Populist Rhetorics: Case Studies and a Minimalist Definition (Rhetoric, Politics and Society) [1st ed. 2022] 9783030873509, 9783030873516, 3030873501

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RHETORIC, POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Populist Rhetorics Case Studies and a Minimalist Definition Edited by Christian Kock Lisa Villadsen

Rhetoric, Politics and Society

Series Editors Alan Finlayson, University of East Anglia, Norfolk, UK James Martin, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK Kendall R. Phillips, Syracuse University, Syracuse, USA

Rhetoric lies at the intersection of a variety of disciplinary approaches and methods, drawing upon the study of language, history, culture and philosophy to understand the persuasive aspects of communication in all its modes: spoken, written, argued, depicted and performed. This series presents the best international research in rhetoric that develops and exemplifies the multifaceted and cross-disciplinary exploration of practices of persuasion and communication. It seeks to publish texts that openly explore and expand rhetorical knowledge and enquiry, be it in the form of historical scholarship, theoretical analysis or contemporary cultural and political critique. The editors welcome proposals for monographs that explore contemporary rhetorical forms, rhetorical theories and thinkers, and rhetorical themes inside and across disciplinary boundaries. For informal enquiries, questions, as well as submitting proposals, please contact the editors: Alan Finlayson: [email protected] James Martin: [email protected] Kendall Phillips: [email protected]

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14497

Christian Kock · Lisa Villadsen Editors

Populist Rhetorics Case Studies and a Minimalist Definition

Editors Christian Kock University of Copenhagen Copenhagen S, Denmark

Lisa Villadsen University of Copenhagen Copenhagen S, Denmark

Rhetoric, Politics and Society ISBN 978-3-030-87350-9 ISBN 978-3-030-87351-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 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. Cover illustration: Bess Hamiti/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Introduction Lisa Villadsen and Christian Kock Populist Melancholy Paul Elliott Johnson Voltagabbana Rhetorics: Turncoating as a Populist Strategy in Pandemic Times Pamela Pietrucci Brexit, YouTube and the Populist Rhetorical Ethos Alan Finlayson Populism and the Rise of the AfD in Germany Anne Ulrich, Olaf Kramer, and Dietmar Till The Rhetorical Strategy of Moralisation: A Lesson from Greece Sophia Hatzisavvidou Victorious Victimization: Orbán the Orator—Deep Securitization and State Populism in Hungary’s Propaganda State Miklós Sükösd

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The Voice and Message of Hugo Chávez: A Rhetorical Analysis Pierre Ostiguy Populism: A Definition Sought and Tested Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen

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Notes on Contributors

Alan Finlayson is a Professor of Political and Social Theory at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. His research combines contributions to the development of democratic political and cultural theory with the theoretical, historical, and rhetorical analysis and interpretation of the ideologies that shape political culture. From 2018 to 2021 he was a Principal Investigator for the AHRC funded research project Political Ideology, Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century: The Case of the ‘AltRight’ and from 2020 to 2022 a Co-Investigator on the project Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Music also funded by the AHRC. Sophia Hatzisavvidou is a Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Politics, Languages, and International Studies at the University of Bath. Sophia’s research looks at the uses of scientific evidence in political discourse; at the different (and competing) ecopolitical visions that emerge in response to the ecological emergency; and at the role of commonplaces in political rhetoric. Her work has appeared in journals such as Environmental Politics, Political Studies, and Politics. Sophia holds a Ph.D. in Political Theory and teaches environmental politics, as well as political theory. Paul Elliott Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Deliberation and Civic Life in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on questions of sovereignty and personhood

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in both political rhetoric and media texts, focusing particularly on the racist and misogynistic character of US conservatism. His work has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, and Argumentation and Advocacy. His forthcoming book, I The People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States (University of Alabama Press 2021) offers a treatment of the populist strain of argumentation in US conservatism. Christian Kock is an Emeritus Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Communication. His research interests include political argumentation and debate, the history of rhetoric, credibility, journalism, literary and musical aesthetics, linguistics, and writing pedagogy. Han has been a Visiting Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, and is author, editor, co-author, or co-editor of a number of books in rhetoric, linguistics, argumentation, journalism, political debate, aesthetics, and literature, as well as book chapters and articles for scholarly journals including Philosophy and Rhetoric, Argumentation, Political Communication, Informal Logic, Cogency, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Paradigmi, Deutsche Jahrbuch Philosophie, PTL: Poetics and Theory of Literature, Studies in Short Fiction and KB: The Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society. A recent article is “Evaluating Public Deliberation: Including the Audience Perspective” in Journal of Deliberative Democracy https://doi.org/10.16997/10.16997/jdd.945. He has written extensively for general audiences. With Lisa Villadsen, he has published on the notion of rhetorical citizenship. Olaf Kramer is a Professor of Rhetoric and Knowledge Communication at Tübingen University. He studied Rhetoric, Philosophy, Communication Studies, and Psychology in Tübingen, Frankfurt/Main, and Chapel Hill, USA. Kramer is head of the Presentation Research Center and Editor of “Science Notes Magazin.” His main research fields are presentations as a rhetorical format, communicative competence, political rhetoric, and science communication. Latest publication: Kramer, Olaf and Markus Gottschling, eds., Recontextualized Knowledge. Rhetoric— Situation—Science Communication. Berlin/Boston 2021. Pierre Ostiguy is a Professor at the Escuela de Administración Pública of the Universidad de Valparaiso, in Chile. He is Co-Editor of Populism in Global Perspective: A Performative and Discursive Approach (Routledge 2021) and of The Oxford Handbook of Populism (OUP 2017), in

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which he is one of three authors featured in the Concepts section. He has authored several chapters of these and other books, as well as many articles and working papers on populism. Holding a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in Latin American politics, he has served as a regular faculty member in Canada, the United States, Chile, and Argentina. Best known for his socio-cultural approach to populism, as well as his previous work on Peronism in Argentina, his long-standing interests have also included Venezuela, where he conducted research in the 2000s, and on which he has commented regularly in Chile’s national news media. Pamela Pietrucci is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Copenhagen. Her ongoing research explores various modes of rhetorical citizenship emerging in public discourse at the intersections of science, politics, and activism. She is interested in rhetoric that has the potential to bridge publics across media platforms, locales, and discursive spheres, and also in the cases where rhetoric fails in that task, thus engendering public communication breakdowns. She works with transnational and translational rhetorics and has published in various international communication and rhetoric journals, including Rhetoric and Public Affairs, The Journal of Argumentation in Context, Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements, and Comunicazione Politica. Miklós Sükösd is a Media Researcher, Sociologist, and Political Scientist. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen and serves as Co-Director of the “European Culture and the Media” research group at CEMES (Center for Modern European Studies) at the University. His research interests include political communication and censorship in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and China. He participates in the Jean Monnet Network “Post-Truth Politics, Nationalism and the (De)Legitimation of European Integration.” He has published over 20 books and many book chapters and journal articles. His latest book is Peggy Valcke, Miklós Sükösd and Robert Picard, eds. Media Pluralism and Diversity: Concepts, Risks and Global Trends. London: Palgrave, 2015. Dietmar Till is a Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Tübingen. He has taught at the universities of Tübingen and Regensburg and directed the project “Language of Emotion” at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and

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Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has held central positions in the Rhetoric Society of Europe and the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. He is Co-Editor of the Cambridge History of Rhetoric (to appear in 2023) and, with Olaf Kramer, co-editor of the series neue rhetoric at DeGruyter. Anne Ulrich is an “Akademische Rätin” in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen. She is interested in the interrelations between media theory, journalism, and rhetoric, in particular in the context of current changes in the media landscape and in the functions of journalism. Currently, she studies rhetoric and media theory in relation to the threat from Jihadic terrorism. Among her research interests are also the theory of TV, visual communication, political rhetoric, and propaganda. Lisa Villadsen is a Professor of Rhetoric and Head of the Section of Rhetoric at the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Northwestern University, USA. Her research interests are in rhetorical criticism and theory related to contemporary political rhetoric. Together with Christian Kock, Villadsen has developed the concept of rhetorical citizenship and edited two volumes on the topic: Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation. Penn State University Press, 2012 and Contemporary Rhetorical Citizenship: Purposes, Practices, and Perspectives. Leiden University Press, 2014. She has published in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Argumentation, and Citizenship Studies. A recent article discusses populist rhetoric in Denmark: “Emotions in Politics: Populism’s Win?” WCSAJ online journal 1(1), 2020 (https://www.wcsaglobal.org/volume-1-issue1-2020/emotions-in-politics-populisms-win/).

List of Figures

Populism and the Rise of the AfD in Germany Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Alice Weidel, May 1, 2018, promoting a about the judicial evaluation of her speech, com/Alice_Weidel Alice Weidel, May 1, 2018, promoting a about the judicial evaluation of her speech, com/Alice_Weidel

poll https://twitter. 131 poll https://twitter. 132

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On January 6, 2021, having attended a rally with Donald Trump, who repeated his claim of having had the Presidential election “stolen” from him and told his supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” a crowd of several thousand people stormed the US Capitol, vandalizing and looting it for several hours in what to many was the capping event of the perverse and erosive influence of Donald Trump on the US political climate in general and political discourse in particular. While “populism” to many Americans rings of a nineteenth-century rural political movement, to most observers around the world this event symbolized the alarming success of populism in contemporary American politics: an angry crowd feeling ignored and cheated by a self-serving bureaucratic and political elite and eager to

L. Villadsen (B) · C. Kock University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen S, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] C. Kock e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Kock and L. Villadsen (eds.), Populist Rhetorics, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6_1

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follow a charismatic leader to the point of erecting a mock gallows and shouting “Hang Mike Pence” as retaliation against the Vice President for not overturning the election results (which, of course, he had no power to do).

The Problem(s) of Populism Populism is, it is generally agreed, on the rise in many regions of the world, and populist leaders and movements are in power or highly visible and are influential on the public agenda setting in multiple democracies. In response to this development, “populism” has emerged as a key term in political rhetoric, journalism, and scholarship in recent years. Typically, it is discussed as a topic that is as important as it is vexing due to its unwieldy, norm-defying forms and rapid spread. In academia, too, attention to populism has grown in significance over the past ten years across a broad range of disciplines. Major themes have concerned its definition, scope, and significance. Recurring key questions have concerned populism’s political grounding, i.e., whether it is ideologically informed in any one direction, and if it is, then to what extent. In so far as populism has been considered both a left- and a right-wing phenomenon and therefore seems to evade a simple ideological characterization, the question has been raised if populism is a “thin ideology” in the sense that it cannot be associated with left- or right-leaning views but is seen on both sides of the political spectrum as well as in versions that “politicize an orthogonal dimension of sociopolitical difference” (Ostiguy and Roberts 2016, 26). In all versions, it is widely agreed, it is characterized by being driven by the assumption of a deep divide (in terms of interests, power, and moral integrity) between “the people” and “the elite”––often in combination with a strong political leader who is considered the true voice of the people. Another question is whether populism is best considered a more or less neutral categorizing label or in fact carries a negative valorization. To some, populism is associated with authenticity and a truly democratic attitude, and “populist” is thus a badge of honor, whereas to others it suggests an illiberal and undemocratic stance characterized by irresponsible pandering to particular groups at the expense of other societal groups and entailing an exclusionary approach to politics. Another ongoing discussion concerns the relation between populism as a set of particular substantive ideas and its presentation. In other words, the issue is whether populist rhetoric is to be considered as a particular

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rhetoric, i.e., a particular and recognizable way of communicating that may be separated from what might be considered its political/ideological agenda. This latter issue, the relation between form and content, as it were, is what this book aspires to address and provide reflections on. To that end, each chapter considers a particular case or example of political populism with a focus on the way it communicates to its audiences.

Approaches This book brings together scholars who work in a range of relevant academic fields, including political science, social theory, media studies, and rhetoric. Differences notwithstanding, the contributors’ work is joined by a shared interest in what can best be called a rhetorical approach to the subject. This approach implies a concern with understanding situated discourse in its particularity and involves an interest in how the discourse and its specific traits and qualities build a relation with its intended auditors, and how that relation may be characterized. What is the persuasive appeal and what kind of reaction from the audience does it invite? In putting together a volume of studies of populist rhetorics we hope to accomplish two things: The first is to make clear for a wider academic audience the relevance and usefulness of close rhetorical readings of populist discourse as a supplement to the already rich literature on populism in fields such as political science and philosophy (e.g., Mudde 2004; Laclau 2005; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012; Moffitt and Tormey 2014; Kaltwasser et al. 2017; Müller 2016; Eatwell and Goodwin 2018). Scholars in neighboring disciplines have extensively studied the discourses of populism, especially of the right-wing sort, and leading political scholars have explicitly suggested that populism in part, or even best, is characterized as a particular kind of rhetoric. Even when they do not use the term rhetoric, many find the distinctive features of populism in the communication practices or political “style” of populist figures and in the “rapport” that it helps create between them and their followers. Most prominent among the several scholars who do this are Laclau (2005), Moffitt (2016), and Ostiguy (2017). Their approaches come close to assuming that populism is a rhetorical notion. Laclau’s view of populism as a political “logic” is thus based on the way populists rhetorically interpellate their conception of the people; rhetorical devices, he notes, “become instruments of an expanded social rationality, and we are no

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longer able to dismiss an ideological interpellation as merely rhetorical” [emphasis in original]. He mentions as an example how the early American populists “through rhetorical operations […] managed to constitute broad popular identities which cut across many sectors of the population, [and thereby] they actually constituted populist subjects ” [emphasis in original] (2005, 12). Too, Moffitt criticizes definitions of populism as ideology, strategy, and political logic and argues instead for a definition of populism as a political style and for the populist leader as a performer embodying such a style. He mentions Canovan (1981, 1982) as a forerunner of the approach to populism that sees it as a style of discourse, and he recognizes Laclau’s emphasis on what he calls “the process of naming, performance or articulation” (Moffitt 2016, 24)—in other words, the way Laclau sees the key to populist political logic in a certain rhetorical behavior. Moffitt’s approach resembles that of Ostiguy, who has recently presented it in The Oxford Handbook of Populism—an approach emphasizing the typical populist’s predilection for performing “the low,” as exemplified in this volume in his analysis of Venezuela’s former President, Hugo Chávez.

Untapped Interdisciplinary Opportunities To us, it is striking that these prominent scholars in political science and theory come so close to defining populism in terms of rhetoric and to applying notions that rhetorical scholars have also developed and used for years. With this volume we hope to foster a more direct and fruitful interaction between disciplinary traditions that have much to contribute to each other. It is, however, equally striking how rhetoricians have had relatively little to say about a concept of the first international importance that scholars in neighboring disciplines have, as it were, placed on their doorstep. Our second hope for this volume is thus to highlight the theme of populism as a pressing area of inquiry for rhetorical scholars. In discourse studies, populism has been a key term for years with the work of Wodak (Wodak and Weiss 2007; Wodak 2015) as a prominent example, but while related topics have interested rhetoricians, e.g., demagoguery (Roberts-Miller 2019), fake news (Cloud 2018), and political resentment (Engels 2015), it strikes us that in the field of rhetoric surprisingly little attention has been dedicated to populism so far (with Lee 2006; Maddux 2013; van der Geest et al. 2020 among the exceptions). It seems obvious that scholars in rhetoric, media studies, and political science and theory

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do work that is potentially of mutual interest and enriching, and with this book we hope to begin that conversation. It is clear that if political scholars are increasingly agreeing to find the hallmarks of populism in discourse, style, or rhetoric (whichever term is used), then the methods, concepts, and theories that rhetoricians have developed from antiquity until the present for analyzing discourse, style, and rhetoric should be applied professionally and to their full capacity. Laclau (2005) made extensive references to ancient rhetorical thought and concepts, but contemporary rhetorical theory, such as Black’s work on the second persona or Charland’s work on constitutive rhetoric and Conley’s, Miller’s and others’ work on genre has gone largely unnoticed by Laclau as well as other political theorists. Similarly, rhetoricians may benefit from drawing on political scientists’ knowledge of political substance and ideology formations past and present. It is time, then, for scholars in rhetoric as well as in neighboring disciplines to investigate the theory and practice of populism under the heading of rhetoric. Another particular feature of this collection is that in addition to its interdisciplinary design, it brings together scholars who hail from countries in the Western hemisphere as different as Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, UK, and USA to offer case studies from what are in most instances their countries of origin. In this way, it provides not only a cross-disciplinary look at the phenomenon of populist communication, but also an international overview of manifestations of populist rhetorics. The following case studies in this book consider instances of populism across a political spectrum, from socialist Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to German right-wing politicians Björn Höcke and Alice Weidel, and it looks at populist rhetoric as it unfolds in a range of genres and media, including speeches at rallies and political meetings, party platforms, YouTube videos, tweets, and interviews.

What We Mean by “Rhetoric” The term “rhetoric” itself can be tricky, and we therefore offer a few comments on how we understand and use it in this book. To some, “rhetoric” is a word that connotes empty, overly ornamental, or deliberately manipulative communication. In such an understanding, the title of this book might almost seem pleonastic, at least if one subscribes to a skeptical view of populism: What populists say or write must ipso facto be “mere rhetoric,” i.e., empty and manipulative discourse.

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We think of the term rhetoric differently, namely as a politically unmarked term used to describe public discourse in the political realm. Moreover, we refer to rhetoric as an academic tradition with roots in the ancient world and alive in many university settings to this day. More on this comprehensive understanding of rhetoric––as distinct from the narrow use of the term found in some contemporary scholars and fields––will be said in the concluding chapter. Suffice it here to say that our understanding of what “rhetoric” means aligns with the way the term was used and defined by the leading thinkers in the rhetorical tradition itself, from Aristotle, over Cicero, Quintilian, and Erasmus to the present day. We thus use the term rhetoric to refer to everything a rhetor does communicatively with the aim of securing others’ adherence to a position: The topics covered and how they are ordered, the claims made, the argumentation and appeals to reason and emotion, the vocabulary, the speaker’s self-presentation, and the delivery are all based on rhetorical decisions. It is not as though one separable component of a politician’s statement is “content” or “ideology,” while the remaining, more superficial features make up the rhetorical part. Rhetoric on this view is thus not a matter of stylistics, nor a presentational technique, but a comprehensive approach to communication that begins with the adaptation of a message (understood in its totality of ideas, appeals, and form) to a particular audience in order to influence their understanding, views, feelings and actions about the matter in question. The chapters in the book represent a range of assessments of populism. While no common definition of populism or populist rhetoric immediately emerges from the chapters when seen collectively, they still partake in a shared approach to populism that sees it as a primarily rhetorical concept. In this it could be said to at least not run into the same problem that vexes most conceptions of populism, namely that they tend to posit a set or bundle of features assumed to characterize populisms generally— only to discover that while many of the phenomena that observers agree to call populism do exhibit a given set of features, there are others that don’t. And while these probably share a somewhat different set of features with other alleged populisms, attempts to find a set of defining features shared by all tend to return empty-handed. In the concluding chapter we make an attempt to avoid this problem while still suggesting a unifying thread in this handful of highly diverse populist rhetorics—a thread that becomes visible under close rhetorical scrutiny, and which we suggest may provide a way of seeing a conceptual unity in phenomena that have so far

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proved quite recalcitrant to such attempts. We also offer some thoughts on the feasibility of talking about populism as a rhetorical phenomenon that is neither substantive (in the sense of relying on particular ideological agendas and values) nor normatively inscribed (that is, not in itself ethically based) but rather a descriptor for a cumulative communicative activity. The present collection illustrates the problem indicated in the previous paragraph: In it, we find certain significant features that recur in many of the versions of populism studied here, but not in all. An example of such a theme is the significance of the medium, where especially digital platforms and online circulation are means found to be particularly conducive to populist messages. This is evident in Finlayson’s study of Brexit rhetoric and in the study by Till, Kramer, and Ulrich of rhetorical maneuvering by two leaders of the right-wing political party “Alternative für Deutschland.” There are several other intriguing properties found in one or a few of the populisms studied that invite further inquiry into how that property might be connected with a putative, underlying thread across populist discourses. As Hatzisavvidou suggests, there is, for example, the Syriza government’s assertion of an inherent superiority of moral dignity in the Greek people which also resembles anti-EU rhetoric as studied by Finlayson; there is the cultivation of victimhood in Republican “melancholic” rhetoric of the Trump era according to Johnson; there is the apparent rank “voltagabbana” opportunism diagnosed by Pietrucci in Italy’s Matteo Salvini of the “Lega”; and there is, according to Ostiguy, the massive “Messianic” appeal invoked by Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. Each chapter, in holding these populisms up for rhetorical scrutiny, offers a unique theoretical framework, and several of the case studies in fact occasion and test new conceptual developments. Numerous similarities become discernible across differences in these studies. We invite readers to also find them in their own observations and to try to look deeply there for a possible underlying and connecting thread. In doing that, they would enter into a discussion with the authors and editors who put together this book; they would be asked to grapple with the suggestions we offer and the questions we ask: Does it seem plausible, on the basis of these studies, that populism is best understood as a rhetorical concept, and might a rhetorical definition emerge that helps subsume them under the same concept? The following pages offer brief introductions to following chapters.

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Populist “Melancholy” in Trumpist Republicanism The 2020 Republican National Convention decided to not publish a new political platform for the 2020 presidential election but to instead keep the 2016 platform and even rule out of order any attempt to amend it or adopt a new one. This remarkable decision is the starting point for Paul Johnson’s look at contemporary American politics of the right, and it was the clearest possible signal that the RNC pledged unequivocal support to President Trump’s person and policies. In a reading of the 2016 RNC that reveals its reliance on the theme of victimage undergirded by conservatism and the privileges of White America, Johnson shows how the GOP’s rhetoric insistently affirms a narrow conception of “the people” and posits it in opposition to the Obama administration, which is constructed as the enemy. He also shows how the Republican platform links this ostensible enemy with the system in a way where improvement is not an option, thus leaving only one route of action: overturning the system in what is framed as an apocalyptic vision. Johnson sees the Republican Party’s approach to contemporary political challenges as an exemplar of what he calls populist rhetorical melancholy. With this concept Johnson brings together rhetorical studies, political theory, and psychoanalysis to characterize a rhetorical form which posits the negation of “the people” as the structuring force organizing the political and social system where the separation of “people” and politics is considered a done deal, leaving only the option to destroy the old political system to build a new one. Johnson shows how the 2016 Republican National Platform and the decision to not present a new platform in 2020 unequivocally render the voters’ situation as one of victimhood, even as material conditions would suggest otherwise. Figuring populism as a rhetorical form and a political logic rather than an ideology, Johnson considers how it constitutes subjects through an argumentative frame that posits them as being somehow lost and critically threatened by the existing political system. Melancholic populism, he writes “attributes the loss of ‘the people’ not to the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘people’ in its totality but instead to actors external to the imagined nation.” It also “primes its audience to expect the ‘the people’ [to] have been negated, and crucially satisfying this expectation of negation with the conclusion that the recognition of this victimhood is an appropriate response to this

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negation.” According to Johnson, another key characteristic of melancholic populism, particularly this right-wing version, is that this presumed unified will of the “people” is unchanging, and that the individual both is in opposition to and disavows any relationship to the system. With the term melancholic populism Johnson offers a model for explaining why a right-wing rhetoric of victimage can continue to appeal to voters. He explains how the unconscious character of “the people’s” loss emerges in an intensifying grievance-based feedback loop as the need to experience the loop of loss and anger perpetuates and ends in a demand for authoritarian control and violence. Johnson’s study of right-wing melancholic populism teaches us to understand the sense of a world in crisis, where the crisis is the loss of what has gone before, not a perpetuation of an absent core of a nation, and he also reminds us that not all rhetorics of crisis and “the people” can be thought of as similar.

Self-Confident Turncoat: Italy’s Salvini In her chapter on voltagabbana rhetorics, Pamela Pietrucci studies “turncoating” as a populist crisis strategy and turns to the workings of social media to explain this populist strategy. With a study of Italian MP and former Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s history of opportunistically changing positions on topics––sometimes within a very short time, and usually going to the contrary position––she describes a rhetorical behavior which is rooted in a particular Italian political tradition called trasformismo, but which can also be found among right-wing rhetors around the world, including Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Boris Johnson. Unlike many accounts of populism as fundamentally driven by a declared rift between “the people” and the dominant political system, Pietrucci suggests that turncoating behavior is populist by virtue of its algorithmic origin. Drawing on Ico Maly’s notion of “algorithmic populism”—defined as “a digitally mediatized chronotopic communicative and discursive relation”—Pietrucci draws on Italian politics and finds that Salvini’s multiple and dramatic changes of view can be directly linked to careful monitoring of his social media and algorithmic adaptation designed for maximum positive feedback. Writes Pietrucci: “[w]hile Salvini carefully constructs his public image to appear authentic, direct, and in tune with [the] average citizen, the reality [of politics] is that every message of his public communication is carefully crafted, researched, and

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based on algorithmic data: there is no improvisation or spontaneity in his public discourse.” Pietrucci links the phenomenon of voltagabbana rhetoric to contexts of crisis and sees it as a populist response to complex exigencies where political leaders attempt to adapt their communication to the moment and garner support amidst volatile public feelings and unstable public opinion. The fact that political leaders can get away with proclaiming strikingly incoherent viewpoints rests, in the case of Italy, on the tradition of trasformismo, which has left the population with the cynical expectation that views come and go depending on what is opportune. To explain this political impunity in other national contexts, Pietrucci turns to American rhetoric scholars Jennifer Mercieca and Joshua Gunn and their work on demagoguery and political perversion. To Pietrucci, Salvini’s and other top politicians’ deliberate use of voltagabbana rhetoric demonstrates the quintessential trait of demagogues, namely that they make it rhetorically impossible for the public to hold them accountable by using rhetorical figures such as paralipsis (saying something by saying that one won’t say it), and by distorting public sentiment by means of manipulative social media mechanisms. She thus suggests that voltagabbana rhetoric is another rhetorical strategy used, in Mercieca’s term, to weaponize communication, i.e., manipulatively gain compliance, enabling disavowal at the same time. This “perversion” (with Gunn’s term) is possible because political cultures are increasingly losing faith in a shared authority or law, making it possible to get away with blatantly false or unrealistic claims because people (want to) believe what they hear:––Even when they know it is untrue, and even if they don’t really believe it, they keep listening and interacting online with this rhetoric, thus contributing to its circulation.

A Digital Boost to Character Appeals in Brexit Rhetoric In his chapter “Brexit, YouTube and the Populist Rhetorical Ethos” Alan Finlayson brings together political studies, political science, digital media studies, and rhetorical studies to consider the implications of the increasing role of digital means of communication on populist politics and how their affordances form political communication online. A main argument in the chapter is that online communication creates new genres with new kinds of rhetorical situations that are centered on claims about character. Rather than pitting theories of populism that define populism

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as a general structure across ideologies, as a specific political-ideological content, and as a style of performance, respectively, against each other, Finlayson wants us to notice how they overlap with respect to establishing a contrast between “the people” and an “Other,” developing this contrast through a logic of good vs. bad, and performing this position in a manner that is recognizable across countries and systems. This pool of commonality, Finlayson suggests, can be characterized as a concern with “character,” and the populist character is one who is outside or beyond the mainstream, deliberately breaking the rules political leaders are expected to follow. The point is not so much to invite followers to identify with the leader as to allow them to identify as part of the people which the leader defends. In Finlayson’s reading, the weight of populist political argument is carried by the character of the speaker and audience, and ethos is, thus, not only a premise of argument, but a kind of conclusion. Finlayson finds in the increasingly multimodal digital media use perfect conditions for communication that is disruptive, even transgressive, but also empowering to those whose voices have not previously been heard. This mediated context, he suggests, is particularly conducive to populist forms of communication. As an example of an online form of communication which was prophetic of later social media he mentions the blog because it raised expectations of personal sharing by the blogging persona and thus encouraged affective attachment and communities linked to particular online genres and fora. Finlayson takes these thoughts to a study of YouTube rhetoric with a focus on political communication: Here the implied intimacy has particular resonance when communication takes the form of “ideological testimonials” and is consumed in viewers’ individual, algorithmically constructed mix of politics, gaming, music, and entertainment. At the same time, YouTube viewers are invited to feel that they are part of a community, and the relationship between YouTubers and their audiences has a double nature, with leaders as both experts and peers, which resembles relationships between leaders and followers in populist politics. In a case study of a very popular YouTube video, “The Truth About Brexit,” Finlayson illustrates how its producer, Paul Joseph Watson, employs a populist idiom in claiming the mendacity, even treachery, of the Remain campaign and presenting the Leave campaign as the only reasonable, patriotic road forward. Watson does this by utilizing distance and name-calling to underscore the unity of the “true” British people against Remainers, who are cast as meanspirited, lying, domineering and undemocratic suppressors. In terms of

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visuals, the video is shown to support the message via visual enthymemes, e.g., images supposedly showing refugees spilling into the country and wreaking havoc, presenting as “common sense” what is not stated explicitly, but clearly understood (the criminality of foreigners). In all of this, the unifying principle and the main reason to accept Watson’s message becomes his own character—active, self-possessed, honest, rational, and morally right-minded as he presents himself. Combined with an organizing principle of pitting an ostensible Truth against supposed lies about Brexit, the video effectively taps into imaginaries about a core people under threat of being misled by evil bureaucrats and self-serving politicians. This casts Watson in the role of the truth-teller and the people’s liberator. Finlayson concludes more broadly that populism consists, in part, of a rhetorical form for which ethos is both origin and destination, a quality which is brought into sharp relief by audio-visual social media, which often are extremely speaker-centered; at the same time the attempt to forge a semblance of community between speaker and audience, and among the audience, becomes, in Finlayson’s words, “a microcelebrity culture characterized by the seeming personalization and individualization of content and the inducement to form parasocial relationships.” Finlayson links this to Weber’s notion of charismatic authority because Watson relies on the personal trust shown to him by viewers, a trust that will lead them to accept his views, and considering the parasocial element, his likens Watson’s rhetoric to a cult holding out a promise of salvation.

