associate at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. She worked in the international projects “Frasledia” and “Hislecdiac (University of Valencia)”. She has been the recipient of several scholarships and excellence awards (Prix Germaine de Staël, Förderpreis Sprache und Recht, Barbara- und Alfred-RöverPreis, Reinhard-Kiesler-Preis, Förderprogramm Andreas Wesch). Among her areas of research and teaching are the history of French and Spanish, language contact, language and migration, phraseology, political discourse in times of populism, immigration and terrorism, as well as the rhetoric of election campaigns. Katja Kahlina works at the University of Helsinki, Finland, Department of Cultures, where she leads a Kone Foundation funded project Sexuality and Democracy (SEXDEM). Her research commitments are in the study of sexual politics and political discourse, and the ways in which these two are culturally and geopolitically produced and entangled. Within SEXDEM, Katja explores the interplay of heterosexism, populism and white ethno-nationalism within transnational anti-gender/anti-LGBTQ mobilization. Argyro Kantara is a Conversation Analyst at Cardiff University, United Kingdom. Her research interests lie broadly in the areas of institutional talk and political communication, with a particular emphasis on how interactants collaboratively produce talk and knowledge. Darren Kelsey is Reader in Media and Culture at Newcastle University. Darren is a mythologist whose teaching and research focuses on storytelling, ideology and collective psychology in media, culture and politics. Natalia Knoblock is an Associate Professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, USA. Her research interests lie mostly in political and cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. Some of her queries focused on the US presidential debates, xenophobia and hostility in online communication, and the cognitive processes involved in verbal aggression and propaganda. She is the editor of “Language of Conflict: The Discourses of the Ukrainian Crisis” and

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is developing a project on the morphosyntax of hateful, offensive, and dehumanizing discourse. Michael Kranert is Lecturer of Sociolinguistics at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He is interested in comparative political discourse analysis in English and German speaking countries. In 2019, he published a major monograph on the discourses of the Third Way in Germany and the UK (Discourse and Political Culture). Nkululeko Mabandla is a Lecturer at the Sociology Department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His broad research interests include the fields of settler colonialism, the anti-colonial archive and the Black radical tradition. Carola Schoor is an external doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University, The Netherlands (defense; August 2020). Before entering academia she worked as a journalist and political communication officer in The Hague and Brussels. Nikola A. Venkov holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Sofia (2017) and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Nottingham (2009). He has been a Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia and at the Leibnitz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig. His work ranges from theoretical sociology to engaged anthropology and even socially engaged art (co-founder of Duvar Kolektiv). His principle interests are in advancing Laclau’s Discourse Theory, applying it to understand power and marginalization, the mechanics of politics and coexistence in the city, and lately, new political forms and propaganda.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6

Ideological catch terms (simplified and adapted from Burkhardt 2003: 103) Change in collocation strength (logDice) for populism-left-right Change in collocation strength (logDice) for populist-left-right Plural of ‘Populist’ in the German and English press corpus “Euromaidan” as a floating signifier Posting by H.-C. Strache on the integration study, October 2, 2017 H.-C. Strache in 2009 Statement in the 2009 election campaign of the FPÖ (with kind permission from Demokratiezentrum Wien) A user posting on Sebastian Kurz’s page, October 2, 2017 User posting on the page of H.-C. Strache, October 2, 2017 User posting on H.-C. Strache’s page, October 2, 2017

33 40 40 44 71 154 157 158 161 163 164

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Fig. 7.1 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 14.1

Fig. 14.2 Fig. 14.3 Fig. 14.4 Fig. 14.5

List of Figures

Narrative structure of the Intellectual Dark Web (“SJW”—Social Justice Warrior) Concordance of give and people Concordance of help and people Concordance of protect and people Concordance lines for transform and Britain Concordance lines for make + Britain + adj/noun phrase/verb Topoi in the friend–opponent field of tension The concepts of populism, elitism, and pluralism have altering relationships in three dimensions, with shifting oppositions and coalitions The triangular relationship between populism, elitism, and pluralism Descriptions of political styles and anti-styles in five elements and three dimensions An example of a coded speech, here a fragment of the Brexit speech of Boris Johnson in 2016 The political styles of nine politicians plotted on a triangular field, capturing them as having a mix of populist, elitist, and pluralist style elements (The sub-scores on which the scores are based are provided in Appendix B)

175 267 268 269 275 276 303

373 376 378 379

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List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 2.4 Table 2.5 Table 2.6 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 10.1

Table 10.2 Table 10.3

Contributions and their disciplinary, methodological, and political contexts Search term representation in the corpus Modifier collocations Evaluative contextualization of populism/populist Changes of populism/nationalism collocation, logDice value Verb collocations of populism and populist Random sample for concordance analysis Ideological leanings of Maidan speakers Key signifiers Rank by collocation strength (lexical words only) of people (L5 to R5 span); frequency is shown in brackets Rank by collocation strength (lexical words only) of people (L1); frequency is shown in brackets Rank by collocation strength (lexical words only) of Britain (L5 to R5 span); frequency is shown in brackets

6 38 39 43 43 46 47 72 74

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Table 12.1 Table 13.1 Table 13.2 Table 14.1 Table 14.2 Table 14.3 Table 15.1

List of Tables

Governmental populist strategies in Bolivia and Ecuador Corpus of Hanson speeches analysed in the study Most frequent (stemmed) content words in Hanson’s speeches The cognitive-functional structure of ideologies (van Dijk 1998: 69–70; 2013: 178), applied to populism Main features of populism, elitism, and pluralism in one framework Sub-scores of the analysed speeches Transcription glossary

331 345 349 371 375 397 427

Part I Populism as an Essentially Contested Concept in Academic and Political Discourse

1 Introduction: Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines Michael Kranert

‘How can you spot a populist?’ asked the website of the British newspaper The Guardian in December 2018 (Rice-Oxley and Kalia December 3, 2018), introducing its readers to the complexity and ambiguity of the matter. This is but one example of a broader discussion of the meaning and evaluation of ‘populism’ that is so widespread in politics, media and academia these days. At a time when protesters against the ‘Islamisation of the occident’ in the streets of Dresden have shouted ‘Wir sind das Volk’ (‘We are the people’) and the newly elected British Prime minister Boris Johnson spoke from a lectern announcing ‘The People’s Government’, the use of the keywords ‘populist’ and ‘populism’ has become a daily occurrence (see Kranert, Chapter 2 in this volume), and in academia publications with ‘populism’ in the title are reaching a new peak. M. Kranert (B) Modern Languages and Linguistics, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_1

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This volume contributes to this debate by presenting a crossdisciplinary and international conversation about the discursive nature of ‘populist’ politics. Its chapters are based on the idea that language and meaning making are central to politics. Political discourse analysts assume that politics is a performative act and the main tool of politicians is language. This sentiment, though certainly not shared by everyone interested in researching politics, has had a significant influence on thinking about populism. Ostiguy (2017: 74), for example, stresses that ‘populism as an ideology can only be studied through discourse’. Political discourse analysis is part of a broader cross-disciplinary project called discourse studies (Kranert and Horan 2018b: 4). For decades now, the connection between semiosis and power has been approached from both a social and a linguistic perspective. The social sciences have long focused on discourse as a social practice of meaningmaking which is shaped by and shapes power structures in society. These paradigms have undergone a linguistic turn towards the analysis of social reality as constructed in language, while linguistics took a discursive turn, moving from a structural analysis of language to the question of language use in context. These two strands have recently been brought together by efforts to establish Discourse Studies as a ‘fully fledged field in which a number of currents meet’ (Angermuller et al. 2014: 3). Here, the concept of ‘discourse’ has become a common denominator for theoretical and empirical research and allows an exchange between these different traditions, similar to the concept of ‘gender’ in ‘gender studies’ and ‘culture’ in ‘culture studies’ (Angermuller 2014: 18). The core assumption of the field is the (post)structuralist idea that reality is accessed and formed through language. While physical objects certainly exist without language, they only gain meaning through discourse (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002: 8–9). This volume brings together researchers who share ‘discourse’ as a common denominator in their effort to understand the phenomenon of ‘populism’ in its different shapes, forms, geographies, and from different disciplinary backgrounds. It therefore gives credit to the variety and context dependence of both populist discourse and its analysis, and introduces the reader to a broad toolbox of discourse analytical theories and

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methodologies to grasp the wealth of discursive phenomena in populist discourse in future research. Although it cannot possibly be representative of this complex field, the aim was to sample the broadest possible representation of ideas on populism, on discourse as well as on the geographical and political location of the research. In this Introduction, I will give a very brief but by no means all-encompassing overview of the variation of the research object of populism across disciplines as well as approaches to discourse within the cross-disciplinary project of discourse studies. Table 1.1 gives an overview of the disciplinary, methodological, political, and geographical context of the different contributions. The final section of this Introduction will introduce the core problems that structure the volume.

Populism: Approaches to a Complex Phenomenon ‘Populism’ as a political phenomenon and as an academic concept is by no means new. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, it has been a highly contested political term often used to stigmatize political opponents, but also seen as inspiring democracy. Other than referring to the specific movements of the nineteenth century, however, Brubaker (2019) shows that academic publications on populism as a more general political phenomenon only appear in the 1950s, cumulating in a first peak of populism research focused on the first waves of populism in Latin America, which were interpreted as a reaction to modernization (Germani 1975). By contrast, the current wave is sometimes seen as a resistance against ‘neoliberal, post-democratic forms of governance’ (Stavrakakis 2014: 507). The obvious question is, do the various political movements and forms of rhetoric covered in academic research under the label ‘populism’ really belong together, and if so, how? A common ground can be found in the basic distinction in populist discourse between ‘the people’ and an ‘Other’ that is often described as ‘the elite’. Both categories are somewhat abstract and need to be filled with meaning and analytical purpose in a particular context. ‘The people’ are not a new political category specific to populist discourse. On the

Methods and theoretical approaches

Anti-Colonialism/Decolonization (Mabandla & Deumert) Argumentation Analysis (Fenton-Smith) Critical Discourse Analysis (Demata, Gaul, Kahlina, Schoor, Brandmayr, Knoblock) Conversation Analysis (Kantara) Corpus Linguistics (Demata, Kranert, Knoblock) Essex School of Discourse Theory (Baysha, Cadalen, Venkov) Frame Semantics (Knoblock) Interpellation (Brandmayr) Multimodality (Issel-Dombert, Brandmayr) Political Myth (Kelsey)

Disciplinary affiliations

Political Science (Baysha, Cadalen, Gaul) Linguistics (Demata, Deumert, Issel-Dombert, Kantara, Knoblock, Kranert, Fenton-Smith, Schoor) Education (Brandmayr) Gender Studies (Kahlina) Sociology (Venkov, Mabandla) Journalism (Kelsey) Right-Wing (Baysha, Brandmayr, Gaul, Fenton-Smith, Kahlina, Knoblock, Venkov) Left-Wing (Cadalen, Demata, Issel-Dombert) Transcending Left–Right (Kantara, Kelsey, Kranert, Schoor) Anti-Colonialism/Decolonization (Mabandla & Deumert)

Political spectrum

Table 1.1 Contributions and their disciplinary, methodological, and political contexts Australia (Fenton-Smith) Austria (Brandmayr) Bolivia (Cadalen) Bulgaria (Venkov) Croatia (Kahlina) Ecuador (Cadalen) Greece (Cantara) Germany (Kranert) Netherlands (Schoor) South Africa/Pan-African context (Mabandla & Deumert) Spain (Issel-Dombert) Sri Lanka (Gaul) Ukraine (Baysha) UK (Demata, Kelsey, Kranert, Schoor) USA (Knoblock, Schoor)

Geographical location

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contrary, this category has been enshrined as the origin of all political authority in secular democratic societies. The category is based on the idea of a unified and homogeneous body of a sovereign people—a construction that has always been problematic. Canovan (1981: 298) already stresses that despite ‘the people’ as a common core of populist discourses, they cannot and should not be reduced to it. Kaltwasser et al. (2017a: 1) seem to contradict this as they are warning that the wealth of literature on country specific incarnations of populism means ‘that populism literature is not as cumulative as it should be, and it is prone to exception fallacy’. From a discourse analytical point of view, this is a problematic positivist assertion, as political discourse is of course dependent on local context, political institutions, and political cultures (Kranert 2019a). But even as a phenomenon that transcends the political coordinates of left and right as well as national political cultures, populism is still dependent on a particular political group. The wealth of populist phenomena analysed in the chapters of this volume underline this critical point. In the following sections, I will briefly introduce some approaches and problems in populism research. I will point out different understandings of ‘populism’ as well as their overlaps and situate the chapters in the volume within this debate.

Populism as an Ideology: The Ideational Approach The ideational approach to populism originates from studies of new right-wing parties in Western Europe, which frame their politics as the ‘people’ against ‘elites’. While ‘populism’ was originally an academic term referring to single political movements rather than to a broader political phenomenon, the ideational approach aimed to produce a generic definition. Mudde (2007: 23) calls populism a thin-centred ideology: whereas full-blown political ideologies are formed of normative ideas and specific ways of transforming societies according to them, thin-centred ideologies lack this feature and are often combined with features from political ideologies such as neo-liberalism or socialism. Mudde (2017) suggests

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three elements are central to populist ideologies, all of which are based on a moral divide: 1. ‘the people’ as a homogeneous and morally ‘pure’ group that is defined by populists according to the target community of their politics; 2. ‘the corrupt elite’ as the anti-thesis of ‘the people’; 3. the general will that is ‘[b]ased on a kind of vulgar Rousseauian argument […] that politics should follow the general will of the people’ as they, by definition morally pure and homogenous, are in possession of common sense (Mudde 2017: 33). The issues of the ideational approach are well known. Firstly, the notion of thin-centred ideologies is vague. Their combination with elements of other ideologies makes a methodological operationalization difficult, as it would lead us back to the question of distinguishing populism from non-populism. The ideational approach also allows only a limited understanding of ‘the people’, an understanding that is one-dimensional and not empirical. Populism research needs to take into account other elements of populist politics that are not morally defined, such as ‘the people as democratic souvereign’ and ‘the people as a nation’. This would need a clearer understanding of how categories are constructed and performed in political discourse itself, yet the ideational approach adopts a very positivist manner in that it treats ideas as given and does not reflect on their creation and reproduction. Such reflection is a core element of the discursive approaches showcased in this volume. A final issue is that populism in this approach seems to be treated as a pathological phenomenon that threatens liberal democracy or is at best ambiguous to democratization, while discourse theoretical approaches such as Laclau’s (2005: 13) reject ‘an approach to populism in terms of abnormality, deviance or manipulation’. This issue is particularly addressed by Mabandla and Deumert (Chapter 16 in this volume) who show that ‘populism’ in the South African context ‘is woven into the texture of resistance politics’. In this context, populism has a different, de-colonial and anti-colonial meaning.

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Populism as Political Style and Repertoire While sharing Mudde’s (2007) minimal definition of populism, approaches to populism as political style or political repertoire assume that politics is performed and semiotically constructed. Moffit and Tormey (2014) argue the concept of style can help analysing phenomena that are normally subsumed under the concepts ideology, discourse, or organization, concepts that in their view lack the performance element of politics and do not take into consideration that political performance creates political beings. The idea of populism as a political style amongst others, such as technocratic and authoritarian, enables us to analyse populism as part of mainstream politics, because it captures the situated appearance of populist features in the behaviour of politicians—they can slip into and out of it. It also links politics to entertainment, especially as populism can be seen as ‘the media-political form par excellence’ (Moffitt 2016: 77). The analysis of populism as political style has adopted arguments from the socio-cultural approach, which sees populism as a relational concept between political leaders and their social basis. Ostiguy (2017: 73–74) suggests that the core element of this populist relationship between leaders and the social basis is identity creation rather than contesting world views. This relationship is formed through ‘low appeals’, i.e. the use of supposedly bad manners in accent, body language, taste, and performance. This creates a rapport between populist leaders and their followers. Based on this, Kantara (Chapter 15 in this volume) analyses how populist style appears in TV interviews between mainstream party-political leaders and TV journalists. Her analysis shows how conversational violence (Luginbühl 2007) as part of the populist style is normalized in these interviews. More comprehensive than the stylistic approach is the idea of populism as a repertoire. Brubaker (2017) argues that repertoire can be taken as a broader concept in populism research: Style only captures discursive, rhetorical, and stylistic elements of populism and neglects ideological commitment, policies, and organizational practices. These can be grasped with the metaphor of repertoire that, in Brubaker’s view,

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has three useful implications: It suggests that there is a set of historically established, standardized elements of political discourse known to political actors. Treating these elements as a repertoire construes different occurrences of populist politics as belonging together by family resemblance: not all of them will share the same elements and, more importantly, elements on their own might not be seen as populist. Instead, it is their link to the core element of populism—the claim to speak on behalf of ‘the people’—that makes them populist. Finally, the repertoire metaphor ‘suggests a way of responding to the claim that populism is ubiquitous (and therefore cannot serve as a useful analytical category). For while the populist repertoire is chronically available in contemporary democratic contexts, it is not chronically deployed’ (Brubaker 2017: 362). Brubaker (2017) suggests five central elements of a populist repertoire: populist politics reacts to the depoliticization, i.e. the removal of spheres of life such as the economy or the life risks from democratic decisionmaking, with antagonistic re-politicization, blaming ‘the elites’ for the abdication of national sovereignty and a lack of political alternatives. This element is relevant for both left-wing and right-wing populism. Directly following from this idea is the element of economic, security-related, and cultural protectionism, which offers people a protection from a crisis supposedly caused by ‘the elites’, a crisis that is constructed through the exaggerations and distortions of populist rhetoric. Another element of the repertoire leads us back to the idea the high–low axis in politics, which Ostiguy (2009) describes as fully independent of the left–right axis. The low dimension of this axis is more than language, taste, and performance, it also has conceptual and strategic elements such as antipolitical correctness and the devaluation of complexity through rhetorical practices of simplicity, directness, and anti-intellectualism. The final two elements are radical majoritarianism and anti-institutionalism. Various problems have been identified in the idea of populism as a political style. Weyland (2001) criticizes the concept as too wide and running the risk of hindering a distinction of populist and non-populist politics. Wodak (2015: 3) warns that the danger of populism lies in its integration of form and content, so to see populism only as a political style risks to downplay the ideological substance of populist movements.

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While this would suggest that the rethinking of populism as a political repertoire could potentially solve that problem, it could be argued that the original critique of the concept of ‘interpretative repertoires’ suggested by discursive psychology (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002: 147) applies here as well: it lacks empirical support and, as practitioners of critical discourse analysis have suggested, neglects the of analysis of linguistic form, which is central to meaning-making. Various chapters in this volume attempt to rectify this problem: Schoor (Chapter 14 in this volume) employs a multidimensional approach to the analysis of political discourse that links the concepts of populism, elitism, and pluralism. On the basis of political speeches from Britain, the United States and the Netherlands, she demonstrates that politicians of various political affiliations draw on that continuum, a result that suggests that populism is indeed a part of a general political repertoire. Kahlina (Chapter 9 in this volume) supplies further evidence by analysing how ethno-nationalism and heterosexism are part of the populist repertoire. In her analysis of discourses driven by the campaign group On Behalf of the Family (OBF) in Croatia she shows how these elements tie in with the other elements of a populist repertoire suggested by Brubaker. Gaul (Chapter 4 in this volume) demonstrates how the repertoires of populism and authoritarianism are interlinked and how populist style draws on local political resources.

Populism from a Poststructuralist Discourse Theoretical Perspective Poststructuralist approaches to populism grew out of the critique of sociological modernization theories which analysed populism in Latin America from the 1940s to the 1960s as a result of the transition from a traditional to an industrial society (Germani 1975). In his alternative interpretation, Laclau describes populism as a logic of the political, a logic that is central to our understanding of politics: ‘Populism starts at the point where popular democratic elements are presented as an antagonistic option against the ideology of the dominant bloc’ (Laclau 1977: 173).

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Laclau (2005) takes Saussure’s identity/difference nexus as a starting point to explain the reality of political antagonisms. Based on Saussure’s paradigmatic and syntagmatic axis in signification, his discourse theory suggests two major logics in discourse: in the logic of difference, individual political demands create different signifiers and increase the complexity of the political. As long as these diverse demands can be successfully made in an administrative way, this is a successful logic. If, however, more and more political demands are neglected, a logic of equivalence is necessary. This logic simplifies the political space by finding equivalences between demands and common signifiers to make these demands heard. Therefore, this logic is often a reaction to a dislocation or crisis. A populist logic leads to an internal antagonistic frontier separating ‘the people’ and power. Here, ‘the people’ act as a nodal point, ‘a point of reference around which other peripheral and often antithetical signifiers and ideas can become articulated’ (Stavrakakis 2017: 528). ‘The people’ therefore acts as an empty signifier that represents the equivalential chain to keep this political discourse unified; it is a structuring signifier of populist discourse. This formal poststructuralist theory of populism has several advantages: it does not presuppose a moral element like the ideational approach does and is not based on a priori assumptions about the definition of ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ or their ideological aims. Despite being highly abstract, it is a useful theoretical approach for discourse analysts as it is based on semiotics, hence it is compatible with their assumption about the discursive character of reality. It also suggests a discourse theoretical explanation of the ‘us and them’ construction that is a core element of the theory of ideologies as group phenomena developed within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (van Dijk 1998: 67) and generalizes the idea of semantic battles as a central mechanism of political discourse (Kranert 2019a: 101–168). This volume offers various contributions employing poststructuralist discourse theory to discuss populism. Baysha (Chapter 3 in this volume) uses it to enquire how the Euromaidan attempted to articulate itself as a group representing the whole of Ukraine, demonstrating how strong appeals to morality and the dichotomy of good and evil led to the

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intensification of the conflict. Cadalen’s (Chapter 12 in this volume) comparative empirical study demonstrates that populist discourse as a strategy creates ‘a people’ that is strongly linked to local political structure and discourse history. Venkov (Chapter 8 in this volume) offers an important theoretical contribution as he aims to extend PostFoundational Discourse Theory (PDT) to make it more empirically fruitful. He sees it as well equipped to understand the ontology of the political, i.e. the constitution of the political in discourse, but argues that it poses a difficulty in understanding the ontic level that is based on politics as complex interaction of subjects. It is therefore necessary to introduce the analytical concepts of discursive social actor, discourse circulation, and access to discourse. This allows him to reframe accounts of populist discourse that see it as either disillusion of the masses or malicious propaganda: an important reason might be the weakening of liberal political hegemony because of wider access to political discourse.

Political Discourse: Concepts, Methods, Approaches As a linguistic discourse analyst and sociolinguist, I tend to approach the concept of discourse from its origins in linguistics, so these introductory remarks on political discourse will move from discourse as language use to discourse as knowledge systems structured by power. I will first introduce Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Discourse Linguistics (DL) as linguistic approaches to language in context and demonstrate the advantage of combining them with methods from corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis as well as ideas on narrative. Argumentation analysis will be discussed as a separate strand, as it is independently used by scholars of rhetoric in both political science and linguistics. A further linguistic approach necessary to capture the increasingly mediated world of politics is the analysis of talk in interaction. I will finally turn to Post-Foundational Discourse Theory (PDT), and show how this is also in need of drawing on both social science and linguistic methodologies to capture political discourse empirically. Throughout the text,

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I signpost where these various permutations of discourse theory and discourse analysis are represented in this volume.

Critical Discourse Analysis and Discourse Linguistics The difficulty with CDA as a central element of Discourse Studies is how to categorize it. Is it a method, methodology, theory, school? The difficulty arises because it is an overarching term for a broad variety of analytical methods and approaches. Van Dijk (1993) describes it as ‘at most a shared perspective on doing linguistics, semiotics or discourse analysis’. This shared perspective is based on an interest in natural occurring language use in context. CDA investigates language as a form of social practice, which implies that language use and situative, institutional, and social context are in a dialectic relationship—language shapes context, context shapes language (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). Wodak and Meyer (2009a: 3) explain that CDA is in ‘theory as well as methodology […] eclectic, both of which are integrated as far as is helpful to understand the social problems under investigation’. Therefore, under the umbrella of the term CDA, we can find a broad theoretical spectrum from Marxist dialectics to cognitive linguistics (see Wodak and Meyer 2009b). The analyses can focus on cognitive and interactional strategies as well as on argumentation and multimodality. Parallel to debates in CDA is the development of German politicolinguistics, which originated in reflections on the language of National Socialism. Central concepts such as genres of political discourse, catch terms (Schlagwörter) and argumentative topoi are now integrated into a framework known as Discourse Linguistics (DL) (see Kranert 2019a: 9–15). In contrast to CDA, DL has a slightly more positivist approach to research and sees the notion of critique developed by CDA as problematic: CDA could, in Wengeler’s (2011) view, run the risk of being circular as their determination to start with what is assumed as a social wrong might predetermine the results of the research. However, these dividing lines seem to wane. Issel-Dombert (Chapter 11 in this volume), for example, draws on discourse linguistics as a ‘linguistic response to current social challenges and issues’, and applies

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it to the populist discourse produced by the Spanish party Podemos. Her contribution introduces the model TexSem (Gardt 2012) developed within Discourse Linguistics, and employs it to demonstrate the intertextuality between the election manifesto of Podemos and the IKEA catalogue as an anti-elitist strategy. A methodology that is often combined with CDA is Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) (Partington et al. 2013). Akin to CDA, this is not a single method or theory, but ‘utilizes a collection of different methods which are related by the fact that they are performed on large collections of electronically stored, naturally occurring texts’ (Baker et al. 2008: 274). Although in its mother discipline, corpus linguistics, the aim of electronic analysis and quantification has sometimes been to produce a more ‘objective’ analysis or to ‘avoid human bias in an analysis’ (McEnery et al. 2006: 6), this has always been questioned by discourse analysts on the basis of their constructivist epistemology. However, even without buying the positivist notion of a corpus-assisted analysis bypassing intuition and bias, corpus approaches have clear advantages: They make larger text corpora manageable, provide tools to analyse linguistic patterns in them, and give discourse analysts a new tool for data access as well as for triangulation. Knoblock (Chapter 5 in this volume) as well as Demata (Chapter 10 in this volume) employ corpus tools to access their complex data, while Kranert (Chapter 2 in this volume) presents a fully developed longitudinal study utilizing corpus statistics in combination with a concordance analysis to study the use of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in German and British political discourse. A further way of expanding critical analysis of discourse is the development of tools to analyse multimodal discourse (Kress and Leeuwen 2006). This is particularly relevant in an age of rapid media change where multimodal representation of discourse has become dominant through the use of online platforms. Brandmayr (Chapter 6 in this volume), combines multimodal analysis with the discourse theory of interpellation to gain insights into how populist politics is done online. An element long-sidelined in discourse analysis is the analysis of narratives and political myths. These are central to political discourse as they ‘condition the public to the powerful symbols used by politicians’ (Bennett 1980: 168). Political myths and narratives are now researched in

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terms of their integration into the argumentative structures of political discourse (Kranert 2018), but also in terms of being part of the available structures that are used in journalism to interpret the world (Kelsey 2015). Kelsey (Chapter 7 in this volume) analyses the example of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and its underlying archetypal populism, showing how a monomyth forms a cohesive narrative that overarches what seems to be a complex and diverse conversation between various public figures who relate to the concept of the Intellectual Dark Web. The metaphor of murmurations turns out to be analytically helpful to describe these functions, as it grasps both the shared recurring patterns of narratives as well as their transformation over time.

Argumentation Analysis and Rhetoric The analysis of argumentation patterns forms a central part of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Reisigl and Wodak 2009), but was also further developed in the German tradition of politico-linguistics (Klein 2000; Wengeler 2016; Kranert 2019a). The focus of the analysis lies on argumentative schemes called topoi that are not always explicitly communicated but necessary to understand the argument. They allow the transition from the data to the conclusion. Argumentation is also relevant to the rhetorical analysis of political speech—a method that has recently become influential in political science, where Martin and Finlayson (2008) have developed a research programme called Rhetorical Political Analysis (RPA). While discourse analysts are interested in the linguistic mechanisms constructing social reality, political scientists mainly focus on how political thinking depends on ideas and concepts, and their historical forms. In Chapter 13, this volume, Fenton-Smith draws on argumentation theory for his analysis of Australian right-wing populism, focusing on one particular element of rhetoric and argumentation: the persuasive power of definitions, combining insights from studies in rhetoric and political science to distinguish different functions and mechanisms of persuasive definitions in the political discourse of Pauline Hanson.

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Talk in Interaction Parallel to CDA and discourse theoretical approaches in Europe, sociologists in the US developed approaches to discourse from the philosophical tradition of pragmatism: ethnography, interactionism (Goffman 1981), and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967). These methodologies aim to study individuals’ experiences from their own perspective, using observation to understand what speakers are doing. Even more focused on the language is Schegloff and Sacks’s (1973) version, which researches conversational organization in detail in order to understand patterns of relations between individual interactants. Conversation analysis and interactionist sociolinguistics have a distinct advantage for the analysis of political discourse: They are concerned with naturally occurring discourse interactions and take an emic perspective by analysing the orientations of the discourse participants themselves. This is particularly relevant in a media-driven age where political discourse is often observed by voters as being co-constructed by politicians and media professionals in conversation. Kantara (Chapter 5 in this volume) applies conversation analysis to political interviews in Greece to gather evidence for the idea of populism as political style in mainstream politics, especially conversational violence in news interviews.

Post-foundational Discourse Theory (PDT) While the linguistic approaches above started out from discourse as language use and moved, through contact with poststructuralist ideas, towards the idea of discourse constructing the social, the origins of PostFoundational Discourse Theory started from an ontological question: what is society? Laclau and Mouffe (1985), as two of the main proponents of discourse theory, begin their answer with a critique of Marxism: they moved against the economic determinism of Marxism and produced an approach to the social as discursive construction. Drawing on Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) dismiss the Marxist theory of the economic base determining the social

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superstructure along with the idea of an objective class-based society, and argue that identity is not class based but a result of discursive struggles. They conceptualize the discursive struggle by deconstructing Saussure’s structural semiotics that assumes meaning as a fixed network, demonstrating that meaning can not be fixed, as the signifiers tend to glide and are therefore always contested. Thus, discourse theory understands the social as discursive construction that cannot ever be finished or total. ‘Discourse’, in this approach, is a structured totality that results from the practice of articulation: the formation of a network of signifiers to make meaning (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 105). Nodal points are signifiers used to order other signifiers in an equivalential chain and attempt fix their meaning. Nodal points are often floating signifiers: in linguistic terms they are concepts whose meaning is heavily contested, e.g. ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’. To gain hegemony, political actors attempt to stabilize a discursive system (for example liberal, representative democracy) by redefining signifiers in a way that public views are made compatible with the interests of the ruling group. However, there will always be resistance to these redefinitions, therefore discourses can never be a totality and are always just partially structured. A further insight from discourse theory is that discourse produces social positions—an idea Laclau and Mouffe borrowed from Althusser’s (1971) concept of interpellation. It has always been a major criticism of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory that it ‘is short on specific methodological guidelines and illustrative examples’ (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002: 8). Therefore, a combination with empirical methods is necessary. Brandmayr (Chapter 6 in this volume), for example, combines discourse theory with elements of critical discourse analysis and multimodality to understand populist discourses online and to draw conclusions for political education. Cadalen (Chapter 12 in this volume) draws on interview material from his research in Ecuador and Bolivia to understand the dependency of the discursive construction ‘the people’ on local political, institutional, and ideological contexts.

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Populist Discourses: Core Questions Having situated the chapters both in the discussion on populism as a research project as well as the theoretical and methodological map of discourse studies, I will now briefly introduce the core questions that guide research on populist discourse at the moment and how they structure this volume.

Populism and Nationalism Populism and nationalism are closely related both as academic concepts and as elements of political discourse, where right-wing politics is often called both ‘nationalist’ and ‘populist’. Employing methods of corpus assisted discourse analysis, Kranert (Chapter 2 in this volume), demonstrates a shift in the semantic prosody of the terms ‘populist’ and ‘populism’ in the German and British press between 2012 and 2017 from a stigma term for rhetorical policy-making in all ideological quarters towards a name for right-wing nativist politics. Populism and nationalism share ‘the people’ as a central signifier that is highly ambiguous (Mény and Surel 2002; Brubaker 2019). Mény and Surel (2002) distinguish three main meanings in populist discourse: – common/ordinary people; – sovereign people as demos; – bounded/distinct people as ethnos. Similarly to populism, nationalism has been conceptualized as a thincentred ideology: Different varieties of nationalism depend on the meaning produced through the combination of nationalism with other political signifiers such as liberty or democracy (Freeden 1998). Populism and nationalism with their central shared signifier are therefore easy to link; however, they draw on that signifier differently (Brubaker 2019: 7). De Cleen (2017: 342) argues that a clear distinction between nationalism and populism is necessary in order to also grasp nonnationalist populism: Populism uses people-as-underdog and nationalism

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uses people-as-nation. However, the co-articulation of these concepts produces a multi-layered meaning of ‘people’ (de Cleen 2017: 347; for an empirical example in the UK and Germany see Kranert 2019b). This leads Brubaker (2019) to the conclusion that populism and nationalism are analytically distinct but not independent of each other, and it is this interdependence that explains the productivity of the signifier ‘the people’. The co-articulation is not merely contingent, but constitutive for populism, as its discursive construction of the political realm need both a vertical and horizontal dimension (see also Stavrakakis 2017). In this volume, Baysha, Gaul, and Demata all demonstrate this constitutive link between populism and nationalism in politically and geographically very different case studies: Baysha (Chapter 3 in this volume) analyses the populist discourse of the Euromaidan in Ukraine employing a post-foundational framework. She demonstrates how the signifier of a ‘Ukrainian people’ is constituted in political discourse— and how it was read as nationalist discourse by the opponents of the Maidan. Using CDA, Gaul (Chapter 4 in this volume) analyses the populist-authoritarian discourse of President Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005–2015), arguing that it relies on the Sinhalese nationalist framework. Demata (Chapter 10 in this volume) demonstrates how Jeremy Corbyn’s populist includes a nationalist element.

Populism and Post-truth The new wave of public and academic debate on populism occurred alongside a debate about so-called ‘post-truth’ and the question about the links between the rise of online media, manipulation of the public debate, and right-wing populism. ‘Post-truth’ was named word of the year 2016 by the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), and the link to populism was made in various press releases, e.g. ‘In the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” to be its international word of the year’ (Flood, November 15, 2016). The question that needs to be asked of course is whether this is a new development. Both Orwell’s ideas on doublethink and newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell 1949) and research on propaganda are

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much older (e.g. Herman and Chomsky 1988). Furthermore, Hannah Arendt already pointed out in 1977 that ‘no one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues’ (Arendt 1977: 227). Discourse analysts have a longstanding interest in the linguistic construction of reality and the mechanisms of propaganda. On a more social and structural level, Foucault (2001: 130) was interested in the politics of truth in a society and the mechanisms of producing and sanctioning knowledge. While Foucault analysed this for the age of mass communication, arguing that news media are under the control of political and economic apparatuses, Harsin (2015: 329) argues that the relationship between institutions of society and discourse circulation can change, especially with changing technology such as social media. However, the development of ‘regimes of post-truth’ is also driven by the fragmentation of news sources, by user-generated content, but also content targeted through algorithms on the corporate-political level. Bratich (2004) saw this regime change arrive before the rise of social media with the ‘War on Terror’, whose propaganda was not one big lie repeated, but the use of many little lies: ‘The retractions, prevarications, withdrawals, and recontextualizations come so quickly and without fanfare that “truth” is a difficult value to hang one’s strategy on’ (Bratich 2004: 237). Four chapters in this volume approach questions of truth, post-truth, and populism in a different way. Knoblock (Chapter 5 in this volume) is interested in the reception of political communication and the audiences interpretation of vagueness. She analyses unscripted, unprompted online exchanges about Trump’s announcement of a Muslim ban in the 2016 presidential election campaign. Analysing fillers of semantic slots that were modified when commenters discussed Trump’s statement, she demonstrates how audiences interpret political discourse based on their own values and reinterpret vague comments. Based on the psychoanalytical theory of Carl Jung, Kelsey’s (Chapter 7 in this volume) discourse-mythological approach (DAM) focuses on archetypal narratives used to share values, morals, and ideals in politics.

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He argues that archetypes are products of a combination of neurological and cultural-behavioural patterns. These archetypes provide cohesive narratives to pitch the people against the elite, transcend the left–right spectrum and are deeply engrained in (political) cultures. Using the phenomenon of the Intellectual Dark Web, Kelsey demonstrates that the Web 2.0 is a particularly effective means for the dissemination of such narratives. Brandmayr (Chapter 6 in this volume) asks why populist messages are reaching people more easily on Facebook. Drawing on Althusser (1971), he argues that Facebook is a place of subjectivation. He analyses the discourse on willingness of Muslims to integrate in Austria and suggests that the idea of social media as filter bubbles is too simplistic. Rather, to explain their role in political discourse, it is important to understand how individuals become social and political subjects. He shows that images and videos on social media link the subject that constitutes itself to discourses because of the vagueness of collective symbols. Venkov (Chapter 8 in this volume) discusses the rise of populist political dynamics in liberal democratic states as the by-product of a more politically emancipated citizenry due to a restructuring of the circulation of discourses. He argues that there is a shift in the dynamics of how ordinary people acquire politicized identities, which he grounds in the advent of new media. He warns us that the results of this process might be beyond just “more populism”; instead, we might be witnessing a break up of the hegemonic grip of the post-war liberal-democratic consensus and a retrenchment of liberal values.

Populism and the Political Space In Western liberal democracies, political discourse is traditionally characterized by the left–right metaphor, which is a core part of the political repertoire. However, its exact meaning has always been vague and relative to a political culture as well as the historical frame of reference. Ostiguy (2017) suggests to add a high–low dimension to the analysis of political space in oder to understand populism as a relational concept between

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political leaders and social basis with the low dimension describing anti-elitism and transgression. Populist movements restructure political competition and therefore the political space, but this research area has attracted too little attention so far. Roberts (2018) analyses this restructuring in the 1990s and early 2000s in Latin America, where left-wing populist leaders challenged hegemonic neoliberal policies. He sees a similarity in southern Europe after the 2008 financial crisis: As the centre-left moved towards austerity, emerging left-wing movements avoided self-identification with the partypolitical left in order to have a broader appeal, adopting citizenship identities and promising restoration of power to the people. In this volume several contributions are looking at left-wing populism (Demata, Issel-Dombert, Cadalen). Demata (Chapter 10 in this volume) discusses the discursive strategies of Jeremy Corbyn and argues that he identifies ‘the people’ by social class and age, constructing the antagonism against the elite in political and economic terms. He also shows that Corbyn’s discourse contains strong elements of nationalism. Issel-Dombert (Chapter 11 in this volume) demonstrates how the election manifesto of the Spanish left-wing party Podemos imitates the IKEA catalogue to align themselves with ‘the people’ and construct the people– elite distinction. In a comparative study of Ecuador and Bolivia, Cadalen (Chapter 12 in this volume) demonstrates how left-wing populism as a strategy differs depending on the details of the ideological basis of the populist movements as well as the institutional and cultural context. He also argues that in the transition from opposition to government, populist discourse needs to adapt, a process that is still governed by the political context of the movement. Most approaches to populism see it, in one way or another, as part of mainstream politics: the idea of a populist repertoire is interesting here as it combines style, discourse, and ideology, while the post-foundational approach sees populism as a general political logic. Mudde (2004: 550– 551) suggests Tony Blair’s rhetoric as a good example for mainstream populism as, for example in the struggle with the Countryside Alliance over foxhunting ‘Labour presents itself as the champion of the (true) English people against the privileges of the (upper class) elite.’

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In this volume, Schoor as well as Kantara analyse populism as a main-stream phenomenon that changes the political landscape. Schoor (Chapter 14 in this volume) develops a framework that links the concepts of populism, elitism, and pluralism and identifies political styles in this semantic network. Kantara (Chapter 15 in this volume) employs conversation analysis to demonstrate how populist styles are employed in TV interviews with mainstream politicians. Two contributions focus on populism in civil society: Kahlina (Chapter 9 in this volume) discusses how a neglected element of the populist repertoire, heteronormativity and heterosexism, is foregrounded by the Croatian organization ‘On Behalf of the Family’. In their contribution on populism in the African context, Mabandla and Deumert (Chapter 16 in this volume) analyse political documents as well as in creative expressions of the ‘soundscape of freedom songs’ in Africa in order to shift the perspective on populism away from the Western perspective towards a perspective from anti-colonialism and decolonization, as a shift that should allow us to rediscover traditions of collective decision-making and people-centred politics, without which the ongoing freedom struggles could not be successful. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Clare Mar-Molinero, Alasdair Archibald, and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments. The responsibility for inconsistencies and mistakes in this final version is, of course, all mine.

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Kranert, Michael, and Geraldine Horan, eds. 2018a. Doing Politics: Discursivity, Performativity and Mediation in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kranert, Michael, and Geraldine Horan. 2018b. “Introduction: ‘Doing Politics’—Recent Developments in Political Discourse Analysis.” In Kranert and Horan 2018, 1–24. Kress, Gunther R., and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. La Torre, Carlos de, ed. 2018. The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. Abingdon: Routledge. Laclau, Ernesto. 1977. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism. London: NLB. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Luginbühl, Martin. 2007. “Conversational Violence in Political TV Debates: Forms and Functions.” Journal of Pragmatics 39 (8): 1371–87. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.pragma.2007.04.003. McEnery, Tony, Richard Xiao, and Yukio Tono. 2006. Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book. London: Routledge. Mény, Yves, and Yves Surel. 2002. “The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism.” In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, edited by Yves Mény and Yves Surel, 1–21. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Moffitt, Benjamin, and Simon Tormey. 2014. “Rethinking Populism: Politics, Mediatisation and Political Style.” Political Studies 62 (2): 381–97. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12032. Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government & Opposition 39 (4): 542–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x. Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mudde, Cas. 2017. “Populism: An Ideational Approach.” In Kaltwasser et al. 2017, 27–48. Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel . London: Secker & Warburg. Ostiguy, Pierre. 2009. “The High and the Low in Politics: A Two-Dimensional Political Space for Comparative Analysis and Electoral Studies.” Working

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paper 360. Unpublished manuscript, last modified May 3, 2019. https://kel logg.nd.edu/sites/default/files/old_files/documents/360_0.pdf. Ostiguy, Pierre. 2017. “Populism: A Socio-Cultural Approach.” In Kaltwasser et al. 2017, 73–98. Oxford English Dictionary. 2016. “Word of the Year 2016 Is … Post Truth.” Accessed November 4, 2019. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-ofthe-year/word-of-the-year-2016. Partington, Alan, Alison Duguid, and Charlotte Taylor. 2013. Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2009. “The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA).” In Wodak and Meyer 2009, 87–121. Rice-Oxley, Mark, and Ammar Kalia. 2018. “How to Spot a Populist.” The Guardian, December 3. Accessed December 18, 2019. www.theguardian. com/news/2018/dec/03/what-is-populism-trump-farage-orban-bolsonaro. Roberts, Kenneth M. 2018. “Left, Right and the Populist Structuring of Political Competition.” In La Torre 2018, 149–62. Schegloff, Emanuel A., and Harvey Sacks. 1973. “Opening Up Closings.” Semiotica 8 (4): 289–327. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1973.8.4.289. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2014. “The Return of ‘The People’: Populism and AntiPopulism in the Shadow of the European Crisis.” Constellations 21 (4): 505– 17. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12127. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2017. “Discourse Theory in Populism Research: Three Challenges and a Dilemma.” JLP 16 (4): 523–34. https://doi.org/10.1075/ jlp.17025.sta. Van Dijk, Teun Adrianus. 1993. “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Discourse & Society 4 (2): 249–83. Van Dijk, Teun Adrianus. 1998. Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage. Wengeler, Martin. 2011. “Linguistische Diskursanalysen—deskriptiv, kritisch oder kritisch durch Deskription?” In Sprachkritik und Sprachkultur: Konzepte und Impulse für Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit, edited by Jürgen Schiewe, 35–48. Greifswalder Beiträge zur Linguistik 6. Wengeler, Martin. 2016. “Patterns of Argumentation and the Heterogeneity of Social Knowledge.” JLP 14 (5): 689–711. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.14.5. 04wen. Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics.” Comparative Politics 34 (1): 1. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/422412.

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Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer. 2009a. “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology.” In Wodak and Meyer 2009, 1–33. Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer, eds. 2009b. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage.

Michael Kranert is Lecturer of Sociolinguistics at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He is interested in comparative political discourse analysis in English and German speaking countries. In 2019, he published a major monograph on the discourses of the Third Way in Germany and the UK (Discourse and Political Culture).

2 When Populists Call Populists Populists: ‘Populism’ and ‘Populist’ as Political Keywords in German and British Political Discourse Michael Kranert

Introduction: ‘Populism’ as a Key Term in Political Discourse In 2017, ‘populism’ was announced as the Cambridge Dictionary word of the year, arguing that it ‘represents a phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent’ (Cambridge Dictionary 2017). The choice was not uncontested: in a Guardian article, political scientist Cas Mudde argued that not ‘populism’ but ‘nativism’ should be declared the word of the year as this is what is really the core of the current public discourse on populism (Mudde, December 7, 2017). Mudde also took issue with the analysis that ‘populism’ is mainly used with reference to ‘the implied lack M. Kranert (B) Modern Languages and Linguistics, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_2

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of critical thinking on the part of the populace, and the implied cynicism on the part of the leaders who exploit it’ (Cambridge Dictionary 2017), as this implies an opposition of ‘populism’ and genuine politics which he finds unhelpful, elitist, and self -serving. As a solution, he offers a theoretical explanation of ‘populism’ and demonstrates how modern right-wing nativists adopt populist elements. Of course, the theoretical debates about populism are not straightforward either: Canovan (1999: 3) and others have argued that the meaning of ‘populism’ is unclear due to the slipperiness of the concept. Without repeating the theoretical debates outlined in the introduction (Kranert, Introduction in this volume), we can say that most theoretical approaches to populism share two elements: the distinction of ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’ and ‘our people’ versus ‘them’. Within the theoretical debates, three main strands can be distinguished: – populism as a type of political ideology (e.g. Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013); – populism as a political style of politicians (Moffitt 2016); – populism as a type of political discourse (Stavrakakis 2017). The complexity, range, and diversity of meanings of both ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ suggest that both terms can now be seen as cultural or socio-political keywords (Jeffries and Walker 2017) that are indicative of the major discourses at any one time. This chapter aims to empirically analyse the public use of these terms in Germany and the UK between 2012 and 2017—in the run-up to the term becoming Cambridge Dictionary word of the year. I will ask what the discursive functions of the terms are in political discourse captured in a 14-million-word corpus of German and British newspaper articles containing the term. I will first develop my theoretical framework, discuss previous studies, and define my corpus. I will then discuss the results of the corpus-assisted analysis, describing the changing semantic prosody of the terms and their discursive functions in utterances by journalists and politicians.

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Theoretical Approach and Previous Research Socio-political keywords are words that reflect significant cultural, social, or political discourses (Jeffries and Walker 2017)—they capture ‘discourse in a nutshell’ (Schröter 2008). Lexicographical research on keywords has a long tradition in German politico-linguistics, which has developed a large body of literature on political lexis, specifically Schlagwörter, their semantics and their discursive function. In order to distinguish them from statistical keywords, I suggested elsewhere translating the German ‘Schlagwort’ as ‘catch term’ (Kranert 2019: 101). Burkhardt (2003) suggests distinguishing groups of ideological catch terms in the way captured in Fig. 2.1. The main distinction is between non-group specific and group specific lexis. In both cases, these can be subdivided into evaluative terms and neutral terms. In fact, being evaluative is one of the core properties of political lexis: using political catch terms means performing not only a reference act, but also a predication.

Fig. 2.1 Ideological catch terms (simplified and adapted from Burkhardt 2003: 103)

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Girnth (2015: 66) argues that every reference act is also an act of predication and evaluation. This is particularly exploited in politics where the meaning of group specific evaluative lexis has a cognitive, affective, and voluntative component. The stigma term ‘extremist’, for example, contains the evaluation of the person it refers to as somebody who takes extreme political positions and possibly acts violently to fulfil their aims. Girnth (2015: 66) therefore suggests that the meaning potential of this stigma term can be rephrased as follows: (1) This person is dangerous (= cognitive component). (2) This person takes a position that must be rejected and disdained (= affective component). (3) This person should be excluded by law (= voluntative component).

However, these meaning elements are not fixed, but part of a semantic struggle that strategically chooses programme terms to signify the group’s own position or stigma terms to describe and devalue the position of the political opponent. The semantic struggle and therefore the reinterpretation of the semantics of a term happens through processes of contextualization and through metalinguistic comments. The contextualization of a term forms part of its textual meaning. Girnth (2015: 77) distinguishes between denotative contextualization, which influences the reference of a term, evaluative contextualization, which influences the evaluation of a concept, and deontic contextualization, which changes the voluntative implications, i.e. what a term asks the hearer to do. The following examples from my corpus should help explain the types of contextualization: (4) right-wing populism (denotative contextualization); (5) forces of division, intolerance, populism, nationalism and cynicism (evaluative contextualization); (6) It is worth fighting populism (deontic contextualization).

While (4) restricts the reference of ‘populism’ to a particular group or ideology, (5) connects ‘populism’ with other negative connotations, and

2 When Populists Call Populists Populists …

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(6) makes the voluntative component of the use overt—a repeated use of this pattern will strengthen this component. Another way to recognize the complex semantics and pragmatics of political lexis is to analyse samples of open contestation—a process that has been named ‘meta-linguistic comments’ (Schröter 2008: 51). Metalinguistic comments focus on the meaning of language used and can be understood as part of meta-discourse. Political catch terms are often surrounded by metalinguistic comments and demonstrate public awareness of the contestation of the concept or issue in question (Schröter 2008: 51). As they are used to reinterpret core terminology, they give the analyst an insight into strategic use of political language and the contestation of meaning, as well as provide an emic perspective on meaning from language users themselves. Three major studies on the discourse of populism in newspapers have been conducted to date. Bale et al. (2011) analyse a corpus of British broadsheets from October to December 2007 and July to September 2008. In their study, they apply a type of content analysis to understand what they call the vernacular use of ‘populism’ and its connection to the academic use. In this corpus from 2007/2008, ‘populism’ is never central to the text, which indicates that it was not a socio-political keyword at that time. Furthermore, the term is mainly used pejoratively. The authors also find that ‘the almost random use of the term in vernacular language still poses a problem’ (Bale et al. 2011: 128), a conclusion that is possibly reached through a lack of a linguistic perspective on the pragmatic function of the term. Herkman (2016) analyses the meaning of ‘populism’ in the Nordic press (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark) between 2010 and 2013, arguing that these four countries all belong to the democratic-corporatist model of media systems which are defined by an external pluralism of the press, strong professionalization, and strong state intervention (Hallin and Mancini 2004). Using quantitative frame analysis, Herkman (2016) finds that the focus on the various frames (nationalism, nativism, empty rhetoric, political movement, and voice of people) differs slightly between the polities under analysis. Hamo et al. (2019) is currently the only discourse-linguistic study on the use of ‘populism’ in political discourse. Their study is based on a small

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corpus of Israeli press articles between 2012 and 2017 as well as media interviews. The authors stress the importance of an emic perspective to demonstrate how ‘the meanings of populism are negotiated, constructed and strategically employed by actual participants in public discourse’ (Hamo et al. 2019: 1). In their analysis, they find that in the corpus the meaning attributed to ‘populism’ by political actors themselves is mainly motivationalintentional and the term used as a device to manage face. They also find a reversal of evaluative load, i.e. instead of claiming authenticity in populist discourse, when explicitly discussed by political actors populism ‘is associated with cynicism and inauthenticity’ and therefore used as ‘an accusatory (or defensive) device, which sometimes involves the attribution of insincerity, superficiality and irresponsibility’ (Hamo et al. 2019: 7).

Methodology and Corpus This chapter employs a corpus-assisted analysis of catch terms, in order to apply the lexicographical methodology from politico-linguistics outlined above to a press corpus from Germany and the UK between 2012 and 2017. Using the software system sketch engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) to run a collocation analysis, I aim to analyse the changing semantic prosody (Louw 2000: 60) of both ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ at a time when the terms developed into socio-political keywords. Semantic prosody is the part of lexical meaning produced through consistent collocation patterns with evaluative expressions. The description of collocation patterns can therefore add an understanding of the semantics of the terms in the press by allowing an analysis of the contextual meaning on a denotational, evaluative, and voluntative level. In order to investigate the use by journalists and politicians quoted in the press in more detail, I will employ a combination of a quantitative corpus driven analysis and qualitative concordance line analysis: The qualitative part of the analysis will be based on a set of one hundred random concordance lines for each newspaper and each term,

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selected automatically through a function in sketch engine and examined manually by annotating them, forming categories inductively. Using a press corpus for research on political lexis is an established methodology: the press is one of the discursive spheres of political discourse. It both reports political utterances and interprets policy and rhetoric. Therefore, press texts are a good source for documenting language use of a variety of political actors: politicians and experts who are quoted, but most centrally journalists who are highly influential in the discursive formation of public opinion. The software package sketch engine offers a function that supports the analysis of semantic prosody: the ‘word sketch’ function produces an overview of the collocations of a word distinguished by grammatical relations. This method was previously successfully used, for example to explore representations of MUSLIM in a press corpus (Baker et al. 2013). Statistically, word sketch is based on a logDice measure to describe the strength of a collocation, because it is not affected by the corpus size (Rychlý 2008). The score has a theoretical maximum of fourteen, but usually scores for collocations are expected to be around ten. The British and German press systems have many similarities: despite the German press being categorized as democratic corporatist and the British as liberal (Hallin and Mancini 2004), both have a high level of professionalism in journalism as well as a similar level of external pluralism, i.e. a wide range of media outlets linked to different political groups. However, the party and the electoral systems, as well as the history of political discourse in Germany and the UK, show significant differences (Kranert 2019). To ensure comparability but also to keep the corpus manageable, a centre-left and a centre-right quality newspaper were chosen for each country: for Germany, Die Welt was chosen as a centre-right publication, while Die Tageszeitung (TAZ) represents centre-left publications. In the UK, The Times was chosen as a centre-right newspaper and the Guardian as a centre-left. In order to have tabloid newspapers represented, the Daily Mail and Die Bildzeitung were included in the corpus, as they are amongst the most widely read papers as well as accessible through the data base LexisNexis Academic (‘Lexis Nexis Academic Database’ 2018). Unfortunately, the database only contains Die Bildzeitung from

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2017 onwards and a realistic agreement could not be reached with the publisher Axel Springer Verlag, so that the analysis only contains the data from 2017. To form the corpus, LexisNexis was searched for articles from the German newspapers using the search phrase ‘populis! OR !populis!’ in order to capture compounds. For the British press, the search term was (‘populis!)’. The German corpus consists of 8057 documents with 5,949,175 words while the British corpus comprises 7756 documents counting 8,222,421 words. There is a clear rise in search results from 2012 (9% of the corpus) to 2017 (31%). Overall, there are substantially more hits in the quality newspapers than in the tabloids. Table 2.1 shows the representation of the search terms ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ (noun) in the corpus: In the following analysis, I aim to demonstrate the discursive function of the terms ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ used in the German and British press between 2012 and 2017, which I subdivided into five research questions: RQ 1: Overall, how has the semantic prosody of the terms changed? RQ 2: What is their function in the reported use by politicians? RQ 3: What is their function in the use by journalists? RQ 4: Which elements of meaning are contested in metalinguistic comments? RQ 5: Are there significant differences between the terms’ use in the German and in the British corpus? Table 2.1 Search term representation in the corpus Populism/Populismus Populist (n)

British corpus

German corpus

2495 1606

1852 1809

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The Semantic Prosody of the Nouns ‘Populist’ and ‘Populism’ in German and English Looking at the modifiers of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in Table 2.2, we can see that half of the terms concern the left–right spectrum, while the other half are negative terms such as ‘authoritarian’ or ‘cheap’. Figures 2.2 and 2.3 show that the collocation strength with leftwing/right-wing is less strong in 2012/2013 and rises in 2016. This analysis was made difficult by the fact that the spelling conventions in English are not consistent: While The Times and The Daily Mail mainly use ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’, the Guardian uses both the hyphenated and non-hyphenated spelling. This indicates that the function of the term was changing at that time towards a term that structures the political landscape: there is left and right, the classical metaphor for structuring the political space since the Table 2.2 Modifier collocations Populismus German Press

Populism British Press

Modifier

Freq.

Coll. Score (logDice)

pur [pure] rein [pure] billig [cheap] rechts [right] links [left]

28 31 24 59 46

10.30 9.94 9.88 9.41 9.13

blank [bare] antieuropäisch [antieuropean]

10 19

8.93 8.73

Modifier

Freq.

Coll. Score (logDice)

right-wing right-wing crass left-wing antiestablishment authoritarian xenophobic

116 34 21 23 20

10.52 9.26 8.91 8.63 8.6

18 16

8.48 8.35

populist (−n) German press

populist (−n) British press

rechts [right] mild [mild] gefährlich [dangerous] böse [evil] sogenannt [so-called] link [left]

right-wing right-wing left-wing

92 5 9

10.13 8.37 8.3

6 10

8.22 7.98

far-right anti-EU

17

7.78

reactionary

114 50 19

10.81 10.3 8.79

22 10

8.64 8.19

8

8.05

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M. Kranert

Populismus-link

Populismus-recht

Populism-leŌ-wing

Populism-right-wing

Populism-leŌwing

Populism-rightwing

12 10 8 6 4 2 0 2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

Fig. 2.2 Change in collocation strength (logDice) for populism-left-right

Populist-link (German)

Populist-recht (German)

Populist-leŌ-wing

Populist-right-wing

Populist-leŌwing

Populist-rightwing

12 10 8 6 4 2 0 2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

Fig. 2.3 Change in collocation strength (logDice) for populist-left-right

French revolution, which is often modified as centre-left, centre-right, far or radical left/right etc., and ‘populism’ seems to become an additional element in this structuring vocabulary.

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An analysis of the left–right modification of ‘populism’ in the centreleft and centre-right newspapers shows that ‘right’ is a stronger collocation in the centre-left newspapers the Guardian (10.75) than in The Times (9.19) and stronger in Die Tageszeitung (9.3) than in Die Welt (6.91). Looking at all concordances of the left–right modification from the whole corpus, it seems the left of centre newspapers insist on the distinction much more: 10.45% of all uses of ‘populism’ in the Guardian, and 8.21% in Die Tageszeitung are modified with either ‘left’/‘links’, or ‘right’—in comparison to just 4.5% in The Times and 2% in Die Welt. One explanation here could be found in quite a few articles in both the Guardian (11) and Die Tageszeitung (19) which discuss whether leftwing populism could be a positive alternative to right-wing nationalist and xenophobic populism: (1) Was ist etwa Populismus, was kann linker rechtem Populismus entgegensetzen, und was ist ehrlicher Populismus? (Hofmann, September 6, 2016) What is populism and what can left-wing populism put up against right-wing populism, and what is honest populism? (2) The left needs a new populism fast. (Jones, November 10, 2016)

Particularly revealing are the, albeit few, examples in which ‘populism’ as a negative phenomenon is seen on the left and on the right, a chain of equivalence that can be found in the centre-right newspapers. They show a function of the term ‘populism’ first described by Knobloch (2007: 116–17): in cases where the term is not used to devalue a policy or a rhetorical move, ‘populism’ is used as a term to order the political landscape. It locates political organizations and ideologies in the political spectrum and threatens them with exclusion. Knobloch found that populists are located in a grey zone between the acceptable political centre and political extremists. (3) Linksfraktionschefin Sahra Wagenknecht hat Merkels Flüchtlingsund Sicherheitspolitik mitverantwortlich für den Berliner Anschlag gemacht. Tauber: ‘Damit wird wieder mal deutlich, dass die Linkspartei eine rote AfD ist. Sahra Wagenknecht und Frauke Petry sind das doppelte

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Lottchen des Populismus in Deutschland. Deshalb schließt die CDU auch mit beiden Parteien eine Zusammenarbeit aus. So eine klare Abgrenzung nach beiden Seiten erwarte ich auch von SPD und Grünen. (Bild , January 7, 2017)

The Left Party’s parliamentary leader Sahra Wagenknecht partially blamed Merkel’s migration and security policies for the attack in Berlin. Tauber: ‘This illustrates that the Left Party is a red AfD. Sahra Wagenknecht und Frauke Petry are the twins of populism in Germany. The CDU therefore rules out a collaboration with either party. I expect similarly clear boundaries to both sides from the SPD and Greens. (Translation MK)

Example (3) illustrates that the term is not exclusive to right-wing parties and is here used to force other centre ground parties to accept that. This quotation, possibly because of its sexist salience and the literary allusion,1 was widely quoted in many newspapers. Of course, the debate here is about criticizing the migration policy of the Merkel government and many on the left also accused Wagenknecht of using xenophobic topoi. However, Tauber, a CDU politician, generalizes here from one member of the front bench to the whole party. But there are other examples not linked to the migration discourse where left- and right-wing populists are construed as comparable. Joachim Pfeiffer, another conservative politician, for example, talks about ‘left-green and right wing populists’ being allowed to exploit the open debate about the trade agreement TTIP (Tauber and Doll, October 31, 2016). This supports Knobloch’s (2007: 115) observation that ‘populism’ has also become a stigma term against groups who strategically act against the hegemonic idea of globalization as progress. A further part of the semantic prosody of the terms under analysis is their connection to other political terms through lists such as ‘nationalist, populist and’ in Table 2.3. The algorithm for this part of the word sketch looks for collocations of the node with coordinated phrases using ‘and’/‘or’ or a comma. They contribute to the meaning of the term through evaluative and denotative contextualization. If we search for collocations diachronically, the collocation with ‘nationalism’ becomes stronger from 2015 onwards. The difference is

43

2 When Populists Call Populists Populists …

Table 2.3 Evaluative contextualization of populism/populist Populist and …

Freq.

Coll. Score (logdice)

Populismus and …

Freq

Coll. Score (logdice)

Nationalismus Extremismus Protektionismus Fremdenfeindlichkeit Rassismus

27 10 8 4 6

10.58 9.63 9.26 8.15 8.03

Nationalist Demagogue Extremist Autocrat Dictator

26 12 23 8 5

11.04 10.25 20.23 9.74 9.04

Populism and …

Freq

Coll. Score (logDice)

Populist and …

Freq.

Coll. Score (logDice)

Nationalism Xenophobia Protectionism Demagoguery Euroscepticism

52 16 13 8 7

11.06 9.56 9.37 8.83 8.65

Demagogue [Le] Pen Nationalist Wilders Extremists

14 23 13 12 8

9.75 9.44 9.37 9.20 8.89

particularly strong against pre-2011 corpora: the British National corpus (BNC Consortium 2007) for English, collected in the 1990s, and the DeTenTen (see Jakubíˇcek et al. 2013) for German, collected in 2010 (Table 2.4). Looking at the fifty-two concordance lines for the collocation nationalism and populism, and sorting them for context as well as for year, I found that in British newspapers it can often be seen in negative lists such Table 2.4 Changes of populism/nationalism collocation, logDice value populism + nationalism populist + nationalist Populismus + Nationalismus (German) populist + Nationalist (German)

Pre–2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

7.83

9.04

9.11

0

0

10.87

10.51

0

0

0

0

7.12

9.42

8.46

1.84

0

0

0

8.09

10.14

10.22

3.36

9.4

0

9.31

0

10.19

10.61

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M. Kranert

as ‘division, intolerance, populism, nationalism and cynicism’ or ‘nationalism, populism, xenophobia’. These lists exist mainly in 2016–2017 and cannot be found in the corpora EngTenTen 2015 and the BNC either. These results indicate that the use of the terms ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in both German and British English is changing: the denotative contextualization points towards a use as a stigmatizing term for more nationalist ideologies, and even extreme right-wing political ideologies that include elements of nativism and xenophobia. Despite the fact that the right-wing leaders Geert Wilders (The Netherlands) and Marine Le Pen (France) appear in the overall collocation list, the results indicate that the concept ‘populist’ has a decreasing focus on leaders and is increasingly construed as a political group following a certain ideology, which is also indicated by a big increase in the number of plural uses of ‘populists’ in both corpora (Fig. 2.4). The singular use was in the majority in the English data before 2014— a result that is confirmed through the British National Corpus, which indicates 46% plural use in the 1990s. While in English there are a few examples of ‘nationalist and populist’ in the singular, all examples in German are in the plural. The stronger use of the plural in German could of course have its origin in the major referent of ‘Populisten’: the Plural of "Populist" in % 100 90 80

Axis Title

70 60 50

English Plural

40

German Plural

30 20 10 0

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

Fig. 2.4 Plural of ‘Populist’ in the German and English press corpus

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party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is, in great contrast to UKIP or the Brexit Party, not focused on a single person as the leader. In summary, I argue that one major emerging meaning of the terms ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in both German and English is their growing reference to ideological groups that have nationalism and nativism at the core of their world view, which supports Mudde’s (December 7, 2017) argument that actually nativism should be the focus of the debate. The verb collocations for ‘populism’/‘Populismus’ and ‘populist’ as calculated in the word sketch strengthen its semantic prosody as a stigma term (Table 2.5). Firstly, ‘populists’ is found as the subject of ‘nutzen’/‘use’ in the sense of ‘abuse’ and ‘exploit’, and ‘populism’ regularly appears in the object position of ‘vorwerfen’/‘accuse’. Other verbs that contribute to the negative semantic prosody are ‘stop’, ‘exploit’, ‘überlassen’/‘cede’ and ‘betreiben’/‘operate’. Secondly, it is possible to argue that some of the verb collocations of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ construe an overarching metaphorical scenario (Musolff 2006) of POPULISM as DISASTER: – POPULISM AS PLANTS/WEEDS (um sich greifen, nähren, feed, flourish, thrive) – POPULISM AS STORM (rise, sweep) – POPULISM AS FIRE (fuel) – POPULISM AS A BEAST (unleash) – POLITICS AS WAR/ POPULISM AS ENEMY (fight, combat, win, in eine Lücke stoßen, Terrain/Thema/ Räume überlassen, in die Hände spielen) Again, these patterns cannot be found in the BNC from the 1990s and DeTenTen, which was collected before 2010. This metaphorical scenario suggests a weakening of the denotative meaning of ‘populism’, as within this frame the focus is no longer on the meaning ‘policies or principles of any various political parties which seek to represent the interest of ordinary people’ (OED Oxford English Dictionary online 2019), but on the connotation of threat: it is the affective component of meaning that takes over in this context.

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Table 2.5 Verb collocations of populism and populist Populismus

Freq

Coll. Score (logdice)

Populist (German)

vorwerfen [accuse] nähren [approach] funktionieren [function] um sich greifen [run rampant] betreiben [operate] definieren [define] bedeuten [mean] brauchen [need] stellen [put]

21

9.5

5

9.03

9

9.05

7

8.69

überlassen [cede] hinterherlaufen [run after] verhelfen [help/empower] nutzen [use]

7

8.37

helfen [help]

4

8.3

gewinnen [win]

4

7.24

9

6.98

4

6.16

profitieren [profit] stärken [strengthen] in die Hände spielen [play into somebody’s hands] wählen [elect]

Freq.

Coll. Score (logdice)

15

10

5

9.26

5

9.13

7

8.65

6

8.6

10

8.54

5

8.48

7

8.43

10

7.99

10

7.76

Populism

Freq

Coll. Score (logDice)

Populist (English)

Freq.

sweep gallop fight fuel trump feed influence prefigure seduce unleash

11 7 17 11 7 7 6 5 5 5

9 8.93 8.83 8.83 8.58 8.33 8.27 8.21 8.17 8.02

grandstand thrive exploit oppose promise stop use offer allow make

5 5 4 5 5 4 6 4 6 12

Coll. Score (logDice) 8.49 8.29 7.92 7.32 7.18 6.85 6.96 6.77 6.69 6.5

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‘This Is Pure Populism’: Politicians’ Use of the Terms ‘Populism’ and ‘Populist’ in the Corpus In order to analyse the use of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ as a political catch term in more detail, I will now present a qualitative analysis of a sample of concordance lines. Through the random sample function in the sketch engine, a random sample of one hundred concordance lines for each term was chosen to make an in-depth analysis possible. As I could only obtain articles from Die Bildzeitung from 2017, all hits from that newspaper were included in the concordance analysis. Table 2.6 demonstrates the proportion of each term. All concordance lines of the random sample were annotated inductively, i.e. while reading through the concordance lines, functions of the term were identified and grouped. During that process, the following categories were developed: – – – –

the political spectrum named (left–right); the person or party called populist; whether it includes a metalinguistic comment; topic of the article;

Table 2.6 Random sample for concordance analysis

Populist (English) Populism (English)

Populist (German) Populismus (German)

N in corpus

N in random sample

% of hits in random sample

Guardian

The Times

The Daily Mail

1606

300

18.7

100

100

100

2495

300

12

100

100

100

N in N in % of Die TAZ corpus random hits in sample random sample

Die Welt

Die Bild-zeitung

1852

285

15.8

300

300

85

1809

263

14.2

300

300

63

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– if stigma term what the stigma is against; – use by journalist or quotation/reported use by politician, expert, or member of the public. All concordance lines in the corpus were annotated for whether they are speech of the journalist, or whether they are quoting or reporting somebody else’s utterances. If this could not be ascertained by the context of the concordance line, the text itself was checked. Looking only at the quotations of politicians, three types of uses of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ were identified: – stigmatization of a policy; – stigmatization of rhetoric; – naming of a (party-)political ideology or movement. There are many examples of politicians of all sides whose policies have been named ‘populism’ in both German and English because they are seen as symbolic policies aiming at popularity—these policies are, often implicitly, stigmatized as not effective but popular. The term ‘populism’ is here used as an interactional resource to discredit policies and rhetoric. (4) Die Fraktion von Bündnis 90/Die Grünen nannten die Forderung nach Senkung der Stromsteuer jedoch „reinen Populismus”. […] Es gehe nicht an, dass durch eine Senkung der Stromsteuer auf der anderen Seite die Rentenkasse belastet werde, hieß es. (Kaiser, January 30, 2013) However, the parliamentary group Bündnis 90/Die Grünen called the demand for lowering taxes on electricity ‘pure populism’, saying […]that a lowering of energy taxes should not burden the state pension fund. (Translation MK) (5) Murphy says Labour must avoid the ‘populism’ of opposing every spending cut: It is important to be both credible and popular when it comes to defence investment and the economics of defence. There is a difference between populism and popularity. Credibility is the bridge away from populism and towards popularity. (Watt, January 5, 2012)

In example (4) from Die Welt we find one of the strong collocations in the corpus: ‘reiner Populismus’. This can be found in all three German

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newspapers in all years: this is used for both stigmatization of a policy and of rhetoric, which are, of course, sometimes difficult to distinguish. Is a demand just rhetoric or for an actual policy to be implemented? Here, it seems to be an argument about policy as it is countered with possible consequences of the policy. But politicians also warn their own parties not to suggest policies that are not credible. The metalinguistic comment about the meaning of ‘populism’ and ‘popular’ in (5) illustrates that well. The category of countering rhetorical suggestions that are purely for the purpose of attracting voters often follows the pattern of ‘that is populism’ or, in indirect speech, ‘is accused of populism’ and ‘bemoan populism’. The first two categories of quotations constitute between 2 and 11% of all concordance lines of the random sample: The Times with only 2% and Die Welt with 11%. I found no significant difference in quotations from the left or the right. These examples are almost evenly spread through the years of the sample. Throughout the sample, the use of ‘populism’ to name a political or ideological movement in quotations of politicians clearly increases between 2015 and 2017, and mostly refers to xenophobic and nationalist right-wing parties outside the established political centre. Although this could just be an effect of the random sample, it is in line with the semantic prosody demonstrated above.

‘Populism’ and ‘Populist’ Used by Journalists Not surprisingly, the use by journalists reflects the use by politicians, with a few exceptions: non-political and non-negative uses. The non-political use of the words is fairly widespread in the UK and amounts to about 10% of the random sample. The topics it is connected to vary between tabloids, where the main topic is sports, and broadsheets, where it is art, cinema, and literature. In both cases, the noun ‘populist’ is almost exclusively used in the singular referring to a sportsperson or artist, and mainly carries positive or neutral connotations, as in (6).

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(6) Olivia Chaney: celebrating Henry Purcell, the bawdy baroque populist (Guardian, May 11, 2016).