Provocative by Design: Media-Savvy German Populist Rhetoric In their chapter on the rhetoric of leading figures in the “Alternative für Deutschland” movement, Olaf Kramer, Anne Ulrich, and Dietmar Till argue for a conception of populism that rests on a combination of ideology, rhetorical form, and media logic. Like Finlayson, these authors point to social media as central to not only the spread of populist politics but also its form. They chart the rise of AfD (Alternative for Germany) as a right-wing populist party and how this rise is especially linked to online media. The populist rhetoric of the party is exemplified in rhetorical analyses of particularly notorious statements by two of the party’s leading figures, Björn Höcke (a leader of the AfD’s far-right faction “Der Flügel,” “the Wing”) and Alice Weidel (AfD leader in the federal Parliament, the “Bundestag”). The authors trace how mass media have

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spawned “politainment” and how social media are particularly suited as platforms for criticism of authorities. This combination of high visibility and unorthodox communicative behavior (ranging from the entertaining to the provocative and scandalous) is conducive to the spread of populist messages and also fits well with populist politicians’ ambivalent relation to the mainstream media: They are both dependent on them due to their wide reach and critical of them for being elitist and corrupt. To populists, social media offer a welcome possibility to position themselves as outside and independent of establishment power structures and thus present themselves as voices of protest. Following Benjamin Krämer, the authors point to people-centrism, anti-elitism, exclusion of others, creation of a populist worldview, and expressions of populist lifestyle and identity as central characteristics of populist ideology, style, and rhetoric, noting that these work particularly well with online communication structures. Because right-wing populist rhetoric circulates in a complex media environment comprising “mainstream” news media, “alternative” online and social media, the far-right world of imageboards, and the so-called “dark social” (content shared “invisibly” through private channels), the authors take on the complex challenge of studying communication across all these different platforms and media environments to present a thorough description of the media landscape in Germany in which AfD operates including print and online magazines, tabloid newspapers, websites, and more. The first example to illustrate the populist rhetoric of AfD is a reading of Björn Höcke’s 2017 speech to a youth organization in Dresden. It highlights this speech as a textbook example of populist rhetoric complete with incendiary and provocative claims pitting the audience against an institutional other said to perpetrate a distorted and crippling account of German history to the detriment of the people. Höcke is shown to appeal to his immediate audience as an in-group, forging identity with them, and at the same time to signal distance to the mainstream, which is said to be blinded by misleading narratives of the German past. A case in point is the mentioning of the Allies’ bombing of Dresden, which is cited as evidence that Germans were the true victims of WWII. The most controversial part of the speech, however, was Höcke’s mention of the Berlin Holocaust Museum as a “monument of shame,” an ambiguous phrasing leaving two interpretations possible: “a monument to Germany’s shame” or “a shameful monument.” Although it was perfectly clear that Höcke meant

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it in the latter sense, he met criticism with claims to the contrary and presented himself as unjustly charged. In this way, the authors suggest, Höcke managed to present himself as a parrhesiastes, one who speaks truth to power for a higher purpose and at their own risk, while at the same time posing as innocently accused. The authors next turn to a 2018 speech by Alice Weidel, a floor leader for the AfD in the Bundestag. Through an analysis of rhetorical aspects of the speech, mass media coverage of it, and Weidel’s accompanying social media communication they illustrate the populist cross-media strategy favored by Weidel and the AfD. With appeals to “the people” and antielitist claims, combined with racist and clearly Islamophobic attitudes, they find in the speech characteristic features of the AfD’s populism. While the speech was met with protests from members of the Bundestag, and the President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Schäuble, called Weidel to order and had the presidential board discuss judicial sanctions against her, these reactions only intensified media attention and thus effectively helped circulate Weidel’s provocative attempt to undermine democratic institutions by confronting and challenging their authority. In the concluding section of the chapter the authors, however, suggest that the AfD’s populist politics in many ways came up short in the face of the COVID-19 crisis, as scientific information and rational decisionmaking earned a renewed popular interest. Weidel and the AfD have since tried to fan the flames of dissatisfaction with corona restrictions and positioned themselves as corona skeptics. But recent performance by the AfD in polls and regional elections has not, as of early 2021, been impressive.

Syriza Over-riding the Moral High Horse One theme that runs across the chapters in this book is the way populist rhetoric operates on a moral schism between “them” and “us.” We see this in Johnson’s chapter, where the Republican party pits the former Obama administration as irresponsible and essentially dangerous, and in Finlayson’s discussion of the Brexit conflict, where Brexiteers are portrayed as defenders of British values and compassion for the common man (as opposed to Remainers, who are only concerned with taking care of themselves). Sophia Hatzisavvidou contributes to this theme with her argument that moralization is a rhetorical strategy endemic to populist discourse. She illustrates this through a case study of the negotiations between the Greek government and that country’s creditors in 2015.

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PM Tsipras from the Syriza party met outside pressure for continued austerity measures to combat the effects on the Greek economy of the global financial crisis with arguments to the effect that this approach was not commonsensical, but in fact unfair and immoral. Hatzisavvidou argues that populism as a rhetorical form that “frames” and organizes meaning is informed by other rhetorical devices without which it cannot perform its functions, and she suggests that populism as an analytical category in political life can be more fully appreciated when placed within a broader context of analysis. To this end, she recommends a rhetorical approach because it reveals what populism does, namely offering opportunities for political identification––albeit at the cost of creating rigid morality-based lines of division that cannot be negotiated. This rhetorical strategy obscures the political nature of public issues and risks precluding the possibility of social and political transformation. By considering populism within a broader rhetorical strategy, analysts can better understand the virtues and limits of populist rhetoric. Hence, she focuses on the rhetorical strategy of moralization and shows how Syriza employed it in its effort to appropriate the exigence of “the crisis” and to shape common sense by introducing it in the discursive field as an alternative doxa. The case study thus illustrates a struggle over the determination of common sense. With Gramsci, Hatzisavvidou notes that common sense is not a solid reference but in fact fragmentary and polyvalent and as such subject to political construction and negotiation. Hence, claims made with reference to common sense are based on something rhetorically constructed for a particular context and purpose, and similarly doxa is found to both participate in the function of persuasion and be subjected to it. Syriza presented an anti-austerity doxa and framed it as ethically superior and therefore more moral than the austerity dogma of the Troika (the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund), but to do so required an inventive strategy which exploited popular dissatisfaction and turning it into a different political vision based on a sense of dignity of the Greek people. This was done primarily through a moralizing approach, moralization here being defined as a process or project that refuses the moral ambivalence involved in political claims, personifies evil, and directs outrage against certain social and political actors. It adopts a didactic style insisting that politics be based on norms of morality. Using moralization, Tsipras sought to advance the superiority of his claims and positions by presenting them

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within a binary moral logic which underscored the virtue and good character of the Greek people as opposed to the cynical and self-serving bureaucrats of the EU. Hatzisavvidou underscores that her identification of the rhetorical moves of redefining an issue as moral, in combination with epideictic traits and appeals to ethos, does not imply that such moves “belong” to populism; she suggests, rather, that these conceptual tools can be used to better understand the rhetorical workings of political agents who aspire to constitute “the people” in an antagonistic social terrain. Thus understood, populism requires a particular type of speech and ethos to perform its functions. The last two chapters offer narratives of the rhetorical careers and developments of two prominent populist leaders, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

Populism as Victorious Victimization Hungary arguably constitutes a successful laboratory of mature, hegemonic state populism. The country showcases, for the first time in an EU member state, what happens when right-wing populism functions as a regime ideology in a political system where democratic checks and balances have been largely dismantled. In his essay Miklos Sükösd recalls his own early experiences with Viktor Orbán, whose authoritarian regime has made right-wing populism the semi-official discourse in Hungary. Speechmaking has been crucial in Orbán’s political career, leading to his total dominance of his country’s political life with no likely end in sight. His activity as an orator has been prolific, systematic, and central to his project with over 40 strategy speeches since 2010. Moreover, Orbán’s seasonal messages are actualized, elaborated, custom-tailored, and distributed by several layers of a complex state-controlled media and communication system, all in all amounting to a propaganda state. Orbán has, for example, institutionalized his giving of regular radio “interviews” (rather: monologues) on state radio every Friday morning. Sükösd’s essay explores key characteristics of Orbán’s populist rhetoric, which he posits as central to the post-democratic transformation of the country since 2010. It seeks the roots of Orbán’s success in certain consistent features of his prolific rhetoric as well as in the deep resonance it has had owing to particular features in Hungary’s history and a self-image prevalent among Hungarians. With a focus on a speech given by Orbán in 1989 at the fall of communism as part of a major national media event and catapulting

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the hitherto unknown young activist into fame, Sükösd argues that it made a long-term imprint on the formation of Orbán as an orator and the formulation of his successful populist strategy, and that he has since drawn on this speech to cement his position as the nation’s leader. For several decades, Orbán has repeated this impactful, victorious experience by strategically and regularly re-establishing similar speech situations and using similar rhetorical patterns. Two main themes stand out: massive fear-mongering and enemy creation (targeting migrants, George Soros, the EU/“Brussels,” domestic democratic opposition or any critical speakers). Together, they solidify into a rhetoric of “deep securitization” in which mobilization for Orbán and his party-state against perceived existential threats by the enemies of Hungarians is fortified by a rigorous and powerful propaganda system.

For the Love of the People In the closing essay, Pierre Ostiguy offers a case study of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez as an interesting exemplar of left populist leadership. Ostiguy, whose work in political science on populism has often been more concerned with conceptual and definitional issues, here takes us into the loquacious universe of Hugo Chávez and suggests that while Chávez in many respects epitomized the populist ethos, there was also a side to Chávez’s public persona that was uniquely SouthAmerican and uniquely personal. For example, a striking feature of Chávez’s and other South-American populists’ rhetoric is the theme of love. Another interesting feature is that while Chávez repeatedly talks about the importance of the fatherland and hardly at all about the working class, his is nevertheless a left-wing populism. Ostiguy aligns himself with the tenor of what he calls the relational performative approach because it allows a focus on the embodied delivery of populist rhetoric, and in Chávez’s case remarkable body language and intonation, but he also makes note of characteristic topoi and vocabulary, including personal insults and the use of swear words. In this respect, Chávez is the perfect example of Ostiguy’s own descriptor of populism on “the low.” Paradoxically, at the same time as Chávez is coarse and norm-breaking, his delivery is best characterized as poetic in virtue of its musical qualities ranging from the rhythmic cadence of sentences to actual singing. A reading of a speech given by Chávez in 2009, when he had won a referendum allowing him indefinite access to re-election, reveals the ideational

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or “logical” core of Chávez’s appeal to the voting population. In addition to a heavy reliance on standard topoi: the patria (fatherland), the pueblo (the people), Simon Bolívar, and eternity, four key characteristics are revealed: (1) making key terms which really are quite different from one another semantically, absolutely synonymous; (2) metonymy; (3) daring historical distortions of world history; (4) a conception of time that is not chronological, but rather prophetic. But more than anything, Ostiguy finds that Chávez plays on religious themes. Following Weber’s idea of charisma and Canovan on redemptive politics, Ostiguy finds in Chávez’s rhetoric a full-fledged religious nature, and the religious mode is repeatedly confirmed by Chávez himself. Chávez as interpreter connects Bolívar and himself, from the continent’s liberation in the early nineteenth century to his project in the early twenty-first, and precisely by virtue of this connection, “Bolívar” not only signifies Bolívar himself but also Chávez, while conversely Chávez fulfills the dream of Bolívar. Chávez, as always, jacks up the sentence’s meaning into a (non-materialistic) selfsacrifice, a self-immolating promise made out of pure love. Presenting himself as a Jesus-figure, like him sacrificing his body for the people (a body which no longer belongs to him), Chávez says, “I do not belong to myself any more, I belong to the pueblo of Venezuela. My life is yours.” This fusion with the people involves “being consumed,” and Ostiguy concludes that his act of love and death, undoubtedly romantic and dramatic, is accomplished in conjunction with (not despite) the pleasure principle: “Lo hare gustosamente” (“I will do so with pleasure”). With this collection of analyses of contemporary populist rhetorics from different countries we hope to contribute to the further interdisciplinary study of a political phenomenon that seems as powerful as it is difficult to subsume under one singular principle.

References Black, E. 1970. The Second Persona. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 56(2), 109– 119. Charland, M. 1987. Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73(2), 133–150. Conley, T. 1986. The Linnaean Blues: Thoughts on the Genre Approach. In Form, Genre and the Study of Popular Discourse, eds. Herbert W. Simons and Aram A. Aghazarian, 59–78. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Canovan, M. 1981 Populism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Canovan, M. 1982. Two Strategies for the Study of Populism. Political Studies, 30(4), 544–552. Cloud, D. 2018. Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Eatwell, R., and M. Goodwin. 2018. National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Penguin, UK. Engels, J. 2015. The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy. University Park: Penn State University Press. Kaltwasser, C. R., T. Paul, P. O. Espejo, and P. Ostiguy, eds. 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford Handbooks Online. Laclau, E. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Lee, M. J. 2006. The Populist Chameleon: The People’s Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 92(4), 355–378. Maddux, K. 2013. Fundamentalist Fool or Populist Paragon? William Jennings Bryan and the Campaign Against Evolutionary Theory. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 16(3), 489–520. Miller, C. R. 1984. Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151–167. Moffitt, B. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Mudde, C. 2004. The Populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39( 4), 541–563. Mudde, C., and C. R. Kaltwasser, eds. 2012. Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moffitt, B., and S. Tormey. 2014. Rethinking Populism: Politics, Mediatisation and Political Style. Political Studies, 62(2), 381–397. Müller, J.-W. 2016. What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ostiguy, P., and K. M. Roberts. 2016. Putting Trump in Comparative Perspective: Populism and The Politicization Of The Sociocultural Low. The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 23(1), 25–50. Ostiguy, P. 2017. A Socio-Cultural Approach. In Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira, Paul Taggart, Pauline Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Populism, 73–97. Oxford Handbooks Online. Roberts-Miller, P. 2019. Rhetoric and Demagoguery. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. van der Geest, I, H. Jansen, and B. van Klink, eds. 2020. Vox Populi: Populism as a Rhetorical and Democratic Challenge, 143–159. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Wodak, R., and G. Weiss. 2007. Critical Discourse Analysis. Theory and Interdisciplinarity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wodak, R. 2015. The Politics of Fear. What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. Los Angeles: Sage.

Populist Melancholy Paul Elliott Johnson

Introduction The 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC) broke custom when it came to the party platform. Customary in presidential election years is that the major parties in American politics publish platforms at their annual conventions. These platforms enunciate principles, policy goals, and attitudes that represent compromise if not consensus positions among the voters, politicians, activists, party functionaries, and party constituencies. Citing the logistical challenges posed by COVID-19 and the implications regarding holding an in-person convention, the RNC, in lieu of a new platform, put out a brief statement that pledged support for President Donald Trump’s candidacy for reelection and warned, “any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.” The decision to rerun the 2016 platform drew criticism. Conservative blogger Allahpundit (2020) attacked the decision as a sign that Trump had no governing agenda on which he could campaign for

P. E. Johnson (B) Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Kock and L. Villadsen (eds.), Populist Rhetorics, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6_2

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a second term. Similarly, pundit Tim Alberta observed that the GOP has become a “cult of personality” under Trump. Yet the decision to carry forward the 2016 Platform and defer writing a new platform for 2020 is about more than Trump. It exemplifies the form of populism that dominates the American Right. This essay offers a reading of the 2016 Republican National Platform (RNP) and the slide into a platformless 2020 for the Republican Party as an exemplar of populist rhetorical melancholy, which I define by drawing on work in rhetorical studies, political theory, and psychoanalysis. Melancholic populism is a rhetorical form which posits the negation of “the people” as the structuring force organizing the political and social system. Yet in affirming “the people” as the central force warranting its claims and in conflating “the people” with the concept of nation, melancholic populism relies on defining the vox populi as separable from the actually existing political and social system. My use of melancholy is a nod to the work of Sigmund Freud, who in “Mourning and Melancholia” (“Trauer und Melancholie”, 1917) describes the psychological conditions of working through loss. Throughout the essay, I toggle between both self and “people” as the subject of melancholy, a nod to how this rhetoric collapses the two into one another. For Freud, some version of the self is always incomplete, not just the way in which people define themselves through and against their familial relationships but also their relationship to a larger world, which can appear to be an alienating force that threatens fantasies of hermetic individualism. Mourning and melancholia are different modes for adjusting to this incompleteness. Both, for Freud, are techniques of approaching loss but rationalized differently, as matters of either unconscious or conscious processing. Drawing on work in trauma studies, loss should be understood as the condition of something that once had existence being gone. This is different from absence, the notion that something is simply not present, which does not necessarily imply its elimination, only its contingent non-presence in a particular moment (LaCapra 1999: 705–706). The mourner consciously reckons with the fact that the world cannot be entirely subordinated to individual will, developing an attachment and affinity for some other object that stands in for what was lost in that external world. The mourner compromises with the fact that the self is not omnipotent by establishing a relationship with some outside of themselves. Perhaps some other versions of the self are absent, but they are not lost. In contrast, the melancholic denies the existence of some world beyond themselves,

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processing this threat to their selfhood unconsciously, leaving them fewer tools available to think about existence as anything other than an exercise in non-sovereignty (244). Functional democratic politics requires the most powerful and privileged members of a political community to share power, to accept losses, and to process any increases in the distance between their identities and the political system not as threats but as signs of change inherent in human community. By starting from their possession of dispossession and negation as the warrant for their claims, melancholic populists contribute to the production of a political pressure cooker in which feelings of injury and marginality heat up. At the same time, left with nowhere to go, these feelings degrade the capacities of the subject to process or relate to politics as anything other than a source of loss. Melancholic populism figures the contingent effects of a confluence of events and powers that goes by the name politics as a catastrophe that negates the American “people.” Rather than figuring the relationship between the conservative “people” and the political world as one of a constantly iterated entanglement and struggle, the separation of “people” and politics is understood as a tragic fait accompli. These set parameters warrant understanding politics as the struggle in which the conservative “people” must not only displace their opponents from their position in the political system but also requires the conservative “people” to destroy the old system to build a new one. Read in sequence, the character of the 2016 RNP and the RNC’s decision to not produce a platform in 2020 illustrates how melancholic populism encourages the reduction of existence into victimhood. Such analysis is important to understanding, especially in American politics, the persistence of grievance rhetoric on the American Right even amid victories. During the leadup to the 2016 presidential election the Republican Party, the chief electoral vehicle for conservative representation in U.S. politics, held significant power in American politics. The GOP controlled the House and Senate. During the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency, the GOP held control of the presidency, both legislative houses, and filled the federal judiciary with conservatives at all levels, placing three conservative jurists on the Supreme Court to solidify a conservative majority while flipping the ideological balance on a number of federal appeals courts. Despite these wins, conservatives acted like victims throughout much of Trump’s presidential term, for example in suggesting that revelations about judicial nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s abuse of women made it a “very scary time for young men in America”

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(Diamond 2017). Attending to the psychological dynamics of melancholy, I suggest, helps elucidate how such attitudes persist even when material conditions should suggest otherwise. In terms of populism, I hew to the features of Michael Lee’s (2006) definition of populism, though I go beyond his designation of the argumentative frame, figuring populism as a rhetorical form. Populists define a heroic “people” in conjunction with their ordinariness, separate them from an enemy, link this enemy to a system often defined in relationship to government and finance capitalism, and promise an apocalyptic reckoning with these forces (359–363). Lee’s definition lines up with a consensus template for populism at the cross-section of scholarship in political science (Moffitt 2016: 41–42; Müller 2016: 2–3) and history (Kazin 1996: 2–3), alongside cognate work in media studies (Baldwin-Phillipi 2018: 17). In addition to overlapping with these definitions of populism as frame, my approach here also draws on those who discuss populism as a political logic rather than an ideology. I follow both Margaret Canovan’s (2004) argument that the existence of left and right populisms confounds the ability to describe it as a robust ideology (243; see also Mudde 2004: 544) and those who describe populism as a political logic (Arditi 2008; Laclau 2005; Panizza 2004; Urbinati 2019), a means not just of orienting people but constituting subjects.1 In the case of melancholic populism, attention to form sheds light on how one element Lee highlights, the apocalyptic, is embedded throughout the structure of the document. Read through argumentative frame, the apocalyptic, save a few mentions of taking the country back, is absent from the RNP. Yet at the level of form, where melancholy encourages the audience to think about the ultimate goal of politics as the abolition of the system in the name of a lost “people,” one finds the apocalyptic present in the way the RNP argues that the existing political system threatens the death of the American “people.” Advancing on the work of populism in the frame vector, some scholars in rhetorical studies have attempted to distinguish between various forms of populism. Some, like David Zarefsky, offer to distinguish between progressive and reactionary populism on the basis of soundness, rooted in 1 There is considerably overlap here between the view of populism as subject constituting and work in rhetorical studies and political theory which thinks about “the people” as a democratically available rhetorical function. See (McGee 1975; Wanzer-Serrano 2012; Frank 2010).

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whether or not the rhetoric points with accuracy toward an enemy, a criterion which finds right-wing populism problematic on the basis of its inaccurate definition of the enemies of “the people” as an alliance of governmental institutions, immigrants, and/or Black folks and people of color. In contrast, progressive populism’s tendency to blame economic elites for problems is sounder (80). However, the efforts of some right-wing populists in America, like Senator Josh Hawley (2020), who routinely attacks Big Tech as an economic enemy of “the people,” suggest the need for recourse to other criteria in filtering between populisms to offer a scaffolding that enables critiques of types of populism to persist in the face of rhetorical adaptation by the Right. Zarefsky argues that scholars can distinguish between real and false populism. Leaving aside whether or not one can find the right definition of “the people,” attending to which populism will have rhetorical efficacy demands attention to how rhetoric constitutes audiences. Thinking about the psychology of form offers one such additional tool, explaining how melancholic populism undercuts possibilities for change rather than expanding them. Crucial to this understanding of form is apprehending how audiences can make seemingly odd or even counter-intuitive connections between texts. Kenneth Burke (1931) defines form as “the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite” (31). Form has a constitutive function that distinguishes it from communication that serves only as the transmission of mere information, with the former affording the audience’s agency/vitality a role in producing the reality they inhabit while the latter reduces them to the role of agentless spectators. Joshua Gunn (2012) explains Burke’s concept of form to show how resonances between texts that are not necessarily easy to read may be found at the level of plot or character. His example is an analysis of Mel Gibson’s brutal The Passion of the Christ (2004), and Gunn notes the formal similarity between the film’s climactic scourging of Christ and the ending shot customary in pornographic cinema, archiving a shared investment in pleasure and violence that would otherwise confound straightforward readings (374–375). Gunn’s reading accounts for the generic blending of the Passion which is mostly a melodrama whose scene of climactic violence reads as generically out of place but coherent. What I show in this essay is how the loss of “the people” functions as the formal element that suggests a unity between the seemingly anodyne 2016 Republican Platform, the 2020 decision to eschew the work of

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producing a new platform, and the increasingly visible right-wing violence emergent in the last half decade in American politics. Finally, this chapter aims to supplement subcategories of work on populism both in cultural studies. One path taken is to generate and specify further subcategories of populism. Work in cultural studies and political theory on Stuart Hall’s (1979) idea of “authoritarian populism” (15) is useful for understanding the increasing visibility of the decline of liberal democracy in the United States, particularly the racist and misogynistic character of movements that are hostile to democracy and to the concept of social difference (Brown 2019: 171; see also on authoritarian populism and its cognates, Rose 2017; Gammon 2017). In authoritarian populism, the authoritarian drive to monopolize control over meaning and centralize decision-making manifests itself in conjunction with a popular will giving democratic institutions an air of functionality. Hall sought to distinguish authoritarian populism from fascism not because fascist rule was impossible outside of the—to the West—iconic confines of Nazi Germany, but because the forms of rule which might effectuate similar outcomes to those of fascist regimes would almost necessarily appear in uncanny, differential forms in nations like the United States and Great Britain. In what follows, I show how the 2016 RNP and the absent 2020 RNP share a form. This form is melancholic populism, organized around the idea of a lost “people,” an idea which does not reckon with this loss as part of the normal conduct of democratic affairs. Instead, the loss of “the people”—despite the fact that the rhetoric of the 2016 RNP and the political rhetoric which has followed it does talk about an aggrieved and injured “people”—withdraws into an unconscious loss in which the “people” as a hermetically sealed, totalistic entity are lost by virtue of the actions of a political system which is separate from the one which the RNP imagines. Melancholic populism attributes the loss of “the people” not to the fact that there is no such thing as a “people” in its totality but instead to actors external to the imagined nation. The form, present not only in the RNP but in a host of conservative artifacts, ranging from Tea Party demands to Trump’s rhetoric, primes its audiences to expect that “the people” have been negated, and, crucially, satisfying this expectation of negation with the conclusion that the recognition of this victimhood is an appropriate response to this negation. Melancholia is part of what enables white Americans who make up the GOP base to think of themselves not as the beneficiaries of a system that privileges whiteness and masculinity.

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Rather, by maintaining their membership in a “people” exiled from the country, the real loss—that of a monopoly of definition on an idea of “the people” and therefore the nation—manifests in rhetorical choices that depict the GOP base as exiled from power. Such rhetoric operates even as conservative forces maintain and consolidate positions of power, while warranting the escalation of violence when confronted with real political losses, as in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which saw a Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, victorious. In what follows, I outline the suitability of psychoanalysis for thinking about the American Right, paying particular attention to how some of the limitations to Freud’s thought in thinking about a minoritized and marginalized population’s rhetoric are in fact warrants for its applicability to examining the dominant class, notably people in the United States interpellated by white masculinity, who make up much of the GOP base. After contextualizing the centrality of a politics of white victimhood to the Right, especially amidst neoliberalism, I turn to reading, first, the 2016 RNP, and then the 2020 RNP. I show how the formal alliance between the two documents is expressed, insofar as the 2016 document, running 66 pages, and the perfunctory statement about the 2020 document, running less than a page, admit to essentially the same sentiment, an understanding that the rhetorical histrionics can be foreclosed because conservatism amounts to something like a politics of victimhood. Melancholy explains this progression and why the 2020 platform, rather than adjusting to the conditions of almost four years of a GOP hold on the presidency, simply recommits to a politics of victimhood and support for the figure of Trump. I conclude by drawing a connection between this melancholy and the increasing open willingness of conservatives to engage in acts of violence, suggesting that the repeated failure of fantasies demands this kind of acting out, and also suggests future pathways for research.

Victimage, Whiteness, Conservatism In this section I briefly outline the case for thinking about populism in a psychoanalytic vocabulary. I argue for the suitability of psychoanalysis, and particular Freud’s concept of melancholia, for analyzing right-wing populism in the United States because Freudian melancholia is well suited for diagnosing the case of subjects misled about their relationship to the broader social and political milieu, particularly relevant to understanding

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conservative politics organized around the perceived interests of whiteness and masculinity. Right-wing politicians and enthusiasts in America rely heavily on rhetorics of victimhood to appeal to audiences and understand their positions, insisting that they have a monopoly on claims to victimhood (Cole 2007: 5; Horwitz 2017: 560). These claims to victimhood are therapeutic as opposed to historical. Rhetorical critic Bryan J. McCann (2007) distinguishes between therapeutic and historical-material approaches to victimhood. Therapeutic approaches, McCann argues, individualize trauma, configuring the deliberation about a particular case or topic around apolitical questions regarding individual trauma, questions that personalize problems which often have roots in deeper, historical sources. In contrast, approaching victimhood through a material and historical lens offers the critic the opportunity to think about the context grounding various claims to victimhood, providing not just a vocabulary for discussing their claims in greater detail, but also offering a criterion to distinguish between various claims to victimhood as sound or unsound. Consider, for example, how therapeutic claims to victimhood render intractable the contemporary debate about racist police violence, captured in the two slogans #BlackLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter. Read therapeutically, both slogans make claims organized on the basis of somewhat plausible grounds and data. On the one hand, racist police violence and rampant talk of the need for law and order in the United States suggest a troubling pattern of behavior by law enforcement. On the other hand, the promulgation of slogans like ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) and calls to defund and abolish the police appear to threaten the occupational livelihoods of police. Read outside of history, one could might be tempted to reduce these slogans to matters of two incommensurable cases of feelings of fear and threat, in which Black Americans fear for their lives from the policing apparatus while officers of the law fear demonization and abuse from protestors. However, applying a historical and material lens to understanding these claims to victimhood enables the critic to sort between the claims in ways that evade flattening these claims out as somehow equivalent. Such an analysis would note the genealogical roots of modern policing in slave patrols (Bass 2001: 159) and the pervasive character of anti-Black racism which organized the mid-twentieth-century reaction against the welfare state in the United States. Meanwhile, police can often count on their membership in a labor union to keep them unaccountable, while someone

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shot by the police must rely on social activists and often underprivileged people in their kinship network to fight for their rights. Police can rely on a host of powerful political and economic forces to “back the blue.” While distinguishing between therapeutic and historical victimhood is helpful in preventing the critic from equivocating between these different claims, it cannot explain why certain unsound claims to victimhood persist, and indeed, seem to intensify in their appeals and character. Psychoanalysis, grounded in the study of why subjects, especially white men who find themselves relatively well-off and privileged in terms of socio-economic privilege, nevertheless rebel against a civilizational structure that constitutes the condition of possibility for their material and economic power. Freud’s distinction between melancholia and mourning offers something of utility because the melancholic subject is the one who is not able to grapple with or otherwise reconcile themselves to the reality they inhabit, as opposed to the mourner whose conscious integration of loss allows them to understand that both are parts of but not entirely selfsame with society. A number of critics, in direct conversation with Freud like David Eng (2010), Mari Ruti (2005), Judith Butler (2004), and Frantz Fanon (1961), advance general and perceptive critiques of the dangers involved in flattening out alienation into a pathology, pointing out that one should take care with the distinction between mourning and melancholia, lest one end up misreading progressive activism as pathological melancholia. Many populations, after all, are constitutively excluded from society and one should be careful not to call their demands for justice and equality unhealthy. In this essay I rely on the mourning/melancholia distinction to analyze the privileged, white base of the Republican Party in the United States, a set of actors whose melancholy eggs on their claims to victimhood despite their historically grounded privilege. Three key concepts, whiteness, masculinity, and neoliberalism, set the context for how this victimhood sustains, even thrives. Whiteness names two things: a position of authority within the U.S. power hierarchy, and an often historically unmarked identification with this position of power. It is not equivalent to phenotype, rather it is reducible to a definition of “being against” such that white has no stable content. To be white is to be powerful in economic, political, and social terms. So, whiteness cannot be narrowed to stereotypes organized around cultural and economic practices (Nakayama and Krizek 1995: 293). Whiteness finds one “invoking the historically constituted and systematically exercised

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power relations” (302) such that, at least in the United States, whiteness and power are historically synonymous. As Daniel Martinez Hosang and Joseph Lowndes (2019) have argued, whiteness is in the midst of a transition, one inverse to late nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century practice of ethnic immigrants becoming white (8). Declining upward mobility, the 2007–2009 Global Financial Crisis and the 2008 election of Barack Obama have each put significant pressure on whiteness. Yet instead of grappling with these trends as signs that the promises offered by whiteness were false, many Americans interpret these events as signaling a problematic displacement of whiteness from its correct place of authority in U.S. politics and culture. Because positions of political, social, and economic authority have tended to be occupied by white men, gender plays a role here as well. Masculinity is a social construct tied to expressions of gender, often wrongly reduced to a binary relationship defined against femininity. This binary understanding continues to inform and organize social and political life in the U.S. Traditional oppositions render features like physical strength, rational intelligence, and emotional restraint masculine while feminizing physical fragility, emotional expression, and empathy. In many cases these divides have given way to a more flexible, stylized vocabulary for thinking about masculinity, such that masculinity appears to modernize, offering space for categories like sensitive men, some kinds of queer men, and entertaining the possibility that men might be objects rather than subjects (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 848). However, the seeming advancement of masculinity past its more brutish and unsublimated variant does not banish masculinity’s essence, which is a sense of entitlement to mastery. These other styles simply provide ways of keeping masculinity hegemonic as its older stylizations come to be socially stigmatized. So, the caveman archetype of an Archie Bunker, the racist and sexist patriarch of the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, might give way to a figure like former President Bill Clinton, whom press praised in the 1990s for his emotional attunement. Yet Clinton’s predatory tendencies, revealed by accusations that he assaulted Ginnifer Flowers and Juanita Broaddrick, suggest the continuity here is a need for control and power, and likewise Donald Trump’s open celebration of the right of white men to act as predators is continuous with the U.S. power structure (Justice and Bricker 2020: 326). A wealth of visible conversations about the problem of rape culture in the United States during the Obama presidency, discussions which led up to the #MeToo movement’s (originated by a black woman,

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Tarana Burke) mainstreamed revelations about the sexual predation of Harvey Weinstein and many other powerful men in the United States, suggest anxieties about masculinity akin to those subtending whiteness in the contemporary United States. Whiteness is the chief position of power in the United States, and masculinity connotes an attitude of entitlement to the white position of mastery. White masculinity describes a key attitude among the GOP base, which is made up mostly of white people, white men and plenty of white women who subscribe to traditional accounts of masculinity and femininity that prop up masculinity. One does not have to be either phenotypically or historically white to be interpellated by discourses of white masculinity, nor does one have to be a man (though it helps). Identifying with a position of power and feeling entitled to that power is toxic enough, but under conditions of widening economic inequality they become even more dangerous. Inequality, already on the rise before the 2008 financial crisis, offers conditions for attitudes of resentment to thrive. Neoliberalism is an intensified form of political liberalism in which the market and the freedom it guarantees shifts from being a contestant among several others in a fight for political and social power into a force assigned the power of truth (Foucault 2008: 32; see also Spence 2015). A disconnect between the needs of the economy and the needs of the population is nothing new. The decoupling of economic interest from the interests of the social reproduction of life is a customary tenet of capitalism (Marx 1978: 209). The 2008-onward crisis highlighted the stark terms of this disconnect. In the neoliberal epoch “the reproduction of workers themselves is uncertain” and “capital … reenters the very domestic sphere it formerly abandoned” during earlier eras of capitalist development when the split between public and private emerged to consolidate capitalism (McClanahan 2018: 331). Capital’s original conditions of production required the separation between public civil society and the patriarchal home, a mode of production that conserved the white and male authority of the home while subjecting men to the rule of the market even as it afforded them the opportunity to participate in it. Under neoliberalism, the market’s penetration of the home threatens men with emasculation in a realm they previously imagined as theirs to rule, giving white men fewer and fewer refuges to hide from their exposure to the emptiness of whiteness, the negative character of masculinity, and the rapacious regime of capital.

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By themselves each of these conditions would threaten to unsettle the comfort enjoyed by the GOP’s base, mainly well-off white people and others who aspire to find personhood through economic accumulation. Together, they give rise to a moment of existential threat to historical ideas of what it has meant to be an American. Any moment in which the traditional social order appears to be shifting or moving in ways that might establish a new set of norms and tacit conventions about the rules governing reality, a moment which Stuart Hall (1985) calls a conjuncture (105), is rife with possibilities and threats. One possibility is the emergence of a more egalitarian order. Another is the possibility of re-securing the violence of the older order. Melancholy constitutes a rhetorical mode for managing this conjuncture in ways that lean into the latter possibility. By organizing its argument around a lost “people,” melancholic populism marries an approach obsessed with the idea of loss to these ongoing crises as a way of generating power and authority. The feelings of worry are, in many cases, more therapeutic than material in McCann’s sense, suggesting that the series of conditions I describe above, in which masculinity and whiteness find their authority challenged, appears within melancholic populism as moves which are already succeeding in eliminating “the people” from politics and society, as if that entity were selfsame with white masculinity. Casey Ryan Kelly (2020) has ably documented some of these moves among right-wing extremists, and I hope to extend this analysis to even more respectable and conservative GOP politics. In the section that follows, I substantiate this claim by offering a close reading of the RNP and its brief 2020 postscript.

The RNP The negation of “the people” offers a master cipher for reading the 2016 RNP. But where, in the earlier example of The Passion, form is the resonance between two counter-intuitively connected images, here form emerges in the opportunities for entry into the text afforded to the reader, especially the way its rhetoric collapses “the people” and nation into one another. The RNP presents reality as a series of negations of both the popular will and the United States. It follows Lee’s (2006) schema for populist rhetoric, which holds that such rhetoric celebrates “the people,” opposes them to an enemy, aligns that enemy with a system of control that often includes government and economic elites, and then promises an apocalyptic reckoning (356).

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However, in a nod to the genre of the political platform, the RNP’s promise of apocalypse can only be detected through attention to form. It would be quite a thing, after all, for a major party platform to promise the destruction of the world. Ergo the RNP affirms “the people,” defines their enemy, and constructs a nefarious system, building an argument that “the people” can be defined on this opposition to the existing system. The tendency to use words and phrases like “crisis” (9), “cultural revolution” (35), “assault on the liberties of individual Americans” (15), “quiet tyranny” (27), and similarly charged phrases suggest how the notion of a lost “people” influences the form of the RNP. The apocalyptic element here is the loss of “the people” which is built into the other three parts, the affirmation of “the people” as having an autonomous existence from the world of politics, the conflation of the Democratic Party with authoritarian and even dictatorial capacities, and the definition of these capacities as determining and overflowing the political and social system. The apocalypse of the self, of “the people” and a white and masculine understanding of both, blend together in the ways that the document is accessible to the reader as a story of popular negation. Party platforms can reveal much about our political world (Stuckey 2005: 64), and this platform is defined by its commitment to a populist form. The document’s rhetoric offers no external point of entry, not point of exit, from the “America” it conjures into existence. The formal character of the appeal is that it produces the expectation of control by “the people” even at the same moment it points to the seemingly contradictory exile of “the people” from the place of power. In Burke’s discussion of form, he makes a distinction between information and form. Information, for Burke, are set of facts about the world relayed in ways that reduce an audience to the role of passive spectator. Burke highlights this point by sarcastically reducing Shakespearean plays to their plot points: Hamlet is the story of someone seeing a ghost then taking their own life, or Julius Caesar is a simple story of murder and betrayal (Burke 1931: 51–53). Often, political discourse from politicians and platforms mentions “the people” as a going-through-the-motions nod at the political conventions. These are the “stripped-to-plot-points-Hamlet ” versions of populism, in which need and expectation are met in a banal manner. For example, the 2016 Democratic National Platform speaks of a “people,” but this entity is flagged as the eventual accumulation of particular groups: women, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, people with disabilities, black Americans, and indigenous nations (i–iv). Each of these particulars

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accumulates to the American “people.” This unfolding not only lines up with the American slogan e pluribus unum, “out of many, one” but also with the conventions of political platforms which are gestures in the direction of an anodyne political norm. The DNP is information in Burke’s sense. Compare to the RNP, which fits into the category of psychological form by enacting a sustained drama in which each element points to the loss of “the people” and makes a traumatic nationalism the form of the document. Affirming “The People” The document opens with an anaphoric chain of “we” statements that emphasize the bind between the document and its readers, formulating “the people” as a kind of shared armor binding document and audience. These are posited together as a kind of life force. Rather, the RNP’s (Barasso et al. 2016) first principle is patriotic freedom, which RNP defines through forceful statements and slogans, issuing a series of proclamations: “We believe in American exceptionalism. We believe the United States of America is unlike any other nation on earth…We believe political freedom and economic freedom are indivisible” (i). The document’s most sustained moment in defining “the people” occurs in the section titled “A Rebirth of Constitutional Government” which opens with the header “We the People” (Barasso et al. 2020: 9). The first page of this section twice affirms the “inalienable” and “God-given” status of individual rights, calling them “non-negotiable.” Other affirmative rights of “the people” listed in this section include the right to “self-defense,” which is conflated with the Second Amendment’s guarantee that one may bear arms (12), the right to property ownership against government claims (15), and the productive “ingenuity” of Americans in various agricultural and energy sectors of the economy (17). Later, the population’s right “to govern themselves” (28) appears, as do the virtues of individuals and communities with autonomy from the state to “solve problems” (31). What content inheres in self-government or problem-solving remains somewhat unclear, speaking to the difficulties that the melancholic subject has in formulating an affirmative relation to the world they oppose. Following these and other statements of first principles, the document moves quickly to attack the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. The

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platform states, “Our standing in world affairs has declined significantly— our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no long < sic > trust us…. The President and the Democratic party have abandoned their promise of being accountable to the American people” (i). Separating “people” from both government and Democratic Party aligns the latter two figures with an institutional system. Combined with the earlier work in the document to define freedom, this separation marks not just a difference of degree between the “people” and the system but locates the government and Democratic Party outside the human franchise marked by the possession of liberty. Indeed, the 2016 RNP freely names enemies that oppose an absolute liberty characteristic of America. In the case of the figure of queer Americans, for example, the RNP invokes the specter of sexual orientation as “an ideology alien to America’s history and traditions,” a history threatened by “bureaucrats—and by the current President of the United States—to impose a social and cultural revolution upon the American people by wrongly redefining sex discrimination to include sexual orientation or other categories” (35). Further, the Obama administration “sought to divide America into groups and turn citizen against citizen,” positing that mentioning inequality is the problem, constituting a division rather than an objective identification of a problem dogging the polity. The RNP speaks of one America, making its oneness evident through the expulsion of some. The RNP openly rationalizes exclusions: rather than assuming that differences between groups can be worked out, the GOP posits a seemingly universal identification with a patriotic idea of nation that abolishes in advance the presence of difference from the space of the nation. Moreover, the preamble of the text says that Obama has been “regulating to death” the United States (ii). Melancholia is characterized by a loss that is only processed unconsciously. The loss here manifests as the loss of the possibility that “the people” might be otherwise. But, instead of grappling with the possibility that one definition of “the people” might be incorrect, or at least mistaken, the RNP’s discourse suggests the outcome of unconscious loss. The outcome of melancholia, psychoanalytic theorist Mari Ruti (2005) suggests, is that it positions a subject who is hostile to the very “logic of well-being” (639), preferring to view reality as an enemy to be negated rather than a condition with which one must negotiate. The notion that “the people” are being regulated to death, that the power they face is

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authoritarian, even totalitarian in character, are symptoms of what melancholy demands: that the reality which one faces is not one that includes them but that has designated them as existing beyond it. Characteristic of what Chantal Mouffe (2004) calls the capacity of far-right populism to manage the fact that in the liberal tradition “no consensus—or no common identity, for that matter—can exist without a frontier” (59), the RNP is not fully inclusive in any sense, instead offering a direct rationalization for its exclusions, advocating for the expulsion of those who would distinguish between the particularities of the population and in the case of the latter, and for the right to preserve the capacity to discriminate by maintaining the capacity of the law to morally regulate sexual and gender alterity. Moreover, the language of revolution suggests the Democrats and progressives together are offering a new order, one that it is implied has negated the historically constituted America. Constructing the Enemy The RNP has no compunction about being for America by naming enemies, identifying President Obama 20 times by name directly (either directly or invoking healthcare reform), and another 18 times as simply “the president” or “current president.” These invocations oppose Obama to the American population and also associate him with enemies both foreign and domestic. For example, the platform narrates the decline of American national interest in the area of immigration by locating the population of the country and the Republican Party as an audience displaced from the stage, so that, “With all our fellow citizens, we have watched, in anger and disgust, the mocking of our immigration laws by a president who made himself superior to the will of the nation” (Barasso et al. 2016: 25). Here the platform cashes in the traumatic promise of its opening discussion of “the people” as metaphysically great, pointing out its unfair exile from politics proper. The section “Restoring the American Dream” notes that “Obama Presidency” has also seen a period in which “business closures have exceeded business startups,” correlating the time of Obama’s leadership with a decline in American economic fortunes. The document similarly posits Barack Obama as the enemy of the rule of law, noting that “President has refused to defend or enforce laws he does not like” and also saying that the “current President of the United States” is pursuing a cultural “agenda that has nothing to do with individual

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rights; it has everything to do with power” (9). The Obama administration correlates with the death of business, a decline of the rule of law, and an administration motivated by power rather than a pure democratic spirit. Opposed to the virtuous “people,” law enforcement, and hard workers of the preamble, Obama and his party have obtained their sovereignty at the expense of the people, rising above the national will. The document charges the Democrats with having “enabled, supported, and defended” breaches of the Constitution (9). They attack the Supreme Court’s affirmation of gay marriage as “five unelected lawyers” robbing “320 million Americans of their legitimate Constitutional authority” to define marriage (11). The Democrats believe in “almost limitless support for abortion” which “puts them dramatically out of step with the American people” (14). Government is another enemy, not only the figure of “Big Government” and the “quiet tyranny of the ‘Nanny State’” (27) both appear but also the idea of a government that threatens to “‘master’” the people, language conjuring up the specter of slavery (23). President Obama “made himself superior to the will of the nation” and deserves “anger and disgust” (25) for his permissive immigration policies. These policies are linked to gangs, connecting government policy to violent criminality (26). This rhetoric attempts to figure the time of Obama’s presidency as beyond the United States of the RNP’s audience. Obama’s two terms in office have shared roots in the United States. The Obama presidency represents an event and interval in American politics that could communicate to conservatives not a loss of personhood but rather a disagreement. Melancholia converts this disagreement into victimhood, associating Obama with anti-democratic forms of government to locate him outside the space of the United States, refusing to grapple or reckon with the significance of his actual position of emergence, one immanent to the United States. One insight from psychoanalytic work is that the subject begins not as an atom, separate from the world, but rather that the inaugural moment in the production of a subject is something collective in so far as relations to forces beyond the subject are themselves the basic ground of the subject’s existence. A crucial feature of melancholic populism is that its “people” is already firm and fixed in its character, and the terms of its character, precisely because of the loss which assigns to “the people” a permanent rather than mutable identity, curating this atomistic origin story as if it were the only possible account of the self. The notion of a “people” with a unified

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will is essential to populism, and idea that this unified will is unchanging is what is particular to melancholic populism, particularly in its right-wing iteration, so that both person and “people” exist against this system but disavow their real, actually contingent relationship to it. The document narrates this reckoning when the preamble notes that “the many sections of this platform affirm our trust in the people, our faith in their judgment, and our determination to help them take back their country” (2, emphasis original). Further, the preamble discusses what appears to be the foreign policy question of hostile nations, but in fact functions as a kind of sleight of hand to promise to confront any sinister forces, as it notes “We seek friendship with all peoples and all nations, but we recognize and are prepared to deal with evil in the world.” As the document discusses foreign policy later, in a section titled “America Resurgent,” these implications are further fleshed out while the document tells a story about how a “bipartisan commitment” to national security has waned, and where there was once a consensus against “those who wish us evil,” now the leadership of the Democratic Party “pander to world opinion and neglect the national interest.” The solution is that the American people will “lead the world into a new century of greater peace and prosperity – another American Century,” a new time and place from the one in which the country is currently entangled (46), lines that come closest to an open apocalypticism in the document. The document welcomes “all citizens who are determined to reclaim the rights of the people that have been ignored or usurped by the federal and intrusive state governments.” While not specifically apocalyptic by itself, the opening section’s repetition of the phrase “God-given” as an adjective describing the rights of the American people suggests that the constraints on freedom identified throughout the document come from a different place than that of “the people’s” authority. Linking System and Enemy The system is composed of a number of elements, encompassing the president, a liberal legal system, regulatory agencies, and both individuals and companies that benefit from government largesse. Regulatory agencies do 90% of rulemaking, language which implies an enormous democratic deficit. Court decisions swamp the will of Congress and ergo “the people,” with legislative bodies—headed in both the House and Senate by Republicans—composing the enemy of the administrative, legal, and

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executive system (10). This system is “an assault on the liberties of individual American,” positioning federal officials as the controlling entity who decides whether or not Americans are free (15). Regulators are not just enemies of freedom, but together with a set of some corporate entities—the document mentions Solyndra, a solar panel company that received money during the Obama administration—work to figure the system as one in which money circulates between government and only certain private entities (28). The RNP describes an “expansive federal regime,” with the word regime signaling kinship with anti-democratic and even authoritarian foreign governments (31). Meanwhile some members of the population who take advantage of government welfare programs are ruined by the “progressive pathology” which keeps people from realizing their full potential (32). Those who receive no benefits are locked out, while those who do receive benefits lose their human potential in the bargain. Repeated, routine use of the word “control” and its variants in the document further cements this effect of opposing “people” to system, as in the description of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations imposed in 2008 as “unprecedented government control of the nation’s financial markets,” a National Labor Relations Board with interests in “controlling” workers, a rather duplicitous description for an entity that adjudicates labor disputes, and “control over political speech” (9), as a description for policies encouraging people to respect people’s pronoun choices. The document further solidifies this sense in the way that it jumps between talking about the Obama administration as a “regime” in the same paragraph that it describes China as such while articulating it to “barbaric population control” and “the cult of Mao” (48). Such rhetoric associates Democratic power with authoritarian forces. Even the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has “dictatorial powers unique in the American Republic” (3). One could be forgiven for imagining that the consequences of people taking this messaging seriously would be dire. The Apocalyptic The RNP draws on both God and country to authorize a reading which would hold that Americans are never “weak”: they have spiritual and nationalistic groundings which can ultimately protect them, even as its populist focus on exclusion renders this “people” fragile in the sense of always feeling victimized. They are metaphysically strong because the

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populist form threaded throughout the RNP equips this “people” to read its exclusion from the world of politics and culture as a sign of its enduring vitality. At the same time, the rhetoric oscillates between insistence on the strength and unity of “the people” and labeling the opposition party and system as quasi-authoritarian, powerful enough to constitutively exclude conservative life from the system, producing a recipe for constant apocalypticism. The RNC platform shows how American conservatism weaponizes what Lee Pierce (2014) calls “traumatic nationalism” in the service of its political interests through a populist argument frame, one which posits the story of the nation as “one ripe with suffering, loss, and trauma” (56). Utilizing melancholy reveals the visceral feedback loop generated by the RNP as an effect of its refusal to reckon consciously with the loss of “the people.” “The people’s” function within the GOP’s grammar is not as a concept whose incompleteness provides a motivation or driving force toward altering, even perfecting the polity: instead “the people” functions as a concept out of politics, separate from the world. This reflects Freud’s observation that the melancholic ego is “poor and empty” because the subject has misapprehended their relationship to what they believe is the world: the refusal to consciously acknowledge loss presents the subject with the entirety of the world as ridden with a deficit, a deficit that the subject perceives as a failure to accord with the reality of the world itself. Here the deficit is “the people’s” absence from the world. Unable to acknowledge their loss, the melancholic constantly misapprehends the gap between themselves and the external world as a failure of the world itself to be the “real” reality of the subject’s expectation of total coincidence between their existence and the world itself. Trump’s MAGA slogan exemplifies this melancholy. In one sense, the slogan’s implied state of the nation in the “Again” part of “Make America Great Again” appears to explicitly acknowledge loss. But in fact, Trump’s rhetoric of traumatic nationalism and that of the RNP are both littered with constant signs that the “America” and “people” he seeks to conjure are not capable of suffering loss or injury within themselves. Trump promises to be the “people’s” voice, and his xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist rhetoric seals off these white “people” from alternative definitions and broader conceptualizations that would expose the limitations and permeable parameters of the category (Kelly 2020: 5). Rhetoric in the RNP that defines “the people” as bearers of “God-given” (9)

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right proposes their humanity is beyond the reach of government. Similarly, when the RNP quotes an American Founder, James Wilson, who states that “in America, ‘the people are the masters of government,’” the language implies a wholeness to the population derived from their shared antinomy to government (23). The God-given rights of the population, “the people’s” antonymic relation to government, and Trump’s promise imply that the population has certain total qualities that are their defining characteristics, each rhetorics of victimage that do not so much grapple with the mutable nature of “the people” as figure its malleability as a source of danger, figuring the fact that “the people” are up for political contestation as a traumatic loss rather than an opportunity for democratic politics. Typically, objects work to mediate loss and make it livable. When the object taken is a person who is an enemy, however, that enemy may become “an obsessive object of study” (Jutel 2018: 377) which undercuts the possibility of negotiating with the contingency of the self, and “people” as something other than loss. The RNP, in figuring “the people” with a previous existence as a clearly defined entity, cannot stabilize its “people” vis-à-vis some commonly held object. Or, at least, these objects are other people and countries to be taken as objects of disgust: Barack Obama, China, transgender people, government bureaucrats, and so forth. That the staging ground for the fantasy can change in terms of scapegoated object, but that the content of the fantasy can remain the same—a demand for control, expressed through a definition of freedom understood as the power to police morality, exercise military capacity, and extend the reach of American liberty—symptomatizes what one would expect of melancholy. Each object testifies to unacknowledged loss, understood in the traumatic sense of having at one point been total. As in the analogy that if one has a hammer all one can see are nails, if one cannot imagine they have a place in the world, then many parts of that world may appear diseased and rotten to confirm the view of the world as a fallen place. So Chinese economic expansion represents a loss for the United States, trans* people as threats Barack Obama represents foreign dictatorship, and the government bureaucrat appears in alliance with authoritarians. By 2020 this fantasy of omnipotence reached an even fuller form in the RNC’s decision regarding the production of a new platform.

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The 2020 RNP The 2020 RNP was curious, in that it does not really exist. The Republican National Committee’s (RNC 2020) made the controversial decision to scrap the platform in favor of a few brief statements including a commitment to reassert “the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump” and its enthusiasm for “the president’s America-First agenda.” Much of the other work typical of national party convention took place over conference calls and Zoom, suggesting that the restrictions on physical meetings and an in-person conference cannot entirely explain this decision by the RNC. Rather than attempting to read deeply the single page statement put out by the RNC, I will offer some thoughts here that consider the decision as the logical outcome of the melancholic attitude identified in the 2016 RNP, suggesting that the cavalier attitude regarding the norm of producing a new document suggests one of the outer boundary outcomes of melancholia, a disinterest in communication and a corresponding increase in relying on spectacular violence to manage one’s relationship with the world. The melancholic subject is susceptible to becoming ensnared in feedback loops of repetition. Such repetition is defined not by repetitive actions marked by significant differences that suggest a capacity to sublimate and move through trauma, as in the example of say, the consumption of literature which affords the experience of intensities related to traumas but also catharsis. Rather, the melancholic subject is drawn to repetitive behaviors so difficult to distinguish from one another that they index how the subject is invested in understanding the world in terms of the loss of self, or in this case, the loss of “the people.” Like almost any condition, melancholia operates on a continuum. Ruti (2005) suggests as much in her discussion of how melancholia can be understood to be a customary part of the process of identity formation, rather than some incommensurable category (642). The decision about the 2020 RNP signals the intensification of melancholia into a particularly severe case, one in which the fact that “the subject clings to an object that is already irremovably lost” (640) can be observed. The patterns and genre constraints of political platforms and conventions represent the artifice of history. Politicians, parties, and voters tacitly or explicitly buy into these rituals because of what has gone before. To an extent, these rituals and their markers are the binding agents that help keep some semblance of political normalcy running even during times of crisis. The

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flippant dispatch of them suggests the intensification of unacknowledged loss running the show. The literal gesture to toss out the need for another platform itself suggests the formal contours of conservative populism: the nation’s loss is such a serious event that playing out the typical string of organizing a committee, drafting and revising a platform, and putting out a statement that encapsulates what the Republican Party stands for offers no supplement or backstop against the state of melancholy. This lens offers a means of interpreting various violent recent political events in the United States as expressions of this white and masculine melancholy, including various right-wing plots, like the December 2020 conspiracy to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer and the militant resistance to suggestions that citizens need to wear masks in the face of the recent pandemic. Increasingly visible political extremism is a symptom of melancholy because conservative populism has left the Right with few tools to grapple with the contingency of actually existing politics. The spectacles of violence both increasing in number and receiving more attention in the Trump-era—violence at the border, hate crimes, an enthusiasm for violent policing of protests—are now doing the work that discourse promised. Eric Santner observes that the melancholic is given to “(infantile) fantasies of omnipotence” through which the melancholic imagines that the world revolves around them (9). These actions whose structure did not, in fact, depart to a great extent from what the form of the 2020 RNP suggested, namely that a nation found itself under dictatorial rule and “the people,” who had once been characterized by their unity and a place of power in the political and social system, no longer occupied such a position. Moreover, the difference in their current position and the prior one was not a matter of degree, but of kind, such that the sense of “the people” in the RNP and the storming of Congress are formally similar: signs of a population worried not about contingent defeat but constitutive exclusion. Such is the logic of the unconscious character of the loss at work in melancholia, so that “the people” remain a unified, even divinely blessed entity, and the world they are separated from appears impoverished by virtue of the fact that it negates “the people” while the rhetoric of injury throughout constantly admits—there is loss, after all, it is simply unconscious—to the vulnerability of “the people.” When an alliance of Republicans, conspiracy enthusiasts, and conservatives, worried that they had lost their nation, invaded the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, they were merely carrying out the next

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logical step in the progression of melancholy. The nature of melancholia suggests this violence will only temporarily satisfy the subject, who finds this acting out as only a momentary sign of their agency and invulnerability. The system in which these maneuvers and struggles take place is external to the sense of “the people” lost to the melancholic, who is forever attempting to claw back something that was never there in the first place, in this case a toxic mixture of “the people” as a homogeneous entity theorized in white and masculine terms.

Conclusion I have here outlined the features of melancholic populism, a rhetorical form that produces a negative feedback loop that figures politics in terms of a lost “people” and as a consequence encourages a traumatic orientation toward politics that encourages reading it broadly in terms of loss. Read in this way, recent outbursts of violence in U.S. politics appear not as curious signs of a neutral democratic decline, but rather symptoms of a deeper-seated attitude on the political Right and among American conservatives generally who are hostile to democracy. Researchers can, hopefully, identify melancholic populism as a species that enables them to avoid conflating all acts of rhetorical populism with extremism. Melancholic populism offers a model for explaining not only why right-wing rhetoric of victimage and anger escalates rather than burns out but also explains why the 2020 RNC decided they needed to issue no traditional platform. The unconscious character of “the people’s” loss emerges in the intensifying grievance-based feedback loops, as the need to experience the loop of loss and anger is ground down to its rawest form, a demand for authoritarian control and the violence therein. While I don’t take up the whole schema of what populist mourning might look like in progressive discourses here for reasons of space, I hope that by illuminating the characteristics of melancholic populism, I provide researchers with another tool in their analytic set to avoid falling into the trap of treating all intensely argued claims warranted in the name of “the people” as the same argument. Of particular interest is the question of whether or not there might be a progressive populism organized along the terms of mourning, or whether or not the Freudian schema’s features that make it well suited to animate the political right place constitutive limits on its utility for analyzing progressive politics.

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Finally, this study has suggested that authoritarian populism will tend to manifest in the U.S. context as organized around the concept of loss in ratio with the tendency for society to appear increasingly dispersed and inchoate. This is precisely because of the triple convergence of whiteness, masculinity, and neoliberalism around a shared point of uncertainty and fragmentation. Whiteness has no substance beyond an identification beyond a position of power. Masculinity has no stable content aside from its negative definition against what it is not, and its certainty that it is not feminized, it is not out of control, and so forth. And finally, the distributed regime of control of capital is increasingly dispersed as traditional civic and political centers of authority lurch and collapse. At the center of this convergence, melancholic populism makes intelligible the sense of a world in crisis, but figures this crisis as the loss of what has come before, rather than as the perpetuation of the absent core of American empire. Such an understanding is essential for scholars of rhetoric and populism, to emphasize that not all rhetorics of crisis and “the people” refer to the same situation.