The exclusive singular use indicates that a ‘populist’ here is clearly a type of personality or style of an individual. As its meaning is related to popularity, and some high-brow culture comments of course see popular culture as less valuable, this is a rare exception. This type of use is far less frequent in the German press, where it exists mainly in sports reporting. Obvious non-negative uses in political discourse are rare; more commonly, the naming of an ideology as populist is evaluatively ambiguous. Sometimes, ‘populism’ is construed as a personal skill of being popular and evaluated positively, parallel to the non-political use, and is applied to various politicians from the British Prime Minister Cameron (Conservative) to the German Chancellor Merkel (Christian Democrat). In the two left-of-centre newspapers there are also a few examples where ‘populism’ itself is seen as positive, because it politicizes an otherwise depoliticized and restricted debate. The interactional resource against policies and rhetoric we saw in utterances of politicians are also employed by journalists and amount to between 5 and 10 per cent of the concordance lines. The politicians or parties attacked cover the whole political spectrum, even in The Daily Mail the terms are used against the former British Prime Minister and centrist Labour leader Blair (3) and the left-wing Labour Leader Corbyn (2), as well as the Dutch populist Wilders (2) and the US presendential candidate Hillary Clinton (2). The noun ‘populist’ is regularly used in the singular, referring to a broad spectrum of popular and rhetorically skilled politicians from Thatcher to Macron. The use is mostly, but by no means always, defined by negative connotations, often of an over-reliance on popular rhetoric and a lack of credibility. The increase of the plural ‘populists’ over time is also reflected in the sample. The plural ‘populists’ here often collocates with terms that indicate negative evaluation, such as ‘fighting populists’, ‘angry’, and ‘defeat’. This use was marked as a reference to an ideological or political group, and increasingly we find the bold unmodified ‘(the) populists’/ ‘(die) Populisten’—both with and without article -, which mostly refers to

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right-wing nativist and authoritarian parties in Europe. The increased plural usage therefore mirrors the increased visibility and success of rightwing parties which are termed populist. And despite the fact that not all uses have a clear negative evaluation in the context, the semantic prosody of the term is strong enough for it to be read as a stigma term that, in Knobloch’s (2007) thinking, orders the political space. In some cases, mainly in the centre-right press, I also found a parallel exclusion of left-wing and right-wing populists. A similar function becomes dominant for the term ‘populism’: it is regularly employed as a name for a political group or ideology. The majority of cases are again bare uses without any definition or discussion and mostly referring to right-wing parties, which draw their stigmatizing meaning either from the semantic prosody analysed above or from metaphorical constructions as the POPULISM IS AN ARMY metaphor in (7): (7) Gerade in einer Zeit, in der die Welt neu geordnet wird und der Populismus auf dem Vormarsch ist, kommt es mehr denn je auf ein starkes Europa an. (Ettel and Zschäpitz, November 23, 2016) Especially at a time in which the world order is changing and populism is gaining ground, a strong Europe is needed more than ever before.

Although the vast majority of analysed cases where the meaning of ‘populism’ is not reflected in the context does not include elements of meaning proposed by political theory, there are some cases in which the elite–people distinction that unites most political theory on populism shines through despite the term being used as a stigma term: in a 2013 article in the Daily Mail a European Union referendum in 2014 is suggested as a ‘proper response to populism’. ‘Populism’ here refers to UKIP, as the chain of reference in the text shows, and at the heart of it lies ‘a legitimate concern unacknowledged by the political establishment’ (Afriyie, October 6, 2013). Thus, while the headline suggests ‘populism’ as a problem, the text picks up a core topic of populist political thought: the issue of a political elite not listening to a legitimate concern of the people. This is, however, by no means the general use of ‘populism’ in the Daily Mail —in other places, left-wing politicians Ed Miliband (Labour),

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Nicola Sturgeon (Scottish National Party), Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru), and Natalie Bennett (Green Party) are all brought together under the umbrella term ‘left-wing populism’ (Daily Mail , April 18, 2015).

‘What You Call Populism, We Call Democracy’: Metalinguistic Contestations of a Political Term The analysis of the semantic prosody and the functions of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in context showed that in the majority, although certainly not in all cases, the terms are used as stigma terms. To add a further layer of analysis, which will allow us to triangulate the results so far, I will now explore how the meaning of the terms is contested in metalinguistic discourse, i.e. when politicians or journalists openly address and reflect on the meaning of the terms. The analysis is based on those concordance lines from the random sample that contained metalinguistic comments. Metalinguistic comments on ‘populism’ in the Daily Mail mainly occur in the context of discourses on Euroscepticism and Brexit, core topics of the version of Eurosceptic conservatism supported by that newspaper. The metalinguistic reflections focus on the function of ‘populism’ as a stigma term. There are comments that produce a competition in nomination suggesting a different term to be used to foreground certain discursive elements (Klein 1991: 55): in 2014 two articles report comments by the then vice-president of the European Commission, Viviane Reding, criticizing the anti-immigrant sentiments of the British government as populist (Daily Mail , January 10, 2014; Daily Mail , January 11, 2014). In the articles, Eurosceptic conservatives Daniel Hannan and Peter Bone argue that what is called ‘populism’ by Reding should actually be called ‘democracy’: (8) Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan said: When Mrs Reding says ‘populism’, what she means is politicians doing what their constituents want, or as we call it in English, ‘democracy’. (Daily Mail , January 11, 2014)

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Here, the writer activates a part of what Brubaker (2017) calls the populist repertoire—a discursive repertoire of politicians that can be described as populists in the academic sense. Its core element is the reference to an understanding of democracy as direct democracy, which constitutes a case of re-democratization and antagonistic repoliticization. Antagonistic re-politicization is a strategy that aims to re-open political discourses that are supposedly suppressed by an elite, and therefore bring it back under control by the people: here, it is the discourse on regulating immigration. Therefore, the repudiation of the stigma term ‘populism’ here is linked to elements of populist discourses itself. A further metalinguistic comment is the reflection on ‘populism’ as ‘a sneering term of the political class’ (Murray, December 8, 2016). Again, the semantic battle here starts with the insight that ‘populism’ as a stigma term should be avoided. The reflection itself also draws on a populist repertoire, here the distinction between the elite and the people. The argument reflects what Hamo et al. (2019: 7) call a reversal of evaluative load in the use of the stigma term ‘populism’: while populist discourse claims authenticity, the term itself ‘is associated with cynicism and inauthenticity’. This is exactly what Murray claims: the state broadcaster BBC and politicians are construed as the elite that uses ‘populist’ as a stigma term against the people who fight the corruption of the elite. The term stigmatizes as it supposedly implies that Brexit voters are vulgar and uneducated. This constitutes a politics of re-democratization that mixes speaking on behalf of the people as plebs and defending the ordinary voter as the sovereign people. Of course, repudiations of the use of ‘populism’ in articles of the Daily Mail do not stop the newspaper from using the stigma term continuously, particularly against the policies of the left, as we saw in the discussion above. That ‘populism’ is a term that structures the political landscape and has an exclusionary character is picked up in articles in both Die Tageszeitung and Die Welt: the left-of-centre Die Tageszeitung reflects on its function to discredit positions that ‘criticise the liberal ideological consensus, question the liberal-conservative and social-democratic two party system in Europe, or call out and criticise deficits in the parliamentary democracy’ (Camus, March 14, 2014; translation MK). The right of centre Die Welt

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quotes the 5-star Movement politician Luigi Di Maio saying that the term is used for new political movements that cannot be classified in the old political spectrum (Reuscher, July 12, 2017). Another core topic in Die Welt is the argument that accusing political parties of ‘populism’ is problematic as all political parties want to be popular and elected—so we have ‘populists that call populists populists’ (Sprenger, September 8, 2016). The semantic element ‘popularity’ is picked up in numerous metalinguistic comments—some of which want to draw a clear line between popularity and populism: both the Guardian and The Times quote Jim Murphy, who in 2012 warned his Labour colleagues not to oppose spending cuts ‘out of populist intentions’—by which he means out of the intention to be popular, as in his view policies only lead to popularity if they are credible. A final group of metalinguistic comments concerns the conceptual level of discussion of populism by political scientists. While in terms of understanding right-wing politics it is often Cas Mudde who is used as an expert, there are quite a few examples of debates on Ernesto Laclau in both left-of-centre newspapers in a debate on whether there is a credible possibility of a left-wing populist movement in Europe.

Conclusions This chapter aimed to analyse the functions of the terms ‘populist’ and ‘populism’ in political discourse in Germany and the UK by employing a combination of computer assisted critical discourse studies and lexicological reflections from German politico-linguistics to describe these terms as political catch terms. The semantic prosody, concordance lines from the sample, and metalinguistic comments all point to a use as a stigma term with two different functions: to discredit policies and rhetoric of political actors, or to name political ideologies and groups that are not part of the established political centre ground. The delegitimization of policies and rhetoric mainly happens through the semantic element of ‘aiming at popularity’, which is also the core meaning as a non-political term. As a political stigma term, ‘populism’ seems to include an opposition of ‘popularity’ and ‘credibility’.

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The quantitative changes in the semantic prosody between 2012 and 2017 and the increased use as a naming device for right-wing political groups means the terms have become synonymous with nativism and xenophobia. Mudde (December 7, 2017) points out the problem of the conflation of the radical right and populism in the definition of the Cambridge Dictionary and the announcement that ‘populism’ was the word of the year 2017. He argues from the point of view of political theory that this conflation is problematic. However, the analysis given in the announcement of the word of the year reflects what seems to happen with the term ‘populism’: while it used to be more a device for discrediting a certain type of policy or rhetoric of any part of the political spectrum, it seems to have become synonymous with right-wing ideologies. The question that political theorists have to answer is whether it is still a useful term to use in academic analysis. A critical awareness of its function as a political stigma term would certainly help. Linguistically, the new meaning is often implied when the terms ‘populism’ or the plural ‘populists’ are used in a structure that Jeffries and Walker (2017: 78) call bald unmodified: the use of the term without pre- or post-modification, which seems to indicate ’the end point of the process […] of a specialized sense of a lexical item developing that becomes a kind of shorthand for a complex set of ideas’. The stigmatizing function of the bald unmodified use is supported by a metaphorical emptying of denotative meaning when populism ‘sweeps’, is ‘unleashed’ and ‘fuelled’. These metaphorical frames strengthen the affective component of meaning. In order to triangulate the functions suggested in the corpus analysis, I analysed metalinguistic comments on the use of our catch terms in the random sample. This analysis revealed that while the use of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in the majority of cases is not linked to the semantics of ‘populism’ suggested by political theory, these elements become relevant in metalinguistic strategies by right-wing Eurosceptics: they reject the use of ‘populism’ as a stigma term for their policies and suggest replacing it with ‘democracy’. This justification of a competition in nomination draws on the populist repertoires suggested by Brubaker (2017). It also contests the reversal of evaluative load (Hamo et al. 2019) in the stigma term.

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This last point also addresses the comparative element of the research presented: there is generally no indication that the use of ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ differs widely between German and British press systems, despite their different media and political systems. However, in the corpus there is no German newspaper actively using populist topoi in reflection and repudiation of the term ‘populism’. This seems to be quite specific to the role of the Daily Mail in British political discourse, as Euroscepticism and populist repertoire seem to be central elements of its political stance. Finally, we need to reflect on the complexity of different functions, and the indication that the usage is changing: the changes between 2012 and 2017 seem to be subtle. They seem to be a case of ‘layered simultaneity’ (Blommaert 2005: 126) in discourse history: changes in discourse semantics are often not visible in short spaces of time. I used some comparison with older corpora to gain a clearer picture and saw that the emerging use of ‘populist’ synonymous with ‘right-wing’ is a more recent phenomenon, but for a more detailed diachronic picture a longer timescale of the corpus seems necessary to capture that change. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Adrian Sewell and Patrick Stevenson as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The responsibility for inconsistencies and mistakes in this final version is, of course, all mine.

Note 1. ‘Das doppelte Lottchen’ is a well-known children’s novel of separated twins who found each other. It has been repeatedly adapted for the screen.

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Sprenger, Reinhard K. 2016. “Was ist ein Populist?” Die Welt, September 8. Retrieved from LexisNexis Academic database. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2017. “Discourse Theory in Populism Research: Three Challenges and a Dilemma.” JLP 16 (4): 523–534. https://doi.org/10.1075/ jlp.17025.sta. Tauber, Andre, and Nikolaus Doll. 2016. “Jetzt muss Europa die Lehren aus Ceta ziehen” Die Welt, October 31. Retrieved from LexisNexis Academic database. Guardian. 2016. “Olivia Chaney: Celebrating Henry Purcell, the Bawdy Baroque Populist.” May 11. Retrieved from LexisNexis Academic database. Watt, Nicholas. 2012. “Labour Accepts £5bn of Defence Cuts as Jim Murphy Rejects ‘Populism’.” Guardian, January 5. Retrieved from LexisNexis Academic database.

Michael Kranert is Lecturer of Sociolinguistics at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He is interested in comparative political discourse analysis in English and German speaking countries. In 2019, he published a major monograph on the discourses of the Third Way in Germany and the UK (Discourse and Political Culture).

Part II Populist and Nationalist Discourses: Links and Tensions

3 The Impossible Totality of Ukraine’s “People”: On the Populist Discourse of the Ukrainian Maidan Olga Baysha

Introduction Scandalization and dramatization; anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism; a search for simple answers and scapegoats; a fictionalization of politics through the blurring of the boundaries between information and entertainment; Manichean divisions of the social into “good us” vs. “evil them”; the instigating and constant stoking of fears of “others”— such are the characteristics of populism most often mentioned in both popular and academic publications (Mammone 2009; Reisigl 2014; Wodak and Forchtner 2014). According to numerous authors, all of these hallmarks of populism stem from the simple fact that it always appeals to the “common man/woman” as opposed to “the elites” (see also Kranert, Introduction in this volume) and that to connect with and convert diverse audiences into a unified popular front, populist O. Baysha (B) National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_3

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politicians/movements/parties need to create what Ruth Wodak calls “calculated ambivalence” (2015: 14). In terms of its capacity to create “calculated ambivalence,” to simplify the social to the extreme, and to divide the world into clear-cut categories of “us”—“the marginalized/the underdog/the people”—vs. “them”— “the establishment/the 1 percent/the elites” (Stavrakakis 2017: 258)— populism takes no ideological stance. As Wodak states, “the central meaning of populism—that democracy should reflect the ‘pure and undiluted’ will of the people—implies that it can accommodate ideologies of both the traditional right and left” (2015: 8). Both left-wing and right-wing populism consider society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite” (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017), but the constructed character of “the people” in each case is different. Left-wing populism traditionally orients itself towards internationalism (see also Demata, Chapter 10 in this volume), drawing the line between “us” and “them” as a boundary between reactionary and progressive forces regardless of national identity. In contrast, rightwing populism more often than not invokes nationalistic imaginaries, employing metaphors related to blood ties such as “nation as body” (Wodak 2015)—one of the most enduring metaphorical constructions of political discourse (Musolff 2010). In other words, what unites various types of populism across ideological differences is the need to create their own versions of “the people” through aligning different popular “demands,” to put it in Ernesto Laclau’s terms. In this sense, Laclau argues, populism is “quite simply, a way of constructing the political” (2005: xi). In order to constitute a broad popular front of “the people,” it needs to ignore social diversity and present its “people” as a homogeneous unified demos—an ideal collective of all citizens existing beyond social divides. In this paper, using Laclau’s theory of populism, I analyse the populist discourse of the Euromaidan—a 2013–2014 movement for European integration in Ukraine, an Eastern European state known for its cultural heterogeneity (Plokhy 2008). While the majority of people living in western Ukraine (populated predominantly by ethnic Ukrainians)

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supported the Euromaidan, the majority of those living in the southeast (predominantly ethnic Russians or Russian-speaking Ukrainians) rejected it. In the Euromaidan’s populist discourse, however, this split was not reflected: “The Ukrainian people” appeared to be a homogeneous, unified demos existing beyond social divides. In what follows, after presenting Laclau’s theory of populism, I discuss the Euromaidan and its populist discourse in more detail.

Laclau’s Theory of Populism First and foremost, in Laclau’s theorizing, populism appears not as an ideology or “a type of movement—identifiable with either a special social base or a particular ideological orientation—but a political logic” (Laclau 2005: 117). It is a way of establishing the very unity of the collective, “the people,” which always emerges as a result of political articulation (Laclau 1977). According to Laclau, “the people” of a populist movement appear when one unsatisfied democratic demand—the smallest unit of his analysis—comes to be united with other demands, and when these demands are “equivalently” united to oppose the established order.1 This chain of otherwise different and sometimes even incommensurable claims is equivalent only in one sense: vis-à-vis the “otherness” of those excluded from the newly established populist collective (or “totality,” as Laclau calls it). “To grasp that totality conceptually, we have to grasp its limits— that is to say, we have to differentiate it from something other than itself,” Laclau (2005: 69) maintains. The exclusion of “otherness” is thus the condition that sets up the emergence of “the people,” and thereby enables populism to take root through a “constitutive exclusion,” as Laclau calls this (2006: 652). The excluded “other” performs thus as a “constitutive outside.” Any populist identity for “the people,” created through the equivalential chaining of various unsatisfied demands, will necessarily be full of internal contradictions and tensions, as the constructed external equivalence always subverts internal differences. Accordingly, all populist identities are formed through the tension of differential and equivalential logics. “What we have ultimately,” Laclau claims:

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is a failed totality, the place of an irretrievable fullness. This totality is an object which is both impossible and necessary. Impossible, because the tension between equivalence and difference is ultimately insurmountable; necessary, because without some kind of closure, however precarious it might be, there would be no signification and no identity. (Laclau 2005: 70)

Any “closure,” in turn, requires naming, which is central in constituting the unity of a populist collective. It serves as a discursive glue used to assemble the heterogeneous elements of the impossible but necessary unity. In order to go beyond a vague feeling of solidarity and actually form “the people” of populism, equivalential relations need to be crystallized in a certain discursive identity. Without naming, the collective simply cannot be formed. The populist collective comes into existence through signification, when one particularity (democratic demand), without stopping to be a particular difference, assumes the representation of the whole. The process of “taking up, by a particularity, of an incommensurable universal signification” is what Laclau calls “hegemony” (2005: 71); for him, a non-hegemonic universality cannot exist. According to Laclau, the newly established hegemonic identity “becomes something of the order of an empty signifier, its own particularity embodying an unachievable fullness” (2005: 71). Representing the ever-larger chain of demands, it “has to dispossess itself of particularistic contents in order to embrace social demands which are quite heterogeneous” (Laclau 2005: 96). In other words, the “emptiness” of the signifiers that provide unity and identity to a populist collective is not the result of ideological or political underdevelopment; rather, it is a structural necessity (Laclau 1996). The wider the equivalential chain, the more difficult it is to determine the identity of the populist collective in any clear terms: “It is here that the moment of emptiness necessarily arises … Ergo, ‘vagueness’ and ‘imprecision’, but these do not result from any kind of marginal or primitive situation; they are inscribed in the very nature of the political” (Laclau 2005: 98–99). The language of a populist discourse, therefore, regardless of its ideological leaning, will always be “imprecise and fluctuating: not because of any cognitive failure, but

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because it tries to operate performatively within a social reality which is to a large extent heterogeneous and fluctuating” (Laclau 2005: 118). Because any assemblage of heterogeneous elements can only be kept together if unified by a single name, and because “the extreme form of singularity is an individuality” (Laclau 2005: 100), the group as a whole is often identified with the name of its leader. The whole process of “investing” one particular signifier with the meaning of “mythical fullness” is unthinkable without “affect”—the moment of “enjoyment” (Laclau 2005: 111–115). “There is no populism,” Laclau claims, “without affective investment in a partial object” (2005: 116). When a “popular demand” appears—passionately formed from the plurality of unsatisfied social claims—an internal antagonistic frontier emerges, separating the institutionalized system from the people. The social is dichotomized. This division is sustained through the employment of privileged signifiers like “regime” or “oligarchy” to denote the totality of the “evil other” as well as “the people” or “the nation” to denote the “good us.” According to Laclau, the emergence of an antagonistic frontier is an essential feature of populism. In reality, however, things become far more complex as this dichotomizing frontier, without disappearing, “is blurred as a result of the oppressive regime itself becoming hegemonic— that is, trying to interrupt the equivalential chain of the popular camp by an alternative equivalential chain, in which some of the popular demands are articulated to entirely different links” (Laclau 2005: 131). For example, the equivalential chain of any populist movement—be it the Occupy Wall Street in the US or the Yellow Vests in France—is comprised of many different demands, including radical ones. Normally, in the discourses of progressive social movements, radical demands do not assume the hegemonic representations of these movements. However, radicalism may come to represent them in institutionalized discourses “simply through administrative practices which deal bureaucratically with social issues” (Laclau 2001: 12). In such a way, in the hegemonic articulations of “regimes,” populist movements may appear as associated primarily with radicalism, lawlessness, and disorder. If such an interruption of the populist chain happens, the meanings of particular demands become “indeterminate between alternative

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equivalential frontiers” (Laclau 2005: 131). A signifier whose meaning is “suspended” in this way is called “floating”; it is used to organize alternative discourses and alternative ways of constructing “the people,” until the outcome of the hegemonic struggle determines which meaning will ultimately be fixed. According to Laclau, “floating and empty signifiers should be conceived as partial dimensions—and so as analytically distinguishable—in any process of hegemonic construction of the ‘people’” (2005: 133). In practice, however, there is not much distance between the two; both denote hegemonic operations, their referents largely overlap, and a situation where only one of the terms applies exclusively is hardly imaginable. It is the unending, undecidable game between “the empty” and “the floating” that constitutes the essence of “the political,” which always deals with the construction of a “people” (Laclau 2006). In other words, according to Laclau, any political intervention is populist to some extent, which “does not mean, however, that all political projects are equally populist; that depends on the extension of the equivalential chain unifying social demands” (Laclau 2005: 154). The more extended the chain, the more populist its discourse. According to Laclau: [w]e have two ways of constructing the social: either through the assertion of a particularity—in our case, a particularity of demands whose only links to other particularities are of a differential nature (as we have seen: no positive terms, only differences); or through a partial surrender of particularity, stressing what all particularities have, equivalentially, in common. The second mode of construction of the social involves, as we know, the drawing of an antagonistic frontier; the first does not. I have called the first mode of constructing the social logic of difference, and the second, logic of equivalence. Apparently, we could draw the conclusion that one precondition for the emergence of populism is the expansion of the equivalential logic at the expense of the differential one. (Laclau 2005: 77–78)

Laclau acknowledges that in practice equivalence and difference are not mutually exclusive; they require each other for the construction of the social, which is characterized by this irreducible tension: “All social (that

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is discursive) identity is constructed at the meeting point of difference and equivalence” (Laclau 2005: 80). However, “an institutionalist discourse is one that attempts to make the limits of the discursive formation coincide with the limits of the community,” while in the case of populism, “the ‘people’ … is something less than the totality of the members of the community: it is a partial component which nevertheless aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality” (Laclau 2005: 81). The crux of the difference between “institutional” and populist discourse is that the latter privileges some hegemonic (or empty) signifiers “which structure, as nodal points, the ensemble of a discursive formation” (Laclau 2005: 81). It is these privileged signs that delimit the boundaries of the social constructed through populist equivalential logic. As Laclau puts it, “[i]n order to have the ‘people’ of populism, we need … a plebs who claims to be the only legitimate populus—that is, a partiality which wants to function as the totality of the community” (2005: 81). In contrast, “institutional discourse” enables all differences to be considered as equally valid. In what follows, I discuss the formation of the populist discourse of the Ukraine’s 2013–2014 revolution, which established itself as a broad social movement after the empty signifier “Maidan” had come to reresent hegemonically various revolutionary demands united equivalentially and when the totality of Maidan’s constitutive outside had been discursively constructed.

The Impossible Totality of the Ukrainian Maidan Euromaidan (hereafter also “the Maidan”) started in Kyiv on November 21, 2013, when protesters expressed their disapproval of President Victor Yanukovych for refusing to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union.2 The events that followed are well documented: the dispersal of demonstrators by police special forces, the escalating confrontation, violent clashes, human casualties, Yanukovych leaving Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea by Russia, an insurgency in the east of Ukraine (Donbas region), and the Ukrainian army’s actions against

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Donbas “terrorism,” which took the lives of thousands of Ukrainians and caused hundreds of thousands to flee the country (UN News 2017). Among the Maidan protesters, there was a widely shared belief that Yanukovych refused to sign the agreement as a result of “Russia’s attempt to strong-arm the Ukrainian government into joining the Eurasian Economic Union” (Yekelchuk 2015: 66). For many of these protesters, an idealized “Europe” served as a symbol of “democracy, rule of law, and economic opportunity” (Yekelchuk 2015: 102), while the Russia-led economic union signified historical regression. Joining Russia instead of Europe was seen as slipping back toward a “Soviet despotism” (Kuzio 2017). It is here that the positions of Maidan liberals and nationalists converged: the latter supported the Maidan not because of democratization but due to its clear anti-Russia stance (Sakwa 2015). At the end of the day, it is this paradoxical unity that made the Maidan movement deeply contradictory and alienated Ukraine’s Russophone population who live predominantly in the southeastern regions of Ukraine (Baysha 2020). The farther east one looked, the stronger and more unified a rejection of the Maidan one would find (KIIS 2004; Kull et al. 2015).3 Starting in late February of 2014, anti-Maidan demonstrations spread in Ukraine’s eastern and some southern regions. In April 2014, after Russian military forces took control of Crimea, anti-Maidan protests in the Donbas escalated into an armed insurgency, with Russia providing the rebels with weapons and supporting them with military personnel (Sutyagin 2015). Many analysis, politicians, and media workers see this as Russia’s “invasion,” “incursion,” or “occupation” of Ukraine (e.g., Brzezinsky 2014; Hadley 2019; Haltiwanger 2018; McCain 2014; Klimkin 2019; Stanovaya 2019). However, what is often lost in representing the Ukrainian crisis exclusively through this frame is that about half the people living in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions justified the armed resistance against the new Kyiv government, which they perceived as illegitimate (ZN,UA 2014). In other words, what is often disregarded is that the roots of the insurgency were local, despite Russia co-opting it for its own geopolitical interests. To define the situation in Laclau’s terms, the Maidan drew an internal antagonistic frontier separating those in power from the protesters

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holding democratic demands of various sorts: the latter wanted to stop abuses of power, corruption, and nepotism, to restrain oligarchic influence, to refuse economic cooperation with Russia in favour of European integration, and so on. Articulating these demands equivalentially, the movement for European integration brought to Ukraine’s political discourse the impossible totality of “the Ukrainian people” fighting against the “anti-popular regime,” as the Maidan dubbed Yanukovych’s government. “The Maidan,” which had thereby become an empty signifier, assumed the hegemonic representation of all the democratic demands of the movement. As the confrontation between the protesters and the government unfolded, the particularism of the demands that were already part of the Maidan’s equivalential chain clashed with the demands of those opposing the Maidan. Some of the Maidan’s basic demands had entirely different associations from those of anti-Maidan views (See Fig. 3.1). Maidan liberals associated the Maidan predominantly with the movement toward democracy and civilization, while for Maidan radicals it was connected mainly with the movement away from any dependency on Russia and any union with it. By contrast, for opponents it became

Fig. 3.1 “Euromaidan” as a floating signifier

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linked to the ideas of extremism, nationalism, and a colonial dependency on the West. The empty signifier “Maidan” became a floating one: its meaning was “suspended.”

Research Questions, Methodology, and Design The purpose of this study was to trace the formation of Maidan populist discourse. My research question was therefore: how had the Maidan come to articulate itself as a totality representing the whole of the Ukrainian people? To answer this question, I analysed the speeches delivered onsite in Kyiv’s main square from December 1, 2013 (the day after police dispersed protesting students) to February 22, 2014 (the day Yanukovych was removed from office). All the data was collected from YouTube using its search function. Overall, thirteen speeches by ten Maidan leaders (Table 3.1) were analysed qualitatively. I analysed the articulations of the Maidan leaders using a method informed by Laclau’s theory of discourse, which he developed in partnership with Chantal Mouffe (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). According to this theory, discourse appears to be “a real force which contributes to the moulding and constitution of social relations” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 110). Since social relations are seen as discursively constructed, the classical “thought/reality” dichotomy no longer appears relevant, and “the categories which have until now been considered exclusively of one or another” are reconsidered (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 110). Synonymy, metonymy, metaphor, and other rhetorical devices are understood not as “forms of thought that add a second sense to a Table 3.1 Ideological leanings of Maidan speakers Liberal-democratic

Liberal-nationalistic

Radical-nationalistic

Klitschko, Vitali Lutsenko, Yuriy Poroshenko Petro Saakashvili, Mikheil

Lyashko Oleg Tymoshenko, Yulia Yatsenyuk, Arseniy

Farion, Irina Parasyuk, Volodymyr Tyahnibok, OlehYaroch, Dmytro

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primary,” but as “part of the primary terrain itself in which the social is constructed” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 110). Insisting on the ontological generality of rhetoric and on the tropological character of any articulation, Laclau asserts that hegemony is realized through a passage from metonymy to metaphor, from a “contiguous” starting point to its consolidation in “analogy” (Laclau 2014: 22). The culmination of this tropological movement is the moment of synecdoche. As Mark Wenman put it: For Laclau, hegemony is intrinsically a threefold process of symbolic representation that moves from an initial movement of metonymy to metaphoric substitution and then to a decisive (although necessarily incomplete) synecdoche: the part standing in for the whole. (2003: 584)

The hegemonic moment of synecdoche takes place when one particular sector represents the new collective identity—when a part comes to represent the whole. One of the most famous examples Laclau uses to illustrate this tropological transformation is Solidarnosc ´—a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement in communist Poland of the 1980s that took its name from a Gdansk-based trade union. In Laclau’s presentation, the signifier Solidarnosc ´ became empty (lost its specificity) as soon as it stopped representing a particular demand of Gdansk workers and “came to signify a much wider popular camp against an oppressive regime” (2005: 81). In other words, Solidarnosc ´ came to signify synecdochically what, strictly speaking, it was not: an impossible totality of various anti-governmental struggles united equivalentially; it became a figural term of the totality that could not be substituted by any literal name. Before it was able to perform this synecdochical function, however, Solidarnosc had some way to go: first it had to be associated with the whole of the movement contiguously/metonymically, and then analogically/metaphorically. After the metaphorical analogy had been consolidated, it assumed the unquestionable synecdochical representation. Using this conceptualization of hegemonic discourse, I analysed how “Maidan” came to represent synecdochically other elements that had been united equivalentially, and thus assumed a hegemonic position.

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Table 3.2 Key signifiers Yanukovych’s system of power The enemies of Ukraine, occupants, Ukrainophobes, bandits, criminals, killers, fratricides, bloodsuckers, villains, thieves, robbers, orientals, despots, liars, etc.

The Maidan

The Anti-Maidan

Ukrainians, Ukraine’s sons, sisters, brothers, compatriots, freedom fighters, comrades, Europeans, free, strong, fearless, resolute, patriotic, heroic, dignified, etc.

Slaves, servants, serfs, lackeys, footmen, beggars, renegades, traitors, enemies, apostates, degenerate, fearful, scared, sick, weak, etc.

There were three stages in my analysis. First, through carefully listening to and transcribing the speeches, I collected a comprehensive list of all the signs—the basic elements of any discourse formation—that were used in the speeches to present each of the conflicting camps (see Table 3.2). Then, I identified the connections between these signs and other elements of the discursive field to see how the discourse had been formed through equivalential linkages between signs. Finally, I compared my findings to the findings of my previous research, in which I analysed 430 opinion pieces by pro-Maidan bloggers from the beginning of the revolution until its victory (Baysha 2018). All the speeches under my analysis were delivered in Ukrainian. Since I am a native Ukrainian speaker, I analysed and translated all of the cases presented in this chapter.

“We Are the People” The populism of the Maidan, as my analysis of the speeches of its leaders and activists shows, manifested itself first and foremost in their presentation of the movement as an unproblematic totality without internal divisions, tensions, or rifts. From the very beginning of the movement, there were different groups of protesters pushing different agendas within it—Europhiles seeking Westernization, liberals struggling against abuses of the government, nationalist radicals pursuing strictly anti-Russian goals, and so forth—but this diversity remained invisible in the speeches

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of Maidan leaders. What also remained invisible were the incommensurable ideological contradictions that existed between the demands of the radicals and those of the liberals supporting the revolution. Leaving these contradictions aside, the Maidan’s hegemonic discourse emphasized the vague idea of moving toward a better civilizational future. As Yuriy Lutsenko, a post-Maidan General Prosecutor of Ukraine, maintained, it was a movement from the Asian system of rule [azicko| cictemi yppavlinn] towards a European house [do mvpopeckogo domy] (Lutsenko 2013). Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, who introduced the metaphor “common European house” in the political discourse of the 1980s (Chilton and Ilyin 1993), Maidan leaders used this metaphotical construction not to exlore the possibility of healing sensitive Cold-War divides but as a symbol of a progressive historical movement, its final destination. In the view of Mikheil Saakashvili, a post-Maidan governor of the Odessa region, the whole process of the historic transformation was the embodiment of: (1) European ideals, principles, and values pvpopeckix idealiv, ppincipiv, cinnocte. (Saakashvili 2013)

This simplistic and one-domensional representation of the protest was structurally necessary because the meanings that liberals and nationalists ascribed to the revolution were different. The hegemony of this populist discourse was cemented by the empty signifier “Maidan,” which came to denote the impossible but necessary unity of the movement, to put it in Laclau’s terms. As Laclau’s plebs who claims to be the only legitimate populus, the Maidan claimed to represent the people of Ukraine. This is how Yulia Tymoshenko, one of Ukraine’s top politicians, presented the uprising: (2) This is the nation of free people … I am sure that when the snipers were shooting our boys, their bullets targeted the hearts of all of us. To Ukpa|na vilnix lde …  vpevnena, wo koli cnapepi pyckali kyli v naxix xlopciv, to kyli byli zapyweni v cepce konogo z nac. (Tymoshenko 2014)

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The metaphor of “hearts” targeted by the snipers invoked the idea of one social organism made up of millions of hearts, all beating in unison with the Maidan, and equated it to the heart of the nation—a figure typical of right-wing populist discourse (Wodak 2015). Even more explicitly, this idea was expressed by Oleh Tyahnybok, a leader of the radical nationalist party “Svoboda,” which was a member of the oppositional “troika” representing the Maidan in the eyes of the world: (3) Maidan is our heart. Madan—ce p naxe cepce. (Tyahnybok 2014)

Again, as is evident from this construction, the Maidan was presented metaphorically as the heart of the Ukrainian body, which implied that the nation should be imagined in a unitary form and without space for any internal “abnormality” which, within the metaphorical frame of “the body,” could only be conceived as a malignancy. Other speakers’ articulations were similar. Albeit through different rhetorical means, all of them equated Maidan protesters with the general population of the country, ignoring millions of others who did not share their views. This is how Petro Poroshenko, who became the president of Ukraine as a result of the Maidan revolution, addressed those gathered in the Maidan square: (4) Honourable people of Ukraine! Bicokodoctoni ykpa|ncki napode! (Poroshenko 2014)

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whom the victory of the revolution made the Prime Minister, appealed to the Maidan with a similar unifying message: (5) Dear Ukrainian community. Dopoga i xanovna ykpa|ncka gpomada! (Yatsenyuk 2014)

Dmytro Yarosh, a leader of Right Sector, a coalition of radical nationalists organized during the Maidan, who would become a member of parliament, addressed the Maidan in a similar fashion:

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(7) Long live Ukrainians—the heroes who sacrificed their lives for Ukraine’s freedom. Clava ykpa|ncm, ki polgli v bitvi za cvobody, cppavedlivict i dobpobyt naxo| batkivwini. Haxo| Ukpa|ni. (Yarosh 2014)

Volodymyr Parasyuk, a commander of one of the Maidan’s paramilitary groups who later became member of parliament, presented himself as a representative of the whole nation: (8) We are just the people of Ukraine. Mi zviqani napod Ukpa|ni. (Parasyuk 2014)

Mikheil Saakashvili, a former president of Georgia who after the victory of the Maidan became the governor of the Odessa region—a southern region of Ukraine whose population for the most part did not support the revolution—echoed his Ukrainian fellows: (9) I am proud of you—the proud nation!  pixac vami—gopdo nacip. (Saakashvili 2013)

None of the Maidan speakers whose speeches I analysed problematized this constructed equivalence between “the people of Ukraine” and “the people of the Maidan”; in all their representations, the latter and the former were wholly the same. What all these and numerous similar constructions unambiguously suggested was that “the other Ukraine”—the one that did not support the uprising—simply did not exist. The actual division of Ukrainian society with respect to European integration was either presented as an artificial split created strategically by Yanukovych’s system of power, or disregarded completely: (10) Those in power do everything possible to turn Ukrainians against one another. Blada  na cogodnixni den pobit vce, wob zxtovxnyti lde odin ppoti odnogo. (Klitschko 2014)

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(11) Today, all the country, from the West to the East, unanimously demands the resignation of the government … Cogodni vc Ukpa|na vid Zaxody do Cxody odnoctano vimagap vidctavki ypdy … (Lutsenko 2013)

But how was it logically possible to ignore an anti-Maidan population so large it amounted to half the country? The condition enabling this was ascribing a lower moral/intellectual status to Ukrainians who did not support the revolution; they were seen as “non-citizens” who did not deserve to be part of the community of “Ukrainian people,” a term equated with Ukrainian Maidan supporters. Irina Farion, one of Svoboda’s leading figures, framed the issue in this way: (12) We are persistent in our aim to build a free, unitary, selfsufficient, and invincible Ukraine. Lackeys, plebeians, slaves, sovki, pshonki-yanukovychi-azarovi [4 ] will never understand this. Mi nevidctypni vid cvop| meti. Bin naxix zavdan. Mi nevidctypni vid naxogo baann bydyvati vilny, cobopny, camodoctatn, cilny, nezdolanny depavy. Lake|, plebe|, pabi, covki, pxonki-kykoviqi-azapovi cogo nikoli ne zpozymit. (Farion 2014)

According to her logic, apart from the corrupt bureaucrats in power, only “unworthy” people could refrain from supporting the uprising. Maidan leaders always presented the movement as a gathering of free and brave people who, unlike their opponents, deserved to steer the fate of the whole country, whose diversity was never discussed: (13) The power in Ukraine belongs to the people, and the people have proven this. Blada v Ukpa|ni naleit napody Ukpa|ni, i ce koen z nac doviv. (Yatsenyuk 2014) (14) With your blood and with your patriotism you have earned your right to rule the country.

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Bi zaclyili cvop kpov’, cvo|m patpiotizmom ppavo yppavlti cvop kpa|no. (Tymoshenko 2014)

What these and similar constructions suggested was that “the other Ukraine,” in failing to support the Maidan, had forfeited its right to rule the country and could thus be excluded from politics: (15) These are not the people you are used to seeing in your Donetsk … These are the people [of the Maidan] who are becoming a political nation. Ce ve ne to napod, ki vi zvikli baqiti v cvopmy Donecky … Ce napod ctap ykpa|ncko politiqno nacip. (Lutsenko 2013)

This articulation by the future General Prosecutor of Ukraine demonstrated in the clearest possible way his attitude toward the country’s Eastern population, who for the most part rejected the revolution. In his view, the latter had not become part of the “political nation,” as defined strictly in pro-Maidan terms. Even though this and similar constructions left space for acknowledging that “the other Ukraine” actually existed, its negative characterization—by both nationalistic and liberal representatives of the Maidan as slavish, moribund, and wholly unfit to be considered part of the Ukrainian nation allowed any views associated with it to be disregarded completely: (16) We are the nation that wants changes … We have chosen the European model. Mi pdini napod, ki pazom xoqe zmin. Ci zmini ppocti. Mi obipapmo pvpopecky model. (Lutsenko 2013)

Upon returning from Davos, future President Poroshenko (2014) claimed that: (17) The representatives of the whole world—not only the United States and the European Union—made it clear that they are with the Ukrainian people, they are with the Ukrainian Maidan.

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 wono povepnyvc v Davocy, de ppedctavniki ycogo cvity, a ne lixe Cpolyqenix Xtativ Amepiki i mvpopeckogo Cozy, qitko zavili: Boni pazom z ykpa|nckim napodom, voni pazom z ykpa|nckim madanom.

Vitali Klitschko, a three-time world heavyweight boxing champion who became the mayor of Kyiv after the victory of the Maidan, followed the same route: (18) Ukraine has won. Ukpa|na pepemogla. (Klitschko 2014)

All these and similar declarations equated the demands of the Maidan with those of the whole of Ukraine, without taking into account the opinions of millions of anti-Maidan “others.” The extension of the Maidan’s equivalential chain to the boundaries of “the nation” resulted in an extreme simplification of the discourse, which manifested itself in the omnipresent “either/or” constructions used by all the speakers whose articulations I analysed. Of the extremely narrowed set of options they acknowledged, and which they presented in mythical terms as a fight between “good” and “evil,” Europeanization appeared to be the only possible choice: (19) The choice that we face is rather simple. European Union or Eurasian Union … In fact, this is a choice between life and death; this is an opportunity to transform into a nation … or remain slaves. Bybop, kotopy ctoit peped nami, dovolno ppoct. Evpopecki Coz, libo Evpazicki Coz … Ale faktiqno ce vibip … p vibopom mi ittm i cmept. ce zmoga… pepetvopitic na naconalny depavy… abo zalixitic pabami. (Saakashviki 2013) (20) Either the house that all our western neighbours have already chosen—a comfortable and safe house … Or a Jack-the-Ripper who can do anything.

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Abo vpeped y dim … ki obrali ve vci naxi zaxidni cycidi. Dim, v komy komfoptno, v komy bezpeqno … Abo Dekpotpoxitel, ki moe pobiti vce, wo zavgodno. (Lutsenko 2013)

Even in a contemporary political landscape marked by the rise of populism on a global scale, one can hardly find more extreme cases of populist dramatization than the above examples. These articulations can be taken as classic examples of populist constructions, reducing complex social reality to the mythical choice between “life and death” and invoking fear through the image of “Jack-the-Ripper.” Presented this way, the undisputably preferable nature of the strategic European course could not but engender radicalism in tactical decisionmaking. (21) The Right Sector will go on blocking state buildings until Yanukovych resigns. Ppavi Cektop ne znime blokady ni z odnip| depavno| yctanovi poki ne byde … vidctavki nykoviqa. (Yarosh 2014) (22) If Yanukovych does not resign, we will storm [the governmental district] with weapons. kwo … nykoviq ne pide y vidctavky, mi demo na xtypm zi zbpop. (Parasyuk 2014) (23) We will celebrate the victory only after there will be a new president. naxa pepemoga byde lixe todi, koli v Ukpani byde novi ppezident. (Poroshenko 2014)

Importantly, all these pronouncements were made after the agreement settling the political crisis had been signed by Yanukovych and the oppositional “troika” in the presence of high-ranking European officials. According to this agreement, Yanukovych was supposed to stay in power until early presidential elections. However, the implacable antagonism of the Maidan’s “either/or” populist logic ran roughshod over the results of the negotiations, and Yanukovych was ousted from power while millions

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of Ukrainians still considered him more legitimate than the new political authorities born out of the revolution.

Discussion My analysis of the speeches of Maidan leaders discussed in this chapter confirms the findings of my previous research in which I examined 430 opinion pieces written by Maidan activists on their blogs (Baysha 2018). In both cases, the revolution’s supporters cast anti-Maidan “others” as the constitutive outside of the Maidan movement. The “masses” of Ukrainian citizens holding anti-Maidan views were imagined to be dependent on the “criminals in power” and so scared of them that it was impossible even to imagine a better life, let alone struggle for it. As one of the Maidan’s activists put it: (24) Many people living in Kiev think that the Donbas supports Yanukovych. This is not exactly the case. It doesn’t support him—it is afraid to say anything against [him]. Kievlne ickpenne cqitat, qto Donbacc poddepivaet nykoviqa. Tak vot: to ne covcem tak. On ne poddepivaet. On boitc ckazat qto-to ppotiv. (Vishynsky 2013)

Both the Maidan leaders and the bloggers supporting the revolution saw Ukrainians who had not supported it not as adversaries striving to organize the common symbolic space in a different way, but as enemies existing completely outside the symbolic space shared by Maidan leaders and activists: (25) I am not talking about the split along the East–West … I am talking about a more bitter and more essential phenomenon that is typical for all regions—the distinction between the people and the population; between citizens and slaves.  ne ppo podil po lini| Cxid-Zaxid. I ne ppo ppixilnikivppotivnikiv pvpointegpaci|.  Ppo gipkixe  nabagato cyttpvixe, xapaktepne dl vcix pegioniv—ppo cpivvidnoxenn napod-nacelenn, abo gpomadni-pabi. (Hrytsenko 2013)

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The populist discourse of the Maidan presented both opponents and proponents in homogeneous terms, as uniform groups of either “slaves,” “sovki,” and “non-citizens” (in the former case) or the “new elite” of Ukraine, seen as free, brave, and smart (in the latter case). Although some activists did acknowledge that there were “thinking people” in the anti-Maidan camp and that the inclusion of radical nationalists in the Maidan’s equivalential chain was incommensurable with its democratic aspirations, such differentiated opinions were far from typical—their voices were isolated and did not form a full-fledged alternative discourse (Baysha 2018). Instead of framing the issue of European integration in political terms through discussion of its social, economic, and political aspects, the Maidan’s populist discourse appealed to morality, constructing a strict dichotomy of good vs. evil that allowed no room for a decision on political grounds. By imagining themselves as “the forces of good” fighting against “the forces of evil,” Maidan revolutionaries revealed their lack of awareness of or strategic unwillingness to recognize the tensions existing within each of the two imagined unities. Their insistence on seeing both themselves and the other side as a homogeneous entity, instead of a complex web of relations characterized by contradictions and antagonisms, prevented the Maidan leaders and activists whose articulations I analysed from seeing possibilities for engaging with this complex social reality for the sake of positive social change. As a result, instead of the negotiations on which these “others” counted, the strict dichotomization of the social prescribed by the Maidan’s populist discourse led to the intensification of the confrontation between the two Ukraines. Analysing the political representation of pro-Maidan and anti-Maidan political forces in post-Maidan government of Ukraine, Richard Sakwa (2015) concludes that the most important posts in the interim government were occupied by representatives of nationalistic parties. The Jacobin political turn, which developed logically from the dichotomy of the Maidan’s populist imaginary, manifested itself in the prosecution of Donbas “separatists,” the prohibition of “pro-Russian protests,” the legal ban of the opposition aiming at “the violation of sovereignty and territorial unity of the state,” the liquidation of political parties participating in

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“separatist” actions, an official declaration of “separatists” to be “terrorists” announced by the Office of the Public Prosecutor and, finally, the “Anti-Terrorist Operation” with heavy involvement from the Ukrainian army and radical nationalists in volunteer battalions. It brought enormous suffering to people living in the Donbas and undermined the democracy in the name of which the Maidan was initiated (Baysha 2017). Proof of the non-democratic tendencies of government in postMaidan Ukraine can be found in UN reports which have regularly expressed concerns about “increasing manifestations of intolerance” toward alternative opinions in the post-Maidan Ukraine and legal prosecution of Ukrainian journalists based on “the broad interpretation and application of terrorism-related provisions” (UN OHCHR 2017). “With the passage of time,” one UN report claims, “divisions in Ukrainian society resulting from the conflict will continue to deepen and take root” (UN OHCHR 2017: 40). In order to stop this tendency, the UN advised the law enforcement agencies of Ukraine to ensure investigation of violence against those holding alternative political opinions, including the cases of enforced disappearance, incommunicado detention, and torture, in which Ukrainian forces and right-wing groups have been allegedly involved (UN OHCHR 2017: 41). However, given that the law-enforcement agencies of post-Maidan Ukraine were made up of populists who presented the “other Ukraine” as “slaves,” “sovki,” and “traitors,” one could hardly expect such recommendations to be implemented.

Conclusion As my analysis suggests, such an exclusion of anti-Maidan “otherness” was a logical consequence of the anti-“other” Maidan discourse, which appeared to be “a real force which contribute[d] to the moulding and constitution of social relations” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 110). All these dramatic consequences of the revolution logically stemmed from the radical dichotomization of the social prescribed by the Maidan’s populism. The latter, in turn, was necessitated by the presence at the

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Maidan of political forces with incommensurable political demands that were united equivalentially by the empty signifier “Maidan.” The ways discourses are constructed delimit what is meaningful to discuss, the manner in which it can be discussed, and the political actions stemming from these discussions. Through extreme simplification of the social, populism greatly narrows the set of topics to be discussed, arguments to be considered, and political actions to be taken. As the example of Ukraine discussed in this chapter demonstrates, such shrinking of the political can have extremely detrimental consequences for peace and social well-being. This is why it is important not only to recognize populism as it forms but also to deconstruct it by breaking up its equivalential chains through the assertion of particularity—through strengthening the logic of difference, to put it in Laclau’s terms. If Laclau is correct in pointing out that the precondition of the emergence of populism is the expansion of equivalential logic at the expense of the logic of difference, then effective opposition to populism would depend upon reinforcing the latter so that it cannot be overwhelmed by the former.

Notes 1. In Laclau’s usage, “democratic demands” do not imply any normative judgment; rather, they remain strictly descriptive. What Laclau means is that these demands “are formulated to the system by an underdog of sorts” and “that their very emergence presupposes some kind of exclusion or deprivation” (Laclau 2005: 125). For Laclau, any demand of any group of people within a broader social movement is democratic, even if this demand is about denying migrants welfare benefits, as an example. 2. This agreement was an extension of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) project launched by the EU in 2004 with an idea of creating a comfort zone around the Union—“a ring of friends” that would be aligned with the West though without necessarily becoming EU members. In May 2008, the Eastern Partnership (EaP) initiative was launched targeting six post-Soviet states—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. The programme aimed to improve political and economic relations with these states by encouraging them to implement reforms toward

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the principles of rule of law, a market economy, and good democratic governance. Each of these six countries was expected to sign an individual Association Agreement (AA) with a provision of deepening bilateral economic relations through a “Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area” (DCFTA). 3. This split of attitudes toward the Maidan reflected the complexity of the history of Ukraine—“a borderland not only of different state formations but, much more importantly, of different civilisational and cultural zones” (Plokhy 2008: 293). Before contemporary Ukrainian territories were unified as a nation-state, they had been controlled by different state and imperial formations, including the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the AustroHungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire. 4. “Sovki” is the plural form of “sovok,” in the sense of a person with a “sovok” (“Soviet”) mentality. The signifier “pshonki-yanukovychi-azarovi” was constructed from the surnames of three men in power at the time: Viktor Pshonka (prosecutor general), Viktor Yanukovych (president), and Mykola Azarov (prime minister).

References Primary Sources Brzezinsky, Zbiegniew. 2014. “Putin Wants to Rebuild USSR with Ukraine.” Euronews, March 7. www.euronews.com/2014/03/07/putin-wants-to-reb uild-ussr-with-ukraine-brzezinski. Farion, Iryna. 2014. “Vistup Irini Faron na Madan Nezalenosti” [Iryna Farion’s speech at the Maidan of Independence]. YouTube, December 20. www.youtube.com/watch?v=--QOd RudKVk. Hadley, Stephen. 2019. “It’s Time to Stand Up to Russia’s Aggression in Ukraine.” Foreign Policy, January 18. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/18/ its-time-to-stand-up-to-russias-aggression-in-ukraine. Haltiwanger, John. 2018. “‘Putin Didn’t Respect President Obama’: Trump Blames Obama for Russia’s Annexation of Crimea.” Business Insider, June

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15. www.businessinsider.com/trump-blames-obama-for-russias-annexationof-crimea-2018-6. Hrytsenko, Anatoliy. 2013. “Dv rznih Ukra|ni” [Two Different Ukraines]. Ukrayinska Pravda, December 15, 2013c. http://blogs.pravda. com.ua/authors/grytsenko/52ae1bbb1e26e. Klimkin, Pavlo. 2019. “Five Years Have Passed, and Russia Is Still Occupying Territory in Ukraine. Washington Post, February 19. www.washingtonpost. com/opinions/2019/02/19/five-years-have-passed-russia-is-still-occupyingterritory-ukraine. Klitschko, Vitali. 2014. “Madan 21.02: Kliqko, cenk, Tgnibok, Poroxenko, rox. Ultimatum nukoviqu” [Maidan 21.02: Klitschko, Yatsenyuk, Tyahnybok, Poroshenko, Yarosh. An ultimatum to Yanukovych]. YouTube, February 21. www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4IWe4 a2k9Y. Lutsenko, Yuriy. 2013. “Vistup r Lucenka na scen Madanu” [Yuriy Lutsenko’s speech at the Maidan podium]. YouTube, December 13. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kynOMmtDl3c. McCain, John. 2014. “We Are All Ukrainians.” Time, February 25. https:// time.com/10829/ukraine-john-mccain-putin-crimea. Parasyuk, Volodymyr. 2014. “Madan 21.02: Kliqko, cenk, Tgnibok, Poroxenko, rox. Ultimatum nukoviqu” [Maidan 21.02: Klitschko, Yatsenyuk, Tyahnybok, Poroshenko, Yarosh. An ultimatum to Yanukovych]. YouTube, February 21. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=U4IWe4a2k9Y. Poroshenko, Petro. 2014. “Kliqko, Poroxenko, Tgnibok, cenk— 25.11.14” [Klitschko, Poroshenko, Tyahnybok, Yatsenyuk—11.25.14]. YouTube, January 25. www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-BOAk8gO3w. Saakashvili, Mikheil. 2013. “Saakaxvl, vistup na Madan v Kipv (povnst)” [Speech Saakashvili at the Maidan in Kiev (full version)]. YouTube, December 13. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uDAC48C8Bc. Stanovaya, Tatiana. 2019. “What the West Gets Wrong About Russia’s Intentions in Ukraine.” Foreign Policy, December 6. https://foreignpolicy.com/ 2019/12/06/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-russias-intentions-in-ukraine. Tyahnybok, Oleh. 2014. February 18. “Tgnibok zaklikap vsh priti na Madan” [Tyahnybok calls everybody to come to the Maidan]. YouTube, February 18. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3flFGNnN09w. Tymoshenko, Yulia. 2014. “Req lii Timoxenko na Madane posle osvobodeni iz trmy” [Yulia Tymoshenko’s speech at the

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Maidan after her release from prison]. YouTube, February 22. www.youtube. com/watch?v=Q57-QIq4mnE. Vishynsky, Andriy. “Patrul,  ‘smotrw.’ Doneck qasv mvromadanu” [Patrols, the Revolutionary Military Council and “Supervisors”. Donetsk of Euromaidan Times]. Ukrayinska Pravda, December 16, 2013. www.epravda.com.ua/columns/2013/12/16/408879/. Yarosh, Dmytro. 2014. “Madan 21.02: Kliqko, cenk, Tgnibok, Poroxenko, rox. Ultimatum nukoviqu” [Maidan 21.02: Klitschko, Yatsenyuk, Tyahnybok, Poroshenko, Yarosh. An ultimatum to Yanukovych]. YouTube, February 21. www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4IWe4 a2k9Y. Yatsenyuk, Arsen. 2014. “Kliqko, Poroxenko, Tgnibok, cenk” [Klitschko, Poroshenko, Tyahnybok, Yatsenyuk—11.25.14]. YouTube, January 25. www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-BOAk8gO3w.

Secondary Sources Baysha, Olga. 2017. “In the Name of National Security: Articulating EthnoPolitical Struggles as Terrorism.” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 14 (4): 332–348. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2017.1363217. Baysha, Olga. 2018. Miscommunicating Social Change: Lessons from Russia and Ukraine. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Baysha, Olga. 2020. “Dehumanizing Political Others: A Discursive-Material Perspective.” Critical Discourse Studies 17 (3): 297–307. https://doi.org/10. 1080/17405904.2019.1567364. Chilton, Paul and Mikhail Ilyin. 1993. “Metaphor in Political Discourse: The Case of the Common European House.” Discourse & Society 4 (1): 7–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926593004001002. KIIS. 2004. “The Views and Opinions of South-Eastern Regions Residents of Ukraine.” Kiev International Institute of Sociology, April 14. www.kiis.com. ua/?lang=eng&cat=reports&id=302&y=2014&page=9. Kull, Steven, Catherine M. Kelleher, Clay Ramsay, Evan Lewis, and Eric Pierce. 2015. “The Ukrainian People on the Current Crisis.” Program for Public Consultation Affiliated with the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland and Kiev International Institute of Sociology, March 9. www.public-consultat ion.org/studies/Ukraine_0315.pdf. Kuzio, Taras. 2017. Putin’s War Against Ukraine: Revolution, Nationalism, and Crime. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

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Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London, UK: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto. 1977. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. London: New Left Books. Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. “Why Do Empty Signifi ers Matter to Politics?” In Emancipation(s), 36–46. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto. 2001. “Democracy and the Question of Power.” Constellations 8: 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.00212. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. New York: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto. 2006. “Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics.” Critical Inquiry 32 (4): 646–80. Laclau, Ernesto. 2014. The Rhetorical Foundations of Society. New York: Verso. Mammone, Andrea. 2009. “The Eternal Return? Faux Populism and Contemporarization of Neo-fascism Across Britain, France and Italy.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 17 (2): 171–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14782800903108635. Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal R. Kaltwasser, 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Musolff, Andreas. 2010. Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic. New York, NY: Routledge. Plokhy, Serhii. 2008. Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Reisigl, Martin. 2014. “Argumentation Analysis and the Discourse-Historical Approach: A Methodological Framework.” In Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, edited by Christopher Hart, and Piotr Cap, 67–96. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Sakwa, Richard. 2015. Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in Borderlands. London: I. B. Tauris. Stavrakakis, Yiannis. 2017. “Discourse Theory in Populism Research: Three Challenges and a dilemma.” Journal of Language and Politics 16: 523–534. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17025.sta. Sutyagin, Igor. 2015. “Russian Forces in Ukraine.” Royal United Services Institute, March. https://rusi.org/sites/default/files/201503_bp_russian_forces_ in_ukraine.pdf. UN News. 2017. “Conflict in Ukraine Enters Fourth Year ‘With No End in Sight’.” News.un.org, June 13. https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/06/559 322-conflict-ukraine-enters-fourth-year-no-end-sight-un-report.

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UN OHCHR. 2017. “Report on the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine 16 August to 15 November 2017.” Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, December 12. www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countr ies/UA/UAReport20th_EN.pdf. Wenman, Mark A. 2003. “Laclau or Mouffe? Splitting the Difference.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (5): 581–606. Wodak, Ruth, and Bernhard Forchtner. 2014. “Embattled Vienna 1683/2010: Right-wing Populism, Collective Memory and the Fictionalisation of Politics.” Visual Communication 13 (2): 231–255. https://doi.org/10.1177/147 0357213516720. Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Yekelchuk, Serhy. 2015. The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ZN,UA. 2014. “Mnenie i vzgldy itele go-Vostoka Ukrainy” [Opinions and Views of the Citizens of the Southeastern Regions of Ukraine]. ZN.UA, April 18. http://zn.ua/UKRAINE/mneniyai-vzglyady-zhiteley-yugo-vostoka-ukrainy-aprel-2014–143598_.html.

Olga Baysha Olga Baysha is an Associate Professor at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics,” Moscow, Russia. Olga Baysha earned her Master’s in Journalism from Colorado State University and PhD in Communication from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Previously, she worked as a news reporter and editor in Kharkiv, Ukraine, then as an editor-in-chief of a documentary production company in Kyiv, Ukraine. Her research centres mainly on political and cultural aspects of globalization with an emphasis on new media and global social movements for justice and democratization. Dr. Baysha is especially interested in analysing inherent anti-democratic tendencies of the discourses of Westernization employed by post-Soviet social movements.

4 Sri Lanka Between Triumph and Defeat: Studying Populism and Authoritarianism Within Presidential Rhetoric Anne Gaul

Introduction With the recent wave of populist movements expanding their influence across the West, populism has become a buzzword for researchers, journalists and the public alike. While the term lacks a universally agreed upon definition, in practice we recognize these actors and movements as they share core features like appeals to “the people”, usually in opposition to “elites” (Moffitt and Tormey 2014). Yet, to truly understand the force and appeal of successful populist movements we need to explore how universal features are appropriated by populists to specific contexts in order to resonate with the people they seek to mobilize. This chapter focuses on Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was president of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2015. He was a charismatic leader who knew how to stage himself simultaneously as a modest Sinhalese Buddhist and a glorious leader of the country. His rule was well mediatized—he had a strong presence on social media, was the centre of parades and A. Gaul (B) Limerick, Ireland © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_4

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memorials, but also remained rooted within local performances such as participation in religious rites. Populist performances and rhetoric were crucial to the construction of Rajapaksa’s legitimacy and authority, as his authoritarian politics were based in populist appeals to the people and performances of crisis. Utilizing critical discourse analysis I study Rajapaksa’s speeches as both populist performances and discursive events through which to explore the construction and perpetuation of the core features of populism. This account of Rajapaksa’s populism demonstrates how populist performances derive significant power from local resources that provide them with additional meaning and a repertoire of practices that are shared widely across the population. Another aspect that makes Rajapaksa’s populism an interesting case to study was the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in his first term of office.1 This provided both opportunities and challenges for Rajapaksa’s populist project as it required the reinvention of the major crisis that had been the basis of his politics. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the discursive approach used to study the content and style of Rajapaksa’s populism. It then examines the core features of his populist authoritarianism, highlighting the construction of a simultaneously broad and limited conceptualization of “the people” in opposition to the main “other”, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as well as domestic and foreign elites. Next I discuss Rajapaksa’s performance of the LTTE crisis as the primary rationale of his politics and how this was realigned after the defeat of the LTTE to continue to serve as a source of legitimacy for his rule. The chapter concludes with brief remarks on the defeat of Rajapaksa, raising questions about the limits of his populist performances to substantiate shifts towards an ever more authoritarian regime.

Populism, Ideology and Discourse It is beyond the scope of this chapter to engage in detail with the attempts at defining and theorizing populism; however, an overview of the current discussion can be found in the introduction to this volume (Kranert, Introduction in this volume). Instead it must suffice to briefly

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outline the approach adapted for this account of populism in Sri Lanka and how it is linked to other key concepts, especially ideology, discourse and nationalism.

Populism as Political Style This chapter draws heavily on the work of Moffitt and Tormey (2014), who seek to expand the conceptualization of populism beyond common definitions as a thin ideology (e.g. Mudde 2007), political strategy (e.g. Weyland 2001) or discourse (e.g. Laclau 1980). They conceptualize it as a political style, defining populism as “the repertoires of performance that are used to create political relations” (2014: 387). They highlight the increasing stylization and mediatization of the political, the importance of content and style to understand populism, and draw attention to the relational character of political representation where populist actors make claims and demands that the audience may accept or reject. Populism is thus understood as a tool that can be applied by actors across the political spectrum, but as one style among many it remains fluid as politicians may slip in and out of it (Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 393, see also Schoor, Kantara, Chapters 14 and 15 in this volume). What allows us to recognize populist leaders and movements around the globe are the core features of this political style: appeals to “the people”, performances of crisis, and “bad manners” (Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 391f.). First, common to all populist appeals are “the people” as central audience and primary subject that populist leaders claim to represent. Populists distinguish themselves from “the elite”, often constructing “the people” in opposition to it. Other groups, such as migrants, may also be presented as “others”, especially where exclusionary nationalism and populism intersect. “The people” then takes on a multi-layered meaning of “the underdog” vis-a-vis an elite and “the nation” vis-a-vis non-nationals (De Cleen 2017). The second core feature of populism is the performance of crisis. Moffitt (2015) argues that crises are not just external triggers for populism, but populist actors participate in the performance and mediatization of crisis in order to pit “the people” against a dangerous “other”, simplify political debates, and advocate

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strong leadership and quick action to solve the crisis. Crisis thus becomes internal to populism and is instrumentalized to further the goals of populist actors. Finally, “bad manners” are established as another feature of populism, as populists often disregard what is seen as appropriate ways of speaking and acting in the political realm to raise their profile or establish themselves as the true representatives of “the common man” (Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 392). What is deemed as “inappropriate” may, however, differ greatly across political contexts or time. These features provide a universal framework that allows us to identify populisms around the globe, but to fully understand their specific contents and performances we need to examine the social, cultural and political resources available to populist actors. Those are shaped by local forces such as a potent nationalism, long-established populist traditions or specific historical legacies. Populist movements need to be able to “localize” the universal mechanisms of populism in order to tap into the specific repertoires of performances that are most likely to resonate with their audiences.

Studying Populism This study is positioned within the broader framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA), a heterogeneous research programme that seeks to understand how power and inequality are produced and resisted in and through language (van Dijk 2001: 352). CDA is made up of diverse theoretical perspectives, an overview of which can be found in Kranert (Introduction in this volume). I focus specifically on political speeches to study the construction and perpetuation of populism. Speeches are a specific kind of official discourse through which speakers seek to define or redefine situations and narratives and thus provide insights into political institutions, ideologies and strategic actions (Finlayson 2013). As “an unstable combination of ideas, policy propositions, political gestures and rhetorical moves” speeches may reveal what and how speakers think (Finlayson and Martin 2008: 450f.). Speeches provide not only responses to specific political realities and

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events, but through them speakers seek to shape the audience’s understanding of those. Below, for instance, I will examine how Rajapaksa’s representations of the LTTE were not merely a response to increasing levels of violence, but rather sought to shape a specific image of the crisis that would further his own goals. I analysed a total of seventy speeches delivered by Rajapaksa throughout his two terms of office (2005–2015). Fifty-five of those were delivered in Sri Lanka to domestic audiences, fifteen were given abroad. As most of the speeches were originally delivered in Sinhala, this analysis is based on official English transcripts provided by the office of the former president and various ministries posted on their websites. The speeches were selected to cover a wide range of topics, audiences and occasions. They include highly ritualistic ones, such as the annual Independence Day speeches, standardized speeches such as the Budget Speech, and one-off speeches marking special occasions such as conferences or national exhibitions. To systematically analyse this data set I draw on the discoursehistorical approach (Wodak et al. 2009). This inductive approach emphasizes the need to explore the relationship between discourses and political institutions and structures within their historic context. It offers an analytical framework that allows us to systematically engage with different aspects of texts, by identifying the thematic areas expressed, the more or less conscious methods that serve certain intentions of authors or speakers (mobilization, reconstruction, challenge of existing narratives and construction of new ones), and finally the mainly linguistic devices that mediate between those two. Applying this framework to the analysis of Rajapaksa’s rhetoric we can examine both the ideas that are included, or left out for that matter, as well as the way these ideas are shaped into arguments that seek to persuade the audience at specific moments and locations (Martin 2014: 9). The analysis was facilitated by Weft QDA, an open-source tool for the textual analysis of documents. Importing transcripts of the speeches into Weft QDA allowed coding of the material according to thematic categories and identifying relevant means and forms of realization, especially noteworthy rhetorical devices such as euphemisms or metaphors.2 The following discussion focuses particularly on the contents of the

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speeches that relate to Rajapaksa’s populist style. Given the size of the corpus I cannot explore each speech, its arguments, linguistic features and context, in detail; rather I will focus on the core themes identified throughout the analysis that are relevant to Rajapaksa’s populist performances. The construction of “the people” and performances of crisis are of particular interest to study how these “universal” features of populism are enacted and perpetuated locally. Crucial here is the link between populism and nationalist ideology. Ideologies are socially shared belief systems that provide the basis of social practices and allow groups to pursue goals through coordinated actions (van Dijk 2007: 116f.). Populism lacks such a fundamental set of beliefs (Bobba and Seddone 2017: 5) and in fact it may only create the very groups it claims to represent (Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 389). It can, however, draw on the ideas and practices of existing ideologies, and many populist movements have a nativist dimension (De Cleen 2017). Populist actors frequently tap into the well-established, omnipresent ideas and beliefs of nationalist ideology that divides the world into distinctive nations and promotes their respective autonomy, unity and identity (Smith 2009: 61). In countries like Sri Lanka, where nationalism has long been a salient force, one cannot understand populism without reference to nationalism as a repertoire of performances for populists like Rajapaksa.

Populism in Sri Lanka: Authoritarianism, Nationalism and Populist Performances The following sections explore how core features of populist style are given meaning, legitimacy and force through deeply local performances and discourses in Sri Lanka. First I define the concept of populist authoritarianism before investigating Rajapaksa’s “people”, who were constructed both as underdogs and the nation, as well as how he tried to connect with them by establishing himself as a man of the people. Lastly, a feature unique to Sri Lanka was the government’s conflict with the LTTE, which was relevant to both Rajapaksa’s construction of “us” in opposition to this “terrorist other” and his performances of crisis. It

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is the realignment of these dimensions after the defeat of the LTTE in 2009 that highlights the potential versatility of populist styles in the face of change.

Populist Authoritarianism Above I defined populism as a political style that is primarily characterized by appeals to “the people” and performances of crisis. Authoritarianism is another political style that can best be understood as anti-democratic, favouring the centralization of power over liberal values. While populism is seen by many as illiberal, as it often espouses racism, nativism and xenophobia, it is not necessarily authoritarian and can still work within democratic systems (De Cleen et al. 2018; Moffitt 2017). In the case of Sri Lanka, however, populism gradually became intertwined with authoritarian politics throughout the twentieth century. Through the term “populist authoritarianism” Roberts (2012) highlights the relationship between the two styles in practice, where populist performances seek to bolster and legitimize authoritarian measures, and theory, as they share ideological underpinnings within Sinhalese nationalist ideology,3 particularly the Asokan Persona. This is an analytical construct that captures conceptions of hierarchy in Sinhalese society. It highlights traditional discursive, social and political practices that underlie modern images of authority and its modes of reproduction (Roberts 1994). The conception of authority of the Asokan Persona is most clearly embodied by the cakkavatti, the figure of the ideal (Sinhalese) Buddhist king—an image that, as we shall see below, Rajapaksa sought to emulate to buttress his rule. In 2005 Rajapaksa took over a country that had a long tradition of both populist and authoritarian politics. Successful Sinhalese leaders like SWRD Bandaranaike, who won a landslide victory on the basis of an anti-elitist, Sinhalese nativist agenda appealing to “the poor [suffering] people” (Roberts 2012), and J.R. Jayewardene, who institutionalized populist leadership in the office of the executive presidency in the 1970s, significantly shaped the post-independence state. It was a journey of gradual erosion of democracy and institutional decay, which transformed

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the country into “a veritable ethnocracy masquerading as a liberal democracy” (DeVotta 2005: 152f.). It is against the backdrop of authoritarian traditions and a rife nationalist political culture that we need to understand the rise of Rajapaksa and the populist cult he nurtured around his persona like no other president before him.

Appealing to a Besieged People The division of society into “the people” versus “others” is perhaps the most recognizable and commonly agreed upon feature of populism. The signifier “the people” can mean many things, allowing populist leaders to construct and appeal to a somewhat vague, heterogenous group of people which is constructed as homogeneous. Populist leaders often construct a “down/up antagonism between ‘the people’ as a large powerless group and ‘the elite’ as a small and illegitimately powerful group” (De Cleen 2017: 345), claiming to represent the true people in their struggle against an oppressing or threatening “other”. This conception of people often overlaps with the nationalist people, especially when “the people” are pitted against foreigners through racist or xenophobic undertones of populism (ibid.: 351). The origins and definition of nations remain a matter of debate, with one of the most influential definitions of nations describing them as “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983). Like “the people” populists address, nations are socially constructed, which means they receive their meaning and are reproduced though social practices and representations that distinguish them from outsiders (Özkırımlı 2010: 169f.). Nations are generally more precise with clear visible markers like national food or dress, language, and often passports. Their content and boundaries are thus more static and identification both from within and outside is usually easier than for the more malleable “common people” populist movements prefer. Given the pervasiveness of nationalist ideology in practice it can be difficult to distinguish nationalist and populist appeals to “the people” as they often overlap.

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The People The first crucial step to understand Rajapaksa’s populism is to ask who “the people” were that he frequently appealed to and sought to mobilize. A rather difficult undertaking, for while we may distinguish between “nation” and “people” conceptually, Rajapaksa’s rhetoric did not. He never explicitly defined these terms and frequently used both synonymously. (1) If anyone were to ask me what the secret of the victory is, I would extend my hands and show our beloved people, who include these mothers, fathers, wives who gave their closest and dearest for this battle. Our entire nation owes an immense debt of gratitude to these mothers, fathers and wives. They sacrificed their children and loved ones for the nation, to save the lives of others. In order to defeat racist terrorism the people of the country have a mature knowledge of the threat before them. The fortune of a nation lies in such knowledge and maturity. As much as the Government, the people too had a good awareness of who the enemy was. (Rajapaksa 2009c)

This quote demonstrates how Rajapaksa effortlessly shifts between “nation” and “people” in this case using them synonymously. It requires a close reading of the specific statements and context within which the terms were used to examine who exactly is included or excluded at any given time. Coding Rajapaksa’s references to “us” throughout all speeches reveals that on the surface his “we” sought to address an inclusive Sri Lankan nation that encompassed all communities in Sri Lanka. His appeals to “the common people” usually avoided ethnic or religious markers, not explicitly distinguishing between Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. We thus need to look beyond linguistic markers to understand how both populist and nationalist inclusion and exclusion were constructed implicitly within the context of the country’s identity politics. When analysing the nationalist resources Rajapaksa mobilized the rather limited character of Rajapaksa’s “us” as Sinhalese Buddhists becomes evident. This can be seen for instance in the Sinhalese-dominated historical narratives within

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which he situates “us” as well as the perpetuation of Buddhism, the religion of the Sinhalese, as primary religion of the country and a source of values for society and the state (e.g. Rajapaksa 2010b, 2012a). One dimension that highlights the subtle exclusionary construction of “the people” is the recurrent rural connotation of this concept. The preservation of traditional values through the revival and development of villages across the country was a major focus of Rajapaksa’s politics. His speeches, however, presented an essentially Sinhalese Buddhist village often used as a synecdoche, representing a role model for the nation at large, and linking its decline to that of the nation: (2) We are a nation that has faced massive invasions in our history. We were able to rise again because our agrarian economy was strong in the past. We had our irrigation tanks and canals. We know that it was the English who were able to totally subjugate the country. After the revolt of 1818 the tanks and all irrigation facilities in Wellassa were destroyed. The people faced great destruction at that time with curfews and martial law, the killing of youth and letting the village decline in importance. The abundance of the village was destroyed. It was not possible for the village to rise after that. (Rajapaksa 2012b)

The romanticization of the ideal village of the golden ages of the country is a distinctively Sinhalese nationalist narrative rooted in the veneration of the ancient hydraulic kingdoms (Wickramasighe 2013). Representations of the village as the backbone of the Sri Lankan nation conflate the populist and nationalist dimensions of “the people”, giving it a distinctively peasant and Sinhalese character. By drawing on well-established tropes of tradition and heritage Rajapaksa was able to infuse populist appeals to “the people” with distinctive local meaning, allowing him to simultaneously connect with his rural electorate and distance himself from the Colombo elites by appealing to the rural bourgeoisie and the underprivileged (Roberts 2012).