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Voltagabbana Rhetorics: Turncoating as a Populist Strategy in Pandemic Times Pamela Pietrucci

U-Turns and Mixed Messages in a Pandemic Context On July 20, 2020, the then-President of the United States Donald J. Trump tweeted a black and white photo of himself wearing a mask, offering his clearest endorsement to date to this basic precaution during the coronavirus pandemic after months of resisting wearing a face mask in public. His tweet read: “We are united in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!” (Trump 2020). This tweet came as a surprise after months of mixed messages on his position regarding the use of face coverings as a precaution to curb the spread of the coronavirus. In a Fox News interview from the day before this tweet, responding to remarks by Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) director of the coronavirus White House Task Force, who said that if everybody wore

P. Pietrucci (B) Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Kock and L. Villadsen (eds.), Populist Rhetorics, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6_3

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masks the virus could likely be kept under control in a matter of weeks, he declared: “I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wear a mask everything disappears.” In the same interview he added that masks cause problems, too, and that “with that being said, I’m a believer in masks. I think masks are good” (Breuninger 2020). Yet, Trump had largely refused to wear a mask in public up to that point. In April 2020, when the CDC changed its guidelines to recommend using a face covering in public areas where social distancing is unfeasible, Trump announced this change to the public, delivering the news while also adding: “I don’t think I’m going to be doing it” (Breuninger 2020). Fast forward a few weeks, to the end of October, after Trump’s Covid-19 hospitalization and less than a week from Election Day 2020, reporters started noting occasions in which Trump demonstrated a stark change of tone on mask-wearing. At a rally in Tampa, Florida, he talked to a crowd of his supporters, largely mask-less and standing shoulder to shoulder, saying that wearing a mask is a good idea when social distancing cannot be maintained. He said to the audience: “If you get close, wear a mask. ‘Oh it’s controversial.’ It’s not controversial to me. You get close, you wear a mask. Social distance, social distance” (Vazquez 2020). Organizing crowded rallies such as that one, with its lack of proper security measures, appeared to be sending a message to his supporters in odd contrast to the President’s words about masks, reflecting once again an oscillating and ambiguous position that had been mostly consistent in Trump’s rhetoric from the very beginning of the pandemic emergency. These confusing turns and disorienting series of changes of opinion and position on masks, however, are not unique and they are not peculiar to Trump’s rhetoric. On the contrary, similar turns have been characterizing the public discourse of several other populist politicians across the globe. In Brazil, one of the countries worst affected by the coronavirus crisis, with the highest pandemic death toll after the USA, the far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro has been reported to have mocked the recommendation of wearing a mask as a preventive measure in early spring, before a mask mandate was eventually issued for the capital of Brazil in April. After downplaying the pandemic and describing Covid-19 as a “little flu,” Bolsonaro was reported to have used homophobic slurs to taunt aides who were wearing a mask, stating that masks are “for fairies.” Bolsonaro often shunned the use of masks despite the mask-wearing mandate in some locations in Brazil: he was regularly seen breaking the

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social distancing measures or photographed while giving handshakes and hugs at rallies, hosting barbecues, or going out for hot dogs, generally without a mask (Phillips 2020). Bolsonaro tested positive for Covid-19 in July 2020 and developed symptoms of the illness. He subsequently started wearing a mask in public more often during the summer, but not always. Like Trump, he sent mixed messages in various occasions, the most notable probably when he announced his Covid-19 infection to reporters: while infected with the virus, he participated in a public press conference, this time wearing a mask. Yet he also abruptly removed his mask while being in close proximity of some journalists whose professional association ended up suing him for endangerment and for breaking the rule of self-isolation while infected with a highly contagious virus (Bostock 2020). On the other side of the ocean, in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson also did a series of dramatic U-turns in policy decisions regarding precautions and security measures related to the pandemic. Johnson spurred international outrage early in the pandemic in March, declaring to the British people that the UK would not jump on the lockdown and precautions global bandwagon, but also said: “It is going to spread further and I must level with you, I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time” (Stewart et al. 2020). After initially boasting a firm decision to not enact restrictive pandemic precautions in the UK, Johnson tested positive for Covid-19 in April and developed serious symptoms of the illness, ending up in an intensive care unit. In the months after re-emerging from the ICU, Johnson appeared to have dramatically changed idea pretty much about everything related to pandemic precautions, including the use of face masks in school and strict national lockdowns (Devlin 2020). To add another relevant and similar case to this initial overview of countries hard-hit by the pandemic and their populist politicians’ attitudes toward precaution measures, one should look no further than Italy, the first European country to face a serious Covid-19 outbreak. Of particular interest here, for the striking similarities to those of the other populist leaders discussed thus far, is the leader of the far-right populist party “Lega Nord” (“Northern League,” from now on referred to as “League”1 ), Matteo Salvini. From the beginning of the pandemic, Salvini’s rhetoric was a rollercoaster of sometimes abrupt and often confusing and hard-to-track opinion shifts regarding public health precautions to curb the uncontrolled spread of the virus during surges of

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contagion. Just like his international colleagues, Salvini has been observed over time occupying opposite sides of the spectrum in relation to policy issues regarding the pandemic. Like Trump and Bolsonaro he went from mask-skeptic crowd-hugger to mask-supporter and back, consistently sending mixed messages during a dire national health crisis. Similar to Johnson, he changed opinion and position on very serious political issues such as mask mandates or a national lockdown. He surpassed Johnson in speed and intensity in his changes of mind: when new lockdowns were being unrolled all over Europe to contain the second wave of contagion, Salvini expressed three different and somewhat contrasting positions regarding an impending national lockdown in Italy within a single day, attracting national media criticism for his “giravolte,” the dramatic U-turns (Mari 2020; Pipitone 2020). According to several national newspapers on October 29, 2020, Salvini released a morning interview to Radio Anch’io on Rai Radio 1, stating the following about an impending national lockdown: “If a lockdown becomes necessary, it is right to do it” (Pipitone 2020). By lunchtime his breakfast position that acknowledged the potential need and implementation of a national lockdown had evolved already, becoming starkly contrarian to the possibility of any closure. Before speaking in the Senate, by mid-day, he invited people to follow his speech live, declaring decisively on Twitter: “A lockdown? It would be a complete disaster, not so much for Conte [Italy’s PM], but above all for all Italians. We have to work to avoid it at all costs, starting with testing and curing patients at home. In 20 minutes, I’ll say this in the #Senate. Follow me live” (Mari 2020). By dinner time he tweeted again, smoothing both positions expressed earlier in the day and saying to his followers that he would “do everything in his power to avoid it [the national lockdown]” (Salvini 2020). Bombarding the public with contrasting or different statements has been a characteristic of Salvini’s political rhetoric, even more so throughout the pandemic and the related national crisis. His now infamous sudden, dramatic, and continuous flip-flops both increased and at the same time leveraged public feelings of confusion, distrust, and in the latest pandemic period also despair. This rollercoaster of U-turns characterized Salvini’s public communication for months, stoking the fire of a growing public unrest in a moment of crisis as Italy had become “emblematic of a despair, exhaustion, and fear that is spreading throughout the Continent” with the second wave of contagion (Horowitz 2020).

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Salvini’s rhetoric will be my central case, but the populist turncoating strategy I identify and study within the Italian context is not only happening in Italy. In fact, it appears to have an international character, as we can trace it in the discourse of several politicians across the globe, for similar reasons, and in similar occasions. The similarities across the different examples illustrated above are striking and concerning: Looking at their context and rhetoric, it is in fact hard to say with complete confidence whether Salvini, Trump, or Bolsonaro (and initially even Johnson) are no-maskers and fundamentally hostile to pandemic precautions or not. Each one of them, to a different extent and at different times, declared several starkly contradictory positions, thus puzzling and confusing their audiences in the middle of a global and national crisis. Additionally, each of those politicians failed to take responsibility for those contradictory statements and their public political consequences. Populist Turncoating, Rhetoric, and Crises As is evident by now, the strategic ambiguity and the dangerously mixed messages in regard to pandemic precautions, along with drastic changes of mind regarding key issues of prevention and risk management, characterized the public discourse of populist politicians during the evolving coronavirus crisis. Populist politicians across the globe seem to be consistently engaging in turncoating rhetorical moves on pandemic issues, which they often frame as arising at the intersection of freedom and prevention, such as mask-wearing or lockdowns and curfews. This deserves critical attention because its simultaneous presence in public communication makes it impossible for any of those politicians to be held accountable for any of their public positions and statements, thus promoting in their relative contexts a similar politics of disavowal and unaccountability, and a political rhetoric of weaponized communication and dangerous demagoguery (Gunn 2018; Mercieca 2019). So far, I have referred to each politician whose U-turns I described above as “populist” and generally belonging to far-right parties from different nations and contexts. Scholarship on populism can help us highlight some relevant similarities that justify the grouping of all the politicians mentioned above under the general label “populist” that transcends the specific political, cultural, and ethical differences they might represent locally.

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Current accounts of populism conceptualize it as an ideology that is distinctively anti-pluralist, leveraging the opposition of “the people” against a corrupt elite (Müller 2016). Populism has also been theorized rhetorically as a form or an argumentative frame (Lee 2006) that “positions a virtuous ‘people’ against a powerful enemy and expresses disdain toward traditional forms of democratic deliberation” (Lee 2006, p. 356). Additionally, populism has been studied as a political style and a performance and has been contextualized in contemporary mediated and technological environments (Moffitt 2016). Moffitt defines his approach in this way: …we need to move from seeing populism as a particular ‘thing’ or entity towards viewing it as a political style that is performed, embodied, and enacted across a variety of political and cultural contexts. This shift allows us to make sense of populism in a time when media touches upon all aspects of political life, where a sense of crisis is endemic, and when populism appears in many disparate manifestations and contexts. […]. In this global environment, idealised views of populism as an unmediated or direct phenomenon that exists between the ‘leader’ and ‘the people’ must be abandoned, and its intensely mediated nature needs to be addressed and explored. We are no longer dealing with the romantic notion of the populist speaking directly to ‘the people’ from the soapbox, but witness a new breed of savvy populist leaders who knowhow to utilize new media technologies to their advantage. (Moffitt 2016, p. 3)

According to Moffitt, then, a “political style” is not just a way of speaking or an argumentative frame (as in Lee’s concept of populism as form). A political style is not just found in its “communicative and rhetorical elements” but can, rather, be identified by “emphasizing the performative, aesthetic or relational elements of contemporary populism” (Moffitt 2016, p. 5). Here, I read Moffitt’s perspective as still an essentially rhetorical one––where “rhetoric” is conceived in a broader sense as encompassing more than language and requiring a relational approach in research (Conley and Dickinson 2010; Ott and Dickinson 2019; Edbauer 2005). Thus, I take up Moffitt’s call to explore the performances, rhetorical strategies, and political-stylistic elements of contemporary populist politicians, paying special attention to their engagement with the contemporary mediated world and with the pandemic crisis. In particular, I focus on far-right conservative politicians’ rhetorical strategies and performances of political disavowal during the pandemic. I do so by identifying

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one of the ways in which populist leaders escape responsibility and accountability during a time of crisis, while fostering further instability through the strategic leveraging and amplifying of volatile public feelings via social media and digital technologies, thus stirring chaos and political and social unrest. According to Moffitt (2015), crises do not just trigger populism. Looking more carefully at the relation between these two terms, crisis and populism, he argues that we have to acknowledge and better understand how the opposite relation is also significant: Populism attempts to act as a “trigger for crisis” (Moffitt 2015, p. 189), because crises are always mediated and performed. The storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021 is a good example of how populist rhetoric and performances, in a context of pandemic crisis and through the support of digital technologies and social media platforms, can trigger deep political unrest and even violent insurrection. The de-platforming of former President Trump on Twitter and Facebook, where his accounts were suspended indefinitely, demonstrates the complex relations among populist style, media, and crisis, a set of relations that is particularly relevant as a frame for interpreting the turncoating strategy I focus on in this chapter. Here, I contribute to deepening our understanding of how these relations unfold and function during this pandemic period, taking the global stage and the miscellaneous populist rhetorics described above as the background and context for identifying a subtle way in which political populist style and performances reify crisis in an already complicated and historic global moment. I will do so by identifying and describing a type of turncoating (or voltagabbana-ing, to adapt the Italian term that emerges from my case study) as a quintessential populist strategy that aims to trigger or deepen crises, while enabling populists to escape public accountability and responsibility. Voltagabbana-ing as Populist Strategy In the remaining sections I shift my attention to the Italian context in particular, investigating Salvini’s public rhetoric during the pandemic as a case study to better understand the motives and consequences of this type of turncoating that I defined above as a performance or rhetoric of “voltagabbana”—a type of political style and public communication characterized by volatile U-turns, ideological incoherence, internal contradictions, and showcasing a simultaneous public disloyalty and

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strategic adaptation to quickly shifting public feelings. In the second part of this chapter, I focus in particular on Salvini’s giravolte on maskwearing between March and October 2020, covering the time between the outbreak of the coronavirus emergency in Italy and the explosion of the second surge of contagion in Europe. Considering closely the Italian context and Salvini’s case vis-à-vis the other international examples of drastic U-turns and opinion changes from populist politicians across the globe, I explore and conceptualize a contemporary version of the classic Italian concept of transformismo that can help us make sense of populist rhetorics in this unstable period. This inquiry can thus teach us more about contemporary populism and the entanglements between political discourse and digital/mediated platforms and tools within the reality of a global crisis. I first turn to conceptualize voltagabbana rhetorics as a mode of contemporary transformismo in order to better understand the functions, goals, motives, and consequences of this political-rhetorical strategy. I then delve deeper into Salvini’s case to evaluate his turncoating discourse on masks and science during the Covid-19 emergency in Italy.

Trasformismo and Contemporary Populist Rhetoric Trasformismo is an Italian word that we could translate with “transformism” or “turncoating.” The original word has recently been added to the list of untranslatables (les intraduisibles ), terms that are hardly detachable from the tradition and culture of a given country and hard to render in different historical and cultural contexts. As an historical phenomenon, trasformismo has characterized Italian history from the late 1800s, taking many forms at different times. Marco Valbruzzi, in his work about the history of this idea, highlights the fact that trasformismo is a complex concept that encompasses several different and sometimes contrasting definitions (Valbruzzi 2014, 2015). He explains: … trasformismo has been seen as a peculiar system of government, the Italian way to democratization and modernization. In contrast, other scholars, especially political scientists, have preferred to make their focus the individual behavior of those who ‘transform’ their opinions and decisions in order to reach a particular opportunistic goal. In this case, transformism has come to be known as little more than a form of

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“party switching”, that is the changing party affiliation by individual politicians. Accordingly, those politicians who practice the ancient art of trasformismo have been labelled “switchers” or, more figuratively, “turncoats” (voltagabbana). Finally, there are scholars, especially sociologists and anthropologists, who have approached the concept from a cultural perspective. For many among them, trasformismo is neither the product of a difficult historical conjuncture nor the behavior of a single opportunist politician. Briefly put, trasformismo should be interpreted as a prototypical Italian trait: a distinctive national vice (for its critics) or the best example of Italy’s quintessential ability to survive (for its apologists). (Valbruzzi 2014, p. 170)

Valbruzzi explains that trasformismo has been identified over time as multiple distinct phenomena and that it should plainly be seen as a concept with several definitions and referents: an umbrella term that includes different ideas rather than a precise word referring to a simple or unequivocal phenomenon. I build on this flexible idea’s complex history by identifying and reflecting on one of its contemporary evolutions in political rhetoric. By doing so, I contribute to tracing the idea of trasformismo in practice, in particular by exploring its contemporary evolutions from its long history in Italian political life. I also demonstrate that in a time of globalized political issues and discourse, a concept that has been considered uniquely Italian has now become more translatable and increasingly detectable in different corners of the world, but in similar political figures. This contemporary version of transformism that we see emerging in populist politicians in a time of global crisis, the rhetoric of turncoating or voltagabbana-ing, can be conceived as an evolved manifestation of the transformist practice of party-switching for opportunist goals identified in Valbruzzi. Contemporary voltagabbana-ing, however, is less about party-switching and more about internal position changes to achieve political opportunistic goals. If historically, at its beginning, trasformismo did not have a negative association attached to it, over time a specific version of transformism lent this term a highly negative connotation that attached to it a sense of ethical ambiguity, opportunism, disloyalty, and weakness. To use a rhetorical term, we can think of trasformismo as a classic ideographic term, in Michael McGee’s terminology, because it is never ideologically neutral but rather carries an interpretive baggage that shifts depending on context and history. If historically in Italy it was considered something sound and positive, something that “parties should consider carefully”

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(Valbruzzi 2015, p. 3), later on its practical manifestations and consequences in Italian political history gained it a connotation of dishonor and vice, to be famously defined at the end of the nineteenth century by the poet Giosuè Carducci as follows: “Trasformismo, an ugly word for an uglier thing” (Valbruzzi 2015, p. 1). Valbruzzi explains that trasformismo can be categorized across two different dimensions: The first separates cases of “molecular transformism” from those of “group transformism.” While the former identifies examples of legislators who, as individual parlamentarians, cross the floor and/or change party affiliation, the latter concerns those cases in which entire groups of politicians are co-opted within a given parliamentary majority. The second dimension distinguishes between cases of “inclusive transformism,” whereby parties in government seek to increase the existing majority through the assimilation of other parties excluded from the customary coalitions, and cases of “exclusive transformism” by which different centrist majorities are formed through different combinations of the existing pro-system parties. (Valbruzzi 2015, pp. 10–11)

This taxonomy, described in Valbruzzi to help systematize the many manifestations of Italian historical transformism, helps us characterize contemporary voltagabbana rhetorical strategies as manifestations of what Valbruzzi calls “molecular transformism.” Voltagabbana turncoats in contemporary political discourse tend to be individual politicians more than entire groups. Usually, a leading figure of a political party, acting as spokesperson for an entire party or coalition, is the contemporary individual voltagabbana. This molecular strategy of turncoating makes sense in the contemporary context where the personalization of politics catalyzes public attention on individual politicians and party leaders more than on the party’s rhetoric as a collective, multi-figure endeavor. When we look at contemporary political rhetoric in Italy, for instance, we think about Salvini as a synecdoche for the League, of which he is the leader. Not only is Salvini a “part” speaking for “the whole” of the League, he has become the leading figure of the right-wing coalitions, so we often think of him also as representing the right-wing and farright political discourse in Italy tout-court. As a consequence, we look carefully at what Salvini says and register his positions as those of the center-right coalition broadly, and the League more precisely. Generally, we can expect other leaders of right-wing and far-right parties to be in agreement with Salvini, and to often amplify his opinions and remarks.

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One recurring example is Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the far-right party Fratelli D’Italia (“Brothers of Italy”): We see her amplifying, sharing, and relaunching Salvini’s anti-system discourse in the vast majority of cases, even though Meloni’s own rhetoric differs from Salvini’s in significant ways. Thus, we can talk about voltagabbana strategies as a type of contemporary molecular trasformismo as they are generally enacted by a single individual, even though the consequences of those rhetorical strategies reverberate in the discourse of larger coalitions. Looking at the second dimension of transformism gives us another interesting insight in contemporary facets of this phenomenon. If historically transformism was aimed at managing political coalitions for maintaining and enacting political power––for instance by a governmental majority incorporating centrist parties (inclusive transformism), or by forming different centrist majorities from governmental coalitions through re-shuffling pro-system parties in different combinations (exclusive transformism)––nowadays contemporary manifestations of transformism seem to happen more outside of the center and toward the extreme fringes of the political spectrum, such as far-right parties. Furthermore, types of transformism such as voltagabbana strategies are decidedly not directed at the internal mechanics of party politics. Rather, this type of contemporary transformism is aimed at publics of potential or current voters, not toward politician colleagues. Therefore, it is not possible to locate voltagabbana rhetoric in the inclusionary/exclusionary continuum of transformism. Rather than characterizing this type of transformism as inclusive or exclusive, it is significant to note that it crosses over between technical and public spheres and it is intentionally directed outward, from politicians to publics. In conclusion, this type of discursive turncoating is not about partyswitching, rather it deals with fast and continuous opinion-switching by specific politicians. This is a direct consequence of the contemporary context: our personalized and mediated political environment. This, together with the outward orientation, explains why voltagabbana rhetorics do not function in the technical sphere of policy; they are rarely persistent or significant for governing purposes. Instead, they circulate and function in the public sphere, to affect and sway public opinion. The goal is not strategic party-affiliation maneuvering, in an inclusionary or exclusionary sense, as in historical transformism; rather its aims are directed outwardly, at maneuvering public opinion and affecting the composite audience of potential voters. Finally, it is also worth noting

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that this type of trasformismo, similarly to the aspects of Italian historic transformism characterized by party-switching, is often associated with the negative connotations of ethical ambiguity and dishonor described above. Transformismo as a practice, and voltagabbana performances in particular, are undeniably ethically questionable. Being a voltagabbana, or performing strategic voltagabbana moves, thus has nothing to do with reasonable changes of opinion: It has more to do with exploitation of external events, contexts, tools, and people for opportunistic political goals. It is important to note, however, that this type of transformism, characterized by turncoating performances, is less typical of the Italian context, and more international in its nature, even historically. Valbruzzi notes that: The Italian party system is far from the only example in which switchers and turncoats have existed and proliferated. Indeed, the term “transfuguismo” was coined in Spain, during the years of the Restauración, precisely to describe any change in party affiliation on the part of a single parliamentarian. No different from what happened to the word “trasformismo,” “transfuguismo” also became a negatively charged word– –characterizing, in Spain and elsewhere (but particularly in Latin America), any blameworthy and opportunistic behavior exhibited by politicians. (2015, p. 16)

In conclusion, voltagabbana/ turncoating rhetoric as a specific type of political style seems to be an evolution of other types of historical turncoating, such as party-switching. Like those other types, being a voltagabbana today is a practice charged with a negative connotation. In the next parts I will illustrate Salvini’s voltagabbana performances in the Italian pandemic context to illustrate this populist strategy that international politicians use to simultaneously exploit and stir crises around the globe, while escaping accountability and responsibility for their political discourse and personal rhetorical style.

Covid-19 Outbreak in Italy: from Epidemic to Pandemic Between the end of February and the beginning of March 2020, Italy became the first European nation seriously affected by the coronavirus

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outbreak, immediately after its diffusion in China between late 2019 and the start of 2020. Lombardy in particular (Matteo Salvini’s home region in northern Italy) became the epicenter of the Italian outbreak. In the ensuing months, Lombardy suffered a high concentration of infection and record numbers of Covid-19 related deaths, bringing the Italian national health system to the brink of collapse and requiring one of the most severe and restrictive lockdowns in the western world. Images of the Italian army tanks transporting victims of Covid-19 out of the Lombardy region, whose crematoriums were overwhelmed by the number of dead bodies to process, made the headlines and generated affect internationally (Marsi 2020). Reports from the Italian hospitals treating Covid-19 patients also were among the first global mediated warnings about the serious consequences of the virus: images of intensive care units overcrowded with patients on ventilators went viral, testimonies from northern Italian doctors and nurses in safety gear carrying out grueling shifts circulated globally. Quickly, Lombardy became a tale of terror and warning at the onset of what was about to become a global pandemic. In this context, the never-seen-before images of completely empty Italian squares and streets at the beginning of the national lockdown also were among the first uncanny public visualizations of the societal consequences of the virus, followed by the videos of Italian citizens singing with their neighbors from their balconies during the curfew in a creative effort to keep a semblance of sociality during a time of prolonged lockdown and social distancing. Months of intense national governmental work for the management of the Covid-19 emergency in Italy went hand in hand with the continuous controversies stirred by the populist leaders of parties such as the League or “Brothers of Italy.” At the time of writing this chapter, having monitored public and political rhetoric emerging and circulating in Italy from the months between the first Covid-19 cases and the autumn of 2020, I carefully traced different public controversies about any and all governmental choices in the management of the pandemic: from the details of the lockdown, to the plans of economic recovery to negotiate with the European Union, to the plans of gradual reopening, to the national preventive measures adopted, such as the mandatory use of masks in public places where social distancing is not feasible. Within a few months since that outbreak in northern Italy, with a global spread of the virus, the medical mask became the universal visual symbol associated with the pandemic, quickly replacing the first icon

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associated with the emergence of the new coronavirus, a representation of the crowned virus that circulated widely at the beginning of 2020. As the months went by, public imagery related to the news about the pandemic shifted from a focus on visualizing the new virus, with its peculiar spikes, to the visualization of its consequences and the fight to curb the global contagion through the synecdochic image of the mask. Surgical masks quickly became iconic in news stories about the pandemic all over the world. Masks were not adopted without generating massive public debate and skepticism about their efficacy, however. Mask-wearing as a precautionary practice was never univocally uncontroversial: The WHO updated its guidelines regarding mask-wearing in public places on June 5, 2020, after initially claiming that there was not enough evidence to recommend wearing a mask for healthy people (WHO 2020). Wearing a mask, in fact, is not as much about protecting oneself from the virus as preventing the virus from being spread by infected people that may or may not be aware of carrying it. Similar to vaccines, masks have a double duty: to protect oneself while also protecting others, especially the most vulnerable. Countries heavily affected by the pandemic, such as Italy, mandated mask-wearing in public a lot earlier than the WHO official position, contributing to the national efforts to curb the spread of the virus. Despite the fact that wearing a face cover is now the norm in Italy, no-mask discourse and related protests still abound. No-mask discourse, of course, is not limited to Italy––where the early requirement to wear them everywhere got the majority of people used to their daily use––but is as widespread as the virus itself, as I have illustrated at the outset of this chapter. No-maskers are heavily present in the USA as well, one of the places hit the hardest by the pandemic as of early 2021, and no-mask rhetoric in this pandemic has definitely also gone viral, finding often as exponents populist leaders such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, or Matteo Salvini.

No-Mask/Pro-Mask Rollercoasters in the Italian Public Sphere “I am and I will always proudly be a populist, because listening to the people is my job and my duty”––Matteo Salvini, 2018. (Vista Agenzia Televisiva Nazionale 2018)

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“When they [the Italian press] tell me I’m a populist, for me it’s a compliment.”—Matteo Salvini, 2016. (Vista Agenzia Televisiva Nazionale 2016)

From the beginning of the pandemic outbreak in Italy, Matteo Salvini often spoke against or disregarded the rule of mandatory mask-wearing as a sign of protest against the governmental management of the Covid19 emergency. In the Italian public sphere his mask-less and face-to-face selfies with his followers during various public events made the headlines more than once between the spring and summer of 2020. So did public mass rallies organized and attended by the leader of the League and his political allies such as Giorgia Meloni of “Brothers of Italy.” All the precautionary rules about social distancing and mask-wearing were often violated during a series of demonstrations in Rome and Milan (2 Giugno 2020, La Repubblica). Related to public conversations on these right-wing and symbolically mask-less or mask-defiant demonstrations was an episode that went viral. During a televised interview with Salvini in mid-June 2020, the journalist Giovanni Floris questioned him on his practice of taking off his mask or not wearing it altogether when taking selfies and interacting publicly with his followers. Salvini answered testily with a question of his own asking, with shocked incredulity, in the style of a rhetorical question: “Can’t I take off my mask when I am talking to a woman? … NO?!?” Floris quickly rebutted him by answering: “No, you can’t. Not if you are not 1.5 meters away from each other” (Floris bacchetta Salvini 2020). The clip of this interaction, with Salvini’s surprised and irritated expression and Floris’s mic-dropping rebuttal, circulated widely on social media, television, and all over the Italian public sphere, causing the creation of viral parodies like memes, remixes, and mashups of that bit of infamous and memorable exchange between the two. Another episode, widely covered by the Italian press, that generated public indignation and controversy, was Salvini’s performance at a conference organized at the Italian Senate of the Republic by the otherwise unknown organization “Osservatorio Permanente sulle Libertà Fondamentali” (Permanent Observatory on Essential Liberties). This organization, created ad hoc to organize the event, titled Covid-19 in Italy, between science, information, and rights, is chaired by Vittorio Sgarbi––an art critic, TV personality, and committed no-mask right-wing politician, and Armando Siri, a member of the League. The conference

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was widely criticized in the Italian press because it provided a platform to speakers with controversial positions on Covid-19 during an event hosted on the premises of the Italian Senate, a location that, by virtue of its status of institutional symbol, has been perceived by many commentators as an inappropriate venue for such a divisive and polarizing event. On July 27, 2020, the convention took place at the Senate as planned, despite widespread criticism of its organization and aims, hosting several controversial speakers including: the organizers Vittorio Sgarbi (Forza Italia) and Armando Siri (League), Paolo Becchi (philosopher and rightwing opinion writer), Giulio Tarro and Maria Rita Gismondo (virologists who have made the headlines for having spread flawed scientific information on Covid-19), Alberto Zangrillo (a senior Italian doctor who famously and inaccurately stated that Covid-19 had disappeared in Italy after losing potency), the popular singer Andrea Bocelli (who talked about his uneasiness with the lockdown restrictions), and, last but not least, Matteo Salvini. The frame for this conference, as well as the list of participants, mostly reflected the clear goals of right-wing parties with vested interests to criticize the governmental management of the emergency. The configuration of guests, themes, and discussions for this event made the press refer to it as “the counter-seminar of Covid deniers” (Caccia 2020). This label was not easily accepted by the participants, who emphasized that their discussions should not be interpreted within a “Covid-deniers” frame. They did not deny the existence of the virus or the pandemic, like some other fringe publics of anti-maskers; rather, they claimed to be “defenders of liberty and good sense” at a moment when these values had been under attack in Italy because of the freedomlimiting pandemic precautions imposed on the general population. The most prominent political figure in attendance, a self-professed champion of liberties and proud populist, was precisely Matteo Salvini. Salvini joined the event fashionably late, proceeding to sit in the first row while being videotaped by numerous journalists as he visibly violated the governmental mask-wearing requirement in indoor spaces. This rule-breaking behavior appeared to be not only intentional but also symbolic: Salvini ignored the repeated reminders from a convention floor manager to wear a mask and clearly and quite dramatically refused to mask-up. The insistence of those reminders irritated Salvini so much that he vocally complained with those sitting close to him, saying: “I do not have a mask, I don’t wear one” (Caccia 2020). Even after having been provided with a patriotic-looking mask, decorated with the three colors of the Italian

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flag, Salvini continued to refuse to put the mask on. In this same context, a much-discussed remark by Salvini during his intervention at the event regarded the common practice of replacing the handshake with the elbow salutation during times of pandemic. Salvini stated: I’ve been the first politician to return among the people. Remember all the headlines on Repubblica and Il Corriere [two prominent Italian newspapers. P.P.] that called me an outlaw, an irresponsible, and an infection spreader just because I did not wear a mask and dared to hug an elderly woman that really wanted to hug me … I risked jail time for that hug! Apropos: I refuse to salute people with the elbow, because this elbow salute-thing is the end of the human species! You’d rather not greet me than greet me with your elbow … and if someone gets close to me with their hand ready for a handshake, I confess now, and I hereby selfincriminate with this statement … because the Senate is voting for another trial of mine on Thursday and I don’t care about having an extra one, one more one less makes no difference … well, if anyone gives me their hand to shake, I will break the law and I will shake their hand! (“Salvini” 2020)

A few days after this infamous conference, on August 2, 2020, once again Salvini made the headlines when, during a rally in Cervia, he invited a teenager to respond to a few questions on stage. As the teenager approached him, walking closer to the speakers on stage, Salvini also invited him to remove his mask if he wanted. In response to this obvious public provocation, the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte declared to the press that “Covid ‘deniers’ (negazionisti in Italian) are dissolving the trust of Italian people” (Salvini invita ragazzo sul palco 2020). The Democratic Party leader also reacted harshly to Salvini’s stunt, declaring publicly: “Those who are telling Italians to remove their masks are rooting for a return of the pandemic. For a handful of votes, they’d put people at risk of getting infected and dying, as it’s been happening in those countries that have let their guard down. Let’s defend family, entrepreneurs and workers, who cannot shut down again because of irresponsible people. Let’s defend health workers, who at this moment are looking disconcerted at what has been happening. Let’s defend Italy” (Salvini invita ragazzo sul palco 2020). Just a few days later, however, a sudden and puzzling change of opinion was voiced by Salvini in an interview on SkyTg24, when he uncharacteristically went on record saying: “The mask has to be used when it is needed, hoping to soon return to normality. I have this to say to

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young people: use your head, keep your distances, and respect the recommendation of scientists. However, a government that extends a state of emergency when there is no emergency in our country, while also letting thousands of immigrants disembark on our soil, is just surreal” (Mattioli 2020). This statement is interesting because it brings together Salvini’s usual anti-governmental rhetoric with a sudden change of stance about maskwearing. For a moment, Salvini appeared to have replaced his anti-science tropes with an anti-immigration one, perhaps to strategically highlight the latter by calling attention to the former. A peculiar aspect of this declaration, in fact, is precisely his public call to trust the scientists’ recommendations. This endorsement of science is interesting because in Salvini’s rhetoric science and government are usually conflated and represented as enemies of the people, an elite out of touch with reality, whose recommendations and policy decisions cannot be trusted by the Italian people. Salvini created a straw man figure by bringing together both experts in the government (such as economists like Prime Minister Conte) and experts in science (such as virologists or other prominent scientists) in his public communication: he refers to all these types of experts as “professoroni di sinistra” (hot-shot left-leaning professors) and characterizes this straw man figure of the arrogant intellectual as one detached from the common man and only engrossed in their own elitist interests. In a variety of ways, Salvini has built his public political persona in contrast to this straw man stereotype of a privileged intellectual, incapable of relating and looking after the needs of the average Italian citizen. He did so through the strategic use of social media in which he curated a portrayal of himself as a “common man” who likes to eat classic but never too fancy Italian food, or as a down-to-earth citizen interested in defending the country against immigration, or as a man respectful of traditions (including religious ones: the image of Salvini kissing the holy cross, or his call to reopen churches and remove the ban on assembly for Easter during a global pandemic are representative of this tendency) and generally promoting his persona of a “captain,” champion of the average Italian citizen. A captain with average tastes, who wears average clothing, who uses an average political language, and who is proud that his competence on the issues he discusses in politics never seems to surpass that of the “average Italian” (the Italiano medio is a common trope which usually carries a negative connotation of mediocrity and ignorance). Salvini’s rhetoric strategically re-appropriates this term while casting the average, but good, Italian

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against the hot-shot leftists professors that in his depiction are the elite that is actively ruining the country. This quick discussion of Salvini’s recurrent straw man gives me an opportunity to compare him with another prominent no-masker from the Italian context, Vittorio Sgarbi, the organizer of the convention discussed above. This parallel is interesting because it demonstrates that right-wing no-mask politicians can also be very different and suggests that turncoating is a strategy mostly enacted by populists. If Salvini considers himself proud to be called a “populist” and strategically embodies and performs the stereotype of the Italiano medio, Sgarbi stands on the opposite side of the spectrum. In fact, Sgarbi has become known in Italy as a popular art critic turned politician and as an intellectual with distinctively unpopular opinions. Sgarbi’s rhetoric has very often been characterized by strong tones of critique and even insults directed at the average Italian that Salvini claims to represent, but whom Sgarbi despises because of the alleged ignorance and lack of intellectual depth that characterizes this stereotype. If Salvini’s straw man opponent is the intellectual professorone di sinistra, Sgarbi’s is the ignorant Italiano medio incapable of understanding and appreciating themes of cultural and intellectual relevance. If Salvini’s recurring insult is professorone, Sgarbi recurring public insult is capra. Capra in Italian means goat, and it is a word generally used in a negative sense to indicate lack of culture, intelligence, knowledge. It is an idiomatic synonym of “ignorant” that over the years has been used by Sgarbi so spectacularly and explosively in public that it has achieved a sort of pop-culture status in Italy. If one searches “Sgarbi + capra” Google will return more than a million pages, including many links to videos with Sgarbi pointing the finger at his various victims while repeatedly yelling “Capra! Capra! Capra!” at them on numerous different occasions through the years. There is even a Capra store online, where Sgarbi sells merchandise inspired by his capra-themed public performances (Capra Store—Di Vittorio Sgarbi 2020). Now, this detour into goat-branded merchandise is intended to sketch the figure of Sgarbi vis-à-vis that of Salvini, to support a specific point: Sgarbi represents a type of elitist right-wing politician whose public persona is the polar opposite of Salvini, a selfprofessed populist. This comparison between Sgarbi and Salvini, in their shared no-mask moment during the Covid pandemic, becomes a helpful juxtaposition to illustrate their very different modi operandi. While Sgarbi and his hostility for the mask-wearing mandate––based on his right-wing ideology that defends personal liberties against governmental invasive

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policies (that he often provocatively labels as “fascist”)––has remained coherent and solid throughout the entire year, Salvini’s positions instead have been shaky and oscillated back and forth without any immediate legible justification. While Sgarbi was physically removed from parliament twice because of his confrontational refusal to wear a mask to openly resist the government’s mandate, Salvini has often been pictured without a mask, but only when he could get away with it without consequences. We’ve seen him often removing his mask in dangerous contexts such as rallies, where he encouraged and inspired others to do so, but then again he has also been heard and seen to embrace the mask. In contrast, Sgarbi, while on Mayor duty in the small town of Sutri, decided to oppose the mask-wearing mandate by counter-mandating locally to not wear a mask unless strictly necessary when in the proximity of an assembly, Salvini only uttered confusing and contradictory statements (Vittorio Sgarbi Vieta Le Mascherine a Sutri: La Nuova Ordinanza - Corriere.It 2020). No one in Italy can doubt Sgarbi’s position on mask-wearing, and most people, if questioned, could clearly explain Sgarbi’s rationale for opposing the mask. This is not to condone Sgarbi’s risky behavior, but to reflect on the clarity and coherence of his controversial position. We simply know where Sgarbi stands. We might find his public persona disturbing or amusing, but there is never a shadow of doubt on any of the stances he takes and why he takes them. The same, however, cannot be said for Salvini, as I have demonstrated above. Was he really opposed to the mask or not? How and why did he go from opposing to supporting masks and all the way back? Simply put, Sgarbi is a right-wing politician, but he is not a populist (in fact, he might represent the opposite side of the spectrum with his tendency toward elitism), and he does not operate as one. Salvini, by contrast, is a self-professed populist and a voltagabbana who keeps turncoating and oscillating about everything related to pandemic policies. Going back to Salvini’s odd endorsement of the mask discussed earlier, it has to be noted that his pro-mask statement has been publicly covered by the Italian press and defined as a “turncoating” move, a “U-shaped turn,” a staggering change of opinion, and a giravolta performed by a voltagabbana––a turncoater, an incoherent politician. It is interesting here to note that despite the harsh news coverage, general public feelings and the not-so-astounded public reaction to these giravolte reflect the fact that yet another sudden change of opinion coming from Salvini was not so surprising for Italian citizens after all. Given Salvini’s long history of drastic and unexpected changes of positions, opinions, and even

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parties during his political career––as well as the dumbfounding evolution of his positions regarding the Covid-19 lockdown during the first few months of the pandemic––almost no one appeared to be shocked or flabbergasted by his sudden embrace of the mask requirement or even of science at this point. To illustrate this point about the lack of public shock toward Salvini’s turncoating rhetoric it is enough to recall that the Italian public has seen Salvini starting his political career as a member of a farleft communist party, the “Comunisti Padani,” to arrive to his current ideological position as the leader of the extreme right-wing, nationalist, Eurosceptic, anti-immigration party known as the League. Knowing Salvini’s career evolution, which is a materialization of the essence of trasformismo, the Italian public has been slowly desensitized by its exposure to continuous ideological turncoating, party-shifting, and confusing anti-establishment attitudes. From the beginning of the Covid-19 emergency, Italians have heard Salvini expressing so many unexpected and quick shifts in positions critiquing the government that the sudden and possibly temporary endorsement of the mask did not seem particularly provocative to anyone used to the routine political controversies in Italy and to Salvini’s rhetoric and political history. Needless to say, Salvini’s pro-science attitude did not last long, and the public has witnessed more turns after the selection of events I listed in the timeline above. Salvini Unmasked: Rhetorical Somersaults and Data-Driven Rhetorics As I first wrote this chapter while the pandemic evolved, in November 2020, after the mask-wearing mandate in Italy has been re-issued for both indoors and outdoors public spaces, the topic of Salvini’s rhetorical somersaults in anti-scientific discourse seemed to shift to the use of hydroxychloroquine for treating Covid-19 patients at home. Just as on all the other pandemic-related topics, this scientifically flawed discussion, touting hydroxychloroquine for use in prevention and home treatment of infected patients, does not seem to be an original idea produced by the “Captain.” A controversy on the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine had exploded between late March and the beginning of April, when Trump repeatedly stated that those drugs could prevent or treat Covid. The former President’s statements caused a boom of prescriptions of these drugs in the USA, with a 200% increase compared to the previous year, leading to a temporary shortage of the drug. As news spread about the shortage and the lack of evidence to support its use,

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prescriptions returned quickly to normal. This did not prevent Trump from boasting hydroxychloroquine use again in May, when he stated that he had been taking the drug himself as a preventive treatment, and then again in July when Trump retweeted a video that was subsequently taken down by Twitter of an alleged doctor promoting anti-mask discourse and claiming that hydroxychloroquine is an effective cure for Covid-19. On the same day, Dr. Anthony Fauci declared to the public that hydroxychloroquine had proved ineffective in all clinical trials (“Trump Defends …” 2020). In August, Trump doubled down again, claiming without evidence that hydroxychloroquine had been critiqued as a treatment only because he had supported it. In late October, after Trump’s diagnosis with Covid-19, the conspiracy theories on hydroxychloroquine, which at this point had been shown ineffective and potentially dangerous for Covid-19 patients, resurfaced again. This coincided almost precisely with the uptake of the hydroxychloroquine support by Matteo Salvini. It has to be noted that the sudden appearance of this topic, previously linked to Trump’s rhetoric, appeared in Salvini’s discourse in conjunction with the debates linked to the presidential election at the beginning of November. This interesting coincidence sparks the need for further investigation. Salvini’s touting of hydroxychloroquine online and on TV happened only within the first two weeks of November, then appears to stop as abruptly as it started. Looking up on Google the terms “Salvini + idrossiclorochina” we can notice at a glance a clear concentration of the coverage of this topic between November 5, 2020 and November 15, 2020. Salvini has a past record of SEO-strategic speaking (SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization), i.e., of using terms and themes to gain algorithm-boosted visibility on Google searches through capitalizing on existing search trends. He routinely exploits SEO opportunities by creating fake controversies involving key popular terms, such as in the infamous “Nutella case” (that coincidentally included another typical Salvinian U-turn), when he denounced Nutella’s producer for the use of Turkish hazelnuts and then retracted the allegations and endorsed Nutella in less than 24 hours. When Salvini launched that made-up conspiracy theory of Ferrero’s sourcing of foreign hazelnuts for its Nutella spread, he seemed to do it only to gain online attention by capitalizing on the Nutella search trend: the term “Nutella” in those days was topping Google searches due to a sudden shortage of the popular Nutella biscuits that sent the Italian public into an frenzy of online Nutella biscuit search

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and shopping (Flora 2019; Johnson 2019). A similar strategic capitalization of SEO trending terms happened with other topics, such as Salvini’s mentioning of religious themes (like the Medjugorie Madonna). In the case of Nutella, to exploit the online attention and search trend, Salvini entered the Nutella conversations with completely made-up allegations against Ferrero that gained him public attention and a strong social media engagement due to his stark position that incited many, provoking numerous angry reactions online on Facebook, Twitter, and on all Salvini’s other political pages. The instant public outrage over the Turkish hazelnut allegations didn’t last long as Salvini detached from the fake controversy by conveniently changing views within 24 hours, voltagabbana-ing, but only after having attracted record numbers of users’ engagement. He exploited public attention online in a moment of neglect, without any significant political content. This SEO-exploitation strategy is not Salvini’s invention but is used by other politicians like Boris Johnson or Donald Trump and by Internet influencers and online marketers alike. His delayed endorsement of hydroxychloroquine and his frequent and sudden uptake of this term, in conjunction with the return of this controversial theme in global public discourse and Internet searches in relation to the American elections, deserve further attention but is beyond the scope of this chapter. It remains to be seen how Salvini’s support of hydroxychloroquine will evolve, but on the basis of his past communication strategies we can expect that his position might follow online trends and/or the turns induced by the algorithmic data so dear to Salvini’s communication strategists. While we do not know this yet, we can establish one uncontroversial, simple fact in the light of all the discussions unpacked thus far: populist politicians across the globe appear to have adopted similar strategies of discursive turncoating during the Covid-19 pandemic: sudden U-turns, flip-flops, and giravolte on topics related to precautions at the intersection of science, policy, and personal freedom. These drastic and continuous changes of position pose a series of questions on the ethics of this type of turncoating, which is often associated with the dangerous boasting of anti-scientific positions—questions on its motivations, which seem to be linked to the promotion of anti-establishment discourse and politics, and on its public consequences that seem to be disruptive and destabilizing for the general public, stoking chaos and public distrust of science and politics at the same time.

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On Algorithmic Populism, Beasts, Disavowal, and Demagoguery Identifying voltagabbana rhetoric as a quintessential populist strategy tells us a lot about the relationships between elements of the rhetorical situation in most instances of this type of turncoating. Populist politicians in contexts of crisis, such as the pandemic, engage in voltagabbana in moments of political or societal instability, responding to exigences to appeal to composite audiences by carefully assessing public opinion and volatile public feelings, often via digital tools and algorithms, in order to quickly craft and adapt their communication to the moment and generate public and social engagement in different forms, depending on the political and social context. However, the modes of engaging publics enacted by contemporary populist politicians and their ways of fostering political engagement and moving the electorate are starkly outside of any norm of political communication or style. As I noted above, tracing anti-mask discourse in the rhetoric of populist politicians across the globe, the mere speed of their turncoating rhetoric, likely resulting from intercepting momentary uncertain public stances about significant issues through digital tools, is unprecedented. This is in part due to the help of technology and our immersion in a mediated digital environment, but mostly it is a strategy and style intentionally used and exploited by this brand of politicians. Above, I discussed how some of Salvini’s talking points at the origin of his voltagabbana performances seem simultaneously a reflection of momentary and shifting public feelings, and a way of manipulating and directing those feelings toward creating and evoking an urgent crisis. While Salvini carefully constructs his public image to appear authentic, direct, and in tune with average citizens, the reality of politics is that every message of his public communication is carefully crafted, researched, and based on algorithmic data: there is no improvisation or spontaneity in his public discourse. His communication strategist is famous for his heavy reliance on what has become known as “The Beast,” as the League calls it, allegedly for its “ferocious” precision, or just “The Algorithm.” How does this algorithm work? Is it a single algorithm? What is it? Here’s a description published by La Stampa in 2019 (note that since then Salvini’s followers have increased from 3M to almost 4.5M at the end of 2020):

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…But a good part of Italian deputy premier Matteo Salvini’s Facebook posts are actually packaged following an algorithm’s instructions that allow the leader of the League to appear from “very bad”, to just “bad” and sometimes even a little “good”. But always––and in any case––in tune with the public opinion’s prevailing moods. And all thanks to a computer system that has few equals in Europe. Inside the far-right League party they call it “The Beast.” For it is cynically “ferocious.” Yet it has nothing instinctive to it: everything is looked into, nothing is left to chance, all meticulously calibrated. This algorithm is not only able to intercept what people want but is also able to enter their heads in the most subliminal and imperceptible way. […] On Facebook, Salvini has become the undisputed “number one,” aka “the Captain” in Italy. He has just exceeded 3 million “likes” and from those “thumbs up” radiate his most effective messages, invading the entire platform. How? Through a system––the Beast––that scientifically analyzes thousands and thousands of the best-performing posts and tweets, as well as gathering data on what kind of people have interacted with those posts. Then, messages and keywords are put together, ready to be spread on FB. This is the system, aka “the Beast.” (Martini 2018)

This description of how the “Beast” works explains a lot of the puzzles discussed so far. If we had access to the algorithm, we could probably better understand when, how, and why Salvini decides to speak about something or change his opinion on anything. This type of populism is what Maly calls “algorithmic populism,” a new manifestation of populism in the digital age that he defines as a “a digitally mediatized chronotopic communicative and discursive relation” (Maly 2018). In algorithmic populism, such as the one Salvini performs, politicians are not at the core of the production of messages. Because of the digital environment in which political discourse circulates, populist politicians, as Moffitt reminds us, need to consider closely the infrastructure of digital platforms and the ways their audiences engage in the battlefield of social media. In order to be popular on social media, for instance, it is necessary to create engagement in the form of likes, shares, retweets, etc. It is also necessary to know how to create a post that reaches an audience that will feel compelled to interact with that mediatized voice so that it can become algorithmically relevant. Paradoxically, politicians in the age of personalized politics cannot just manage their public persona or their political content independently of their social media presence; everything becomes instrumental in the production of posts that can work in the mediated environment:

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Producing such posts is clearly not only a matter of content, it is also about knowledge about the medium itself and the algorithms and affordances that organize the distribution of posts. The algorithms of these media have agency (Tufekci, 2015), they “select and prioritize content by algorithmically translating user activity into ‘most relevant’ or ‘trending’ topics.” (Van Poel & Van Dijck, 2014). … this process is partially algorithmically constructed. In Facebook for instance we see that the number of interactions, and especially shares will make your post more visible on the News Feeds of your followers (Maly & Beekmans, 2018). (Maly 2018)

So, in this mediated environment, populists relying on digital information tools do so in an instrumental way, becoming the shell-personae embodying and performing the results of data analysis elaborated by communication experts and sourced online. This modus operandi is one of the many ways in which contemporary populist politicians weaponize communication, through digital technologies and new media in particular, to reach their political goals. In rhetorical theory, Jennifer Mercieca has argued that there are many different ways “dangerous demagogues” may weaponize communication (Mercieca 2019). Dangerous demagogues, according to Mercieca, can be identified with a single, simple criterion: “whether or not they allow themselves to be held accountable for their words and actions. […] dangerous demagogues use weaponized communication techniques to gain compliance and prevent themselves from being held accountable” (Mercieca 2019, p. 266). In her study of the rhetoric of Donald Trump and farright figures, Mercieca has demonstrated that the use of weaponized communication strategies in order to create the rhetorical impossibility of being held accountable is the quintessential trait that enables us to spot a dangerous demagogue. Furthermore, Mercieca explains how dangerous demagogues use rhetorical strategies to weaponize their public communication and render them unaccountable. This instrumental use of public communication as a tool toward a particular goal is carried out through different rhetorical strategies, digital information tools, etc. She explains: “Dangerous demagogues attempt to distort public sentiment through bots, manipulating algorithms, and computational propaganda. Dangerous demagogues also use typical rhetorical figures and fallacies such as paralipsis and tu quoque to say two things at once and accuse their accusers of being hypocrites. In these ways and more, dangerous demagogues weaponize communication” (Mercieca 2019, p. 272).

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Mercieca’s theory of weaponized communication and dangerous demagoguery is helpful here because it helps us solve the puzzle of voltagabbana rhetorics. So far, I have identified voltagabbana-ing as a typical populist strategy. Through a study of Salvini’s communication, I found that his giravolte are not random or just symptoms of his internal ideological and political incoherence, rather they have a more complex and instrumental function and are strategically planned with the support of carefully monitored and “cynically ferocious” algorithms. The algorithms are deployed to weaponize Salvini’s public communication to achieve his political goals while he remains unaccountable for his political actions, opinions, and proposals. Voltagabbana moves, thus, are one additional rhetorical strategy to weaponize communication by dangerous demagogues, as theorized by Mercieca. We can think of Salvini as a dangerous demagogue, just like Trump, and potentially all the other populists included in this chapter. Voltagabbana-ing is an effective way to say everything and its contrary, creating confusion and escaping accountability through creating a loop of contrasting statements that allow infinite deniability of problematic stances and statements. Voltagabbana-ing is a populist performance that enables political disavowal and public unaccountability. Voltagabbana moves are often based on data collected through digital tools and algorithms and are a way for populist politicians to escape responsibility, while instrumentally and strategically leveraging and manipulating uncertain public feelings toward opportunistic political goals. Voltagabbana-ing, in summary, is a rhetorical-political strategy that weaponizes communication, capitalizes on algorithmic populism, and represents the contemporary manifestation of trasformismo. All these features illuminate how voltagabbana rhetorics fundamentally enable disavowal and accountability avoidance by populist politicians. Fundamentally, being a voltagabbana or routinely voltagabbana-ing, like Salvini and other populist politicians have been doing in this time of pandemic, is also one expression of what Joshua Gunn calls “political perversion,” a term that describes the “coherence of disavowal at many levels of political discourse” (Gunn 2018, p. 179). For Gunn, Donald Trump’s rhetoric is the guiding exemplar of political perversion, the tendency for “public demands that disavow consequences and refuse responsibility” (Gunn 2018, p. 179). Gunn claims that political perversion is dominant in Trump’s discourse and can be identified in his consistent technique of disavowal and refusal to take responsibility for his

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statements. In other words, political perversion happens when a politician knows that what they say or do is wrong (or bad, or questionable, or a lie), but they say or do it anyway, while declining responsibility for it. Gunn provides examples of Trump’s classic “perverse” communication: “Trump says what he means, except that he does not; Trump’s the real deal, except that he is not. He will build a wall and keep them out, although we do not believe such a wall is feasible” (Gunn 2018, p. 180). A perverse style is possible and has proved seductive in many contemporary contexts, according to Gunn, because democratic cultures are moving toward a “generalized perversion, a collective identity in which a people are losing faith in a shared authority or law” (Gunn 2018, p. 178). In this sense, the disavowal and consistent lack of accountability and responsibility in populist politicians like Trump or Salvini is made possible not just because they are enacting a type of weaponized communication and demagoguery, but because they are doing it within an already perverse broader political and cultural structure that involves the public in its perversion. When Americans heard Trump speak, Gunn noted, probably they knew the infamous wall was not going to happen, or that he doesn’t really mean what he says, but in the structural perversion of contemporary cultures, they continue listening anyway. They know they are being lied to, but they believe in those lies anyway. The same perverse mechanism happens in Italy while we witness Salvini’s giravolte: we do not really believe in Salvini’s support of science or the mask, or even in his opposition to them––but we continue listening and tuning in to that discourse anyway, without feeling too shocked or outraged and without feeling we were made fools of. Salvini’s and Trump’s techniques of disavowal and dangerous demagoguery have worked quite well before the pandemic, but they have been challenged during the crisis; citizens are realizing that when no one takes responsibility the outcomes can become disastrous. Trump lost the 2020 election and was impeached a second time on charges of inciting an insurrection. In Italy, Salvini’s popularity plummeted throughout 2020, which is probably enough to make us skeptical about the efficacy of populist turncoating in times of global crisis: the stakes are so high and the consequences of lack of responsibility and ethos so threatening that they may again move citizens toward demanding public accountability and democratic transparency.

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Note 1. N.d.a. All translations from the original sources in Italian are mine. I included references to all the original newspaper articles and videos and I used my translations in the body of this chapter.

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Moffitt, B. 2015. How to perform crisis: A model for understanding the key role of crisis in contemporary populism. Government and Opposition, 50(2), 189–217. https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2014.13. Moffitt, B. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest. com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=4517325. Müller, J.-W. 2016. What is populism? In What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press. https://www-degruyter-com.ep.fjernadgang.kb.dk/ penn/view/title/526424. Ott, Brian L., and Greg Dickinson. 2019. Redefining rhetoric: Why matter matters. Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, 3(1), 45–81. Phillips, T. 2020, July 8. Brazil: Bolsonaro reportedly uses homophobic slur to mock masks. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ jul/08/bolsonaro-masks-slur-brazil-coronavirus. Pipitone, G. 2020, October 29. La confusione di Salvini sulla gestione della pandemia: Tra lockdown no e lockdown sì. “Sarebbe il fallimento di 6 mesi di governo”. Quando lui dubitava della seconda ondata (e girava senza mascherina). Il Fatto Quotidiano. https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/ 10/29/la-confusione-di-salvini-sulla-gestione-della-pandemia-tra-lockdownno-e-lockdown-si-sarebbe-il-fallimento-di-6-mesi-di-governo-quando-lui-dub itava-della-seconda-ondata-e-girava-senza-mascheri/5984279/. Salvini: “Il saluto con il gomito è la fine della specie umana” (VIDEO). 2020, July 27. L’HuffPost. https://www.huffingtonpost.it/entry/salvini-il-salutocon-il-gomito-e-la-fine-della-specie-umana-video_it_5f1ed875c5b638cfec 47c72f. Salvini invita ragazzo sul palco: “Se vuoi puoi toglierti la mascherina”. 2020, August 2. Corriere della Sera. https://www.corriere.it/video-articoli/2020/ 08/02/salvini-invita-ragazzo-palco-se-vuoi-puoi-toglierti-mascherina/c46 cd238-d4a3-11ea-85eb-cddcd933cbd3.shtml. Stewart, H., K. Proctor, and H. Siddique, H. 2020, March 12. Johnson: Many more people will lose loved ones to coronavirus. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/12/uk-movesto-delay-phase-of-coronavirus-plan. Trump, D. J. 2020. Donald J. Trump on Twitter. Twitter. Retrieved November 1, 2020, from https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/128529937974 6811915. Trump defends disproved hydroxychloroquine again as COVID-19 cure. 2020, July 29. Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/2020/07/29/trumpdefends-disapproved-hydroxychloroquine-again-as-covid-19-cure. Valbruzzi, M. 2014. Is trasformismo a useful category for analysing modern Italian politics? Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 19(2), 169–185. https:// doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2014.871144.

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Brexit, YouTube and the Populist Rhetorical Ethos Alan Finlayson

Introduction It is neither accident nor coincidence that an explosion of populist politics has happened at the same time as an explosion of political discourse facilitated by digital means of communication. All sorts of ideological entrepreneurs have entered the “marketplace of ideas” selling their wares to political interests previously too scattered, marginal or extreme to be catered to by the mainstream (Munger and Phillips 2019). But access

This chapter draws on research undertaken as part of the project “Political Ideology Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century: the Case of the ‘Alt-Right’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council” (AH/R001197/1). The paper benefits from the advice and comments of my partners on the project Dr. Robert Topinka and Dr. Cassian Osborne-Carey. A version was presented at International Conference in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex in May 2019. A. Finlayson (B) School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Kock and L. Villadsen (eds.), Populist Rhetorics, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6_4

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is not the only thing that digital social media change. Its platforms and their software are not neutral carriers of content. They also shape its form, creating, in direct if unplanned ways, new genres of communication and new kinds of “rhetorical situation” to which political content adapts. This chapter argues that these forms tend in a “populist” direction, inducing rhetorics centred on claims about character. Understanding the implications of this requires combining insights from Political Theory and Political Science with those of Digital Media Studies, and above all from Rhetorical Studies, a discipline which is naturally well-placed to illuminate the persuasive forms of argumentation and identification characteristic of digital political culture. The chapter consists of three distinct but related parts. It begins with a consideration of approaches to the study of populist ideology within Political Studies. Here I argue that a central but untheorized aspect of these is what rhetoricians understand as ethos, and outline a concept of the populist rhetorical ethos. In the second section I consider how media can enter into and shape rhetorical occasions, looking in particular at the case of YouTube. Such media, I argue, contribute to an intensification of rhetorics of ethos. In the third section I present an analysis of Brexit rhetoric, looking in detail at a YouTube video titled The Truth About Brexit, created by a prominent political YouTuber to promote the “Leave” case in the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the EU. It is an exemplary instance not only of Brexit rhetoric but of YouTube style and of successful right-wing populist political communication. In the conclusion, drawing together the three parts of the chapter, I argue that digital media platforms encourage political channels which stage intense dramas of dark forces and the brave rebels fighting against them, led by charismatic rhetors revealing secrets and telling truths about what is “really” going on and what “they” won’t tell you, promising salvation to their heroic followers. It is a form of rhetoric which, increasingly, characterises political rhetoric of all kinds.