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A Man of the People, for the People Following his election as president, Rajapaksa frequently established himself as one of the “ordinary people”, a vindicator of the people’s wishes and aspirations. He would highlight the democratic endorsement he received in 2005 and 2010 respectively, locating the source of his authority within the sovereignty of the people. Very much in line with the Buddhist ideal king who is good and righteous because he upholds Buddhist values and acts in the interests of the people (Kapferer 2012: 70), Rajapaksa fashioned himself as “the leader, servant and friend” (Rajapaksa 2006d) of the Sri Lankan people. He staged himself as a president that would “not [be] the master but the trustee of the country” (Rajapaksa 2005) and firmly established himself as one of the very people he claimed to represent: (3) I am not a prince born with a golden spoon in the mouth. Like most of you I am a leader that grew from the ordinary people. Therefore I do not need new advisors to understand the problems of the people. I can understand them well. … I will not build any barriers that make me inaccessible to the people. My Presidential house and office are open to the people. (Rajapaksa 2005)

Anti-elitist rhetoric is a common feature of populism, and in the case of Rajapaksa his image as a president closely linked to the “common people” was further supported by his widely known rural heritage in the south of the country, the traditional garb he wore, and his public devotions. Drawing on deeply rooted traditions and symbols allowed him to connect with “the people” he sought to represent, yet his performances as a Sinhalese Buddhist further perpetuated the limited version of his “people” as basically Sinhalese and Buddhist.

The Terrorist Other Having looked at who “we” were, it is also necessary to look at those presented as threats looming near and far: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil

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Eelam. The performance of the LTTE crisis is discussed below, but it is worth briefly outlining the importance of the LTTE as “other” to Rajapaksa’s “people”. When Rajapaksa took office in 2005, he presented the Tamil Tigers as the first and foremost threat to the country, a sinister, brutal and “ruthless terrorist outfit which resorts to the most hateful forms of terror” (Rajapaksa 2009a). This “them” enabled Rajapaksa to make claims and appeals to “the people” beyond common xenophobic tropes of populist leaders. By branding the LTTE as terrorists the line was drawn between victims and perpetrators, the government and illiberal terrorism. It presented a moral and political claim, as the LTTE “other” was a source of legitimacy to Rajapaksa’s government as the champion of democracy and freedom, and also served as a unifying force. While a closer look at Rajapaksa’s construction of “the people” and nation reveals the exclusive, anti-pluralist character of his populism, the “terrorist other” provided a powerful trope for Rajapaksa to mobilize all communities and parties alike against the common threat: “The true story that stands out in our history is that on every occasion when we were united we emerged victorious” (Rajapaksa 2006a). Rajapaksa’s appeals to a people in opposition to the LTTE sought to gloss over differences among and between communities, as the fight against terrorism necessitated unity above everything else.4 These people could remain rather vague, uniting all “innocent people [who] were collectively massacred” (Rajapaksa 2006d), regardless of language or religion against a common enemy. For who would not reject oppressive and destructive terrorism? Even after the defeat of the LTTE in 2009 it was reinvented as part of the broader alignment of the crisis after the end of the war and these functions remained largely intact as we shall see below.

Discounting Domestic and Foreign Elites The LTTE was a threat unique to Sri Lanka, but Rajapaksa also utilized more common themes of populist “othering” in his appeals to the people, pitting them and himself against national and international elites. Local elites were a rather minor trope of Rajapaksa’s populism even though

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he regularly resorted to attacks against the opposition and pointed out the inability of previous governments to defeat the LTTE. The latter in particular strengthened Rajapaksa’s own position by emphasizing that he would, and eventually did, do what others could not: “previous governments were not prepared to shoulder the responsibility of liberating the country from terrorism … We took the responsibility” (Rajapaksa 2014a). His representations of elites perpetuate the simplified dichotomy of victims and perpetrators, where everyone, including elites, had to choose a side or it would be chosen for them: (4) I ask this of all political parties, all media, and all people’s organisations. You decide whether you should be with a handful of terrorists or with the common man who is in the majority. You must clearly choose between these two sides. No one can represent both these sides at any one time. (Rajapaksa 2006d)

Overall domestic elites were comparatively unimportant for Rajapaksa’s populist performances as the LTTE served as main “other” and his government was able to wield extra-legal means against critics and an altogether weak and disjointed opposition. International elites, however, were a much more prominent feature of Rajapaksa’s rhetoric, particularly after the end of the war. Not long after the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, international investigations were launched into allegations of human rights violations during the final stages of the war. The Rajapaksa regime came under severe criticism from Western countries, the UN and international NGOs, who were concerned and disappointed with the lack of progress and reconciliation. In response Rajapaksa and his supporters launched a campaign against these foreign elites, rejecting accusations, denying cooperation and access to international investigators, and not complying with UN resolutions asking for more accountability. In his post-war speeches Rajapaksa regularly attacked international actors, seeking to construct a forceful narrative of these powerful foreign actors as enemies to the Sri Lankan people, dismissing their allegations and requests as the result of false propaganda and misinformation

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campaigns. He even went so far as to imply a global conspiracy against Sri Lanka: (5) The armed racist terrorism that existed for several years was used to control our country in the way that external forces wanted to. Foreign forces and pressures, foreign invasions are not new to us. In the four years since this great humanitarian victory there were many strategies tried out by these forces to rule our Motherland. […] There were attempts to make us file answers to such charges almost every six months. It is these sinister aims that are put forward as the protection of human rights and democracy. However, what is hidden below this is the expectation to break up this country. Today we have a Sri Lankan nation that is sufficiently matured to understand this. Through the entirety of the past four years we had to struggle with these forces. It will be so in the future too. (Rajapaksa 2013)

Such performances of insecurity and crisis were particularly effective as they were embedded within historical narratives of colonial domination and threat. Fears of foreigners near and far have long been a part of a deeply entrenched siege mentality of the Sinhalese (Manogaran 1987: 2; Tambiah 1986: 92), providing a fertile ground for Rajapaksa’s performance of crisis and othering of international elites. He was able to delegitimize criticism from abroad while simultaneously showing how he stood strong against the LTTE and foreign elites alike, further entrenching his rule.

Performing Crisis Populists often emphasize a real or perceived threat or crisis as these call for urgency and decisive action. It allows populist actors to promise solutions while criticizing established elites for their inability to deal with threats effectively. Moffitt (2015) highlights that crises should not be understood as merely a trigger of populism or something external to it. On the contrary, populist actors actively perform crises, making them an internal feature of populism (ibid.: 190). The “spectacularization of failure” is part of populist performances that divide “the people”,

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those who suffer, from “the elite”, those who are responsible for the crisis. Unlike temporary crisis politics, the perpetuation of crisis becomes crucial for the survival of populism and thus the performance of crisis never really ends (Moffitt 2015). The case of Sri Lanka provides an interesting example of how a crisis may be reinvented in order to continue to support populist politics. In the 2005 presidential election Rajapaksa ran against Ranil Wickremesinghe, who stood for the continuation of the previous government’s moderate politics and negotiations with the LTTE. By contrast, Rajapaksa had fully embraced Sinhalese nationalist rhetoric and promised to take a hard stance against the LTTE. After his election the LTTE threat became the primary focus of Rajapaksa’s government and four years later he made good on his promises, ending the civil war. In the following sections I look at the main features of Rajapaksa’s performance of the crisis through its different stages.

Of Escalation and Violence From the early 1980s the conflict between the LTTE and successive governments of Sri Lanka had held the country in a tight grip. The peace process initiated in 2001 brought a brief respite that came to an end with Rajapaksa’s election. A central aspect of Rajapaksa’s populist authoritarianism was the performance and intensification of the “terrorist crisis”, which led to a downward spiral of anti-LTTE rhetoric and the collapse of the ceasefire. Levels of LTTE violence increased, which in turn further fuelled the government’s anti-LTTE stance and led to even harsher military responses. The LTTE crisis was a dominant trope in Rajapaksa’s rhetoric, referenced in nearly every speech between 2005 and 2010. He took an unambiguous stance towards the Tamil Tigers as the enemy of the Sri Lankan people, depicting them as “the most de-humanizing and politically de-stabilizing phenomenon of our time” (Rajapaksa 2006c). Above I have already discussed how the representation of the LTTE allowed Rajapaksa to construct dichotomous identities of “us” and “them”, presenting “the innocent people” as a catch-all category for

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everyone opposing terrorism without much regard for the cultural diversity of the country. Beyond this, by focusing attention primarily on the omnipresent LTTE threat, the need for a solution, that is the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, became Rajapaksa’s foremost policy objective. Through his firm, assertive language he promised that his determination would bring the solution that had evaded previous governments for decades: “I will take whatever measures necessary” (Rajapaksa 2006b). As the crisis escalated, both in levels of violence and rhetorical performances, his performances enabled him to legitimize even the harshest responses and undemocratic measures as inevitable in the face of terrorism (Wickramasinghe 2009: 65). The Eighteenth Amendment to the constitution that removed the presidential term limit, increasing nepotism that allocated many of the most influential and prestigious political positions to Rajapaksa’s relatives, and the intimidation of the media and judiciary are only some of the most pronounced examples of the decay of democracy during Rajapaksa’s presidency (DeVotta 2011), justified by the necessity of strong leadership in the face of terrorism. Through the simplification of politics to the “terrorist problem” other issues, like economic problems, could be downplayed or presented as a side effect of it. The fact that the crisis had been a salient issue for decades and fit in neatly with well-established Sinhalese vs. Tamil tropes made it easy for the regime to establish it as a major source of legitimacy and justification for Rajapaksa’s populist authoritarianism. Its “solution” thus presented a challenge to the government.

Reinventing a Resolved Crisis In May 2009 the defeat of the militant separatist threat seemed to rob Rajapaksa of the crisis that had provided the main rationale of his policies as well as the “other” to his nation. Given its importance for the endurance of populism, populist actors will often try to reinvent, extend or switch crisis to serve changing needs (Moffitt 2015). Following the end of the war Rajapaksa’s continued performance of crisis relied mainly on two arguments: first, commemorations of the war and victory, and second, the internationalization of the LTTE threat. This realignment

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of the nature of the threat allowed him to continue to construct a crisis based on the LTTE despite its military defeat. For while the regime celebrated an unequivocal “victory over terrorism” (e.g. Rajapaksa 2009d, 2011b), it kept the memory of the “brutal” and “savage” Tigers alive rhetorically and through physical manifestations, such as war memorials and sites of former battlefields or LTTE bunkers that were opened up to a new form of “war tourism” (Hyndman 2015). Every May Rajapaksa presided over the celebrations of the end of the war on Victory Day, reminding the nation of the great sacrifices the defeat of the LTTE had required and that should never be forgotten: (6) We must bear in mind that thousands of heroes like this sacrificed their lives for the country to obtain this great victory. Many lakhs more offered their blood, sweat and tears and lost their eyes and limbs for this land. I am pleased to state that we have elevated all of you as high as the national flag flies to give you the honor you deserve. (Rajapaksa 2013)

Furthermore, the government frequently emphasized that remnants of the LTTE remained. According to Rajapaksa these continued to pose a threat to Sri Lanka, despite being located outside the country as part of the international network of the Tamil Tigers. An excerpt from Rajapaksa’s 2012 Victory Day address highlights the construction of this post-war threat: (7) It is no secret that those who conscripted children to war, and other war criminals who are leaders of the LTTE, are acting with freedom in foreign countries. Just as much as their work their demands also remain the same; they seek the same ends through different means. (Rajapaksa 2012c)

The increasing internationalization of the LTTE threat enabled Rajapaksa to continue to propagate the LTTE crisis so that the main “other” to the Sri Lankan people remained even after 2009. At the same time constructing foreign elites as a threat through their link to LTTE terrorism abroad allowed Rajapaksa to delegitimize foreign critics as well as to rally Sri Lankans against foreign powers. Thus while celebrating the victory in annual parades and monuments dedicated to this historic feat,

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the Rajapaksa government subtly continued to stoke Sinhalese fears and anxieties to perpetuate a crisis that would continue to require vigilance and strong leadership.

A President of Ancient Glory Despite the challenges, the military victory also provided a new, unprecedented source of authority for Rajapaksa: triumphalism. Unlike many populists who rely on “bad manners” to raise their profile (Moffitt and Tormey 2014), he was able to draw on this feat to set himself apart as the president who defeated the “most ruthless terrorists of the world” (Rajapaksa 2008). The end of the war can hardly be described as a solution to the underlying crisis, yet it nonetheless benefitted most people in the country and brought immense prestige and authority to the Rajapaksa regime (Roberts 2012), boosting his popularity and already strong support among the Sinhalese. Post-war populist performances sought to secure this image of Mahinda Rajapaksa as the victor, a modest hero of the nation: (8) You are well aware that you now stand on our motherland that is much greater than what was handed over to me five years ago. There can be no greater satisfaction to a leader than the humble joy of being able to address one’s people after building a much better country than before, and successfully carrying out the responsibility handed over to me by the citizens of this country. (Rajapaksa 2010b)

This is a rather powerful trope as few heads of state can claim to have defeated a militant organization as powerful as the LTTE, although this victory came at a very high cost. Rajapaksa’s performances of victory were bolstered by being placed within one of the most potent Sinhalese historical narratives: the myth of Dutugemunu and Elara. The story of Dutugemunu, the Sinhalese king who defeated Tamil King Elara and united the country, holds a central part within Sinhalese imaginary. It encapsulates the encompassment of demonic forces and the regeneration of the Sri Lankan state under rightful Buddhist rule (Kapferer 2012).

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In several of his post-war speeches Rajapaksa referred to Dutugemunu’s battle and subtly constructed his own fight against and victory over the LTTE as a continuation of this ancient past (e.g. Rajapaksa 2009b, 2010a, 2011a, 2014b). Rajapaksa sought to construct himself as a twenty-first century Dutugemunu (Rampton and Welikala 2011), locating himself and the victory within the same ontological ground as legends of one of the most venerated Sinhalese heroes (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014: 187). Rajapaksa’s rhetoric and mannerism where key in his performances of ideal Buddhist kingship, further underlined by visualizations of the post-war unitary state which heavily relied on Buddhist symbols. The population also shared in these performances, for instance by garlanding a Dutugemunu statue only a few days after the victory (Roberts 2009). Performances of triumphalism set Rajapaksa apart from other past and present leaders who failed to defeat the LTTE. They mobilized and in turn perpetuated traditional conceptions of authority of the Asokan Persona, presenting Rajapaksa as embodiment of the cakkavatti king, the ideal leader, a servant of the people who preserves unity and hierarchy of the polity (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2014: 19; Kapferer 2012: 70). Thus populism reached its climax after the end of the war, as Rajapaksa’s performances managed to combine triumphalism and the reinvention of crisis in his appeals to the Sri Lankan people to continue to support his leadership. It had become “a cult of the masses which vests the figure espousing and embodying the popular cause with an enormous concentration of power” (Roberts 2012), naturalizing the entrenchment of Rajapaksa’s rule that seemed like it would continue for a long time.

The Limits of Populist Authoritarianism? In January 2015, however, Mahinda Rajapaksa was rather surprisingly defeated in hastily organized presidential elections by a widely unknown opponent, Maithripala Sirisena. Called two years ahead of schedule the elections were meant to cement Rajapaksa’s rule after he had abolished the two-term limit on the presidency. Instead, the opposition forces that had long been scattered and weak formed an alliance behind Sirisena

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and his 100-day reform programme that promised far-reaching constitutional reforms, good governance and reconciliation. Sirisena managed to appeal not only to the minority communities that Rajapaksa had aliened through his populist and nationalist politics, but was also able to tap into Rajapaksa’s rural Sinhalese voter base (Srinivasan 2015). Then most observers highlighted Sirisena’s election as a resounding victory of democracy, as the people of Sri Lanka rejected the corruption, nepotism and impunity the Rajapaksa regime came to embody (Hoole 2016; Chandran 2015). For a moment voters halted Rajapaksa’s “authoritarian rampage” (DeVotta 2013), indicating that there might be limits to the kind of illiberal politics populism can support. Yet, Rajapaksa’s defeat heralded the end of neither populist politics nor Sinhalese nationalism in Sri Lanka as both are deeply entrenched in the country’s culture and institutions. And as the Sirisena government failed to deliver on many of its ambitious election promises and struggled with internal divisions, Rajapaksa again became an attractive option for voters and took the position of Prime Minister in November 2019 alongside his brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who became President of Sri Lanka.

Conclusion This chapter has provided an empirical account of populism in Sri Lanka, with a focus on Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency that marked the zenith of “populist authoritarianism” on the island. While highlighting the universal features of populist performances that link Rajapaksa to other populist movements across the globe, it discussed how “the people” and performances of crisis were rooted in the country’s traditions, symbols and narratives. Looking at the local adaptations of populist styles can help us understand how and why populist leaders and movements resonate with the people they seek to mobilize, or not. This analysis has demonstrated the intricate link between populist performances and authoritarian politics in a time that saw the final phase of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war. Following the defeat of the LTTE we can observe the remarkable adaptability of populist performances as they were realigned within the complex set of repertoires provided by the

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underlying Sinhalese nationalist ideological framework. Rajapaksa was able to adjust the crisis by internationalizing it, and take advantage of the victory by fostering a triumphalism through which he established himself as a modern embodiment of righteous Sinhalese Buddhist kingship. It was the grounding of universal populist performances and rhetoric within local resources, particularly the traditional Sinhalese nationalist narratives and imaginaries, that provided them with meaning shared by Rajapaksa and the Sinhalese community at large, which accounted for the success of his populist rule and legitimized his illiberal politics.

Notes 1. For detailed examinations of the violent conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities see for example Tambiah (1986), Manogaran (1987) or DeVotta (2005, 2014). 2. An in-depth linguistic analysis of translated documents can be problematic, as the adaptation of texts for the target audience means that linguistic elements may be changed, potentially leading to some nuance lost and shifts in meaning of the target text (Blum-Kulka 1986). Using official translations alleviates some of these issues, as they were provided by the same institutions as the original speeches it can be assumed that general themes and strategies remain the same. 3. In a nutshell, Sinhalese nationalism holds that the Sinhalese nation, Buddhism and the Sri Lankan state are inseparably linked. It draws heavily on pre-modern polities and traditions as a rich body of symbolic resources as the basis of Sinhalese national identity and political mobilization. For indepth accounts of Sinhalese nationalism see for instance Kapferer (2012), Roberts (1994) or Tambiah (1986). 4. While on the face a markedly inclusive rhetoric that could potentially foster a shared identity, Rajapaksa’s often blatant nationalist rhetoric, the lack of reconciliation, and the sporadic outbursts of religious violence largely tolerated by his government never made him a man of all people of Sri Lanka. His populist rhetoric simplified the complexity and diversity of the country’s communities into “the people” who supposedly would all be equally represented by Rajapaksa and his politics.

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References Primary Sources Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2005. “Speech at Swearing-in Ceremony.” Speech, Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte, 19 November. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2006a. “Address at the Celebration of the 58th Anniversary of Independence.” Speech, Colombo, 4 February. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2006b. “Address at the Joint Meeting of All Party Representative Committee and Panel of Experts.” Speech, Colombo, 11 July. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2006c. “Speech at the 14th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement.” Speech, Havana, 16 September. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2006d. “Address to the Nation.” Speech, Colombo, 6 December. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2008. “Address at the Celebration of the 60th Anniversary of Independence.” Speech, Colombo, 4 February. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2009a. “Address to the Diplomatic Corp.” Speech, Colombo, 7 May. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2009b. “Address at the Ceremonial Opening of Parliament.” Speech, Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte, 19 May. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2009c. “Address at the Victory Day Parade.” Speech, Colombo, 3 June. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2009d. “Keynote Address to the 8th Asia Cooperation Dialogue.” Speech, Colombo, 15 October. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2010a. “Address at the Victory Day Parade.” Speech, Colombo, 18 June. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2010b. “Speech at the Second Swearing-in Ceremony.” Speech, Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte, 19 November. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2011a. “Address at the Celebration of the 63rd Anniversary of Independence.” Speech, Colombo, 4 February. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2011b. “Address at the Victory Day Parade.” Speech, Colombo, 26 May. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2012a. “Address at the Celebration of the 64th Anniversary of Independence.” Speech, Colombo, 4 February. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2012b. “Speech at National Exhibition.” Speech, Anuradhapura, 5 February. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2012c. “Address at the Victory Day Parade.” Speech, Colombo, 19 May.

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Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2013. “Address at the Victory Day Parade.” Speech, Colombo, 18 May. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2014a. “Address at the Celebration of the 66th Anniversary of Independence.” Speech, Kegalle, 4 February. Rajapaksa, Mahinda. 2014b. “Speech at the National Unity Convention.” Speech, Colombo, 7 April.

Secondary Sources Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1986. “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation.” In Interlingual and Intercultural Communication, edited by Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, 17–36. Tuebingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Bobba, Giuliano and Antonella Seddone. 2017. “The Age of Populism? An Analysis of Facebook Political Communication in Italy, France, and Spain.” ECPR General Conference, Oslo, 6–9 October. Chandran, D Suba. 2015. “The Fall of Rajapaksa: Why Democracies Fail Strongmen.” IPCS Commentary (19 January). http://www.ipcs.org/comm_s elect.php?articleNo=4809. [Accessed 16 February 2015]. De Cleen, Benjamin. 2017. “Populism and Nationalism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Christobal R. Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy, 342–362. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Cleen, Benjamin, Jason Glynos, and Aurelien Mondon. 2018. Critical Research on Populism: Nine Rules of Engagement. Organization 25 (5): 649–661. De Silva Wijeyeratne, Roshan. 2014. Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. London: Routledge. DeVotta, Neil. 2005. From Ethnic Outbidding to Ethnic Conflict: The Institutional Bases for Sri Lanka’s Separatist War. Nations and Nationalism 11 (1): 141–159. DeVotta, Neil. 2011. Sri Lanka: From Turmoil to Dynasty. Journal of Democracy 22 (2): 130–144. DeVotta, Neil. 2013. “Sri Lanka’s Ongoing Shift to Authoritarianism.” Asia Pacific Bulletin (22 February). https://www.eastwestcenter.org/system/tdf/pri vate/apb201_0.pdf?file=1&type=node&id=33932. [Accessed: 29 September 2018].

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DeVotta, Neil. 2014. Parties, Political Decay, and Democratic Regression in Sri Lanka. Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 52 (1): 139–165. Finlayson, Alan. 2013. “Ideology and Political Rhetoric.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, edited by Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears, 197–213. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finlayson, Alan and James Martin. 2008. “‘It Ain’t What You Say …’: British Political Studies and the Analysis of Speech and Rhetoric.” British Politics 3: 445–464. Hoole, Rajan. 2016. “Investing in an Educated Society.” Colombo Telegraph (20 January). https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/investing-inan-educated-society/. [Accessed 7 June 2016]. Hyndman, Jennifer. 2015. “The Securitisation of Sri Lankan Tourism in the Absence of Peace.” Stability: International Journal of Security & Development 4 (1): 1–16. Kapferer, Bruce. 2012. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Rev. ed. London: Berghahn Books. Laclau, Ernesto. 1980. Populist Rupture and Discourse. Screen Education 34: 87–93. Manogaran, Chelvadurai. 1987. Ethnic Conflict and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Martin, James. 2014. Politics & Rhetoric: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2015. How to Perform Crisis: A Model for Understanding the Key Role of Crisis in Contemporary Populism. Government and Opposition 50 (2): 189–217. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2017. Liberal Illiberalism? The Reshaping of the Contemporary Populist Radical Right in Northern Europe. Politics and Governance 5 (4): 112–122. Moffitt, Benjamin, and Simon Tormey. 2014. Rethinking Populism: Politics, Mediatisation and Political Style. Political Studies 62: 381–397. Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Özkırımlı, Umut. 2010. Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rampton, David and Asanga Welikala. 2011. “Would the Real Dutugemunu Please Stand Up?” In Conflict and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka: Caught in the peace trap? edited by Jonathan Goodhand, Jonathan Spencer and Benedikt Korf, 92–105. London: Routledge.

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Roberts, Michael. 1994. Exploring Confrontation: Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers. Roberts, Michael. 2009. “Some Pillars for Lanka’s Future” Frontline (28 January). http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2612/stories/200906192612 02400.htm. [Accessed 30 October 2014]. Roberts, Michael. 2012. “Mahinda Rajapaksa as a Modern Mah¯av¯asala and Font of Clemency? The Roots of Populist Authoritarianism in Sri Lanka.” Groundviews (25 January). http://groundviews.org/2012/01/25/mahindarajapaksa-as-a-modern-mahavasala-and-font-of-clemency-the-roots-of-pop ulist-authoritarianism-in-sri-lanka/. [Accessed 28 January 2014]. Smith, Anthony D. 2009. Ethno-Symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach. London: Routledge. Srinivasan, Meera. 2015. “Rapaksa Can No Longer Count on Rural Sinhala Voter Bank.” The Hindu (16 February). http://www.thehindu.com/news/int ernational/south-asia/rajapaksa-can-no-longer-count-on-rural-sinhala-votebank/article6745750.ece. [Accessed 16 February 2015]. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1986. Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Dijk, Teun A. 2001. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton, 352–371. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Van Dijk, Teun A. 2007. Ideology and Discourse Analysis. Journal of Political Ideologies 11 (2): 115–140. Weyland, Kurt. 2001. Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics. Comparative Politics 34 (1): 1–22. Wickramasinghe, Nira. 2009. Sri Lanka in 2008: Waging War for Peace. Asian Survey 49 (1): 59–65. Wickramasinghe, Nira. 2013. “Producing the Present: History as Heritage in Post-War Patriotic Sri Lanka.” Economic and Political Weekly XLVIII (43): 91–100. Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart. 2009. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Anne Gaul completed her PhD on politics in Sri Lanka in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick. Her research interests include nationalist ideologies, peace and conflict studies and critical discourse analysis.

Part III Populist Discourse and the Politics of (Post-)Truth

5 Trump’s Text Appeal: Vague Language in Post-Truth Politics Natalia Knoblock

Introduction The troubling prevalence of lies and disinformation in the contemporary social sphere has prompted the classification of our time as the “posttruth” era. This term, popularized by Keyes (2004), has become the focus of research in the recent years (e.g., Harsin 2015; Higgins 2016; Prado 2017; see also Kranert, Introduction in this volume). Post-truth society gives the impression of giving up on the expectation of honesty as the default position; politicians are not even anticipated to be truthful and do not suffer consequences for lying (Higgins 2016). Besides, populist appeals to emotion rather than fact are dominant and fact checks are ignored if they contradict the audience’s beliefs and preferences (Suiter 2016). Studies of the 2016 US presidential election paint an alarming picture: “Junk news, characterized by ideological extremism, misinformation and the intention to persuade readers to respect or hate a candidate N. Knoblock (B) Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_5

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or policy based on emotional appeals, was just as, if not more, prevalent than the amount of information produced by professional news organizations” (Howard et al. 2017). Such reports are disconcerting. Free and fair discussion, the foundation of modern liberal societies, needs to be conducted and exercised by informed and unbiased citizens to be effective. Quality of debate may be undermined not only by lies or mistaken beliefs, but also by inability to separate fact from emotion and the propensity to dismiss off-hand the facts that do not match one’s preference or expectation. Studying the “receiving end” of post-truth communication appears a worthwhile goal; however, it has not received the attention it deserves. Attempts have been made to examine post-truth politicians’ communicative techniques, and much of the research concentrates on the productive rather than receptive side of communication, but little has been done to analyse how the addressees process problematic statements. This chapter starts filling the gap by specifically looking at the reactions of Trump’s audience to his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US, as they were posted and discussed on Facebook.

Theoretical Foundations of the Study This chapter concentrates on the issue of vagueness as allowing the audience the freedom to interpret a populist politician’s statement in multiple ways, some close, some far from what was actually said (see also Brandmayr, Chapter 6 in this volume). Researchers of political speech have long noted its vagueness (Bavelas et al. 1988; Bull 2008; Channell 1994; Clayman and Heritage 2002; Wodak 2003), which has been highlighted as one of the features of populist discourse since early classic studies (e.g., Le Bon 1897). Trump has been known to be ambiguous as well (Harsin 2017; Tannen 2017). His unique communicative style has been addressed by several researchers, and he has been identified as a perfect post-truth politician, a “hollow man” and a “Wizard of Oz” (Lakoff 2017), whose words “are often initially or even perpetually nonsensical” and reflect some emotional truth rather than verifiable facts (Harsin 2017: 512). One does not have to be a scholar to note how vague much

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of Trump’s discourse is. One of the Facebook commenters from the corpus studied in this project remarked: (1) That doesn’t sound a little crazy to you at all? A lot of what Trump says is very vague anyway. There’s no specific names, ideas, or anything. Just a lot well, we’ll figure this stuff out as we go. And people are eating this stuff up. This is Obama all over again I fear. Well, enjoy yet another Politician making a fool out of you.1

This leads to the central questions of this paper: how do audiences interpret D. Trump’s utterances if they are so vague and semantically impoverished? Does the vagueness strategy pay off and allow Trump to be successful in appealing to his voters? This latter question is important since we know that excessive evasiveness can be beneficial to politicians, but it can also turn people away (Clayman 2001; Rogers and Norton 2011). To describe the interpretation processes, reflected in the examples presented in this chapter, this project relies on analytic tools of frame semantics (Fillmore 1975, 1985) as providing the necessary theoretical foundation for understanding speech production and comprehension. It has long been demonstrated that the conduit model of communication (Shannon and Weaver 1949) fails to explain the specifics of speech processing, which is not limited to handling only what was given as input. In contrast, listeners are capable of filling in missing elements and supplanting the overall picture with components commonly present in contexts specified, even when they are omitted from the incoming utterance. To explain this phenomenon, psychologists, artificial intelligence scholars, cognitive- and psycholinguists have been using the term and concept of frame (e.g., Baker, Fillmore and Lowe 1998; Coulson and Kutas 1998; Fillmore 1975, 1985) in their description of mental processes involved in communication. A semantic frame is understood as a cognitive structuring device, whose parts are logically related to the others. It is a representation of an event, object, situation, or state of affairs whose parts are identified as frame elements, which are indexed by words that evoke the frame (Fillmore 1985). Somewhat similar is Lakoff ’s concept of the idealized

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cognitive model (2008), which represents the way our mind organizes knowledge. According to this view, a semantic frame is a conceptualization of experience that may or may not correspond to reality. Importantly, uttering a particular word can activate an entire frame (or a collection of frames) in which that word is commonly used (Coulson & Kutas 1998; Fillmore 1975, 1985; Lakoff, 2008). This brings us to the concept of “code words” also known as the “dog whistle” effect. It was first described by the polling director for The Washington Post who observed that small changes in question-wording are capable of producing remarkably different results when respondents “hear something in the question that researchers do not” (Morin 1988). Certain messages “seem innocent to a general audience but resonate with a specific public attuned to receive them” (Safire 2008: 190). This phenomenon was further studied by researchers (e.g., Mendelberg 2001, Stanley 2015) who analysed coded, concealed nefarious messages directed at a subgroup of the general public that mark the speakers as members of an in-group and invoke that group’s beliefs or values, while camouflaging as neutral. Reading through the examples collected for this project produces an impression that people reacted to what was said on a level that was different from the level of text. Some commenters seemed to respond to the stimuli they heard, or they believed they heard, in a way that suggested a “dog whistle’ effect, filling in the gaps with the information from their background knowledge, previous experience (including Trump’s previous speeches), their preferences, values, and ideology, and more. The material for the study was collected from Facebook. Social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, play an increasingly important role both as a debate platform and a primary carrier of misinformation/disinformation (Desigaud et al. 2017; Howard et al. 2017). They are increasingly employed by politicians, especially since the 2008 presidential campaign (Cogburn and Espinoza-Vasquez 2011). Trump’s use of Twitter is well-known, but he is also present and active on Facebook. The latter social network is a better source of data for the analysis of electorate’s discourse because it is not constrained by the Twitter’s 140-character limit, thus allowing for more elaborate explanations and a clearer picture of the commenter’s position.

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To answer the main question about interpreting Trump’s vague message, the research questions I posed for this study are: 1. What semantic areas were covered by the utterances of Trump’s supporters interpreting his proposal to ban Muslims from the US? 2. To what extent was the audience willing to manipulate the actual text to prove that it fit within the U.S societal norms of fairness and respect for human rights?

Data and Method The material was collected from the official Facebook page of Donald Trump, a presidential candidate at that time. He proposed a “shutdown” of Muslims at a campaign rally on December 7, 2015 (Trump 2015). His Facebook announcement about it attracted well over 17,000 user posts within days, some of which prompted hundreds of replies, demonstrating what a salient topic it was for the US public. Collecting the responses to the post produced a specialized corpus of the anti-Islam, anti-immigration discourse of 856,769 tokens/674,277 words, named Ban-the-Muslims (BTM) corpus (Knoblock 2017). The analysis concentrates on the use of the lemma SAY by the supporters of the ban because it was the most frequent lexical verb (after only BE and HAVE) serving as a verbal predicate in sentences with “Trump” as the subject. This choice was also dictated by the nature of the discussion as many commenters treated it as a speech event while analysing its meaning, presentation, and implications. The study utilizes both quantitative methods, attained with the help of the corpus management and query system Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004), and qualitative approaches of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), relying on a back and forth between machine reading of the texts and close readings of the comments. The main focus of the analysis was on the uses of “he said”, “he did not say” and their versions in the BTM corpus since my focus was on the way people reacted to Trump’s words. Out of the 2632 concordance lines containing the lemma SAY, I singled out its uses by Trump’s

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supporters referring to his Muslim ban. The utterances by Trump’s critics containing SAY were excluded, as were the cases where the discussion covered Trump’s statements on different topics. When a comment was too short and/or too vague to make a judgement whether it was pro- or anti-Trump and whether it fit the thematic requirement, it was left out as well. General expressions of support, such as “I am with Trump all the way! Shut it down!” were excluded if they did not contain the lemma SAY for the sake of consistency. Altogether, 158 cases were identified where Trump supporters used the verb SAY to interpret what Trump meant when he announced his proposal. To draw conclusions about such interpretations, the full texts of the comments were used, and they are quoted here in full. When a comment is too long or if only a part of it is relevant, I mark truncation by to differentiate from the ellipsis used by the commenters. Since most comments covered more than one sub-topic related to the ban, I sometimes quote parts of the same comment in different sections of the paper to illustrate pertinent points. Another consequence of the broad range of semantic information covered by most comments is the difficulty to quantify the results, so the discussion of the interpretation strategies is largely qualitative. The following section will present the comments by the semantic roles of the arguments in Trump’s proposition at both ambiguous and specific points. It identifies the filling in or omitting patterns in the discourse of his supporters, and it looks at the distance between the actual text of the announcement and the meanings the commenters derived from it.

Results and Discussion To provide the proper context for the discussion, let’s start by looking at the actual text of Trump’s proposal. At a rally in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Trump said, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. We have no choice. We have no choice” (2015).

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To break the statement up into its semantic elements, we can apply the frame analysis developed by the FrameNet project (Baker, et al. 1998). The relevant frame in FrameNet is “Thwarting” described as a situation where a “Preventing_cause interferes with the ability of a Protagonist to complete an intended Action. The Protagonist may not be mentioned in the sentence, in which case the Action is an endeavor that an individual or group of individuals hopes to accomplish. In this frame it is necessary that the Protagonist is unable to successfully complete the Action”. The core frame elements (FEs) are Action, Preventing_cause, and Protagonist, and the non-core FEs are Degree, Explanation, Frequency, Manner, Place, and Time (Thwarting, n.d.). Applying this list to the text of Trump’s proposal, we see that the core FEs are Protagonist (Muslims), Action (entering), and Preventing cause (the shutdown). The non-core FEs are Degree (total and complete), Place (the United States), and Time (until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on). The FEs of Explanation, Frequency, and Manner are left unfilled. Trump’s statement has both specific and vague elements. He does name the Protagonist he wants to “shut down”, stipulates that the shutdown should be “total” and “complete”, and names the action he wants to thwart: “entering”. The Action (entering) is fairly straightforward; in today’s US, it commonly means going though border control checks at airports or land ports of entry to the country. However, “shutting down” a group of people is a metaphor and as such is inherently ambiguous. In the context of immigration, it might mean stopping to issue new visas, refusing to issue new visas and revoking existing ones, or the previous step and preventing US citizens and green card holders of Muslim faith to re-enter the country after leaving it for some reason. It might also mean changes to asylum and refugee resettlement programs, among other possibilities. The next point of ambiguity is identifying the Protagonist. Since being Muslim does not necessarily entail noticeable physical differences or a particular dress code etc., it is difficult to define clear-cut criteria for separating Muslims from non-Muslims. Possible strategies of “shutting them down” then might include discontinuing immigration from particular countries, asking prospective immigrants to identify their faith,

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collecting intelligence on immigrants and visitors or coming up with other tactics. The timing, that is, “until” officials “figure out what the hell is going on”, is particularly vague as it might equally refer to a day or a century. The addition of the intensifier “the hell” does nothing to clarify what kind of timeframe Trump is talking about. Moreover, it might take an indefinite amount of time because “figuring out what is going on” is an ambiguous expression in itself. In the context of Muslim extremism and keeping the US safe, it might mean identifying actual and potential terrorists and barring them from crossing the border; it might mean solving US domestic terrorism or mass shooting problems; it might mean understanding the differences between Islam and other religions; just as it might mean many other things. Not only does the proposal leave out precise details about identifying the people to be “shut down”, the timeframe, or the criteria for the end of the shut-down, it also lacks particulars about its implementation. The “country’s representatives” charged with figuring out what is going on are also not specified. Despite its vagueness (or thanks to it), the announcement appears to have been extremely successful, judging by the enthusiastic reception of the statement by the audience at the rally where it was announced, by the extraordinary attention the FB post with it received, and the fact that Trump’s approval rating went up after it and reached a height it had not reached all year (The Data Team 2015).

Interpretative Strategies of Trump’s Supporters To identify the strategies used by Trump’s supporters in their construal of his proposal, I grouped the comments by the criterion of how much the commenters modified the actual text of what Trump said. Out of 158 comments containing the lemma SAY and agreeing with the ban, eighty-five expressed support without quoting or paraphrasing the text, thirty-eight stayed fairly close to the text of the proposal, twentyfive exhibited substantial reinterpretation and rephrasing of the text, six

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attributed to Trump something he did not say at all, and four comments were unintelligible and defied categorization.

Expressions of Support with no Explanation The largest group, eighty-five of 158 (54 per cent), consisted of expressions of support without mentioning any specifics. The writers declared their approval of Trump’s proposal and stated that he is right in his stance but did not reference any elements from the text of the proposal. One of the examples of such statements is below: (2) The heck with all these bleeding hearts! Trump says what I think. Trump 2016!

Many of them assert that the proposal is fine and there’s nothing wrong with it. These comments are often brief and do not elaborate why their authors felt the need to word their support that way: (3) I don’t see a problem with what Trump is saying.

It might be assumed that such statements are indirectly responding to accusations that the ban is discriminatory and not in the spirit of fairness and equity traditionally prized by Americans; however, the commenters do not state that explicitly. They refer to “what Trump is saying” but do not quote, paraphrase, or summarize any specifics from the proposal. Many examples express support for Trump’s proposal while employing the bandwagon or ad populum strategy. This group expresses support for Trump’s proposal and claims that “everyone” or the majority of Americans agree with it. The specifics of what exactly the majority of Americans believe and support are not mentioned: (4) Donald Trump is saying what a majority of Americans are feeling but would’nt say for themselves!!!!

Several times the lemma SAY was used in comments claiming that Trump’s statement was distorted. For example:

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(5) It’s amazing how all of his enemies totally distorted what the man said.

An inference can be made that the commenters perceive Trump to be treated unfairly and his critics as attacking a perfectly good proposal. Interestingly, the comments rarely specify what exactly was distorted although some say that journalists left out parts of what Trump said (even though they were engaging in a discussion under the video containing the original announcement by Trump). These comments do not paraphrase or quote Trump’s text and do not explain what the right interpretation should have been. It would have been interesting to read such interpretations because it is difficult to judge how the commenters understand the proposal’s specifics. A few comments switch to Clinton or Obama or other politicians and claim that they should be saying the same thing as Trump did without interpretation of Trump’s words: (6) I love waking up to the Today Show having all the “experts” flapping about you … they should not be wasting their air time on what Donald J. Trump says but what our PRESIDENT IS NOT SAYING!!! Donald J. Trump all the way to 1600 Penn Ave 2016!!!!

The proposal’s evaluation, again, appears to be positive since the commenters criticize other politicians for “not saying” what Trump was saying. They see it as correct, expect other politicians to make similar announcements, or they claim that others are putting forward similar proposals and express frustration that Trump is criticized for his. Two of the comments advise all who disagree with Trump to leave the country: (7) If no one likes what Mr. Trump says and think he is all bad go live in another country and enjoy your life …

Again, an inference can be made that the commenter believes that “what Mr. Trump says” is good for the country and that every US citizen

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is expected to like it. Those who do not are not welcome in the US anymore and should leave. In several cases the writers use the “straw man” strategy and defend the proposal to ban Muslims by writing what was not in the proposal. According to them, Trump is not as bad as Muslims because he did not suggest beheading Muslims who, as implied by the posters, want to behead Americans: (8) How is that different than what Trump wants to do? Oh yea, Trump isn’t saying cut their heads off like their Quran tells them (9) Trump is not saying to behead them like they do Americans who go to their country or to put them in concentration camps like Hitler

The comments in this group avoid discussing Trump’s text. This fact is quite interesting since most CDA work has been dedicated to the legitimation strategies and other strategies to hide racism, xenophobia, and other prejudice (van Dijk 2008). In the BTM corpus, however, the commenters explicitly referring to what Trump said often did not feel the need to employ any of those strategies. They seem to have shaken off the societal expectation of disavowing prejudice and are not afraid to support a discriminatory proposal. While expressing their support, they do not make any attempts to legitimize the proposal or their beliefs; instead, they express their approval without any explanations.

Paraphrases of the Original Text The reinterpretation and rephrasing of Trump’s statement to various degrees was also frequent in the BTM corpus. Overall, there were sixty-nine such comments (44 per cent). Posts with quotes fit in this category as well because they did not stay faithful to the actual text and paraphrased it despite utilizing quotation marks; moreover, they proceeded to discuss the desired implementation of the ban thus adding the commenter’s own opinion. Many writers paraphrase the text of the proposal fairly closely by using synonyms (e.g., “stop”, “not allow”, or “ban” instead of “shutdown”). The

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common stance is still support, and the strategy is often ad populum, but the comments grouped here make some use of the genuine text of the proposal when they discuss it: (10) Trump said ban Muslims, and the other candidates said to stop Syrian refugees from coming in here

The authors of such comments demonstrate that they heard Trump or read the text of his speech and are informed of what was actually said. They still imply that they support the proposal as they appear to defend it from criticism, and they do so by highlighting one of the words that was actually uttered by Trump.

Modifications Involving the Time FE In the statements that do refer to the actual elements of the proposal, the comments most commonly address the Time Frame Element (FE); that is they focus on the word “until” from the text of Trump’s proposal (as in “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”). This word appears important to the commenters, and it is often spelled in all capital letters or is marked by quotation marks around it: (11) Trump said UNTIL we can figure out what’s going on. Spot on

Besides graphical highlighting of the time factor in Trump’s proposal, it can be further emphasized lexically. A couple of the commenters did that by adding focusing expressions as in “the operative word in what he said was UNTI …” or “The emphasis was clearly on ‘Until’.” While focusing attention on the temporary or conditional nature of the ban, many writers deviate further away from the actual text of the proposal by adding a specifier that was not in it originally. These additions do involve some modifications of the original text, even though they can be considered moderate and staying within the general spirit of the proposal. It appears that some commenters who approved of Trump’s proposal found the application of a faith test for immigrants problematic, and they felt the need to defend it from criticism. They seemed to

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believe that being temporary or conditional would exonerate the ban. They often included the word “temporary” even though it was not in the actual text of the proposal. They must have felt that it was important since they often highlighted it by quotation marks or capital letters. (12) We had an Islamists attack in the USA so Trump says “temporarily” ban Muslim immigration

Another point of ambiguity of the conditional clause in the original text of the proposal is “our country’s representatives”. Since Trump did not specify which agency would be charged with the job of “figuring out” what is going on, the commenters “jumped in” readily to fill in with names of such agencies or groups (even though they were also often vague). Some such groups that are mentioned are the White House, the feds, the government officials, “our dumb-heads in DC”, etc. (13) He is not saying never allow Muslims in the USA, he said let’s hold off until the White House can figure out what they are doing (meaning until we can figure out better screening process)

Oftentimes, the “country’s representatives” are metonymically replaced with “we”, the US, or “our country”. Ironically, the only use of the term “quote” in the comments from the corpus belongs to a supporter of the ban who, as many others, attributes to Trump an idea he had not verbalized. The announcement was misrepresented by adding a reference to ISIS, which is a significant piece of information absent from Trump’s proposal. However, the writer is assuring others that he/she knows what Trump really meant: (14) OK some of yall on here are stupid … Trump is not saying we need to ban Muslims forever which I don’t think he could anyway but what he did say and I quote DONALD J. TRUMP WOULD STOP ALL ENTER OF MUSLIMS UNTIL UNTILLLLL … WE FIGURE OUT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH ISIS … so basically what he’s saying is when we destroy ISIS we can let Muslims, Syrians, etc. back in the USA #trump2016 #trumpforpresident

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Similarly, the only use of quotation marks around the phrase from Trump’s utterance (until our country’s representatives figure out …”) extends the quote to beyond Trump’s exact words even though the comment starts with a focuser “They are missing the point the point here of what exactly Mr. Trump said.” (15) “That until our countries Reps can figure out what the hell is going on in our country, we must stop Muslims from entering our country”

The writer continues to retell the proposal as taking “a breather ”, and referring to Muslims as “Muslim Radicals.” These kinds of “extensions” bring up to the issue of adding pieces of information that were absent from Trump’s utterance. Some examples veer away from the wording of Trump’s proposal by elaborating on what was said. Many comments from the interpretation group modify Trump’s text while explaining it. In so doing, they make a significant semantic leap. It takes some imagination to interpret “until [the officials] figure out what the hell is going on” as “till the vetting process is improved”, “until better screening”, sorting Muslims into good and bad, or changing visa approval practices (none of which was explicitly mentioned by Trump): (16) to what Donald Trump said yesterday about locking down the VISA program

Even though Trump did not mention new laws, at least one of the commenters interpreted the announcement as proposing a new law: (17) Trump has said to consider a law that would restrict Muslims

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Modifications Involving the Preventing Cause FE The comments that address Preventing Cause FE by specifying what Trump meant by the word “shutdown” may reflect the US sociocultural belief that immigration is a problem and the current procedures are inadequate and put US citizens at risk. They may also echo the conviction that Muslims are prone to violence and need to be evaluated more rigorously than non-Muslims. There is a case when a commenter not only starts by asserting that the ban was going to be implemented “only for a short time” (which Trump did not specify), but also adds a completely new condition of ISIS being “taken care of ”: (18) He also says that his idea of this policy is only for a short time. Most likely until ISIS is taken care of.

This extension does not come from Trump’s utterance but is obviously a belief of the writer indicated by the modal marker “most likely”. The full text of this comment deviates from Trump’s words quite substantially as it extends into allusions to the population of undocumented immigrants who live in the US and to the need to deport them. The ideas sound as something the commenter believes him/herself but is sure Trump shares: (19) He says himself he doesn’t hate all Muslims, and you would be fine bro. He is trying to limit the intake of people because of the ISIS problem. ISIS proclaims to be of Muslim followership, so he sees fit to target the closest related group like most people would. He is only deporting illegals too. Which means there will still be a decent population of Muslims, and legal immigrants. He also says that his idea of this policy is only for a short time. Most likely until ISIS is taken care of.

The writer is confident that he knows what beliefs Trump holds, and he/she feels knowledgeable enough to reassure the author of a prior comment who asked if he/she would be deported for being Muslim. Some writers produce a long list of requirements, which seem to have been invoked by the vagueness of “what the hell is going on”. One of the comments covers a range of issues from “Department of Homeland

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Security” , to “jihadi training camps” , to people overstaying their visas, to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents. This phrase seems to have worked as a “dog whistle” for the listener and activated an elaborate network of contextual information related to the dissatisfaction with existing US immigration policies.

Modifications of the Protagonist FE The FE of Protagonist (Muslims) receives a lot of reinterpretation in the comments collected for this project. The majority of the alternative phrasings in the corpus under analysis ignored the problem of identifying followers of Islam at the border. Instead, commenters wandered away from the actual text, which did not contain an explicit evaluation of Muslims, to offer their opinions of that group. A couple of comments inserted the word “new” into Trump’s proposal as related to Muslims even though Trump did not specify which groups of Muslims would or would not be allowed. In the comment below, that word is even spelled in all caps: (20) Yes I agree … we need to stop NEW people from coming in until we can properly document them … what’s wrong with that?

Another notable deviation from the text of the proposal is separating Muslims into peaceful and dangerous ones. Several writers want to sort Muslims out and to let in only the “safe” ones: (21) Well what does Trump say restrict all until they learn who is good or bad.

The determination to keep “dangerous” or “radical” followers of Islam out of the US (which, again, was absent from the text of Trump’s proposal) gets inserted into paraphrases of Trump’s text: (22) You are totally ignorant as to what Trump is saying. He isn’t attacking the Muslim Faith, He is trying to keep RADICAL MUSLIMS out until

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our dumb-heads in DC take the time to figure out a strategy to and get the backbone to stop them from coming in!!!!

Several commenters evoke the feeling of danger they associate with Muslims: (23) He is not attacking a faith, but trying to protect America from those who wish to destroy us.

These kinds of sentiments must have been prompted by Trump’s proposal since they are a response to it, but they must have come from the commenters’ own ideology because Trump did not mention them directly. The following comment is illustrative because it starts with a reference to Trump’s announcement, then highlights the temporary nature of the ban (as many others did), and after that veers off in a new direction: putting in a new requirement for Muslims to be admitted to the US, namely denouncing Sharia Law. (24) Trump never said ban all MUSLIMS! He said freeze the Muslim inflow until we can figure out what the hell we’re doing. Until the Muslim Community gets rid of Sharia La[w] …

This is a substantial deviation: Trump definitely did not say anything about Muslims denouncing Sharia law in the proposal under discussion. While he might have said it before and after, the example connecting the condition of “until we can figure out what the hell we are doing” with “until the Muslim Community gets rid of Sharia Law” is a new item introduced by the commenter, which must have come from the his/her own convictions or echoing previous conversations rather than from Trump’s wording. This dynamic is fairly common in the corpus of comments of Trump’s supporters. If they do elaborate on their opinion beyond “I support what he is saying” or “I see nothing wrong with it” , then they veer away from Trump’s text, usually into the area of safety for US citizens and the perceived danger emanating from Muslims.

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One person starts a comment with a vague promise to explain “why Trump is saying what he is saying”, continues with a long list (only a short part of which is quoted below) of why Muslims are barbaric and dangerous, hints at some conspiracy theories, and finishes with pasting a link to a website that supports the expressed opinions: (25) Here is why Trump is saying what he is saying-> Roughly 1 3rd of Muslims worldwide OPENLY approve of ISIS. We do not know how many approve silently. I ask why we do not hear these highly relevant statistics on the tube? If this 1 statistic is anywhere near accurate we obviously have several myths floating around!

This particular comment goes on to declare that Islam “is NOT a religion at all” but is “a barbaric system of Governance” that is incompatible with Western civilization and to praise Trump for standing up to it. The attack on Islam as a “sect” is also fairly common and is used as another reason for implementing special immigration policies for Muslims: (26) When Mr. Trump says we need to stop admitting Muslims until we can determine what is going on he means until we can define religion and clearly identify which individuals belong to hostile secs of Islam, we cannot legally admit any Muslim.

Many more commenters, after affirming that Trump was only to keep Muslims out temporarily, move on to a long list of grievances, including cultural and religious ones, perceived loss of freedoms, economic hardships caused by immigrants, and danger. For example, one comment mentions “Nativity scenes … removed to stop us from offending Muslims” , “[p]ork … removed from our schools”, “Merry Christmas messages … changed to Happy Holidays” among other complaints and blames the newcomers for American citizens’ loss of “their rights and freedoms of speech”. Some attack the “libs” and blame them as failing to understand Trump, after which they start pouring out many complaints they have about their life and perceived violations of their rights, including the Second Amendment.

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Some offer elaborate descriptions of what (they think) Islam is and what the US policy toward Muslims should be, alluding to the problem of terrorism and using war imagery: (27) You cannot conduct a war against your enemy while leaving your back door open …

Even though the number of comments that attribute something Trump did not say to him is small, it is interesting because it contains comments that are drastically different from the text of the proposal. According to one commenter, Trump says “the truth” about Islam and calls it a Satanic death cult, even though Trump did not say anything remotely close to what this commenter attributes to him (whatever beliefs Trump holds about Islam): God bless Donald Trump for standing up to the antiChrist, Satanic death cult!!! The only person who says the truth what Islam is!!!

This example is not unique. Other writers use the occasion to share their negative views of Islam and refer to Trump as vocalizing these views: (28) They might learn exactly what Trump is saying about Muslims and their Cult … not a religion, it’s a cult!

And even though Trump might have associated Muslims with terrorists in some other statements, he did not equate Islam with terrorism in his December 7, 2016 announcement. Yet some comments praised him for calling Muslims out as terrorists. (29) This is the first statement that I can agree on that Trump has said Islam is terrorism just read the Quran and seek the truth for yourselves.

Again, commenters put words in Trump’s mouth that he did not say. Even though Trump attracted much praise for being sincere and being uninhibited by political correctness, his statement is quite tame compared to some of the statements by his followers. Oddly enough,

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they attributed their words to him. No matter what he might or might not be thinking about Muslims, he did not mention an “evil version of Islam” at the rally where he made the announcement about the ban, nor did he say anything about the need for Islam to reform itself. These ideas, however are attributed to him: (30) What Trump is saying is also what China, India, Japan, Egypt, Jordan and others are saying … No more Muslims Until Muslims Reforms Islam. Christianity, Judaism and Catholics have all reformed themselves in my life time, but You Mr.Ryan, Rino’s, and Democrats all stand for Muslims that support this evil version of Islam???

The Protagonist FE group of comments illustrates the “dog whistle” theory of code words better than any other semantic group in the corpus. Namely, Trump did not use any negative epithets to refer to Muslims, but his proposal to “shut them down” was enough to open the floodgates of negativity, sometimes bordering on hate speech, expressed in the comments left as a reaction to what he said.

Conclusion The variation in comprehension of the same utterance by different listeners described in this chapter stresses the importance of underlying convictions and individual cognitive systems for the way people react to verbal stimuli and process new input. This is in line with the cognitive linguistic approach (Coulson and Kutas 1998; Fillmore 1975, 1985; Lakoff 2008) and with research in social psychology demonstrating that people who hold strong opinions on social issues often examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner (Ditto and Lopez 1992; Edwards and Smith 1996; Lord et al. 1979; Taber and Lodge 2006). This study demonstrates the propensity of the audience to interpret populist discourse in accordance with their own preconceived notions, values, and ideologies: Trump’s supporters used their background knowledge, possibly including Trump’s earlier statements, to make sense of his controversial announcement. The comments exhibited a broad scope of

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interpretations of his statement and ranged from general declarations of approval without mentioning any specifics, to fairly accurate paraphrases of Trump’s utterance, to modifications of the text to fit the commenters’ own vision of the best way to handle Muslim immigration, to complete re-writes of his proposal and the content Trump did not verbalize at all, at least not in the video they were responding to. The comments were informative in the sense that they demonstrated which semantic elements were the most salient for the writers and/or which ones were the most problematic and required defending. Many writers added some justification for Trump’s plan, some stressing its temporary or conditional nature, and some expressing security concerns. Such comments can be interpreted as an indication that the commenters did perceive the ban as problematic, and the apparent need to defend it hints at a realization that it was, in fact, flawed and discriminatory. Defending the proposal, the commenters modified the fillers of semantic slots of the Thwarting frame evoked by Trump’s utterance, mainly the Time, Preventing Cause, and the Protagonist frame elements. They filled the slots with content they liked better even when it was far from what was literally said. Some writers filled Manner or Explanation slots that Trump left completely empty. Those who noticed that discriminating against a religious group contradicts the spirit, if not the word, of US laws as well as the country’s posturing as a supporter of human rights picked up the phrase “until … figure out what the hell is going on” and defended the proposal as temporary or aiming at improving immigration procedures. Some departed from the text of the proposal altogether and described what the immigration process of the US should be in their opinion (while claiming that Trump said so). Those with a hateful attitude toward Muslims focused on the Protagonist frame element, interpreted the whole announcement as a declaration of prohibition of Islam in the US, and shared their negative view of followers of Islam thus demonstrating behaviour consistent with the “dog whistle” or “code words” theory (Mendelberg 2001; Safire 2008; Stanley 2015). In line with a “code word” effect, these attitudes came through when indirectly prompted by the statement they responded to, and they may be studied as prevalent world views of Trump’s electorate.

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At the same time, the fact that more than a half of the comments did not elaborate on the meaning of the proposal might, in fact, spell trouble for an analyst. Having observed the broad range of interpretations expressed by the commenters who expounded on Trump’s text, one might ask what those who expressed support for the proposal without elaborating were actually supporting. If their interpretations deviated from the literal meaning of Trump’s utterance as much as those of the people who did try to retell and explain the specifics of the ban, they could have been “agreeing” with significantly different plans. The project, therefore, emphasizes that the “post-truth” communication depends not only on misinformation or disinformation but on vagueness as well. Whether on purpose or accidentally, the Trump’s announcement of the Muslim “shut-down” is semantically vague, allowing multiple interpretations even if the audience sticks to its actual wording. Despite claiming to be an outsider in politics, Trump seems to have perfected the art of ambiguity continuing the tradition of mainstream politicians who are notorious for evasiveness. If R. Keyes was troubled by “euphemasia” and “terminological inexactitudes” (Keyes 2004: 15) at the turn of the century, now these strategies seem to have reached an even higher level of popularity, and President Trump has successfully applied them in his appeals to his audience.

Note 1. The original spelling and grammar of the Facebook comments quoted in this paper are preserved. Many of them had multiple issues, sometimes severe enough to make the message barely comprehensible. Since adding a [sic ] note after each non-standard expression could overwhelm some of those comments, I am leaving them for the reader to decipher, just like any Facebook user would have had to do while reading them.

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Natalia Knoblock is an Associate Professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, USA. Her research interests lie mostly in political and cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. Some of her queries focused on the US presidential debates, xenophobia and hostility in online communication, and the cognitive processes involved in verbal aggression and propaganda. She is the editor of “Language of Conflict: Discourses of the Ukrainian Crisis” and is developing a project on the morphosyntax of hate speech and another one on the discourse of Trump’s supporters.

6 Social Media and the Concept of Interpellation Michael Brandmayr

Introduction Following the electoral success of right-wing populist movements in many European countries, an increasing number of political commentators have suspected a link between these election results and the functioning of social media. It has been suggested that social media create filter bubbles and echo chambers which produce and reproduce certain views of the world, i.e. ideologies (cf. Pariser 2011). Accordingly, the structure of social media platforms such as Facebook allows a different kind of interaction between users, making it easier to convey right-wing populist ideologies. But do users actually feel more easily addressed by right-wing populist statements when they are on Facebook and if this is the case, why? This could partly be due to populist messages themselves. Similar to Mudde (2004), I understand populism to be “a set of ideas focused on M. Brandmayr (B) University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_6

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an opposition between the people (good) and the elite (bad)”, i.e. “an ideology that considers society to be separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups” (Mudde 2018: online). Populists thus always address the individual against the background of an urgent, inescapable, possibly existential conflict. They regard their membership of a social group as a given and unconditional fact; being part of the group is not bound to achievements, social status or the like and therefore conditional, but is unalterable and unconditional. However, it also formulates an apparently unambiguous task that the individual should accept. Populist forms of interpellation (Althusser 2001) are less new than the field where they take place, and Facebook is undoubtedly a place of subjectivation. In my view, political subjectivation is the acceptance of attitudes regarding moral, ethical and political aspects of daily life, but also the adoption of interpretations and explanations about the functioning of the world, which often happens rather unconsciously. If it is true that the structure of Facebook encourages the adoption of rightwing populist attitudes, then reasons for this must be found in the way (and not necessarily in the content) of communication. This article therefore analyses excerpts from Austria’s 2017 general election campaign. Using a concrete example, I try to show how a distortion of the statement occurs on several levels by using different stylistic devices, and how images and metaphors are intended to evoke associations among users. An examination of the nature of communication, while emphasizing its strategic aspect stands in the tradition of discourse analysis rather than media analysis (cf. Link 2013; Keller 2005). I refer to discourses as the sum of statements that are and can be made about a specific, delimitable area. The latter means that in every discourse there are limits to what can be said as well as dominant views. Discourses produce both knowledge and a distinction between what is legitimate knowledge and what is not, i.e. which knowledge is considered suitable to legitimize a certain view of the world. This knowledge—as Keller (2005) in particular points out—also modifies our patterns of perception, which leads to the fact that statements from other discourse arenas are no longer received in an unbiased way. Althusser (2001) calls the process of interpellation the process by which a group or a speaking person creates a certain offer of meaning

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in order to appeal to an individual, and by which this individual accepts this interpretation and thus adopts the social position intended for the individual in this interpretation. This is explained in more detail in section “Theoretical Background” below; however, I want to raise the question here whether, if the way of communication in social media changes, the way of interpellation will also change. This would be the logical consequence if indeed there is a connection between right-wing populism and social media, and between the rise of right-wing populist justifications and social media use. Analysis that is based only on terms like filter bubble is too superficial. Rather, it is necessary to analyse why people react to postings in what way, what images, interpretations, and associations are being evoked.

Theoretical Background Since Pariser (2011) famously described the discursive closure on social media platforms as an effect of “filter bubbles” resulting from algorithmbased content management, several publications have addressed the question of subjectivation processes in social media. For example, the topic of (political) processes of subjectification through communicative practices on Facebook is discussed by Simanowski (2016). Parallel to Wodak’s (2015) analysis of general right-wing discursive strategies, he describes how on Facebook subjectification is achieved by the exclusionary construction of a “we” identity. Fuchs (2016) analyses comments on the Facebook pages of Heinz-Christian Strache and Norbert Hofer during the Austrian presidential elections 2016, aiming to detect ideological strategies of a positive representation of the self and a negative representation of others. This chapter seeks to develop this idea further by asking how exactly ideologies on social media platforms such as Facebook are mediated to the subject. It follows Althusser’s (2001: 109) understanding of ideology as “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”. Ideology leads to certain forms of subjectification, in which the internalization of a self-image and a world view are highly relevant in characterizing processes of subjectification, which

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in turn are mediated through practices. While this is still true, with the arrival of social media we have to ask if the conditions framing the process of interpellation are still the same, and the process itself is still functioning in the way Althusser described it in the famous scene of the policeman. In this scene, Althusser gives the example of a policeman shouting “Hey, you there!” to an individual who turns around and by “this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject ” (Althusser 2001). In the act of acknowledging that it is indeed he who is addressed, the individual constitutes and recognizes his subject position, which is based on discursively constructed forms of subjectivity, and takes this position. So, in this scene, the individual becomes a subject because there is a more or less definite form of subjectivity as a citizen that the individual has been taught in different ideological state apparatuses. The interpellation itself is short but relatively concrete, and the position of the subject is quite definite, of course within a certain range. Still for Althusser there are no concerns that the individual becoming a subject finds his or her exact position in society without any difficulties—he hardly mentions how exactly this process works and, more importantly, why the individual follows this process. To quote Choi (2012: 155), the undiscussed question in the example of the policeman is: “Why does she [the individual] turn around?” According to Žižek (1989: XXI), Althusser is assuming that the interpellation will always take place in the same way with the same success to anyone—which Žižek strongly doubts. Therefore, Žižek is among the first authors who try to explain the subject’s willingness to identify themself with the offered subject positions by employing the concept of the constitutive lack developed by Lacan (Lacan and Fink 2004: 177). For Lacan, the lack is constitutive for the subject, which means, that our whole picture of ourselves, as well as our aspiration to conform to this picture, is based on a fundamental lack. The reason for the lack is the original separation of the child from its first caregiver (usually the mother) in the mirror stage. The incest taboo or the authority of the father prohibit the child from (oedipal) union with the mother and force it to direct its desire to other objects. However, these alternative objects (Lacan calls them objets petit a) come from the sphere of other subjects or cultural influences; therefore Lacan believes that desire is always a desire

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of the other—both in the sense that one wants to be desired by others, as well as that one accepts the desire of others (i.e. one desires fashionable things). This acceptance does not always happen consciously, so neither these influences nor their consequences, i.e. the motives of desiring (or fearing) something are not necessarily conscious to the subjects. The desire’s reason of existence is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire. After all, the concrete desire of a certain object is a proxy action, a culturally accepted symbolization of the original desire, which is forbidden—a final fulfilment of the desire is thus excluded. While this highlights the individual’s need for identification and the influence that discourses, the symbolic and imaginary dimension of society, have on individuals, it also shows that individuals potentially resist interpellation due to their conscious and unconscious desires. As the lack results from both conscious and unconscious dimensions, interpellation is both a contingent and a determined process at the same time: It is contingent because of the self-reproducing effects of desire, with Žižek (1989) arguing that within the subjects a residue will remain that is unable to identify itself with a dominant ideology. But it is also a process determined by the subject, which Žižek (1989: 34) shows by introducing the example of Kafka’s subject: though in Kafka’s novels the subject wishes to identify itself with the Other (in his case the nationstate), bureaucratic and insufficient structures lead to a hostile attitude that evolves into resisting the call of the Other. While Althusser (2001: 114) assumes (by referring to Pascal’s bon mot “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe”) that by simply exercising practices in the state apparatus ideologies are internalized, Žižek (1989: 43) doubts that: this external ‘machine’ of State Apparatuses exercises its force only in so far as it is experienced, in the unconscious economy of the subject, as a traumatic, senseless injunction. Althusser speaks only of the process of ideological interpellation through which the symbolic machine of ideology is ‘internalized’ into the ideological experience of Meaning and Truth: but we can learn from Pascal that this ‘internalization’, by structural necessity, never fully succeeds, that there is always a residue, a

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leftover, a stain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it.

In a very similar way, Dolar (1993: 87, 88) points out that the equitation of external structures that guide subjectification processes with the internal process of subjectification by Althusser is misleading in two ways: Firstly, it would suggest a totality of the process that could not explain how individuals (like Althusser himself ) could gain insights into the ideological situation they are actually in; and secondly, it cannot explain the ideological potential of other forms with no material structure, like love: Love can function as a mechanism of ideology—it can serve as a link between what is most private and a social bond—only because it can successfully produce that passage from the outer into the inner and at the same time cover it up. Love masks the external origins of subjectivity, concealing them not behind the illusion of an autonomous subject as a causa sui, but, quite the contrary, by offering one’s being to the Other, offering one’s own particularity in response to external contingency.

This argument is crucial for the reflections in this chapter. Similar to love, certain content like images or videos produced and mediated on social media can also serve as an ideological force that can link, using a different terminology here, the subject to the discourse, or, to be more specific, link discursive elements to a media subject which constitutes itself as a speaking subject, a user, in the space of social media. But this raises important questions regarding the conditions and structures of this process: What characterizes this media subject, the content and the discourse of social media as surrounding structures guiding subjectification processes? And how can the internalization process be described? Dolar (1993) describes this internalization process as transformation of the constitutive lack on the level of the real into the symbolic. He argues that the basis for the transformation process to succeed is not only the lack of the individual that has to be filled with an imaginary subjectivity; also, the big Other, the SUBJECT,1 has a lack. The Other

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does not have a full, consistent material force; following Lacan’s bon mot that “the other does not exist”, Dolar (1993: 89) points out that the Other exists only by the (conscious or unconscious) recognition of the subject: The subject cannot simply respond to the call of the Other, for there is no call; however, that makes the Other all the more present. The presence of that Other has to be supplied by the subject him/herself; he/she has to make the Other exist first, not just recognize him/herself as the addressee. The Other exists only by the subject’s belief in it, the belief that there is a subject supposed to know.

For that reason, Dolar calls the act of identification with the Other a form of “forced choice”: Though the choice is forced in the way that the subject may not have any other options as a result of an unconscious desire, the compliance of the individual response to the call of the SUBJECT is a necessity as otherwise there would not be a call at all. The reason is that it is the individual who produces the meaning of material practices and attributes this meaning to the practices that would otherwise appear senseless and random. Or, conversely, if material practices were not partly void in meaning and constituted their meaning as a totality by themselves, the individual would not be able to identify those with its own desires as they would hardly match: The Other that emerges here, the Other of the symbolic order, is not material […]. If subjectivity can spring up from materially following certain rituals, it is only insofar as those rituals function as a symbolic automatism, that is, insofar as they are governed by an “immaterial” logic supported by the Other. (Dolar 1993: 90, 91)

To follow up Dolar’s argument, I would claim that meaning in postings is not given but constructed by the user. Postings offer more than one level of significance, so the important question then is: how were certain elements of postings such as images or videos interpreted and how and why did users choose a certain meaning? Is there a connection between certain elements of a posting and the users’ evoked reactions? How did the user evaluate and connect the new information (for instance, did they

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regard claims read in postings as legitimate knowledge and why)? Which equivalences or comparisons did the user make, which metaphors were used, and which emotions can be found in comments?

Methodology This contribution is based on insights from a project2 which is currently conducted at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. In this project, data from the Facebook pages of the main actors of political parties, i.e. from pages of politicians, as well as the Facebook pages of three daily newspapers—Der Standard , Die Presse and Kronen Zeitung —was collected during the six weeks leading up to the Austrian general elections on 15 October 2017. The project focused on discourses of migration, security and integration, and not only the postings, but also user comments were collected. In total, the data consists of approximately 600 postings and many thousands of comments. The evaluation of this data is currently in progress and thus no final results can be given. For this reason, I would like to present some initial findings using a concrete example that is representative in the qualitative sense. Methodologically, the project mainly relies on the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Wodak 2012) as well as on Jürgen Link’s understanding of discourses. While the DHA particularly emphasizes the historical and situational contexts of discourses, Link uses the term collective symbol to refer to linguistic images that are present in collective memory. They evoke very specific reactions and memories and are thus able to shorten and distort statements, to reduce complex contexts and to make contradictory assertions seemingly congruent (Link 2013: 12–13). However, despite different focuses, both approaches are methodologically highly compatible, not least because Wodak also includes the effect of linguistic images in statements. From the methodological proposals of the DHA, I particularly take up the analysis of topoi, metaphors, analogies and other discursive strategies and rhetorical elements (c.f. Wodak 2012: 72ff.; Wodak 2015: 50ff.). In the practical analysis, a multimodal approach (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) is chosen that is not limited to linguistic images, but

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integrates images, videos, graphics, etc. into the analysis. In the debate on how this additional data material should be interpreted, however, I assume—similar to Poferl and Keller (2017)—that images do not have their “own logic” (Böhm 2008), but that, like images, language has meaning on several levels, i.e. can be read in several ways. However, the interaction of language and images constitutes a new level of meaning that requires a multimodal analytical approach.