Ideology and the Populist Ethos Within Political Studies analysis of political ideas and ideologies is often concerned with the “isms” which define political positions and traditions—the arrangements of concepts which make up, say, Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism. Those arrangements change over time, and as

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the relationships between concepts change (some become more prominent, others fade and new ideas emerge) the meaning of key terms is altered (Freeden 2006; Finlayson 2012). Within this sort of framework approaches to Populism can be distinguished by the extent to which they consider it a general form that may be taken by any political ideology or a particular ideology in its own right characterised by a distinct arrangement of concepts. Laclau (2005) is an example of the former. He argues that a populist dimension is inherent to any democratic politics which must, of necessity, constitute a demos, a “people”. From this perspective all democratic demands are seen as sharing an underlying rhetorical structure. Firstly, the claim that there is a gap or blockage between the demand or will of a people and its realisation, something preventing “the people” from becoming what it “truly” is, wants or needs to be. Secondly, the giving of a name to the source or cause of that gap (see Laclau 2014). It may be an institution, a social group or a collection of individuals. It is “the elite”, “them”. Thirdly, the argument that the movement or party articulating the demand is the vehicle in which the gap can be crossed or the obstacle overcome. Thus, for example, a seemingly non-populist figure such as British “New Labour” leader Tony Blair can be interpreted as a populist. Blair positioned his political programme of national renewal and modernisation in opposition to what he named “forces of conservatism” found on both the left (trade unions engaging in defensive politics and resisting technological change) and on the right (traditionalists discriminating against minorities, preventing them from playing their full part in society and economy). New Labour, Blair proposed, would overcome these forces and in so doing renew the nation and bring into being “a young country” (Blair 1999; Finlayson 2003). What makes this a form of populism, it is argued, isn’t the content of the political ideas but, rather, the way they are arranged and articulated. In contrast with Laclau’s claim about the “general” or “formal” shape of populist ideologies, other scholars emphasise the specific content of the claims and positions taken by populist parties and movements. According to Mudde, for instance, populism is a “thin” ideology, organised around the concept of “the people”. Populist parties of the Far-Right are characterised by the combination of such Populism with other concepts such as “Nativism” (privileging the “native” people of the nation, agitating for limitations on others) and authoritarianism (commitment to strong leaders and the punishment of transgressors) (Mudde 2007, 22). The

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political discourse of such parties is “moral” in that it opposes the inherent “goodness” of the people to the essential “wickedness” of elites (see also Mudde 2004; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013; Stanley 2008). Another approach identifies Populism as a “style”, a particular “repertoire” of political performance (Moffitt and Tormey 2014, 387; Moffitt 2016). Here Populism is a way of doing or representing a politics, the central features of which are an appeal to “the people” versus “the elite”, “bad manners” (breaches of established codes of decorum and of polite speech) and regular invocations of crisis, breakdown and threat (Moffitt and Tormey 2014; Moffitt 2016). In their performances, Moffitt argues, populist leaders combine the appearance of “ordinariness” (as indicated by informality) with that of “extraordinariness”, of exceptional virility, strength and health. The populist proposes the existence of a terrible threat to the people against which the leader, and their exceptional body and character, are the last defence. These three perspectives, in which Populism is, variously, a general structure found across ideologies, a specific political-ideological content and a style of performance, can be put in strong opposition to each other. But they also overlap considerably. Insofar as they show that populist politics centres on identifying a group of people with each other against an Other, articulates a moral discourse of goodness and wickedness and takes shape as public political performance, these approaches also show that Populism is fundamentally concerned with “character”. And as we shall see, one of the things which distinguishes Populism is the role of character in its ideological discourse. For rhetoricians, of course, emphasis on “character” is understood in terms of ethos. It is what a rhetor must establish in order to gain standing, to be listened to, taken seriously and seen as authoritative by those to whom they communicate. Following Moffitt, we can say that in populist rhetoric that character is of one who is outside or beyond the mainstream. Rather than demonstrate their capacity to conform to the rules of discourse expected by political figures populists strategically break from them. Their political critics sometimes see this as evidence of incapacity, unprofessionalism or even stupidity; they think that the populist doesn’t understand the proper rules of political discourse or doesn’t know how to inhabit them. But, on the contrary, such “bad manners” are central to populist rhetoric. They reveal the conventions of political discourse to be, indeed, conventions—a genre which people learn and the rules of

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which they use to police the boundaries of political dispute and participation. Breaking these rules is an implicit critique of “establishment” discourse and establishes a warrant to make populist claims. It is also a point of “stylistic identification” between rhetor and audience. As Burke famously put it, we persuade someone by talking their language, using their “speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea” and so on (1969, 55) so that they see us as at one with them. Such talk, as Laclau argued, is constitutive of the community or people defined by it (see also Charland 1987). The populist rhetor doesn’t really speak in the “language of the people” but in a stylised, exaggerated, part of it. It is the language of “the people” only insofar as it is distinguished from the language of “them”, but it is a language with which people may identify (and through which they may identify with each other). The ethos of the rhetor is thus also a proposition about the ethos of the people and, following Mudde, their moral character. It is, following Laclau, a way of giving the people a “name”, of defining who or what they will be when they accept the invitation to identify. Political theories of populist ideology point to the centrality of the category of ethos in the establishment of “a people”, the specification of its moral character and in the performances of populist leaders. Populist politics takes a form common to all kinds of democratic politics, defining a people by that which prevents them from being fully who they are. It adds specific elements in the form of moralising discourse that brings good and evil to the fore, articulating these in relation to national and cultural identities. It wraps these in a style which ostentatiously breaks from conventions of political speech and centres the performance of leaders. In this respect however, Populism, while often closely related to it, is not a simple cultic authoritarianism. It does not invite direct identification with the leader but identification as one of the people, the existence and greatness of which the leader affirms and in whose defence they claim to be unrelenting. In populist rhetoric everything is directed at making this invitation and at sustaining its promise once accepted. It thus brings ethos to the fore in a peculiar fashion. All substantial political claims involve appeals to ethos. That is, they say something about the probity, commitment, solidarity and so forth of the person or group making the argument. They also say something about the character of the addressees of that discourse, about who and what they will be if they agree, if they accept and identify with those claims or, indeed, who they must be if the claims are to be intelligible

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(see Black 1970). In most political discourse and arguments these uses of ethos form part of an attempt to persuade people to accept a specific proposition: to increase or decrease social security for the least well off; to defend the rights of our fellow workers; to commit to war or refrain from retaliating. In such instances ethos appears in combination with other forms of proof and presentation and as a premise of political argument (even though its precise content may in part be retroactively provided by that same argument). In populist political rhetoric ethos is dominant; the weight of political argument is carried by the character of speaker and audience. That ethos is not only a premise of argument. It is also a kind of conclusion. Political argument often takes the form “Because we are this kind of people we ought to undertake such-and-such a course of action, it is in accord with our values and character”. Here, as Thomas Farrell has put it, “the norms and conventions of a culture find themselves employed as premises of both recognition and inference” (Farrell 1993, 76). But in populist rhetorics the implicit form of argument is: “Because we have been prevented from being the kinds of people we truly are, we must undertake such-and-such a course of action and prove that we really are that kind of people”. Here, ethos is, as it were, both cause and effect of a proposed course of action. Thus—and importantly—while it provides a basis for making specific claims about policy areas such as immigration, policing or membership of the European Union, for Populism these are primarily stages upon which populist ethos may be performed and demonstrated, mythical dramas enacted and people invited to identify the part they must play (see also McGee 1975; Alexander 2010). Consequently, populist rhetoricians eschew the practical, future-oriented genres of deliberative political rhetoric for epideictic rhetorics. All arguments are occasions for praise and blame, and for focusing attention on the putative enhancement, protection or restoration of the character of a people.

Media and Populist Rhetoric Analysis of populist rhetoric can take the form of rhetorical criticism showing how rhetors define the people, to whom or to what they are opposed, the claims about authority or legitimacy they make and how stylistic features create discursive space for “the people” to inhabit. It must also be concerned with analysis of the contexts within and through which such populist rhetoric is manifested. Audiences cannot come into

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existence if there is no occasion to gather them, putting them in the presence of a rhetor and a rhetorical genre. A fundamental fact about most such occasions today is that they are mediated and, in the case of populist rhetorics, often online. And as we shall see the ways in which media shape rhetorical actions and experiences tend to favour, and perhaps to induce, populist uses of ethos. Bitzer (1968), famously, identified three constituents of a “rhetorical situation” prior to the creation of any discourse or its dissemination: the exigence, the audience and the constraints. That model is today considered too mechanical and static not least because it presumes that key elements are given before a rhetorical situation and not themselves created rhetorically (Vatz 1973; Consigny 1974). Rhetorical situations may be better understood, in Edbauer’s words, as “a mixture of processes and encounters”, taking shape within the unstable networks and flows of a wider “ecology” (2005), a reconceptualisation especially significant for the theory and analysis of mediated rhetorics. Media are not “containers” for rhetorical situations but complex, dynamic environments of interacting elements which blur the boundaries of what were once distinct genres of public communication. For example, in the latter half of the twentieth century the ubiquity and dominance of television were such that political actors, to be successful, had to adapt to its styles. A domestic medium, characterised by “talking heads” addressing the audience of families in their living room, television demanded intimacy and personability (Ellis 1982; Williams 1973). Consequently, in the UK for instance, political rhetoric on television became more informal and conversational (Pearce 2005). Public addresses began to emphasise the “ordinariness” of political leaders and adopted forms of anecdotal argument made popular by genres such as the talk show (Atkins and Finlayson 2012). Evidence also suggests that public judgements of politicians came to focus on their perceived “normality”, how much they are “like us” (Clarke et al. 2018, Chapter 8). Broadcast audio-visual media redirected the flow of the elements of rhetoric. In ways which have had complex and profound effects, they brought together the worlds of politics and celebrity (Street 2004; Corner and Pels 2003) foregrounding performances of particular sorts of ethos. It is with this in mind that we should take note of Moffitt’s observation that “many of the attributes of media logic are roughly analogous with (or at least complementary to) the features of populism as a political style” (2016, 76), and also of the fact that a large number of

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politically successful contemporary populists have a background in broadcast media entertainment such as game shows and wrestling (see O’Brien 2020). Today, however, broadcast television is no longer the dominant form of media. Populism and the populist ethos flourish with yet greater intensity because of what Gries calls (2015, in words which echo Bitzer’s formulation) the “built-in constraints in social media”. Indeed, media theorist and analyst Paolo Gerbaudo (2018) argues that there is an “elective affinity” between populism and social media which fragment mass audiences yet also enable widely dispersed individuals to swarm around particular issues, filtering the information they receive, hiding people from each other while intensifying involvement with an “in-group”. Furthermore, as Boyle et al. note, “the digital is no longer conditional on particular devices but has become a multisensory, embodied condition through which most of our basic processes operate” (Boyle et al. 2018, 252). The situation of viewers, looking at the world through a computer screen tapping away at a keyboard or swiping on a phone, makes engagement bodily (tactile, perhaps adrenalin and dopamine fuelled) yet distanced from other bodies. That makes it all too easy to experience the thrill of transgression without the risk of being disturbed by seeing or experiencing its effects on others. Also importantly, since its inception, social media has been associated with the idea that it is disruptive, empowering and outside the mainstream giving voice to the voiceless. All of these features create a terrain, a structure of a situation, conducive to populist forms of communication. As well as these general “constraints” on the complex rhetorical situations created by digital media the “affordances” of particular platforms (see Boyd 2010; Bucher and Helmond 2018) dispose “content creators” towards particular modes of persuasion and intensify focus on ethos. An important and instructive example of this is the blog. Miller and Shepherd (2004) have shown how blogs emerged in an established “kairos of confession, celebrity and commercialisation”, in which the boundary between public and private was breaking down. They enabled and invited writing which emphasised personal expression in situations in which this was also a proof that the text was beyond or outside the “mainstream media” and therefore “authentic”. The software, the underlying code which structured the appearance of blogs and the way in which they could be used by writers and readers, intensified this. Dated and timestamped entries, organised in a reverse chronology, encouraged readers (and writers) to expect updates and to think of the blog as an unfolding

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narrative of personal, real-time responses to ongoing events but which also (through the hyperlink for example) folded in on itself to communicate a whole person. Miller and Shepherd also argue that the combination of wider exigence and the distinct affordances of the blog, interacting with the “modelling of forms and topoi offered by antecedent genres” gave rise to a new genre which was also a form of social action oriented at the construction of a self, understood as “an ongoing event” (Miller and Shepherd 2009). That project of the self could connect with other such projects, establishing “affective attachments” and forming “affective communities” which in turn affirm the selves of which they are composed (see also Dean 2010). The blog is now an outdated form. But it was a template for social media which exploded thanks to the easy means of self-disclosure and its circulation created by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These maintain some features of the blog identified by Miller and Shepherd: the timestamp and the feeling of the permanently immediate, the “profile”, the performed persona built up over time. In these ways the design of such platforms induces rhetorical moments and situations in which ethos is at stake (a subject of argument), a proof (often the most dominant) and a proposition (or promise) of what one will be if one is able and willing to accept or identify with that persona. Consequently, the genres to which such media give rise have a deep affinity with the rhetorical and ideological form and content of populism. With this in mind we can consider how this plays out on one particular platform.

YouTube Rhetoric YouTube is an online video-sharing and social media platform. It enables users to upload video very easily, converting it into a format which viewers anywhere can stream on any operating system. Uploaded videos are stored on a user’s channel, their own easily branded profile, and show the date of their original upload as well as a title and short description. Viewers can indicate approval or disapproval by clicking a thumbs-up or thumbsdown icon. They can also leave comments beneath the video and engage in debate or conversation there. They can click to share the video, posting a link on other social media platforms or “embedding” it in their own webpage, “subscribe” to YouTube channels, receiving notifications of new content or finding it posted onto their personalised YouTube “frontpage”. The page for any particular videos shows the number of subscribers

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to that channel and the number of views of that video (see also Burgess and Green 2018; Stokel-Walker 2019). The most obvious effect of this platform is that it makes it easy for individuals otherwise without means to present content online and to find audiences that had previously existed only as potential. It also makes it possible for people to earn an income from cultivating such audiences. Videos can include advertising breaks and YouTube shares a proportion of revenue with producers. The latter may in turn develop sponsorship arrangements, sell subsidiary merchandise and receive donations from subscribers via platforms such as Patreon. These technologies have contributed to the rise of a new kind of “ideological entrepreneur”, making a living from politics but—importantly—without being tied to a party or a media organisation and free from their restraints. Users are, however, constrained by the medium itself, which imposes on communicative form. While the platform hosts all manner of things— including music videos, old films, university lectures—original content possesses a recognisable YouTube style: an amateur “DIY” appearance (with editing often very visible), vernacular styles of speech communicated by talking heads addressing the viewer directly, often from what seems to be a private, personal, space. There is, then, an implied intimacy to much YouTube content, and an appearance of authenticity derived from the combination of apparent amateurism and the blurring of “backstage” and “frontstage”. Like the blogs that Miller and Shepherd studied, on YouTube channels a single video is just one part of an ongoing stream of content which derives meaning from the character of the channel and from its place in its ongoing output which builds up a relationship with subscribers. On political YouTube this shows itself through content which, as Lewis observes, is “often highly personal” with political ideas communicated “through subjective storytelling and affective cues... over long periods of time” (2018, 18). She describes conservative and far-right YouTube videos as “ideological testimonials ” likening them to advertising testimonials. Political “influencers”, she suggests, “display the way they live their politics as an aspirational brand” (Lewis 2018, 28). This personalisation of political content is matched by the individualisation of its consumption, often of course via a smartphone designed for use by a single individual. Viewers will watch YouTube content as part of a media “flow” (Williams 1973) unique to them and in that sense participatory at the most basic level. Each user’s front page on signing into YouTube will be different. Functions, topics and media forms

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are jumbled together and genres like comedy, entertainment, education, gaming, music, sports and so on, compete for attention (Uricchio 2009). The medium thus blurs the boundaries of these forms. They ebb and flow in and out of one another. Sport appears in a political feed. Politics appears as part of entertainment. And users might be anywhere, consuming anything at any time. Political content which can be watched on the bus, in the bath, at the back of a lecture-hall is part of an “infotainment” continuum alongside compilations of football highlights, music, exercise tips and so on, and it loses the character of a distinct discursive, public and collective activity. As Stiegler put it, YouTube is nothing less than “the entrepreneurial instantiation of a mutation in grammatization”, a new way of organising and formalising behaviours, creating new kinds of political and micropolitical relations (2009, 47). YouTube, then, gives rise to communication channels hungry for attention which needs to be won and held. It encourages a microcelebrity-culture of “parasocial” relationships, in which users feel a bond or affinity with a producer they never directly meet (Rasmussen 2018). Channels address viewers directly—“like and subscribe”, they will insist— and encourage participation in the form of comments, suggestions for future videos, sharing and so on. Such participation may extend to other platforms where videos and related issues can be discussed, larger affective communities take shape (Papacharissi 2015) and subsidiary content— such as new videos highlighting the best moments of a channel—is created and circulated. Viewers are invited to imagine that they are part of a community. Such relationships between YouTubers and followers, turn, paradoxically, on the YouTuber being both extraordinary in some way—able to deliver insights about make-up, movies, fitness or whatever the channel may be about—yet also ordinary, on the same level with us, speaking from their bedroom to ours, as it were, and not part of the mainstream official media system. The medium sets up a series of relations that are similar in form to the populist relationship in politics which, as we have seen, was itself already similar to relationships between celebrities and fans. To see what happens when populist politics meets a populist platform we turn to an example.

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A Case Study in YouTube Populism: The “Truth” About Brexit. My case study is a YouTube video released during the campaign over the referendum concerning the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union. The Truth About Brexit was released on 5 June 2016 (three weeks before the referendum itself) and at the time of writing has been viewed approximately nine-hundred and thirty-five thousand times. (The video can be viewed on Watson’s YouTube Channel here: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=rNJ05NfM-4Y.) It was published on the channel of the British-based political YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson. He has a significant presence on political social media with 1.2m followers on Twitter and 1.86m subscribers on YouTube. His most-watched video has been seen 12m times and most significant online intervention was to release a video during the 2016 US Presidential election campaign claiming Hilary Clinton had a brain disease. In 2019 then President Donald Trump tweeted his support for Watson when the latter’s content was being regulated by Facebook. But before we look in detail at Watson, his channel and The Truth About Brexit we need to take a brief detour and familiarise ourselves with the wider rhetorical situation of this text: the rhetorical culture around British membership of the EU and the distinct topoi which emerged clearly during the referendum campaign. This is a large topic but here we can highlight just three aspects. Firstly, since joining the EU in 1973 British discourse about its membership has tended to be distinctly transactional. That is, membership is justified and promoted (or criticised and rejected) in terms of a balance sheet showing what the UK gets from the bloc, and in particular whether it gets more or less than it puts in (e.g., Wodak 2018; Grube 2017). A second and clearly related theme has been the geographical and ideological/cultural distance between the UK and the EU, which, combined with claims about the particularity and peculiarity of British history, sets limits on how far the UK can ever be fully involved in the EU (Daddow 2013; Spiering 2015; Wodak 2018; Finlayson 2018). Arguments about the EU were always, in this sense, arguments about British identity (Wenzl 2019) and ethos. Thirdly, the more directly “Eurosceptic” discourses emphasise an aspect of the first two: that what distinguishes the UK from the EU is a particular approach to liberty linked with hard-headed scepticism about the capacity and legitimacy of regulatory authority. From this perspective, “ever closer union”,

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especially after the Lisbon Treaty, could only be conceived of as a threat to British autonomy, even part of a deliberate programme to contain the nation, shackling what would otherwise be a great economic and political power (e.g., Hawkins 2015; O’Toole 2018). The 2016 referendum took place within this discursive context. The official Remain campaign concentrated on the transactional dimension, emphasising the losses that would be incurred on withdrawal. The Leave side also employed this frame but concentrated on the failure of EU membership to satisfy the interests of particular groups explaining economic decline not with reference to the fiscal austerity imposed after the 2008 Global Financial Crash, nor to the industrial restructuring and globalisation of the nineteen-eighties, but to membership of the EU since 1973. However, and significantly, in so doing it moved the discourse beyond transactional calculations. Because EU bureaucracy and regulations were presented as hindering the country from seizing opportunities, Brexit could be presented as an opening onto a boundless utopian future. In the influential Brexit: The Movie released online during the campaign and showing 1.5 million views by the day of the vote, the conservative politician David Davis argued that “We have huge scope, huge scope for creating vast numbers of new jobs” while conservative journalist Matt Ridley claimed that “Outside Europe we could have prosperity on a level that we can’t even imagine now”. (At the time of writing it is still on YouTube and has 2.9m views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= UTMxfAkxfQ0.) As the discourse developed from one of transactional costs and benefits to the promise of political and economic transformation so did the discourse of freedom become more prominent. Examining a large corpus Douglas (2021) found that “freedom” was prominent within the Leave campaign’s discourse, often collocated with “independence”, “liberty” and “sovereignty”. Freedom understood as possession of the power to act both effectively and without necessary regard to others, thus underpinned the slogan “Vote Leave, Take Back Control” which became, as Zappettini and Krzyzanowski ˙ (2019) put it, a “floating signifier” referring simultaneously to “global deceleration” (a rejection of neoliberal austerity) and acceleration (greater liberalisation and free trade) both being connected to the argument that to achieve either requires liberation from EU rules. It is significant, then, that, as Buckledee finds, the Remain and Leave campaigns differed in linguistic modality. The former tended to hedge, making arguments about what “would” or “could” happen if Leave won,

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while the latter was direct and strident in claiming that the UK “will” be free to make laws, trade with the world and so on (2018, 31–35). Buckledee also shows how Leave made better use of an inclusive “we” which, opposed to the establishment in favour of Remain, would be the subject of that freedom. Who was and wasn’t part of that “we” was of course also part of the debate, to which immigration was central, particularly in the rhetoric of UKIP (Cap 2019) but also more generally (Zappettini 2019). The referendum debate, then, took place on a terrain organised by a central pairing of freedom and control. In Leave rhetoric the former organised otherwise diverse demands for both more and less economic liberalisation, promising unimagined riches, while the latter articulated a capacity to determine the future of the nation and could accommodate a range of nationalist, racialised political claims about the character of the nation or “the people”. Voting Leave could be construed—perhaps experienced—as an act of national liberation and self-determination, bringing into being or enabling expression of an otherwise silenced national identity. This was linked to a rhetoric centred on timeliness. In Brexit: The Movie UKIP leader Nigel Farage said: “This is the single most important political decision any of us will make in our lifetime”. But it was Boris Johnson, closing the Leave case during a televised debate at the end of the campaign, who encapsulated this appeal. The choice, he said, was between hope and fear, those who believed in the country and those rubbishing it. Voting Leave was “speaking up for hundreds of millions of people around Europe who agree with us but who currently have no voice” and, to make it clear, “If we vote Leave and take back control I believe that this Thursday can be our country’s Independence Day”. Over the course of the campaign transactional rhetoric which had framed debate about the EU turned into something else. Leave presented its case in terms of transformative possibility, making Brexit an opening into the unknown which for that very reason could appear enticing and the braver path to choose. Brexit rhetoric was, then, populist according to more than one of the conceptual definitions we have considered. As Laclau might observe, it proposed the existence of a “people”, prevented from being themselves fully because of an Other, the EU. It proposed a means of overcoming that Other in the process of transforming the situation and restoring to the nation its true character—freer, wealthier, more powerful than before. As Mudde might say, it was centred on the Nation while also predominantly moral and, dividing good from evil. And it had elements

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of the style identified by Moffitt and Tormey, breaking with decorum, combining the ordinary and the extraordinary and seeking to embody them in the nature of the movement and the person of its leading figures. With this in mind we can now return to YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson. Our interest here is in how this already populist, ethos-centric, Brexit rhetoric combined with the political rhetorical style of the digital platform. Watson himself has a background in conspiracy theory. In a 2003 book, for example, he tried to prove that most of world history was caused by the machinations of a “power elite” involving bodies such as the UN and the EU. Since working for professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (Hines 2018) Watson has moved outwards and worked with both economic libertarians and far-right activists (see Finlayson 2020). In 2018—two years after the referendum—he joined UKIP. Over that time his online output has shifted from explicit conspiracy theory to more mainstream political issues, particularly concerning immigration, gender politics and Islam. In so doing he has developed a particular political style, adapted to and making use of the medium, which is also a way of performing a populist ethos, connected to a moralising rhetoric dividing the world into good and evil, inviting viewers to adopt his political style, to align themselves with good and inhabit the populist Brexit ethos. The Truth About Brexit came out as the referendum campaign had taken shape. It is 19.36 minutes long with a script of around 3000 words. It primarily consists of Watson talking to camera, delivering what is in effect a political speech, interspersed with still images of news reports and clips from Brexit: The Movie which serve as citations from authority, tendentious uses of images and quotations of opponents which serve as evidence against them, and, importantly, footage over which he speaks, and which fulfils, as we shall explain later, an important “enthymematic” function. The video contains numerous inaccurate claims, but these are not a direct focus of this chapter. The issue for us is not whether or not Watson’s claims should be believed but the kind of belief they invite. Watson’s ethos is constructed through his appearance across many videos. He is a well-groomed, suited but informally dressed young man. His address is less intimate than some YouTube videos, evoking a style of current affairs broadcasting, part news commentator delivering an editorial straight to camera, and part radio shock-jock. He stands, looking slightly down at us, his face and body active, expressive and very directly addressing us. Behind him, usually, is a world map, connoting news programmes, but perhaps also a military adviser, and a certain seriousness.

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Watson’s enunciation is sharp, aggressive but not out of control, confidently sarcastic. This bearing and appearance establish a form of rhetorical authority. There is no equivocation. The modality is direct. At the same time, the video doesn’t hide the jump cuts that connote authenticity on YouTube. This performance is one of the anchors of a key argument of the video, summed up at the end: “The Vote Leave campaign is based on sound arguments, facts, logic, statistics; the Vote Remain campaign is based on fear-mongering and hyperbole”. Remain is an “insult” to our intelligence. “Their arguments”, Watson says, “are baseless because all they can appeal to is irrational panic”. He mockingly describes them as “all this Chicken Little, the sky is falling, there will be World War III if Britain leaves the EU, there will be economic catastrophe”, concluding, in an example of the “bad manners” style of populism, that “it’s all total bollocks”. The argument, then, is that the Remain campaign is manipulative, trying to frighten you and exploit your irrational self, yet itself also frightened and irrational. That may appear contradictory. How can the campaign be both calculatingly manipulative and emotionally driven? But the argument isn’t really about Remain. It is that Leave is brave, rational, uncowed, confident like Watson himself whose ethos of self-possession is demonstrated by the bold, decisive way in which he makes these claims. Remain relies on “the tyranny of the status quo” and people’s psychological aversion to change. Its hedging is evidence of weakness and insincerity. The only people who could believe in it, it follows, are people who allow themselves to be manipulated and scared into submission. To accept Watson’s argument is to demonstrate one’s resolute, strong-willed independence of mind. Meyer argues that rhetoric is “the negotiation of the distance” between subjects in relation to a question or problem (2017, Chapter 11; Turnbull 2014). Through language we demonstrate and justify where we “stand” in relation to a matter at hand and so also in relation to others: who is near, who is further away. Watson’s rhetoric is evidently concerned with such distance. The EU’s behaviour is “a complete insult to British common law”, coming as it does from what is characterised as a European tradition of regulation and control. Yet EU politicians are people you have no power to remove, “whose names you don’t even know” and whom “you” cannot even recognise. Through this rhetoric of distance EU interventions become intrusions and migrants a way of forcibly reducing distance while also pulling people away from their own governments.

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Throughout, the language is of taking and sending and the emphasis on locations in space as, for example, with a reference to the EU “banning fishermen from operating on their own doorstep”. Remain is distant, “we” are close, strong and united. Throughout this speech Watson describes and names his opponents. He attributes to identities, interests and motives which prove their bad character. Sometimes this involves word choices which negatively characterise both Remain supporters and the EU. “They” don’t simply say things but “lecture us”; the EU isn’t about compromise between nations but “obliterating” the nation state and building “their own Byzantine United States of Europe”; it doesn’t just have power but is “seizing raw power”. These amplifications form part of a deeper strategy through which The European Union becomes one of the names of a catastrophe that has already happened and Brexit the name of an act of self-determining salvation. Watson calls the EU “a state” (rather than an intergovernmental or transnational organisation) claiming: the EU isn’t planning to become a federal super state, accountable only to the bureaucrats who profit from it. It already is one. It already has a central bank, a President, a currency, a criminal justice system, a passport, a flag and anthem. These are all defining characteristics of a nation-state.

He then defines that state as “not undemocratic…anti-democratic”, a “tyranny”, capping this with a clever flourish (not Watson’s coinage): “if the EU were a country applying to join itself it would be rejected on the grounds of being insufficiently democratic”. Similarly, the definition of the EU as an economic union is overturned: “They lied to us from the start. They claimed it was just going to be a free trade zone. It’s already a sprawling Empire”. It is also an economic “basket case” which harms the UK through “wealth confiscation”, giving British money to poorer countries, while restricting fishing and preventing the UK from making trade deals. Rather than an open market it is a closed one characterised by bureaucratic “overreach”, regulating in the interests of big corporations while smaller businesses are “strangled”. “Why”, he asks, “would we want to remain part of an institution that’s designed to screw over small businesses and the middle class? Why wouldn’t we want to leave an institution that jacks up our cost of living by slapping regulations and tariffs on everything that we consume?”.