The Case Study: A Posting by H.-C. Strache in the 2017 Election Campaign As a case study, I would like to analyse the media discourse around a study conducted by Heiko Heinisch und Imet Mehmedi (2017) on behalf of the Austrian immigration fund (ÖIF). The ÖIF is subordinate to the Austrian Foreign Ministry. From 2013 to 2017, at the time of the elections, the Foreign Minister was Sebastian Kurz, who is now the Austrian Federal Chancellor. During this period, the ÖIF saw massive increases in funding and has intervened more and more frequently in the debate on migration through research reports, expert opinions and other publications, above all supporting Kurz’s position. The study is called “The Role of the Mosque in the Integration Process”, and in their findings the authors claim that 38% of the Austrian mosques actively discourage Muslims from integrating into Austrian society. The most striking aspect of the study is, however, that the authors emphasize its non-scientific character: The findings of this study cannot be considered representative in the understanding of social sciences. First, because the sample used in the research is too small, second because the panorama of mosques in Austria is hard to determine in its complexity. (Heinisch and Mehmedi 2017: 78)3

All of the analysed newspapers reported on the study, and so did Sebastian Kurz and Heinz-Christian Strache, the party chairman of the FPÖ and previous vice-chancellor of Austria, respectively, by commenting on

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it via their Facebook accounts. Strache links his post to an article in the newspaper Kronen Zeitung, which is a tabloid and known for politically incorrect articles. The headline of the paper is “38 per cent of Austrian mosques work against integration”, and Strache writes: “Once again Kurz reacts two years too late. A real late bloomer. He demands solutions only when it’s too late and problems explode. Austria cannot afford such a lack of leadership in the future” (see Fig. 6.1). My first interpretation refers to the relationship between the text and the image. What can be seen here is a supposedly Muslim man with a turban, turning away from the observer (which, in most cases, will be an Austrian or someone who considers themself as a member of Austrian

Fig. 6.1 Posting by H.-C. Strache on the integration study, October 2, 2017

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society) towards the mosque. One could therefore say: you see a Muslim man, turning his back on the Austrian reader. In the image, the mosque is positioned as in opposition to Austrian society and so symbolizes a threat. It is this very threat that Strache refers to when he speaks about “exploding problems” and the “lack of leadership” that “Austria can no longer afford”. But it only becomes a threat, because Strache speaks of it as if it were a threat. The full meaning, as I want to show, constitutes itself by the interrelation of image and text, while of course there is no fixed and definite significance in the posting. It is characteristic of images that they present multiple levels of significance at the same time, and an image can always be understood in different ways. Nevertheless, images can function as collective symbols, as Link (2013) understands them. As cultural stereotypes, their meaning is not infinite, but very specific. Since the current discourse establishes an equivalence between the lack of integration of immigrants and a threat to security, the image of a Muslim man who turns away from the viewer can therefore arguably express the diffuse danger of which right-wing populist parties consider him a collective symbol. Only the fact that the Muslim man is shown makes it possible to speak of “the Muslims” as a foreign group—the collective symbol generates a homogeneous group which actually does not exist. Nevertheless, the recipient of the collective symbol already believes exactly that s/he knows about certain characteristics of this group without having to name them. We have now already touched upon an important part of the second step of the interpretation, which is analysing the topos and the narration of the posting. Following Wodak (2012: 35), topoi can be described as “the content-related warrants or ‘conclusion rules’ which connect the argument or arguments with the conclusion, the claim”. A frequently used topos of right-wing populists that we can also find in the example is the topos of threat. How does it work? If we agree with Massumi (2005), a threat is (by definition) something that is unknown, because if it were known in its specifics, it would not be a threat, it would be a problem society could deal with. Another characteristic, according to Massumi (2005: 35), is that it is not present, it is “just a looming. It is a form of futurity yet has the capacity to fill

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the present without presenting itself. Its future looming casts a present shadow, and that shadow is fear.” So, the effect of this discursive strategy is to constitute a homogenous social group, an “us”, by claiming the existence of a common threat, the group of the “others”. What is important is that both groups— us, the threatened, and the others, the offender—do not need to be named. They remain as vague as the threat itself does; the audience has to decide who belongs to which group and what the threat exactly is—and in analysing the postings, we saw that there is an ambiguity about who is in and who is not, and why we have to be afraid of the others. A central aspect of the political lies in its conflictual and antagonistic dimension: Wodak (2015) highlights this dichotomic division as one central element of right-wing populist discourses. Wodak and others argued that the discursive strategy to create a difference between “us” and “the others” was to claim a cultural difference between “us Christians” and “the Muslims”, between Orient and Occident. An idea of a homogeneous Muslim culture was positioned as a threat to our Western lifestyle, for instance because of Muslims’ alleged lack of respect for women’s rights, their lack of religious tolerance and so on. These attitudes were simply assumed as to naturally belong to Islam and the message here was that we need to defend our culture against theirs. Other examples are the well-known images from 2009 (see Figs. 6.2 and 6.3), which were taken from a campaign of former Vice-Chancellor Strache under the slogan “Abendland in Christenhand”, which means “Occident in the hands of Christians”, which was curious because Strache was known as not being religious at all. Here, too, it is clear that much of the symbolism—the symbol of the Occident and the cross Strache is holding in his hand— must be understood as collective symbolism in the sense of Link. The picture evokes a whole series of associations in the collective unconscious, from a historical reference to the Turkish sieges of Vienna in the medieval battle of the Orient against the Occident, to current vampire films. In all cases, the cross symbolizes the divine and the good in the battle against evil. Strache evokes this collective association in his appeals to form a collective identity. What is important, however, is that the group of the “us” is explicitly addressed as “Christians”, while in the previous example, this is not

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Fig. 6.2 H.-C. Strache in 2009

the case. But how is the difference constituted, if groups are not named directly and assigned to certain elements? In the corpus of data examined, fewer contributions were found which justified the differences between the groups of the “we” and the “others” exclusively with cultural or religious differences. Rather, the discursive strategy has changed to a mode that I call the “scientification of the difference”. In the given example of the reaction to the report by Heiko Heinisch und Imet Mehmedi (2017), hard facts, scientific reports and investigations, concrete events and other elements are used to “prove” a fundamental difference between the groups of “true” Austrian citizens and those who are not. The strategy is to claim that the supposed differences are not naturally, genetically or culturally constructed, but nevertheless existent objectively, which can be seen in concrete behaviour, in a thorough examination of norms, values and attitudes of immigrants.

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Fig. 6.3 Statement in the 2009 election campaign of the FPÖ (with kind permission from Demokratiezentrum Wien)

A central element here is numbering: it is crucial in the example that exactly 38% of all mosques prevent people from integration. The number symbolizes accuracy and objectivity and at the same time disguises the fact that the study was not scientific at all. Part of this strategy is of course generalization, mainly done by populist agents, where the message is freed from its concrete context. It is important to note that the generalization is done in a very careful and broad manner. In the example, actors speak in a very dramatic way about “exploding problems”, but never mention who exactly is causing problems and what these problems are. The focus in this step is the positioning of a general, unknown, shadowed (in Massumi’s terms, cf.

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Massumi 2005: 35) threat out of a concrete fact. The discursive strategy seems quite paradoxical, since its pattern is to appear concrete, objective and fact-based in the first step and then open, vague and general in the interpretation and conclusion of the message. Therefore it can be assumed, that the intention of the distribution of these facts is not to inform and make the audience reflect, but to stabilize beliefs that the audience already have. A second aspect is the so-called “emotionalization of the political”. In the corpus, the most frequent emotions are hate and fear, which may not be surprising, and neither is the tendency of populist parties to play on these emotions. Yet, it is argued here that emotions have become a more important element of the political for two reasons. First, this is due to the rising importance of the visual in political discourses and the structure of social media. Structures of social media promote emotional postings in the sense that they give them a greater audience: Emotional postings get more likes, are shared more often and so get more attention. Social media furthermore promote a culture of visuality, which can be seen by the rising numbers of memberships in platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, as well as in different ways these platforms give their users the means to express their emotions—by likes and dislikes, gifs and emojis. The second reason why I think that emphasizing the emotional is more important in current discourse lies within the success of right-wing populists. Following Laclau, the identification of the individual with a social group is an emotional rather than a rational act, and it is so for any political group, left and right. Laclau (1996: 303) argues that “the belief that there is a particular social arrangement which can bring about the closure and transparency of the community” is an ideological effect, an illusion that is at the same time necessary for, and impossible in, the existence of communities. While this is certainly true, I would argue here that the extent of the emotional part in statements by right-populist discourses is in large part due to the fact that the threat and the problems that the group of the “us” is confronted with is not named, and is left to the interpretation of the audience. The empty signifier within right populist discourses does not only require an emotional act of identification of the individual in order to constitute a social group within

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the community; its whole substance, so to speak, is indeed emotions. Nearly any political message I have analysed so far by right-wing politician Heinz-Christian Strache evokes emotions but is indistinct and vague at the same time. This can be clearly seen in the comments and reactions to these posts. Yet, this vagueness is a crucial aspect for understanding the interpellation in social media that will now be discussed further.

Interpellation in Social Media: How Meaning Is Constructed I generally understand interpellative effects to be the visible reaction of users to the posting of H.-C. Strache. It shows the subject position that a user constitutes and occupies. This position establishes a specific world view as well as a specific (e.g. emotional) way of expressing it. It distinguishes between legitimate knowledge and knowledge that is rejected and makes use of certain symbols and imaginary ideas. Six hundred comments on Sebastian Kurz’s Facebook Page and 538 comments on Heinz-Christian Strache’s page were analysed; they referred to postings published on the pages on the topic of the integration study that was discussed in the earlier section of this article. It needs to be said that many postings were excluded as they could not be considered expressions of interpellation (e.g. some posts clearly rejected the argument, while others were probably posted by bots). The affirmative reactions were categorized into the three most frequent patterns of statements. However, many comments include more than one scheme or combine different arguments, which is why the following distinctions present idealistic types. A representative example of the first common reaction is the following posting (see Fig. 6.4), in which the user states: “There is no integration in Islam. If a Muslim says so, it is Taq¯ıya. It is written in the Quran that a Muslim may not befriend an infidel—but he may appear to do so to further the Muslim cause. He may not adapt either. Never. The Quran cannot be reformed either.” Reisigl and Wodak (2017: 95) describe the discursive strategy that the user adopted and used in this posting as “nomination”. Here the user

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Fig. 6.4 A user posting on Sebastian Kurz’s page, October 2, 2017

creates an individual Muslim as a social actor who is completely governed by the writings of the Quran, i.e. who is characterized by his religious beliefs (and nothing else). Here the Quran becomes the totum pro parte for all Muslims, they seem to have no freedom of choice in their actions. The Quran, which is also thought of here as a homogeneous, unambiguous written document with only one interpretation, one truth, one mission, is presented as providing binding rules for the behaviour of all Muslims. From this it follows that Muslims have no other option than to present themselves as different to the local population of the receiving country, for any relativization of the significance of Islam for one’s own life or any insistence of a different understanding of Islam by a believing Muslim would have to be interpreted in this logic as “Taq¯ıya” (in brief: taq¯ıya, Arabic “fear, caution”, is a principle that applies to various Shiite groups, according to which it is permitted to disregard ritual duties and conceal one’s own faith in the event of coercion or danger). Here the effect already mentioned in the second section is pushed to the extreme: discourses determine our modes of perception and patterns of interpretation to a large extent. This immense simplification of reality, which claims that there is only one reading of the Quran and which can apparently determine the behaviour of all Muslims, finds its justification in the user’s comment regarding the concept of taq¯ıya. Even though the meaning of the word taq¯ıya is misrepresented afterwards, the use of the original term is very important on a symbolic level: it implies that the user refers to knowledge secured from the Quran or Islamic theology itself. The use of the

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word taq¯ıya therefore suggests that the user is familiar with it and that the rule actually exists—after all, there is even a word for it. The stylistic element which can be found in a prominent place in the user comment as well as in the posting by H.-C. Strache, I would like to call—again following the analytical category of Wodak (cf. 2015: 50)—the topos of secured knowledge . It describes the discursive strategy of proving differences with knowledge from supposedly secure sources, as in the present example from the Quran. The topos of secured knowledge creates a subject position in which it is necessary to speak in correspondence with the discursive mode of expression of the “scientification of difference”, astrategy that, as mentioned before, consists of naming alleged or actual facts in order to construct the imaginary group of “others” and position them as a threat to “us”. When powerful social actors like political parties produce a certain kind of knowledge through studies and position it in discourse, users either take up this knowledge or supplement it with statements that can also be considered knowledge in this context. This means that the source to which the users’ statements refer must occupy a similar position in the discourse—the Quran, for example, is regarded as a legitimate determinant of Muslims’ behaviour. However, this does not mean that the content of the statement must be correct—in the case I analysed above it is actually wrong. Racism, however, is rarely allowed to be expressed explicitly, e.g. in a sweeping devaluation or a general prejudice, but needs a seemingly suitable reference in order to be considered appropriate in this discourse. The effect of the interpellation thus consists in generating a specific way of speaking among users, through which existing discursive strategies of right-wing populist groups are reproduced. A second pattern can be seen in the following posting (see Fig. 6.5), where the user comments: “Now even the most stupid ‘do-gooders’ and indoctrinated system-benefiters realise that Islam does not belong to Europe. Try to mix oil and water!” Wodak (2015: 52) names the “topos of culture” among the frequently used topoi of right-wing populist groups. In the user’s posting, “Europe” is a collective symbol (Link 2013) representing “our” culture, to which Islam cannot belong. It is compared to mixing oil and water, two

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Fig. 6.5 User posting on the page of H.-C. Strache, October 2, 2017

substances that cannot be mixed because they have unchangeable structural properties that prevent this. For the user, the existence of two opponent and incompatible groups seems obvious. There is no possibility of harmonious coexistence, instead the two elements must oppose each other antagonistically. As Wodak (2015: 68/69) explains, the discursive effect behind the recourse to metaphors consists in a naturalization of social and societal conditions. The comparison with water and oil is supposed to symbolize that both groups are clearly separable, homogeneous units whose incompatibility is a natural fact. The reaction to the posting by H.-C. Strache shows that the user justifies his views mainly on an emotional basis. In contrast to the example above, he does not try to explain his view by referring to (what he considers) knowledge of the “others”. His comparison shows that the claimed incompatibility of “us” and (in this case) the “others” in his view needs no further explanation. Both the terms and the metaphor that are used in the posting indicate that the strong refusal of Muslims results from emotions, where fear expresses itself in a catastrophic interpretation of the status quo and an aggressive, hostile language. The interpellating effect of the posting by Strache triggers existing negative emotions in the individual, impelling for actions against the others. A typical example of the last pattern is the following (see Fig. 6.6): The user writes: “Close these mosques, everywhere. At first, they say they are for praying, but the opposite is the case. A good friend of mine, a Turkish person, has even confirmed that to me.” A second common topos is the “threat topos” (Wodak 2015: 52). The user addresses the threat in this posting—he expresses that mosques

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Fig. 6.6 User posting on H.-C. Strache’s page, October 2, 2017

are not used for praying, but that the “opposite” is the case. But what is the opposite of praying? One might think of many things—atheistically inspired debates, collective heresy, etc.—but none would give rise to fear of Muslims nor the request to close the mosques. The effect of the threat, however, is precisely that it is not stated explicitly. Wodak (2015: 187) mentions as a central condition for the topos of the threat that nothing precise is known about the group of others (and therefore much is possible); very similarly, Massumi (2005: 35) also points out that a threat is only a threat if one does not know anything precise about it—otherwise it would become a (solvable) problem. The discursive strategy of vagueness can be found both in Strache’s posting and in this comment: Strache’s statement only spoke of “exploding problems”, but not of what they are, so that every user could fill this image with his or her own associations. Regarding the user in question, the effect of Strache’s posting is that he recognizes himself as the threatened party. The subject position of the threatened that is created in Strache’s posting makes identification possible precisely because it does not name the exact threat. The interpellation effect here lies in filling the vagueness present in the discursive elements by the individual based on his/her daily experiences, hearsay, common-sense assumptions and beliefs. Those may be as obscure as they come; as long as they show convergence with the basic assumptions and tendencies of H.-C. Strache’s statement, they are able to fill the void in the claim of the Other: in the example I analysed above, this would be the “real” function of the mosques. After showing some differences, it needs to be stated that the individual’s reception of postings can only vary within a certain range if

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an interpellation took place: The boundaries of possible fillings for the void in the SUBJECT can be determined by the interpretative schemes underlying the concrete expression that all three postings have in common. All three postings show that the users have internalized a dichotomous worldview, the division between an “us” and the “others”. While the justification may differ, the exclusion of the others follows the same distinction marks. And, to name another obvious fact, nearly all users demand the same political action—to shut down all mosques as a measure of “protection” from the group of the others. If the view of the group of the “others” as a threat to the group of the “us” and the demand for measures of protection are the main result from the act of interpellation, the question is: in which way does this expression function as a symbolic gesture to compensate the desire of the individual, and how do the lack of the individual and the SUBJECT match here? My hypothesis is that the image behind the concrete discursive statements of right-wing populists is the loss of the known and secure homeland. It appears that the interpellation in right-populist discourse consists in triggering the experience of the loss of homeland that any individual at a certain point has suffered, beginning with the already mentioned loss of the mother in the mirror stage, combined with the experience of uncertainty, exclusion and underprivileged situations that come with entering a new territory. The idealistic image of the homeland appeals to the individual’s pre-reflexive imaginary which does not want to progress but rather return to the symbiotic state, the place of the familiar homeland. In its symbolization in the discourse of populists, when it is promised to bring the homeland back if the group of the others do not impede it, the situation of loss and of being displaced, rejected, oppressed and estranged are simultaneously triggered. The lack that both the SUBJECT and the individual share is clearly that neither knows exactly what the homeland is supposed to be like. Similar to the “promised land” in the Bible, it is a necessary and impossible object at the same time that, following Laclau, symbolizes the closure and transparency of the community and hides any existing antagonism within it. The aim of this paper was to demonstrate that as a result, content in social media always needs to be broad, vague and

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indistinct, it has to operate on multiple levels and leaves space for interpretation as a condition to evoke an interpellating effect. The content has to be partially void to leave space for the individual to fill it with their conscious and unconscious desires and imaginations. The dangerous potential of social media is then less, as often claimed, the easier distribution of fake news; it is rather the easier distribution of symbolic and image-based content with no distinct meaning, or a lack thereof, that one could argue against. The image that was posted in the example— the Muslim man turning his back on the viewer—can trigger strong emotions and can mediate its message of an alleged threat to society while a greater part auf the audience wouldn’t even understand it in that way.

Conclusion The aim of this article was to explain the relationship between social media and the success of right-wing populist groups. It is not only filter bubbles, echo chambers or fake news, it is also the changing the process of interpellation on social media through which individuals become political subjects. While Althusser’s interpellation was thought of as a process that mediates a relatively concrete and determinable subject position, the field of offered subject positions on social media is much more undefined, open and left to the imagination of the subjects. But it is exactly this vagueness seen in the Facebook postings that is the condition for generating an interpellative potential. My findings support Dolar’s argument that interpellation does not happen merely because of a call of the Other, because the Other does not exist. As in love, we ourselves create all the qualities we love and project them on the other person. Social media contents are in this respect equally large projection objects for our conscious or unconscious wishes and desires. They do not address us because of their content or their fixed statement, but precisely because they have no fixed meaning. We ourselves generate the meaning, and we ourselves generate the call of the interpellation.

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Furthermore, a central argument of Laclau’s (1996) can be confirmed, in that the desire that right-populist content mostly refers to is the individual’s wish to become part of an imaginative community which is assumed to be a homogeneous, peaceful community based on the topos of the nation. What does this mean for political education? Facebook must be seen as an important place where young people today have their first experiences with politics (cf. Marichal 2012: 90). In this sense, Facebook is the discursive field in which interpretations of politics are negotiated. The central problem is that Facebook mainly enables shortened, particular and, to a greater extent, pre-linguistic, i.e. pictorial experiences. Statements made by political actors usually appear to be very strongly context-bound and are not to be translated into larger embedded connections. In order to deal with this in the context of political education, I will briefly mention two central points (for a detailed article see Brandmayr et al. 2018). Firstly, the contextualization of online experiences must be recognized as a main part of political education. The term “contextualization” refers to the fact that political education creates a connection and a location in the world with regard to a concrete object, a statement or a (visual) fact. It is therefore a matter of making visible the integration, the social or historical context of a detail, its invisible consequences or preconditions. In concrete terms this means that political educators should treat widely received contributions—such as the Facebook posting presented in this article—as examples; not least because political educators today have to assume that large parts of their target group already know them but take up the contents in an alienated and shortened version. Secondly, as can often be observed, there is a specific strategy of right-wing populist groups to discredit public media and journalists. Along the described dichotomization between the “us” and the “others” it is claimed that “mainstream media” do not tell people the truth. Right-wing populists discredit certain media organizations and journalists without assessing how they work and how they achieve their results. In this way, ethical standards of journalistic work, such as checking sources, are not considered. This is not only extremely dangerous from the point of view of democratic politics, but also further promotes the

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formation of political statements on social media as described above. Political education must therefore aim to convey basic principles of journalistic work, as well as the importance of the media, for the vitality of a democracy.

Notes 1. Both Lacanand Althusser use capitals to distinguish between the big other, the SUBJECT, and the “regular” subject. I follow this suggestion here. 2. The project team consists of Hermann Mitterhofer, Martin Fritsche, Tanja Voggler, Fabian Madlung and Michael Brandmayr. I thank the project team for their insights and support for this article. 3. This quote and the following postings have been translated by the author.

References Althusser, Louis. 2001. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 85–126. New York: Monthly Review Press. Böhm, Gottfried. 2008. Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens. Berlin: bup. Brandmayr, Michael, Hermann Mitterhofer, Tanja Vogler, Martin Fritsche, and Fabian Madlung. 2018. “Das Politische in sozialen Medien: Herausforderungen für eine politische Bildung.” SWS-Rundschau 3/2018: 328– 348. Choi, Won. 2012. “A Structuralist Controversy: Althusser and Lacan on Ideology.” Dissertations. Paper 297. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_dis s/297. Dolar, Mladen. 1993. “Beyond interpellation.” Qui parle 6 (2): 75–96. Fuchs, Christian. 2016. “Racism, Nationalism and Right-Wing Extremism Online: The Austrian Presidential Election 2016 on Facebook.” Momentum Quarterly 5 (3): 172–196. Heinisch, Heiko, and Imet Mehmedi. 2017. Die Rolle der Moschee im Integrationsprozess. https://www.integrationsfonds.at/fileadmin/content/AT/

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Downloads/Publikationen/Forschungsbericht_Heinisch_Die_Rolle_der_ Moschee_web.pdf. Keller, Reiner. 2005. “Analysing Discourse. An Approach from the Sociology of Knowledge.” Historical Social Research [Historische Sozialforschung] 6 (3): 223–242. Kress, Gunther R., and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Lacan, Jean, and Bruce Fink. 2004. Ecrits: A selection. W. W. Norton. Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology.” Journal of Political Ideologies 1 (3): 201–220. Link, Jürgen. 2013. “Diskurs, Interdiskurs, Kollektivsymbolik.” Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung 1 (1): 7–23. Massumi, Brian. 2005. “Fear (The Spectrum Said).” Positions 13 (1): 31–48. Marichal, José. 2012. Facebook Democracy: The Architecture of Disclosure and the Threat to Public Life. London: Taylor & Francis. Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 39 (4): 541–563. Mudde, Cas. 2018. “How Populism Became the Concept that Defines Our Age.” Guardian, November 22. https://www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2018/nov/22/populism-concept-defines-our-age. Pariser, Eli. 2011. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. London: Penguin. Poferl, Angelika, and Reiner Keller. 2017. “Die Wahrheit der Bilder.” In Fotografie und Gesellschaft, edited by Thomas Eberle, 305–316. Wiesbaden: Springer. Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2017. “The Discourse-Historical Approach.” In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, edited by John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson, 87–122. London: Routledge. Simanowski, Roberto. 2016. Facebook-Gesellschaft. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Verlag. Wodak, Ruth. 2012. “The Discourse-Historical Approach.” In Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 63–94. London: Sage. Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

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Michael Brandmayr, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Educational Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is coordinating the project “Political and Civic Education in the Tyrol” and his research interests are in the fields of sociology of education, discourse theory and social inequality in the education system.

7 Archetypal Populism: The “Intellectual Dark Web” and the “Peterson Paradox” Darren Kelsey

Introduction Populism is an archetypal phenomenon. It can be seen in the stories we tell and the ideologies that operate through its narrative form. We recognize it when we see it in movements we oppose but, equally, we can feel it in some of those causes we support—populism transcends the political spectrum. As it moves from its psychological foundations through to communicative forms of expression such as storytelling, its archetypal qualities function as narrative vehicles for ideology. Hence, populism is mythological. Mythologies provide building blocks of meaning through the stories we tell about who we are and how we live. Political mythologies (Flood 2002; Bottici 2007) enable us to share social values, morals and ideals that resonate through archetypal forms of storytelling (Campbell 1949; Jung 1959; Lule 2001; Kelsey 2017, 2021). Drawing mainly on Kelsey’s (2017, 2021) discourse-mythological approach D. Kelsey (B) Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_7

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(DMA), this chapter will show how archetypal populism functions to provide a cohesive narrative around the concept of an “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW). As the range of contexts examined throughout this volume demonstrate, populism transcends left- and right-wing ideologies. As Kranert (Introduction in this volume) explained, right-wing populism has been studied at length in the field of critical discourse studies (see also Brandmayr and Kahlina, Chapters 6 and 9 in this volume). Likewise, left-wing populism has been analysed through attention to political movements and narratives that construct the struggle of the people against a corrupt or unrepresentative elite or ruling class (see Chapter 10 by Demata and Chapter 11 by Issel-Dombert in this volume). Hence, some populist movements attract right-wing and left-wing agency through the perception of shared opposition and mutual interest against “elites” and “establishments”. As Pelinka puts it, populist discourse often demands “more direct power for ‘the people’—and less for the people’s representatives” whilst protesting against “the self-interest of politicians, parties and parliaments who tend to forget their democratic mandate” (Pelinka 2013: 7). In doing so, populism seeks to disrupt established social and political orders by challenging notions of who “the elite” are perceived to represent. But as Kranert (Introduction, in this volume) also pointed out, this phenomenon is not limited to politics. Hence, we can start to question how the narrative components of populist stories are engrained deeper in our cultural and collective psyche than we are often encouraged to consider. It is worth noting that whilst right-wing populism has been on the increase in recent years, we have also seen significant growth in the anti-vaccination movement and the popularity of flat-earth conspiracy theories—both of which feature familiar populist traits (Kennedy 2019). These movements are fuelled by a distrust of experts and elites that has spread beyond politics into anti-science and anti-intellectualist discourses. As Kennedy states: It seems likely that scientific populism is driven by similar feelings to political populism, for example, a profound distrust of elites and experts by disenfranchised and marginalised parts of the population. Even where

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programmes objectively improve the health of targeted populations, they can be viewed with suspicion by communities that do not trust elites and experts. In the case of vaccine hesitancy, distrust is focused on public health experts and pharmaceutical companies that advocate vaccines. (ibid.: 512)

Whilst such narratives have always existed, the Internet has provided an effective dissemination tool for sharing these stories and theories— providing further concerns and challenges for science communicators (Wilson and Keelan 2013; Kata 2012; Betsch and Wicker 2012). So, when approaching populism with attention to its narrative forms, our concerns should both precede and focus on ideologies and political movements. In other words, populist narratives are not limited to politics or science. They are, more broadly, social and psychological phenomena that operate throughout culture.

A Cultural (and Psychological) Phenomenon The case study featured in this paper might feel like a tenuous link to populism in its topical or political form. But my aim here is to focus on the narrative form in a case that is not commonly recognized as populism like those political parties, leaders and activists that are typically discussed in the field. My point here is that the psycho-discursive formations of populist narratives operate to both precede and be reinforced by political parties and movements. The latter do not operate in isolation from other aspects of media and popular culture; they are interwoven with the broader mythological landscapes of the cultures that they are part of. This chapter sees archetypal populism as an inevitability in cultural storytelling that can serve different purposes according to its cultural context. It is what populism does and why it resonates that warrants critical attention. Populism can be destructive, divisive and regressive. But it can also be necessary, unifying and progressive. Populism can be reductive and simplistic. But it can equally stimulate nuanced debate and intellectual complexity. Ideological context is, therefore, significant to the judgements we all make about populist stories and movements.

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Archetypal traits of populism can help explain how complex political movements and phenomena provide a binding and cohesive account of who they are and what they stand for—even when multiple ideologies operate within them. An example of the latter is the IDW.

The Intellectual Dark Web The IDW is an eclectic conversational space that claims to be expanding the realms of political and intellectual discourse beyond the parameters of mainstream media and academia. “IDW” was initially a joke metaphor coined by mathematician Eric Weinstein to describe a movement that he says has grown outside of, and in response to, “the gated institutional narrative” of the mainstream media establishment and political elite. Weinstein described a group of intellectual thinkers who are excluded from mainstream conversational spaces in media, politics and academia who “have a much easier time talking amongst ourselves despite [their] apparent frictions and differences because there is this different substrate of conversation that is available” (Weinstein 2018). But what was Weinstein really alluding to in the political landscape of the IDW? Can attention to this phenomenon be potentially enlightening, and what are its limitations? How can psycho-discursive theory help to critically examine some of its affective narrative qualities in this respect?1 In addressing these questions, I am concerned with the story that has developed around the IDW and how its key figures have been identified. I will show how archetypal populism provides the IDW metaphor with affective qualities that resonate with audiences—both its followers and its critics. I argue that this archetypal narrative creates a multifaceted ideological space through which networks of public intellectuals appear united by a common cause against the “mainstream media” and/or the “radical left” in social and academic contexts. By addressing these characteristics, I will draw on a selection of IDW and mainstream media sources, with particular attention to the case of Jordan Peterson, mainly due to his

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breakthrough into mainstream media and culture. Throughout my attention to these sources, the psycho-discursive elements I discuss will help to explain some of these paradoxical traits around Peterson’s persona.

Source Material and Multi-Layered Analysis My selection of source material was a challenge given the limited scope of this chapter. Having viewed and read hundreds of articles, interviews and lectures by and with IDW figures, I use Weinstein’s quote above as a starting point to define what the IDW metaphor has been used to signify by those associated with it. From Weinstein’s account and my familiarity with this phenomenon, I present the archetypal structure depicted later—in Fig. 7.1. Furthermore, rather than purely relying upon my own summary of the IDW, I provide examples of media sources that have commented upon or critiqued the IDW.

Fig. 7.1 Narrative structure of the Intellectual Dark Web (“SJW”—Social Justice Warrior)

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It is important to note that beyond Weinstein’s definition of the IDW, media sources commenting upon it—whether positively or negatively— have further contributed to the archetypal salience of its narrative. Hence I refer to a combination of media (mainstream/alternative) and IDW sources throughout this chapter. I also do this to demonstrate not just how IDW figures have defined themselves in light of Weinstein’s metaphor, but to show what kind of narrative has been stimulated in response to them. In the case study of Peterson, I then draw on a combination of commentaries about him and interviews with him. This enables me to present the multidimensional layers of IDW discourses; showing how archetypal forms function both in the construction of Peterson’s own persona and in other responses to him. However, there is a further nuance to consider in this source material. The work of psychologist Carl Jung functions on multiple layers throughout this chapter: firstly, in the influence of my own approach to psycho-discursive analysis that adopts Jungian concepts of archetypes, shadows and persona; secondly, through my attention to Peterson, who is significantly influenced by Jungian psychology in his own work and analysis; thirdly, through my use of David Fuller, who has launched the YouTube channel Rebel Wisdom. Fuller is also influenced by Jung, which explains why he has often focused on Peterson through the Rebel Wisdom channel. Here, Fuller has sought to accommodate a psychoanalytical perspective that does not seek to pursue the right-wing ideological agency that Peterson is often accused of. Likewise, the closing discussion with Russell Brand provides another account of a conversation with Peterson in which the interviewer (Brand) shares the Jungian perspective that Peterson is influenced by. I seek to understand the complexities and political diversity of an archetypal form that binds the IDW story and its figures through a cohesive narrative. Rather than trying to establish whether this populist narrative is left-wing or right-wing, good or bad, right or wrong, I am trying to show how it has accommodated cohesive conversations that some intellectuals feel are prohibited from mainstream media and/or college campuses. That is not to suggest the IDW does not have its problems, limitations or contradictions. However, I argue that the IDW is a politically diverse form of intellectual populism that has managed to

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engage with audiences beyond the academy. In light of Weinstein’s earlier point regarding the “gated institutional narrative”, Fig. 7.1 depicts the narrative structure concerned in this chapter.

My Position in this Analysis It would be dishonest for me not to declare that I admire some of the work by IDW figures—even those who I disagree with politically. I do feel that the IDW has provided an effective tool for expanding intellectual consciousness in public discourse. However, the aim of this chapter is not to simply endorse or criticize the IDW. As Slate journalist William Saletan argued, the IDW’s significance stretches beyond a matter of approval: It offers a forum to skeptics and dissenters. It’s politically diverse, ranging from Trumpers to Never Trumpers to Bernie Sanders fans. … You don’t have to love the IDW. You don’t even have to think it does more good than harm. But you ought to ask why so many people have fled to it, what we can learn from it, and why self-satisfied progressives are so quick to dismiss it. (Saletan 2018)

Whilst there are controversial aspects of the IDW that critical research needs to address, the IDW hosts a group of political and intellectual figures who are engaged in a polygonal complex of political discourse. For this reason, I argue that archetypal populism provides a cohesive narrative to bind an eclectic group, which pitches itself against a “gated institutional narrative” of the media establishment. Its story is a form of affective mythology.

Affective Mythology and Archetypes In Media and Affective Mythologies (2017), I showed how archetypal storytelling functions ideologically in political discourse. By revisiting the discourse-mythological approach (Kelsey 2015), I expanded beyond

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its semiotic scope to offer a psycho-discursive framework. Here I introduced the work of Carl Jung (Jung 1959) to incorporate psychoanalytical toolkits for analysing narrative construction and archetypes (see more recently, Kelsey 2021). Archetypes are products of neurological stimuli, recurring psychodiscursive complexes and the influence of cultural contexts in the behavioural and communicative tendencies that we all share. They take on powerful forms in how we tell stories to construct meaning. From the “collective unconscious” (Jung 1959) through to the social and cultural salience of consciousness, we can analyse the affective trajectory of archetypes as they become personally and collectively fused within popular narratives and stories of our times.2 A significant archetypal structure in IDW discourse is Campbell’s (1949) monomyth (the hero’s journey) because it provides populist movements with a coherent narrative to articulate “resistance”, “struggle” and “triumph” against “elites” or “the establishment”. This archetype operates through stories of individual and collective journeys: “The hero’s journey … is one of the most familiar narratives of mythology that we see commonly played out in fictional and non-fictional stories. It is a moral form of storytelling that we often use to reflect upon our own life challenges, experiences and journeys” (2017: 41). Therefore, it is important that we critique the “ideological constructions and discursive substance of stories that feature this archetypal pattern” (2017: 41). As I showed in my analysis of audience responses to UKIP leader and national populist, Nigel Farage (Kelsey 2017), even when we are sceptical of certain stories or disagree with them entirely, we can often identify these archetypal forms within them. Either way, populist stories function through this archetypal narrative known as the monomyth since it can provide narrative cohesion among collective groups that might otherwise hold conflicting political positions. In the case of the IDW, through its opposition to a “gated institutional narrative”, archetypal populism unfolds.

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Political Diversity Beyond the “Gated Institutional Narrative”? IDW figures are often unified in their opposition to “radical leftist”, “social justice warriors” and “political correctness” movements. They argue that certain groups have pressured mainstream media and higher education institutions into avoiding controversial topics and difficult conversations that are important in academic research (Weinstein and Heying 2017, 2018a, b; Heying 2018; Shapiro 2018a, b, c; HoffSommers 2018; Rubin 2018; Soh 2019). A recurring trait in IDW discourse sees public intellectuals claiming unfair treatment in this respect. Here are some profiles listed on an IDW website: Jordan Peterson (2016, 2018a) opposed the legal introduction of gender pronouns, criticized the radical left on college campuses and gave a pivotal interview to Cathy Newman (see below); Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (2017, 2018a, b) opposed a day of absence for white staff and students at Evergreen College and have since expressed ongoing criticism of identity politics and “gender ideology” (Heying 2019); Sam Harris (2015, 2017a, b, 2018a, b) criticized religion, radical Islam and identity politics; Christina Hoff-Sommers (1994, 2000, 2015), a feminist and outspoken critic of contemporary “victim feminism” and “women’s studies” in academia; Deborah Soh (2018, 2019), a neuroscientist, sex researcher and columnist for Quillette and Playboy who has been critical of “science denialism” and hostility towards researchers studying biological sex differences.3 Ben Shapiro, an American conservative political commentator, podcast host and public speaker, sees the IDW as a host of political diversity and mutual respect amongst figures with different political affilliations: “The only thing that unites us is that we don’t like identity politics, we want to have conversations with each other, we don’t want conversations shut down by calls of racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia” (Shapiro 2018c).

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Podcast host and comedian Joe Rogan (another IDW figure) has responded to criticism he has faced for some of the conversations he has had with figures like Shapiro: I’ve had so many people call me a right wing monster. What is right wing? I support gay marriage. I support universal health care. I am in absolute favour, if it could work … of universal basic income. … I’m anti-war. … I am way more likely to vote for someone on the left than someone on the right … If our taxes are going to go on anything, shouldn’t it go on taking care of our neighbours and our fellow humans? That seems to me to be a no-brainer and that’s a pretty left wing idea. (Rogan 2018)

Nonetheless, IDW figures such as Dave Rubin (2015, 2018) have resisted the idea that the group should unitfy through victimhood. Rubin sees it as an empowering space for its key figures and audiences. Rubin describes the IDW as “one of the most important forces for reason that exists. This crew of people from Harris to the Weinstein brothers and from Shapiro to Sommers have all come from different walks of life and different academic career backgrounds” (ibid.). But not all mainstream media are hostile towards the IDW. A notable case that stirred significant debate involved New York Times journalist Bari Weiss (2018). Weiss described the IDW’s recurring topics and viewpoints as follows: Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”… It’s a pattern that has become common in our new era of That Which Cannot Be Said. (2018)

The archetypal (monomyth) conventions that bind the IDW’s construction of its story are apparent here: the gated institutional narrative and its threshold guardians who obstruct the intellectual quest for knowledge and truth; a radical leftist ideology that must be overcome by those IDW figures willing to respond to a call to adventure—a quest for the greater

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good; if triumphant they will bring more liberty and intellectual freedom to public and political discourse. A significant figure in this narrative is Jordan Peterson. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. There are many controversies and figures I could focus on in relation to the IDW. However, I will focus mainly on Peterson for the rest of this chapter through attention to various sources—mainly in the work of David Fuller (2018a, b, 2019) and Russell Brand (2018a, b). Fuller and Brand provide examples of rigorous conversations with Peterson that enable deeper analysis of his role within the IDW and the complexities of his public persona.

“A Glitch in the Matrix” and the Peterson Paradox Journalist David Fuller (2018a, b) produced a documentary about Jordan Peterson and the IDW. Fuller states: “Sometimes there’s a glitch in the matrix, where the limitations of the old [media] operating system are laid bare and something new pokes through.” Fuller identifies Peterson as a key figure in the IDW—his interview with Cathy Newman being symbolic of this “glitch in the matrix”. In this interview Peterson was using psychological and neurobiological arguments as a clinician to counter some of the social theories of gender inequality. As Fuller and Joe Rogan both point out in conversations with Peterson, the Newman interview was designed with the intention of producing reductive soundbites rather than a long conversation. Whilst some audiences will have found Peterson’s views controversial, he was not the figure that Newman had attempted to expose. Many saw the interview as an embarrassment for Newman and Channel 4 (2018) despite the fact that they willingly uploaded the full half-hour video. As of May 2018, the interview had been viewed almost 10 million times. Peterson’s YouTube channel has over 1.5 million followers. His videos and interviews have received millions of views online. His book 12 Rules for Life has sold millions of copies worldwide. He has sold out large arenas on his tours of the US and UK He frequently appears on

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IDW podcasts and now receives significant attention from the mainstream media. But prior to this, Fuller had been tracking the growing popularity of Peterson online for some time before the Cathy Newman interview on Channel 4 saw his global fame escalate. Fuller sees the interview as a reflection of the polarization that we are currently experiencing and he feels it is dangerous. After the interview went viral on social media, Peterson had to step in and tell some of his followers to back off after Newman received abuse and death threats. Fuller tried to get Peterson and Channel 4 to engage in a follow-up conversation to reflect on the interview and move forward through more constructive dialogue. Channel 4 declined. In his documentary, Fuller approaches the Newman interview as a watershed moment where old media met the Internet and, essentially, failed at the hands of an IDW figure. In a conversation with Joe Rogan, Peterson said the interview showed why YouTube is going to make TV obsolete because “narrow broadcast technologies rely on forcing the story—it has to happen now, often in five minutes”. Hence, despite uploading the full interview, Channel 4 initially only showed an approximately five-minute segment. Since the interview, Fuller (as a former colleague of Newman) and Peterson (reflecting on his pleasant conversation off-air with Newman beforehand) have both said that the persona Newman adopted for the interview was not reflective of her as a person or a professional. Rather, Fuller argues that the position Newman found herself in reflects the ideological frameworks of old media combined with a change in collective consciousness that the mainstream has struggled to keep up with. As Fuller points out, Peterson has provided a problem for mainstream media and analysts because he is difficult to pigeonhole into a political category. The depth and nuance he is able to explore (and disseminate to mass audiences) in his lectures online and discussions on podcasts enable Peterson to demonstrate that he is not the alt-right bigot he is often accused of being. That is not to suggest he is not controversial nor is it to agree with everything he says. But it is significant that he was at one stage receiving $80,000 a month in voluntary donations via the online platform Patreon, as a result of his YouTube channel, public lectures, book sales and, more recently, his mainstream media appearances. But

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why does Peterson receive this level of support whilst simultaneously stimulating such controversy?

The Liberal Shadow? The IDW’s political diversity, unifying through an anti-establishment narrative, often functions in response to the concept of a liberal shadow. Like Peterson, Fuller uses the work of Carl Jung to make sense of “the chaos”, as he puts it. He sees the IDW movement as a response to polarization that is played out through the liberal shadow: The new documentary is influenced by the thought of the psychologist Carl Jung, as is Jordan Peterson, and particularly his concept of the shadow—those things about ourselves we repress or deny. In fact, I believe that what we are seeing right now in culture and politics is the eruption of, and the necessity to integrate, that shadow on a vast cultural level—and if we can’t own our own tendencies to anger, reactivity, judgementalism and so on—particularly ‘liberals’ who cloak their shadow in an ideology of ‘inclusivity and tolerance’—then we won’t survive. (Fuller 2018a, b)

Fuller claims that he has always viewed himself as a left-leaning liberal. However, since the election of Trump he says he has started to question the causes of what he identifies as “unhelpful polarization”. He feels that the shadow side of liberalism is partly responsible because some of its social justice movements have stopped becoming inclusive and instead “secretly judge and despise anyone who doesn’t share the same view”. In response, Fuller sees the IDW as a collection of figures who represent a growing awareness that the ideological structures and presuppositions of Western society are becoming more vulnerable, with the Internet providing an open space to explore alternative ideas: One theme that nearly all these thinkers have in common is a conviction that the chaos of the times is because the structures that have run western society for decades are breaking down—and this is a reflection of a deeper ideological—even spiritual crisis. … And they argue that it’s now essential

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to have much deeper conversations than we are used to if we are to get through the next few years. (Fuller 2018a, b)

Hence, rather than reductively labelling Peterson, Fuller tries to understand more about the psychological dynamics of his psychological perspective. For example, Peterson sees a balance between temperaments and personal types—attached to certain political inclinations—as being fundamental building blocks of a stable, democratic society: If you start understanding that the person that you’re talking to doesn’t share your political views—it isn’t because they’re stupid. People actually do see the world differently. It’s not merely that they are possessed of ill-informed opinions. The whole point of a democracy is to continue the dialogue between people of different temperamental types so that we don’t move so far to the right that everything becomes encapsulated in stone and doesn’t move so far to the left and everything dissolves in a kind of mealy mouthed chaos. (see Fuller 2018a, b)

Peterson argues that neurobiological evidence shows us how certain personality types are shaped to some degree by natural temperaments and characteristics. Whilst to some extent this is true, the distinctions Peterson draws here are problematic at times, since they overtly naturalize temperaments as fixed or static determinants of ideological preference regardless of environmental, cultural and political factors that develop among individuals (and groups) over time. Nonetheless, we can still consider those psychological factors as significant influences in the problem of polarization and how we might start to think about counteracting such a divisive political discourse. Fuller’s documentary follows the notion that current polarization in political discourse can be understood through political, psychological and archetypal lenses. A central theme in Peterson’s philosophy is the significance of the individual as the starting point for moral and social accomplishment (preceding the collective, in order to benefit the collective). But due to his focus on the individual, Peterson is often labelled as a conservative and some right-wing groups find his arguments easy to manipulate for their own ideological needs. Some leftist notions of the collective as the

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starting point for societal values sit precariously with this approach in mind. However, there are ideological complexities here that problematize these typical assumptions of left- and right-wing politics—especially when we consider the concept of individuation.

Jungian Individuation and Peterson’s Persona A significant aspect of Peterson’s philosophy is the Jungian (1959) concept of individuation and Campbell’s (1949) monomyth (the hero’s journey). Individuation often sees individuals consciously examine the Self to confront and integrate their own characteristics, flaws and shadows so that they can reconnect with the collective and make a better contribution to society. It reflects their own transformative journey to develop and improve with the intent of contributing to the greater good. Hence, there are nuances to this concept that have no clear position in the binaries of a left–right political spectrum. When Peterson discusses the monomyth and its importance in society, he stresses the importance of the hero’s transformation as a return to the collective—the hero must return with something to give back to the society. Individuation is not the same as individualism—in the former, there is a collective interest at stake (Kelsey 2017: 159). This distinction is important. A Jungian mythologist might argue that a progressive cultural story needs to integrate these aspects of the individual and collective in order to make a positive contribution to society. But as the case of Peterson shows, he cannot escape the inevitabilities of ideological contextualization. In the same way that Brand’s (2015) Jungian approach to individuation (or “spiritual revolution”) cannot shake perceptions of being leftist (Kelsey 2017: 132), Peterson faces similar challenges since he is deemed to be too conservative—see the Newman interview and Peterson’s position in the gender pronoun debate, for example. So, this is not to suggest Peterson does not hold any conservative views. He does. But it explains why he is equally difficult to locate in one political category and why his work appeals beyond an exclusively conservative audience. To some extent, as Fuller points out, Peterson transcends the left–right dichotomy.

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As I have argued (2017), mythology might be part of who we are but societies are responsible for its ideological substance and implications. Peterson’s work often demonstrates this tension. Despite those rightwing adoptions of his work, Peterson has also faced significant criticism from the radical right (Day 2019). With Day being a radical-right figure, Peterson (2019) saw Day’s criticism as a good thing because, as he states, he is “not a fan of collectivists on the right wing either”. So it is Peterson’s focus on the power and responsibility of the individual (2018b, c) that distinguishes him from radical left and radical right groups; he states his equal opposition to any political movement that is based upon collectivist ideology. Furthermore, Peterson points to cases where his work has helped young men turn their lives around (2019) and some make the case that his work has saved disillusioned young men from drifting towards the radical right (see Conroy 2018). Since his documentary, Fuller has published critical (albeit constructive) analyses of Peterson’s work following his tour of the UK in May 2018. Here, Fuller felt the manner of Peterson’s conduct warranted considerable scrutiny following a series of public and media appearances. He states: I still believe the depth of his thought transcends opposites and offers the clearest map forward that we have—but it’s equally clear to me that the way he is delivering it is not working, and is adding to the polarisation. Most concisely, that his opponents are successfully pulling him onto political territory, where he is spending most of his time defending himself, getting reactive, rather than engaging with the bigger picture. (Fuller 2018b)

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Meghan Daum alluded to similar points. On the one hand, it is possible to see how Peterson’s work transcends right- and left-wing binaries. However, his persona can compromise his message and some of those populist traits in the IDW narrative that he is central to can stimulate valid criticisms: His constant railing against political correctness has made him a particular favorite of disaffected young men who might otherwise gravitate toward … the alt-right. If you listen to Peterson for more than five minutes,

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you’ll see that he hates right-wing identity politics as much as the leftwing variety. But his demeanor can make him come across as a blunter instrument than he actually is, and he seems to enjoy the limelight too much to refine his message or change his tone. (Daum 2018)

Having viewed vast amounts of Peterson footage, I can see that Daum has a point. But, somewhat paradoxically, his ambiguity of political allegiance lends itself to the diverse audience interests that are attracted to his work and other conversations among IDW figures. As Fuller and Daum point out, there are justified criticisms of Peterson’s style. However, there are cases where Peterson does resemble a different persona to that of the “abrasive” and “abstruse” figure often seen in heated interviews. For example, Russell Brand’s interviews with him provided an intriguing shift in persona—partly due to the way that Brand (who has often adopted his own populist persona) conducted the interview. It showed, again, why Peterson is difficult to categorize politically.

Brand and Peterson: Under the Skin Podcast Comedian and political activist, Russell Brand is not commonly associated with the IDW. But through his own populist persona (Kelsey 2017) and criticisms of media institutions, much of his political campaigning in recent years has reflected a similar frustration to those associated with the IDW. Brand supports the notion that traditional media is failing to provide adequate information for a healthy democracy, informed public discourse or politically progressive conversation. His YouTube channel, The Trews, was in part a response to his frustration with the mainstream media. More recently, Brand started his own podcast and has engaged in long form conversations with a variety of guests relating to areas of academic, political and philosophical interests. Brand’s interviews with Peterson were the antithesis of Newman’s. Whilst Brand wanted to push Peterson on some points of political differences between them, it remained constructive even when Brand scrutinized Peterson’s application of Jung as an accommodation to conservative

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ideology. But, interestingly, there were other points of agreement where they discussed Jungian transformation and their shared value of Jungian individuation. Here they compare the philosophical similarities between Brand’s book Recovery (adopting the 12 Steps programme) and Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. Given that Brand has struggled to shake off accusations of being a lefty, celebrity, communist hypocrite (Kelsey 2017: 126) and Peterson faces accusations of being an alt-right bigot who only appeals to young angry white men, they could easily be constructed as polar opposites if a story was to select reductive sound bites to fit those perceptions. But their conversations moved beyond this. Here we have two figures of different political orientations who have sought to express themselves in long form conversations beyond the parameters of traditional media. Despite Brand disagreeing with Peterson on who has real social and economic power, there was a calm and reasoned tone to Peterson’s persona. He accepts some of Brand’s points about the excesses of consumer capitalism—the motivation behind Brand’s own populist activism (Brand 2015; Kelsey 2017). Brand argues that global corporations hold real power and challenges Peterson’s claim that the “postmodernist neo-Marxists” (a problematic conflation in itself ) are as powerful as he makes out. Brand accepts the flaws of some critical theory, postmodernist movements and the radical left, but he disputes the notion that this is real power (beyond university campuses). Instead, Brand proposes that real power lies in other, broader macro-structures of capitalism—a view that Peterson often opposes. Nonetheless, Peterson identifies the legitimacy of Brand’s concern as one focused on “overwhelming largescale corporate dominance”, which he agrees is equally valid to his own point about the radical left in higher education. In identifying the validity of both perspectives, they return to the (Jungian) importance of understanding the Self as a pathway to acknowledging differences between people in society, rather than being paralysed by ideological opposition. Similar to the IDW narrative, they agree that this enables us to celebrate political diversity by understanding the balance of eclectic influences people can bring to society for the best shared, collective interests.

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In this conversation, we arguably see the kind of refined response from Peterson that Daum and Fuller called for earlier. This is partly because the long form conversations between Brand and Peterson offered the time, space and mutual discipline to explore those philosophical, psychological and ideological complexities that transcends left–right polarization. Despite reflecting populist narratives in their own work, neither Brand nor Peterson attempt to categorize each other—their shared Jungian interest and attention to the deeper psychological orders of people and culture moved them beyond this. Their conversations also reflect the integration of viewpoints that Jordan Greenhall (CEO of Neurohacker Collective) highlighted in Fuller’s (2018a, b) dark web documentary: he suggests a fundamental shift and rethink in collective consciousness is necessary for society and that this can only be achieved beyond the static polarization of left–right tribalism. Greenhall shares the view that individual “sovereignty” enables better collective conditions for co-operation and social change. For the IDW, archetypal populism is significant here: through the IDW’s narrative of isolation from, and opposition to, mainstream narrative systems, it has stimulated this conversation that seeks to change those conditions for collective consciousness. Ironically, in Brand’s recent past he has been the type of activist who Peterson has criticized for wanting to bring down capitalism— who Peterson argues should “tidy his room” before he tries to change an entire economic system. Brand acknowledges this point. Now, rather than calling for an end to capitalism, Brand has accepted some of his own observations about “the system” and refined his approach: “What I was looking at was much too limiting. … What I learned is that I was right in the first place; the system will preserve itself. Now I’m focused on what’s best for human beings.” A story of reconnection with the collective through spiritual enlightenment and individuation is at the core of Brand’s current mythos. Brand’s populist rhetoric has, at times, been similar to that of the IDW narrative: pushing the the boundaries of public discourse and tired notions of left– right politics; opposing political and media establishments that fail the publics they should serve; encouraging academic and political conversations considered to be suppressed by the ruling elites. But the populist

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metaphor of a “gated institutional narrative”, also stimulates criticisms of this conceptual paradigm.

Accusations of Victimhood Whilst the IDW’s populist narrative has provided a sense of cohesion to its eclectic figures and political diversity, it has also stimulated significant criticism from other media sources. In response to Peterson’s growing popularity, his former friend and colleague Bernard Schiff (2018) wrote an article titled, “I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.” He said Peterson was guilty of playing the victim and accused him of self-martyrdom by exaggerating the level of threat he faced in losing his job after a gender pronoun controversy. According to Schiff this episode resulted in significant increases in Peterson’s donations from YouTube followers: “Jordan may have, however, welcomed being fired, which would have made him a martyr in the battle for free speech. He certainly presented himself as prepared to do that. A true warrior, of whatever” (ibid.). Schiff then refers to another incident where he believes Peterson played on a victim complex to construct the case that he was being politically suppressed in academia: Later, when his research grant was turned down by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Jordan told the world he was being punished for his political activities. There was no such evidence. The review system is flawed and this has happened to other academically renowned and respected scholars. (ibid.)

Whether they are justified or not, such criticisms are not limited to Peterson. Writing in the New Statesman, Nesrine Malik’s (2018) piece asked: “If the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ are being silenced, why must we keep hearing about them?” Malik addresses the point about their popularity and the apparent contradiction between their message of being marginalized from the mainstream despite their enormous popularity and growing presence within and beyond the media:

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But the main problem with the whole [IDW] profile is that it struggles because of a fundamental inherent contradiction in its premise … Either they are persecuted victims standing outside of society or they are not. Joe Rogan “hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country”, Ben Shapiro’s podcast “gets 15 million downloads a month”. Sam Harris “estimates that his Waking Up podcast gets one million listeners an episode”. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show has “more than 700,000 subscribers”, Jordan Peterson’s latest book is a bestseller on Amazon. (ibid.)

Nonetheless, there does appear to be a desire for complexity beyond the simplicity of sound-bite media. Unlike the misleading simplicity often associated with populist discourse, the archetypal dynamic in this instance appears to be driving a narrative that is striving for complexity and tolerance of political differences in the public domain. In its metaphorical form, the IDW alludes to an intellectual affinity group that has effectively adopted tools of digital democratization in multifaceted cultural and geo-political contexts.

Conclusion: Populism, Archetypes and Murmurations? This chapter has focused on archetypal populism by showing how the monomyth functions as a cohesive narrative around the concept of an IDW. This is not to suggest that other archetypal conventions are not relevant here. There are multiple archetypal conventions to any individual or collective story at any single moment of time. This applies to the IDW and there are many different figures and personalities that can be considered within its politically diverse discourse. For example, the IDW itself, particularly in figures such as Peterson, reflects certain qualities of the trickster archetype (Bassil-Morozow 2018); they break through, they do and say the unexpected, they interrupt the established order, they bring about change, they shed light on the shadows of the status quo. There are many archetypal conventions that could be considered in those complexities beyond the scope of this chapter.

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In previous work, I used murmurations as a metaphor to describe some of the archetypal and transpersonal dynamics of affective mythologies (Kelsey 2017: 168). This accounted for the behavioural and narrative patterns that occur between affinity groups sharing a common cause or goal.4 The IDW could be seen as a murmuration that occurred online and has expanded into mainstream culture. Its origins were subtler than an organized movement. The IDW is neither an organization nor an institution. Its narrative bond is populist in its archetypal form. IDW figures are not typical populists per se—they are often the antithesis of populist politicians. But the eclectic profiles and political backgrounds reflect a familiar dynamic of archetypal populism: shared opposition against the “the Other”, which in this case is the establishment media and “radical left”. In some instances, IDW figures might risk overstating the Other. For example, Ben Shapiro recently apologized to British journalist Andrew Neil after calling him left-wing and cutting a live interview short. Shapiro later admitted he “misinterpreted [Neil’s] antagonism as political leftism” (Busby 2019). As I have argued (Kelsey 2017: 168): “Like murmurations, ideologies are not monolithic or one-directional. Ideologies evolve, shape-shift and adapt overtime and collectives move with them through shared social practices and mutual understanding.” Since the stories we tell often reflect our shared, personal and cultural experiences, we often find ourselves in sync with members of the same groups, societies, nations or international communities. As Anderson (1983) and Harari (2014a, b) argue, we find ourselves in “imagined communities”. Harari (2014b) refers to the “mysterious glue” that enables us to organize ourselves as groups, institutions, religions, societies and nations through the stories we believe in. Hence, like the followers of the IDW, we cannot “know the millions of strangers within a group that we image ourselves to be a part of based on national, commercial, religious or other ideological needs” (Kelsey 2017: 169). The IDW as a concept is reliant upon this mechanism and might vary from the imagination of one person to another. Nonetheless, archetypal populism provides cohesion through a narrative that enables politically diverse groups to communicate via their perceived opposition to established elites.

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Murmurations do not reflect monolithic ideological movements. More so, they are the products of “shared and recurring archetypal patterns that operate as the building blocks for transpersonal experience and collective coherence” (Kelsey 2017: 171). Murmurations are bound through the neurological and transpersonal mechanisms behind stories; their stories express the mythological structures and ideological agency of groups, societies, nations, religions, cultures and institutions. They are as varied and endlessly shape-shifting as archetypes, mythologies and ideologies themselves. If we see the IDW as a murmuration this might be partly explained by audiences craving long form conversation beyond the soundbites of mainstream media, the clickbait of online sources and the reductive characteristics of other social media platforms. Many populist movements are often reductive or simplistic in their rhetoric. But, as this chapter has shown, the IDW story has arguably resonated with audiences looking for more conversation and complexity beyond the simplicity of polarized political discourse.

Notes 1. Bari Weiss provides an overview of key figures—“Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web”: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/int ellectual-dark-web.html. 2. For the most recent refinements in the DMA framework, see Kelsey (2021). 3. For further profiles and examples, see the following IDW websites: https://intellectualdarkweb.site/vanguards-of-the-intellectual-dark-web. http://intellectualdark.website. 4. “The metaphor stems from a phenomenon performed by thousands of birds (commonly starlings) through which they move in synchronised patterns to perform spectacular shapes and routines as a flock in the air: ‘As they fly, the starlings in a murmuration seem to be connected together. They twist and turn and change direction at a moment’s notice. … Regardless of the size of the murmuration, all the birds seem to be connected to the same network. This phenomenon puzzles scientists, because it goes beyond what we know from biology about how animals behave. The mystery of the murmuration

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is a fascinating example of a natural phenomenon that hides secrets about the world that scientists have still yet to uncover!’” (Kelsey 2017: 168).

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Peterson, Jordan. 2018a. Posted by: LBC . “Jordan Peterson On Why He Refuses to Use Special Pronouns For Transgender People—LBC.” YouTube, 22 May. www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_UbmaZQx74. Peterson, Jordan. 2018b. Posted by: Baxylz. “Jordan Peterson—The Power of the Individual.” YouTube, 24 November. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Roy vcaVUej0. Peterson, Jordan. 2018c. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. London: Penguin. Peterson, Jordan. 2019. Posted by: NEWS, 1. “Jordan Peterson Says Young Men Attend His Talks to Turn Their Lives Around.” YouTube, 18 February. www. youtube.com/watch?v=VICsw43SOV8. Rogan, Joe. 2018. Posted by: Clips, JRE. “Joe Rogan on Being in the Intellectual Dark Web.” YouTube, 26 July. www.youtube.com/watch?v=spb8bY IfP1g. Rubin, Dave. 2015. Posted by: The Rubin Report. “Dave Rubin on Free Speech, Safe Spaces, and Trigger Warnings.” YouTube, 10 November. www. youtube.com/watch?v=WjkhBVvw7RI. Rubin, Dave. 2018. Posted by: The Rubin Report. “What Is The Intellectual Dark Web? | Rubin Report.” YouTube, 30 January 2018, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=n5HN-KT9rj0. Saletan, William. 2018. Slate. “No, Bari Weiss Isn’t Glorifying the ‘Dark Web’.” https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/bari-weiss-is-not-glorif ying-the-dark-web.html. Schiff, Bernard. 2018. “I Was Jordan Peterson’s Strongest Supporter. Now I Think He’s Dangerous.” Thestar.com, 25 May. www.thestar.com/opinion/ 2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-hesdangerous.html. Shapiro, Ben. 2018a. Posted by: Trigger Happy Media. “Ben Shapiro vs. Social Justice Warriors Compilation #1—NEW 2018!” YouTube, 14 November. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lckyH4tRlHA. Shapiro, Ben. 2018b. YAFTV. “SO SATISFYING: Ben Shapiro Triggers SJW Snowflakes and Sends Them Running.” YouTube, 13 August. www.youtube. com/watch?v=HQ_Ky74o4FE. Shapiro, Ben. 2018c. Posted by: The Daily Wire. “Leftists Fear Intellectual Dark Web.” YouTube, 9 May. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdfHefFWFdE. Soh, Deborah. 2018. Posted by: PowerfulJRE. “Joe Rogan Experience #1147— Dr. Debra Soh.” YouTube, 26 July. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zere8W RepGo.

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Soh, Deborah. 2019. “Science Denial Won’t End Sexism.” Quillette, 15 March. www.quillette.com/2019/03/11/science-denial-wont-end-sexism. Weinstein, Bret. 2019a. Posted by: Bret Weinstein. “Andy Ngo Discusses Antifa Attacks with Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast #1.” YouTube, 2 July. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC4u1zo6OpQ. Weinstein, Bret. 2019b. Posted by: Rebel Wisdom. “‘Jordan Peterson, Sex and Ideology’ with Bret Weinstein.” YouTube, 30 November. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qR5yN2G4h54&t=5s. Weinstein, Bret, and Heather Heying. 2017. Posted by: VICE News. “Campus Argument Goes Viral as Evergreen State Is Caught in Racial Turmoil (HBO).” YouTube, 16 June. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cMYfxOFBBM. Weinstein, Bret, and Heather Heying. 2018a. Posted by: PowerfulJRE. “Joe Rogan Experience #1081—Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying.” YouTube, 20 February. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYJFgyqs0sM. Weinstein, Bret, and Heather Heying. 2018b. Posted by: Wisdom, Rebel. “Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying—Gender Ideology vs Biology.” YouTube, 8 February. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xU77FhkcZ8. Weinstein, Eric. 2018. Posted by: The Intellectual Dark Web. “Who Is The Intellectual Dark Web? Eric Weinstein.” YouTube, 18 May. www.youtube. com/watch?v=KavrerKPzms. Weiss, Bari. 2018. “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.” The New York Times, 8 May. www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellect ual-dark-web.html. Wilson, Kumanan and Jennifer Keelan. 2013. “Social Media and the Empowering of Opponents of Medical Technologies: The Case of Antivaccinationism.” Journal of Medical Internet Research 15 (5): e103. https:// doi.org/10.2196/jmir.2409.

Darren Kelsey is Reader in Media and Collective Psychology at Newcastle University. Darren is a mythologist whose teaching and research focuses on storytelling, ideology and collective psychology in media, culture and politics.

8 On the Retreat of Liberal Values and Access to Discourse: Extending Post-Foundational Discourse Theory Nikola A. Venkov

Dramatic Shifts in Public Perception A recent poll in the US tested the perception of colleges and universities among supporters of the two major political parties (Pew Research Centre 2017). Between 2010 and 2017, the share of Democrat supporters who thought that institutions of higher education “have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country” declined from 22 to 19%. More striking is the graph for Republican-leaning respondents: it remained roughly stable at around 35% until 2015. After this a sharp rise began, reaching as much as 58% by the last year of the survey. The period of change overlaps with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Still, the image that colleges are hotbeds of leftist indoctrination is a well-known and not at all new trope of the American Right. What I find intriguing is that after being dormant for decades this view had such N. A. Venkov (B) Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_8

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a sudden and dramatic effect on public opinion. I will be asking in this chapter how it is possible that even an institution so integral to the myth of modernity could lose its standing (and so quickly) for a significant portion of the population just because of the ongoing political polarization. How can we begin to understand this “ability” of political discourse to shift such seemingly solid ground? In political studies this example and others like it are taken as a symptom of a fundamental political transformation taking place. A number of authors today discuss a ubiquitous rise of populism in liberal democracies and explore whether there are some overarching factors facilitating such a seemingly global shift in politics (e.g. Inglehart and Norris 2016; Moffit 2016; Brubaker 2017; Eatwell and Goodwin 2018). In this chapter I too will engage with this question. However, before I suggest a novel answer to it, I will argue that it is not quite the right question to ask. I claim that what we are observing is not simply more populist politics but rather a retreat of the taken-for-granted values, knowledge and politics of the established liberal democratic order. I advance the preposition that we are living in a genuine populist moment, engendered by an unprecedented democratization of access to political discourse which is shifting the balance in national discourse circulation and thus facilitating a historical uncoupling between elite and popular discourses. Thanks to this democratization of access a much smaller investment is required today from the common (non-elite) citizen in order to become politically active—not in the sense of joining a political movement, but of a much earlier step: having an opinion. To construct the analysis I will turn to the theory developed by Ernesto Laclau and the Essex School in Discourse Theory (in Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Laclau 1990, 1996; and other works). It is variously termed postfoundational, poststructuralist or post-Marxist discourse theory (PDT). PDT gives us a powerful frame for analysing how political identities are constituted and how they enter into political struggles.1 While it offers a sophisticated ontology of the political, it is as yet less well equipped to analyse politics as action (the ontic level). Namely, it is lacking the tools to look at a world made up of multiple interacting subjects located in a landscape structured by the inertia of history and power. While this is a larger project begun elsewhere (Venkov 2017, in Bulgarian), here I will

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extend the conceptual apparatus of PDT by elaborating the notions of discursive social actor, discourse circulation, and access to discourse. With this extended PDT toolbox I will be able to theoretically ground the argument for an overarching shift in the way the dynamics of discourses on matters of public concern (amongst others) play out in contemporary societies. This shift results in what analysts have been perceiving as a ubiquitous rise of populist politics. I contend that we are experiencing something larger: a general retreat of liberal values, and possibly even, a retreat of the fundamentals of modern knowledge. This claim is illustrated in the next section through an empirical example.

Bulgaria: The “Invasion” of Gender At roughly the same time as when Americans were changing their views on universities, on the opposite side of the planet a mass moral panic ensued as the Bulgarian government was preparing to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Council of Europe 2011). The reason was that the text of the document contained the unfamiliar term “gender”. It was quickly reinterpreted as a “third sex”. The Convention was seen as a surreptitious attempt to introduce this “third sex” to the Bulgarian socio-national body, under the pressure of humanrights/“liberal” NGOs (non-governmental organizations). Large parts of the general population became convinced that the government was preparing the ground for future policies to “re-educate” children into this “deviant” sex.2 The Convention became a hot topic overnight, discussed in TV studios and the Parliament. Although many political actors jumped on the bandwagon, a lot of the action was happening beyond the traditional public sphere and media. Flaming arguments between ordinary people would erupt with hundreds of comments on Facebook. A study on Facebook and Twitter activity showed that in January 2018 73.5% of posts about the Convention by ordinary citizens were arguing against it (Media Metrics 2018). In March 2018, in a “populist” gesture, the government withdrew from the ratification process.

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It is striking that in this unprecedented for Bulgaria truly popular political debate the supporters of the authority of institutions and professions, of women’s rights, of trust in Europe (in an, until recently, highly pro-EU country), of the integrity of scientific language, and of what one might see simply as “reason” were heavily outnumbered. A year later a similar mass moral panic erupted about an update of the National Strategy for the Child intended to improve the regulatory frame on social services and child protection. The document was quickly rearticulated through a number conspiracy theories (see in National Network for Children 2019), most striking of which was that Norway is looking for ways to “kidnap” Bulgarian children on a mass scale for improving its own weak and depleted DNA pool. In April 2019 the adoption of the strategy was likewise scrapped to keep the nation at peace. What I would like to illustrate through these examples is that although we could try to think about the Bulgarian events of 2018 and 2019 through the concept of populism (and even propaganda), there is something deeper and grander at play. Along with the US example given earlier, they hint that today large groups of people are prepared to dispute values, practices, norms and institutions that for many decades were seen as default elements of a good “modern society”. Thus, the question “why the rise of populist politics?” seems to be closely related with another: why have many understandings, which were taken for granted in liberal modernity, become so easy to dislodge on such a mass scale in both the East and the West?

Following Up on the “Rise of Populism” Thesis The research literature on populism is by now vast (see also Kranert, Introduction in this volume). Most accounts try to understand the rise of populisms as a general disillusion of the masses with the liberaldemocratic model due to some concrete frustrations (so-called “demandside arguments”). They maintain a range of arguments that popular grievances arose due to changes taking place in the late twentieth century:

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from dissatisfaction with the existing parties becoming more technocratic and distanced from the citizens (Mair 2002: 84–87; Rummens 2017: 567–568) to an anxiety caused by global neoliberal transformations threatening local social relations (Kriesi et al. 2008; Holmes 2010), e.g. through immigration or economic restructuring. Treatments such as Eatwell and Goodwin (2018) or Mouffe (2019) synthesize all of these arguments together. This kind of account suffers from an overall epistemological flaw: the authors remain dangerously close to economism when they foreground some “factually-existing” cause (if not the 2008 financial crisis, then the crisis of democratic representation) to which populism is posited as the largely automatic reaction. To avoid sliding into economism it is necessary to theorize how the reaction itself is produced —how it takes shape in one direction or the opposite, or does not take shape at all (in other words, when and why a given situation becomes a “social problem”, Iakimova 2016, in Bulgarian; see also De Cleen et al. 2018: 651–652). More sophisticated accounts recognize that crises to which populist leaders promise to give the right response are most often the discursive creation of populists themselves (Moffitt 2015). “Supply-side” accounts, on the other hand, look at populism as a repertoire cultivated by political actors in order to create an advantage over competitors (Mudde 2010). Populist leanings of the public are also increasingly recast as the result of malicious propaganda (Vatsov 2018). Alternatively, Zankina (2016) argues that populist policy-making could be seen by all involved as more efficacious than traditional forms of politics, especially in the wake of a crisis. Again, such approaches are not sufficient when trying to understand not a local political dynamic but to support a global “rise of populism” thesis. If populist projects are a winning tactic for gaining political influence by varied actors, it is not clear why it was not employed with a similar intensity two or three decades earlier. If one is to argue for an unprecedented rise of populism taking place today, it is necessary to differentiate it from earlier periods by something more substantial than contingent tactics. Rather, it is necessary that we uncover historical conditions of possibility that evolved in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We

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saw that such an evolution cannot be about an “objective” intensification of crises in late modernity. Could it be, instead, about humanity being more easily prodded into a crisis mode? The writings of thinkers such as Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, Nicholas Rose and others suggest ways to argue such a point. I am concerned, however, with a simpler thesis: that a global technological shift—the widespread take up of interactive new media—is having a profound impact on the ways political identity is constituted.

A Second Wave of “Cognitive Mobilization”? My contribution to the debate is inspired by Ronald Inglehart’s 1970s notion of “cognitive mobilization”. The latter relates to the possession of resources and skills that enable people to deal with socio-political dependencies in an extended society, i.e. to care about the abstraction and complexities of national politics. The term was applied to a marked increase in political awareness among Western publics which was registered in the 1960s and the 1970s (Inglehart 1977; Alaminos and Penalva 2012: 1–3). Inglehart’s argument (1977: 299–303) was that with modernization and industrialization society was rendered too complex for the ordinary person to participate even in local political decision-making. The shaping of opinion was delegated to organizations of (typically) life-long membership, such as political parties, trade unions, churches. Only since the late 1950s this picture started to change in Western democracies, due to two chief factors: increasing levels of education and the spread of television receivers. This exposure to political discourse facilitated emancipation of opinion, which was seen in the decrease in traditional party identification and the rise of new social movements (Dalton 1984). In the next sections I will theoretically re-ground the somewhat problematic term “cognitive mobilization” in a post-foundational-discursive framework through the analytic concept access to discourse, and then elaborate the significance of such a notion for our understanding of liberal-democratic societies in the twenty-first century. Essentially, what we are seeing is a second wave of cognitive mobilization due to a

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changing media infrastructure. If in the 1960s and 1970s the infrastructural transformation of public communications consisted of the advent of broadcast television and the “forced” regular exposure of the masses to the evening news (Prior 2007: 255–258), in the twenty-first century it is the interactive nature of the Internet (and other communication networks) and the opportunity for “practicing” discourses. Thus, populism can be seen as a by-product of a more politicized citizenry, becoming emancipated from the sway held by the elites on political discourses, values and projects (Mudde 2004: 554). There is an important difference between the two waves of cognitive mobilization, and between Inglehart’s argument and mine. I suggest that a political discourse is appropriated (or, in other words, a politicized identity is shaped) not by passive exposure to it but by practicing articulations within it. To demonstrate this preposition, I need to dive in post-foundational discourse theory next, and then upgrade its set of analytical concepts.

Introducing Post-Foundational Discourse Theory In this section I give a brief introduction to the tenets of postfoundational discourse theory (PDT).3 Discourse theory accepts that the social world operates only through the discursive production of meaning. Of course, physical reality exists independently of our perceptions, but its components can be discerned and perceived only through the meanings we impart upon them. Individuals perceive the world around them through systems of meaning which are shared, socially produced and historically established. We call these discourses. Discourses establish meaningful relations between objects in the world, actions, practices, social roles and so on, by embedding them in a net of interrelations. That is, they supply things with identities. A discourse is inescapably imbued with power: it orders the social in one way instead of another, draws lines between acceptable and odd, visible and invisible, familiar and foreign. There are many ways to ascribe

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meanings to the social and some of these might be competing. For Laclau and Mouffe any political project is an attempt to fix identities in a particular way, that is, to impose a particular order on the world. The (always temporary) success of such a totalizing move is called hegemony. When alternative discourses have been hidden from view and the contingent character of the established order has been forgotten, the hegemonic discourse sediments into a self-evident and natural state of affairs. What comes as natural can only be problematized when another discourse intrudes on the local terrain and supplies the frame for a different perception of social reality. Discourse is a relational complex of elements (signifiers) in which it is the relations that play the constitutive role. The identity/meaning of every signifier is defined by its relations with the whole complex and is therefore modified along with any change in the whole. Articulation is the practice which establishes a new relation between discursive elements, modifying their identities as a result. Articulation always contains a degree of contingency and undecidability—otherwise it would already be a part of the relational complex. Radical contingency and undecidability—the rupturing of any structure—are fundamental properties for the theory: the social can never be fully signified and integrated in a completed discursive structure (totality). Every discourse has a limit and is always only partially constructed. That which is outside threatens the inner structure of the discourse with the potential to rearticulate the latter’s elements through a different set of principles. It has to be either incorporated into the relational complex, or wholly excluded through a “militarization” of the discursive limit into an antagonistic frontier. The construction of a frontier involves a “logic of equivalence”—unifying everything beyond the discursive boundary under one name for “The Other”, in order to block its structural threat to the inner order. At the same time it unifies the inside by symbolizing it as one in relation to the outside. The discursive field is criss-crossed with antagonistic frontiers: between discursive formations (interlinked complexes of discourses that share meanings and operate well together) and also within them. Hegemonic struggles reinscribe different meanings to signifiers, ultimately redefining

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(rearticulating) what is “good”, “true”, “scary”, “worthwhile”, “unimportant”, and predetermining anxieties, ambitions, social and political actions.

Discourse Theory in a World of Polycentric Discourse Production Acts of hegemonic articulation are, for discourse theory, the elementary acts of politics. How does hegemony look like in practical terms? If we go back to the classical formulations put forward by Hall and Gramsci, hegemony is a tool of domination by consent (Hall 1996: 426). It is achieved by redefining the vocabulary of terms and identities used by the dominated group in such a way that its views are made compatible with the interests of the ruling group. In discourse theory, which dispenses with any pre-discursive elements in the understanding of power, any series of articulations that inscribes a region of the social terrain into a given discursive formation is, for PDT, totalizing and hegemonic (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 139). Hegemony can be seen as placing a specific discursive repertoire at the subject’s disposal, through which it will subsequently perceive, think and act. In the analysis of empirical case studies PDT has one major shortcoming. We know empirically that a hegemonic discourse is not successful over all subjects in a population. In January 2018 Bulgarian society quickly split into people suspicious of the gender innovation and others suspicious of the anti-gender discourses. Some people exposed to the hegemonic discourse would muster a resistance but not others. How can we study that interplay? PDT recognizes that societies are criss-crossed by multiple political divisions and frontiers-in-the-making. We should keep in mind that any subject is submerged in a dynamic terrain where a number of not (yet) directly antagonistic political projects may be competing to define identities in the subject’s locality. We therefore need theoretical tools that can understand how in practical terms a subject relates and reacts to a complex landscape of polycentric discourse production.

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Presently, discourse theory collapses these dynamics into the highly conceptual “black box” notions of contingency, heterogeneity (Laclau 2005: 150–153), and “the split subject” (Torfing 2009: 119–121; see next section). Within the theory they serve the function to capture the fundamental gap of the unknowable present in the social. In my opinion this gap might currently be stretched wider than is necessary: a large part of the so-called contingent dynamics can be re-admitted in the analysis by complicating the conceptual tools available to PDT. While PDT and Laclau’s analysis of populism operate on the level of political ontology, that is, on the level of the categories through which we should think the political, we need a new, second level of tools for the analysis of politics as action. One way to go about this is to reconstruct a world of transactions between social actors (agents) while staying firmly grounded in a post-foundationalist understanding. I have begun such a theoretical endeavour elsewhere (Venkov 2017, in Bulgarian). Here I add to it by developing the concept of the discursive social actor before I proceed to the new terrain in the analysis of populism that this opens up for PDT.

Enter the Discursive Social Actor What is the difference between the subject in post-foundational discourse theory and the classic sociological concept of a social actor? PDT avoids seeing agents as self-defined totalities with clear-cut interests or as endowed with autonomous wills that go on to produce the social through their interactions. The subject is not necessarily a person— it could be “the working class”, for example, or “the state”—but even if, on occasion, it is used to conceptualize an individual, it does not overlap with our common-sense perception of a person. That person would be construed not as a basic unity, but rather as a series of dispersed subject positions. This is because PDT accepts that the language we speak and the actions we undertake are always borrowed from the discursive formations in which we are embedded in, in order to be made subjects (there cannot be a subject outside of the social). A subject would operate through identifications, such as “a woman”, “a truck driver”, “a daughter”, “a Bulgarian”, “a European”, “a stamp-collector”, and so on. Each

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of them endows one with a specific “sense of self ”, value orientations, language, body language, significant others against which to define one’s being. Moreover, PDT states that those different subject positions will not be able to suture a coherent, fulfilled identity—at every moment the mutual articulation between them is contingently determined (hence a “split subject” for Torfing 2009).4 If identity is produced through the discursive order, any putting into question of that order must necessarily constitute an identity crisis (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 126). This is why hegemonic political projects are resorted to as the mythical surfaces of fullness, into which a subject hopes to inscribe itself in order to achieve complete identity (Laclau 1990: 60–63). It is the sedimentation of hegemonic discourses, through the forgetting of their contingent and insecure grounds, that covers over the fundamental gaps in reality, and, likewise, in one’s self. So far I outlined PDT’s insights into the ontology of the subject. The issue with PDT’s analytical toolbox is that both inter-subject interactions and power are deconstructed into articulations between discourses. To be able to study politics as involving multiple subjects in a social space which is prestructured by power and inequality, we need to upgrade that toolbox. We need to complement discourse theory’s drive to reveal the contingency and indeterminacy of any social structure with tools that keep in view what sustains it, after all, as a structure. Here I respond to the call for building up a theoretical framework suited for empirical research (Marttila 2015a). Marttila directs our attention to the argument that it is the sedimentation of hegemonic discourses that turns them into a “mere” “objective presence” (Laclau 1990: 34). The self-evidentiality of sedimented forms of discursive meaning tends to settle institutions, practices and the perception of objects (objects as perceived) into stable “material” existence—this Marttila names “discursive materiality” (2015b: 6–7). In light of this reasoning, I take a social actor to be a discursive subject together with its history of hegemonic articulations and with its embeddedness in structured relations and relations of power (which are, of course, discursively constituted). As a history of articulations accrues, its discursive materiality somewhat limits the actor’s choices for future articulations. I would like to evoke here Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: the

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accumulated heritage of a person’s life trajectory through social structures. It is “deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action [and tends] to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time” (Bourdieu 1990: 54–55). This is part of a much larger project of combining Bourdieu and postfoundational discourse theory (Venkov 2017: 123–146). Here I will not go into how a discursive habitus may function; I will outline only some properties that will be useful for us. My central observation is that a social actor starts to value certain positions in the discursive field when he or she lays claim to them. One gets “sentimentally attached” to discourse as one articulates through it. Why? There is a certain pressure to be consistent. One reason is that this preserves the identifications already laid down: it avoids the crisis of discovering that one’s identity is contingent. Another is to avert challenges by opponents. When asked a question one is forced to deploy a discourse, sometimes without much prior thought, but then has to stick with the enunciated position even if not very satisfied with it. The discourse employed once also becomes easier to employ again, in a less reflexive and more habitual mode. Over time, a certain “regularity in dispersion” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 105–106) between articulations/identifications accrues as well, which guides what future articulations feel “correct”. For all the above reasons, sets of solidifying subject positions are laid down and the response to the next question/challenge or/necessity to define oneself is somewhat constrained. Still, as the principle of undecidability reminds us, it never becomes fully constrained. In each subsequent moment the social actor must make a new contingent choice, one which tells him or her, “Aha! I think this on that question.”5

New Media and Political Identity-Making Beyond the Elites Here I will dwell upon an important corollary from the idea for a discursive social actor. In the preceding section I basically suggested that an actor’s discourse-social identity takes shape through an ongoing process

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of practising articulations. It follows that it is not so much the passive exposure to information, e.g. by broadcast television or the morning reading of the newspaper, that fosters the cultivation of opinion, political or otherwise, but the retelling at the dinner table of what was read and heard. Choosing the point to make makes it stick. Of course, articulations can also take place in one’s mind—but taking part in a heated argument is always better. Conversation can be stimulating even when one is not an active participant in it: in terms of mental articulations, more are induced when listening to a third-party dispute or to incongruent versions on a topic than to a coherent, serially reproduced discourse. The luxury of individual political opinion is traditionally related by sociologists to the elites and middle classes (e.g. Bourdieu 1984: 453– 465; see quantitative data for the US in Dalton 1984: 274–283). In the larger part of the twentieth century the common man, and even more so woman, had no experience and confidence in being political— beyond what was expected and established for them by the system (e.g. by the national electoral ritual or by the traditional partisan belonging, see in Alaminos and Penalva 2012: 2; Dalton 1984: 264). In a less strong image, even if he or she did sport an individual political opinion, they could perform and reaffirm it before a small constituency of peers whose views were already familiar and, very likely, similar: close friends, family and relatives, fellow workers and the pub regulars (for the men). Political views, therefore, brought with them less sense of importance to the person than skills in other ways of performing social identity and demonstrating wit. Non-elite political passion rarely had an audience and was for this reason suppressed—unless special channels were painstakingly organized for it, such as by trade-unions and communist parties. These observations hint that one factor for the great rise of populist politics since the late 1980s—and even more intensively in recent years—may have been the transition of media to more interactive forms: not only social media and the Internet (blogs, forums, news comments sections) but also the earlier spread of cable TV and political talk radio.6 Benefiting from the new access to communication, former passive audiences could start to rehearse “knowing” politics and to practice having an opinion. I suggest that a socio-technical shift has fostered a

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new wave of “cognitive mobilization”, expanding on the one identified in the 1960–1970s (Inglehart 1977). Thanks to it new constituencies are being politically emancipated and can enter the scope of electoral interests as independent subjects. Since they are likely to be impartial to the elite sensibilities attaching earlier empowered groups to the liberal political order, these newcomers also happen to be more open for illiberal political projects. The advent of interactive media does not in itself bring about politicization of its users. Politics is just one domain of articulative identity-making, and it may remain excluded for a long time from a communicative community’s interest or decency norms. Rather, the new communication infrastructure creates the conditions for the possibility of political identity-making and for emergent dynamics independent of identities prescribed by the system. The claim here is one of a degree. I argue that until recently the hegemonic weight of political discourses promoted by elites and the system was much greater than it is today. By “the system” here I have in view something quite heterogeneous: state institutions, media, parties from the established political spectrum, trade unions, even, after a certain point in time, new social movements. It depends on the national political context how diverse the discourses circulated by this heterogeneous complex are—in a liberal democratic society they would include both right and left politics, a civil rights movement, etc. In the post-1989 Bulgaria they were dominated by the intellectual anti-communist reaction in all of its variety. What leads me to unite a range of positions under one term (“the system”) for this analysis is that the politically opinionated strata that fill in the positions of the system typically share some core set of values and convictions, stemming from their common privileged position. An important part of this shared core is the post-World War II consensus on political liberalism, trust in the working of democratic principles, deference to scientific knowledge and to institutional authority—the tenets that today seem under attack. Stirring up popular political engagement from non-elite positions was not impossible in the past but had to overcome much higher obstacles.7 If a common person’s views happened to go against the discourses fed and reinforced by the system, their otherwise slow, short-distance,

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family-to-family and pub-table propagation would be dampened even sooner as they confronted one politically shy audience after another. In this way dissent from the dominant discourses would typically remain fragmented and on the level of everyday dissatisfaction. In such a setup of society, if certain discursive formation holds a monopoly over the systemic discourse, this is enough to maintain it as a hegemonic regime for the entire society. Importantly, even if a political entrepreneur came along and tried to mobilize counter-hegemonic sentiments, they would find that their potential supporters had no practice of expressing such sentiments and would have difficulties identifying with them (cf. Mudde 2004: 553–554).

Circulation of Discourse and Access to Discourse There is an important nuance to my argument here. New media are significant not so much for democratizing the production of discourse— i.e., giving an opportunity for marginalized perspectives to be heard— but for democratizing the circulation of discourse. Both are achieved by enabling new groups to express their thoughts before an audience—by calling into a TV or radio programme, maintaining a blog, posting on Facebook or commenting on Twitter. Yet, discourse circulation is the process crucial for shaping discourse-social identities. I define it as the iterative practice of articulating and rearticulating a discourse within a population of social actors communicating with each other. From the perspective of a single actor the circulation of discursive statements is the cycle of their consumption (i.e. articulating them with/in one’s discursive habitus), reproduction (which now differs from the initial input) and reconsumption (of a variety of modified, possibly mutually incongruous, successors that had been reproduced by others in the community). Each of these steps forces one to make identity-asserting choices. The opportunity to intensify circulation of a particular type of discursive content in a social group or communicative community is what I call access to discourse for that group. Access to discourse is about the multivalent process of its appropriation, which includes the growth in

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confidence and in the ability of using it. As discursive social actors “exercise” the discourse, they work out creative and diverse ways to employ it for varied aims and needs. Beyond beginning to be “comfortable” with it (e.g. with taking a public stand on political matters—in the case of what I referred to as “political discourse”), they gradually incorporate it in their identity (e.g. being an “engaged citizen”) and may become invested in it. The argument advanced in the preceding section can now be formulated in the following way: the majority population of established liberal-democratic societies previously had access to those discourses that are propagated by “the system” (in all its variety and complexity). New interactive media have democratized access to political discourse and opened space for independent dynamics in identity-making. Let us go back to the preposition that a rise of populisms is the byproduct of an ongoing second wave of what quantitative sociologists of modernization have called “cognitive mobilization”. By reconceptualising Inglehart’s notion, the first wave of cognitive mobilization can be understood in a theoretically more complex way as the mass attainment of access to the discourses of modern national society (which in the West was also espousing a liberal consensus). Broadcast media began emancipating individuals from organizations of primary political identity-making (parties, churches, local communities) by making its audiences more intimately aware of alternatives, on a national scale. While widening horizons this new knowledge was itself centrally filtered, and thus, likely more elite-dominated rather than less. In effect, what happened thanks to education and television in the post-war period is that larger share of the population joined the discourse-producing elites and “the system’s” national hegemony. On the contrary, the impact of interactive media today is to shift the balance over the volume of circulation of discourse, decreasing in relative terms the weight of the elite component. By purely dynamic means spaces of non-systemic potential are sustained, where politicized identities may begin to be appropriated. This is a point of opportunity for the sort of political repertoires typically analysed as “populist”. I call this a genuine populist moment, in the sense that a deeper dynamic made this type of repertoires effective and advantageous.

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This argument is a different one from the now commonly made claims that social media lets populist leaders bypass the filter of mainstream media (Brubaker 2017: 23); that a populist style of politics is better suited to the exigencies of the contemporary mediascape (Moffitt 2016); or, more generally, that a changing relationship between public, media and politics leads to a “mediatization of politics” (Manucci 2017). It is also different from the “echo chamber” metaphor claiming polarization of politics due to a fragmentation of the public sphere (Sunstein 2017). My claim is that politicised identities which are less closely attached to discourses of the elites and the system are able to emerge today thanks to the articulatory practices afforded by interactive media. It is worth noting that the reclaimed spaces of “independent” discursive dynamics are not necessarily populist or anti-liberal. Theoretically, we should expect diverse formations to emerge if there were no other factors involved. It is true that those that did not go against hegemonic elite sensibilities would likely not be recognized at all, while those that did—have a good chance of being marked as “populist” (Stavrakakis 2017: 1–4). Still, the ubiquitous presence of far right, conservative or anti-liberal mobilizations around the world is a sign that additional structured dynamics and dependencies are at play. Certainly, the impact of the elites (systemic or new “populist” ones) over the masses has not vanished, rather the relationship is transforming. These topics will be explored in future research, taking advantage of the extended PDT framework developed here. The significance of elite actors and strategic production of discourses is easily demonstrated for the examples, described earlier on, of Bulgarian popular mobilizations. The local debate took up tropes from the worldwide “anti-gender movement” (Kovats 2017), while many political actors jumped on the bandwagon in a typically populist manner, with the hope to regain some political relevance. Yet, just a decade earlier the ratification of similar documents did not galvanize public resistance or, for that matter, draw much interest. There are many factors for that change, but a significant one is that recently large swathes of Bulgarians who do not belong to the customary “protester” crowd (anti-corruption, pro-European, mostly liberal and/or Green, highly educated) have been

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taking up the discursive/behavioural components of being “an active citizen” concerned with the nation’s future. They were trying these new articulations, first of all, in online communities.

Conclusions The dramatic transformations of the twenty-first century in national political dynamics require that we develop new analytical approaches to understand them. The paradigm of post-foundational discourse theory (PDT) is a powerful tool to conceptualize political change at a deeper level. While its native domain is that of political ontology, it is useful to extend its apparatus with concepts that reach across to the ontic domain of politics as action. To this end, I introduced here the concepts of the discursive social actor, discourse circulation and access to discourse. With the concept of the discursive social actor we can begin to look into a post-foundational discursive world where the subject reacts variably and heterogeneously to a complex landscape of polycentric discourse production. In PDT such dynamics have been relegated until now to the theoretical black boxes of heterogeneity and contingency. While there will always be a remainder to any description of the social, and these concepts are designed to capture it, their necessary scalability makes them at the same time just too easy to stretch wider than strictly needed, enabling, in this way, unambitious sociology. The concept of the discursive social actor was constructed here to assist in limiting the scope of their use. It was formulated as PDT’s discursive subject together with its particular history of hegemonic articulations and its embeddedness in relations of structure and power. It introduces an emphasis on consistency and inertia to PDT with regards to the subject’s search for sutured identity. Such a push towards consistency was stipulated on the basis of the regularity in dispersion that we expect from any discursive system and therefore also from the subject’s articulatory practice. Of interest in this chapter was the corollary that what is significant for a social actor’s identity-making is articulatory practice, i.e. the ongoing process of attempting, succeeding and failing in making links

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with and between discursive elements. Practicing articulation of political discourses gradually makes actors comfortable with a politicized identity. Zooming out from the single actor led me to the notion of discourse circulation, the iterative practice of articulating and rearticulating a discourse within a population of communicating social actors. A discursive formation, as well as the identifications related to it, is produced, made relevant, and, ultimately, made hegemonic through discourse circulation. For a variety of contingent historical reasons the circulation of some types of discourse in certain populations is more intensive than in others. To be able to pinpoint these dynamics analytically I introduced the notion of access to discourse. Access to a discourse by a given population is about the multivalent process of appropriation of the discourse through articulatory practice i.e. about the intensification of its circulation. This process leads to more ease, confidence and skill in evoking the discourse; to its inner diversification and, thus, to more possibilities for its tactical use and more reasons for subjects to become invested in it. Access to a discursive formation makes a discursive social actor able to “think” on new issues and perspectives. Benefiting from the “extended PDT” toolbox laid out above I explored the implications for the analysis of populism. I contend that what we are observing today is not simply more populist politics but rather a retreat of the taken-for-granted values, knowledge and politics of the established liberal democratic order. A PDT-based perspective allows me to see Western electoral democracy not as the best, if imperfect, organization of society (as many analysts do) which will naturally be supported by a population of free citizens—but as a hegemonic order sustained by an elite consensus. I claimed here that what kept liberal hegemony stable in the post-war era in Western societies was an enforced monopoly over the political discourse. In the last decades the monopoly was lost and we are now observing liberal hegemony being ruptured as alternative popular identities have the opportunity to emerge. In post-1989 Eastern Europe the discursive monopoly had a shorter duration, less comprehensive elite support, and a much shallower hegemonic penetration (cf. Dawson and Hanley 2016). Still, I believe there is a structural analogy from which we

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can benefit in order to gain insight into the political shifts both in the East and the West. I argued that the rise of populist politics and the retreat of liberal values hinge on the democratization of access to political discourse, or, in other words, on the spread of politicized identity. Gaining such an access is not tied anymore to exposure and participation in the political discourses hegemonic among the elites. Therefore, we are at a genuine populist moment where alternative politics not supported by “the system” can easily gain traction. I suggested that this change is rooted in an ongoing socio-technological transformation engendered by the nature of new interactive media and their recent mass spread. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, the editor of this volume, Michael Kranert, and my colleague Georgi Medarov for very engaged readings of an earlier draft of this chapter. It also benefited enormously from feedback received at the conference “New Discourses of Populsim and Nationalism”, June 2018, Edinburgh and at a workshop “How to Get your Paper Published in an International Journal”, June 2019, Zagreb, organized by the Journal of East European Politics and Societies. Special thanks to Hannah Oswald-Rose for making sure my endeavours in English are at least partially readable.

Notes 1. Note that I am not interested here in Laclau’s (2005) own analysis of populist logic. 2. The presentation of these developments is here necessarily condensed. There are a number of reports available in English (Gotev 2018; Stanoeva 2018; Smilova 2018) and two research publications (Squire 2018; Darakchi 2019). The mobilization in Bulgaria falls in the scope of the so-called “anti-gender movements” (Kovats 2017). 3. Howarth and Stavrakakis (2000) and Laclau (2009) are further good sources for the beginner; for a detailed recent treatment see Marttila (2015b). 4. A good illustration of this is the tension between the identifications as a Bulgarian and a European. These aspects are sometimes felt to be complementary (Bulgarians are today recognized citizens of the European Union),

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and sometimes in a strong opposition. The guilt of “not being truly European” or “not European enough” is integral to the very constitution of the modern Bulgarian national identity since the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Until this day it remains penetrated by a subversive “Oriental heritage” in mentality and values. 5. These acts are nicely apportioned during a chain of exchanges in a Facebook discussion. On the other hand, a philosopher writing a research chapter goes through the entire process by themselves, consciously playing it over and over again in their mind, and adjusting it until they are confident it is a coherent ensemble of articulations. 6. In the Bulgarian context a prime feature of cable TV channels are the talk programmes with open phone lines where the audience would call into share with the host their views and, often, to vent their rage. The Romanian film 12:08 East of Bucharest by Corneliu Porumboiu beautifully depicts such a call-in programme. They are possibly homologous to the political talk radios in the US that emerged after the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987, however, without the editorial screening of callers. It might be that the wellestablished censorship on call-ins in the Western equivalents of programmes with audience interaction has effected a temporal drag on the formation of system-independent popular subjects. 7. Bringing an anti-system discourse to the stage of smooth propagation often depended on the allegiance of an elite group (revolutionary intellectuals, students, local teachers, etc.) that wielded the cultural capital and social technology to achieve that. Sometimes it also required the systematic organization of spaces of discussion (clubs, clandestine committees, reading seminars, sports societies, etc.).

References Alaminos, Antonio, and Clemente Penalva. 2012. “The Cognitive Mobilization Index: Crises and Political Generations.” Sage Open 2 (1): 2158244012440437. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 2017. “Why Populism?” Theory and Society 46 (5): 357–385. Council of Europe. 2011. Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, 4 December. https://www.coe.int/en/web/istanbul-convention/text-of-the-convention. Dalton, Russell J. 1984. “Cognitive Mobilization and Partisan Dealignment in Advanced Industrial Democracies.” The Journal of Politics 46 (1): 264–284. Darakchi, Shaban. 2019. “‘The Western Feminists Want to Make Us Gay’: Nationalism, Heteronormativity, and Violence Against Women in Bulgaria in Times of ‘Anti-Gender Campaigns’.” Sexuality & Culture: 1–22. Dawson, James, and Sean Hanley. 2016. “The Fading Mirage of the ‘Liberal Consensus’.” Journal of Democracy 27 (1): 20–34. De Cleen, Benjamin, Jason Glynos, and Aurelien Mondon. 2018. “Critical Research on Populism: Nine Rules of Engagement.” Organization 25 (5): 649–661. Eatwell, Roger, and Matthew Goodwin. 2018. National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Penguin. Gotev, Georgi. 2018. “Istanbul Convention Spells Trouble for Bulgaria’s Ruling Coalition.” Euractiv, 23 January. https://www.euractiv.com/section/ freedom-of-thought/news/istanbul-convention-spells-trouble-for-bulgariasruling-coalition. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 411–440. London: Routledge. Holmes, Douglas R. 2010. Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Howarth, David, and Yannis Stavrakakis. 2000. “Introducing Discourse Theory and Political Analysis.” In Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies, and Social Change, edited by David Howarth, Aletta J. Norval, and Yannis Stavrakakis, 1–23. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Iakimova, Milena. 2016. Kak se rada socialen problem [The Rise of a Social Problem]. Sofia: Iztok–Zapad [East–West]. Inglehart, Ronald F. 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton Legacy Library. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, Ronald F., and Pippa Norris. 2016. “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash.” In HKS Faculty Research Working Paper: HKS Working Paper No. RWP16-026.

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Kovats, Eszter. 2017. “The Emergence of Powerful Anti-Gender Movements in Europe and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy.” In Gender and Far Right Politics in Europe, 175–178. Springer. Kriesi, Hanspeter, Edgar Grande, Romain Lachat, Martin Dolezal, Simon Bornschier, and Timotheos Frey. 2008. West European Politics in the Age of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto. 2009. “Discourse.” In A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, edited by Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas W. Pogge, 541–548. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd ed. London: Verso Books. Mair, Peter. 2002. “Populist Democracy vs Party Democracy.” In Democracies and the Populist Challenge, edited by Yves Meny and Yves Surel, 81–98. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. Manucci, Luca. 2017. “Populism and the Media.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 467–488. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marttila, Tomas. 2015a. “Post-Foundational Discourse Analysis: A Suggestion for a Research Program.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 16 (3). Marttila, Tomas. 2015b. Post-Foundational Discourse Analysis: From Political Difference to Empirical Research. Basingstoke: Springer. Media Metrics. 2018. ISTANBULSKATA KONVENCI: Obwestveni vzpriti v socialnite mrei prez m. nuari 2018g [The Istanbul Convention: Public Perceptions in Social Networks During January 2018], 31 January. http://mediamonitoring.bg/2018/ 01/31. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2015. “How to Perform Crisis: A Model for Understanding the Key Role of Crisis in Contemporary Populism.” Government and Opposition 50 (2): 189–217. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 2019. “The Populist Moment.” Revista Simbiotica 6 (1): 6– 11.

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Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 39 (4): 541–563. Mudde, Cas. 2010. “The Populist Radical Right: A Pathological Normalcy.” West European Politics 33 (6): 1167–1186. National Network for Children. 2019. Child Rights Under Attack in Bulgaria, May 31. https://nmd.bg/en/child-rights-under-attack-in-bulgaria. Pew Research Center. 2017. Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions, July 10. http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisandivisions-in-views-of-national-institutions. Prior, Markus. 2007. Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rummens, Stefan. 2017. “Populism as a Threat to Liberal Democracy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy, 554–570. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smilova, Ruzha. 2018. “Promoting ‘Gender Ideology’: Constitutional Court of Bulgaria Declares Istanbul Convention Unconstitutional.” Oxford Human Rights Hub, August 8. https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/promoting-gender-ide ology-constitutional-court-of-bulgaria-declares-istanbul-convention-uncons titutional. Squire, I. 2018. Gender Ideology and the Istanbul Convention in Bulgaria. MSc thesis, Aalborg Universitet. https://projekter.aau.dk/projekter/files/281553 551/Istanbul_Convention_in_Bulgaria_300518.pdf. Stanoeva, Elitza. 2018. “While Bulgarians Argue About Gender, Injustice Thrives.” BalkanInsight, August 2. https://balkaninsight.com/2018/08/02/ while-bulgarians-argue-about-gender-injustice-thrives-07-31-2018. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2017. “Discourse Theory in Populism Research: Three Challenges and a Dilemma.” Journal of Language and Politics 16 (4): 523–534. Sunstein, Cass R. 2017. #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Torfing, Jacob. 2009. “Power and Discourse: Towards an Anti-Foundationalist Concept of Power.” In The SAGE Handbook of Power, edited by Stewart R. Clegg and Mark Haugaard, 108–124. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Vatsov, Dimitar. 2018. “Logics of Propaganda. Part One. Populism and Propaganda: Dangerous Liaisons and Family Resemblances.” Critique and Humanism 49 (1): 71–106.

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Venkov, Nikola A. 2017. “Dentrifikaci na enski pazar— konstruirane na gradski politiki i transformaci na mestnite otnoxeni” [Gentrification of the Women’s Market: Construction of Urban Policies and Transformation of Local Relationships]. PhD diss., University of Sofia. Zankina, Emilia. 2016. “Theorizing the New Populism in Eastern Europe.” Politologicky Casopis-Czech Journal of Political Science 23 (2): 182–199.

Nikola A. Venkov holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Sofia (2017) and a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Nottingham (2009). He has been a Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia and at the Leibnitz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig. His work ranges from theoretical sociology to engaged anthropology and even socially engaged art (cofounder of Duvar Kolektiv). His principle interests are in advancing Laclau’s Discourse Theory, applying it to understand power and marginalization, the mechanics of politics and coexistence in the city, and lately, new political forms and propaganda.

Part IV Populist Discourse and Discourses of Gender and Sexuality

9 On Behalf of the Family and the People: The Right-Wing Populist Repertoire in Croatia Katja Kahlina

In 2013, the same year when Croatia became a full member of the European Union, a new civil initiative On Behalf of the Family (U ime obitelji in Croatian) launched its nationwide campaign for a referendum on the constitutional definition of marriage as an exclusive union of a man and a woman. Its marriage referendum campaign was largely based on the demand to allow “the people” to express their views on the definition of marriage, accompanied by a critique of democratic deficit reflected in the alleged gap between the actual political decisions and the popular will. After succeeding in its aim to define marriage along heteronormative lines in the Constitution, On Behalf of the Family (OBF) started to increasingly demand, again through referendum initiatives, changes to the current electoral system, which would allow for smaller parties to enter the Parliament and widen the scope of preferential voting. To date, two similar referendum campaigns have been initiated, both of which K. Kahlina (B) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_9

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were rejected on the grounds of an insufficient number of required signatures.1 The first was launched directly by the OBF, while the other, based on the slogan “Referendum for a more just electoral system” has been led by the citizens’ platform People Decide (Narod odluˇcuje in Croatian), which includes OBF as one of its key partners. However, paradoxically, the demands to widen citizen influence on election results have been accompanied by the request to limit the scope of influence of national minority representatives elected in the Parliament via separate minority lists. By generating notable citizen support, these referendum initiatives allowed On Behalf of the Family to gain significant influence in the Croatian socio-political landscape. However, although the populist appeal to “the people” against the political establishment and certain liberal-democratic values promoted by the establishment constitutes the central feature of OBF’s rhetoric and has been strongly guiding its actions since the marriage referendum, OBF has not been recognized as a populist social movement in studies of local anti-gender/anti-LGBTQ mobilization (Hodži´c and Bijeli´c 2014; Hodži´c and Štulhofer 2017; Petriˇcuši´c et al. 2017), nor in the recent scholarly literature on populism in Croatia (Derado et al. 2016; Grbeša and Šalaj 2018; Mustapi´c and Hrsti´c 2017). Grbeša and Šalaj’s Dobar, loš ili zao? Populizam u Hrvatskoj [Good, Bad, or Ugly? Populism in Croatia], certainly the most comprehensive study of populism in Croatia to date, only briefly mentions On Behalf of the Family as a potential case of right-wing populism. However, OBF did not fall within the scope of Grbeša and Šalaj’s study. Based on their research, Grbeša and Šalaj conclude that there is currently no right-wing populism in Croatia (Grbeša and Šalaj 2018: 265). Given the strong presence of an appeal to “the people” in the marriage referendum campaign and in the subsequent electoral law campaigns, in this chapter I would like to question the extent to which OBF’s referendum campaigns represent a case of right-wing populism. In order to account for the populist appeal to “the people” in OBF’s referendum campaigns, I will focus on the argumentation and meaning-making structures present in OBF’s political discourse by using qualitative discourse analysis. In this regard, I will explore in detail the architecture and usage of populist discourse in On Behalf of the Family’s

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activism. In my analysis, I will look at how an appeal to “the people” and antagonism between “the people” and “the elites” are articulated, and how the populist discourse is linked to the exclusionary discourses of heterosexism2 and ethno-nationalism. This will allow me to identify the specificities of OBF’s populist discourse and to account for the implications of the kind of populism present in OBF’s rhetoric and activities. Based on this analysis, I will argue that OBF’s appeal to “the people” may be regarded as a form of mobilizing discourse targeting the privileged sexual and ethno-national majority in the political project of maintaining the existing systems of power. I will suggest that, based on this argument, OBF’s mobilizing rhetoric could be regarded as a form of exclusionary, or, even more specifically, anti-emancipatory populism.

Thinking and Researching Populisms There is little doubt that populism has been one of the most widely used concepts in the past decade of political research, with its circulation increasing even more in the past couple of years following Brexit and Trump’s presidency. Such extensive use of the concept has been accompanied by the multiple, often conflicting, meanings attached to populism. Much of the confusion regarding how to understand and define populism stems from its link to very different political projects and ideologies. It can be found both to the left and right of the political spectrum, it can be both liberal and anti-liberal, socialist or neoliberal, conservative or progressive (Brubaker 2017). Therefore, as Margaret Canovan argued decades ago, in order to understand populism, it is necessary to move attention away from the ideology and focus instead on its structural aspects (Canovan 1999). According to her, populism is best understood as an “appeal to ‘the people’ against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values of the society” (Canovan 1999: 3). Such a broad definition represents the now dominant “minimal” approach to populism (see also Kranert, Introduction in this volume). This minimal perspective based on structural qualities rather than political content also underlies Cas Mudde’s widely used definition of

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populism as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde 2004: 543). A significant number of scholars who agree with the “minimal” approach do not necessarily consider the idea of thin ideology as best suited for defining populism, and instead promote other, more structure-oriented analytical and methodological concepts, such as discourse (Aslanidis 2016, 2017; Brubaker 2017, 2019; De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017; Stavrakakis et al. 2017), communication style (Jagers and Walgrave 2007), and political style (Moffitt 2016). As Paris Aslanidis suggests, the discourse-based approach can be particularly illuminating when researching the use of populism by social movements given its capacity to account for the strategic aspect of populism without falling into the trap of seeing populism as pure demagoguery (Aslanidis 2016, 2017). In his work, Aslanidis also points to the widely shared assumption that populism is almost exclusively present in the sphere of institutionalized politics and political parties, while the use of populism by social movements, he further notes, has gained very little attention (Aslanidis 2016, 2017). In this chapter, therefore, by focusing on the populist discourse in grass-roots mobilization, I hope to bring more light to this under-researched phenomenon. In so doing, I hope not only to place On Behalf of the Family on the map of Croatian and European populism, but also to contribute to a greater understanding of the presence of populist discourse in social movements and grass-roots mobilizations. At the same time, scholars who embrace the minimal approach also disagree on the role of morality as a defining category, which distinguishes populism from other discourses centred around the notion of “the people”. Motivated by the frequent conflation of populism and nationalism in current political and media discourses, while at the same rejecting the category of morality as a defining feature of populism, Benjamin De Cleen and Yannis Stavrakakis (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017) propose an alternative analytical framework for distinguishing populism from other similar discourses, such as nationalism. They argue that populism is a unique discourse in that it evokes the vertical

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“down/up” relationship between two main opposing groups: “the people as underdog” and “the elite.” In contrast to the vertical down/up axis underlying populist discourse, nationalist discourse is characterized by the horizontal in/out opposition between the groups, which, in the case of nationalism, comprise the members of the nation (those who are “in”) versus non-members (outsiders) (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017). The concept of populism as a vertical “down/top” relationship established between “the people” and “the elite” contributes conceptual clarity and helps to avoid the frequent conflation of populism with nationalism and other similar discourses without using the vague and restrictive category of morality. However, this approach also has some weaknesses. Rogers Brubaker was among the first to raise concerns in relation to such a sharp conceptual distinction between populism and nationalism (Brubaker 2019). In his critical reflection on the relationship between populism and nationalism, Brubaker argues that it is in fact a close intertwining of vertical and horizontal axes which constitutes populist discourse. This “two-dimensionality” of populism is to a great extent related to the inherent ambivalence of the category of “the people”. As Brubaker notes, following Mény and Surel, the notion of “the people” can assume different meanings in populist discourse: it can refer to the idea of “plebs” as common, ordinary people; to the notion of “demos” as sovereign people; and to the idea of “community” in a moral, cultural or political sense (Brubaker 2017, 2019). “The productive polysemy of ‘the people’”, argues Brubaker, “denoting at once plebs, demos and nation […] evidently creates a substantial zone of overlap between populist and nationalist discourses” (Brubaker 2019: 6). Thus, the frequent interplay between populism and nationalism today is better understood as an intersection of already overlapping discourses, instead of two strictly separated ones (Brubaker 2019). Two-dimensionality and ambiguity are also embedded in the meanings attached to “the elite” in populist discourse. As Brubaker argues, “the elite” is always conceived of as both “on top” and “outside,” which does not necessarily mean outside the nation, but can, and often does, refer to being outside of the “moral community of ‘the people’”, differing in “ways of thinking, talking, acting, even dressing and eating” (Brubaker 2019: 14). And it is precisely this inherent ambiguity and twodimensionality of populism’s main categories—that of “the people” and

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“the elite”—that gives the existing strength and effectiveness to populist discourse. “Highlighting this ambiguity and two-dimensionality […]”, Brubaker argues, “reveals the nature—and the power—of populism” (Brubaker 2019: 15). Brubaker further suggests that given its inherent semantic ambiguity and heterogeneity, populism is best understood not as a strictly bounded phenomenon, but rather as a discursive repertoire, which includes several key elements articulated together in different ways and degrees, depending on the political project and/or ideology by which it is informed (Brubaker 2017, 2019). One of the core elements of populist discourse is certainly an appeal to “the people” against “the elites”, but also against the “threatening others” (who can be both “below” and “outside”). Other key elements of populism suggested by Brubaker are antagonistic repoliticization; majoritarianism; anti-institutionalism; protectionism; and a distinct style of communication that extensively relies on “common-sense” knowledge, simple language, and personal experiences (Brubaker 2017, 2019). I find Brubaker’s understanding of populism in terms of a powerful discursive repertoire informed by inherent semantic ambiguity and close intertwining of the vertical and horizontal antagonisms particularly suited for exploring the populist appeal to “the people” in On Behalf of the Family’s campaign for the marriage referendum and other referendum initiatives. On the one hand, such an approach fosters paying close attention to the ambiguity of the category of “the people”, which is particularly important when exploring populism in the Croatian context where the central category of populism—narod —is semantically even more intertwined with the idea of a bounded ethnic community than its English counterpart “the people”. At the same time, a conception of populism in terms of a close interweaving of vertical and horizontal registers represents a particularly illuminating framework for analysing the ways in which the populist appeal to “the people” is used in the mobilization against the rights, current or envisioned, of sexual and ethnic/national minorities. Finally, the concept of populism as a discursive repertoire composed of several core elements allows for identifying different configurations of populist discourse and their mobilizing potential.

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Following Brubaker’s approach, in my analysis of populist discourse used by OBF in their referendum campaigns, I will direct my attention towards answering the key questions of who “the people” and who “the elite” are, and how this vertical antagonism has been interwoven with horizontal othering on the grounds of sexuality and ethnicity in these campaigns. In other words, I am interested in analysing how the populist appeal to “the people” has been used in OBF’s discursive practices of political persuasion and mobilization. In my analysis, I will employ qualitative discourse analysis, which is more suitable for exploring the argumentative patterns and meaning-making structures than frequently used quantitative methods (Wodak 2008). In this regard, I am also more interested in achieving a “richness of textual detail”, to borrow from Fran Tonkiss (1998) than collecting a representative sample. According to Tonkiss, the representativeness of a sample is not so relevant in a research that aims at answering the “how question,” such as for example, “how particular attitudes are shaped, reproduced, and legitimized through the use of language” (Tonkiss 1998: 253). While relying on the idea that the “richness of textual detail” can give us an insight into how language use participates in re/producing or transforming social relations, in my analysis I will focus on the publicly available texts that contain OBF’s mobilization arguments and persuasions in favour of the proposed referendum and the desired results. The collected texts belong to different types and genres. The first type of data consists of texts and video materials produced directly by On Behalf of the Family and their partners gathered in the People Decide (PD) coalition. This type of data includes self-representation texts and video clips published on the groups’ respective websites and social media profiles, printed leaflets and posters disseminated in the physical public spaces, and columns written by OBF members and published in printed and digital media. The second type of data includes interviews, press conference speeches, and footage from talk show participation by members of OBF and PD, which have been published or broadcast by Croatian media. In the light of Brubaker’s concept of populism, my analysis of these documents is guided by five key questions:

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1. What is the place and role of the appeal to “the people” in OBF’s political rhetoric related to referendum campaigns? 2. How are the categories of “the people” and “the elite” constructed; who are “the people” and who is “the elite”? 3. What kind of features and traits are assigned to these two categories? 4. How is the need for referenda presented by the members of OBF and PD in the context of their referendum initiatives? 5. How are sexual and ethnic minorities referred to in OBF campaigns? These analytical questions, together with Brubaker’s approach to populism and its elements, will allow me to question the extent and features of OBF’s populist discourse. They will do so by providing the theoretical and analytical tools for analysing the ways in which the categories of “the people”, “the elites”, and “the referendum” have been articulated and how the ambiguity of the notion of “the people” has been exploited in OBF’s mobilization. They will also provide the necessary tools for exploring the ways in which the vertical appeal to “the people” in OBF’s referendum campaigns has been woven together with the horizontal exclusions of sexual and ethnic minorities, i.e. how the interplay between populist, anti-LGBTQ, and ethno-nationalist discourses has been articulated in the context of OBF’s referendum campaigns.

Citizens and People’s Referendum vs. Not-of-the-People Government: Exploring the Vertical Antagonisms in OBF’s Mobilizing Discourses The marriage referendum initiative united under the name On Behalf of the Family represented the first-ever referendum proposal coming “from below” in a nationwide appeal for citizens’ support through collection of signatures in public spaces. The initiative managed to gather around 750,000 signatures, which amounts to the support of around 20% of registered voters. A quick look at OBF’s rhetoric during the signature collection period shows that their mobilizing rhetoric at this time significantly drew on two discourses: a populist discourse of democracy and

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a heterosexist discourse of marriage and family (for another example of this combination in Bulgaria, see Venkov, Chapter 8 in this volume). Such a dual discursive underpinning of OBF’s rhetoric and practices reflects their self-stated mission “to actively participate in empowering marriage and family and in the building of a democratic society through social advocacy” (U ime obitelji, n.d.). In this part of the chapter, I will examine how the antagonistic relationship between the people and political elites is articulated in the marriage referendum action and subsequent public campaigns as one of the key discourses of OBF’s mobilizing rhetoric. In the second stage of my analysis, in the third section, I will explore the close intertwining of populist discourse with the discourses of heterosexism and ethno-nationalism in OBF’s referendum campaigns, thus deepening our understanding of the discursive architecture of this form of right-wing populisms. During the signature collection period to support the marriage referendum, OBF printed an informational leaflet explaining the aims and importance of proposed referendum. Given its role in increasing citizen support for the marriage referendum initiative and its unmediated character, the leaflet represents an important source for exploring the position and characteristics of populist discourse in OBF’s mobilization rhetoric. While the first page includes the title, OBF’s name, logo, the dates of the signature collection period and the argument that marriage is the union of a woman and a man only, the second page is dedicated to a section titled “Why a referendum?” It lists six points, all of which, in varying ways, address this question. Here are the first two points: (1) A referendum is an expression of direct democracy and it gives all citizens the opportunity to express their opinion on marriage. (2) At the present time, the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia does not contain a definition of marriage, which makes it possible to redefine marriage and family contrary to the values, culture and will of the majority of citizens.3

In the original:

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(1) Referendum je izraz izravne demokracije i daje priliku svim grad-anima da iskažu svoje mišljenje o braku. (2) Ustav RH za sada ne sadrži definiciju braka, što omogu´cava redefiniranje braka i obitelji suprotno vrijednostima, kulturi i volji ve´cine grad-ana. (U ime obitelji 2013, my emphasis)

Even without conducting a quantitative analysis of OBF’s populist discourse, it is possible to see that the term “citizens” (grad-ani in Croatian) represents one of the central categories in OBF’s political discourse, evoked at the very beginning of the marriage referendum leaflet. The consistent use of the term “citizens” in OBF’s mobilization discourse suggests the strong presence of the discourse of democracy in OBF’s rhetoric, whereby the citizens as key actors are articulated as subjects of democratic governance. The term “citizens” has often been used interchangeably with another empowering signifier—that of “voters”. For example, when asked in an interview about the purpose of the marriage referendum since the Family Act already defines marriage as the union of a woman and a man, Željka Marki´c, the leader of OBF, gave the following explanation: It is extremely important to allow the voters to decide whether they agree with the redefinition of marriage and family. It is, therefore, important that the voters say whether for them marriage is the life union of a man and a woman and that this gets into the Constitution. The only way in which it would be possible to change this would be by organizing another referendum and saying “we want this to be different”. And it would again be up to the Croatian people. This is the way to protect the right of the people, so that politicians, who constantly try to manipulate this referendum, cannot forcibly redefine marriage.

In the original: Jako je važno da biraˇci mogu odluˇciti pristaju li na redefiniciju braka i obitelji. Dakle, važno je da biraˇci kažu je li za njih životna zajednica muškarca i žene brak i da to ud-e u Ustav. Jedini naˇcin da se to promijeni [je] da se na idu´cem referendumu kaže ‘mi želimo drugaˇcije’. To ´ce opet biti hrvatski narod. Na ovaj naˇcin se štiti pravo naroda da politiˇcari, koji

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stalno nastoje izmanipulirati ovaj referendum, ne mogu posti´ci da se nasilno redefinira brak. (Marki´c 2013, my emphasis)

As these excerpts from the leaflet and Marki´c’s interview show, citizens/voters/people, used interchangeably, are the key subjects of OBF’s mobilization discourse. Moreover, the very term “the people”, again employed interchangeably with the categories of citizens and voters, was used by OBF even more in the post-referendum period. Thus, soon after the proposed constitutional definition of marriage as the union of a woman and a man was approved by the marriage referendum, OBF launched its own news portal called “The People.hr” (Narod.hr in Croatian) as an alternative to the existing news outlets in Croatia. The use of the term “people” in OBF’s political rhetoric is further reinforced in the “People Decide” (Narod odluˇcuje) referendum initiative, which was launched as a response to the ratification of the Istanbul Convention (The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence; see also Venkov, Chapter 8 in this volume). This ratification has been resisted on the grounds that the Convention promotes so-called “gender ideology”, which negates the alleged biological origins of gender and sexual difference, and, in so doing, legitimizes the claims of trans* rights and the idea of gender as a choice. As such, the Istanbul Convention is deemed to promote values which are contrary to the culture and will of the majority of citizens. As the following excerpt taken from the “People Decide” initiative’s official website, section “About us,” shows, the referendum and the change of electoral mechanisms it seeks to achieve are again perceived as a way for “the people” to assert their will against the decisions of “political castes”: “People Decide” is the initiative of citizens who want to use the referendum to secure a more just election system in Croatia. The change of how our political representatives are elected is a key for a change in the way in which Croatia is being governed. The latest example of irresponsibility by our members of parliament to the voters who elected them is the ratification of the Istanbul Convention. […] Through the use of referendum, we want to secure a more just election system—representatives

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who are competent and not abiding; politicians who are accountable to their voters and not to the political castes and/or the interest lobbies.

In the original: “Narod odluˇcuje” je inicijativa grad-ana koji žele referendumom osigurati pravedniji izborni sustav u Hrvatskoj. Promjena naˇcina biranja naših politiˇckih predstavnika kljuˇcna je za promjenu naˇcina na koji se Hrvatskom upravlja. Posljednji primjer neodgovornosti saborskih zastupnika prema biraˇcima koji su ih izabrali, ratifikacija je Istanbulske konvencije. […] Referendumom želimo osigurati pravedniji izborni sustav—sposobne, a ne podobne zastupnike; politiˇcare odgovorne biraˇcima, a ne politiˇckim kastama i/ili interesnim lobijima. (Narod odluˇcuje, n.d., my emphasis)

As the above examples show, on the one hand OBF’s political discourse articulates the notion of “the people” in terms of citizens and voters. Such articulation can be regarded as inclusionary, as it refers to sovereign people—demos—and includes all the citizens and all the voters, regardless of their social status, educational background, their gender, age, or ethnicity. At the same time, “the people” in OBF’s mobilization discourse are also articulated as a bounded community holding certain values and beliefs, which have not been adequately represented in political institutions. OBF’s mobilization rhetoric, thus, is based on the discursive construction of a vertical antagonism between “the people” as a moral and cultural community, supposedly making up the majority of citizens, and those with political power. Political elites, often referred to as politicians, political castes or political representatives, are depicted as those imbued with political power stemming from the people, but who use this power to make decisions contrary to the values, beliefs, and the will of “the people”. The excerpts above show that OBF’s mobilization discourse regards politicians as manipulative, irresponsible, incompetent, and working in the interests of their party or interest lobbies, and not in the interest of the voters. To reify estrangement of political elites from “the people” and to further emphasize the antagonism between the two, the attribute nenarodna, which roughly translates to English as not-of-the-people, has commonly

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been attached to both centre-left and centre-right governments by OBF members and the People Decide initiative. Politicians are, thus, at the same time, placed “above” and “outside” in relation to “the people” in OBF’s political discourse. Their views and decisions regarding the rights of LGBTQ people and gender-based violence are presented as contrary to the “will of the people” and, consequently, a sign of flawed election procedures. The marriage referendum and the change of the current election procedure in a manner that would give more decision-making power to the voters are seen as necessary remedies that would allow for better representation of “the people’s will.” The empowering potential of the referendum is further reinforced through the common use of the phrase “people’s referendum” (narodni referendum) when referring to the marriage referendum as the first in Croatia to be initiated by the citizens through the signature collection process. It is also important to mention that the European Union did not play a significant role in OBF’s populist discourse. This is particularly visible in OBF’s resistance to the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, which has been strongly supported by the EU. Instead of embracing the anti-EU discourse as seen in the context of anti-LGBTQ discourses in Poland (Korolczuk and Graff 2018) and Hungary, OBF launched the People Decide referendum initiative, focusing its critique on the current electoral system, which is regarded as producing a gap in political representation and allowing the local political elites on both sides of the political spectrum to ignore citizens’ concerns. The marginal position of the EU establishment in OBF’s populist discourse may be explained by considering the meanings of “Europe” present in Croatian nationalist discourses since the armed conflict related to the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In the past thirty years, nationalist discourse in Croatia has been imbued with strong Orientalist overtones, separating Croatia from “the rest of the Balkans/Yugoslavia/Serbia” and placing it in the circle of “European civility” (Razsa and Lindstrom 2004). The idea of “Europe” thus came to represent an important ethical and civilizational authority in Croatia’s national imaginary (Kahlina 2015). So far, we have seen that the antagonism between the people/citizens/voters and the local political elites represents the crux

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of OBF’s rhetoric. Based on the above analysis, it is possible to regard this discourse as a form of populist repertoire, which, along with the antagonism between “the people” and “the elites”, includes several key elements (Brubaker 2017, 2019). One of the basic elements of OBF’s political discourse is certainly an antagonistic repoliticization. This repoliticization is particularly visible in the way in which samesex marriage and the Istanbul Convention are being articulated and brought into the domain of social mobilization as issues of seeming importance for Croatian citizens. Additionally, there are also elements of anti-institutionalism in OBF’s rhetoric, though its presence is perhaps not as systematic and pervasive as the other elements. It is mostly present in OBF’s distrust in the media and political institutions. However, it is important to note that OBF’s criticism is not directed against the representative democracy as such. Rather, as we saw above, the critique is posed against the existing model of representative democracy operating in Croatia, followed by suggestions of how to improve and widen citizens’ participation and decision-making capacity within the framework of representative democracy. In this regard, OBF’s political rhetoric confirms the argument that populism and representative democracy do not necessarily represent strange bedfellows (Müller 2016). Finally, one of the key elements of OBF’s populist repertoire is certainly majoritarianism. One could even go so far as to argue that majoritarianism, along with antagonism between “the people” and “the elites”, is the most essential element of OBF’s populist repertoire. The idea that there is a “majority” of citizens/voters/people who share a certain culture and values pertaining to the issues of marriage, family and gender, represents the central assumption of On Behalf of the Family’s populist argumentation. It is also a discursive site where the close interplay of the vertical and horizontal antagonisms becomes apparent. As we saw above, on the opposite side of the majority are, on the one hand, the political elites, who are both “above” and “outside” of the bounded moral and cultural community for protecting the rights and dignity of those who are not perceived as part of this community. On the other hand, outside of this community there are also various non-belonging “others” who are at the same time “below” the imagined majority. In the following section, I will further explore these horizontal antagonisms present in OBF’s populist discourse. Who are the “others” against

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which “the people” are being mobilized in the context of the marriage referendum and subsequent OBF campaigns?

Exploring Horizontal Antagonisms in OBF’s Political Discourse As we saw above, in the marriage referendum promotional leaflet, OBF first refers to all the citizens (or citizens as demos), and then moves its focus to the majority of citizens (or citizens as a bounded community). In the context of the marriage referendum, this majority of citizens/voters/people has been articulated as a community of people sharing common “values, culture and will”, specifically related to the issue of sexuality (U ime obitelji 2013). The referendum leaflet appeals to citizens to protect the existing sexual order. This is particularly visible in the section “Goals of the referendum” on the fourth page of the referendum leaflet, which states the following: (1) To ensure that the Constitution and the laws of the Republic of Croatia define marriage as the life union of a woman and a man. (2) To guarantee permanent legal protection of children, marriage, and family. (3) To prevent same-sex partnership from becoming equal to marriage. (4) To protect children from being adopted by same-sex couples.

In the original: (1)] Osigurati da Ustav i zakoni RH definiraju brak kao životnu zajednicu žene i muškarca. (2) Jamˇciti trajnu zakonsku zaštitu djece, braka i obitelji. (3) Sprijeˇciti izjednaˇcavanje istospolnog partnerstva s brakom. (4) Zaštititi djecu od mogu´cnosti da ih usvoje istospolni parovi. (U ime obitelji 2013)

As these excerpts show, although OBF’s discourse on marriage and family utilizes affirmative rhetoric based on the idea of “protection of marriage, family, and children,” the overt and covert goal of the marriage

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referendum was to prevent the future extension of marriage and associated rights to same-sex couples. This rationale was further reified after the marriage referendum when the government, in an attempt to offer a compromise solution, adopted the Life Partnership Act, which allowed same-sex couples to register their partnerships as life partners without enjoying all the rights granted to married couples. In the letter issued for this occasion, OBF fiercely criticized the new Life Partnership Act primarily on the basis that it grants the rights associated with marriage to same-sex couples, which is seen as contrary to the results of the marriage referendum (Odbacite prijedlog 2014). Thus, unsurprisingly, one of the main “others” against which “the people” are being pinned in On Behalf of the Family’s political discourse are LGBTQ people. While already widely stigmatized and deprived of some of the rights enjoyed by heterosexual individuals and couples, LGBTQ individuals and those who support social changes that would improve their living conditions and social status are nevertheless constructed as a threat to the values and culture of the alleged “majority”. It is important to note that the referendum results in no way confirm the existence of OBF’s claimed “majority”. Altogether, only 37.9% of registered voters participated in the marriage referendum. Out of this 37.9%, 65.87% voted in favour of OBF’s motion, while 33.51% voted against it (Državno izborno povjerenstvo RH, n.d.). This means that OBF’s constitutional definition of marriage was supported by only 24.96% of registered voters, which is very far from the claimed “majority of citizens”. While LGBTQ people remained one of the key “internal others” of OBF’s populism, subsequent OBF campaigns, primarily directed towards changing the current election procedures, revealed further horizontal antagonisms present in OBF’s populist discourse. Since the marriage referendum, OBF launched two referendum campaigns, both rejected by the Parliament due to an insufficient number of signatures and both directed towards diminishing the perceived gap between political decisions and the “people’s will” by widening the scope of preferential voting and allowing smaller parties to enter the Parliament. However, while reflecting most of the earlier demands, the second referendum campaign, based on the slogan “Referendum for a more just electoral system” and

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led by the citizens’ platform People Decide, added an additional request: to limit the scope of power for the representatives chosen from the separate national minority lists by excluding them from participating in the budget vote and the government confidence vote (Narod odluˇcuje, n.d.). Although many countries in Europe and beyond do not even have separate minority lists in the national elections, and, if they do, the representative power of MPs from these lists is often limited, it is important to note the specificities of the Croatian context, which led to the adoption of minority voting lists in the first place (Mesi´c 2013). Some of the existing rights of ethnic/national minorities in Croatia, including the minority voting lists, can be regarded as part of measures adopted over time to facilitate the integration of people of Serbian ethnic background into Croatian society after the armed conflict related to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In the context of the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation, the reified divisions between the Croats and Serbs as homogenized ethnic groups holding different stances towards Croatian statehood played a central role in facilitating the conflict. AntiSerbian arguments and sentiments surging in the context of the conflict still represent a significant challenge when it comes to ethnicity-based inequalities and exclusions. In this regard, separate minority lists, which allow the people of Serbian ethnic background to have three representatives in the Croatian Parliament, represent one of the measures for tackling existing marginalization and stigmatization. The demand to diminish the representative power of national minorities does not represent the first case of OBF’s challenging the rights of Croatia’s Serbian minority. Before the “Referendum for a more just electoral system”, OBF launched a public campaign against the statefunded Serbian minority weekly Novosti, which has been persistently exposing the recent rise of exclusionary ethno-nationalist anti-Serbian discourses and politics in Croatia, while also pointing out the discriminatory heterosexism of OBF’s activism. The critical stance towards problems of inequality and discrimination was framed by OBF leaders as an insult to the “Croatian national majority” (Krešimir Planini´c o Novostima 2017). In order to support these claims, OBF published a detailed study of texts published in Novosti entitled “A Report about the

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Misuse of Public Funds Designated for the Serbian National Minority” (Proˇcitajte izvještaj 2017). In the conclusion of this report, OBF states: We believe that with this report we demonstrated that the Serbian National Council’s weekly “Novosti” expresses and encourages intolerance towards a majoritarian Croatian nation by severely insulting it, by insulting the purpose of its statehood, its sovereignty, its religious belonging, and by insulting the Republic of Croatia!

In the original: Smatramo da smo ovim Izvještajem dokazali kako tjednik Srpskog narodnog vije´ca „Novosti” izražava i potiˇce na netolerantnost prema ve´cinskom hrvatskom narodu, grubo vrijed-aju´ci njega, smisao njegove državnosti, njegove suverenosti, njegovu vjersku pripadnost, te Republiku Hrvatsku! (Proˇcitajte izvještaj 2017: 16)

Based on its conclusion that Novosti spread hatred, bigotry and intolerance towards the “majoritarian Croatian nation”, OBF launched a public petition requesting/demanding a cut in public funding of Novosti (Potpišite peticiju 2017). From the analysis of the horizontal exclusions present in OBF’s populist discourse, it is possible to see that the notion of “majority” is a central concept through which the antagonisms in the horizontal register are articulated. What is also visible are different meanings attached to the concept of “majority.” In the context of marriage referendum, “majority” is defined on the grounds of shared “values, culture and will” (U ime obitelji 2013). At the same time, in the context of OBF’s petition against the weekly Novosti and the People Decide initiative, “majority” is constructed on the grounds of homogenized categories of ethnicity/nation. However, this simultaneity allows these different meanings to mutually sustain each other. As a result, the perception of a shared culture becomes implied in the notion of a common belonging to the ethno-nation, while the concept of a shared ethno-nation comes to be implied in the idea of common values and culture. It is, thus, precisely in and through the productive interplay of these two meanings attached to “majority”—at once a group based on shared values and culture and

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a group based on a shared ethno-nation—that the notion of “majority” becomes such a powerful discursive tool in OBF’s populist mobilization. In both cases, the notion of “majority” signifies a strictly bounded community and establishes the rules of belonging—who is “in” and who is “out”. What follows is that both LGBTQ people and people of Serbian ethnicity are being regarded as threatening “internal outsiders” in Brubaker’s terms (Brubaker 2019), against which a homogenous community has been established in OBF’s populist discourse. At the same time, as we saw earlier, political elites, who are “above” the “majority”, are also positioned “outside” of the imagined community precisely for supporting the rights and non-discrimination of those who are seen as “outsiders”. OBF’s populist mobilization could thus be understood as a resistance to the changes in the hegemonic position of heterosexism and ethno-nationalism, which have dominated both public discourses and “common-sense” knowledge in Croatia since the early 1990s (Kahlina 2015). In this sense, OBF’s populist mobilization may be regarded as a struggle for maintaining the privileged status of the heterosexual family and Croat ethnicity and, as such, could be viewed as a form of antiemancipatory populism directed towards protecting the existing systems of discrimination and power inequalities. In the context of an antiemancipatory populism such as OBF’s, repoliticizing populist discourse, which appeals to the people as citizens and voters, can be seen as a tool for mobilizing the privileged majority with the aim of maintaining regimes that favour them and marginalize others.

Conclusion In this chapter, I explored the ways in which On Behalf of the Family’s political discourse used in the marriage referendum action and in subsequent campaigns represents a case of exclusionary populism and examined the main characteristics of this populist discourse. By drawing on Rogers Brubaker’s (2017, 2019) understanding of populism as a discursive repertoire informed by inherent semantic ambiguity of the notion “the people” and a close intertwining of vertical and horizontal antagonisms, I showed how the appeal to “the people” as one of the central

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features of OBF’s rhetoric figures in OBF’s heterosexist and ethnonationalist campaigns. By employing qualitative discourse analysis, I found that the most prominent feature of populism—the vertical antagonism between “the people” and “the elites”—is strongly present in the texts published in OBF’s key mobilization materials, such as the marriage referendum leaflet, OBF and People Decide websites, as well as in the interviews with OBF and PD leaders in Croatian printed and digital media. On the grounds of my analysis, I revealed that, contrary to the recent studies, which claim there is no right-wing populism in Croatia (Grbeša and Šalaj 2018), On Behalf of the Family could be regarded as a case of a right-wing populist social movement. In OBF’s populist discourse, “the people” are articulated both as sovereign people—citizens and voters—who should be adequately represented in the political institutions (demos) and as a bounded community based on the common values and shared ethnicity/nation. I argued that it is this double-meaning of “the people,” reflected in the systematic use of the notion of “majority”, which allows On Behalf of the Family to utilize a repoliticizing appeal to citizens and voters in the anti-emancipatory actions against the rights (current or envisioned) of LGBTQ people and people of Serbian ethnic background. In this regard, the imagined value-based “majority” is at the same time constructed against those positioned “below” and perceived as threatening “internal outsiders”, and against those “above”, the elected representatives positioned “outside” the imagined community due to their support of the rights and non-discrimination of those “threatening others”. The use of Brubaker’s theoretical lenses, thus, allowed me to reveal how the combination of the ambiguity of “the people” and the multiplicity of meanings attached to the imagined “majority” brings the vertical and horizontal antagonisms into a productive interplay, widening the appeal of OBF’s actions. The approach I followed proved to be particularly useful in exposing the inner functioning of populist discourse and its effects, revealing how inclusionary populist repoliticizing discourse is and can be employed for achieving concrete anti-emancipatory goals. Finally, such an approach allowed me to show the ways in which populist discourse is employed in the context of grass-roots social

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mobilization, thus illuminating the presence of populism in social movements and broadening our understanding of this insufficiently studied phenomenon. Acknowledgements This work was supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 706706 and by a Kone Foundation grant. This support is acknowledged with thanks. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments and suggestions helped me to strengthen my arguments and develop further some of the ideas presented in the initial version of this article.

Notes 1. Both initiatives claim they collected the required number of signatures, which now stands at 10% of registered voters. However, this claim was rejected by the responsible officials after the signatures were officially verified. The dispute is to a large extent based on the perceived discrepancy between the number of voters in the register and the actual number of voters in Croatia. 2. I will use the notion of heterosexism as a way of accounting for the institutionalization of heterosexuality as the only “proper” way of being sexual. Regulating sexuality in such way, heterosexism at the same time secures the hierarchical binary of gender and produces social exclusion of non-heterosexual identities and practices (Peterson 1999). 3. All the quotes originating from Croatian were translated to English by the author.

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peticiju-zaustavimo-financiranje-vrijedanja-hrvata-i-republike-hrvatske-iznasih-dzepova. “Proˇcitajte izvještaj U ime obitelji o zloupotrebi proraˇcunskog novca namijenjenog srpskoj nacionalnoj manjini” [Read On Behalf of the Family’s Report About the Misuse of Public Funds Designated for the Serbian National Minority]. 2017. U ime obitelji, February 15. https://uimeobitelji.net/procitajte-izvjestaj-u-ime-obitelji-o-zloupotrebiproracunskog-novca-namijenjenog-srpskoj-nacionalnoj-manjini. Razsa, Maple, and Nicole Lindstrom. 2004. “Balkan Is Beautiful: Balkanism in the Political Discourse of Tud-man’s Croatia. East European Politics and Societies 18 (4): 628–650. Stavrakakis, Yannis, Giorgos Katsambekis, Nikos Nikisianis, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, and Thomas Siomos. 2017. “Extreme Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Revisiting a Reified Association.” Critical Discourse Studies 14 (4): 420–439. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2017.1309325. Tonkiss, Fran. 1998. “Analysing Discourse.” In Researching Society and Culture, edited by Clive Seale, 245–260. London: Sage. U ime obitelji. 2013. Prikupljanje potpisa 12.05–26.05.2013. za referendum. U ime obitelji. n.d. “Misija.” Accessed August 12, 2018. https://uimeobite lji.net. U ime obitelji. n.d. “Organizacijski odbor za izjašnjavanje biraˇca o potrebi da se zatraži raspisivanje referenduma.” Accessed August 15, 2018. http://uim eobitelji.net/referendumsko-pitanje/#more-280. Wodak, Ruth. 2008. “Introduction: Discourse Studies—Important Concepts and Terms.” In Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michał Krzy˙zanowski, 576–593. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Katja Kahlina works at the University of Helsinki, Finland, Department of Cultures, where she leads a Kone Foundation funded project Sexuality and Democracy (SEXDEM). Her research commitments are to the study of sexual politics and political discourse, and the ways in which these two are culturally and geopolitically produced and entangled. Within SEXDEM, Katja explores the interplay of heterosexism, populism and white ethno-nationalism within transnational anti-gender/anti-LGBTQ mobilization.

Part V Populist Discourse as Left-Wing and Right-Wing Political Discourse

10 Populism and Nationalism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Discourse Massimiliano Demata

Introduction When asked for a comment on Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged populism, Jon Lansman, the founder and head of Momentum, the organization which mobilized grass-roots support for the former Labour leader, answered that “Momentum and the Corbyn phenomenon is … evidentially populist”, as it has organized “mass rallies, you know, ten thousand people in the streets of Liverpool [listening to] Jeremy. That is populism, it is, how can you not think of it as that?” (interview, 24/11/16, quoted in Maiguashca and Dean 2019: 151). Lansman’s comment is impressive, as it signals that the term “populist”, contrariwise to its commonly derogatory meaning, was beginning to be used with a positive connotation (see also Kranert, Chapter 2 in this volume). The comment may also be seen as part of a larger ploy to showcase Corbyn as the head of a wide populist movement, one in which he would present himself as M. Demata (B) Università di Torino, Torino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_10

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a leader who is truly representative (and part) of the people in opposition to the elite. This statement, however, raises a key question: how, and why, has the leader of one of Europe’s major mainstream left-wing parties been called a “populist”? The term “populist” has often been used derogatorily by the left but has now been employed to define the political character of the Labour leader, placing him alongside other populist politicians of a diverging political orientation, such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, as well as his most immediate counterpart in the USA, that is, Bernie Sanders. Indeed, there is no doubt that any discussion of Corbyn’s populism is bound to address the broader question of the nature of populism itself (i.e. whether populism is a discourse, an ideology, a strategy, or a style), and how ideological differences play out in a set of communicative strategies and discursive features that both left and right populists seem to share. Furthermore, as Brexit has dominated the political agenda in the UK in the last few years, any discussion on the populist nature of Corbyn’s discourse will also have to address the role played by nationalism in his own brand of populism. This chapter attempts to clarify if the discursive strategies employed by Corbyn may be interpreted as either left-wing or populist—or both— and how these strategies are influenced by (and fit into) a nationalist agenda. The first part of this chapter will be dedicated to how “the people” is structured as a key signifier in both populism and nationalism. It will also discuss Corbyn’s place in the recent, ever-growing literature on populism and in particular left-wing populism. The second part offers an analysis of some of the key discursive features in a dataset of Corbyn’s speeches, official statements and newspaper articles from 2016–2017. The analysis of this dataset will show how certain features typically associated with populism and nationalism are realized in Corbyn’s discourse. In particular, following the criteria of the Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 2016), nomination and predication strategies will be analysed to localize those lexical items (“people”, “nation”, “Great Britain”) which make the relationship of populism and nationalism central in Corbyn’s rhetoric.