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These histrionics are a kind of paradiastole, a trope of redescription, re-presenting as vices what might have seemed to be virtues (see Skinner 2007). The EU’s measures to make itself accountable and representative and to manage economic issues are presented as the opposite. While this connects with long-standing transactional Euroscepticism its core is a moral argument about ethos. The naming and the redescription help not only with the establishment of a gulf between “them” on the EU side and “us” in the UK, but construe that gap as more than one of opinion or judgement, a disagreement over ways to reach a common goal. The two sides are shown to have radically different goals and the goal of Remainers as fundamentally venal. Supporters of the EU aren’t really supporters, just people who benefit from it and who are lying to you: “Isn’t it an amazing coincidence that all the economic, academic, NGO, and arts organizations who were fear-mongering about Britain leaving the EU are being bankrolled by the EU?” asks Watson. Those “claiming that Brexit will lead to the apocalypse” are “lying to you because they don’t want their slush fund to come to an end”. He then lists claims familiar to readers of English tabloid newspapers about the “gravy train”, EU expenses accounts, tax breaks for officials and so on. The rhetoric of The Truth About Brexit is a particularly pungent, condensed and intense, version of that which dominated the campaign in general. Some features are, however, particular to the audio-visual form. These include “citations” of supplementary authorities (via clips from Brexit: The Movie featuring prominent Leavers) and still images of newspapers and other texts which appear as sources and proofs of claims (including articles by Watson). Longer clips function as visual enthymemes. Enthymemes work by applying a general and commonly held belief or value to a specific case, identifying a category of something good, for example, showing how the specific proposal we are making is an instance of it and enabling audiences to complete the thought. Here general propositions are affirmed through visual examples. For instance, seven minutes and fifty seconds into the video, in a section focused on the alleged effects of immigration policy, Watson says: “ … and thanks to the EU’s open-border policy Southern European states simply waved millions of migrants through, knowing that they would head to the northern European welfare states and would become someone else’s burden”. These words accompany three visual sequences. The first shows excited (non-white) people running through some gates past a security guard; the second appears to show (non-white) people throwing things

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and smashing traffic lights; the third shows a number of excited looking (non-white) younger men close to the camera and running down the street. Where this footage comes from and what is actually happening is not made clear. The commentary makes no direct reference to the images which just accompany the words. Watson says that EU migration policy brings migrants to Northern Europe. The images provide a second proposition about those migrants and viewers are invited to supply the conclusion. In verbal enthymemes “common sense” is affirmed. Here doxa imposes itself on a visual image making something unspecified into something specific. On the one hand it is a way for Watson to not say what he is clearly saying. On the other hand, it is a way for the viewer to be confident that “seeing is believing” when what they “see” is, indeed, what they believe. My argument so far is, firstly, that Watson’s video applies, in a dramatic form, the core topoi of the Brexit case. There are arguments about the costs and benefits of membership, the distance of EU rule from the ordinary Briton and a performance of scepticism and suspicion of EU power. However, secondly, Watson intensifies these in ways in line with the political theories of populism we have considered and which particularly centre on ethos. A rhetoric centred on naming heightens the moral opposition between ordinary geographically and culturally located individuals and a distanced, displaced and corrupt elite. There is a performance style, centred on bad manners and claims about crisis, grounded in direct and indirect claims about character—Watson’s own, that of Remainers and that of those who, in taking up Watson’s position, will become active, critical, self-possessed, honest, rational and moral rather than passive, credulous, manipulated, lying, emotional and immoral. However, behind, this is a yet more fundamental organising principle. The video is called “The Truth” about Brexit. The description next to it on the webpage is “What they’re NOT telling you about Britain’s vote to leave the EU”. The opening line is unambiguous: “This is the most important vote you will ever cast in your lifetime. So listen up. They’re lying to you about Brexit”. Throughout, Watson employs topoi of secrecy and disclosure, of what’s “really” going on, what “they” don’t want you to know, what the media won’t tell you, what others don’t realize, the order and strategy behind things which he will reveal to you. These commonplaces possess, as Edwin Black has put it, “uncommon powers of implication and entailment” (1988, 134). And they are not unique to this video. Many of Watson’s videos are called “The Truth

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About…” or “What They’re Not Telling You About…” (see Finlayson 2020). It is a trope common on YouTube and in online culture where we are regularly promised we will be told things we never knew, shown things we won’t believe and have revealed to us various tricks, techniques and “life hacks”. In this context, Watson’s rhetoric of “naming” is also a demonstration of possession of a basic power of naming which is also a power of truth-telling, of saying what is “really” going on by giving things their “proper” names. The visual nature of such rhetoric adds to this, showing things “in black and white”, the “reality” of the image serving sometimes to complement Watson’s statements, at others to undercut the verbal claims of an opponent. Watson’s is, then, an “ethical” and quasiepistemological discourse. It locates Brexit within a deeper order defined by an absolute gulf between the self-interested and unprincipled people who support Remain and live with lies, and those who support Leave and who want to see things as they truly are. In form it is congruent with the general structure of Populism identified by Laclau, constituting “a people” defined by its opposition to a “them” posited as preventing that people from becoming fully itself. In content it is congruent with populist ideologies which, as Mudde has shown, map that division onto moral distinctions of good and evil. But the rhetoric is not taking a set of general populist positions and applying them to Brexit in order to make a specific policy proposition. Rather, Brexit is a route through which subjects find a general Truth revealed to them on Watson’s authority. The rhetoric of secrets, Black writes, promotes their revelation “in the belief that such exposure will work to the detriment of whatever is revealed that the secret, which is simultaneously concealed because it is evil and evil because it is concealed, will shrivel in the luminosity of revelation” (Black 1988). The core proposition concerning Watson’s ethos is that he is a truth-teller, someone who can show the otherwise hidden connections between things and reveal—in audio-visual colour—who are your enemies and what is their agenda. The promise is that if you agree with him then you too can expose and destroy evil.

Conclusion In this chapter, drawing on approaches to the topic from within Political Studies, I have argued that populism consists, in part, of a rhetorical form for which ethos is both origin and destination. I further argued that audio-visual media have intensified this focus on ethos and that

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digital social media do so even more. Out of their complex, multi-layered and multi-sensory flows, moments of rhetorical exchange crystallise, the constraints of the medium demanding distinct genres of political communication. On a platform such as YouTube a combination of technical and economic incentives and demands, as well as an imposing procedural rhetoric, give rise to genres which emphasise ethos, the benefits and wisdom which a YouTuber can confer, and create a distinct sort of microcelebrity culture characterised by the seeming personalisation and individualisation of content and the inducement to form parasocial relationships. In his Brexit rhetoric, as we have seen, Paul Joseph Watson drew on established topoi centred on harm/benefit, closeness/distance, freedom/control. He amplified these, employing a fully populist style, and represented Brexit as a fundamental contest and part of a larger resistance struggle linked to a claim about “the Truth”. This rhetoric, bringing together ideological content and form with the genres of YouTube creates a political discourse around a commercial promise of insight and selftransformation. On YouTube Watson’s political appeal is individualised and personalised and what he offers, through the revelation of secrets, manifested in visual and other enthymemes (by which viewers “see” for themselves) is an invitation to accept an “empowering” form of individual identification. In his 2003 book Order Out of Chaos: Elite Sponsored Terrorism and the New World Order Watson’s presentation of the long-standing plot by “them” against “us” led not to a clear political demand but to recommendations for self-improvement. Readers were urged to learn how to resist brainwashing, to see “the agenda” and to help others “realise they are under attack”. Doing so required protecting oneself from contemporary culture, battling feelings of depression or worthlessness. These sorts of claims are at the heart of most of Watson’s YouTube output where the culture from which we should protect ourselves is that of Western Liberalism, of “social justice” and demands for equality between the sexes, ethnic groups, countries and so on. In his Brexit rhetoric Watson implies that it is not only the will of the people which is being thwarted by the EU but “you” and your will. You can regain that will, restore an ethos of dignity and sense of purpose, if you are brave and vote Leave (and if you continue to watch Paul Joseph Watson).

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As a form of politics this is perhaps best understood with reference to Weber’s ideal type of charismatic authority. The YouTuber derives authority not from their place within a formal structure giving them rational-legal or traditional standing. Instead, authority is grounded in the ethos of the YouTuber which is represented as founded on their rejection of rational-legal and traditional authorities. Weber finds that charismatic authority relies on personal trust in the revelations the charismatic presents and the goal of which is “to effect a subjective or internal reorientation born out of suffering, conflicts, or enthusiasm” and “a completely new orientation of all attitudes toward the different problems of the ‘world’” (1978, 245). Interestingly, Weber also observes that charismatic authority is “specifically foreign to economic considerations” in that it rejects “rational economic conduct” (1978, 244). That’s not to say it renounces wealth. Rather, it eschews regular income attained by traditional or rational economic activity. Instead, individual patrons provide the necessary resources “through honorific gifts, dues and other voluntary contributions” (1978, 1113) and the closeness which derives from such followership may give them special access to the charismatic perhaps even a share in the esteem (1978, 1119). The structures of social media celebrity reproduce just this relationship. Subscription to a channel is a basic form of membership of a community affording access to an ethos. Deeper in, one can participate in ancillary discussion about the meaning of various pronouncements. Then one can share them and proselytise. Finally, one can set up regular donations in return for which you might get to see videos early, see special videos available only to a few and even meet the person virtually and “ask them anything”. In this respect we might say that social (digital, participatory and shareable) media tend towards the formation of relationships that are not only parasocial but cultic in nature and that through them political discourse tends to move away from negotiation over differences of interest and become part of a kind of celebrity theodicy, an argument about suffering, sin and a promise of salvation when the demons are destroyed. Today, on all kinds of platforms, online and offline this mode of discourse dominates our politics.

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Populism and the Rise of the AfD in Germany Anne Ulrich, Olaf Kramer, and Dietmar Till

Introduction: Right-Wing Populism in Germany ¨ Deutschland and the Alternative Fur In the wake of the disastrous destruction and terror the Nazi regime brought to the world, German society generally guards itself against populism. Yet, along with the success of right-wing populist movements all over Europe, Germany is once again confronted with the rise of rightwing attitudes and a populist right-wing party. To better understand this recent development, some historical contextualisation seems necessary. Soon after the end of the Second World War, German right-wing parties reorganised themselves (Pfahl-Traughber 2016; Weiß 2017). As early as 1949, the German Right Party (Deutsche Rechtspartei)—only

A. Ulrich (B) · O. Kramer · D. Till Department of Media Studies, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] O. Kramer e-mail: [email protected] D. Till e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Kock and L. Villadsen (eds.), Populist Rhetorics, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6_5

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one of several right-wing parties—won five seats in the first federal elections. Most of its voters were former National Socialists. Among these parties, the National Democratic Party (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD), founded in 1964, was by far the most successful. During the 1960s, the NPD made it into the West German state parliaments several times. After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the NDP was voted into the parliaments of Saxony and MecklenburgWestern Pomerania. Besides the NPD, two other parties, the German People’s Union (Deutsche Volksunion, DVU) with its chairman, the newspaper publisher Gerhard Frey, and the Republicans (Die Republikaner), were successful parties on the extreme right-wing spectrum. DVU and NPD merged in 2011. Attempts to ban these parties because of their anti-constitutionalism have failed due to a variety of legal reasons. The German Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz) estimated that, by the end of 2019, some 32,000 persons could be assigned to this right-wing spectrum. Just over 13,000 of them are organised within political parties. In recent years, these parties have become very popular (Bundesministerium des Inneren 2019, 53). In political science, a distinction is usually made between right-wing extremist and right-wing populist parties. While right-wing extremist parties, according to Michael Kohlstruck, are anti-system parties, rightwing populists are anti-establishment parties (Kohlstruck 2008, 222). The difference between right-wing extremist and right-wing populism is mainly ideological: right-wing extremism represents a holistic approach to the ideology, at the centre of which is the ethnically and culturally homogeneous national community. This results in an anti-pluralistic, anti-liberal conception of state and society, which leaves room for different directions below this level for national socialist traditionalists, German nationalists and the “classical” right in other countries and national revolutionaries. (Priester 2010, 34)1

This distinction is not always clear-cut. While right-wing extremist parties played a certain role in the reunified Germany, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, they no longer have significant influence today (at least not within political institutions like parliaments).

1 All translations from German are by the authors.

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In recent years, the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) has replaced the NPD. The AfD was founded in 2013 by the journalist Alexander Gauland, the economics professor Bernd Lucke and the publicist Konrad Adam. The party first entered a parliament in the 2013 European elections, winning seven seats in the European Parliament. In the years between 2013 and 2017, the AfD managed to win seats in almost all state parliaments across Germany. Finally, it became the third strongest political force in the 2017 federal elections, winning ninety-four seats in the Bundestag. In this early phase, the AfD was, above all, a centre-right conservative party that criticised the financial policy of the European Union after the debt crisis of 2009 to 2012 and wanted to return to the German Mark. Economists were disproportionately represented in the early AfD. Most of them have since left the party, especially since the party split into two rival groups in 2015. One was led by Frauke Petry and took a right-wing, anti-immigration position. The other, represented by Bernd Lucke, wanted to continue taking the Eurosceptic line. Since the split of the party, it has moved significantly to the right. Journalists and political scientists describe the party’s positions on various occasions as racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic (see Häusler 2016; Pfahl-Traughber 2016). Members only half-heartedly distance themselves from clearly right-wing extremist groups inside and outside the party, such as the extremist “Wing” (Der Flügel ) founded by Björn Höcke as a partisan movement within the AfD or the Identitarian Movement or “Pegida” (an abbreviation for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident) founded in Dresden in 2014. In January 2019, the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution officially classified the “Wing” with its 7000 members a so-called “suspected case” (Verdachtsfall ) subject to further investigation. In March 2000, the “Wing” was officially declared a right-wing extremist movement. One of the main arguments for this decision was that officials and supporters of the “Wing” committed clear “violations […] against the free democratic basic order and its characteristics of human dignity as well as the principles of democracy and the rule of law during the period of the survey” (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz 2020). The Federal Executive Committee of the AfD therefore called for the dissolution of the group in April 2020. The websites of the “Wing” then went offline, but it is uncertain whether the extreme right-wing group has actually disbanded.

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The disputes between the moderate section of the party and the radicalright escalated at the Federal Party Congress of the AfD on 28 and 29 November 2020, when the party’s more moderate leader, Jörg Meuthen, violently attacked the members and sympathisers of the former “Wing” in his opening speech. In October 2021, Meuthen announced that he would not run again for the party chairmanship.

Populist Rhetoric and the Media Today, populist rhetoric thrives in a highly mediatised communication environment. One could even say that its entire rhetorical situation is primarily enabled and restrained by the media, especially by social media. This claim is echoed in labels for the AfD like “the first real internet party in German history” (Bender cited in Gäbler 2017, 6) or the “first Facebook party” (cf. Horsch and Huber 2016). A well-established concept in rhetorical studies for examining “the specific condition or situation which invites utterance” is Lloyd Bitzer’s (1968, 4) rhetorical situation. Along three categories—exigence, constraints and audience—Bitzer understands situational constellations as problems that require rhetorical discourse in order to be solved. The concept is quite broad, since Bitzer’s “constraints” range from the personal character and style of the orator to general interests, attitudes and beliefs (Bitzer 1968, 8). At the same time, it is very precise, carefully distinguishing between rhetorical situations (which allow for change effected by discourse) and any other kinds of contexts (Bitzer 1968, 9–11). Therefore, the concept is still popular among rhetorical scholars. It is also very useful for the analysis of the “populist zeitgeist” (Mudde 2004) and the specific populist rhetoric of the German AfD. The European migrant crisis in 2015 has shown how situational circumstances intensified AfD’s political message and turned the movement into a non-negligible player in German politics. However, Bitzer’s concept needs an update to meet the growing complexity of highly mediatised communicational situations. First, situations are no longer (have they ever been?) distinct, or, as Kjeldsen (2008, 116) puts it: Mass media and new media have created a plurality of situations, wherein speakers at the same time address many different groups of audiences and situational exigencies. More than ever before do public speakers find themselves in several rhetorical situations at the same time.

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Whereas the overall historical situation may very well be describable, the intertwined communicative settings and media environments increasingly resist attempts to analyse their distinct qualities and features. Rhetorical messages therefore tend to travel and, in their use and re-use, attain a life of their own (Kjeldsen 2008, 126). Networked media environments such as social media increase these effects and lend them hitherto unknown visibility. On platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, the importance of context and situation as defining moments for rhetorical discourse have been significantly weakened. The concept of situation therefore has been opposed to, or rather supplemented with, the concept of circulation (Chaput 2010). “For rhetorical scholars,” Woods and Hahner (2019, 139) claim with reference to Chaput, “circulation of content challenges several foundational components of the rhetorical situation and posits new questions for criticism itself.” These challenged foundational components include the fixed nature of persons, objects, identities and ideas—the belief in causalities and in the agency of a speaker. Instead, the concept of circulation highlights the fluidity of contexts and audiences and, among others, the “connective tissues of affectivity passing through locations” (Chaput 2010, 19). For Woods and Hahner (2019), memes are the perfect example for this rhetoric of circulation—and for the rhetoric of the USAmerican alt-right. In their view, “[m]emes—which travel expeditiously, propagate easily, and transmit constitutive content to collectives still in the making—are ideal rhetorical devices for networked cultural configurations” (Woods and Hahner 2019, 170f.). The concept of circulation is not introduced in order to replace Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, but to complement it where it lacks applicability. Contemporary populist rhetoric thus can only be fully understood by considering both its situation and circulation in highly mediatised environments. Indeed, right-wing populism tends to flourish under these circumstances. Communication scholars have argued for populism’s “elective affinity” (Gerbaudo 2018) with mass media, as well as online or social media—as if populism shared qualities with media or mediality itself. It is worth exploring these affinities without running the risk of equating populism with either a (medial) form or a (rhetorical) style. Gerbaudo (2018, 746) tentatively introduces the term “elective affinity” to describe the noticeable “social media savviness” of many populist movements and the observation that social media “have offered a channel for the populist yearning to ‘represent the unrepresented,’ providing a

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voice to [the] voiceless and unifying a divided people.” Other scholars draw on the sociological concept of political or discursive “opportunity structures” to understand the ways in which the “online media system” fosters populist communication (Engesser et al. 2017, 1280). Some highlight the “media compatibility” of populism, especially those components that meet the attention-seeking criteria of mass media (Diehl 2016, 78). It is important, though, to differentiate the ideological logic of populism from its rhetorical logic and its media logic and to look at populism as a combination of all three logics. Mass media, as well as social media, may favour certain rhetorical strategies and obstruct others—but this does not mean that they are inherently populist media. Although the increasingly complex mutual dependence of politics and the media may indeed have “weakened all those structures and actors in the political process that embody its dimension of deliberation, permanence, and policy of responsibility, while privileging those actors and strategies which rely on short-term success through mass compatible dramatisation” (Meyer 2006, 88). This is why Meyer attributed the political communication process in the “media democracy” to “an inevitable vicinity to populist strategies” (ibid.). Let us now trace these affinities from the mass media to social media in order to understand the continuities and changes in populist rhetoric and media use, since the rise of the AfD and other populist movements in Europe coincides with the rise of social media and the crisis of journalism in the so-called “mainstream media.” The rhetoric of AfD politicians Björn Höcke and Alice Weidel that is analysed later in this chapter reflect these changes in very telling and slightly different ways. To simplify, one could say: mass media favour all efforts of political parties or actors to become popular, whereas social media favour all efforts to criticise established institutions of discourse and establish alternative media spheres (and become popular within these spheres). Mass media, like television, turn politicians into celebrities and politics into theatre, according to Meyer (2006, 84f.): dramatising their actions, staging pseudo-events, and choosing symbolic political gestures over “real” political discourse helps politicians and political parties get the attention of mass media and appeal to a mass audience. This kind of politainment thrives on the same values as television news, such as personalisation, dramatisation, conflict and simplification (Diehl 2012, 19–21). As populists tend to use similar rhetorical strategies (although for different reasons), scholars like Diehl

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assume that mass media bring more attention to populist communication than to more complex political messages (ibid.). Beyond that, the attention economy of the news media invites (political) communicators to apply attention-seeking techniques like scandalisation or provocation in order to be heard. These strategies are welcome among populists, since they entertain an ambivalent or even contradictory relationship to the news media (see, for example, Gäbler 2017, 5). Götz Kubitschek, one of the leading intellectual figures of the New Right in Germany, openly embraces provocation in an essay of the same title in his magazine Sezession. While those in power, according to Kubitschek, “simply push their message through,” those out of power “prepare meticulously for a long time, study the reflex patterns of the media age and get public perception by force, through a coup” (Kubitschek 2006, 23f.). But Kubitschek’s (2006, 24) analysis goes deeper and shows his profound disregard for news media and public discourse. For them, provocation is an attempt to get invited to the feeding troughs. For us, provocation is no ego-project, no sales strategy, and the hope for an integration into the smug discourse would expose our whole action to ridicule. We are not aiming at participation but at an ending of discourse as a form of consensus […]. Provocation […] is haunting those who do not want to be disturbed.

As much as populists want attention for their cause and therefore depend on the laws and dynamics of the mass media system and the attention economy of news, they simultaneously reject the so-called “mainstream media” due to their being part of an allegedly elitist, corrupt and biased system. AfD politicians such as Björn Höcke and Alice Weidel try to provoke scandals in order to gain the attention of mass media, and thereby promote their social media activities while at the same time criticising and attacking mainstream mass media. Online media and especially social media, therefore, enable populists not only to promote the political imaginary of an alternative media sphere, but also to create this sphere and, at the same time, weaken the credibility and authority of “mainstream media.” Therefore, Krämer (2017, 1304f.) rightly claims: “The use of different Internet applications and platforms by right-wing populists can be interpreted as a message in itself, a tool, and a factor in the development of the ideology that fulfils several important functions.” This is especially true for Alice Weidel’s strategy of targeted provocation,

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whereas Björn Höcke’s Dresden speech reflects a more traditional use of provocation. But how, exactly, do “digital infrastructures,” as Haller (2020, 161) puts it, “contribute to the success of populist politicians and movements”? In a very broad view, the main functions of political online communication are to inform users, to involve and integrate them, to connect content from different platforms and to mobilise users (Haller 2020, 162f.). This is true for all political parties—populist or not. The following elements of populist ideology, style and rhetoric, however, correspond in a particular way with “online opportunity structures” (Engesser et al. 2017): people-centrism and anti-elitism, exclusion of others, creation of a populist worldview and expression of populist lifestyle and identity (Krämer 2017, 1297–1303). People-centrism and anti-elitism: The democratising potential of online media enables populists to pursue the idea of popular sovereignty against elites (Engesser et al., 2017, 1283). Populists establish direct and often personal connections to their audience since online and social media significantly facilitate the entertaining of social relationships (Krämer 2017, 1305). Thus, online infrastructures favour the representation or even construction of “the people” and the criticism of “the elite.” They make non-institutionalised masses and crowds visible and experienceable in new ways, which can be used to legitimise political agendas and mobilise more supporters (Gerbaudo 2018, 750; Engesser et al. 2017, 1286). However, populist actors still tend to apply a top-down communication style that only invites people to like and share their views, but not to discuss or criticise them (Krämer 2017, 1297f.). Exclusion of others: Online infrastructures provide alternative ways of “constituting the people as political subject” (Krämer 2017, 1305). Because the internet “is presumed to frequently cultivate homophily, which is the ‘tendency of similar individuals to form ties with each other,’” populist groups and communities not only exclude elites, but also minorities which they consider as other than “the people” (Engesser et al. 2017, 1284). Online media also facilitate the coordination of collective action and even allow for the collaborative production of content. They also enable the construction of threat scenarios that appeal to emotion. Krämer (2017, 1299) mentions a crowd-sourcing project called Einzelfall-Map (“Map of single cases”) where users gathered news reports on (alleged) criminal incidents with (alleged) foreign offenders and noted them on a Google map as an example to illustrate the internet-specific, in

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this case “bottom-up” construction of an external threat to the populist idea of the “people.” Creation of a populist worldview: Online media in general and social media in particular are not the right place for the intellectual construction of a more than thin populist ideology. The circulatory nature of digital infrastructures favours the fragmentation of ideology as well as the underdetermination of its ideological “pieces.” On personalised streams and news feeds, these fragments may gain quite different meanings—without users even noticing the differences. Applying the well-proven templates of simplification, emotionalisation and negativity to new—and possibly quite different—events is a populist strategy which provides answers to more political problems than just immigration and national security (Engesser et al. 2017, 1285). Thus, “relatively unstructured grievances” are turned into a populist worldview (Krämer 2017, 1301 and 1305), for example by politicians like Alice Weidel. Expression of populist lifestyle and identity: Social networking sites are “some of today’s main means to build and reveal one’s identity” (Krämer 2017, 1305). That’s why they provide “an environment wherein individuals can socialise themselves into a right-wing populist worldview, adopt corresponding practices, symbols and aesthetics as part of their lifestyle, and, thereby, express a right-wing populist identity they have developed” (Krämer 2017, 1302). This is especially true for the activities of the Identitarian Movement on self-fashioning platforms like Instagram (Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung 2020, 21), which form an important environment for right-wing populism. All these effects are, of course, algorithmically reinforced in online environments and on social networking sites. Furthermore, the programmability of social media might favour disinformation campaigns, allow for the use of social bots and enable microtargeting strategies (Haller 2020, 172–175). The alternative mediasphere of right-wing populism thus also relies on technological features to bring itself into existence, to rally supporters, and gradually disconnect them from the mainstream media. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram have been repeatedly confronted with criticism of their lax handling of extremist content. In recent years, they have therefore imposed their community standards more strictly, i.e. flagged or deleted dubious posts and identified social bots. In reaction to this, extreme right-wing populists established new and alternative channels, this time within the so-called

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“dark social” sphere. Messenger services like WhatsApp and Telegram allow, once again, for the uncensored circulation of right-wing populist ideas and messages (Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung 2020, 16–17, 20). In conclusion, right-wing populist rhetoric takes place in a complex media environment comprising “mainstream” news media, “alternative” online and social media, the far-right world of imageboards and the so-called “dark social.” To understand the rhetoric of populist parties like the AfD, it is therefore crucial to follow a cross-platform approach that takes the respective differences, as well as the mutual interaction, of these media environments into account (Medina Serrano et al. 2019, 216). Rhetoricians have to consider that public or parliamentary speeches, demonstrations and “protest walks” are also situated within this complex media environment, where audio-visual fragments, utterances and visual images can be turned strategically into memes that take on their own life. The following portrait of the mediasphere of the AfD in Germany, as well as the two analyses, keep this in mind. For analytic purposes, however, we need to pause at some points, examining singular events, situations and contexts in order to understand examples of particular tactics and strategies used by AfD populists.

The Mediasphere of the Alternative ¨ Deutschland fur Any overview over AfD’s mediasphere runs the risk of obsolescence the minute it is published. The media environment is subject to permanent change. Print media, as well as national public networks, are constantly losing influence to quickly emerging online platforms controlled by international and global tech companies—in an online environment that is constantly being de- and reregulated by national lawmakers and also monitored by, in Germany’s case, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz). As Germany’s “first real internet party,” the AfD both profits from, as well as accelerates, these changes.2

2 The (social) media use of the party, its members and sympathisers has been extensively studied by NGOs/foundations such as Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung, Otto-Brenner-Stiftung or Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, by journalists and political analysts as well as in political and communication studies. Closer readings in rhetoric and media studies are still relatively rare.

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In Germany, there is no parallel to the US’s all-encompassing rightwing platform Breitbart News, but rather, as Gäbler (2018, 32) puts it, “a widespread network of extreme right-wing, teutonic (deutschtümelnd) and racist platforms whose users coordinate the flooding of commentary sections or operate like a troll farm time and again.” It is therefore crucial to locate AfD’s rhetoric within this broader right-wing and “alternative” media landscape, especially since its outlets (newspapers, magazines and other publications) are frequent sources on AfD social media sites (Bachl 2018). The monthly magazine Compact shares the slogan “daring the truth” (“Mut zur Wahrheit ”) with the AfD and openly endorses the party’s politics and politicians since the European migrant crisis in 2015 (Kopke and Lorenz 2017, 81). Beyond serving as the unofficial mouthpiece of the party, the magazine also supports the “Pegida” movement and is considered, together with Kopp publishing house, to be the German “super spreader” of conspiracy theories (Butter 2018). Furthermore, the conservative right-wing weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit, the online youth magazine Blaue Narzisse and the bimonthly journal Sezession show close proximity to the ideology of AfD (Neteler 2018, 53). The latter is published by the “Institute for State Policy” (Institut für Staatspolitik), a think tank of the New Right. Its publishing house, Antaios Verlag, is also closely connected to AfD supporters of the far-right (Funke 2016, 123). The online boulevard paper Deutschland-Kurier, the magazines eigentümlich frei, Cato, Tichys Einblick, the conspiracy theorist webpage KenFM , the populist blog PI-News, the Austrian online platform unzensuriert and the German branch of Russia Today, RT Deutsch, complete, among other outlets, the online environment of the New Right in Germany (Gäbler 2017, 17; for further information on AfD and print media see Behrens et al. 2018a, b; on the “alternative” right-wing online environment see Schulze 2020). Every one of them appeals to the aforementioned idea of an alternative, authentic and uncensored environment in order to circumvent established news media. The AfD itself has a members’ print and online magazine (AfDkompakt ), runs one national and several federal websites and entertains pages and channels on every thinkable social media platform, from Facebook to Gab.ai. Social media are the party’s “primary communication tool” (Medina Serrano et al. 2019, 222). The AfD makes extensive use of social media and succeeds in engaging user interactions and gaining online support across platforms and channels (Medina Serrano et al.