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Background I: The “People” in Populism and Nationalism The identification of a collective entity defined as “people” has induced many scholars to draw parallels between nationalism and populism. In their discursive practices, both populism and nationalism often use “the people” as a collective signifier, but they do so by giving different meanings to “the people”. Nationalism is based on a total identification of nation, state and people (Hobsbawm 1990: 18–20) and aspires to homogeneity of values, cultures, language and religion. Nations are “imagined communities” whose members feel communal bonds, and share a sense of belonging, with all other fellow members of the same nation (Anderson 1991). As such, nations are shaped by the construction of group identity based on similarity (within the in-group) and difference (between the in-group and the out-groups). According to Wodak et al. (2009), this group identity is perceived as real only if members of the nation believe in its existence and identify with it emotionally. Furthermore, the nation as an imagined community “is constructed and conveyed in discourse … National identity is the product of discourse” (Wodak et al. 2009: 22). In this sense, in modern democracies “the people” has become a “discursive formation” and indeed a synonym of the nation (Billig 1995: 94): discursive practices linked to the nation have led to the development of a “syntax of hegemony”, whereby one form of speaking claims to represent the whole nation. The “we” used by leaders when they claim to speak on behalf of the whole nation constitutes a “deixis of homeland” (Billig 1995: 87–95), which points to the existence of a nation made by its own people. Conversely, the core element of populism is a polarized antagonism between the “people”, or the “pure people”, as stated by Mudde (2004), and the “elite”. The populist leader claims to represent the people, constructed as a monolithic, undifferentiated bloc (Canovan 1999) in opposition to the elite, a group represented in a similarly homogenous way consisting of all those social actors (the media, the political and economic establishment) who conspire to defraud the people of their identity, rights or existence. In its most nativist version,1 populism also identifies a third element, the out-group or groups, such as immigrants, who are usually placed outside

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the boundaries of the populist’s idea of the nation and “our” identity and interests. In this sense, when politics is seen as discursive space, populism is based on what Laclau has called the “simplification of the political space” (2005: 18), in itself the product of the “dichotomisation of the social space” (2005: 38). Populism is based on the homogeneity of group composition (see the section on “Populism as an Ideology: The Ideational Approach” in the Introduction in this volume), which in itself constructs a form of political antagonism, in which the identity of the “people” as a group can only be constructed in opposition to an other, an external group who nevertheless threatens the identity (and often the national identity) of the people (Panizza 2017: 409–410). The main issue at stake regarding the political identity of populist movements and leaders is the definition of who the “people” are as political actors. As discussed in the Introduction to this volume, the concept is notoriously slippery: different populist actors use it with different meanings (Mudde 2004: 546), and, as a marker of a projected collective identity, its referential value depends on the (political) interests of those who use it. The “people” are employed discursively to create an “ideology of consensus” (Fowler 1991: 49) structured according to different political orientations and interests, both on the left and on the right, thus giving “the populist mode of identification an extraordinary ideological malleability” (Panizza 2017: 411). The different constructions of the concept of “the people” have been identified by Mudde and Kaltwasser (2013) as the key difference between right-wing and left-wing populism: the ideological perspectives of populism depend on whether “the people” are seen as an inclusive or an exclusive entity. Most European right-wing populist parties tend to be associated with nativism and authoritarianism and are exclusionary in that they are based on a socio-cultural dimension identifying the “people” with nation, whose conditions they want to protect by focusing on those social groups who are constructed as outsiders (i.e. the elite and immigrants). On the other hand, left-wing populism is inclusive and bases the construction of the “people” not on national belonging but on socio-economic grounds and inclusion: it aims at improving the conditions of those social groups that are excluded from the nation’s wealth and identifies the neoliberal establishment as its opponent.2 Inclusive populism is what Jagers and

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Walgrave (2007) call anti-elitist populism, a brand of populism identified as left-wing because it focuses on attacking the elites or the establishment but, unlike other kinds of populism, not excluding social groups or attacking minorities. Similarly, Reinemann et al. (2018: 17) identify four overlapping conceptions of “people”: political (“the people as sovereign”), economic (“the people as class”), nationalist (“the people as nation”) and cultural (“the ordinary people”). The second definition, “the people as class”, best embodies left-wing populism, whereby the “people” are distinguished from the elite and find their own identity on the grounds of their disadvantaged economic status. On the other hand, the concept of “the people as nation” is directly linked to the nationalist view of nation as a homogeneous bloc. The notion that populists often identify “the people” with those belonging to the nation (or at least to some community which is constructed discursively as homogenous) raises the issue of the relationship between nationalism and populism. According to De Cleen and Stavrakakis (2017), the “nodal points” of nationalism and populism are, respectively, “nation” and “people”. Discourses are built around these nodal points in an in/out, mutually exclusive, dichotomous way: nation is juxtaposed to the “Other”, the outgroup of those who do not belong to it, while “the people” are built in opposition to a powerful elite who is seen as dominating society against people’s will. Furthermore, nationalism and populism support two distinct ways to represent “the people”: in the former the people are discursively constructed as coinciding with the national community, while the latter conceptualizes the people as the underdog, whose demands are frustrated by their opposite, i.e. the elite. Stavrakakis and de Cleen conceive of the relationship between populism and nationalism by using a metaphorical spatial image: populist discourse is identified as a vertical axis, consisting of a struggle or a “down/up antagonism” (de Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017: 310) between the people and the elite, while nationalism is projected along a horizontal axis, in which a community occupies a certain space which is separated from the “outgroup”, i.e. those who do not belong to the nation. Populism and nationalism can intersect as nationalist demands can become part of a populist agenda: the people as underdog can be represented not just in opposition to the elite but also by using

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exclusionary arguments of the kind typically associated with nationalism, e.g. by representing them in terms of ethnic or sexual identity (see Venkov and Kahlina, Chapters 8 and 9 in this volume) in opposition to out-groups such as migrants; nationalist demands may also emerge in populist rhetoric when the people as underdog is seen as oppressed by colonizing powers or other supra-national political organizations or bodies (de Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017: 313).

Background II: Corbyn and Left-Wing Populism Corbyn’s left-wing populism has been assessed several times by populism scholars. On the one hand, some (e.g. Atkins and Turnbull 2016; Maiguashca and Dean 2019; Taggart 2016) have cast doubt on the populist nature of Corbyn’s policies and, by implication, on the effectiveness of current definitions of populism accounting for the Corbyn phenomenon. In particular, Maiguashca and Dean (2019) have argued that Corbyn’s supposedly populist rhetoric is not as polarized as that of Podemos or Syriza (and should not even be called populist) because in the United Kingdom there was no equivalent anti-austerity movement such as those emerging in Spain and even more so in Greece. On the other hand, left-wing populism scholar Mouffe has argued on several occasions (Mouffe 2018a, b, c) that Corbyn is an ideal candidate for a British or European brand of left-wing populism seen as a viable alternative to right-wing nativist and populist parties all over Europe as well as in the USA. Mouffe’s argument that Corbyn has been able to construct a “left populist strategy” (Mouffe 2018a: 28) is based on her belief that rightwing and left-wing populism share the same contempt for the neoliberal policies. Corbyn revitalized Labour mainly by rejecting those neoliberal policies associated with Tony Blair and New Labour, by supporting renationalization of key services and utilities and by building close links with social movements fighting all sorts of discrimination, constructing what Mouffe, following Laclau (2005: 166), calls a counter-hegemonic “chain of equivalence” among dissenting groups, i.e. feminist, anti-racist and LGBT movements (Mouffe 2018a: 5, 2018b). The construction of a

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new kind of left populism as “a discursive strategy of construction of the political frontier between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy’” (Mouffe 2018a: 5), or “between an ‘Us’ and a ‘Them’” (Mouffe 2018c) such as the one embodied by Corbyn, is what is really needed to make democracy healthy again and reassert those basic egalitarian values which rightwing populism seems to threaten. Corbyn’s antagonistic view of society is exemplified by the key Labour slogan which was also the title of their manifesto for the 2017 General Elections: “For the many and not for the few”. This slogan embodied the populist dichotomy of the people vs the elite, as it is a “new political frontier” (Mouffe 2018b, c) which followed the populist strategy of identifying a conflict between two socio-political entities. However, there is a major difficulty in the definition of Corbyn as a typical left-wing populist, at least according to Mouffe’s formulation. If left-wing populism is characterized by a socio-economic dimension based on inclusion, how does this dimension square with Corbyn’s avowed Euroscepticism? Euroscepticism, i.e. the opposition or hostility to the EU and to European integration, has a long tradition in the UK and can hardly be seen as inclusive, as it displays nationalist feelings based on both cultural and institutional exclusion, i.e. in opposition to the EU. Euroscepticism received a fresh impetus in 2004 and 2007, when new member states from Eastern Europe joined the EU and a cheap labour force began to arrive in the UK first from Poland and then Romania.3 This generated a sense of danger and insecurity among those social groups who were most exposed to competition from foreign workers, thus fuelling anti-immigration feelings (Evans and Mellon 2016). This confluence of anti-immigration sentiment into Euroscepticism has been seen as part of the current rise of right-wing populist movements in Europe and contributed to the outcome of the Brexit referendum in 2016 (Kneuer 2018): Leave, the movement which supported Britain’s leaving the EU, won over Remain, the coalition which wanted the UK to stay in the EU. While he did campaign for Remain at the Brexit referendum, Corbyn himself had a long personal history of Euroscepticism. He fully accepted the Leave victory and for a long time he would refuse the many calls for a second referendum.4 Furthermore, even while campaigning for Remain, the Labour leader never hid his

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hostility to the Brussels “oligarchy”, using the same lexis as that employed by those right-wing populist and Eurosceptic leaders who had supported the Leave campaign mainly on the basis of their aversion to immigration. Indeed, anti-European and nationalist feelings were not exclusive to the Leave campaign, as those who supported Remain used certain discursive strategies which were not different from those used by Leavers. This is particularly evident in the use of terms denoting national belonging, such as we: as noted by Wenzl (2019), even those politicians who supported Remain were deeply entrenched in a markedly nationalist rhetoric which was based on an ontological distance between Britain and Europe, the latter considered a separate entity from the former in social, political and cultural terms. Corbyn is obviously not a right-wing populist who is hostile to outgroups such as migrants. However, his staunch defence of British interests and jobs and his distance from the Euro-friendly New Labour, which many saw as the British “elite” linked to Brussels, aligned him to those sections of the electorate who, from both the left and the right, had voted for Leave on the basis of strong nationalist views. The results of this strategy could be seen at the General Elections held on 8 June 2017: rather than facing the meltdown predicted only three months before, Labour lost to the Conservatives by a small margin (40.0−42.4%). This happened not only because Corbyn managed to energize a grass-roots movement (as opposed to the Conservatives who ran a dismal election campaign), but also because he attracted sections of the electorate which had been lured by the populist appeal for Leave mainly on the basis of the defence of national interests: 16 per cent of voters for the UKIP voted for Labour (Ipsos 2017), and Labour also attracted many voters who, even in traditional Labour strongholds, had supported Leave a year earlier.

Theoretical Basis and Research Questions An analysis of Corbyn’s discourse may lead to an understanding of the complexity of his politics: the former Labour leader had long supported a left-wing social agenda but nevertheless shared a few distinctive features with right-wing populism, including his thinly disguised Euroscepticism

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and his hostility to the “elite”. As for all populists, such an understanding can be reached, as argued by Moffitt, by looking at how the concepts of “people”, the elite and the nation are handled through the construction of a social identity in discourse: the populist leader draws boundaries in discourse around his or her idea of the people, and he or she does so through performance and mediation (Moffitt 2016: 99– 106). There are two interrelated research questions which are at the core of our understanding of Corbyn’s discourse in relation to general notions of populism. First, how does the key populist concept, i.e. the people, appear in Corbyn’s texts through its obvious main signifier, the noun people? Second, how does Corbyn negotiate a discourse of inclusion within the discursive space of the nation? The research questions will be answered by using the critical framework provided by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (van Leeuwen 2008; KhosraviNik 2010), and specifically the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 2016). This critical framework will be implemented by drawing on the methodology proposed by CADS (Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies) (Partington et al. 2013; Baker 2006; Baker and McEnery 2015; Taylor and Marchi 2018). The approach proposed by the DHA includes three dimensions: (1) the identification of the content or topic; (2) the investigation of discursive strategies; (3) the analysis of “linguistic means (as types) and contextdependent linguistic realizations (as tokens)” (Reisigl and Wodak 2016: 32). Discursive strategies, in particular, are a set of practices used in order to achieve certain aims and are “systematic ways of using language” (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 44). Of these strategies, five are fundamental in the elaboration of self-presentation and other-presentation in discourse: nomination (the linguistic identity of the persons involved), predication (the qualities and characteristics attributed to them), argumentation (the “justification and questioning of claims of truth and normative rightness” [Reisigl and Wodak 2016: 33]), perspectivization (the speaker’s or writer’s perspective from which such attributions and nominations are expressed) and intensification or mitigation (that is, intensifying of mitigating the judgements expressed on the social actors) (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 2016).

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This chapter focuses on nomination and predication, which represent respectively the discursive construction and the discursive qualification of the social actors, objects or events found in discourse. According to Reisigl and Wodak (2001: 45–56), referential or nomination strategies are those devices by which the presence of social actors is enacted in language as well as “the linguistic mechanisms [that] are employed in perspectivizing this presence” (KhosraviNik 2010: 64). The identification of social actors will be implemented by using the categories suggested by van Leeuwen (2008: 23–54), who intended to “draw up a sociosemantic inventory of the ways in which social actors can be represented and establish the sociological and critical relevance” (van Leeuwen 2008: 23) of such categories. On the other hand, predicational strategies are those processes ascribed to social actors. The distinction between different categories of social actors and their predications depends on the different role allocation they are given in discourse and is the result of socially determined processes: it is society that assigns certain roles to specific groups or, in a way, even partitions these groups in discourse according to certain parameters which have an arbitrary and variable nature, role and value in society. Therefore, when speakers use these roles in discourse they are likely to provoke certain value judgements in the audience (Darics and Koller 2019). A fuller understanding of Corbyn’s populism and of its connection with the discursive formations traditionally ascribed to nationalism will be reached by addressing the way people and the nation have been evaluated in Corbyn’s texts in two overlapping sets of lexical items: (1) people, an abstract but ideologically evocative and cognitively specific term (Chilton 2017), and (2) British, Britain and our country. These terms will be analysed as part of nomination and predication strategies, which will be identified through collocation and concordance analysis. In terms of their predication, these items will be analysed by looking at the kinds of processes in which they are involved at the level of the clause and assessing them in terms of transitivity, a key aspect of systemic functional grammar which constitutes an important aspect of evaluation and persuasion in discourse (Wodak 2009; Partington and Taylor 2018).

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Data Corbyn’s discourse will be assessed by analysing a dataset of ninety-eight texts (speeches, public statements and newspaper articles) by Corbyn published in the period from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2017. This two-year period has been chosen because it covers two key recent events in British politics: the Brexit referendum (23 June 2016) and the General Elections (8 June 2017). Corbyn’s texts were available from two websites, https://jeremycorbyn.org.uk and https://labourlist.org. The identification and discussion of the discursive strategies have been made easier by using the SketchEngine software (Kilgarriff et al. 2014), which can detect grammatical patterns within discourse. In particular, the Word Sketch feature of SketchEngine can facilitate the analysis of social actions and discursive strategies by grouping single lexical items according to the grammatical categories of their collocates. The methodological resources offered by CDA have been employed to identify two key discursive strategies in Corbyn’s texts, i.e. nomination and predication (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 2016), which represent respectively social actors and social actions, focusing on the evaluation of people and Britain. Another software, AntConc (Version 3.5.7) (Anthony 2018), has been used to explore collocational patterns and concordances and to see how lexical items interact within the discourse environment of the texts. In particular, collocational patterns are analysed to understand the associations and connotations of certain key words. These patterns have been revealed by using a mix of two algorithms available in AntConc: MI (Mutual Information) and log-likelihood.5 These algorithms measure the probability that two words occur together and are therefore useful to measure the saliency of single-word collocates, that is, how certain items are foregrounded in the context of discourse. The collocational groupings obtained from the AntConc search have been classified according to their semantic categories, established and populated manually by the author, and their analysis is crucial for an understanding of the discourses which the selected signifiers refer to and of the discourse prosody they form (Baker 2006, 104–113).

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Analysis The use of people is central in Corbyn’s discourse: it is the second most used lexical item in the corpus as it appears 828 times, ranking just below Labour, which appears 829 times. The collocational groupings of people provide some useful indications on the discourse environment of Corbyn’s texts. Collocates of people have been derived from calculating them using a L5-R5 range (five words to the left and five words to the right). Two quantitative analyses have been carried out: the bare frequency of collocates and, indicated in brackets, the collocation strength according to the MI (Mutual Information) and log-likelihood algorithms (Table 10.1). On the basis of the quantitative analysis of the top collocates, four main semantic groups can be identified as central to the definition of people. These groups are constructed through certain “membership categorisation devices” (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 45) whereby categories are Table 10.1 Rank by collocation strength (lexical words only) of people (L5 to R5 span); frequency is shown in brackets 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

older disabled young millions working British million lives security many living know more need country Britain our work all labour

8.70(15) 8.64(23) 8.02(48) 7.40(17) 7.23(41) 6.98(26) 6.82(25) 6.68(16) 6.47(16) 6.17(21) 6.13(16) 6.07(16) 5.81(20) 5.48(21) 5.32(32) 5.18(28) 5.04(89) 5.01(15) 4.68(25) 3.99(22)

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presented as the key ingroups in discourse. The main semantic groups are as follows: (1) working and work reveal Corbyn’s concerns with the working class; (2) young, protect, care, disabled and older point to certain social actors connected to a discourse of social vulnerability; (3) Britain, British and country indicate the belonging of people to nation, as does our, which is used as an “inclusive we”; (4) the high frequency and collocation strength of quantifiers such as million, all , millions, thousands, more, many, and most indicate a strategy of consensus and legitimization. The ranking of the immediate pre-modifiers of people (L1) confirms these two trends (Table 10.2). The four key semantic groups emerging from the analysis of Corbyn’s dataset can be classified according to the categories suggested by van Leeuwen (2008: 23–54). In Corbyn’s texts, working people represents a role allocation, that of workers, which van Leeuwen calls categorization, that is, when social roles are represented “in terms of identities and functions they share with others” (2008, 40) or, more specifically, functionalisation, which classifies social actors in terms of something they do, for example a job (2008, 42). On the other hand, the group which includes young, older and disabled includes categories distinguished on the basis of their age or physical condition and can be classified according to another subtype of categorization, i.e. identification, which “occurs when social actors are defined, not in terms of what they do, but in terms of what they, more or less permanently, or unavoidably, are” (2008: Table 10.2 Rank by collocation strength (lexical words only) of people (L1); frequency is shown in brackets 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

disabled older young British working million most many more our

8.51(21) 8.25(11) 7.79(41) 6.92(25) 6.57(26) 6.43(19) 5.68(8) 5.58(26) 4.53(16) 3.57(32)

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42). Young and older can be included in a particular kind of identification, i.e. classification, while disabled is physical identification. These two categories—categorization and identification—clearly identify members according to their social identity and therefore, when they appear in discourse, indicate the priority given to certain social actors rather than others by those who use the respective terms. Corbyn emphasizes the importance of these two sets of groups as a springboard for his social agenda, an agenda which may be interpreted as left-wing: these are the groups who, in Corbyn’s formulation, are suffering the burden of wealth inequality and deserve a greater share of social and political power. They are the people who “felt left behind in lower paid or less secure jobs” or “who felt left behind by the forces unleashed by globalization”, and this happens because of Conservative leaders, who “make our nurses, our carers, our soldiers, our disabled, our young people trying to get a home of their own, our elderly looking for dignity in retirement and those working hard to get on, foot the bill” (9 May 2017). On the other hand, Labour wants “To put the interests of working people front and centre stage and to fight for our values, of social justice, solidarity, equality and internationalism” (3 December 2016). The discursive patterns revealed by the collocate frequency, the collocation strength of people in Corbyn’s texts and its concordances were further explored through SketchEngine, which was used to access the actions in which social actors are commonly involved. When Corbyn speaks of those disadvantaged members of society and of their needs and concerns, he does so by using existential processes, such as live, or mental-affective processes, such as feel , thus highlighting human qualities and feelings in the social actors he addresses. People appears as the goal of verbs such as help, protect and give (Figs. 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3). Corbyn reveals the centrality of economy and jobs in his discourse in clauses where people should be given “a fairer share of our country’s wealth”, “stronger employment rights”, “the job security they need” and “a real say in their community and workplaces”. In the corpus, as shown in the concordances of people, it is government, we (i.e. Corbyn himself as possible next Prime Minister) and state laws and regulations that help and protect people. Such actions seem to suggest that Corbyn supports a strong welfare state which would

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Fig. 10.1

Concordance of give and people

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Fig. 10.2

Concordance of help and people

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Concordance of protect and people

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guarantee protection and help, as well as opportunity and choice, to the British. According to this vision, people should also be helped and protected both in their rights in the workplace and in their access to a public, state-funded health service. The claims of the social groups foregrounded by Corbyn are strongly legitimized by his use of quantifiers, such as millions, many, thousands and most, often in conjunction with categorization and identification. The use of quantifiers is a form of aggregation, which identifies social actors in terms of figures, i.e. when people are quantified in terms of definite (millions) or indefinite (many) quantifiers. When used in political discourse, these quantifiers can communicate an impression of consensus and as such are part of a legitimization strategy, but can also convey a threat. This is particularly true when quantifiers are used to define those social groups who are marginalized in the current socio-political system: (1) Millions of people feel shut out of a political and economic system that has let them down and scarred our country with grotesque levels of inequality. (26 June 2016) (2) Too many people are being pushed to the brink as they find it difficult to get by due to increased rents, stagnating wages, insecure work and in-work benefits cuts. (6 March 2017)

While certain social groups are singled out and prioritized in Corbyn’s texts, at the same time the Labour leader also names people as a single block, in opposition to the elite. This is a populist strategy, whereby populists bestow legitimacy on themselves by using the sheer force of the number of people they claim to represent in opposition to the small number of individuals making up the elite: (3) Tolerance of tax avoidance and tax havens, and inaction on tax evasion, is denying funds to the public purse and leads directly to cuts in services and benefits that are hurting millions of people in Britain. (8 April 2016) (4) Already, across the country, Labour councils are putting Labour values into action, in a way that makes a real difference to millions of people,

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despite cynical government funding cuts that have hit Labour councils five times as hard as Tory-run areas. (28 September 2016)

Corbyn then connects the woes affecting people at the margins of society with the whole architecture of Britain’s political and economic system. It all becomes part of a populist view. The marginalization of certain classes due to economic inequalities is explained as the cause of the people’s lack of trust in the “elite” and the institutions: (5) I put it to you last year that for too many people the economic system simply isn’t working. A system that has delivered rising inequality and falling living standards for the majority, when six million of those in work are earning less than the living wage. It’s a system in which large numbers of people have lost confidence. (6 November 2017) (6) [W]e are being held back by a self-serving elite, who look after themselves and their friends and a failed system which delivers staggering wealth at the top, while more and more people struggle to simply make ends meet. (31 December 2017) (7) … it fits with their bigger project. Just as they are skewing economic life so that wealth is funnelled towards the 1 per cent and away from working people, so now the party of privilege is taking us back to the days when the people were locked out of power. That’s why the commitment I give to you is that a Labour Government will put the people back in power. (18 February 2016) (8) People are alienated from politics and politicians. Our Westminster system is broken and our economy is rigged. Both are run in the interests of the few. (9 May 2017)

The opposition between the people and the elite is one of the characterizing aspects of populism. Corbyn clearly assumes that power is not currently in the hands of the people but in those of the elite. His antagonistic politics, whereby, for instance, “[the rich, the elite and the vested interest] have benefitted from tax cuts and bumper salaries while millions have struggled”, fulfils the populist construction of the social

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space as divided between the suffering people and the corrupt elite. This dichotomy, represented by Corbyn as the opposition between “the 1 per cent”—a figure which seems to be a reference to the left-wing populist movement Occupy Wall Street, whose slogan “We are the 99 per cent” was constructed in opposition to the wealthiest 1 per cent—and the majority of the people is also one of the key discourse topics used by those populists who would later support Brexit. Besides pushing a social agenda which foregrounds some groups because of their disadvantaged economic position, Corbyn also uses people in terms of national belonging: Britain, British, our and country allude to a use of people in terms of the category of collectivization, that is, when a group is presented “as a homogenous, consensual group” (van Leeuwen 2008: 38), and its identity is defined in terms of local orientation. The strategy of collectivization aims at communicating a sense of homogeneity and at legitimizing his discourse, the more so in the case of Britain and British as it connects collectivization with a (supposedly homogenous) national group and identity: (9) Our priority must be public safety and I will take whatever action is necessary and effective to protect the security of our people and our country that includes full authority for the police to use whatever force is necessary to protect and save life as they did last night as they did in Westminster in March. (5 June 2017)

A detailed analysis of the lexical items referring to Britain such as Britain and our country sheds light on how the concept of the nation is structured discursively in Corbyn’s texts. In the corpus under examination, the noun Britain occurs 434 times while the noun phrase our country occurs 141 times. The analysis of the collocation of the term Britain may provide evidence of how Corbyn employs the nation as part of his populist discourse. As in the case of people discussed above, collocations of Britain have been calculated from a L5–R5 range, and the results derived from the calculation (Table 10.3) show the bare frequency of collocates and the collocation strength. The frequency of collocates and the collocation strength of Britain indicate a preference for items referring to change and progress as

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Table 10.3 Rank by collocation strength (lexical words only) of Britain (L5 to R5 span); frequency is shown in brackets 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

transform fairer rebuild campaigning plan need best Brexit build deal EU future better Europe workers new many working trade jobs make labour economy now people more we country government our

9.11 8.64 8.56 7.88 7.48 7.23 6.86 6.79 6.75 6.58 6.47 6.47 6.28 6.24 6.16 6.00 5.99 5.97 5.94 5.88 5.71 5.46 5.30 5.28 5.18 5.05 4.87 4.43 4.19 3.67

(18) (10) (9) (8) (9) (10) (8) (14) (10) (9) (12) (12) (8) (12) (14) (12) (18) (9) (8) (10) (10) (32) (11) (10) (28) (12) (47) (9) (10) (18)

opposed to the current state: transform, new, future, fairer, build , rebuild , plan and better all imply a forward-looking vision and are the most prevalent aspect of Corbyn’s discourse regarding Britain. The frequent use of Britain in sentences with comparatives and verbs denoting change reveals dissatisfaction with the country’s current state. As in the case of people, the analysis of the concordance of Britain through the Word Sketch feature of SketchEngine offers useful insights in terms of actor attribution analysis.

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Britain tends to be the object of verbs connoting or denoting positive change, such as transform and the construction “make + Britain + better/fairer/safer”, with the subject being an “inclusive we” (Corbyn, the Labour party, all British), often subsumed in “our plan” (Figs. 10.4 and 10.5). In line with the Labour manifesto, the transformation of Britain that Corbyn aims at delivering is in favour of the people: the Labour leader argues that he wants to change Britain “by genuinely putting power in the hands of the people, the creative, compassionate and committed people of our country,” a statement which is based on the populist and revolutionary slogan “power to the people”. However, the people described by Corbyn are more often “the many”, an entity which is identified, in typically left-wing fashion, as benefiting from social justice (“for the common good”) first and foremost on the basis of improved economic conditions and wealth redistribution (“so that we generate good jobs and prosperity in every community”, “with an upgraded economy run for the many not the few”, “so that no one and no community is left behind”). Corbyn’s references to the nation’s interests seem to align him with the nationalist discourse behind the Leave victory in the Brexit referendum. The campaign for Brexit was based on a nationalist surge in opposition to the paradigm of the EU’s perceived corruption, lack of democracy and its open borders. The antagonistic strategy of populism and the exclusionary discourse of nationalism surface through Corbyn’s use of our people. Our people identifies a collective identity which includes all those Britons who are paying the price of Tory policies but is also a synecdoche for all Britons: (10) Congress, thank you for that welcome and thank you for everything you do as a movement, for our people and our country, to secure better pay and conditions for working people, to give them a voice in the workplace and a say in our politics. (11) If elected prime minister, I will do everything necessary to protect the safety and security of our people and our country.

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Fig. 10.4

Concordance lines for transform and Britain

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Fig. 10.5

Concordance lines for make + Britain + adj/noun phrase/verb

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(12) But do not doubt my determination to take whatever action is necessary to keep our country safe and to protect our people on our streets, in our towns and cities, at our borders.

The discursive context in which our country is mentioned shows that Corbyn’s vision was that of a nation in which the interests of British workers come first. Indeed, our country means Labour’s country and, in terms of definition of social actors, the identity of working people merges with that of all British people. At the same time, safety, security and our borders belong to a lexicon which recalls the exclusive nationalist approach to society typical of right-wing populism.

Conclusions The analysis of Corbyn’s texts has revealed that his discourse is based on a polarized view of society which may be seen as very close to those movements and leaders both in the UK and beyond which are usually called “populist”. Similarly to Bernie Sanders, Corbyn’s brand of populism identifies the “people” mainly in terms of social class (workers) and age groups (the young, the elderly), in opposition to the wealthy “elite”. In many respects, in using rhetoric to construct a particular view of social relations in the political space, Corbyn took advantage of the antagonistic political space opened up by the Brexit referendum, a space in which the antagonism between the people and the elite provided a very effective political strategy. Corbyn constructs this typically populist antagonism by highlighting the inequalities of power between the two groups in political and economic terms. This has been seen in the above discussion of Corbyn’s discursive strategies: the nomination strategy of people and the processes constituting predications with which the term is associated suggest that the Labour leader’s discourse is addressed to those who suffer because of social and economic inequalities. Corbyn legitimizes his policies by placing the pleas and demands of a high number of people at the centre of his policies. By foregrounding those groups whom he sees as disadvantaged because of unfair economic conditions, Corbyn establishes a chain of equivalence, identifying people as a class,

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or group of classes—the workers, the young, the old, the disabled—and casting them against the “few”, who are “wealthy”, “small” in number and “self-serving” and are represented as “the super-rich elite” and “the closed circle of Westminster and Whitehall”. By emphasizing the importance of workers and jobs and by often associating people with workers, Corbyn seems to fall under Mouffe’s definition of populism as appealing to “the people as class”. The social actors identified by Corbyn’s use of people and the nomination and predication strategies associated with them seem to confirm the broadly left-wing views of the former Labour leader: those social groups who have been affected by economic transformations (low-paid workers), uncertain future prospects (the young) and crumbling public services (the elderly and the disabled) are all foregrounded and become the people for whom he has mobilized. Interestingly, the majority of two of these three groups (low-wage workers and the elderly) voted for Leave in the Brexit referendum, and it is to them that Corbyn addresses his message, sharing with them certain nationalist ideals and a dislike of elites. Corbyn was, therefore, attempting to make his message appealing to two groups who had been persuaded by right-wing populist discourse, and he did so by addressing their concerns about, respectively, economic conditions and the viability of the welfare state. His emphasis on the benefits people should receive from the state are typical of a welfare system which protects the weakest members of society. Just like other populists, however, Corbyn’s discourse is also strongly nationalist. As noted by Eklundh (2018), being both left-wing populist as well as nationalist is not a contradiction. If Corbyn foregrounds disadvantaged or marginal social groups (his “chain of equivalence”) in British society, he negotiates their place in discourse as British and in our country. Corbyn’s populism can be seen as a hybrid between seemingly opposite forces, that is, on the one hand, social inclusion, and, on the other, nationalism, which is by definition based on exclusion. Corbyn presents social actors as possessing simultaneously populist, national and left-wing features: on the one hand, the identification of social actors such as workers and the youth parallels Corbyn’s left-wing class concern and a certain division of society; on the other hand, his emphasis on Britain (nationalism) and the quantification of consensus (plebiscitarianism) are

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strategies which are routinely used in right-wing populist narratives. Clearly, then, Corbyn’s nationalism may be explained as a specific case of the articulation between populism and nationalism discussed by de Cleen and Stavrakakis (2017): he puts workers, the youth and the elderly at the lower end of the down–up vertical axis of populist politics (the people vs the elite) but also positions them on the horizontal axis of the nation. In Corbyn’s discourse the people are defined both in vertical terms (people vs elite) and horizontal terms (people as belonging to the nation), and this is one of the key factors that made his brand of populism so appealing in Brexit Britain.

Notes 1. Nativism is an ethnocentric construct which holds that non-native communities, for example migrants, pose a threat to the homogeneity of “the people”. Nationalism, on the other hand, while in some of its forms may share certain ideological traits with nativism, emphasizes the importance of the nation or the homeland as a determining principle for identity. 2. See Chapter 9 of this volume for a study of the antagonism between “the people” and politicians in Croatia. 3. It should be added that in 2004, the UK, Ireland and Sweden were the only EU countries that did not have any restrictions on freedom of movements from the new EU member states. 4. Corbyn did eventually envisage the possibility of supporting a second Brexit referendum in a BBC interview on July 9, 2019 (BBC 2019). 5. The Mutual Information (MI) score “expresses the extent to which observed frequency of co-occurrence differs from what we would expect (statistically speaking). In statistically pure terms this is a measure of the strength of association between words x and y” (Collins Wordbanks Online 2020). The algorithm used by log-likelihood gives more importance to grammatical words, while MI tends to highlight lower frequency items (Baker 2006, 101–102). A mix of the two algorithms provides a better balance between frequency and saliency in the score than in those scores obtained from either of them alone.

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Massimiliano Demata is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Turin. He gained his DPhil from Oxford (1999), was a Fulbright Research Scholar at Yale University (1999) and Indiana University (2014), and a DAAD Visiting Researcher at the Center for Border Studies, Saarland University (2020). He has published monographs, journal articles and book chapters on the language of British and American media and politics, Donald Trump’s language, computer-mediated communication and climate change refugees. His current research focuses on social media and populist language in the context of American politics.

11 Using Mass and Pop Culture to Dominate Political Discourse: How the Left-Wing Party Podemos Conquered Spanish Living-Rooms with IKEA Sandra Issel-Dombert

Introduction The aim of this contribution is to analyse the language and rhetoric of left-wing populism based on a case study of the Spanish party Podemos (“We can”) with a focus on elements of populist language use. The anti-austerity party Podemos transformed the Spanish two-party system into a multiparty system. In its advertising campaigns, Podemos uses a set of creative and unconventional, semiotically complex communication forms which often include humour. For example, the party recently used street-based activism to demonstrate against corruption, with a bus that depicts the faces of Spanish politicians involved in scandals on its exterior. Serving as a tribute to former Venzuelan president Hugo Chávez and as a battlefield for Podemos to blame corrupt politicians, their beat-’em-up genre videogame Trama Wars is another example of their communication style. Alongside Chávez, the player takes on the role S. Issel-Dombert (B) Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_11

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of the party leader Pablo Iglesias and fights against political opponents. Their television broadcasts are produced with footage from the internationally successful series Game of Thrones. Other broadcasts deal with allusions to the internationally successful space opera Star Wars in the campaign Spain Wars. Both of these short political films draw an antagonistic idea of politics. Using footage from the original films and television series with new subtitles and a photomontage which projects the leading politicians of Podemos into them, the struggle between good and evil is transferred to a bipolar clash between Podemos and the established parties. Podemos conveys its argument via storytelling: to protect the interests of the people from the political elites’ perceived moral decline, the party tries to open the alleged victim’s eyes explaining the dimensions of corruption. In this context Podemos acts as the enlightenment philosopher claiming to be the mouthpiece and representative of interests for the vulnerable and the people in general, understood as a homogenous mass. Podemos integrates its advertising campaigns into popular cultural practices in the realm of everyday life and in this way aims to conquer Spanish society’s living-rooms. The above examples demonstrate that the Podemos campaigns tie in with commercially successful mass and pop culture. According to Maase (2003: 48), mass culture is a collective designation for goods, services and activities which serve as entertainment and pleasure for many in Western industrialized societies. Mass culture is of particular interest in the context of populism, as the concept describes the counterpart to high or elite culture in modern capitalist industrial nations (Maase 2003: 48). Podemos has also adopted a mass cultural narrative using the Swedish furniture catalogue of IKEA as a model for their manifesto. The party drew it up for the parliamentary elections of 2016 as a remake of the previous election manifesto in December 2015. Political content is conveyed via text and images. Hence, this contribution suggests an empirical approach through a multimodal text, the manifesto of Podemos. This type of text is characterized by the use of verbs in the future simple tense that are often conjugated in the plural (JiménezYáñez 2018: 104). The issues in the text are often presented argumentatively to justify political goals. Manifestos communicate central positions and world visions of a party. They are therefore particularly well suited

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to examine not only the content but also the discursive form of the party in order to learn more about the communication style of a young party such as Podemos. The aim of this article is to provide insights for a better understanding of multimodal communication in populist political communication. Therefore, two research questions are addressed: (1) What are the characteristics of Podemos’ language use? (2) What is specific about (left-wing) populist discourse? To answer these questions based on the premise that a discourse linguistic point of view could provide more insight into the workings of a populist discourse on a methodological level, this paper is based on the holistic model Textsemantisches Analyseraster (Gardt 2012; text-semantic analysis grid , my translation) for a systematic discourse analysis and to identify typical characteristics of Podemos’ language use. The chapter consists of four sections. The section “Populism in Spain: Genesis and Rise of Podemos” characterizes the origin and development of Podemos, taking into consideration a discussion of populism. The section “Constructivism and Discourse Analysis as Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks” introduces the research tradition of linguistic discourse analysis and its connection with constructivism, before presenting the holistic model TexSem for a practical implementation of a systematic discourse analysis. The final section “A Manifesto Designed Like an IKEA Catalogue: A Reflection of the Zeitgeist ” compares the IKEA catalogue with Podemos’ manifesto. I conclude with a synopsis of the findings.

Populism in Spain: Genesis and Rise of Podemos After the various shocks of the financial crises since 2008, terrorism and the 2015 refugee crisis, a rise of populism was and is observable. Financial crashes serve as one type of accelerant which can inflame populism (Priester 2012). These findings are also valid for Spain. Almost concomitantly with the outbreak of the profound global financial and banking crisis of 2008 Spain was faced with its biggest economic crisis after a long period of growth in production output and employment. This

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background was the starting point of a protest movement called indignados movement in 2011. Demonstrators all over Spain protested against welfare cuts, high unemployment rates and corruption as well as Spanish politicians. This context brought together a circle of highly educated people, mostly from Complutense University (Madrid), who founded Podemos in 2014. Podemos challenged the traditional established state-wide two-party system consisting of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE, Partido Socialista Obrero Español ) on the one hand and the People’s Party (PP, Partido Popular ) on the other hand. With Podemos’ result of 34.6% (together with Ciudadanos) in the 2015 general election, the end of the two-party-system was introduced and led Spain to a second transition after the transition from Francoism. Its electorate consists mainly of young, well-educated, male urban residents (Sola and Rendueles 2017: 16). Podemos is concordantly classified as a left-wing populist party (Ibáñez-Rosales 2019)—despite the fact that populism is a semantically vague term. There is a consensus on three approaches—with different designations—which see populism as an ideology, as a political power strategy or as a discursive practice (Rovira et al. 2017: 14). This contribution follows the discursive approach “that conceives populism as a discursive frame: an anti-elite discourse in the name of the sovereign People […]—compatible with different ideologies, organizational forms and social bases” (Sola and Rendueles 2017: 5). The heterogenous and hybrid character of populism is captured in its openness towards various ideologies. Michael Freedens (1998: 750) introduced the predominant paradigm of populism as a thin-centred ideology—in other words, it only has a very limited ideological core. Populism can be enriched with specific thick-centred ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, nativism or authoritarianism. Therefore, populism has multiple manifestations on both the left and the right side of the party spectrum (see also Kranert, Introduction in this volume, Demata and Cadalen, Chapters 10 and 12 in this volume). “While right-wing populism tends to define the people as nation and is more likely to attack elites such as the current government or mass media, left-wing populism

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conceives the people as class and may denounce economic and religious elites” (Ernst et al. 2017: 1348). Podemos is a prime example of “inclusionary populism that previous to the Great Recession had been much more common in Latin America than in Europe” (Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017: 8). The party entered the national arena of politics committed to issues such as women’s rights, environmental protection and tax reforms. In return, Podemos advocates the end of austerity and the party is committed to ensuring the government’s expenditure will be used to finance the health and education system.

Constructivism and Discourse Analysis as Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks A linguistic response to the investigation of current social challenges and issues—including crises, refugee flows, terrorism, populism—is called discourse linguistics and is widespread in political linguistics (Girnth 2015: 12, 90).1 The concept of the term discourse has several meanings in linguistics and the social sciences. Bringing together language and social knowledge in linguistics, discourse can be understood as topic (Gardt 2012: 30). In this context, discourse linguistics can be classified as both a theory and a method. German linguistics defined the term discourse in relation to constructivism: [It’s a] constructivist conviction that language does not simply depict reality but makes a decisive contribution to making it cognitively available in the first place. There are (understandably) no definitive statements about the degree of linguistic imprinting of our images of reality, but rather general formulations such as the now classic argument by Reinhart Koselleck that a central term of a discourse is not only an “indicator” but also a “factor” of historical development. (Gardt 2012: 68, my translation)

Developed by Gardt since 2002, the holistic model TexSem provides a guide to the practical application of a discourse analysis. TexSem takes

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into consideration the social reality of a text as its historical, political and cultural context. Based on the related linguistic disciplines of lexicology, stylistics, syntax, morphology and image semiotics, it allows a systematic analysis of texts along three dimensions: the communicative-pragmatic frame, a macroanalysis and a microanalysis. The first dimension, the communicative-pragmatic frame, situates the text in its “fields of action” (following Reisigl and Wodak 2009: 91 and their translation of Girnth 1996) via the consideration of the context in which it was created. Four aspects are of major importance: the producer of the text (writer, photographer etc.) conceived of in terms of sociolinguistic variables like age, sex, profession; the anticipated reader and their sociolinguistic parameters; the medium (written/spoken) and the initial as well as target situation (Gardt 2012: 64). This set allows the reconstruction of the communicative practices, i.e., who communicates in which textual way at a certain time, in a certain space, for which reader groups, about which topics (Gardt 2012: 62–63). The dimension of the macroanalysis observes structural principles and recurrent text components. It does not aim at the perspective of what, but of how. It addresses the text genre considering the domain (politics, economy, etc.), type of action (e.g. informative texts such as technical texts); the topic and their development. To identify internal structures of texts, TexSem considers the layout of the complete text and the structure according to text parts (Gardt 2012: 64). The third dimension, microanalysis, is centred on a linguistic analysis of the text supplemented with semiotic and argumentation analysis. Beginning with the smallest unit, the microanalysis encompasses phonetics, graphology, morphology, lexicology and phraseology. The image analysis includes the colour, contrasts and relations between text and image. Crucial for an argumentation analysis of texts and/or images is the identification of characteristic topoi as sedimented knowledge. An exhaustive list can be found in Gardt (2012: 65). Without losing sight of other linguistic units, the focus of the microanalysis (see the section “A Manifesto Designed Like an IKEA Catalogue: A Reflection of the Zeitgeist ”) will be on examining argumentation, because political genres are characterized by argumentative structures (Girnth 2015: 91) in addition to narrative and descriptive elements

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(Kranert 2018: 884). Argumentation in political discourse (and beyond) can be examined at the level of vocabulary and topoi (Girnth 2015: 33, 61). As a first step, the concept of discourse keywords (DKW ) is applied: “DKW’s are salient lexical items that occur frequently in certain discourse contexts, for example […] austerity in the context of the financial crises since 2008” (Schroeter and Veniard 2016: 1). DKWs can be determined either qualitatively-hermeneutically, by a manual interpretation, or with the aid of statistical calculations and comparisons of corpora. The corpus of this study, the manifesto of Podemos, was analysed manually. For the identification of the keywords, the criterion of their frequent occurrence in the corpus is used (IsselDombert 2019: 203–206). Keywords can be classified into semantic fields. This is done manually by interpreting the semantic relations between keywords, like hypernymy or hyponymy (Issel-Dombert 2019: 212–215). An example: The hyponyms fundamental para la salud “crucial to the health” (542 ), saludables “healthy” (51), bienestar “well-being” (299) have in common that they refer to the same semantic field, HEALTH, which serves as hypernym. The analysis of such keywords is revealing because they disclose characteristics of (populist) discourse, containing evaluations, arguments and attitudes of social groups. They are not an element of the abstract langue but only become visible at the level of the parole. In some cases, keywords are also firmly linked to the language use of a particular party. An example is casta, which also introduced new vocabulary into the political discourse. This term is closely related to two of the party’s main concerns, because it denotes (semantically vague) enemies: the political system, which is burdened by numerous cases of corruption among Spanish politicians, and the economic system. Podemos articulates their critique by distinguishing between an inclusive in-group (“us”) and an out-group (the elite of the establishment, la casta). In the recent past, casta has been replaced by trama “conspiracy” and has become a trademark of Podemos’ language use. The replacement of the keyword casta is explained by the party by saying that too many opposing political parties have already taken over casta “caste”.3 Keywords and their use are therefore temporarily variable. They indicate social and political change through the frequency with which they appear. A decreasing frequency

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of a keyword is accompanied by the decline of a (certain) discourse. Accordingly, keywords are a promising methodological instrument for reproducing both continuities and fractures in discourse. A second methodological focus is a so-called topos analysis. Topoi are understood as a pattern of argumentation (Kranert 2018). The argumentation-analytical interpretation of topoi has its origins in ancient rhetoric. Central to this tradition is a three-part argumentation scheme that can be traced back to Toulmin (1958) and which is still influential for modern argumentation theories in discourse linguistics today (IsselDombert 2019; Kranert 2018). According to Toulmin (1958: 97–98), statements (so-called “claims”) must be supported by rules (so-called “warrants” or topoi) that allow the conclusion to be drawn from the data. It is crucial for the model that an argument must not necessarily be true, but above all it must be tenable and plausible, i.e. there must be an acceptable substantive relation between claim and data. Not all three components of the Toulmin model have to be explicitly given in a certain sequence. In real communication, argumentation is often only presupposed and thus implicit. It is therefore sufficient to formulate the warrants, i.e. the topoi (Wengeler 2003: 181).

A Manifesto Designed like an IKEA Catalogue: A Reflection of the Zeitgeist Lessons from IKEA Podemos constructs its vision of the world and the society in its manifesto of 193 pages (88,864 tokens), which serves as the data for this contribution.4 While this classic multimodal text genre is rarely consulted by voters (Jiménez-Yáñez 2018: 104), so Carolina Bescansa, a founding member of Podemos and responsible for the manifesto, explains that they wanted “the most widely read program in the history of democracy”.5 To achieve this objective, Podemos tackles the problem of a small reach with a profound change and breaks with traditions of conception, layout and presentation of an election manifesto, beginning with the design process. Compared to other programmes, the layout of Podemos’ manifesto is

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more striking and unique. Its format, the placing of the letterings, logos and the story-telling are realized in the style of an IKEA catalogue, a cult marketing tool which was described as a “furnished novel”6 by the famous German literary critic Hellmuth Karasek. To explain the adaptation of the IKEA catalogue format for a political genre, I hypothesize that Podemos chose a marketing communication style which aims strategically to benefit from the Swedish brand’s position and its associated values and image. Firstly, I return to the communicative-pragmatic frame of TexSem to examine the advertising catalogue. The style of marketing used in the IKEA catalogue is culturally specific. For example, the systematic removal of women in the Saudi Arabian catalogue of 2012 led to the public’s major awareness for culturally specific differences. Texts in the catalogue do not go back to a Swedish root version but to a basic English issue, which serves as a guideline for an analogous (and non-verbatim) translation (Petkova-Kessanlis 2014: 134). Linguistic studies have shown the marketing tool to be tailored to the needs and specific conditions of individual countries and their markets (Fleischer 2003). Appropriately, specific linguistic and cultural characteristics can be identified. Therefore, it can be assumed that the Spanish catalogue is also characterized by cultural specificity. A microanalysis is carried out to reveal this. The Spanish IKEA catalogue of 2015/16 on which the manifesto was modelled, was translated into thirty-three languages with 219 million copies distributed in forty-seven countries. Ten million of these catalogues were distributed to households in Spain.7 Turning to the microanalysis, we can see that on the 327 pages of the catalogue, the company outlines its product portfolio. The catalogue is structured into twenty-nine sections. The furniture collection is filled with pictures presenting the products in situations of everyday life. The catalogue presents a large group of customers as its target group. According to the company itself, IKEA aims at society as a whole to become and stay customers, similar to what is realized in the IKEA catalogue (see example 1):

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(1) En IKEA queremos ofrecer a la mayoría de las personas la posibilidad de disfrutar de productos bien diseñados para la decoración del hogar que mejoren su día a día. (314)

“At IKEA we want to offer the majority of people the chance to enjoy welldesigned products for home decoration that improve their day-to-day lives.” (my translation)

IKEA focuses in particular on families with children, but also on the younger generation. This target group must be seen as a red thread running through the entire marketing tool. This is linked to the value of Swedishness and to what IKEA’s image stands for and also to strengthen the company’s identity: The company philosophy aims to address customers as highly diverse individuals whose equally diverse individual needs are important to it. All of them should be satisfied appropriately and affordably for all. The democratic principle conveyed in this way is coupled with the principle of responsibility for society and the environment. (Fix 2009: 5, my translation)

Starting with the microanalysis according to TexSem, the lexis in the manifesto mirrors the corporate philosophy. One of the main semantic fields is the concept QUALITY. It puts emphasis on the quality of products and design: (2) acogedor (158) “cosy” agradable y muy bonita (201) “comfortable and very nice” perfección (102) “perfection” (my translation) Other keywords refer to FUNCTIONALITY, which is about simple handling and implementation of the products: (3) ¡Facilísimo! (167) “very easy” asequible (45) “cheaply”

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buen precio (52)

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“good price” (my translation)

SELF-REALIZATION plays a major role, too. IKEA presents itself as treasure trove, laboratory and experimental field for their customers. They should have the possibility to develop a personal, authentic style: (4) Tus opciones para hacer “your options to create creative recipes recetas creativas se amplian increase” (my translation) (29) Self-reference and self-determination are among the values of the young generation that IKEA addresses as a target group in its catalogues (Fix 2009: 7). In the whole catalogue, the semantic field of SUSTAINABILITY is developed. Mostly, it is used in the sense of environmental sustainability and ecological awareness: (5) reutilizando y conservando (13) ecológico (53) sostenabilidad (52)

“reuse and conserve” “ecological” “sustainability” (my translation)

The semantic field of SUSTAINABILITY is also used in the sense of social responsibility: (6) inspirando a la nueva “inspiring the new generation” (my translageneración (27) tion) The salmon served in the IKEA restaurants has a seal of approval of the independent organization ASC guaranteeing a lasting agriculture (p. 54). The catalogue also mentions the IKEA Foundation, which targets to improve the situation of refugees together with UNCHR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). The Swedish social

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welfare state is regarded as a political role model for IKEA (Kuße 2007: 175). The main function of IKEA’s corporate wording consists of establishing closeness to the customers via various linguistic strategies. One of them is the use of colloquial language, which also emphasizes the reference to the age group of the young generation (Fix 2009: 7): (7) háchara (101) corretear (85) peques (306)

“chinwag” “scamper” “toddlers” (my translation)

In (8), a dialogue is mimicked to create direct contact with the customer signalling that IKEA is familiar with them and knows their needs: (8) ¿El mejor sitio para todo lo feo? Fuera de la vista. (127)

“Best place for everything ugly? Get out of sight.” (my translation)

IKEA’s storytelling in the catalogue is also part of building closeness to the customer by promising an everyday situation as an inner monologue with the first-person plural and then giving the customer solution-oriented advice: (9) Ha salido el sol. ¿Comemos al aire libre? No necesitas que sea una ocasión especial. Basta con llamar a unos amigos y tener listas unas mesas, unas sillas y algo rico de comer (74)

“The sun’s out. Shall we eat outdoors? You don’t need it to be a special occasion. Just call a few friends and have tables, chairs and something nice to eat ready.” (my translation)

Summarizing, IKEA in their Spanish catalogue version use language to create closeness with customers and their specific needs; many colloquial formulations stand for the young generation as a target group. Even though IKEA claims to have the “majority of people” as its consumer

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target group in mind, the catalogue focuses primarily on families, the young generation and consumers with an increased awareness of environmental and social sustainability. Furthermore, the company’s self-image and philosophy are a byword for creativity, quality, social and ecological sustainability. This is where the “democratic principle” (Fix 2009: 5) comes in, together with the principle of responsibility for social and ecological concerns. IKEA has built its image on this “democratic principle” and ethical values that the company represents in its advertising. Podemos links its manifesto with these basic values. This already provides explanations as to why the party chooses the company to advertise its own positions: In terms of mass culture, IKEA is an internationally successful company that is well known in Spain. The party wants to build on this success and the high level of brand awareness and profit from the image of its role model in advertising design. The “Swedish” values of equality, welfare and democracy are aligned with Podemos’ values. The justification for the use of the IKEA catalogue is explained by the party itself in its programme through the effect of increased attention and range of its political contents—according to a model successful in mass culture: (10) Creemos que contar las cosas de otra manera puede servir para que más gente conozca las propuestas con las que queremos cambiar nuestro país, para que más gente vea por qué creemos que sí se puede. (1)

“We believe that telling things in a different way can help more people to know the proposals with which we want to change our country, so that more people can see why we believe it is possible.” (my translation)

A Creative Adaptation: Podemos’ Manifesto Manifestos are a type of text with authorized statements expressing the positions of a party that are ratified in party assemblies (Jiménez-Yáñez 2018: 104). In case of Podemos, a participatory approach was chosen, with the function of presenting the party as a democratic laboratory

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for people and their needs—as in the self-presentation of IKEA as an experimental field for costumers (see example [4]): (11) nuestro programa es el “our program is the same one that thoumismo que miles de personas sands of people made for months” (my confeccionaron durante meses translation) (1) The final version is based on an online consultation with around 50,000 participants and the possibility to edit (Rendueles and Sola 2019: 24). Introductory words present the programme as a contract with the people: (12) el contrato que “the contract which we will sign with our counfirmaremos con nuestro try” (my translation) país (1) This self-commitment has a moral dimension and suggests a high degree of obligation and responsibility. However, the marketing strategy of presenting a manifesto as a contract was neither introduced by Podemos nor is it an isolated case; it is a quite typical metaphor in election manifestos in Europe. For example, Emmanuel Macron announces his 2017 manifesto with the words “mon contrat avec la nation”—“my contract with the nation” (Issel-Dombert 2018: 54). The macroanalysis shows that Podemos’ manifesto is structured into nine sections and further differentiated into several subsections. Every section has a title, too. These titles are metaphors that conceptualize the country as a house. For example, cocinas “kitchens” is used as metaphor for the budget of Spain. The house metaphor refers to the basic questions of how people’s life should be organized. This metaphor transports Podemos’ understanding of politics, which is concerned with the design of life forms. Furthermore, this metaphor presents Podemos as a party with a friendly, domestic and even familial nature. While the household metaphor is not a particularly populist move, conceiving of the nation as a family entails the opposite ideological dynamic, as it can be seen a feature of paternalistic—i.e. father-like forms of conservatism. This aspect exemplifies that Podemos shifts the traditional left–right axis in

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favour of a transversal axis (Rendueles and Sola 2019: 20). Where the original catalogue provides small descriptions and presents the costs of its products, the manifesto presents ideas, requests and visions, which will be discussed in the microanalysis. The appendix includes a detailed description of the party’s objectives. The individual chapters are illustrated with large-format photos of Podemos’ top politicians, who show them in typical everyday situations in their homes. For example, José Rodríguez is shown washing dishes (48 ). The Secretary General of the Balneary Islands, Alberto Jarabo, fills the dishwasher (9) while the Secretary General of Galicia, Carmen Santos, cuts vegetables (16) and the Secretary General of Murcia, Óscar Urralburu, plays with his daughter (136). Party leader Pablo Iglesias is shown several times, for example when working in an office (49), watering flowers (57) or gazing across the roofs of Madrid (23)— these are down-to-earth scenes taken from everyday life that everyone is familiar with and thus create an approachable picture of the politicians. These everyday scenes and situations are strongly oriented towards the presentation of the IKEA catalogue, which shows different lifestyle models and family constellations. A difference can be seen in the integration of disabled people in the manifesto; Podemos politician Pablo Echenique is depicted sitting in a wheelchair (pp. 37, 106–107, 120– 121). This motive refers to the left-wing populist characteristic of inclusion. In other words, it is about showing society in its diversity and creating convergent solutions through a new policy. The following is a microanalysis according to TexSem, starting with the level of vocabulary followed by a topos analysis. An analysis of the lexis can be condensed to the following three results: 1. The lexis of the manifesto is characterized by a mixture of technical language (institutional and departmental vocabulary) and everyday speech. 2. Podemos drafts commitments to basic values with positively and negatively charged deontic keywords. 3. The party creates an area of tension between own positions and those of its opponents.

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All three aspects are characteristic of the text type manifesto, i.e. in this respect Podemos does not reinvent the genre. The institutional vocabulary contributes to the technical linguistic character of the programme which includes particular terms for political institutions and organizations such as: (13) TISA (39) ratificación (38) derogación (48)

TISA “ratification” “derogation” (my translation)

The departmental vocabulary (Ressortvokabular ) includes (14) la energía solar, la eólica, “solar, wind, geothermal, small hydro la geotérmica, la pequeña and low-emission biomass energy” (my hidroeléctrica y la biomasa de translation) baja emission (37) These commitments to values are linked to the ecological and “democratic principles” (Fix 2009: 5) outlined in the IKEA catalogue (see examples [5] and [6]). Like IKEA, Podemos stands for a policy that gives priority to the use of green, alternative energy. The party thus occupies a new direction in environmental policy: (15) trabajamos por una “we work for a new energy matrix that nueva matriz energética, que is more effective and environmentally sea más eficaz y respetuosa con friendly” (my translation) el medio ambiente. (33) The ideological vocabulary that assumes the function of expressing a party’s value orientation is dominated by positively and negatively charged deontic keywords. These keywords comprise basic values to which Podemos is committed such as: (17) democracia (39, 66)

“democracy”

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transparencia (65) igualidad (42)

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“transparency” “equality” (my translation)

All Spanish parties claim the value of democracy for themselves, including the right-wing populist party Vox, because it is a symbol term or “mirandum”, an ideological linguistic expression that has a positive connotation for the members of a linguistic community (Girnth 2015: 63). The mirandum democracy has an important place in the political discourse of Spain, which is to be seen against the background of the transition from Francoism to a parliamentary democracy (for the development of the mirandum democracy in Spanish political discourse cf. Fernández Lagunilla 2014: 26–28). 152 mentions of democracy can be found in the manifesto, but it is rarely explained. Mostly it is used in the sense of citizen participation to find out the people’s needs and to involve them directly in political decisions: (18) Revocación de cargos públicos, Iniciativa Legislativa Popular, Iniciativa de Veto Popular e Iniciativa de Procesos Deliberativos Populares: la democracia de todas y de todos. (66)

“Revocation of public office, Popular Legislative Initiative, Popular Veto Initiative and Popular Deliberative Processes Initiative: the democracy of all” (my translation)

Example (18) shows another element of populism, the aim for direct democracy. This distinguishes Podemos from the centre parties. The manifesto mentions not only these basic attitudes, values and goals for which the party stands, but also what Podemos wants to fight and abolish: (19) violencias machistas (42) “macho violence” la brecha salarial del género “gender pay gap” (60) la trampa de la pobreza (76) “the poverty trap” (my translation)

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Compared to the other parties, Podemos is the party with the highest percentage of women among its deputies (Sola and Rendueles 2017: 16). With the negatively charged keywords in example (22), Podemos introduces new themes into the political discourse, putting an emphasis on feminism, understood as a fight for women’s rights and gender equity, especially in working life. To support their positions, they use statistics, a data topos (see below), and list in their programme that 76% of women work part-time and 60% of them do so involuntarily. Beyond the manifesto, this led to campaigns and demonstrations that have spread throughout the country (Rendueles and Solas 2019: 15). Podemos constructs a field of tension with their own position on the one hand and their opponents on the other hand to create clear lines of political division. This tension serves as a cohesive factor of self-assurance and positioning for the in-group and as a contrast to the opponent from the outside. Both lead to a sharpening of political divisions because they not only determine who the opponent is but also ex negativo who counts as a friend. The linguistic realization of this tension covers a wide range of linguistic structures from pre- and suffixes to stigma words, metaphors, phraseologisms and topoi (Issel-Dombert 2019). A recurrent inventory of topoi can be determined with which the field of tension is built up: Topoi which are listed on the left hand side of Fig. 11.1 stigmatize above all the elite in the form of political opponents as well as the current financial system. On the right are topoi associated with their own position. The leading topos is the topos of a new political beginning. The arrows symbolize the supports between the topoi. In the following, selected topoi will be discussed with examples, beginning with the financial world: (20) Anualmente se pierden alrededor de 200.000 millones de euros de ingresos fiscales en todo el mundo debido a la existencia de paraísos fiscales. (6)

“Around 200,000 million euros of tax revenues are lost annually worldwide due to the existence of tax havens.” (my translation)

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The construction is based on a data topos: Because data substantiates a fact, an action should be performed.

A data topos draws its argumentation power from the naming of statistics (“200,000 million euros”). The stigmatization is reinforced by the negatively charged keyword paraísos fiscales (tax havens). To complete the field of tension, Podemos creates a contrast: the image of the victim, the Spanish family businesses which cannot compete under the same conditions as globally operating companies: (21) El 92 per cent de las “92 per cent of the companies destroyed empresas destruidas durante la during the crisis were family businesses” crisis eran empresas familiares. (my translation) (73). The hostile construction of the harmful financial world thus stands for a system of winners and losers that has been determined in advance. Podemos stages itself as the saviour in this David vs. Goliath fight, arguing for justice in order to create a balance with a topos of equal opportunities:

Fig. 11.1

Topoi in the friend–opponent field of tension

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Because the market/financial world does not offer the same conditions to all participants and therefore fair conditions do not exist, measures must be taken to change/abolish this unjust situation.

This topos of inequality of opportunities can be derived from (22): (22) Instaremos a la creación de una agencia fiscal internacional, bajo el auspicio de la ONU, para luchar contra la elusión fiscal o la competición fiscal entre países, que tenga capacidad sancionadora y que obligue a las empresas multinacionales a pagar sus impuestos donde generan sus beneficios. (169)

“We will urge the creation of an international tax agency, under the auspices of the UN, to combat tax evasion or tax competition between countries, which has the capacity to impose sanctions and obliges multinational companies to pay their taxes where they generate their profits.” (my translation)

With “luchar” (“to combat”), example (28) evokes a war metaphor which has a long tradition of use in the political language of Spain and beyond (Fernández Lagunilla 2014: 49). The political opponent is another central argumentation that is being employed—a classic move, not only for populists. In the reading of the world of Podemos, this includes franquismo “Francoism” (six tokens) as well as one evidence each from fascismo “fascism” and nazismo “Nazism”, but above all the Partido Popular (thirteen tokens). By mentioning the Francoist dictatorship, Podemos recalls a classic theme of the Spanish left (Becker 2009: 226). Talking about the PP, Podemos uses a damage topos:9 Because certain offices/positions/structures per se harm society/the state, they must be abolished.

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The damage topos identifies the consequences of the PP policy for society, supported by a data topos: (23) Durante la legislatura del PP, debido al aumento del precio de la matrícula, el número de matrículas universitarias en España ha ido descendiendo curso a curso cerca de un 2%, cuando lo normal era que aumentaran cada año. (97)

“During the legislature of the PP, due to the increase in tuition fees, the number of university enrolments in Spain has been decreasing from year to year by nearly 2%, when it was normal for it to increase every year.” (my translation)

Example (23) deals with the education system. The opponent (PP) is the cause of maladministration or reinforces it through political action. However, it should also be noted that whilst the example does clearly indict the PP for the falling number of students, it does so in relatively subdued terms. The example shows how the political opponent and the elite have harmed Spain. It demonstrates the human cost of PP’s policy: through increasing tuition fees, the PP is said to have priced a generation of young people out of education. A counterweight to the opponent is the saviour, which proposes measures to change or even eliminate maladministration. This role is played by Podemos and is expressed by an anti-elite topos, which in turn is supported by a damage topos: (24) Reduciremos el tipo aplicable a productos de gran interés social como son los productos culturales y escolares, lo que significa que volveremos a la situación previa antes de la reforma del Partido Popular (PP). (132)

“We will reduce the tax rate applicable to products of great social interest such as cultural and school products, which means that we will return to the previous situation before the reform of the Popular Party (PP).” (my translation)

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In example (24), Podemos refers to a VAT increase by the PP in 2012. In the midst of the Spanish economic crisis, the normal rate of VAT rose from 18 to 21 and the reduced rate from 8 to 10%. The parents of schoolchildren were among those hardest hits, as the rate for school supplies such as exercise books or pens was increased from 4 to 21%.10 This shows a further parallel to the IKEA catalogue, which also deals with the fact that the furniture manufacturer’s offers are affordable and that there is a good price-performance ratio (cf. example [3]). Podemos takes up this idea and makes it the central goal of its policy; an affordable life in which education is not a luxury but accessible to all. They repeatedly emphasize that such an offer is not supported by the current government and elite. Three characteristics of left-wing populism are fulfilled for Podemos: firstly, the advocacy of the will of the people, secondly, the inclusion of the weak and disadvantaged in society and thirdly, the opposition people vs. elite (or PP). The solutions suggested by Podemos are (partly) supported by a topos of authority. This takes on the function of a friend or ally such as the UN, which is used in this function eighteen times within the manifesto.

Conclusion The adaptation of the Podemos manifesto with its pictorial anchoring in everyday life has the same setting as its model, the IKEA catalogue. Analogies also become clear with regards to the form of the catalogue, i.e. the format and layout of the document, the choice of typography, the relationship between text and image and their placement. Surprisingly, Podemos does not take up the creative language and the verbal humour of IKEA but presents its demands in a sober tone, based on numbers and data. On the one hand, the explanation of these findings can be condensed into the thesis that the function behind this use of language is to be seen in the creation of seriousness as well as self-portrayal as a serious party that has an agenda and is able to assume responsibility for government. On the other hand, this strategy serves to stigmatize the political opponent, the elite, as corrupt and harmful to society, supported

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by the reference to figures and statistics to create credibility. The political enemies are clearly named with the financial world and the PP . The IKEA catalogue is a marketing tool with a wide reach in Spain. Key values for IKEA—such as sustainability and the “democratic principle” (Fix 2009: 5)—are also represented in the Podemos programme with the advocating for new policies, for example in the area of the environment, gender justice and education. In addition to the high recognition value through the typological analogy, an analog message is also conveyed: in mass cultural terms, the manifesto is aimed at the breadth of society and not at an elite, i.e. a similar target group of voters is targeted as IKEA’s consumer target group. With the house metaphor, the party is given a friendly and familiar image. Simultaneously, the manifesto sends the message that the policy of Podemos is a policy for people. The party focuses on the middle of society, depicting the imagined life of Spanish voters in the manifesto. With this mass cultural form of advertising, Podemos aims to conquer Spanish society’s living-rooms. Linked to populism, the results mean that Podemos does not represent neither a radical nor a revolutionary form of populism. Using the IKEA catalogue as a “furnished novel” (Karasek), Podemos tells its vision of society and its interpretation of left-wing populism. The party fulfills the following characteristics that are considered populist: the complaint about the will of the people using the data topos, an anti-elitist attitude towards established parties through the support of the damage topos and the inclusion of the weak and disadvantaged in society. The feature of inclusion is characteristic for left-wing populism. Furthermore, Podemos argues that the concerns of the Spanish society should be brought into the political decision-making process via direct democracy. The success of the programme speaks for itself. On 22.06.2015 the party announced the reach of its manifesto: after extensive media coverage, 15,735 copies of the print version were sold and 182,787 copies of the identical free download version were downloaded.11 To be the most read programme in the history of democracy, Podemos also based its manifesto on the catalogue. The IKEA catalogue is a worldwide success, which can be measured by its number of readers—it is rated as the most widely read book in the world—even before the Bible, the Koran or the red book called the Mao Bible (Knaller 2013: 13).

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Notes 1. The analytical approach of this paper is solely descriptive; the author’s political opinion is irrelevant to the analysis: “If he or she does his or her job well, the readers of this analysis cannot assess the political preferences of the analyzer—just as they cannot assess the political preferences of a newsreader” (Niehr 2015: 140, my translation). 2. The numbers in brackets refer to the page number of the source, here the IKEA catalogue. 3. Source: interview with members of Podemos by Sandra Issel-Dombert in September 2017 in Madrid. 4. In addition to the original, Podemos has also published a version of the programme as “Programa de Lectura Fácil” (“easy reading programme”) and as such also marked it with the quality label for texts in easy language of the association “Inclusion Europe”. A shortened programme in English is also available. With the version in easy language and the English version, the party takes up a recent development, as it has become increasingly common that (in particular) election manifestos are developed as a short programme, in a foreign language or in easy language. 5. See https://lasonrisadeunpais.es/programa-llega-los-kioskos/, 15 August 2018. 6. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP0hwWEiko, 15 August 2018. 7. http://www.ikea.com/ms/de_DE/about_ikea/newsroom/press_releases/ IKEA_Katalog_2015_Daten_Fakten.pdf, 03 January 2018. 8. The numbers in brackets refer to the page number of the source, here the manifesto of Podemos. 9. Other examples of the damage-topos can found on page 48 “Durante los últimos 4 años del gobierno del PP, de cada 10 docentes jubilados, solo se ha repuesto a 1.5. Fuente: Comisiones Obreros (CCOO): El envejecimiento del profesorado en España, diciembre de 2014”, “During the last 4 years of the PP government, out of every 10 retired teachers, only 1.5 have been replaced. Source Comisiones Obreros (CCOO): El envejecimiento del profesorado en España, December 2014”, (my translation). Another example is on page 16: “El aumento del IVA cultural del PP explica un 55.6% del descenso de público que sufrío el sector durante 2012, datos que continúan hasta hoy. Fuente: Federación Estatal de Asociaciones de Empresas de Teatro y Danza, febrero de 2013.” “The increase in the cultural VAT of the PP explains 55.6% of the decrease

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in public that the sector suffered during 2012, data that continue until today. Source: Federación Estatal de Asociaciones de Empresas de Teatro y Danza, February 2013” (my translation). 10. See https://elpais.com/cultura/2012/10/03/actualidad/1349293329_8 68990.html, 25 March 2019 and https://elpais.com/economia/2012/07/ 19/actualidad/1342722078_678002.html, 25 March 2019. 11. https://lasonrisadeunpais.es/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Podemos-Pro grama-Electoral-Elecciones-Generales-26J.pdf.

References Corpus http://www.ikea.com/ms/de_DE/about_ikea/newsroom/press_releases/ IKEA_Katalog_2015_Daten_Fakten.pdf, 03 January 2018. https://lasonrisadeunpais.es/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Podemos-ProgramaElectoral-Elecciones-Generales-26J.pdf, 13 August 2018.

Secondary Literature Becker, Christina. 2009. Untersuchungen zur Sprachverwendung der politischen Linken Spaniens. Frankfurt A.M.: Peter Lang Verlag. Ernst, Nicole, Sven Engesser, Florian Büchel, Sina Blassnig, and Frank Esser. 2017. “Extreme parties and populism: an analysis of Facebook and Twitter across six parties.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (9): 1347– 1364. Fernández Lagunilla, Marina. 2014. La lengua en la communicación política II: La palabra del poder. Madrid: Arco Libros. Fix, Ulla. 2009. “Die sprachlich-stilistische ‘Konstruktion’ des Kundenbildes in Warenkatalogen von Pro Idee, Ikea und Manufactum.” In Histoires des textes. Mélanges pour Marie-Hélene Pérennec, edited by Heike Baldauf-Quilliatre, Jacques Poitou, and Emmanuelle Prak-Derrington, 1–10. Lyon: Université Lyon 2.

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Fleischer, Michael. 2003. Wirklichkeitskonstruktion. Beiträge zur systemtheoretischen Konstruktivisimusforschung. Dresden: Thelen. Freeden, Michael. 1998. “Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?” Political Studies 46 (4): 748–765. Gardt, Andreas. 2012. “Textsemantik. Methoden der Bedeutungserschließung.” In Geschichte der Sprache und Sprache der Geschichte. Probleme und Perspektiven der historischen Sprachwissenschaft des Deutschen. Oskar Reichmann zum 75. Geburtstag, edited by Jochen A. Bär and Marcus Müller, 61–82. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Girnth, Heiko. 1996. “Texte Im Politischen Diskurs: Ein Vorschlag Zur Diskursorientierten Beschreibung von Textsorten.” Muttersprache (1): 66– 80. Girnth, Heiko. 2015. Sprache und Sprachverwendung in der Politik: Eine Einführung in die linguistische Analyse öffentlich-politischer Kommunikation. Germanistische Arbeitshefte 39, 2nd ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Ibáñez-Rosales, Ismael. 2019. “Rewriting the News: The Amphibious Relationship Between Populist Podemos and Print Media in Spain.” In Populist Discourse: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Politics, edited by Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio, Miguel-Ángel Benítez-Castro, and Francesca De Cesare, 51–64. Abingdon: Routledge. Issel-Dombert, Sandra. 2018. “En Marche! Wie Emmanuel Macron kollektive Identität und Visionen für Frankreich erzählt.” In Sprache und digitale Medien. Aktuelle Tendenzen kommunikativer Praktiken im Französischen, edited by Nadine Rentel, and Tilman Schröder, 45–63. Berlin: Peter Lang. Issel-Dombert, Sandra. 2019. Sprachgeschichte als Textsortengeschichte. Zur Linguistik der Beschwerde am Beispiel der cahiers de doléances. Frankfurt am: Vittorio Klostermann. Jiménez-Yáñez, Ricardo-María. 2018. “El programa electoral: el análisis desde la teoría del framing” In El análisis del discurso politico: géneros y metodologías, edited by Carmen Llamas Saíz, 103–129. Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, S.A. (EUNSA). Knaller, Susanne. 2013. “Literaturwissenschaft heute. Eine aktuelle Diagnose.” In Literaturwissenschaft heute. Gegenstand, Positionen, Relevanz, edited by Susanne Knaller, and Pichler, Doris, 13–24. Göttingen: V & R uni press. Kranert, Michael. 2018. “Political Myth as a Legitimation Strategy: The Case of the Golden Age Myth in the Discourses of the Third Way.” Journal of Language and Politics 17 (6): 882–906. Kuße, Holger. 2007. “Unternehmensphilosophien McDonald’s und IKEA (die russischen, tschechischen und polnischen Internetauftritte im Vergleich.”

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In Sprache und Diskurs in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Slawistische Perspektiven. Festschrift für Renate Rathmayr, edited by Ursula Doleschal, Edgar Hoffmann, and Tilmann Reuter, 155–178. Munich: Sagner. Maase, Kaspar. 2003. “Massenkultur”. In Handbuch Populäre Kultur. Begriffe, Theorien, Diskussionen, edited by Hans-Otto Hügel, 48–56. Stuttgart: Metzler. Niehr, Thomas. 2015. “Politolinguistik und/oder Sprachkritik. Das Unbehagen in und an der Deskriptivität.” Linguistik online 73 (4): 139–152. Petkova-Kessanlis, Mikaela. 2014. “Den interkulturellen Unterschieden auf der Spur: Produktwerbung und Produktpräsentationen in deutschen, griechischen und bulgarischen IKEA-Katalogen.” In Kaleidoskop der Kulturen 2. Begegnungen mit Sprachen und Kulturen, edited By Busch-Lauer, InesAndrea, 133–152. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Priester, Karin. 2012. Rechter und linker Populismus. Annäherung an ein Chamäleon. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2009. “The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA).” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer. 2nd ed., 87–121. Los Angeles: Sage. Rendueles, César, and Jorge Solas. 2019. The Situation of the Left in Spain. Online-publication: https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/ pdfs/engl/SPAIN-EN-DIGI-RGB.PDF. 27 March 2019. Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy. 2017. “Populism: The State of the Art.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 1–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schroeter, Melani, and Marie Veniard. 2016. “Contrastive Analysis of Keywords in Discourses: Intégration and Integration in French and German Discourses About Migration.” International Journal of Language and Culture 3 (1): 1–33. Sola, Jorge, and César Rendueles. 2017. “Podemos, the Upheaval of Spanish Politics and the Challenge of Populism.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 26 (1): 1–18. Toulmin, Stephen Edelston. 1958 (2003). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wengeler, Martin. 2003. Topos und Diskurs. Begründung einer argumentationsanalytischen Methode und ihre Anwendung auf den Migrationsdiskurs (1960–1985 ). Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP0hwWEiko. 15 August 2018. https://www.elespanol.com/elecciones/elecciones-generales/20160608/130987 102_0.html. 16 August 2018. https://elpais.com/cultura/2012/10/03/actualidad/1349293329_868990.html. 25 March 2019. https://elpais.com/economia/2012/07/19/actualidad/1342722078_678002. html. 25 March 2019.

Sandra Issel-Dombert is a Research Associate at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. She worked in the international projects “Frasledia” and “Hislecdiac (University of Valencia)”. She has been the recipient of several scholarships and excellence awards (Prix Germaine de Staël, Förderpreis Sprache und Recht, Barbara- und Alfred-Röver-Preis, Reinhard-Kiesler-Preis, Förderprogramm Andreas Wesch). Among her areas of research and teaching are the history of French and Spanish, language contact, language and migration, phraseology, political discourse in times of populism, immigration and terrorism, as well as the rhetoric of election campaigns.

12 Republican Populism and Marxist Populism: Perspectives from Ecuador and Bolivia Pierre-Yves Cadalen

Theoretical Framework This chapter is based on a concrete analysis of two populist strategies, one in Bolivia, the other one in Ecuador. Both countries experienced some radical changes after the electoral victories of Evo Morales in 2005 and Rafael Correa in 2006. Both victories were prepared by a strong social movement and a populist strategy, used by the candidates in order to politically unify the respective social movement. The main thesis developed here is twofold: first, populism cannot be defined as a stable ideology but rather as a strategy, which is demonstrated by the differences between the two case studies; secondly, populism has to be defined as a strategy which can not only give access to governmental power, but is also necessary for its conservation. Two central research questions work together in this chapter. The first one is whether Laclau’s paradigm of populism (see Kranert, Introduction P.-Y. Cadalen (B) Sciences Po - CERI, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_12

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in this volume) can be used as a tool of analysis for specific strategic uses of populism that are historically and geographically circumscribed. The second one is whether a populist strategy is still efficient once the forces which adopted it are in government: this question is answered based on the Bolivian and Ecuadorian cases. The history and places covered in this chapter will allow us to introduce an interesting perspective, pushed forward since the 1980s by the Argentinian philosopher Ernesto Laclau. His theory is important in the South American political context, and aims directly at redefining critical theory and revolutionary strategy. In 1985, he and Chantal Mouffe published what was explicitly a strategic handbook, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). The core of their proposal is based on the centrality of discourse within political strategy and for achieving hegemony. On Populist Reason¸ also by Laclau, is a logical consequence of this perspective: populism is, for him, a revolutionary strategy. Rather than focusing on the criteria of ideology, this perspective offers a more comprehensive approach to populism, considered as a discursive strategy relying on identity building, hence producing social and political effects. Discourses cannot be detached from the concrete geographical and historical conditions in which they emerge. This is one of the central theoretical assumptions of this chapter. Indeed, populist discourses do not exist in a vacuum, they are context-driven. One research question of this chapter is whether the Essex School and Laclau’s theorizations can be applied to specific contexts. Even if Laclau’s theory does not rely on specific contextualization, it does not rule it out. Thus, this perspective appears useful in order to analyse the relations between populist discourses and the political situations of Bolivia and Ecuador at the beginning of our century. Indeed, the core of Laclau’s theory is based on the discursive making of one united people acting as a political force.1 Populist discourse is the creation of a people through the elaboration of a common discourse which articulates different social claims and unites them strategically through chains of equivalences which are at the heart of such strategy. In his own words, populism is based on three dimensions: “the unification of a plurality of demands in an equivalential chain; the constitution of an internal frontier dividing

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society into two camps; the consolidation of the equivalential chain through the construction of a popular identity which is something qualitatively more than the simple summation of the equivalential links” (Laclau 2005: 77). According to Laclau, discourse is a central element of the people’s unification: what he calls the equivalential chain is a discursive and political fact which unites various heterogenous social demands; it is, in other words, the condition for a possible unity of one people, discursively and socially created.2 The first reason why I chose to discuss the Essex School discourse theoretical approach in this chapter is because it adds more nuance to the analysis of populist discourses, while the “populism-as-an-ideology” perspective is clearly antithetic and hostile to populism. In our case, it can be directly related to the emergence of political populist strategies in Bolivia and Ecuador, as Laclau’s theories and the South American left interacted a lot. Another reason for that choice is that this comprehensive approach to populism enables political science and other social sciences to acknowledge the necessary populist dimension of any democratic regime. The institutionalization of democracy cannot ignore nor reject the people, which is the very basis for its legitimacy (Colliot-Thélène and Guénard 2014; Hermet 1997; Rancière 2005). Indeed, even Jan-Werner Müller acknowledges this fundamental issue: “Populism arises with the introduction of representative democracy; it is its shadow” (Müller 2016: 17). One may like it or not, but it is a fact: popular demands are intrinsically inherent to the concept of democracy, and there cannot be a democratic regime without any expression of popular demands, nor without their inclusion on the political agenda. Popular demands are the very basis of any populist strategy according to Ernesto Laclau (Laclau 2005). Such an approach to populism necessarily questions the relation between liberalism and democracy, given that popular demands can be theoretically identified by liberal theorists, in a normative and pejorative way, as populist demands threatening democracy (Stavrakakis 2018). In this chapter, I consider populism as potentially democratic discourse, indeed one that is sometimes more democratic than antipopulist discourses.3 Therefore, I define populism as a twofold political strategy, not only associated with attaining political power, but also with its conservation. Indeed, once populism has been defined as a strategy,

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it is possible to distinguish the different ideologies underlying populist strategies. What do populist discourses become when populist forces govern? Based on the Bolivian and Ecuadorian examples, this chapter firstly argues that the methods of government are based on the differentiated ideological backgrounds the populist hegemonic blocks rely on. Secondly, the difficulties met by the blocks in both countries led them to export their populist strategy to a common and central theme on the global international agenda: environmental protection. This chapter is an attempt to test this possible distinction between different kinds of populism. Indeed, it aims at comparing Bolivian and Ecuadorian populisms both in the conquest and in the exercise of power. In other words, populism as an identity builder has to continue the process of identity-building after election victory. Indeed, for populist forces even more than for non-populist forces, the unity of the people built before the electoral victories has to be maintained and guaranteed. Governing as a populist force places stress upon the equivalence between different social demands. As the discursive construction of their people is the most important political resource those governments have, the conservation of this discursive chain is fundamental for them. How do they try to preserve it? Two arguments are central to this chapter. Instead of normatively judging the relevance of populism, I find it useful to apply Laclau’s paradigm to a situation where his strategies have been politically implemented. Secondly, governing through a populist strategy implies an adaptation of prior political discourses: it has to be implemented through political actions and institutional decisions, which differ from one case to another, according to the social and historical conditions of the formation of the new hegemonic blocks in Ecuador and Bolivia. The first part aims at understanding the differences between both populist electoral strategies, while the second part tackles the consequences of those early differences once the respective politicians are in government.

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Methodological Approach This chapter is based on sixty-three interviews conducted in Ecuador (2015) and in Bolivia (2016) with politicians from the populist blocks, their opponents, intellectuals, journalists, indigenous leaders and NGO leaders. Those interviews were originally done to understand the relations of power surrounding environmental matters. However, during these interviews, I learned a lot about the conditions of forming the new hegemonic blocks, as I did about the inherent tensions politicians from them were facing once governing the country. It leads me to wonder about the contradictions of a populist strategy enacted from within government and the search for solutions to solve the concomitant contradictions. Here are a few answers. All the interviews were recorded in order to provide material which can be used for the interpretation. The analysis of that material was essentially qualitative. First, in the immediate aftermaths of the interviews, I established a note in which I summed up the main arguments and elements of style my interlocutor had just used. Secondly, the transcripts are used as linguistic data to show the representations the interviewed actors have of their social and political situation, and beyond that, the social forces they embody. The chapter is divided into two main parts allowing a comparison of the cases. First, the conditions of the electoral victories of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa are examined separately based on Laclau’s paradigm, which highlights the main differences between the two populist electoral strategies. Secondly, those two different strategies are analysed in a postelection context, once both presidents govern: the governmental populist strategies are as different as the electoral populist strategies, suggesting that their differences are due to prior characteristics of the Ecuadorian and Bolivian political processes.

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Towards Victory: Building Collective Identities as an Electoral Strategy Bolivia and Ecuador went through very important and extensive political changes at the beginning of the twenty-first century. From 2001 to 2005, Bolivia was ruled by four different presidents, while Ecuador knew three different heads of state during the same period of time. In Bolivia, conflicts over natural resources such as water and gas have been the trigger for important social movements which destabilized the ruling administration (Hylton and Thomson 2010). The struggle in Ecuador was mainly based on deteriorating social conditions for the urban middle class as well as the dissatisfaction of the indigenous movement (Fontain 2006; Gerlach 2003). This political instability was mainly due to rising inequalities and a debt crisis deepened by the Washington Consensus4 in both countries (Correa 2013).5 In both countries, socioeconomicdevelopments provided the historical conditions for building populist strategies on a stark division of society into two camps (Laclau 2005), which is Laclau’s first defining element of populism. The constitution of an equivalential chain between different demands and the construction of a popular identity are the two other elements I will explore in the context of Bolivia in the next section, and in the context of Ecuador later on. Three elements are to be analysed: the way social discontent was politicized by the political forces, the components of the hegemonic blocks forming the people in both cases, and finally the figure of the leaders in both processes. Indeed, in Laclau’s view, the role of the leader has to be accounted for in the analysis: “in my view, the fully organized group and the purely narcissistic leader are simply the reductio ad absurdum—that is, impossible—extremes of a continuum in which the two social logics are articulated in various ways. […]. That ‘something in common’ which makes the identification between members of the group possible cannot consist exclusively in love for the leader, but in some positive feature that both leader and led share” (Laclau 2005: 58–59).

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The Bolivian Populist Strategy In Bolivia, popular discontent was politicized through mobilization around the idea of sovereignty. This sovereignty had to be articulated to society and social organizations: the base of the Bolivian hegemonic block is to be found in the working classes, the “plebeian forces”. As we shall see, the figure of Evo Morales is highly symbolic and efficient, for the embodiment of this plebeian sovereignty. First, the legitimacy of the political institutions was strongly questioned in Bolivia by farmers’ unions and indigenous organizations. This dimension is particularly important to explain the Bolivian political instability that defined the political life at the very beginning of our century (Hylton and Thomson 2010). In the political crisis Bolivia faced, social movements preceded the political expression of institutional defiance: in 2000, “the war on water” was a strong social movement demanding universal access to water, and in 2003, the “war on gas” led to huge mobilizations for the nationalization of national resources, which In turn led to the dismissal of President Sanchez de Lozada (Webber 2011). In Ecuador as well as in Bolivia, social movements were indeed decisive for leftist electoral victories.6 The aim of the political force led by Evo Morales was to politicize social movements and unify their different demands in a single political platform. The political instrument used by Evo Morales was the MAS— IPSP—Movimiento al Socialismo—Instrumento para la recuperacion de la Soberanía Popular.7 During the electoral process, a strong emphasis was put on the recovery of sovereignty, echoing the popular claims to overcome the elements of economic and social policies inherited from the Washington Consensus. Sovereignty equates to property over national resources: environmentalists, indigenous organizations and the traditional Bolivian Left all had different perspectives on those resources, but they all implied public control of the country’s territory. The very notion of popular sovereignty can be considered as a powerful unifier of different social demands and, as such, constitutes an empty signifier, as defined by Laclau (Laclau and Howarth 2015).8 As such, the notion of sovereignty is one concrete discursive way to create

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the equivalential chain in Bolivia in order to win elections and secure hegemony (Errejón and Argirakis Jordán 2011). This inclusion–exclusion process in Bolivia is theorized as the rise of the plebeian power, defending the fact that working classes are the heart of the Bolivian political process, named the Proceso de Cambio.9 This process is defended as a process of inclusion of the excluded parts of society organized as a social movement. One major intellectual of the MAS-IPSP, Alvaro García Linera,10 was arguing for a “plebeian power” to be established through an articulation with the social movement: “What matters with those emerging forces is that, because of their internal composition (plebeian, indigenous) and their aggregated demands, they are social blocks formerly excluded from the political process. Meanwhile they try to self-organize, they aim at substantially modifying the economic relations”11 (García Linera 2008: 429, my translation). The influence of Vice-President Linera in the discursive strategy was crucial. The new concept of people he defended was based on the centrality of the rural areas, whether they would be represented by the indigenous organizations or the farmers’ unions—both essential to the Proceso de Cambio. Such a strategy reveals an extension of the Marxist concept of the working class beyond the boundaries of the cities: peasants and indigenous communities can be part of the political revolutionary process, as it had already been argued by José Carlos Mariategui, a very influent Marxist Peruvian thinker of the early twentieth century (García Linera 1995; Mariateguí 1928). Hence, it is possible to qualify the Process of Change initiated by Evo Morales’ electoral victory in 2005 as a populism based on the working classes, mainly made up of peasants and indigenous people in Bolivia. This is what I call Marxist-inspired populism, whose strategy is the following: the discursive constitution of the people has to happen exclusively from the excluded sectors of society, which provide legitimacy to the general process as coming from these sectors. Their inclusion produces a new people. This discursive centrality of the working classes is due to the sociological composition of the new hegemonic block the MAS-IPSP embodies politically. The Bolivian process strongly relies on workers and peasant

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organizations, a reasonably well-structured social movement and indigenous organizations that were marginalized and asked for recognition (Santos 2015); the support from the cities is secondary to the rural social movements. This reality was also reflected in the personality of the leader. Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia in 2005. He was a unionist leader of cocoa growers in the department of Cochabamba. These farmers emerged from a wave of internal migration implemented by the state in the 1970s and were miners before becoming farmers. There was an intense unionist culture, strengthened by policies of leaders’ training in the 1990s.12 Indeed, the international development aid programmes aimed at strengthening civil society financed the intellectual training of many unionist leaders, amongst them Evo Morales. Evo Morales had his entire career in the union of cocoa growers in the Chapare13 and became its leader in the late 1990s. He won the Presidential elections and has up to this day never given up his unionist mandate, which demonstrates the strong links to his initial social basis. As Vice-President, he chose Álvaro García Linera, member of a former Marxist group of thought, La Comuna, and former guerrillero in the 1990s: he was an intellectual from La Paz seen as favourable to the indigenous cause. Evo Morales’ leadership relied strongly on his capacity to gather and unify politically various social organizations which may have different or even opposite interests. His legitimacy was primarily popular. This dimension was also adopted by the Vice-President who feared corporatism as a potential threat for the Proceso de Cambio.14 In Bolivia, the populism’s people was close to the plebs (Baker 2015; García Linera 2008), which is the popular component of the people as a unity. This Marxist-inspired populism is embodied in an indigenous peasant coming from a very structured organization, whose presence relies on him belonging to a social sector organized through the years by social and political struggles. We find here the three components designed by Laclau for a populist strategy: politicization of social discontent, components of the hegemonic block, and a leader to represent this people.

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The Ecuadorian Populist Strategy While the Bolivian process insisted more on the popular side of the notion of sovereignty, Correa’s way was to politicize social discontent through the idea of the nation. Rafael Correa’s Ecuador shares the first populist feature theorized by Laclau: the division of society into two camps—the oligarchy and the people. The incarnation of this opposition in the Citizens’ Revolution, the Revolución Ciudadana, is grounded in the concept of sovereignty as the unifier for the equilavential chain. In Ecuador, a new political party was created in 2006 by Rafael Correa and named “Alianza PAIS —Patria Altiva I Soberana”.15 The central idea of this political movement appeared in its name: all social and political processes had to gain sovereignty for the resolution of the socio-economic crisis. Correa’s strategy was to rely on the popular discontent against the oligarchy which was echoed in the streets of Quito during the 2005 protests: “Throw them all out!” (Que se vayan todos!). As stated by Catherine M. Conaghan, “Correa’s campaign focused on two overarching, interrelated themes: (1) the degeneration of institutions and the moral bankruptcy of the political class; (2) the disintegration of the nation/homeland (patria) as a result of elite-imposed economic policies that sacrificed the public interest in favour of private gain. In Correa’s imagery, Ecuador was a ‘kidnapped’ country” (Conaghan 2011: 265). The first set of campaign priorities isolated by Conaghan is useful to understand the discursive construction of two camps within society, while the second one is crucial to capture the mechanisms through which the chain of equivalences worked in Ecuador. Indeed, the patria was at the core of Correa’s populist strategy to get to power. It was not only useful to gather the different social demands within one wider people. The fundamental idea in Correa’s perspective was to establish central political power over intermediary bodies, such as private companies, local powers or social organizations.16 The convergence of environmental and indigenous organizations during the 1990s was important for the emergence of a rebel citizenry which aimed at changing the institutions. A national assembly was created to draft a new Constitution. This democratic move can

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also be qualified as the most possibly populist moment in politics, as the people reclaims sovereign power for themselves. The Washington Consensus had produced a common feeling of dispossession, which led to the general claim for recovering sovereignty through the State (Mayorga 2014; Santos 2010). Indeed, the Ecuadorian populist dimension is directly articulated to the nation as a whole, which has to be proud and dignified again. It can address the same dimension of citizenship, the gathering of the citizens. As for the second term designed by Laclau for a populist strategy, Ecuador differs notably from Bolivia in that the urban middle-class is far more central in the Ecuadorian political process. Still, the strategy is similarly based on a binary division of society, and populism appears to be a good category for the Citizens’ Revolution, even though the main ideological tendency must be qualified as republican socialism. By republican socialism I mean that the ideological foundations of the Citizen’s Revolution are twofold: the process is both committed to the construction of a centralized State à la française and to the redistribution of wealth and the fight against the main sectors where it is accumulated. The urban Left was dominant in the Ecuadorian revolutionary process, but it also tried to connect with the environmental and indigenous struggles from its own perspective. This led an intellectual of the Citizen’s Revolution to describe it as an attempt to build a “republican biosocialism” (Ramirez Gallegos 2010). The “bio” added to socialism is a clear attempt of connecting it with environmental and indigenous movements. Indeed, the indigenous movements were more related to identity politics in Ecuador than in Bolivia, where the peasant struggles oriented the indigenous movements toward social considerations (Fontaine 2006).17 Rafael Correa wanted to strengthen the State and feared the strong claims for autonomy coming from the lowlands’ indigenous organizations. That is why, according to Fernando Mayorga, “since his arrival at the government, diverse Leftist political forces joined the official party which called for ‘a citizen movement’ to be its base, in order to mitigate the influence of social movements, especially the once powerful indigenous movement” (Mayorga 2014: 174). Hence, populist discourse in Ecuador insists on the idea of citizenship being at the core of the political process. This core element is

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reflected, for example, in Correa’s 2009 investiture speech, in which he uses the word “patria” (homeland) twenty-nine times, “ciudadano” or “ciudadana” (citizen) twenty-one times and “soberania” (sovereignty) and its derivatives fourteen times (Correa 2009). The identity of the leader also matters, and here we also observe some strong differences between the Bolivian and the Ecuadorian processes. Rafael Correa won the Ecuadorian elections in 2006. He is an economist who partly studied abroad at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and the University of Illinois in the USA. Before becoming president, he was the minister for economic affairs. When he took office, he gathered many former academics in his team. This dimension immediately added a more elitist trait to his government: the Revolución Ciudadana was mainly led by Leftist academics.It has even been argued that the Revolución Ciudadana associated a populist dimension with a strong technocratic axis and was a “techno-populist” political process (de la Torre 2013). In Ecuador, the populism’s people was closer to the populus than to the plebs (Agamben 1995). A socialist Republican-inspired populism is incarnated by a highly educated former minister for economic affairs who made an individual move, surrounded by intellectuals who agreed with him on the social and economic disaster that was embodied by the institutions he proposed to overthrow in order to break with the “long neoliberal night” (Correa 2013). Based on the idea of the nation, the populist strategy in Ecuador is more linked to the interests of the urban middle class, the latter being embodied by the figure of the Citizen’s Revolution leader, Rafael Correa.

Which Differences Matter? The discursive and sociological formation of the new hegemonic blocks described above shows some important differences. Indeed, the central element of PAIS in Ecuador is the patriotic claim for the recovery of the national , while in Bolivia sovereignty is qualified as being popular . I argue that this difference is based on the very ambiguity of the notion of “the people”. On the Bolivian side, the Proceso de Cambio was based on a plebeian definition of the people, which strongly identified the people

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with the working classes, which is why I argue that Bolivian populism is Marxist-inspired. On the Ecuadorian side, the Revolución Ciudadana is based on the Republican definition of the people, which insists on the unity of all the citizens, and this is why I argue that Ecuadorian populism is Republican-inspired. As far as intermediary bodies are concerned, the Bolivian party MAS is more dependent on social organizations than the Ecuadorian Alianza PAIS, which is strongly autonomous, if not independent from political associations, unions or indigenous organizations. Even though both processes put a strong emphasis on the recovery of sovereignty, the Ecuadorian concept is closer to a French Republican concept of the nation than the Bolivian one, which clearly included a specific representation in parliament for the indigenous nations (Mayorga 2014) as one of the central mechanisms of the plurinational State (Cruz Rodrígue 2012). Last but not least, the differences between the leaders of those processes embody the sociological and discursive differences in the populist strategies they adopted to attain and keep political power.

Governing Through Populist Discourses and Populist Strategies Once the institutions were conquered and redesigned by Constituent Assemblies in both countries, the populist strategy needs to continue in order to maintain the unity of the people and thereby support the new governments. This part of the chapter studies the prior formation of the blocks as key factors to understand the differences between both governments and their strategies. It aims at explaining the differences between both forces in conceptualizing the people during the exercise of political power.

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Populist Governments and the Conservation of the People’s Identity In the case of Marxist-inspired populism in Bolivia, the preservation of the hegemony is attempted through an alliance of, and links between, State and society. In the case of Republican-inspired populism, a more confrontational logic is adopted by the State towards intermediary bodies; I argue that this is a direct effect of the universalist dimension of the Revolución Ciudadana. In Bolivia, the populist strategy based on the working classes and social organizations are permanent incentives for the new government to negotiate with the intermediary bodies, such as the Unified Syndical Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB in Spanish) Analysing the MAS’s government, John Crabtree writes that the will to be more inclusive of “those who were previously at the margins”, although real, did not strengthen the State as it was expected by the government. The government still largely depended on social organizations and the “social pressure from below” continued to be very strong (Crabtree 2013: 292–293). The political subject of the Proceso de Cambio is clearly identified in the new 2009 Constitution as the “indigenous native peasant”, which is above all an aggregation of different sectors forming a new hegemonic block, whether they be Andean miners, farmers’ unions or indigenous organizations. Adolfo Mendoza, a former MAS senator, explained that this concept has to be conceived with dashes, as “indigenous-nativepeasant”; in other words, it has to be considered an indivisible block and the discursive subjective entity supposed to drive the totality formed by the Proceso de Cambio. While sharing his thoughts, he explicitly referred to Ernesto Laclau.18 The evolving relation between the MAS and social movements has been theorized by García Linera as a shift from social movement to corporatism: even if it is part of the unification through populist politics and the electoral process, once the election is won, each social sector resumes its divergent demands. The political challenge is then to maintain the cohesion and unity of the people as a social and coherent actor (García Linera 2015). The MAS government was known as “el gobierno

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de los movimientos sociales”, the government of social movements. Roger Cortez, an intellectual and opponent to that government, criticizes what he considers to be a confusion between social movement and social organization: The Vice-President talks very respectfully of the social movements, but the government, the MAS, is the greatest enemy of social movements. In the MAS’s language, social movement and social organization are identical, which is a mistake. Social organizations are organizing, stable and long-term structures which are ultra-corporatists and have a strong group egoism. By contrast, social movements are momentary mobilization explosions when neither the unions nor the parties can channel a social demand.19

This quote demonstrates that a populist discursive strategy cannot abandon the rhetoric it once employed. In this case, the MAS would not want to be separated from the social movements it emerged from. What Roger Cortez calls a “mistake” can rather be analysed as a political necessity based on the continuity, discursively speaking, of the equivalential chain formed during the electoral process and afterwards. A striking example of this absence of strict separation between the State and the social organizations supported by the government is the conflict around the TIPNIS Park in 2010–2011. The government wanted to build a road in this Amazonian park, which is also an indigenous territory. This was a demand strongly supported by the cocoa grower’s union, whose president was still Evo Morales. However, the idea met with strong opposition from the indigenous communities living in the forest and the environmental groups that had until then been in favour of the government. The social pressure to abandon the project was considerable. A march was organized from the park to La Paz and Evo Morales partially discontinued the project by declaring the forest an intangible good. However, this concept, introduced by environmental NGOs, put the indigenous communities in a difficult situation because it prevented them from any exploitation of the forest, which is the basis of their livelihoods (Cadalen 2017; Perrier-Bruslé 2012).

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In a nutshell, the MAS’s government was highly dependent on the social organizations which were constitutive of its hegemonic block, and vulnerable to the possible frictions that may happen within this block. The “gobierno de los movimientos sociales” could not abstract itself from society. Marxism-inspired populism is not imaginable without a strong participation from society: it would break the original narrative that allowed the conquest of power. In the Citizens’ Revolution in Ecuador, as described in the first part of this chapter, the Republican affirmation of the very name of the process is clear: the entire citizenry is involved in and embodied by the political representation of the people whose general interest is expressed by the new Constitution adopted in Montecristi in 2008. The central subject of the Ecuadorian process is the citizen, more theoretical and abstract than the aggregation of indigenous people, peasants and natives in Bolivia. The appeal to the people is to be resolved by the State, whose autonomy is stronger than in the Bolivian process. Santos (2010) points out that, in Ecuador, “the Republican idea of an individual and egalitarian citizenship is strong enough to neutralize the efficiency of indigenous people’s collective rights established by the Constitution” (Santos 2010: 129, my translation). In other words, the republican populist strategy leads to a relative loss of influence of indigenous movements, and, more generally, a strong increase of the State’s autonomy from social movements. As stated by Fernando Mayorga, “during Rafael Correa’s government, a technocratic governance is adopted, which means the State is autonomous not only with regard to de facto powers, such as economic powers in particular, but also with regard to the social movements” (Mayorga 2014: 174–175, my translation). The people discursively constituted by Alianza PAIS are not as organized by social organizations, such as workers unions for example, as they are in Bolivia. The consequences on the strategy devised to keep the power are important. There is no strong interdependence between the newly elected government and social organizations. Indeed, the Revolución Ciudadana is explicitly referred to by Franklin Ramirez Gallegos as “universalist”, which is why Rafael Correa would see indigenous demands as “particularistic demands which would not

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be willing to participate in the common good’s construction” (Ramirez Gallegos 2010: 191). The opposition to the government can be easily attributed to the attempts by the former dominant classes to destabilize the Revolución Ciudadana. The Republican-inspired populist discourse allows such a strategic move, while the Marxist-inspired one cannot ignore the claims coming from the very sectors that made possible the MAS’s election. It is possible to draw a provisional conclusion at this stage. Indeed, Republican-inspired populism seems to be defined by a confrontational attitude towards the social sectors opposing the government’s policies. By contrast, Bolivian populism, more related to some vague form of Marxism—or at least to a direct and permanent appeal to the working classes—is forced to adopt a more conciliatory attitude. In Correa’s Ecuador, a social conflict could be described as a zero-sum game won by the government strongly supported by the majority of the population. In Morales’ Bolivia, negotiation was the permanent rule, as the government felt permanently threatened by bourgeois factions in the East, especially in the department of Santa Cruz.20 Rafael Correa’s thought is deeply anchored in the central Republican notion of legality. The law as such is a central feature of the struggle against the former oligarchy. It is through the construction of a united and political citizenry that this oligarchy and all its defenders could be defeated. The different conceptions of legitimacy raised by Correa and his environmental and indigenous opponents were one of the main sources of tensions between the two groups. For Correa, the most important and crucial form of legitimacy is the popular one, expressed by Republican institutions through the electoral process. In Ecuador, “representative democracy, far from weakening, affirmed itself because the electoral events are the primordial moments for the definition of power struggle. Besides, politics is condensed in leaderships which have routinized the charisma through plebiscitarian mechanisms” (Mayorga 2014: 171). Last but not least, indigenous organizations, such as the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), argue that they should be allowed to have their own jurisdiction. According to the CONAIE, the idea of judging an “indigenous comrade” on the

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same basis as other citizens, as advocated by Correa, is “barbaric”.21 Such a claim is not acceptable within the Republican-inspired populist framework, in contrast to plurinational Bolivia, where “the intercultural democracy recognizes institutions for communitarian indigenous democracy” (Mayorga 2014: 171). A quick overview of the differences between Correa’s and Morales’s governments allows for a clear conclusion about the continuity which links the discursively differentiated traits of the new hegemonic blocks and government practices. Indeed, both forces, as any political force, tried to preserve the political power they obtained. It is important to acknowledge that political strategy does not end with an electoral victory, but that it is obviously transformed by the new situation. The strategy must be adapted once the forces which used it are in government. Two clearly different strategies were adopted in each country in relation to the discursive and ideological factors analysed in the first part of this chapter. First, redistributive policies are the first and primary source of legitimacy for the new governments (Svampa 2011, 2009). In both countries, the reduction of inequalities was central to the president’s popularity. However, the concrete social and economic policies were not the only factor of the relative stability of both governments. Indeed, they also adopted different methods of government when confronted with opposition from their own original ideological blocks. Those methods were directly related to their initial populist strategies.22 Table 12.1 summarizes the differences between both situations.

Conclusions While Cas Mudde argues that “populism” is a “distinct ideology” which “does not possess the same level of refinement and consistency as, for example, socialism or liberalism” (Mudde 2004: 544), I have argued that Ecuadorian populism was a strategy based on Republican ideology and that Bolivian populism was a strategy based on Marxist ideology. Two conclusions follow from this argument and may deserve to be further discussed. Firstly, governmental populism as a strategy depends

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Governmental populist strategies in Bolivia and Ecuador Bolivia

Ecuador

MAS-IPSP

Alianza PAIS

Union-based, indigenous people

Elite-based, important representation of academics

Leader

Unionist, cocoa-grower

Economist, former minister

Distinctive ideological traits

Socialist, national-popular, Marxist-inspired

Republican socialism

Governmental populist strategy

Preserving the people of the social organizations and the coherence of the aggregated forces of the block

Aiming at the construction of a Republican people, even if it implies fighting intermediary bodies

Governmental position

Between the State and civil society, “government of social movements”

State-centred, unquestioned legitimacy of Republican institutions

Name of the movement Sociological composition of the movement

on the ideologies defended by the populist political forces before they got elected. In other words, there is no undifferentiated populism. The Republican background of the Citizens’ Revolution in Ecuador insists on the centrality of the State, the totality formed by the citizenry as a whole, and the importance of high-level instruction and technicality to rule the country. The more Marxist-inspired Bolivian populism built other discursive bases for the Proceso de Cambio. The latter relied on a strong appeal to the people as all those formerly excluded in order to found a “plebeian power”, far more inclusive for indigenous people and given legitimacy based on belonging to social movements. I think it is fundamental that the analysis of populisms tackle the sociological and ideological dimensions of populist governments, which could avoid homogenizing very different actors as “populist” in an undifferentiated manner.23 Secondly, governmental populisms need to adapt their discourses to the ideological perspectives which were formerly dominant in their

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discourses. In Ecuador, the insistence on the citizenry as the people implicitly allows a unified fight against intermediary bodies. By contrast, the Bolivian process has to permanently negotiate with all the social organizations which ensure its stability and legitimacy. Indeed, the appeal to a people which is more concretely based on a sociological definition— the people as being the working classes—does not allow any separation between the discursive force used by the political power and the social organization the discourse needs to legitimize. In order to reach those conclusions, I used Laclau’s tools of analysis which, even though they are not empirical, are useful to understand the logics of populism in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Notes 1. This united political force through the process of discursive constitution of one people is referred to as hegemonic blocks throughout the chapter. 2. This people is necessarily created in adequation with social factors: various social demands within the working classes are easier to articulate than one demand from the working classes, and another one from the highbourgeoisie, relatively, say, to the redistribution of wealth. What are “populat classes”? 3. The degree of “democraticness” of a populist force strongly relies on its ideological bases, and on the definition of democracy one chooses to adopt. The choice to define populism as a discourse strategy rather than an ideology allows us to stay away from this normative debate on populism and democracy. 4. The Washington Consensus refers to economic policies advised by the IMF and the World Bank to countries which had, as it had been the case in South America, experienced serious economic crisis in the 1980s. It was strongly inspired by the principles designed by the School of Chicago’s economists, and implemented in South America during the 1990s. Liberalization of the market and the correlated retreat of the State were the two main principles of these policies. What market (labour, consumer goods, financial etc.)? 5. Rafael Correa, before becoming the Ecuadorian President, was an economist. During his presidency he wrote a book to explain the social

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6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

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and economic origins of what he called the Revoluci´on Ciudadana, the Citizenship Revolution. In both countries, the relations between academia and the political sphere are numerous and political neutrality of academics is not as important a value as it can be in Europe; in other words, it is quite common that academics are involved in politics and the neutral academic is not a central figure in South American universities. Interview with Sarela Paz, Cochabamba, 9 August 2016. This translates as Movement Towards Socialism: Instrument for the Recovery of Popular Sovereignty. Here is the definition provided by Laclau: “An empty signifier is, strictly speaking, a signifier without a signified. This definition is also, however, the enunciation of a problem. For how would it be possible that a signifier is not attached to any signified and remains, nevertheless, an integraJ part of a system of signification?” (Laclau and Howarth 2015: 36). The fact that there is no signified attached to the signifier makes it open to political battles: “people”, “nation” or “change” can refer to many different things, but they still have a unifying function. According to Laclau, this paradox is one of the conditions making political change possible: the use of empty signifiers in order to build a people’s identity can be a strong factor of political change. The “Process of Change” is the self-denomination chosen by the MASIPSP to name their political revolution. It can also be analysed as an “empty signifier”, given that the social demands unified by the MASIPSP through the idea of recovering sovereignty all asked for changes. The “Process of Change” does not indicate the nature of the changes at stake. Since Evo Morales took office as a President, he has been his VicePresident. “Lo importante de estas fuerzas emergentes es que, por las características de su composición interna (plebeyas, indígenas) y de sus demandas aglutinadoras, son bloques sociales anteriormente excluidos de la toma de decisiones, que al tiempo que buscan autorrepresentarse, pretenden modificar sustancialmente las relaciones económicas.” Interview with Magdalena Medrano, ex-secretary of the Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Cochabamba, 3 August 2016. The Chapare is an area between the national park and indigenous territory, TIPNIS, and the city of Cochabamba, within the department of Cochabamba. The area has the most fundamental and loyal base of Evo Morales.

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´ 14. Interview with Alvaro Garc´ia Linera, Vice-President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, La Paz, 21 August 2016. 15. The translation would be: “Wonderful and Sovereign Nation”. The acronym “PAIS” means “country”. 16. Cf. second part of the chapter. 17. This difference could be observed in the relative importance of indigenous organizations from the highlands and the lowlands. The former stress the social dimension of the problem, articulated with a social class dimension and analysis, whereas the latter mainly claim cultural recognition. In Bolivia, the highlands organizations were stronger, while in Ecuador the lowlands struggles were central in the emergence of the indigenous movements (Gerlach 2003; Martínez 2009). 18. Interview with Adolfo Mendoza, former MAS senator, La Paz, 13 July 2016. 19. Interview with Roger Cortez, Professor of Political Science, La Paz, 15 July 2016: “El Vice-Presidente habla con enorme respeto de los movimientos sociales, pero el gobierno, el MAS, es el mayor enemigo de los movimientos sociales. En el lenguaje del MAS, movimiento social y organización social son idénticos, y eso es un error. Las organizaciones sociales son estructuras organizativas estables de largo plazo, ultra-corporativas, sectorialistas, con un fuerte sentimiento de egoísmo de grupo. Los movimientos sociales en cambio son explosiones momentáneas de movilización cuando ni los sindicatos ni los partidos pueden canalizar una demanda social.” ´ 20. Interview with Alvaro Garc´ia Linera, Vice-President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, La Paz, 21 August 2016; Interview with Teresa Morales, former minister of productive development, La Paz, 12 July 2016. 21. Interview with Katy Betancourt, CONAIE, Quito, 20 January 2015. 22. In both cases, environment NGO’s and indigenous organizations were favourable to the regime change they were promoting through their political platform (Philip and Panizza 2011; Webber 2011). 23. For example, the qualification of Sanders and Trump, or Bolsonaro and Lopez Obrador, as indistinctively “populist” without further differentiation is to be avoided. Indeed, one central element of this chapter is the existing differences between two Leftist populisms, whose ideological differences matter politically.

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References Agamben, G. 1995. La double identité du peuple. Libération. Baker, P. 2015. The Phantom, the Plebeian and the State: Grupo Comuna and the Intellectual Career of Alvaro García Linera. Viewpointmag. Cadalen, P.-Y. 2017. L’action politique à l’ère du terminable. Entre temps sociaux et temps historique. Contretemps. Colliot-Thélène, C., and F. Guénard, (eds.). 2014. Peuples et populisme, 1st ed. La vie des idées. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Conaghan, C. M. 2011. “Ecuador”. In The Resurgence of the Latin American Left, 260–282. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Correa, R. 2013. De la république bananière à la non république. Paris: Utopia. Correa, R. 2009. Intervencion del Presidente de la Republica durante la posesion presidencial . Crabtree, J. 2013. “From the MNR to the MAS: Populism, Parties, the State and Social Movements in Bolivia since 1952”. In Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Carlos de la Torre and Cynthia Arnson, 269–294. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Cruz Rodríguez, E. 2012. Movimientos indígenas, identidad y nación en Bolivia y Ecuador: una geneaología del Estado plurinacional , 1st ed. ed. Abya Yala, Quito: Ecuador. De la Torre, C. 2013. “El technopopulismo de Rafael Correa ¿Es compatible el carisma con la tecnocracia?” Latin American Research Review 48: 24–43. Errejón, I., and Jordán H. Argirakisn, (eds.). 2011. Ahora es cuándo, carajo!: del asalto a la transformación del Estado en Bolivia, Ensayo. El Viejo Topo, Mataró, Spain. Fontaine, G. 2006. Convergences et tensions entre ethnicité et écologisme en Amazonie. Autrepart, 63–80. García Linera, A. 1995. Forma Valor y Forma Comunidad de los procesos de trabajo. La Paz: Quipus. García Linera, A. 2008. La potencia plebeya. Acción colectiva e identidades indígenas, obreras y populares en Bolivia. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores. García Linera, A. 2015. Socialismo comunitario. Un horizonte de época. La Paz: Vicepresidencia del Estado plurinacional de Bolivia. Gerlach, A. 2003. Indians, Oil and Politics: A Recent History of Ecuador. Wilmington: SR Books. Hermet, Guy. 1997. La Démocratie. Flammarion (programme ReLIRE).

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Hylton, F., and S. Thomson. 2010. Horizons révolutionnaires. Histoire et actualité politiques de la Bolivie. Paris: Imho. Laclau, E. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, E., and D. R. Howarth. 2015. Ernesto Laclau: Post-Marxism, Populism and Critique. Routledge Innovators in Political Theory. London: Routledge. Laclau, E., and C. Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. London: Verso. Mariateguí, J.-C. 1928. Siete ensayos de la realidad peruana. Lima: Amauta. Martínez, E. 2009. Yasuní. El tortuoso camino de Kioto a Quito. Quito: Abya Yala. Mayorga, F. 2014. Incertidumbres Tacticas, Plural Editores. ed. La Paz: Plural Editores. Mudde, C. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 39: 541–563. Müller, J.-W. 2016. What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Perrier-Bruslé, L. 2012. “Le conflit du TIPNIS et la Bolivie d’Evo Morales face à ses contradictions: analyse d’un conflit socio-environnemental.” EchoGéo. https://doi.org/10.4000/echogeo.12972. Philip, G. D. E., and F. Panizza. 2011. The Triumph of Politics: The Return of the Left in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, 1st ed. Cambridge: Polity. Ramirez Gallegos, F. 2010. “Post-neoliberalismo indócil. Agenda pública y relaciones socio-estatales en el Ecuador de la Revolución Ciudadana.” Temas y debates: revista universitaria de ciencias sociales, 175–194. Ramirez Gallegos, R. 2010. Socialismo del Sumak Kawsay o biosocialismo republicano. Rebelión. Rancière, J. 2005. La haine de la démocratie. Paris: La Fabrique. Santos, B. de S. 2010. Refundación del Estado en América Latina: perspectivas desde una epistemología del Sur, 1st ed. La Paz: Plural Ed. Santos, B. de S. 2015. Revueltas de Indignación y Otras Conversas. Stavrakakis, Y., 2018. “Populism, Anti-Populism and Democracy.” Political Insight 9: 33–35. Svampa, M., 2009. “Mouvements Sociaux, Matrices Sociopolitiques et Nouveaux Contextes en Amérique Latine.” Problèmes d’Amérique latine, 113–136. Svampa, M. 2011. Néo-“Développementisme” Extractiviste, Gouvernements et Mouvements Sociaux en Amérique Latine, 101–127. Webber, J. R. 2011. Red October: Left–Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia, Historical Materialism Book Series. Leiden: Brill.

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Pierre-Yves Cadalen currently teaches at Créteil University, France. He recently obtained his PhD in Political Science and International Relations. His works are mainly related to the relations of power around the Environmental Commons. His former studies, which also included a Bachelor in Philosophy, led him to theorize the new forms of power related to the Anthropocene era.

13 The (Re) Birth of Far-Right Populism in Australia: The Appeal of Pauline Hanson’s Persuasive Definitions Ben Fenton-Smith

Introduction In the same year as Donald Trump’s presidential victory, another result sent shockwaves through Australia’s political landscape: the resurrection of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON) party, which emerged from the 2016 federal election as the largest right-wing party outside the mainstream Liberal–National coalition in the upper house (Senate). This achievement confirmed PHON as Australia’s representative among the maverick far-right populist movements that have come to prominence globally (see chapters by Baysha, Brandmayer, Gaul, Kahlina, Knoblock, and Vekow in this volume). This was a “rise again” moment for Pauline Hanson, who first emerged from obscurity in the 1996 federal election as a self-styled “fish-and-chip-shop-owning single mother”. She surprisingly won a seat in the House of Representatives by tapping into popular unrest over multiculturalism (particularly Asian immigration), B. Fenton-Smith (B) Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_13

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Aboriginal welfare, high-end profiteering, foreign aid, and foreign corporate takeovers. Her maiden speech to parliament has been described as “the most widely circulated speech ever delivered in the Australian parliament” (Goot 2005: 89). Its incendiary suggestion that “we are in danger of being swamped by Asians” is still seared into the Australian consciousness. Space does not allow for a detailed account of Hanson’s travails over the past twenty years. Between 1998 and 2016, her presence and/or that of PHON in federal/state parliaments was inconsistent (at times nonexistent) due to the party’s organizational incompetence and infighting, and a cordon sanitaire implemented by major parties. She lost her seat, spent time in jail for electoral fraud and was even expelled from her own party. But there always remained a sizable and latent “anti-other” voter base in Australia whose values were never truly captured by the major parties. The constituency’s non-representation was mistaken by many for non-existence. This explains why Hanson was able to return as a federal MP after a nineteen-year hiatus and seamlessly resume as the nation’s most recognizable and divisive politician. While her party’s electoral fortunes waxed and waned, Hanson never relinquished her mantle as the Australian far-right’s spiritual leader, remaining in the public eye as (variously) “political prisoner”, TV celebrity, and marginalized political campaigner. Given the right set of circumstances she could always return as the “voice” of the unrepresented radical right. Her personal setbacks and perceived exclusion from the mainstream only enhanced her iconic status in the eyes of many as a far-right martyr, victim of elitist cabals, and fighter for the forgotten people.

Populism as Style and Ideology There is an ongoing discussion in political science and discourse studies about the extent to which the so-called “populist” phenomenon essentially embodies a communicative style or a coherent ideology. When viewed as the former, there is relatively firm agreement about its characteristic elements. Populist rhetors invariably position themselves as the voice of “the people”, identify ways that “ordinary” citizens are

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exploited by elite interests, and circumscribe a monolithic national identity that necessitates the construal of outsider groups. Variations of this framework are found in the work of Jagers and Walgrave (2007), Mudde (2004), Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017), Pelinka (2013), and Wodak (2015, 2017), among others. Wodak (2014), however, strikes a cautionary note about the “populism as style” thesis, arguing that it runs the risk of downplaying the ideological substance of populist movements. Populism has a capacity to attach itself to so-called “thick-centred” or “full” ideologies, such as neoconservatism, far-right nationalism, or green leftism. When utilized as a communicative frame to “sell” these ideologies, it evolves into a fully-fledged socioeconomic critique. Such political movements are often dismissed because the critique is cloaked in populist terms. However, the electoral victories of Trump, Hanson, and the Brexiteers proved that political movements are no less “substantial” if their message is delivered in an unconventional, disruptive, or emotive manner. That is to say, such movements are not necessarily “policy-lite”: decisions on protectionism and immigration, for example, materially impact millions of people. Something these movements typically share is the capacity to popularize ideas which had hitherto been discredited as naïve, taboo, backward, unscientific, isolationist, or unethical. At a macro level, one central notion of populism is that existing constitutional structures have failed to actualize the true will of the people, and that greater forms of direct democracy are called for. On this basis, Canovan (1999: 2) cautions against the “hasty disdain” with which populism is brushed aside: Populists see themselves as true democrats, voicing popular grievances and opinions systematically ignored by governments, mainstream parties and the media. Many of them favour “direct democracy”—political decision making by referendum and popular initiative.

Populism can therefore be viewed as a disruption, or threat, to the status quo. Stavrakakis (2017: 524) argues that a common element to populists is not so much their “far-right” or “far-left” orientation, but that they “cause surprise”:

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Mainstream media, established political forces and academics are quick to denounce their scandalous nature: all of a sudden, the unthinkable seems to be happening. Populism is seen as violating or transgressing an established order of how politics is properly, rationally and professionally done. It emerges where it should not when it should not; it disrupts a supposed “normal” course of events and can only be seen as a signal of failure.

These formulations of populism apply to Pauline Hanson as well. On the one hand, she adopts policy positions on multiculturalism, economic protectionism, gun control, and climate denial that are typical of farright movements globally. She is broadly committed to direct representation of “the people’s” views in decision-making processes. But she is also a populist communicator of note because she combines a parochial Australian “ordinariness” with the rhetorical tropes of international farright leaders. While she has drawn as much attention for the way she speaks as for what she says, the former has been subjected to far less systematic analysis.

The Significance of Hanson’s Far-Right Populism In 2016 Pauline Hanson made the bold claim that her 1996 maiden speech “shook a nation, woke up many Australians and gave hope to those who thought no-one was listening” (Hansard 2016).1 The truth is, her maiden speech did rock the nation and did inspire many followers who felt their views were not represented by the mainstream parties. Stavrakakis’s notion of populist surprise is evident in the way she subverted the convention of the maiden speech, which is traditionally an uncontroversial statement of warm-hearted values given at the commencement of a parliamentarian’s career. By targeting Asian immigrants and indigenous Australians, she outraged both the elites (media, political, and academic) and society in general. But she also “woke them up” to the fact that large numbers of Australians shared her views and felt unrepresented.

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One Nation’s emergence in 1996 marked the birth of an organized Australian radical right-wing movement (Deutchman 2000; Gibson et al. 2002; Scalmer 1999). Since the 1960s (the last days of the White Australia Policy), issues of race and immigration had not been hotly debated in mainstream politics. With Hanson’s rise, race-based appeals by politicians have achieved a substantial degree of legitimacy. As Hogan and Haltinner (2015: 525) observe, a secret to the longevity of conservative Prime Minister John Howard’s government (1996–2007) was that it quickly adopted Hanson’s rhetoric for electoral advantage: [T]he dramatic rise of One Nation helped reframe ethnonationalism as a potentially legitimate way of conceptualising the nation. Amidst contentious debates over the arrival of “boat people” on Australia’s shores, John Howard’s Liberal party warned of the nation being “swamped by asylum seekers”.

This has continued under subsequent Coalition and Labor governments and is now a common catch cry in election campaigns. However, the reality of winning elections ensures that even the most conservative prime ministerial aspirants can never afford to stray so far from the ideological centre as to allay the conviction of Hanson’s supporters that no one but her truly speaks for them. As Marr (2017: 61) rightly states: “People listen to Hanson. It’s her gift. The only political asset she has is an unshakable belief out there that she speaks for real Australians as no politician can.”

Persuasive Definitions The way we define things has consequences, because “to choose a definition is to plead a cause” and “to name an object or idea is to influence attitudes about it” (Zarefsky et al. 1984: 113). The stakes are raised when the “definer” is a politician, someone with a platform to impose their cause on others. It is therefore crucial to scrutinize the definitions made by influential public figures, because these actors do not just objectively define given realities, but offer self-interested versions. As Walton and

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Macagno (2015: 140) point out, the version of reality that we find most convincing or natural is likely to form the basis for our acceptance of particular policies: [N]ames can become the premises of tacit arguments supporting specific conclusions. The classification of a state of affairs as “peacekeeping” or “war” can lead to conflicting conclusions based on very different values (“to keep peace is our duty” or “wars should be always avoided”). The definitions that assign to such terms the same reference are generally taken for granted, even when they can be controversial. These implicit and condensed arguments can play a fundamental role in political discourse, especially when some policies need to be justified or argued for before the public.

In this sense all definitions are, to some extent, acts of persuasion. On the one hand, arguments about definitions explicitly draw attention to the meaning of a term. For example, conservatives and progressives may squabble over the definition of “marriage” in a same-sex marriage debate. On the other hand, arguments from definition typically occur below the level of consciousness. For example, a speaker’s use of the term “Australian values” can be rhetorically powerful because it stems from an assumed, not openly contested, denotation of the term. Compliance with the meaning is achieved without struggle, because it happens unwittingly. The sections that follow focus on four ways in which Hanson uses persuasive definitions for popular appeal: dissociation, reframing, floating signifiers, and definitions by effect. Each are explained in their respective sections, drawing on the work of scholars in rhetoric and political science (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969; Schiappa 1993; Walton and Macagno 2015; Zarefsky 2004).

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Data Eleven significant speeches were selected from different points in Hanson’s parliamentary career (see Table 13.1) and analysed for instances Table 13.1

Corpus of Hanson speeches analysed in the study Word Length

No.

Form of Address

Topic

Date

1

Background and personal philosophy

10 September 1996

2521

2

Maiden speech to the House of Representatives (HOS) Speech to HOS

2 December 1996

1280

3

Speech to HOS

20 November 1997

1850

4

Speech to HOS

5

Announcement to party supporters

6

Address to the Reclaim Australia rally Maiden speech to the Senate

Perceived campaign of abuse by powerful critics Government white paper on foreign policy and trade Economic rationalism Relaunch of PHON and Hanson leadership. Overview of party policies Overview of PHON party philosophy

7

8

9

10 11

Budget reply speech to the Senate Speech to the Senate

Speech to the Senate Budget reply speech to the Senate

24 March 1998

651

29 November 2014

3319

4 April 2015

3381

Background, political comeback and personal philosophy PHON’s economic policies

14 September 2016

4104

11 May 2017

3676

National security: banning full-face coverings in public places Same-sex marriage plebiscite PHON’s economic policies

17 August 2017

3104

27–8 November 2017 10 May 2018

2404 4131

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of persuasive definitions. Several factors went into the selection of these texts. Firstly, Hanson herself views them as significant, since all bar one of the speeches appear in her book Pauline: In Her Own Words (Hanson and Ravlic 2018), a self-selected collection of major addresses.2 Secondly, the corpus represents Hanson chronologically, since it includes at least one speech from every year of her two parliamentary terms (1996–98; 2016–present). Thirdly, it reflects the range of issues about which Hanson has been outspoken. Finally, it includes speeches that mark occasions when national attention was drawn to her (i.e. highpoints of newsworthiness).

Dissociation Dissociation refers to the breaking down of a concept. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969: 190) explain it as the “techniques of separation which have the purpose of dissociating, separating, disuniting elements which are regarded as forming a whole or at least a unified group within some system of thought”. When pitched as definitions within the context of argument, dissociations have the effect of unravelling and/or redrawing conceptual boundaries that were taken to be sound. This strategy starts from the assumption (set up by the rhetor or already present in listeners’ minds) that a concept is unitary and progresses to a questioning of the concept’s homogeneity. The listener is therefore guided to a fresh appraisal of it—to a belief that it is more complex than first thought. Having split the concept into parts, the speaker can then evaluate some elements (i.e. those that suit the argument) positively while evaluating others negatively (associating them with antagonistic positions). Let us consider Hanson’s definition of government: (1) Australia needs a national government, not a corporate one, not a union one, and not an alternative lifestyle one. (Hansard 2016)

This suggests that there are essentially two forms of government: one conducted in the national interest and another conducted for vested

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interests. Hanson’s One Nation is associated with the favoured national type, while her opponents can be aligned with each of the vested interests: corporate (Coalition), union (Labor) and alternative lifestyle (Green). By implication, only PHON represents everyone’s interests. Schiappa (1993: 408) points out that the “prototypical philosophical pair” used in dissociations is that of appearance/reality: the “arguer uses this pair by claiming that one definition is the real or true instance of X, whereas competing definitions point to an illusory appearance”. This structure is used by Hanson to characterize Muslim culture as incompatible with “true democracy”: (2) Australia is a true democracy based on gender equality and freedom of expression, and where everyone is equal under the law. Most Australians like it that way, but not radical Muslims. Radical Muslims want Sharia law, where women are not treated equally to men and homosexuals are not tolerated. The Muslim world has yet to learn that secularism avoids religious conflict. (Hansard 2017a)

The thing defined (definiendum) is democracy, dissociated into a true/untrue notional pair. Australia is an example of a true democracy, defined by positively valued features such as gender equality and freedom of expression. This is contrasted with a competing system of social organization, associated with adherents to strict Muslim culture, in which these values are not respected. The implication is that Muslim culture is inconsistent with a truly free society and therefore has no place in Australia. Hanson also redefines the Australian Muslim population. There are innumerable ways in which Muslims could be divided (e.g. denomination or country of origin), but she plays on the perception of them as a monolithic group whose most important point of internal distinction is good vs. bad: (3) [O]ur leaders continue to tell us to be tolerant and embrace the good Muslims. But how should we tell the difference? There is no sign saying “good Muslim” or “bad Muslim”. How many lives will be lost or destroyed trying to determine who is good and who is bad?’ (Hansard 2016)

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The same argument could be made about any social group: there are good and bad Anglo-Saxon Christians, self-evidently. In proposing a dissociation of this nature, Hanson can maintain the line that she is not anti-Muslim, only anti-bad Muslim. Another relevant domain is welfare. In the early 1980s Ronald Reagan persuasively redefined social security by coining the term “safety net” in his first Congressional address. He articulated the notion of the “truly needy”, thereby dissociating “need” into that which is “apparent” (closely allied with fraudulence—i.e. welfare cheats) and that which is “real” or “true” (Zarefsky et al. 1984: 114). Reagan was able to appear both fiscally responsible, by eliminating wasteful spending, and compassionate, by reassuring those in (true) need that they would continue to be looked after, via the safety net. Hanson draws on the same rhetorical playbook. Her situation is not unlike Reagan’s, because a key constituency of contemporary far-right populists are the socioeconomically disadvantaged “globalization losers” (Curran 2004; Deutchman 2000; Wodak 2015). Therefore, Hanson treads a fine line on welfare cuts as her supporters include those most affected. She does this by setting up a series of binaries through which welfare ought to be reassessed: (4) Welfare, age pensions and disability pensions were introduced for people who are truly in need or need a short-term helping hand. We can no longer support those who are not prepared to work. Being on welfare has become a way of life for many, as we see third-generation claimants. (Hansard 2018) (5) Welfare is not a right, unless you are aged or sick. It is a privilege paid for by hard-working Australians. (Hansard 2016)

In a Reaganesque move, what has been dissociated in (4) is the notion of the welfare recipient. The distinction is between those who access welfare because they are “truly in need”, and those who access it as a lifestyle choice or as a result of upbringing. In (5), welfare itself is dissociated. Two definitions are presented: welfare as a right and welfare as a privilege. It is implied that both have currency with Australians, but

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only the second is correct. The problem, as she sees it, is that too many people mistakenly believe the first definition to be true. This dissociation allows Hanson, like Reagan, to occupy the dual position of social security defender (by preserving it for the truly needy) and champion of fairness (by denying it to scammers). The dissociative strategy resonates with Hanson’s preoccupation with unity and division. Her party is One Nation. She opposes multiculturalism because “a truly multicultural country can never be strong and united” (Hansard 1996a). Drilling down to the vocabulary of her speeches (see Table 13.2), a frequency count of content words reveals that almost all of the ten most frequent ones are semantically related to the ways people are socially grouped, numbered, separated or organized: “Australia”, “government”, “people”, “country”, “one”, “nation”, “foreign”, and “Muslims”. As discussed above, unity and division are a central concern of populism more broadly. Populists formulate monolithic national identities, which allows them to target social elements that compromise or Table 13.2

Most frequent (stemmed) content words in Hanson’s speeches

Rank

Word

Count

Weighted percentage (%)

1

Australia

423

2.73

2

government

187

1.21

3 4 5 6

people country one taxes

177 133 109 98

1.15 0.86 0.71 0.64

people country, countries one, ones tax, taxed, taxes, taxing

7

nation

95

0.62

nation, national, nationalism, nationality, nationals, nations

8 9 10

foreign Muslims year

92 91 88

0.60 0.59 0.57

foreign, foreigners Muslim, Muslims year, yearly, years

Similar words Australia, Australian, Australians governing, government, governments

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B. Fenton-Smith

threaten this self-constructed whole. A paradox at the heart of populism is that it dissociates “oneness”: at the same time as it constructs mythical unities, it draws energy from the articulation and exploitation of divisions.

Reframing Zarefsky (2004: 613) defines reframing as “postulating a different frame of reference from the one in which the subject normally is viewed”. His example is the 2003 invasion of Iraq by allied forces, originally justified by Bush, Blair, and Howard as securing the world’s defence against weapons of mass destruction. With time, no weapons emerged and global security only seemed weakened by the events. Therefore, alternative frames were generated to (re)explain past decisions and actions. Hanson uses reframing in her 2016 Senate comeback speech to explain away her 1996 comment that “we are in danger of being swamped by Asians”. With anti-Asian sentiment waning in the intervening years (Asian Australians even standing as PHON candidates), Hanson places a fresh interpretation on the earlier statement: (6) In my first speech in 1996 I said we were in danger of being swamped by Asians. This was not said out of disrespect for Asians but was meant as a slap in the face to both the Liberal and Labor governments who opened the floodgates to immigration, targeting cultures purely for the vote … (Hansard 2016)

She now claims her statement has been widely misinterpreted and should not be understood as meaning “Asians do not belong in Australia” but rather as “the major parties exploit Asian immigration for their own ends”. Reframing matters to Hanson because her appeal feeds on the rejection of conventional worldviews promoted by powerful elites (particularly the Liberal and Labor parties) and mainstream media organizations such as the state-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Her point of difference is that her take on issues and values has been suppressed

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or misrepresented by big media and the political establishment, yet represents the “real views” of “ordinary” voiceless Australians. In this light, let us return to Hanson’s discussion of Islam. As example (7) shows, one of her objectives is to recast Islam from a mere religion to an all-encompassing socio-political code of control. (Dorling (2017) argues that PHON very deliberately claims that Islam is not a religion in order to deprive it of the constitutional protections granted to religions, a strategy copied from the American far-right.) Islam, she claims, is concerned with reshaping Australia’s fundamental values, traditions, freedoms, and institutions: (7) Why then has Islam and its teachings had such an impact on Australia like no other religion? Islam sees itself as a theocracy. Islam does not believe in democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of assembly. It does not separate religion and politics. It is partly a religion, but it is much more than that. It has a political agenda that goes far outside the realm of religion. It regulates Muslims’ social and domestic life, their legal system and politics—their total life. (Hansard 2016)

Islam is thus reframed from “religion” to “theocracy”. With this frame established, it logically follows that policies restricting the practice of Islam, and even Muslim immigration itself, are necessary. It cannot be allowed to flourish in Australia, since it is antithetical to the essence of Australia itself. When Hanson famously took her seat in federal parliament wearing a burqa, she deftly reframed the argument around a nationwide burqa ban. Rejecting the claim (i.e. frame) that her actions had fanned the flames of racial discrimination, she recast the ban as an issue of social cohesion and public safety: (8) The case for a general ban on full-face coverings in all public places rests on the need for social cohesion and for the ability to identify and confirm eligibility in a variety of situations and for public safety. […] Our social cohesion is founded on seeing one another’s face; on a common language, English; and on a willingness to integrate into an Australian way of life. (Hansard 2017a)

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B. Fenton-Smith

Where Hanson’s opponents see xenophobia and racism, her supporters see the defence of “an Australian way of life”. Is Hanson a racist? The debate is partly definitional, volleying back and forth over the questions “What is a racist?” and “What is racism?”. Hanson proactively engages this debate: (9) I am not a racist. Criticism is not racism. I am a proud Australian fighting for our democracy, culture and way of life. (Hanson 2018b: 45) (10) Ladies and gentlemen, I have just raised some very taboo topics and will be called a racist and bigot. They did it years ago, but many of you know I am not a racist defined as “someone who believes their race to be superior to another”, but a proud Australian fighting to keep our culture and way of life intact for us, and future generations. (Hanson 2018a: 43)

These examples illustrate her use of prolepsis to reframe the racism charge: i.e. anticipating an opponent’s objections and offering a refutation (Lanham 1991). In statement (9) she recasts her own identity by pointing out that her comments should not be interpreted through the lens of “racism” but rather that of “criticism” (i.e. reasoned critique of a belief system that is antithetical to Australian culture and democracy). In (10) she explicitly invokes a definition of racism to show that her comments are of a fundamentally different order. The distinction that Hanson wants to make is between a blind antipathy towards certain races (she is not that) and reasoned objection to cultural practices that are incompatible with Australian norms. This allows her to articulate an alternative frame to mainstream multiculturalism: (11) It is time that all Australians and our media learn that multiculturalism and multiracialism have two very different meanings and we must acknowledge that there are some cultures that cannot live in peace and harmony with one another due to their incompatible beliefs. Why have we been made to believe otherwise, what if it is just human nature? (Hanson 2018b: 50)

Hanson’s argument is that multiple frames can be used to characterize contemporary Australian society. The conventional view (dictated, in

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Hanson’s eyes, by media elites and others) is that Australia consists of multiple cultures which co-exist peacefully. The dissenting view recognizes the multiplicity of cultures, but does not accept that they “fit in”. A further possibility is that Australia comprises people from multiple racial backgrounds, but they all conform to a singular culture. By opening debates on these perspectives, Hanson positions herself as the outsider politician prepared to offer alternative (even suppressed) interpretive frames through which contemporary Australian society can be understood. As these examples show, the alleged will and views of the broader populace are often invoked by Hanson as foundations for her positions: populism in its purest sense. She identifies herself with a collective “we” assumed to be at loggerheads with powerful elites such as the media and major parties. This is evident, for example, in the use of “they” versus “us” in statement (10) and the passive construction in statement (11): “Why have we been made to believe otherwise …?” A people’s consensus can thus be conjured rhetorically to give weight to the alternative frames.

Floating Signifiers The notion of the floating signifier is associated with poststructuralist discourse theory (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000) but is here integrated with the rhetorical approach because it, too, is essentially a form of persuasive definition. To understand this interconnection, let us commence with a brief explanation of poststructuralism itself, before considering its relevance to politics: The creation of meaning as a social process is about the fixation of meaning […]. We constantly strive to fix the meaning of signs by placing them in particular relations to other signs […] so that the meaning of each sign is locked into a specific relationship to the others. The project is ultimately impossible because every concrete fixation of the signs’ meaning is contingent; it is possible but not necessary. (Jorgensen and Phillips 2002: 25)

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B. Fenton-Smith

Let us break this down. The social process described above is readily applicable to politics, because a goal of politics is to “fix” certain meanings: i.e. to have the public believe that the way my side sees the world is the way the world is, or should be. In reality, meanings are of course context-bound and constantly in flux (“contingent”), but in the contest of ideas politicians act as if certain meanings are stable, even unquestionable, in part as a rhetorical ploy to paint opponents of those positions as undeserving of popular support. This process is, moreover, central to the identity of conservative politicians, who by definition play the role of conserving foundational beliefs, values, customs, and norms (no matter how contingent or partisan they actually are). What the politician is trying to establish is “the partial fixation of meaning around certain nodal points”, where a nodal point is defined as “a privileged sign around which the other signs are ordered” (Jorgensen and Phillips 2002: 26). If done successfully, a “discourse is established as a totality” in which the meanings of signs (e.g. key words or expressions) appear fixed, to the exclusion of all other possible meanings that the signs could have had: that is, all other possible ways in which the signs could have been related to one another. Thus a discourse is a reduction of possibilities. It is an attempt to stop the sliding of the signs in relation to one another and hence to create a unified system of meaning. (Jorgensen and Phillips 2002: 26–27)

While the meanings ascribed to nodal points may be restricted within a certain discourse, they remain open to contestation outside that discourse—or, more accurately, in the contestation between discourses. For example, there will be contestation over the meaning of “the elite” within and between the discourses of “far-right nationalism” and “green leftism”. The term floating signifier refers to highly significant nodal points within discourses that are particularly open to contestation outside those discursive frames. It is the ambition of political actors to recruit these floating signifiers to their cause, which is why they are both semiotically and rhetorically charged.

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A theme that persists through Hanson’s speeches is Australian essentialism, the idea that there is an intrinsic, monolithic, and time-honoured core to the Australian identity which must be protected. This core manifests in various conceptualizations (or “signs”), such as “Australian values”, “Australian culture”, “Australian way of life”, and “Australian traditions”. In reality we might struggle to agree on precisely what those values are, because the terms are not fixed. But Hanson’s persuasiveness stems from acting as if these signifiers are fixed: all that matters is that the listeners accept that adherence to Australian values is a good thing. The rhetorical trick lies in persuading the audience by connoting, but not denoting, the concept. Let us consider some examples, starting with Hanson’s maiden speech to parliament in 1996. It is her recourse to Australian essentialism in this address that allows her to deflect the accusation of racism stemming from her condemnation of Asian immigration: (12) I must stress at this stage that I do not consider those people from ethnic backgrounds currently living in Australia anything but firstclass citizens, provided of course that they give this country their full, undivided loyalty. (Hansard 1996a)

The notion of “loyalty to Australia” is an effective floating signifier because it has wide appeal and can mean myriad things to different people. It has a common-sense ring to it—surely no sensible person would advocate disloyalty to Australia? And to oppose anyone who would advocate disloyalty, as Hanson is doing, is self-evidently an appropriate stance. But when probed further, her statement is problematic. How does one identify disloyal behaviour? For example, is it constituted by practising certain religions or adopting some forms of dress? And what criteria determine an “ethnic background”? Even in her days as a novice politician, Hanson intuitively grasped that a key to winning the public debate was securing the terms through which major floating signifiers were understood. The following example comes from a 1997 parliamentary debate over a federal government white paper:

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B. Fenton-Smith

(13) I refer to the government’s foreign and trade policy paper In the National Interest. This paper states that advancing the national interest of Australia and the Australian people is the primary goal. […] It also states that the only way to achieve these objectives is through more globalisation, more free trade and more foreign ownership. The report does not, however, define in explicit terms what national interest means, nor does it state in clear terms the impact that ever-increasing globalisation will have on the average Australian. I suspect that the government has confused national interest with international interest. (Hansard 1997)

Hanson artfully attacks the key phrase at the heart of the government paper: national interest. The strength of her attack rests on a playful and ironic dig at its semantic ambiguity, suggesting that its vagueness is deliberate and even cagey, since the Australian people would be rightfully upset, were they to realize that the government actually means international interest. Twenty years later, Hanson again spoke of the national interest in broad terms in her maiden Senate speech: (14) I love my country, culture and way of life. My pride and patriotism were instilled in me from an early age when I watched the Australian flag raised every morning at school and sang the national anthem; watching our athletes compete on the world stage, proud to salute the Australian flag being raised to honour them as they took their place on podiums. It is about belonging, respect and commitment to fight for Australia. (Hansard 2016) (15) Tolerance has to be shown by those who come to this country for a new way of life. If you are not prepared to become Australian and give this country your undivided loyalty, obey our laws, respect our culture and way of life, then I suggest you go back where you came from. If it would be any help, I will take you to the airport and wave you goodbye with sincere best wishes. (Hansard 2016)

Statement (14) manifests the rhetorical figure of chronographia: the vivid representation of a historical time to create an illusion of reality (Silva Rhetoricae 2007). It conjures “Australianness” by reimagining a

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golden age of national pride, a past that new arrivals cannot share in. Both statements are replete with floating signifiers referencing Australian essentialism: country, culture, way of life, pride, patriotism, loyalty. The very words “Australia” and “Australian” overflow with assumed meaning. However, unpacking these terms can be problematic. Is there one “culture” and one “way of life” in Australia, or innumerable different cultures and ways of life? If many people feel a sense of “pride and patriotism” for Australia, do they all feel it for the same reason(s)? She implores “belonging, respect and commitment to fight for Australia” but do all Australians “belong” in the same way and to the same thing? What is meant in (15) by the suggestion that there are some citizens who “are not prepared to become Australian”?

Definitions by Effect Catastrophizing (whether by the left or right) is so common in contemporary political discourse that its impact has been dulled by overuse. Doomsday scenarios (ominato in traditional rhetoric) are regularly evoked by Hanson for dramatic effect. She claims, for example, that “Australia will cease to exist as an independent sovereign nation”, if globalization is not resisted, and that “we will be living under Sharia law and treated as second-class citizens with second-class rights” (Hansard 2016), if Islam spreads unchecked. Definitions by effect (Walton and Macagno 2015) are a sub-type of ominato: they offer the veneer of logical argument as a way of evoking an uncertain future. They work by tying the “thing defined” (definiendum) to a real-world effect or outcome. While the effect may be positive or negative, this paper focusses on the latter, because catastrophizing, or extreme negativity, is a favoured strategy of Hanson. In essence, Hanson sets up a relation between an idealized form of the definiendum and a real-world outcome that is unpalatable, unforeseen, dangerous, discriminatory, or even apocalyptic. Let us consider specific examples in which Hanson combines the “definition of a thing” with the “effect of the thing”. The first case relates to multiculturalism. As mentioned, Hanson views the accusation that she

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is racist as a failure to understand her critique of multiculturalism. Her argument is that she opposes multiculturalism only because it leads to cultural tension and social instability: (16) I am opposed to the policy of multiculturalism because history and the rest of the world show us that multiculturalism never works. It stops new citizens from giving this country, their new home, their full and undivided loyalty. I am not a racist; I am a realist. A truly multicultural society can never be strong and united. United States President Bill Clinton pointed out when he was in Australia that the world is littered with the bodies of people killed in failed and tragic attempts at multiculturalism. (Hansard 1996b)

To put this another way, multiculturalism, by definition, has negative social consequences. This is not, she claims, an argument from cherry-picked evidence; on the contrary, it never works, a fact allegedly/supposedly supported by “history”, the “rest of the world”, and even a liberal US President. Its effects are clear: new citizens do not give loyalty to their adopted land, society becomes disunited, and people die. Not only has Hanson redefined multiculturalism on the basis of extreme negative outcomes, but she has also redefined herself, from “racist” to “realist”. The globalized economic order is also catastrophized. A common refrain of far-right and far-left politicians alike is the damage inflicted on working people and local industries by the massive ramping up of free trade and globalization. Hanson speaks in this tradition, defining the unfettered globalized economy in terms of negative causes and effects: (17) I absolutely have to make this clear: the market wants profit only; all other considerations are secondary. Economic rationalism is a weapon wielded by governments on behalf of big business and, in particular, multinationals. To Australia, economic rationalism is a weapon of mass social destruction and it is our own government which press the button and, as yet, have not taken their finger off the trigger. Exposing us to unlimited competition from foreign countries where workers earn a dollar or two a day is destroying our industries and exporting our jobs. The

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proof of this is everywhere. The continuation of Labor or coalition policies can result only in further drops in our standard of living and an increasingly insecure future for Australians. (Hansard 1998)

There is an absence of nuance in this statement, as she explicitly signals through lexis such as “absolutely”, “clear”, “only”, and “all”. The nub of her definition by effect is contained in this statement: “economic rationalism is a weapon of mass social destruction”. If multinational corporations are allowed to dictate economic policy, the result will be the death of local industries, loss of jobs, and decline in standard of living. As in her comments on multiculturalism, she is adamant that the evidence for this is not selective: the “proof of this is everywhere”. The third example relates to environmental policy. Australia is one of over 170 countries that broadly endorses the non-binding 1992 United Nations document “Agenda 21”, which the federal government’s environmental agency describes as a “blueprint that outlines actions that governments, international organizations, industries and the community can take to achieve sustainability” (Department of the Environment and Energy 2018). Agenda 21 has become the focus of far-right conspiracy theorists worldwide (Frick et al. 2014; Harman 2015), with US Tea Party conservatives pressuring state legislatures to pass laws that prevent its environmental sustainability goals influencing planning regulations. Hanson positions herself within this movement: (18) Agenda 21 also calls for the fencing of rivers and creeks, at the expense of the land owner, to stop live stock from accessing the water, supposedly for environmental purposes. Water is our life’s blood, without it we will die. No government or individual has the right to own or control another person’s use of water. […] It’s the man on the land that is being targeted today, tomorrow it will be the cities that will be taxed for the rain water they capture in their tanks. Queensland will experience Agenda 21, it is only a matter of time. Always be wary when you hear the words sustainable development. (Hanson 2018a)

Agenda 21 (and sustainable development more broadly) is therefore defined by the restrictive impact it will (allegedly) have on people’s liberties. The loss of these liberties is concerning, in Hanson’s view, because

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they are fundamental to existence itself (i.e. water) and strike at the nation’s mythological love affair with “the man on the land”. The final example comes from the 2017 same-sex marriage debate. A nationwide plebiscite strongly backed gay marriage in every state and territory, a resounding “people power” decision that ran contrary to her traditional hard-right view that “marriage was between a man and a woman” (Hansard 2017b). She was therefore unable to mount the populist argument that the people’s will had been run over roughshod by the elites. In this case, it was the people—not the elites—who literally redefined marriage. To maintain a hard-right anti-same-sex marriage stance without decrying the people’s verdict, she takes up an “unforeseen consequences” argument, a variant of definition by effect: (19) My concern about this is that, if we pass it in this parliament of 226 people, who’s to say that further on down the track a parliament could not expand it to mean multiple marriages or who knows what? I believe that what should be enshrined in the Constitution is what it has been determined the people want, whether it is marriage between people of the same sex or of the opposite sex. It could then only be changed by being taken back to the people. (Hansard 2017b)

While it is awkward for her to take issue with the new meaning of marriage—redefined by the majority—she can take issue with its effect. She makes the pitch that if a change is legislated now, further changes down the track could result in the legalization of polygamy and “who knows what”. As all these examples show, it is intrinsic to Hanson’s worldview that society as we know it is under threat, or that society as we knew it has been seriously eroded. Definitions by effect are a persuasive technique for making this case.

Conclusion The language of Pauline Hanson is variously derided as unsophisticated, inarticulate, and/or boorish. Perhaps intuitively, she knew from the start that this perception was an invaluable gift. The second sentence

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of her first parliamentary address suggests so: “I come here not as a polished politician but as a woman who has had her fair share of life’s knocks.” It embraces the charge of plain speaking, dispelling the idea that she communicates, and therefore is, like other politicians. Disowning sophistication and articulacy is itself a sophisticated and articulate move—something many critics fail to appreciate. Persuasive definitions are a powerful tool for politicians to hawk their ideas. Fringe political movements, in particular, need to literally redefine the status quo to gain support. The four points below summarize the variations in persuasive definition covered in this chapter and suggest why they may be of relevance for the analysis of far-right populism more broadly: 1. Dissociation is the rhetorical deconstruction of concepts held to be unitary. By breaking them into parts (typically negative/positive pairs), the listener’s focus can be trained on negative evaluations or consequences associated with certain parts, thereby undermining faith in the concepts themselves. This is useful for politicians preoccupied with national unity and division in an era of rapid social change, particularly in densely multicultural countries. 2. When issues and/or events are reframed, dominant narratives and commonly accepted perspectives are overturned. This is the goal of politicians with anti-elitist convictions, who view the mainstream media and establishment parties as purveyors of worldviews that are out of touch with the concerns and interests of ordinary citizens. 3. The semiotic contest over floating signifiers involves identifying and co-opting cultural key terms such as “values”, “way of life”, and “national interest”. A populist leader’s appeal can stem in part from the belief that these essential identifiers have been lost or hijacked. 4. Definitions by effect allow speakers to wed definitions to (negative) outcomes. This may cohere with a populist leader’s certainty that a desired social order is threatened or collapsing. The persuasive definition is a rhetorical tool available to politicians from across the ideological spectrum. As retailers of ideas they would be remiss to ignore it. But this paper has argued that Hanson is particularly adept

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at using it and that, by extension, the Hanson phenomenon cannot be understood without appreciating the role language plays in it.

Notes 1. Hansard speeches are listed under “Commonwealth Parliament of Australia” in the References list. 2. The 2018 Budget Reply speech, which post-dates the book’s preparation, is the only exception. To ensure accuracy, transcripts of parliamentary speeches were retrieved from Hansard, not Hanson’s book.

References Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy.” Political Studies 58: 2–16. Commonwealth Parliament of Australia. 1996a. House of Representatives Parliamentary Debates, official Hansard , 10 September, column 3860–3863. Commonwealth Parliament of Australia. 1996b. House of Representatives Parliamentary Debates, official Hansard , 2 December, column 7441–7443. Commonwealth Parliament of Australia. 1997. House of Representatives Parliamentary Debates, official Hansard , 20 November, column 11014–11017. Commonwealth Parliament of Australia. 1998. House of Representatives Parliamentary Debates, official Hansard , 24 March, column 1468–1469. Commonwealth Parliament of Australia. 2016. Senate Parliamentary Debates, official Hansard , 14 September, column 937–941. Commonwealth Parliament of Australia. 2017a. Senate Parliamentary Debates, official Hansard , 17 August, column 6024–6027. Commonwealth Parliament of Australia. 2017b. Senate Parliamentary Debates, official Hansard , 27 November, column 8913. Commonwealth Parliament of Australia. 2018. Senate Parliamentary Debates, official Hansard , 10 May, column 2966–2967. Curran, Giorel. 2004. “Mainstreaming Populist Discourse: The RaceConscious Legacy of Neo-Populist Parties in Australia and Italy.” Patterns of Prejudice 38 (1): 37–55.

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Department of the Environment and Energy. 2018. “Agenda 21—Sustainable Development.” Accessed November 6, 2018. http://www.environment.gov. au/system/files/resources/4c38f8b4-da1f-409e-8ad6-c3c6246001fd/files/age nda21.pdf. Deutchman, Iva Ellen. 2000. “Pauline Hanson and the Rise and Fall of the Radical Right in Australia.” Patterns of Prejudice 34 (1): 49–62. Dorling, Philip. 2017. The American Far-Right Origins of Pauline Hanson’s Views on Islam: Investigating One Nation’s Thinking. Canberra: The Australia Institute. Frick, Karen, David Weinzimmer, and Paul Waddell. 2014. “The Politics of Sustainable Development Opposition: State Legislative Efforts to Stop the United Nation’s Agenda 21 in the United States.” Urban Studies 52 (2): 209–232. Gibson, Rachel, Ian McAllister, and Tami Swenson. 2002. “The Politics of Race and Immigration in Australia: One Nation Voting in the 1998 Election.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25 (5): 823–844. Goot, Murray. 2005. “Pauline Hanson’s One Nation: Extreme Right, Centre Party or Extreme Left?” Labour History 89: 101–119. Hanson, Pauline. 2018a. “Pauline Back at the Wheel.” In Pauline: In Her Own Words, edited by Pauline Hanson and Tom Ravlic, 37–44. Melbourne: Wilkinson Publishing. Hanson, Pauline. 2018b. “Address to the Reclaim Australia Rally.” In Pauline: In Her Own Words, edited by Pauline Hanson and Tom Ravlic, 45–52. Melbourne: Wilkinson Publishing. Hanson, Pauline, and Tom Ravlic. 2018. Pauline: In Her Own Words. Melbourne: Wilkinson Publishing. Harman, Greg. 2015. “Agenda 21: A Conspiracy Theory Puts Sustainability in the Crosshairs.” Guardian, June 25. Accessed February 4, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jun/24/age nda-21-conspiracy-theory-sustainability. Hogan, Jackie, and Kristin Haltinner. 2015. “Floods, Invaders, and Parasites: Immigration Threat Narratives and Right-Wing Populism in the USA, UK and Australia.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 36 (5): 520–543. Howarth, David, and Yannis Stavrakakis. 2000. “Introducing discourse theory and political analysis.” In Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, edited by David Howarth, Aletta Norval, and Yannis Stavrakakis, 1–23. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Jagers, Jan, and Stefaan Walgrave. 2007. “Populism as Political Communication Style: An Empirical Study of Political Parties’ Discourse in Belgium.” European Journal of Political Research 46: 319–345. Jorgensen, Marianne, and Louise Phillips. 2002. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method . London: Sage. Lanham, Richard. 1991. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marr, David. 2017. The White Queen: One Nation and the Politics of Race. Quarterly Essay 65: 1–102. Mudde, Cas. 2004. The Populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition 39 (4): 541–563. Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Kaltwasser. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Pelinka, Anton. 2013. “Right-wing Populism: Concept and Typology.” In Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse, edited by Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosravNik, and Brigitte Mral, 3–22. London: Bloomsbury. Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1969. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Scalmer, Sean. 1999. “The Production of a Founding Event: The Case of Pauline Hanson’s Maiden Parliamentary Speech.” Theory and Event 3 (2). Schiappa, Edward. 1993. “Arguing About Definitions.” Argumentation 7: 403– 417. Silva Rhetoricae. 2007. “Chronographia.” Accessed June 16, 2018. http://rhe toric.byu.edu. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2017. “Discourse Theory in Populism Research.” Journal of Language and Politics 16 (4): 523–534. Walton, Douglas, and Fabrizio Macagno. 2015. “The Importance and Trickiness of Definition Strategies in Legal and Political Argumentation.” Journal of Politics and Law 8 (1): 137–148. Wodak, Ruth. 2014. “It Would be Dangerous to View Modern European Populism as a Triumph of Style Over Substance.” The London School of Economics and Political Science: European Politics and Policy Blog, July 23. Accessed August 26, 2018. http://bit.ly/1rAYa8s. Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Wodak, Ruth. 2017. “The ‘Establishment’, the ‘Elites’, and the ‘People’.” Journal of Language and Politics 16 (4): 551–565. Zarefsky, David. 2004. “Presidential Rhetoric and the Power of Definition.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34 (3): 607–619.

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Zarefsky, David, Carol Miller-Tutzauer, and Frank Tutzauer. 1984. “Reagan’s Safety Net for the Truly Needy: The Rhetorical Uses of Definition.” Communication Studies 35 (2): 113–119.

Ben Fenton-Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He has a Master of Applied Linguistics and PhD, both from Macquarie University. His teaching and research interests extend to discourse analysis (particularly the language of politics), TESOL, and international education. He has published in journals such as Discourse and Society, Journal of Language and Politics, Studies in Higher Education, and Journal of English for Academic Purposes.

Part VI Populist Discourse Across the Political Spectrum

14 Caught Between Populism, Elitism, and Pluralism: A Method for Political Discourse Analysis Carola Schoor

Introduction This chapter presents a multidimensional approach to populism. It defines populism in three interrelated dimensions—the ideational, the social, and the presentational—and in direct relation to the concepts of elitism and pluralism. With this relative definition of populism, elitism, and pluralism, all political discourse can be assessed—hence mainstream political styles as well. The cohesion between the three concepts and dimensions follows a strict logic. • In the ideational dimension (the level of discourse structure), the opposition is between “regarding the people as a heterogeneous group” (pluralism) or not (populism and elitism). • In the social realm, the core opposition is between “power to the elite” (elitism) or not (populism and pluralism). C. Schoor (B) Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_14

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• In the presentational realm (the level of discourse use), the core opposition is between “identifying with the people” (populism) or not (elitism and pluralism). This logic entails that two styles easily blend, but that a mix of three styles in one dimension (populism, elitism, and pluralism) inevitably contains logical contradictions. The approach is explained in the next three sections and applied in an analysis of speeches in sections thereafter. The last section contains more general conclusions and a discussion.

A Multidimensional Approach The multidimensional approach to populism partly draws on the discourse approach to ideology of van Dijk (1998, 2013). Van Dijk’s approach to ideology is primarily functional : he focuses on the role ideologies play in society. Where Freeden’s (1996) conceptual approach to ideology defines it as a constellation of concepts, van Dijk defines ideology in its function of structuring group behaviour and discourse. Ideology’s functional structure is based on topics such as group membership, activities, goals, norms and values, group relations, and recourses (van Dijk 1998: 69–70; 2013: 178). Different ideologies vary in their core functions. The topics describe the overall self-image of the group and its relations to other groups. Table 14.1 compares this functional structure of ideology with populism. The comparison shows that populism’s core directly refers to this structure without further specifying it; populism mainly takes the functional structure of an ideology without adding content, as the latter differs according to context. As already observed by many others, populism is conceptually too scrawny to be an ideology, not even a thin one (Moffitt and Tormey 2014; Aslanidis 2016; Freeden 2017). Nevertheless, it discursively takes over the function of an ideology by labelling the in-group as “the good people” and the out-group as “the corrupt elite”. This interpretation neatly fits Freeden’s characterisation of populism as a “phantom ideology” (2017).

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Table 14.1 The cognitive-functional structure of ideologies (van Dijk 1998: 69– 70; 2013: 178), applied to populism Cognitive functional structure of ideologies, based on:

Populism

Topics

Questions

Answers

Membership

Who are we? Who belongs to us? Who is a member and who can join?

We are the people. The elite and others are not. Who the people and the others are differs per context.

Activities

What do we (have to) do? What is our role in society?

We want change. What kind of change differs per context.

Goals

What is the goal of our activities?

We want change because others/the elite are corrupt. Which action differs per context.

Norms and values

What are the norms of our activities? What is good or bad for us?

The people are good. The others are not. Main values and what should (not) be done differs per context.

Group relations

Who are our friends and who are our enemies?

The people are our friends; the others are not. The people and the others differ per context.

Resources

What material or symbolic resources form the basis of our (lack of) power and our position in society?

We don’t have power/we are the underdog. The others have power/are the elite or protected by them. Which resources are required differs per context.

In van Dijk’s theory, ideology functions as a socially shared mental interface between group discourse and group action. According to van Dijk, ideology comprises three levels: (1) cognitive, (2) group, and (3) discourse dimension (1998: 53–58; 2013). In a poststructuralist understanding of the social world as constructed in discourse, this can be interpreted as (1) the mental discourse structure, expressed in (2) social actions, and in (3) discourse use.

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For populism to have an ideological function it has to encompass van Dijk’s three ideological dimensions. To avoid the confusing opposition between “cognition” and “discourse” (as, in a poststructuralist interpretation, both are part of discourse) I named the three dimensions: 1. the ideational dimension, referring to the mental discourse structure; 2. the social dimension, referring to the social praxis; and 3. the presentational dimension, referring to discourse use.

Semiotic Analysis A semiotic analysis of the concept of populism in relation to pluralism and elitism shows how the three dimensions interact in populism. It reveals a logical structure tightly connecting populism to elitism and pluralism. This section provides an overview of these connections (more elaborately described in Schoor [2020]). The ideational dimension is depicted in the lower triangle of Fig. 14.1. In this realm, populism unites with elitism: although populism values the people as “pure” and elitism values them as “amoral”, both concepts regard “the people” as one group. In this shared feature, the two concepts together are the opposite of pluralism, which views “the people” as multiple groups and individuals. As separate concepts, populism and elitism only partly oppose pluralism; the two upper triangles in Fig. 14.1 show that they also share important features with pluralism. It is only in their commonalities that populism and elitism completely contradict pluralism. The anti-style of pluralism is, therefore, to be found in the common features of populism and elitism. This anti-style is defined as the negation of pluralism, hence as “non-heterogeneous”. This is broader than “homogeneous”; it can also be a united group that presents itself as “one”. The social dimension is depicted in the upper left triangle of Fig. 14.1. In this dimension, populism unites with pluralism: in both concepts, politicians are part of “the people”, regardless of whether the people are a heterogeneous group or not. This common feature is the direct opposite of elitism, where politicians are part of the elite. Whereas populism and

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Fig. 14.1 The concepts of populism, elitism, and pluralism have altering relationships in three dimensions, with shifting oppositions and coalitions

pluralism both demand “no power to the elite”, in elitism, power naturally belongs to the elite. Hence, in the social realm, the shared features of populism and pluralism can be regarded as the anti-style of elitism. This anti-style is defined as the negation of elitism, hence as “no power to the elite”. This can mean “power to the people” or “no power to one group alone”. The presentational dimension is depicted in the upper right triangle of Fig. 14.1. Here, the shared features of elitism and pluralism are the anti-style of populism. Whereas the populist leader identifies with “the people” and claims to have an unmediated relationship with them, elitist and pluralist politicians have a mediated relationship with the people; they do not identify with the people, they represent them. In populism, leaders act as if mediation is not required because the populist and the people are one and the same. Obviously, in reality, populists abundantly communicate with the people, but in their communication, they speak directly for the people, being “the voice of the people”. This anti-style is

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defined as the negation of populism, hence as “no identification with the people”. The three dimensions of Fig. 14.1 broadly match the categorization into three main approaches to populism (Kaltwasser et al. 2017, see also Kranert, Chapter 1 in this volume). The oppositions associated with the ideational dimension mainly match Mudde’s (2004, 2017) view on populism; Mudde describes elitism as populism’s mirror image, while populism and elitism together oppose pluralism. The oppositions in the presentational dimension mainly correspond to Weyland’s (2017) “political-strategic” approach; Weyland’s “populist twist” refers to the identification of the populist with the people. Other approaches mix dimensions. For instance, on the one hand, Laclau (2005) looks at the phenomenon through the social frame, as anti-elitism. On the other hand, he looks at populism using the presentational frame, seeing it as metaphorically equalising societal demands with the empty signifier of “the people”. Also, Ostiguy’s (2017) socio-cultural approach refers to the social dimension and to the presentational dimension. The question relevant to populism research is: how do these dimensions interact? The previous section already mentioned that the ideational realm can be regarded as the mental interface between the other two realms. However, it cannot be reduced to the other two realms, although it can only be assessed through them. More concretely: 1. In the presentational realm (discourse use), all expressions contain ideas and acts; however, not all ideas or social practices are expressed. 2. In the social realm (social praxis), practices are based on ideas, but not all ideas are acted on. 3. In the ideational realm (discourse system), ideas can exist without being expressed; however, they are only revealed through discourse use and social praxis. This closes the circle of the three realms and makes them indivisible as a study object. The semiotic analysis confirms that the ideational realm is a separate level; a reduction of levels entails that populism contradicts itself, as in one dimension it is aligned with elitism against pluralism and in the other dimensions it does the opposite. This would make populism

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an inherently contradictory concept, while it is perfectly logical at the three levels separately. Given their entanglement, the three dimensions in Fig. 14.1 can be combined into one framework that encompasses the three connected realms of the political styles, as described in Table 14.2. One style always combines two non-unique features in a unique way. Therefore, not the specific features make the style unique; it is the specific combination of features, as follows: – Populism regards “the people” as one body and their leader as part of that body. This implies that this leader has unmediated knowledge of the people because the group is seen as “one,” which entails that the leader is identical with the people. This does not have to be a nativist homogeneous people; it just has to be homogenised enough to present the members of this group as being essentially the same. – Elitism regards “the people” as one homogenised group, while their leader has a mediated relationship with the people. This implies that elitist politicians are not part of the people, because if they were, they would have had unmediated knowledge of the people, since in a homogenised group all people are essentially the same. – Pluralist leaders are part of the people but do not claim to have unmediated knowledge of the people. This implies that “the people” Table 14.2

Main features of populism, elitism, and pluralism in one framework Populism

Elitism

Pluralism

Ideational

The people as one group (Nonheterogeneous)

The people as one group (Nonheterogeneous)

The people as multiple groups (Heterogeneous)

Social

Politicians as part of the people (No power to the elite)

Politicians as part of the elite (Power to the elite)

Politicians as part of the people (No power to the elite)

Representing the people (No identification)

Representing the people (No identification)

Presentational Being the people (Identification)

Bold: unique feature | Regular: shared feature | Two features of one style always imply the third, in every order.

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are not all the same; they are an assemblage of multiple groups and individuals. The connection between populism, elitism, and pluralism can be depicted in a triangular framework, as in Fig. 14.2. The unique (bold) features of Table 14.2 are transposed to the corners of the triangle: they represent the “pure” styles: elitism, populism, and pluralism. The shared features of Table 14.2 are transposed to the sides of the triangle: they represent the mixed styles. The triangular framework also displays the oppositions between the shared features (the sides) and unique features (the corners): these are depicted in the arrows in the middle of the triangle. The arrows depict the dimensions in which these oppositions occur.

Fig. 14.2

The triangular relationship between populism, elitism, and pluralism

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A Method for Analysis of Speeches The framework explained in the previous section is applied to a speech analysis method that captures political styles as expressed in elitist, populist, and pluralist features. For the definition of “political style” I built on the aforementioned multidimensional approach of van Dijk (1998), alongside style theories from diverse disciplines (Ankersmit 1996; Pels 2003; Giddens 1991; Coupland 2007), defining it as “the performance of politicians on the political front stage before an audience, encompassing three dimensions: ideational, social, and presentational.” Building on Wodak’s (2015) and Goffman’s (1956) analyses of the presentation of the (political) self, I deconstructed political style as consisting of five discursive elements related to the political stage (Schoor 2017). These elements are: (1) the people, (2) the elite, (3) democracy/government, (4) politics, and (5) the political context (Schoor 2017: 660–665). The labels “populism”, “elitism”, and “pluralism” can be applied to all five elements. For speech analysis, the broad descriptions of the style labels populism, elitism, and pluralism need specifications. Grouped around the five elements of the political stage, more detailed features are defined, based on additional semiotic analyses and on the existing literature on populism (e.g. Mudde 2017; Weyland 2017; Ostiguy 2017; Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017), elitism (Mackie 2009; Schumpeter 2008), and pluralism (Blokland 2011). The fifteen sub-features are described in Fig. 14.3. The framework of Fig. 14.3 captures populism as a relative matter: nothing is populist in itself; something is populist, elitist, or pluralist only in relation to the other styles and anti-styles, implying that discourse can be “more” or “less” populist, elitist, or pluralist. It forms the core of a digital analysis instrument, the PEP index 2.0, an acronym of populism, elitism and pluralism. The instrument is an adaption of an analysis method described in Schoor (2017), adopting the triangular logic, which precisely defines what populism is and what populism is not. This allows the construction of an unambiguous analysis instrument to assess whether or not speech fragments are populist, elitist, or pluralist. With the features in Fig. 14.3, speeches of all politicians— populist or not—can be analysed for the political style of the fifteen described sub-elements.

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Fig. 14.3 Descriptions of political styles and anti-styles in five elements and three dimensions

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Analysis In the following sections, the political performances of nine politicians in three countries (the US, the UK, and The Netherlands) are analysed and compared. Besides political speeches, contributions to (broadcast) political debates are also analysed. The analysed performances are listed in Appendix A. Quotations in the following sections refer to the numbers in the Appendix. In order to get a better view at different manifestations of populism, politicians were chosen who are in the literature regarded as populist to some extent; some are uncontestably seen as populist, others’ populism is contested. As the analysis model is based on the language structure underlying populism, and not on manifestations of populism, the analysis can shed light on these contestations. It can reveal whether these apparent populisms align with the structural-linguistic definition of populism in this chapter. Figure 14.4 gives an example of how speeches are coded with the help of the model depicted in Fig. 14.3. It displays a fragment of the 2016 Brexit speech of Boris Johnson (Appendix A, speech 9). The example illustrates that the same sentence can contain different styles. For instance, in the displayed fragment Johnson speaks as part of the elite and not of the people. This is elitist at the social dimension of “the

Fig. 14.4 An example of a coded speech, here a fragment of the Brexit speech of Boris Johnson in 2016

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people” [1S-EL] and “the elite” [2S-EL]. At the same time, he criticises the elite, which is populist or pluralist at the ideational dimension of “the elite” [2I-POPL]. The codes are listed and explained in Fig. 14.4 and refer to the features in Fig. 14.3. After coding the speech, the PEP index (using FilemakerPro software) assembles all coded fragments for each sub-element to allow the analyst to assess the overall style of this sub-element. An advantage of assessing the fifteen sub-styles individually is that the average score can be analysed thoroughly, as all fragments are analysed at least twice.1 Also, the separate sub-scores provide insight into the rationale behind the scores. The overall scores of the analyses are plotted on a triangular framework visualising the relationship between populism, elitism, and pluralism, as displayed in Fig. 14.5. The full analyses are too extensive to display; the following sections will instead discuss fragments that illustrate the overall score. The sub-scores of the nine politicians are displayed in Appendix B.

Who Is the “Real” US Populist? The 2016 US primary elections were selected for this analysis because two of their participants, Donald Trump (Republican) and Bernie Sanders (Democrat), are generally regarded as populists (Kazin 2016). Additionally, Barack Obama (Democrat) is included. Although he is mostly not regarded as a populist, he was chosen because he claimed to be the “real” populist instead of Trump (2, 01: 10: 44). The analysis will show in which dimension this claim is grounded and where the political styles of Obama, Trump, and Sanders meet. Speeches of these three politicians (listed in Appendix A) were analysed and compared.2 The results of the speech analyses are depicted in Fig. 14.5 and the separate sub-scores in Appendix B.

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Fig. 14.5 The political styles of nine politicians plotted on a triangular field, capturing them as having a mix of populist, elitist, and pluralist style elements (The sub-scores on which the scores are based are provided in Appendix B)

Obama In the analysed speech, Obama spoke from a government position, which lends itself less to a populist style. All the same, in the analysed speech he claimed to be “populist”. The speech analysis assessed how much this was indeed his style at this moment. In the speech, he mostly spoke of “the people” as an assemblage of different groups and individuals. The people are united but are not one homogeneous group, which is ideationally pluralist:

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(1) I see Americans of every party, every background, every faith who believe that we are stronger together—black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American; young, old; gay, straight; men, women, folks with disabilities [1I-PL], all pledging allegiance, under the same proud flag, to this big, bold country that we [1S-POPL] love. (1, 12: 03)

Speaking of the people as “we” reveals that Obama sees himself as part of the people, which is socially populist or pluralist: (2) We’re not a fragile people. We’re not a frightful people [1S-POPL]. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared saviour promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don’t look to be ruled [1S-PO][1P-PO][1I-PL]. (1, 25: 35)

The phrase “We don’t look to be ruled” speaks of a “we” in which Obama and the people are “one” against an authoritarian ruler (Trump). Obama speaks directly for the people here, claiming to know that the people do not want to be ruled; this is presentationally populist. Also, it implies that Obama and the people are currently ruling themselves, when in fact Obama rules the people. This is an evident example of the “populist twist”, in which the leader and the people are depicted as identical, which is also populist in the presentational realm. However, this twist only occurs when Obama defends his (threatened) pluralist values against Trump because in populism, an authoritarian ruler is accepted if they are “one of us”, but in pluralism, authoritarianism is never right. Hence, this trait is pluralist at the ideational level. Additionally, Obama expresses elitist elements, speaking of the political elite (Hillary Clinton) as good and of the political context (his own policies) as being in progress. In both elements, he combines this elitism with pluralism, because he also advocates change and says that politicians should do better. The subscores (Appendix B) show that, overall, the pluralist label fits Obama best.

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Trump Trump’s analysed speeches (3 and 4) show that he has a full populist style in all dimensions.3 For Trump, the people are ideationally “one”, he is socially “one of us”, and speaks directly for “us” in the presentational realm. All three features are visible in this quote: (3) You see it really in the whole fabric of the community and what are New York values? Honesty and straight-talking. [1I-PO] A lot of times people say, oh, you tell it too straight Mister Trump. I think that is what we like [1S-PO]. That you think? You see it in our work ethic. We work hard and we are proud. You see it in our family values … We are builders. We make things [1P-PO]. (3, 20: 30)

Trump uses the “populist twist” abundantly, speaking directly for the people as if he “is” the people. He regularly shouts, together with his audience, “Build that wall, build that wall, build that wall” and then replies to the public and himself that he is going to build it. This speaking “as one voice” belongs to the presentational dimension of populism.

Sanders Sanders’s analysed speeches (5 and 6) show a pluralist ideational style regarding the people, close to Obama’s. Both view the people as consisting of multiple groups: (4) What this campaign is about, is the understanding that when we stand together, black, and white, and Latino and Asian American, and Native American. When we do not allow the Donald Trumps of the world to divide us up, there is nothing we cannot accomplish [1I-PL]. (5, 1: 17: 00)

However, Sanders’s style meets Trump’s in his populist definition of the elite as one corrupt group. This makes his ideational political style mixed populist-pluralist. Socially, Sanders is part of the people, which is also mixed populist-pluralist. Presentationally, Sanders communicates with

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the people, which is pluralist. However, he also often performs the “populist twist”, speaking directly for the people. He even plays with that, letting the people end his sentences: (5) What people say, they say “Hey Bernie, you’re thinking too biiiig” (accent). Your ideas are just, just …[crowd yelling “Huuuuge”] (Sanders laughing). Yes, your ideas are too Huuuuuuge … I don’t think so [1PPO]. (5, 1: 57: 30)

Conclusion In Fig. 14.5, the dimensions of populist styles can be derived from their position in the triangular framework. At the level of sub-scores, the three dimensions are too entangled to get a clear view. However, because populism’s meaning differs in each dimension, it can be discerned looking at the overall score. A position near the anti-elite axis means that populism is socially enacted, whereas a position near the anti-pluralist axis tells us that populism is ideationally imagined. A position in the populist corner means that it is, besides the above, also presented in a populist way. Hence, while Sanders, Trump, and Obama are all populist if solely looked at within a social frame (i.e., anti-elitist), only Trump is a populist in all three dimensions (social, ideational, and presentational). Sanders is populist in a social frame and mixed populist-pluralist in the presentational and ideational dimension. Obama is only populist in a social frame and, partly, in the presentational realm.

Three Kinds of Populism in the UK The Brexit campaign is relevant to an investigation into populist styles because it is broadly recognised that populism played a role in the voting to leave the EU (e.g., Inglehart and Norris 2016; Freeden 2017). This section assesses the amount of populism, based on a structural-linguistic definition of populism explained in the third section, present in speeches held during and after the UK Brexit campaign in 2016 and 2017: of

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Nigel Farage (UKIP), Boris Johnson (Conservative Party), and Jeremy Corbyn (Labour Party, see also Demata, Chapter 10 in this volume). Whereas the first two politicians campaigned to leave the EU, the latter canvassed to remain, albeit reluctantly. However, all three are said to have used populist strategies (Mouffe 2018). The political styles of UK politicians analysed here are each based on a Brexit speech for a broad audience held in 2016 and a post-Brexit speech held in 2017 for party members or similar groups.4 The results of the analyses are depicted in Fig. 14.5 and the sub-scores in Appendix B. The styles of the speeches during and after the Brexit campaign differed from each other but the general position in the triangular framework stays within the same range: Johnson’s style can be characterised as mixed populist-elitist, Corbyn’s style as mixed populist-pluralist, and Farage’s style as fully populist.5

Farage Farage’s populist style is expressed in the combination of seeing the people as one homogeneous group—the “pure people who know what is right”—and Farage being part of that group, knowing what is right and what “the people” feel and want, as visible in this quote: (6) We have given away our basic rights, our basic freedoms, our basic concept of parliamentary democracy [1S-PO][1P-PO][3I-PO]. All of that has been sold and given away on a lie that unless we’re part of this club that they won’t do business with us [2I-PO][3I-PO]. Not only we will do business with that club, but we will also remember, once we’ve left, who we are as a people [1I-PO], and who our friends are around the world. (7, 00: 09: 14)

Farage is clearly anti-elite, as he mocks others for their elite background. He presents himself as part of the common people—which is populist or pluralist—displaying his common background: working as a trader and with a mother who is proud that her son appears at a famous stage:

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(7) My mum’s really proud I’ve appeared at the Palladium you know [1S-POPL]. (7, 00: 02: 30) (8) And unlike Clegg and Blair and Cameron and Mandelson and all of them, unlike all of them, who’ve come straight from university into research into politics and never done a proper day’s work in their lives. Unlike them, unlike them, I’ve spent twenty years working in global trading business [2S-PO][2I-PO][1S-POPL]. (7, 00: 06: 50)

In the end, his membership of the people is assessed as populist and not pluralist because he excludes “others” from belonging to the people, as in this quote: (9) So the point is that open-door immigration, even to those who are not really particularly interested in politics, or self-government, or sovereignty, every one of us [1S-PO] can see how fundamentally society has changed over the course of the last twelve years. (7, 00: 20: 30)

Johnson Johnson’s speeches (9 and 10) display him as an obvious part of the elite, flaunting his aristocratic background in response to accusations that he was a liberal cosmopolitan and “had no right to vote ‘leave’”: (10) I am a child of Europe. I am, as I say, a liberal cosmopolitan. My family is genetically equivalent to a UN peacekeeping force. I can read novels in French, I can even read a novel in Spanish, I can sing the “Ode to Joy” in German [someone in the public shouts: do it then]. I will, and if they keep accusing me of being a Little Englander, I will. [Starts singing] “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” [2S-EL][2P-EL]. (9, 00: 34: 27)

In both speeches analysed, Johnson refers to the people as “they”; a homogeneous group that he is not a part of. In the speech to the Conservative Party, he even speaks of the people as an animal (a lion, the symbol of England) and himself as the lion tamer, which can be regarded as exceptionally elitist:

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(11) We are not the lion. We do not claim, like some others, to be the lion. That role is played by the people of this country. But it is up to us now—in the traditional non-threatening, and genial, self-deprecating way of the British—to let that lion roar [1S-EL][2S-EL]. (10, 28: 01)

However, there are also many populist elements in Johnson’s speeches, such as attacking the European elite, viewing current democracy as unfair, using a polarising style, and regarding the political context as being in crisis: (13) The independence of this country is being seriously compromised. It is this fundamental democratic problem—this erosion of democracy— that brings me into this fight [3I-PO][4I-PO][4P-PO]. (9, 00: 04: 37) (14) We were told that we would be able to stop the Eurozone countries from using the EU institutions to create a fiscal and political union. We got nothing; instead, we gave up our veto [2I-PO]. (9, 00: 11: 13)

His Brexit speech contains more populist elements than his postBrexit speech, which can be explained by a different audience but also suggesting that populism is used as a political-strategic instrument to mobilise the people. This is populist in the presentational realm. However, even though Johnson often uses populist, polarising language, he never says that he and the people are one. He speaks of “we Britain”, referring to “the people” and “the elite” together forming a coalition against the “other”, European elite.6 In this sense, Johnson is mixed populist-elitist or anti-pluralist.

Corbyn Johnson’s and Farage’s anti-pluralism is directly opposed to the style of the third British politician analysed: former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. He sees the people as different groups and individuals:

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(15) And Labour was the party of unity, bringing generations and communities together, rather than pitting young and old against each other, as the Tories did [1I-PL]. (12, 17: 20)

In this quote, Corbyn recognises the differences between generations and communities, signifying that they are not “one” by nature but need to be “united.” This entails that Corbyn does regard the people as a heterogeneous group; he is pluralist in the ideational dimension of element (1), “the people”. The following quote shows that he sees himself as part of the people, which is populist or pluralist in the social dimension of element (1), “the people”: (16) My principles come from my mum and dad and the way they brought me up and the principles they gave me. They come from my family, they come from the community I live in and I am very proud to represent in Finsbury Park. They are my roots and they ground everything I do [1S-POPL]. (12, 2017, 13: 10)

Corbyn does not only cast himself as part of the people but is also accusatory towards the elite, associating them with “oligarchs”. This is populist in the social dimension of element (1), “the people”, and at the ideational dimension of (2), “the elite”: (17) Left to themselves, it is clear what the main Vote Leave vision is for Britain: to be the safe haven of choice for the ill-gotten gains of every dodgy oligarch, dictator or rogue corporation [2I-PO] [1S-PO]. (11, 12: 37)

Corbyn’s style during the Brexit campaign is, other than Johnson’s, slightly less populist than afterwards. This is mostly due to the difference between defending the status quo and the political elite during the Remain campaign and attacking the government and proclaiming a crisis in 2017. Overall, Corbyn’s style is socially populist and presentationally and ideationally mixed populist-pluralist. His style comes close to Sanders’s style but is slightly less populist, mostly as a result of his defence of the status quo during the Remain campaign: his post-Brexit speech has almost the same overall score as Sanders’s.

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Conclusion While Johnson, Corbyn, and Farage are all populist in their own way, they are so in different dimensions. As visualised in Fig. 14.5, Johnson combines populism with elitism. He is mainly anti-pluralist. This is populist in the ideational dimension. Corbyn, on the other hand, combines populism with pluralism. He is mainly anti-elitist. This is populism in the social dimension. Farage combines both variants of populism. He is both anti-pluralist and anti-elitist. This makes him fully populist in three dimensions. Apart from being socially and ideationally a populist, Farage is also fully populist in the presentational dimension, in which he speaks as if he “is” the people. In this dimension, Corbyn and Johnson are only partly populist—using populist language without directly speaking for the people.

Three Full Populists in The Netherlands In The Netherlands, there is a long tradition of two kinds of populism: right-wing populism of the Freedom Party (PVV) and left-wing populism of the Socialist Party (SP) (Lucardie 2008). Recently, a second right-wing populist party has entered the political stage: the Forum for Democracy (FvD). Speeches of the three populist leaders during the 2017 elections (Geert Wilders–PVV, Emile Roemer–SP, and Thierry Baudet–FvD) are analysed to compare their populisms (see Appendix A). The three political styles, depicted in Fig. 14.5 and in Appendix B, all score within the “full” populist range of the triangle of Fig. 14.5. Still, there are differences.

Wilders Wilders scores as being most populist of the three. He combines his perception of the people as one homogeneous group (ideational populism) with his membership and allegiance to that group (social

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populism) into a full populist style, including being the people’s voice (presentational populism): (18) My friends, this year will be the year of the people! The year in which the voice of the people is finally heard7 [1S-PO][1P-PO][1I-PO]. (14, 20: 10) (19) Netherlands doesn’t fall for this. … The people don’t believe that this government wants the best for the Netherlands8 [1I-PO][1P-PO][2PPO][2S-PO]. (13, 40: 20)

Baudet The second politician analysed, Baudet, portrays himself as a conservative and a nationalist, bringing back “old” values and being proud of Dutch history and culture. He often agrees with Wilders’s standpoints but deems him too aggressive and uncooperative. Although Baudet’s style is clearly populist and very much against the current political elite, the speech analysis shows that he does not endorse anti-elitism: Baudet is even building “a new elite,” which means that he is only opposed to the current group holding power, which he calls “the party cartel”: (20) We are going to train a new elite; we are going to replace and defeat the current leaders9 [3I-EL][2I-PO][5S-PO]. (15, 10: 38)

The speech analysis locates him on the anti-pluralism side of the triange. Baudet combines fully ideational populism (seeing the people as one good, homogeneous group) with partially social populism (being a member of the people and the elite) and a fully populist presentation style (the populist twist of being the people and of speaking on behalf of the people). The latter is visible in this quote, in which the “us” refers to Baudet and the people together as “one” against the political elite: (21) “Politics” don’t trust us anymore. “Politics” have the idea that the moment that we get a say in anything, we would take the most idiotic decisions10 [2I-PO][3I-PO]. (16, 11.40)

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Roemers The style of the third Dutch politician analysed, the socialist Roemer, is positioned on the anti-elitist side of the triangular framework of Fig. 14.5. Socially, Roemer is a populist, denouncing the elite as “wrong”. Ideationally, however, Roemer is a pluralist in his definition of “the people”: he sees the people as consisting of multiple groups and individuals. He is, nevertheless, populist in his definition of “the elite” as corrupt. Presentationally, he speaks in the language of the people about “what the people think and feel”, which is populist or pluralist. However, he does not say that all people want the same; only that “most people” do, which is mixed populist-pluralist. Hence, he expresses “the voice of the people” but does not become the people entirely: (22) But we also stood by the people working in healthcare, who were continually hit. At those moments, I stand beside them, for them, and with them, in parliament to make sure that the voice of the street is heard here too11 [1P-PL][1S-PL][3S-PL]. (19, 00: 46: 00)

Conclusion The three Dutch populist politicians all have a fully populist style. Nevertheless, this gives room to express three different political voices. Wilders is fully populist in all three dimensions. Baudet is fully populist in the ideational and presentational dimension; in the social dimension he is mixed populist-elitist. Roemer is fully populist in the social dimension, but in the presentational and ideational realm, he is mixed populist-pluralist.

Discussion and Conclusion The triangular framework presented here captures political styles in a logical field that offers an unambiguous choice between what populism is and what it is not: non-populism is specifically defined as the shared features of elitism and pluralism. An advantage of this approach is that

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populist and non-populist political styles can be assessed as gradations of populism, pluralism, and elitism. In this way, all political discourse— mainstream or populist—can be compared. Most of the analysed styles in this chapter align with the literature: Wilders, Trump, Farage, and Roemer are assessed as populists, and Obama is not, which is in accordance with general assessments. Corbyn and Sanders, who’s populisms are contested (Maiguashca and Dean 2019; Müller 2016), are revealed as only partly populist: they mix populism with pluralism. Baudet, who is characterised as having populist ideas and an elite style (Rooduijn 2019) is exposed as having a mixed populist-elitist style. As I have analysed more profoundly elsewhere, this matches his nationalist ideology well (Schoor 2019). Johnson, who is often characterised as populist, is here revealed as mainly elitist with populist traits. This is in line with his elite image, and, for this reason, defensible. Overall, this model gives a detailed view of the analysed political styles and is able to explain why contested cases are not unanimously accepted as populist: mainly because they mix populism with either elitism or pluralism. In most of the times, the distinct sub-scores of the three dimensions (see Appendix B) come close to the overall score, indicating that the three dimensions are, indeed, too entangled to separate.12 This was to be expected, as they can only be known through each other. The distinct sub-scores of the five elements (see Appendix B) show a larger deviation from the overall score than the three dimensions, but not in a specific pattern. An explanation is that every political style consists of a unique combination of style elements that are influenced by personal and contextual factors, such as the background of a politician, the audience, or a referendum that is taking place. The analyses in this chapter suggest one emerging pattern particularly worthy of investigating further: the analysed left-wing populists (Sanders, Corbyn, and Roemers) are all situated on the populist-pluralist (antielitist) axis. This suggests that they mainly express populism in the social dimension: being part of “the people” and claiming power for the people. Additionally, right-wing populists (Johnson, Baudet) are situated on the elitist-populist (anti-pluralist) axis. They mainly express populism as an idea; that “the people” are a moral homogeneous group. Populists that

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combine left and right features (Trump, Farage, and Wilders) are close to the populist corner, combining the two axes. They express populism in all three dimensions: ideational, social, and presentational. Complementing this analysis with more (non-Western) countries would reveal whether this spread across the triangular framework is broadly visible. This would provide direction to discussions on whether exclusive politics is an immanent part of populism or whether it originates in ideologies populism is often combined with, such as nativism or nationalism (i.e., Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013; Stavrakakis and De Cleen 2017; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014, 2018). It goes beyond the scope of this article to discuss this in the depth it deserves. As emphasised by Mudde (2017), an empirically sound definition is crucial to researching populism. The logic behind this method offers a solid basis for analysis, with definitions based on clear yes-or-no answers that avoid “concept stretching” (Pappas 2016; Van Kessel 2014; Sartori 1970). The yes-or-no answers in the multidimensional approach do not claim that populism is always a clear-cut style; only that it is clear which part of a political style is populist and which part is not. For instance, Obama may have tried to redefine populism as caring about disadvantaged people in society; however, his reframing only applied to the social dimension of populism, and was, for this reason, only convincing for this part of populism. The analysis of the three dimensions of populism demonstrates that the overall label “pluralist” fits Obama much better. On the other hand, the boundary between mixed forms of populism, pluralism, and elitism is always a matter of framing. An important task of academics is to be mindful of these framings. The multidimensional approach presented in this article can be of help with that.

Notes 1. Ideally, this should be done by different analysts to cross-check the analysis. For practical reasons this is not always possible, in which case it is important to make the coding transparent by briefly justifying the codes. The latter method is followed in the present analysis, additional to an intra-rater reliability test by analysing the same texts multiple times.

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2. Trump’s and Sanders’s speech analyses are more elaborately described in Schoor (2017). These descriptions use an earlier version of the method and differ in detail. 3. A style counts as “full” populist with an average score of 67% or more populist styles on the fifteen style elements. 4. A political style is bound to the place and time of the speech held because the audience and content influences a style (which enables us to analyse style fluctuations over time, as I did with Boris Johnson in Schoor [2019]). 5. The differences between the 2016 and 2017 speeches are part of an ongoing investigation into style developments of British politicians from 2015 onwards, which will be reported on in a separate article at a later date. 6. More on this coalition between the people and the elite in Boris Johnson’s, Donald Trump’s, and Thierry Baudet’s political style in Schoor (2019). 7. Original in German: “Meine Freunde, dieses Jahr wird das Jahr des Volkes sein! Das Jahr, wo die Stimme des Volkes endlich gehört wird!” 8. Original in Dutch: “Nederland trapt daar niet in. … De mensen geloven niet dat het kabinet het goede met Nederland voor heeft.” 9. Original in Dutch: “We gaan een nieuwe elite opleiden; we gaan de huidige leiders vervangen en verslaan.” 10. Original in Dutch: “De politiek vertrouwt ons niet meer. De politiek heeft het idee dat zodra we ook maar iets te zeggen krijgen, de meest idiote beslissingen zouden nemen.” 11. Original in Dutch: “Maar we stonden ook aan de zijde van die mensen in de zorg die continu gepakt werden. Want dan sta ik naast hen, voor hen en met hen, in de Kamer om te zorgen dat het geluid van de straat hier te horen is.” 12. Only in the Brexit speeches are the dimension scores more spread, suggesting that the presentation in these speeches does match less with ideas and social dimension of the analysed styles of Johnson, Corbyn, and Farage. This can be an effect of the referendum, which yes–no structure apparently fosters a different presentation, but would need further investigation.

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Appendix A: Analysed Political Speeches The US: 1. Obama, B. “The Democratic Convention Speech,” Philadelphia, July 27, 2016. https://www.c-span.org/video/?412847-101/presidentobama-remarks-democratic-national-convention. 2. Obama, B. “Press conference,” Canada, June 29, 2016. https://oba mawhitehouse.archives.gov/photos-and-video/video/2016/06/29/pre sident-obama-participates-trilateral-press-conference. 3. Trump, D. “The Buffalo Rally,” Buffalo, April 18, 2016. https:// www.c-span.org/video/?408351-1/donald-trump-campaign-rally-buf falo-new-york. 4. Trump, D. “The Wilkes-Barre Rally,” Wilkes-Barre, April 23, 2016. https://www.c-span.org/video/?408686-1/donald-trump-campaignrally-wilkesbarre-pennsylvania. 5. Sanders, B. “The Washington Square Rally,” New York, April 13, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuNrdKP8UcY. 6. Sanders, B. “The Penn State Rally,” Pennsylvania, April 19, 2016. https://www.c-span.org/video/?408383-1/bernie-sanders-cam paign-rally-university-park-pennsylvania. The UK: 7. Farage, N. “The Peterborough Brexit Campaign Speech,” March 17, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDdDS2NZO14. 8. Farage, N. “The Conservative Political Activism Conference,” February 24, 2017. https://www.c-span.org/video/?424395-4/nigelfarage-2017-conservative-political-action-conference. 9. Johnson, B. “The 2016 Brexit Campaign Speech,” May 9, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ViQNeZRK3w. 10. Johnson, B. “The 2017 Conservative Party Conference Speech,” October 3, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMKURi CcUNI. 11. Corbyn, J. “The Brexit Remain campaign,” April 14, 2016. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6a2sEc-BWE.

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12. Corbyn, J. “Labor Conference Speech,” September 27, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKpCwTEJ77A. The Netherlands: 13. Wilders, G. “Parliamentary Speech,” The Hague, September 21, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-dq2xy80cs. 14. Wilders, G. “ENF Congress Speech,” Koblenz, January 21, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhEAB9dyUpU. 15. Baudet, T. “The Founding Speech,” Amsterdam, January 14, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Jvl RApuId-o. 16. Baudet, T. “The Rotterdam Rally,” Rotterdam, March 9, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuPSQOltuxI. 17. Baudet, T. “The Maiden Speech,” The Hague, March 28, 2017. https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/h-tk-20162017-609.html. 18. Roemer, E. “The Party Congressional Speech,” January 14, 2017. https://www.sp.nl/nieuws/2017/01/emile-roemer-we-makensp-groot-en-rutte-klein. 19. Roemer, E. “Final Election Television Debate,” March 14 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTQLq_9N1rU.

Appendix B: Sub-scores of the Analysed Speeches Sub-scores of the speeches listed in Appendix A, based on the analysis of separate elements (1—the people; 2—the elite; 3—democracy/government; 4—politics; and 5—the political context) at three levels: ideational, social, and presentational. Total scores express the average of the scores of the five elements in three dimensions (Table 14.3).

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Table 14.3

Sub-scores of the analysed speeches US Primaries, 2016 Dimensions

Elements 1

2

Obama, 2016, speech 1 1I Ideational

3

Styles (%) 4

5

pluralist

po

el

pl

13.3

6.6

80

10

80

pl

elpl

pl

popl

pl

10

1S Social

popl

pl

popl

pl

pl

20

1P Presentational

popl

pl

pl

pl

elpl

10

10

80

90

3.3

6.7

Trump, 2016, speeches 3 + 4 1I Ideational

populist popl

po

po

po

po

90

1S Social

po

poel

popl

po

po

80

1P Presentational

po

po

po

po

po

100

Sanders, 2016, speeches 5 + 6

populist/pluralist

80

10 10

10

56.6

53.3

1I Ideational

popl

po

popl

popl

popl

60

40

1S Social

popl

popl

pl

po

po

60

40

1P Presentational

popl

popl

pl

po

popl

50

50

(continued)

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C. Schoor

Table 14.3

(continued)

UK*

Brexit-campaign 2016

Dimensions

Elements 1

2

3

Styles (%) 4

5

Farage, speech 7: populist Ideational Social Presentational

po

10

po

po

po

po

90

po

po

po

po

100

popl

popl

po

po

popl

70

poel

po

po

poel

Elements pl 13.3

po

poel

el

86.7

popl

Johnson, speech 9: populist/elitist Ideational

Party Conferences 2017

2

3

Styles (%) 4

5

Farage, speech 8: populist

po

el

pl

100

po

po

po

po

po

100

po

po

po

po

po

100

30

po

po

po

po

po

100

63.3

30

6.7

Johnson, speech 10: elitist/populist

30

70

80

15

5

el

poel

poel

poel

30

70

el

el

poel

poel

el

20

80

poel

el

poel

poel

poel

40

60

Corbyn, speech 12: populist/pluralist

60

40 40

Social

poel

poel

poel

po

poel

60

40

Presentational

poel

poel

popl

po

popl

60

20

20

30

3.3

66.7

10

Corbyn, speech 11: pluralist/populist

1

el

Ideational

pl

po

po

elpl

popl

50

40

pl

po

popl

popl

po

60

Social

pl

popl

pl

pl

popl

20

80

po

po

popl

popl

po

80

20

Presentational

pl

popl

pl

popl

pl

20

80

pl

po

pl

popl

popl

40

60

* The average score of the speeches held in 2016 and 2017 is depicted in Fig. 14.5

(continued)

399

14 Caught Between Populism, Elitism, and Pluralism …

Table 14.3

(continued) Dutch National Elections 2017 Dimensions

Elements 1

2

Wilders, speeches 13 + 14

3

Styles (%) 4

5

populist

po 96.7

Ideational

po

po

po

po

po

100

Social

po

po

po

po

po

100

Presentational

po

po

po

po

popl

90

Baudet 2017, speeches 15, 16, 17 Ideational

el

populist/elitist

3.3

10

70

30

po

poel

po

poel

po

80

20

Social

poel

poel

po

poel

po

70

30

Presentational

poel

poel

poel

poel

po

60

40

Roemer 2017, speeches 18 + 19

populist/pluralist

pl

70

30

Ideational

pl

popl

po

popl

po

60

40

Social

pl

po

po

po

po

80

20

popl

po

pl

po

po

70

30

Presentational

400

C. Schoor

References Ankersmit, Frank. 1996. Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Aslanidis, Paris. 2016. “Is Populism an Ideology? A Refutation and a New Perspective.” Political Studies 64 (1S): 88–104. Blokland, Hans. 2011. Pluralism, Democracy and Political Knowledge. Farnham: Ashgate. Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Freeden, Michael. 1996. Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freeden, Michael. 2017. “After the Brexit Referendum: Revisiting Populism as an Ideology.” Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (1): 1–11. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. 2016. “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash.” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP16-026. Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/trump-brexitand-rise-populism-economic-have-nots-and-cultural-backlash. Kazin, Michael. 2016. “How Can Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Both Be ‘Populist’?” New York Times, March 22. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/ 03/27/magazine/how-can-donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders-both-be-pop ulist.html. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Lucardie, Paul. 2008. “The Netherlands: Populism Versus Pillarization.” In Twenty-First Century Populism. The Spectre of Western European Democracy, edited by Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnel, 151–165. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mackie, Gerry. 2009. “Schumpeter’s Leadership Democracy.” Political Theory 37 (1): 128–153. Maiguashca, B., and J. Dean. 2019. “Corbynism, Populism and the Re-shaping of Left Politics in Contemporary Britain.” In The Populist Radical Left in

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Europe, edited by G. Katsambekis and A. Kioupkiolis, 145–167. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. Moffitt, Benjamin, and Simon Tormey. 2014. “Rethinking Populism: Politics, Mediatisation and Political Style.” Political Studies 62: 381–397. Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. “Jeremy Corbyn’s Left Populism.” Verso, April 16. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3743-jeremy-corbyn-s-left-populism. Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 39 (4): 542–563. Mudde, Cas. 2017. “Populism: An Ideational Approach.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 27–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803560.013.1. Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposition 48 (2): 147–174. Müller, J.-W. 2016. What Is Populism? Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ostiguy, Pierre. 2017. “Populism: A Socio-Cultural Approach.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 73–100. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pappas, Takis S. 2016. “Modern Populism: Research Advances, Conceptual and Methodological Pitfalls, and the Minimal Definition.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://oxfordre. com/politics. Pels, Dick. 2003. “Aesthetic Representation and Political Style.” In Media and the Restyling of Politics, edited by John Corner and Dick Pels, 41–66. London: Sage. Rooduijn, Matthijjs. 2019. “The ideologie van Forum voor Democratie”. http://stukroodvlees.nl/de-ideologievan-forum-voor-democratie. Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy. 2017. “Populism: An Overview of the Concept and the State of the Art.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803560.013.34.

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Sartori, Giovanni. 1970. “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics.” The American Political Science Review 64 (4): 1033–1053. Schoor, Carola. 2017. “In the Theater of Political Style: Touches of Populism, Pluralism, and Elitism in Speeches of Politicians.” Discourse and Society 28 (6): 657–676. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517721082. Schoor, Carola. 2019. “Where the Real People Meet the Real Elite: Exploring the Mix of Populism with Elitism.” Populism 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.1163/ 25888072-02021032. Schoor, Carola. 2020. “Probing into Populism’s Core. An Analysis of the Deep Semio-linguistic Structure of Populism.” Critical Discourse Studies. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2020.1769698. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 2008. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. 3rd ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Stavrakakis, Yannis, and Benjamin De Cleen. 2017. “Distinctions and Articulations: A Discourse Theoretical Framework for the Study of Populism and Nationalism.” Javnost: The Public 24 (4): 301–319. Stavrakakis, Yannis, and Giorgos Katsambekis. 2014. “Left-Wing Populism in the European Periphery: The Case of SYRIZA.” Journal of Political Ideologies 19 (2): 119–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2014.909266. Stavrakakis, Yannis, and Giorgos Katsambekis. 2018. “The Populism/Antipopulism Frontier and Its Mediation in Crisis-Ridden Greece: From Discursive Divide to Emerging Cleavage?” European Political Science. https://doi. org/10.1057/s41304-017-0138-3. Van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage. Van Dijk, Teun A. 2013. “Ideology and Discourse.” In The Oxford Handbook of Politician Ideologies, edited by Michael freeden and Marc Stears, 175–196. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019 9585977.013.007. Van Kessel, Stijn. 2014. “The Populist Cat-Dog: Applying the Concept of Populism to Contemporary European Party Systems.” Journal of Political Ideologies 19 (1): 99–118. Weyland, Kurt. 2017. “Populism: A Political-Strategic Approach.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 48–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803560.013.2.

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Wodak, Ruth. 2015. “Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse-Historical Approach.” The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, edited by Karen Tracy, Cornelia Ilie, and Todd Sandel. Hoboken. NJ: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi116.

Carola Schoor holds a doctorate in Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University, The Netherlands. Before entering academia she worked as a journalist and political communication officer in The Hague and Brussels.

15 Populism as Mainstream Politicians’ Political Style During the 2012 Greek Election Campaign Argyro Kantara

Introduction Moffitt and Tormey discuss populism as a political style claiming that “the concept of political style allows us to rethink populism by placing its performative dimensions at front and centre and gives us a chance to reflect on the complex relationship between style and content” (2014: 394). Following this conceptualization of populism, and of political style as “the repertoires of performance that are used to create political relations” (Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 394), I examine in this chapter how the leaders of mainstream Greek political parties construct their populist political style through their talk-in-interaction. In particular, I examine what interactional strategies are used by political party leaders when enacting “bad manners” and how these are being responded to by journalists in the course of one-on-one televised interviews broadcast during the 2012 Greek election campaign. A. Kantara (B) Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_15

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Using Conversation Analysis, I will focus on extended sequences of journalistic adversarial questions (i.e. questions that put pressure on politicians, see for instance Clayman and Heritage 2002a, b), politicians’ responses and journalists’ neutralizing moves (i.e. when journalists neutralize politicians’ attacks by agreeing with what was said or by ignoring the attack, Hutchby 1996). The extended sequences discussed are taken from interviews between journalists working for commercial TV channels and the leaders of the two major parties of the period (Conservatives and Socialists) as well as the left-wing party Syriza, which back in 2012 had just started gaining popularity in election polls. The political situation in Greece before the 2012 general elections was turbulent, to say the least. In October 2009, the Socialist Party of Greece (PASOK), under George Papandreou’s leadership, won the general election with an overwhelming majority. Six months later (April 2010) though, in light of the financial crisis, the first round of severe austerity measures was imposed, and the country turned to the EU and IMF for financial help. In November 2011 George Papandreou resigned, and between then and May 2012 an interim coalition government comprising members of both major political parties of the period (Conservatives and Socialists), took over, with the mission to finalize the details of the second bailout agreement and then announce an early election date. Because of the rapid changes in the political environment, both new and old players had, in a way, to reinvent themselves in order to appeal to the electorate. In the sections to follow, I will review previous research on (mainstream) populism as political style, introduce the concept of conversational violence and discuss how it is linked to the specific area of populism as political style I am focusing on this chapter: interactional “bad manners”. Finally, as this chapter examines populism in the interactional context of televised news interviews, I will link mainstream populism as political style to mediated populism. Then I will present my data and analytic approach, before going on to examine how interactional “bad manners” as an indication of mainstream populism as

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political style become manifest in Greek political party leaders’ talkin-interaction, how they are reinforced through journalists’ reactions and what this means for the knowledge produced for the overhearing audience.

Mainstream Populism as Political Style In their 2012 paper, Snow and Moffit proposed the use of the term “mainstream populism” to describe similarities between the populist discourse strategies used by two centre-right political party leaders that were not typically considered populists: ex-Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and ex-Australian Prime Minister John Howard. The view Snow and Moffitt take on populism, and the one I adopt in this chapter, sees populism as “a discourse that simplifies political space through a division of society into two antagonistic groups: ‘the people’ and an ‘other’” (2012: 273). Following Panizza’s (2009) concept of “populist interventions” of mainstream politics, and Curran’s (2004) argument that mainstreaming populist discourse will make it more agreeable to wider audiences, Snow and Moffitt (2012: 274) suggest that the two mainstream political party leaders they examined used populist discourse for electoral success and party building. Later, attempting to fully encompass populism’s fluidity as manifested in mediatized contexts by politicians belonging to different political parties, Moffitt and Tormey (2014) introduced the concept of populism as a political style. They argue that due to the differences in ideology, discourse, and political and organizational strategies that different politicians who have been labelled as populists employ, there is a need to rethink how best to describe and conceptualize populism (Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 381–386). They suggest that viewing populism as a political style overcomes all the discrepancies found in the literature on populism (seen as ideology, political logic, discourse and strategy/organization). As they put it: Thinking of populism as a political style rather than a distinct ideology or logic allows us to consider how politicians can slip in and out of the

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populist style. […] (doing so) frees us from the “puzzle” of populism’s ability to appear across the political spectrum. (Moffitt and Tormey 2014: 392–393)

Moffitt and Tormey (2014: 382, 390–394), and Moffitt (2016: 41–45) identify the following features of populism as political style: appeal to “the people”, that is, speaking in the name of the people versus an elite, exhibiting bad (interactional) manners contrary to “established” political culture, and performing a sense of crisis, breakdown, and threat from “others”. As indicated in the Introduction, in this chapter I will focus on only one feature of populism as political style: how Greek mainstream politicians perform bad (interactional) manners. Previous research on how interactional “bad manners” as an indication of populist performative style are enacted in political debates (Ekström et al. 2018: 6–8) has examined the interactional techniques a specific French populist politician (Florian Phillipot) employed to undermine the other two mainstream politicians and deviate from conventional rules of televised debates.1 Phillipot frequently interrupts the other two politicians and his interruptions “are not so much bids for the floor as evaluative commentary on the actions of his co-participants” (2018: 7). For instance, he calls them “a great double act” and characterizes their interactional behaviour as “Mme Morano is coming to the rescue of Mme Trautman”. He enriches his verbal comments by smiling and/or smiles broadly as a response to what the other two interlocutors are saying. As Ekström et al. (2018: 7– 8) argue, by going against the normative rules of televised debates, that is by being discuprive and non-verbally expressing amused skepticism in receipt of others’ talk, Florian Phillipot undermines and makes fun of his co-participants, manipulating interactional resources to set himself against his “elite” political opponents.

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Bad Manners and Conversational Violence Although not discussed in the context of (mainstream) populism as political style, the enactment of “bad manners”, that is the coarsening of political discourse and disregard for political etiquette as discussed by Moffit and Tormey (2014) and Moffit (2016), has also been identified in mainstream (Luginbühl 2007; Hess-Lüttich 2007) and extreme right-wing politicians’ confrontational talk during debates (Simon-Vandenbergen 2008; Bull and Simon-Vandenbergen 2014). In those studies, politicians’ “bad manners” were either in the form of “personal attacks” that targeted the other interlocutor’s integrity (SimonVandenbergen 2008: 352–356; Bull and Simon-Vandenbergen 2014: 13) or in the form of “conversational violence”. The latter is a term introduced by Luginbühl (2007: 1374) to describe interactional strategies that limit the other interlocutor’s conversational rights, and consequently may affect the other person’s integrity as well as their “conversational efficiency”. In that sense, acts of conversational violence and “personal attacks” are directed at the person and not the position they are maintaining (ad hominem attacks in argumentation theory terms, van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992). Because of that, forms of conversational violence and “personal attacks” issued by mainstream politicians in mediated contexts differ from resistance techniques identified in conversation analytic research (see for instance Dickerson 2001; Clayman and Heritage 2002a: 257–269; Rendle-Short 2007a: 398–402) or equivocation techniques identified in research on news interviews within social psychology (see for instance Bull 2003: 114–122). This is the case, as the resistance or equivocation techniques identified in previous research involved sidestepping a question or refusing to answer it, but not attacking the person asking it and/or not restricting the other interlocutor’s rights and role in the conversation. As Dickerson (2001: 203) put it, politicians’ responses were challenging but “boundaried” at the same time, in the sense that politicians in making challenges did not construct them in personal terms but either raised them in passing and/or produced a justification for not cooperating with the journalists in the question–answer format of the news interview (see

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also Ekström 2009 for a similar discussion). In that way the normative structure of the news interviews was maintained. Interactional techniques identified as exhibiting interactional violence (Luginbühl 2007: 1377–1380) in debates involving mainstream politicians that were not “challenging but boundaried” but personal include: 1. Misuse of everyday conversational features (such as asking questions, e.g. “Do you know the budget?” or giving advice, e.g. “Please actually read the convention once”) so as to portray the other interlocutor in a negative light. 2. Making statements regarding the standard of knowledge or competency of the other interlocutor, such as “I am saying theoretically this consideration is reasonable, internationally is ABSOLUTELY accepted by ALL persons who comprehend even A LITTLE BIT, that Switzerland can NOT end prohibition on its own” (capital letters, indicating loud speech, in the original). In this example the politician is attacking the other interlocutor’s knowledge of how politics work by characterizing their claim as “theoretical” and not realistic. In their analysis of the debating style of extreme right-wing politicians in Flanders and the UK, Simon-Vandenbergen (2008: 352–354) and Bull and Simon-Vandenbergen (2014: 13) have identified that issuing personal attacks targeting the other interlocutor’s integrity, either as a person or as debating opponent (e.g. “You are very excited”), are typical of extremist discourse. Their findings echo similar research on extreme right-wing politicians’ discourse (Bonnafous 1998; Birenbaum and Villa 2003; Biorcio 2003), where contrasting a bad image of the journalist/opponent with a positive one of oneself was a frequent technique employed by Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Umberto Bossi in Italy. Their findings also reflect the analysis offered by Ekström et al. (2018) on Phillipot’s “bad manners” as an indication of his populist performative style, discussed in the previous section. From an (im)politeness theory perspective, Dynel (2011: 12–127) has made similar claims in relation to the use of conversational violence (she called it verbal violence or verbal aggression) in debates between mainstream politicians in the run-up to the 2007 Polish elections.

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Combining impoliteness with Luginbühl’s (2007) ideas she discussed how the candidates examined, coming from diverse parties (centre, leftand right-wing), employed humour as a means to attack and belittle the other interlocutor and build a witty political image. Finally, using Fetzer’s (2007) taxonomy of means speakers may employ to challenge their opponents’ claims as non-valid, namely denying the truth, validity, or appropriateness of the claim, SimonVandenbergen (2008: 352–353) identified that extremist politicians in her data frequently used these techniques to attack their opponents’ claims. Examples included “You mustn’t ascribe intentions to me and you mustn’t put words into my mouth that I didn’t say” (denial of the truth of the claim), “Those details are not representative of our writings” (denial of the appropriateness of the claim). These techniques seem similar to “making statements regarding the standard of knowledge”, identified by Luginbühl (2007: 1379) as exhibiting conversational violence. Personal attacks and attacks on the validity of a claim seem to have the same functions in interaction as conversational violence techniques, that is to affect the other interlocutor’s integrity, restrict their conversational rights, and influence the direction the conversation is going. For the purposes of this chapter I will use the term “conversational violence” as an umbrella to refer to all the above techniques when employed by politicians in my data. Attacking one’s interlocutor by using one or a combination of the above interactional techniques seems to tally with the enactment of “bad manners” as an indication of populist political style and disregard for appropriate political etiquette.

(Mainstream) Populism as Political Style and Mediated Populism As indicated in the Introduction, this chapter augments current investigations of populism as mainstream politicians’ populist style by not only examining how it is enacted through the talk-in-interaction of mainstream politicians, but also by examining the role journalists’ talk plays in the process In doing so, I bring together the notion of mediated

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populism, that is (populist) politicians’ talk that puts pressure on journalists (Mazzoleni 2008; see also Biorcio 2003 and Birenbaum and Villa 2003) that seems to tally with the enactment of “bad manners”, and Schoor’s (2017) discussion of political style. Schoor (2017: 660) sees political style as comprising three interrelated components: “ideological style (the fragmented expression of ideological thought); social style (the co-construction of identities in interaction with others); rhetorical style (language use aimed at persuasion)”, with the social style being the most relevant for the purposes of my analysis (see also Schoor Chapter 14 in this volume). The social political style, which has to do with the co-construction of identities in interaction with others, resonates with the epistemology of Conversation Analysis (the methodology employed in this chapter), because participants’ identities are co-shaped by their collaborative interaction with others (see for instance Clayman and Romaniuk 2011 on the role journalists’ questions play in the identity formation of politicians in election campaign interviews). This idea of social political style that is co-constructed in interaction with others also resonates with Mazzoleni’s (2003: 2) claim that the mass media, by endorsing or opposing populist performances, might intentionally or unintentionally be players in this game. To sum up, in this chapter I suggest that putting together research insights and methodological tools from political communication, journalism, and conversation analysis enriches existing research on (mainstream) populism as political style (in talk-in-interaction), by investigating not only how it is enacted but also how it is legitimatized through the examination of both politicians’ and journalists’ talk.

Data and Method The one-on-one election campaign interviews examined here are between three political party leaders of the period—Antonis Samaras (the then leader of New Democracy, a conservative party and one of the two parties alternating in power until 2012), Evangelos Venizelos (the then leader of PASOK, a socialist party and one of the two parties alternating in power

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until 2012) and Alexis Tsipras (the leader of Syriza, a left-wing party that gained popularity in the 2012 elections)—and leading journalists of three commercial TV channels (ANT1, SKAI, MEGA). The interviews have been transcribed (see Appendix for the transcription conventions) and analysed qualitatively from a conversation analytic perspective and are presented in the original language, alongside my translations into English. My analysis will focus on politicians’ responses that exhibit conversational violence in the form of either misusing everyday conversational features (asking a question instead of answering one), issuing personal attacks regarding the standard of knowledge or competency of the journalist, and/or challenging the validity of the journalist’s adversarial question and their neutralizing moves (i.e., when journalists neutralize politicians’ attacks by agreeing with what was said or by ignoring the attack, Hutchby 1996: 23). Personal attacks are regarded as politicians’ responses that hold the journalist personally accountable for the proposition expressed, thus affecting their integrity and limiting their conversational rights and role.2 These can take the form of comments about the journalist’s interactional behaviour and/or the redundant use of a title and address by full name. As Clayman (2010: 162–163) claims, although the use of address terms by politicians is in line with the institutionalized activity of news interviews, where the two participants address each other for the benefit of the overhearing audience, at the same time doing so is redundant, as by virtue of the news interview structure the directionality of talk is clear.

Challenging the Journalists’ Knowledge or Conduct The next two extracts exhibit conversational violence as an indication of interactional “bad manners” (populism as political style), in the form of attacks on the journalists’ knowledge, conduct and/or the appropriateness of the question, in the design of politicians’ responses.

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Extract 1 The first extract comes from an interview between Alexis Tsipras (the leader of Syriza, a left-wing party) and Maria Houkli. The interview was broadcast on April 24, 2012 by ANT1. The extract begins with the journalist introducing a new topic, which is the party’s position on how to deal with the country’s outstanding debts. (1) 1 ημ: =εσ ε´ις λšτε [κ. π ρ o´ εδρε,]= 2 oλ: =[μας λšτ -]= 3 ημ: =μoρατ´oριoυμ πληρω↓μων ´ γ ια τ ρ´ια χρ o´ νια, και μη π ληρωμη´ τoυ ↓χρšoυς. π šρα απ o´ τ ην αναδιαν oμη´ τ oυ π λo´ τ oυ>κλπ . ξ šρετ εetc.you knowαλλα´ πρoσšξτεbut mind you.τ o γ νω↓ρ´ιζ ετ ε.you ↓know that. < ↑because you have mentioned the opinion ↓polls, i am ↑saying that.] [↑so what? (0.1) and ↑why is this absurd?] ↑why it is ↑absurd what you are saying?= (continued)

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(continued) 3

ημ:

=↑´oχι, >δεν ε´ιναι καθ´oλoυ π αρ αλ ´ oγ o. it is not absurd at all.