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2019; Schelter et al. 2016). Nevertheless, every platform has its specific affordances which shape AfD’s populist rhetoric in different ways. Facebook was and still is one of the most important and influential social media platforms in Germany, especially among AfD-sympathetic audiences. Earlier as well as more recent studies on AfD’s Facebook posts underline their “more uncensored” tone towards politically delicate topics such as antisemitism and racism (Hübscher 2020, 12; see also Arzheimer 2015; Schroeder et al. 2017, 44–47; Voigt 2018, 92–94), which clearly points to the lack of gatekeeping on intermediary platforms so crucial for the success of right-wing populism. Arzheimer analysed the party’s internet activity in 2014 and discovered: “As of July 2014, the official fan page of the AfD’s federal organisation counts almost 122,000 ‘likes’. This is nearly twice as many as the SPD (just under 75,000) or the CDU (almost 84,000) can muster” (Arzheimer 2015, 548). This didn’t change much in the following years, as Medina Serrano et al. (2019, 218) echo Arzheimer’s findings: Between 2015 and 2018, the AfD had “the page with the most fans, with two times as many fans as the pages of CDU and SPD.” The party also posts more actively than other parties and receives the most comments. For instance, between 2015 and 2018, each Facebook post had an average of 420 comments while the CDU page, for example, had an average of only 160 comments (Medina Serrano et al. 2019, 218). In 2019, 85 per cent of the posts shared by political parties were from the AfD (Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung 2020, 18). These are remarkable numbers in terms of party engagement, user engagement and message dissemination, which could have been significantly intensified by social bots. Trevor Davis et al. found 80,000 suspicious accounts “with multiple features common in fake accounts but rare for human users” (Davis et al. 2019). The posts of the official party pages (i.e., the national page, pages for the several federal states, and a page for the faction of the national parliament, AfD-Fraktion im Deutschen Bundestag ) are standardised in design and rhetoric (see Hübscher 2020, 14). Most of them use a combination of a politician’s portrait or a stock photo with a catchy slogan that is accentuated in the party’s key colours, bright blue and red. Others share posts from news media and use them as an opportunity to provoke anger and frustration with the current government, and some, of course, share photos of party events on the national, federal or local level. As Medina Serrano et al. (2019, 218) puts it: “The tone of these messages tends to be provocative and sometimes is even sensationalist. The topics discussed

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are controversial, which encourages users to engage with the posts and express personal opinions.” Followers of AfD pages are encouraged to express their opinions and to post them directly on the respective page’s timeline in order to suggest a feeling of empowerment and connectivity. In sum, AfD’s Facebook pages provide a vital “alternative” sphere within a very popular platform where sympathisers from, for example, the CDU and NPD can follow the activities of the party, where citizens and members can react to topics and express their opinions as well as their emotions, where followers are reinforced in their doubts about “mainstream” media (and federal institutions), and where fans with less moderate views are directed towards more radical right-wing views and communities. As a trendsetter for short video postings (Hübscher 2020, 14), the party also appeals to audiences with shorter attention spans who are used to audio-visual content. Meanwhile, Facebook pages allow for the embedding of other platforms’ content and therefore also serves as a gateway to the party’s YouTube, Instagram and Twitter accounts. Rather than the ancient agorá, a marketplace for the more or less equal exchange of ideas, AfD’s very popular Facebook page functions as an entrance to a whole far-right world that modulates its followers’ feelings and detaches them from deliberative democracy. While still pretending to provide an “alternative” to an allegedly “totalitarian” media regime, the party uses the affordances of the platform very efficiently in order to dominate political discussions, to popularise its ideology and to channel their followers’ frustrations, while also providing some sense of community and momentum. The party’s activities on other social media are modelled on this general strategy, although slightly tailored to their specific potentials and limitations. On YouTube, for example, the AfD hosts, like most of the other German political parties, two national channels (a party channel and a channel for the parliament’s AfD faction) and several federal channels. The Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung further monitors the channels of Corina Miazga and Peter Boehringer, both members of parliament (AmadeuAntonio-Stiftung 2020, 14). Miazga hosts several talk shows like Red Hot—News from Parliament (Brandheiß—Neues aus dem Bundestag ) and Counter statement—the alternative talk show (Gegenrede—die alternative Talkshow) that deal with current politics in conversations with other senior AfD members and posts opinion pieces and snippets from her parliamentary speeches. Boehringer has a video series called Boehringer talks in plain language (Boehringer spricht Klartext ) and also posts excerpts of

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his parliamentary speeches. In his videos, he displays a more radical rightwing ideology than Miazga, which also includes fragments of conspiracy theories. In contrast to channels of the Identitarian Movement, the AfD has less impact on YouTube (Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung 2020, 14), but their channels are still the most successful of all political parties. Medina Serrano et al. (2019, 220) analysed political parties’ YouTube channels from 2016 to 2018 and found that “even though the channel ha[d] been active only since December 2017, the AfD-Fraktion Bundestag’s videos ha[d] more comments and likes than any of the other parties’ channels.” Thus, on YouTube, the party strengthens its online popularity, spreads its message, addresses different wings of the party through the channels of different politicians, connects with Pegida and Junge Freiheit (Rauchfleisch and Kaiser 2020, 384), and engages viewers in para-social interactions and relations with prominent party members. AfD’s activities on Instagram have thus far not been subjected to extensive scientific research. Medina Serrano et al. (2019, 384) claim that, from 2015 to 2018, “most of the party’s Instagram posts [were] a subset of the Facebook posts.” Today, most Instagram posts, as well as many Facebook posts, represent a subset of AfD-Kompakt posts, the members’ online magazine. Some Instagram posts also refer to the AfD podcast on the members’ magazine website. The Instagram accounts of several party members (such as Björn Höcke and Alice Weidel) also illustrate Krämer’s (2017) aforementioned claim that viewers are socialised into a populist lifestyle. In Germany, Twitter is mainly used by journalists, politicians and online activists, but does not represent a mainstream platform (AmadeuAntonio-Stiftung 2020, 22). Medina Serrano et al. (2019, 218) found that the AfD had the fewest followers from all German political parties on Twitter, yet “this lack of followers does not imply that they are less successful on this platform. For example, more than 50% of the political conversation on Twitter on the day of the 2017 federal election was related to the AfD.” The party was more active than other parties, with the largest number of tweets and retweets, but Medina Serrano et al. also claim that, at 33 percent, the AfD also had the highest percentage of bots retweeting their posts (Medina Serrano et al. 2019, 219). Out of all the parties, the AfD relied most on online manipulation during the 2017 federal election. Besides these more popular social media sites, the AfD is present on various “alternative” or “dark social” platforms, as well as online services

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such as WhatsApp, Telegram, VK, Gab.ai and BitChute, but not as active as the Identitarian Movement and other organisations of the far-right (Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung 2020, 23f.). As a political party represented in the national and several federal parliaments, the AfD cannot openly endorse extremism, that is, unconstitutional actors or organisations on right-wing platforms (for the German differentiation between right-wing radicalism and extremism see Mudde 2000, 12). Several AfD members (who identified with the now-dissolved radical “Wing”of the party) flirt with these players and therefore constitute AfD’s connection to the “dark” side of right-wing extremism.

¨ Populist Parrhesia: Bjorn ¨ Hocke’s “Dresden Speech” Digital and social media obviously play a central role in AfD political communication. This applies to internal communication in closed Facebook groups or via services such as Telegram, but also to communication services that aim to have a stronger external impact, like Twitter. However, one should also keep in mind that more traditional forms of communication, such as oral speech, still play an important role. Such speeches are often aimed at local supporters as addressing sympathisers personally enables strong group formation through collective identification with the speaker’s goals. This rhetorical form was described by Bowers and Ochs as a rhetoric of agitation (Bowers and Ochs 1971). In the following, we do a close rhetorical analysis of the most famous— and infamous—speech given by an AfD politician: Björn Höcke’s socalled “Dresden Speech,” delivered before the youth organisation of the AfD on 27 January 2017. The speech can be seen as a textbook example of right-wing populist rhetoric. Höcke’s speech provoked an intense discussion in both traditional and social media. It was perceived as a scandal because Höcke questioned the memorial political consensus (Geschichtskonsens ) in Germany after WWII. At the same time, it revealed central elements of right-wing ideology and the principles of populist rhetoric. In what follows, we first take a closer look at the speaker and the setting of the speech before we deal with matters of structure, content and strategy. Björn Höcke, the speaker, was born in 1972 in West Germany and taught history at a grammar school before co-founding the AfD in the state of Thuringia (in the eastern part of Germany) in 2013. He is

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currently one of two speakers of the Thuringian AfD and chairman of the parliamentary group in the Landtag of Thuringia. Höcke is one of the most prominent representatives of the New Right. His political positions have been described as racist, revisionist and antisemitic. Within the AfD, he is one of the leading figures of the now-dissolved “Wing” group, which was strong in the eastern part of Germany. Many consider him a growing power in the AfD. It is generally expected that, following the election successes in the states of Brandenburg and Saxony in 2019, his future influence at the federal level will increase even further. Höcke’s speech took place at the Ballhaus Watzke in Dresden, a historic inn and brewery house with a large ballroom. A few days before, the event was announced on Facebook without publicly naming a specific location. The 48-minute speech was broadcast live on the YouTube channel of the right-wing populist Compact Magazine.3 The immediate reactions of the audience show that the speech was an overwhelming success. One can see this clearly from the reactions of the listeners in the Ballhaus Watzke. Höcke is interrupted by applause and heckled by the audience throughout the speech; sometimes what he says is barely understandable. His listeners are loyal AfD supporters. Thus, by watching the video on the internet one can get an authentic and “unfiltered” view of an AfD politician delivering a populist speech in front of a supportive audience. Höcke clearly does not mince his words. The speech pursues a double rhetorical strategy aimed at a dual audience. Inwardly, with a view to the supporters of the party, it creates something like an atmosphere of unity, a “warm” state of nearness. To the outside (the media, the public sphere, we as rhetoricians analysing a populist speech from a distance), Höcke’s statements aim to break taboos, stoke indignation and inspire negative emotions, thus creating distance. This leads to a lot of public attention which can be seen as part of Höcke’s strategy of provocation. One single speech is thus capable of creating two very different emotional states by creating unity and division. However, Höcke’s rhetorical skills enable him to adapt to his audience on site, their expectations, and attitudes. He does this throughout the speech by addressing the specific situation in the city of Dresden and comparing it with the situation in his home 3 It can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWwy4cYRFls. A transcription of the speech can be found here: https://pastebin.com/embed_iframe/jQu jwe89. We will quote Höcke’s speech using the line numbers provided in this transcription.

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state of Thuringia. Höcke, originally from the western part of Germany, thus succeeds in offering identification with the AfD supporters as citizens of Dresden. He achieves this mainly using autobiographical narratives, for example about the Anti-Muslim Pegida demonstrations which took place in Dresden in 2014, and by remembering joint walks with his friends, which today, according to Höcke, would probably be life-threatening. Through these narratives, Höcke creates a sense of togetherness and belonging among his followers present at the Ballhaus Watzke and he surrounds himself with a positive aura of emotional warmth and affection. With Kenneth Burke, we can describe this rhetorical function as one creating of unity (Burke 1957). The speech itself clearly adapts schemata of classical rhetoric. This applies, for example, to the disposition of the speech, which is structured as if from a classical rhetorical textbook, especially the beginning and the end of the speech. Following classical doctrine, the exordium of a speech is about presenting the speaker’s ethos as effectively as possible. Höcke uses a technique here that we can call a strategy of parrhesia, following on Foucault’s 1983 Berkeley Lectures on Fearless Speech. Foucault writes, “The one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse” (Foucault 1983, part 1). By representing himself as an “uncomfortable orator,” Höcke draws on a second criterion—Foucault, again: “It is because the parrhesiastes must take a risk in speaking the truth that the king or tyrant generally cannot use parrhesia; for he risks nothing. When you accept the parrhesiastic game in which your own life is exposed, you are taking up a specific relationship to yourself: you risk death to tell the truth instead of reposing in the security of a life where the truth goes unspoken. Of course, the threat of death comes from the Other, and thereby requires a relationship to himself: he prefers himself as a truth-teller rather than as a living being who is false to himself” (Foucault 1983, part 1). This strand of argumentation runs through the entire speech but dominates the argumentation at the beginning and end. Höcke repeatedly presents himself to his Dresden audience as someone who faces an aggressive and dishonest political opponent, which of course supports the speaker’s connection to the audience in the Dresden ballroom. For this self-heroisation, Höcke makes use of the figure of parrhesia. At the end of the speech, however, the excitement of emotions is at the centre of his strategy. Höcke evokes the image of a final “fight,” a

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kind of apocalyptic Armageddon that will take place in a future which is indistinct, but not far away. The arousal of violent emotions is combined with the establishment of a sense of community and “belonging,” a gentle emotion: separation from the outside, solidarity on the inside. The main part of the speech consists of three elements: first, a description of the current state of Germany from the perspective of the populist ideology of the speaker, i.e. the diagnosis of a deep crisis. This part presents a nearly complete collection of right-wing populist topoi. These topoi can be organised according to the two axes of populism (cf. Priester 2012): the vertical axis describing a fundamental opposition between “the people” and the established parties (anti-elitism) and the horizontal axis denoting an opposition between “inside” (a homogeneous idea of “the people” based on the idea of “race”) and “outside” through rejection of migration, multiculturalism and the concept of an open society (peoplecentrism). This distinction, however, is set arbitrarily because there is no such thing as a “pure people.” Such boundaries, of course, can only exist in the imagination of a racist. Höcke invokes a threat scenario stating that Germany is in a state of crisis, which will eventually result in the “elimination of Germany.” He uses this alleged crisis to present himself as a saviour. He calls the AfD Germany’s “last chance” and thus emphasises the urgency of action. A threat scenario consists of rhetorically constructing an external threat by connecting a subject (e.g., migration) and an object of threat (e.g., purity of the people; see Schirmer 2008). Threat scenarios of this sort are—like fear appeals—quite powerful rhetorical devices once they are accepted by the audience both as probable and imminent (Walton 2000). Then they can easily be used to justify the most drastic political measures aimed at addressing, fighting or warding off the perceived threat. Yet, the nature of threat is precarious. With a threat scenario, a speaker usually describes potential dangers that are yet to come. In that sense, it is a complex form of prediction, warning and promise. Threat scenarios, then, are by definition imaginary in the sense that they—as of yet—only exist in our imagination. They are potential, not actual. In fact, they may never become an actual danger if we cope with them in the right way and ward them off. Höcke increases the probability, proximity and magnitude of that threat (Best 2011)—by claiming that the threat has already arrived. The more vividly this presence is “enacted,” the more effective the rhetorical strategy will be. Höcke creates the neologism “problem heaps” or

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“problem disposal sites,” (“Problemhalden”) which are, in his view, piling up because of previous and present governments. According to his speech, these heaps concern border politics, security, the legislative and executive branch, the army, culture, education and many other central aspects of the country. Höcke achieves vividness by wrapping the crisis in an impressive metaphor. According to Höcke, German identity dissolves through migration “like a piece of soap under a lukewarm jet of water” (l. 106). As a conclusion, he appeals to his audience to “turn this jet of water off.” Metaphors need to be retranslated so that they can result in political action, but Höcke leaves it to the audience to interpret the metaphor and to determine what it means to “turn off the water.” Passages like these illustrate the fundamental structure of Höcke’s rhetoric of fear. Large parts of his speech are dedicated to painting a negative picture of the present and the future while, on the other hand, the translation into political action remains notoriously vague. In the second part, Höcke addresses his audience in a direct appeal; he uses this rather short passage to present his conservative-nationalist ideas of society and family ideals. He also seeks to establish himself as a leader who has the authority to impose such norms about how to live and not to live, a self-aggrandisement meant to build his ethos among his followers. In a third strand of argumentation, Höcke argues against widespread consensus regarding what we call the “culture of memory” (Erinnerungskultur) with the aim of establishing a “new patriotism.” It is precisely this third passage that has attracted the attention of the media, for Höcke relativises Nazi crimes by reversing the hierarchy of perpetrators and victims. He calls the inhabitants of Dresden who were killed during an air raid on the city in February 1945 the “true victims” of the war. This section begins very unexpectedly. Höcke takes up two famous speeches by German Federal Presidents: Richard von Weizsäcker’s famous speech on 8 May 1985, in which the German head of state described the end of WWII in positive terms as a “day of liberation” and a speech by Roman Herzog from 1997. In this speech, Herzog famously called for a change in mentality in order to face the twenty-first century. Höcke only quotes the following part: “First of all, we have to get an idea of the society we want to live in in the twenty-first century. We need a vision again. Visions can mobilise undreamed forces.” Herzog invokes liberal ideas like the “American Dream” and the “Perestroika” in order to appeal to his fellow citizens to engage in and realise a positive vision of society.

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Implicitly, he refers to society and nation as an imagined community, a famous concept described by Benedict Anderson (1983). Accordingly, Höcke also claims to emphasise the necessity of visions for the nation. But of course, they are not the same as Herzog’s. In fact, the core element of Höcke’s political vision is that there is none, “we Germans have lost our visionary power [Visionskraft ].” His “vision” therefore does not consider the future (like Herzog’s vision for the twenty-first century), but the present status quo—as an extremely endangered one. All that he offers is a very genuine idea of an authentic self of the nation (“If we want a future […] we need a vision. But a vision will only come into being if we find ourselves again, if we re-discover ourselves. We have to become ourselves again” (l. 294)), which is not elaborated further. It is what you could call an empty signifier—open to very different or even opposing interpretations of “authentic selves.” Also, Höcke names a clear culprit: Due to the “systematic re-education” after WWII, Germans lost their ability to mourn their own victims. It is in this context that the air raid on Dresden comes into play, which Höcke calls a “war crime”—a well-known argument from right-wing extremism (Fischer and Lorenz 2015, 383–384). This brings us to the centre of the speech and to the most quoted phrases. First, Höcke calls the Berlin Holocaust Memorial a “Monument of Shame” (“ein Denkmal der Schande”). This is an interesting and clearly strategic ambiguity. Grammatically, the sentence has two meanings: “The Memorial is a monument of German shame,” but also: “It is a shame to have such a monument.” Interpreted within the larger context of the speech, however, it is clear that only the second meaning can give Höcke’s speech coherence—it is therefore the intended meaning. The strategic play with ambiguities (Ceccarelli 1998) is characteristic of Höcke’s rhetoric. It enables a double semantics: One possible interpretation of “shame” is directed to the insiders. It conjures up fantasies of an alleged collective guilt—a conventional topos of the right since the end of the Second World War. Outwardly, Höcke can justify himself by claiming that the meaning attributed to him is not the one that he meant. In this way, he can present his speech as harmless and stage himself as an innocent victim. Second, Höcke calls for a “180-degree turn” in German “memory politics” (Erinnerungspolitik), also a clear sign of his revisionist intentions.

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These phrases caused great indignation in the media, which is why, one day later, Höcke published a revealing statement on his Facebook page.4 On the one hand, Höcke rejects any criticism by referring to papers of the German Parliament (Bundestag ) in which the phrase “monument of shame” is also used. On the other hand, however, he affirms his revision of history by referring to the deeds of “great Germans”: the theologian Luther, Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, as well as numerous philosophers, artists, writers and inventors. In the light of a long and allegedly glorious German history, the twelve years of Nazi rule appear as an insignificant episode. This revisionist argument is widely used by AfD politicians. Alexander Gauland, the party leader, spoke in a speech in June 2018 (in front of the youth organisation of the AfD) of National Socialism as a “bird shit” (Vogelschiss ) in German history. This is quite clearly a strategic taboo break intended to relativise the crimes of National Socialism. Such provocations can lead to a shift towards the right in discourse and have been described as a discursive strategy of “normalisation of political standpoints” that were formerly considered unacceptable (Wodak 2015). In addressing a specific audience at a specific time and place, the speech is a very situated pre-technological situation creating co-presence between the speakers and the members of the audience. It creates a situated community that—at first sight—does not have to be imagined because of its size, exclusivity and familiarity. But at the same time, the community it addresses reaches well beyond the walls of the Dresden Ballhaus. It is based on the communicative practice of giving speeches, going to speeches, expressing your opinion at weekly demonstrations and what Höcke proudly calls a shared history of protesting on “the street.” It is informed by a “counterculture” (which forms an appropriation of leftist culture; see Wagner 2017), an anti-elitist and anti-institutionalist “back to the streets” movement and a concept of communication that is based on what James Carey (2009, 15) would call “the ritual view,” with its aspects of sharing, participating, associating and a strong belief in fellowship. Therefore, it also presents an imagined non-technological past. At the same time, it is also combined with the “transmission view” of communication (13), with the live transmission of the video on YouTube—and

4 https://www.facebook.com/Bjoern.Hoecke.AfD/posts/1823115994596345/.

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the circulatory nature of (snippets of) the speech and reactions to it in mainstream and networked media.

Targeted Provocation: Alice Weidel’s Populist Cross-Media Rhetoric Alice Weidel, born 1979, is a former business consultant and one of the leading figures of the AfD in the German Bundestag. As floor leader of her party, she regularly represents the AfD as a main speaker during debates and can frequently be seen in TV interviews and talk shows. Moreover, she is one of the most active and recognised AfD members on social media, especially on Twitter and Facebook. Weidel is a talented speaker, nimble and aware of successful media strategies and ways of emotionally appealing to the audience. In a sense, she is the civil face of the AfD, and one of only a few women who play a public role in this male-dominated party. Yet, Weidel’s motivations and intentions are not easy to grasp: Weidel works for a nationalist and racist populist party with a conservative moral programme that is hardly commensurate with her own domestic life, as she is living in an openly same-gender relationship with a film producer from Sri Lanka. Journalists sometimes argue that the position of women in traditional Arab cultures is motivating Weidel to fight against a multicultural society, but she seldom talks about the motives driving her political work. Weidel is an active social media communicator with almost 110,000 Twitter followers and 300,000 Facebook followers (compared with about 900,000 people following the German Federal Government on Facebook). Though the AfD seems to use automated responses and fake accounts to boost their social media presence (Medina Serrano et al. 2019) as well as Hashjacking (Darius and Stephany 2019), these figures show the impact the populist AfD party makes on social media, as the provocative style of Alice Weidel and the AfD seem to be well-matched to the rules and success principles of social media communication. Yet, Alice Weidel’s populist communication strategy still rests on traditional speeches and mass media coverage, as she combines both into a wellorchestrated, cross-media strategy in which the interplay of the different media amplifies the effects and impact of her communication. This strategy is well adapted to the media use of populist voters, who do use social media channels that promote their worldview and beliefs, but also still heavily rely on traditional mass media, especially private TV

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news (Schulz 2019). Weidel’s speeches are aggressive and use targeted provocations to spark scandals for the sake of getting media attention, while coverage in traditional mass media adds drive and power to the accompanying social media communication about her. Weidel favours emotional and controversial communication as it creates a dynamic interaction with the users and is systematically favoured by sharing routines and algorithms. Let us now focus on one of Alice Weidel’s most controversial and influential speeches from May 16, 2018 (Weidel 2018), analysing rhetorical aspects of the speech itself, mass media coverage of this speech and Weidel’s accompanying social media communication to illustrate the populist cross-media strategy of Weidel and the AfD. This speech illustrates the alleged people-centrism and anti-elitism, as well as the tendency to exclude others by promoting racist and Islamophobic world views, which are central features of the AfD’s populism. In this 2018 speech given at the German Bundestag, Weidel forms a strategic narrative about a former security officer to Osama bin Laden who, according to Weidel, receives 1200 e monthly support from Germany while never having paid into the German social security system. According to Weidel, he regularly takes joyrides to the countryside on his motorbike and enjoys his life in Germany. This story is contrasted (using the rhetorical figure of antithesis) with a narrative about a German retired worker who must collect cans to earn a little money by cashing in the deposit. With this story, Weidel suggests that the German government is not acting in the interests of its own people, as it allows criminal refugees to lead comfortable lives while impoverishing German citizens. Weidel, therefore, implies that she and the AfD party are acting in the interests of the German people (peoplecentrism), whereas politicians from the other parties are members of an elite who are controlling political decisions, the economy and the media (anti-elitism) in order to serve their own interests. This people-centrism and anti-elite self-image was also part of the AfD party program for the 2017 federal election: Secret sovereign in Germany is a small powerful political oligarchy, which is located in the existing political parties. It is responsible for the undesirable developments of recent decades. A political class was formed, whose most urgent task was their power, their status and their material well-being. This oligarchy has the shifting levers of state power, political education and the

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informational and media influence on the population in its hands. (AfD 2017, 8)

In her speech, Weidel goes even further, suggesting and spreading the idea that immigration is deliberately used by the German government in order to “exchange” an imagined homogenous German population with immigrants. This idea of a “Great Replacement” is a widespread conspiracy theory in extreme right-wing movements in Germany and Europe. In this conspiracy theory, anti-elitism and alleged peoplecentrism are taken to the extreme. Yet, Weidel’s May 2018 speech is best known for the neologistic expressions Weidel introduces in it, namely, “headscarf girls” (“Kopftuchmädchen”) and “knife men” (“Messermänner”) referring to Muslim men and women, especially with a migration background. According to Weidel, these “headscarf girls” and “knife men” represent a danger to the prosperity of Germany, as they are, according to Weidel’s depiction, criminal by nature, not willing to work and extremely fertile, which Weidel considers threatening in the face of a shrinking German population—a clearly nationalistic and racist perspective (Klikauer 2018). When Weidel talks about “Burkas, headscarf girls and state-fed knife men and other no-goods” (“Burkas, Kopftuchmädchen und alimentierte Messermänner und sonstige Taugenichtse”) she is discussing nationality from a racial perspective. This rhetorical strategy of alluding to racist ideas is typical for Weidel and the AfD, who may not verbalise their racist beliefs openly, yet imply racist world views in many of their utterances. Weidel’s speech led to chaotic scenes and many interruptions as this kind of racist rhetoric is not acceptable to most members of the Bundestag. The then President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Schäuble, called Weidel to order and had his presidential board discuss judicial sanctions against Weidel. Yet, these actions only intensified media attention, unintentionally supporting Weidel’s attempt to undermine democratic institutions by confronting and challenging their authority. With her speech, Weidel takes a populist approach in which fear appeals and the creation of a threat scenario prevent deliberative discourse. Yet, the highly suggestive story and the neologistic expressions have been carefully constructed to be short and therefore easily quoted and shared on social media (rhetorical circulation). Stark neologistic expressions like these have a good chance of becoming popular metaphors for right-wing populist positions, and that is exactly what happened after this speech and

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other public utterances from the AfD. Mass media reacted intensively to Weidel’s speech, and her strategic provocation was successful as most of the national newspapers and all major television networks prominently covered her speech, a volume of attention that is rarely the case with speeches from minority parties of the German Bundestag. In addition, Weidel’s speech was accompanied by intensive social media communication. The day prior to the speech, Weidel posted a picture on Facebook which suggested that she was working on the speech in preparation for the upcoming debate at the Bundestag. This was engineered to generate attention in advance of the speech itself (Fig. 1). When Wolfgang Schäuble as President of the German Bundestag called her to order and issued a rebuke, Weidel took the opportunity to interact with her followers on Facebook, who could take part in an interactive poll and decide whether the rebuke was adequate and whether her formal objection against the rebuke would be successful (Fig. 2).

Fig. 1 Alice Weidel, May 1, 2018, promoting a poll about the judicial evaluation of her speech, https://twitter.com/Alice_Weidel

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Fig. 2 Alice Weidel, May 1, 2018, promoting a poll about the judicial evaluation of her speech, https://twitter.com/Alice_Weidel

Short extracts of the speech attracted thousands of followers and comments. Alice Weidel was thus very successful with her cross-media strategy when it came to communicative impact. A few days later, she even focused on a new aspect of her speech, pension policy, to further prolong interest and attention to her speech. This was an interesting rhetorical turn which illustrates the refinement of Weidel’s social media strategy as it allowed her to achieve a long-term impact with a single speech. While Weidel obviously understands how to draw attention and create public response through scandal, a highly emotional and polarising style, this approach is inadequate for addressing political problems and issues in a rational and evidence-based approach to politics. Weidel does not use emotions and affects to motivate others to embrace a good cause or solve complex problems. Rather she favours style over content. To depict her writing the speech ahead of the debate is a mise en scene of the policymaking process that favours affective visuals over a substantial political work. This exemplifies the tendency of populist speech to appeal to emotion, especially fear, thereby avoiding a factual and objective approach to discussing and solving political questions. Yet, this polarisation strategy is successful in social media contexts and used deliberately (Darius and Stephany 2019). Obviously, Weidel and the AfD adapted well to the new affordances of social media, though the use of social media by the AfD is not focused on communicating and solving complex political issues. We are confronted with a provocative style which leads to polarisation and favours media attention over political principles and moral limits. As scandals produced by the AfD draw a great deal of attention and also objections, these scandals turn out to be a way of raising group cohesion among the followers of the AfD, who see a need to defend themselves

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against a hostile environment. Yet, targeted provocation which deliberately uses scandals to generate attention is not only quite successful as a strategy to build up a group identity among followers and supporters, it also is a political strategy to undermine basic democratic political institutions and shared beliefs of a democratic society which is characteristic for right-wing populist movements. As scandals can help to change public discourse and to mainstream unacceptable ideas by making people acquainted with new ideas that they find unacceptable at the beginning (Kallis 2013). Remarks that initially produce significant resistance tend to lose this provocative potential as people get acquainted with new ideas, even if they do not accept them on the first hearing. Policies which are politically acceptable to the mainstream population can be adopted by this strategy in the longer run. This process to modify the range of accepted ideas within a society has often been associated with the “Overton window of political possibilities,” a popular concept outlined by American policy analyst Joseph Overton, to describe the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population, which according to Overton can only be shifted from agents who leave the range of acceptable positions in order to promote new ideas (Astor 2019). Though Overton’s catchy scheme has a tendency to underestimate the complexity of mainstreaming unacceptable ideas it does point to a central strategy of right-wing populists. From a rhetorical perspective we could describe Weidel’s targeted provocation as a way to negotiate mutual beliefs and mutual assumptions with the supporters of the AfD in a grounding process and to infiltrate the public discourse with these ideas as common ground is defined rather than given in modern societies (Olmsted 2008, 116). Weidel and other members of the AfD are constantly relying on this technique, from introducing racist ideas and arguments in the political sphere, as with Weidel’s May 2018 speech, to relativising the terrors of National Socialism and the dangers of the climate crisis.

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The Challenge of Reality: Populism and the COVID-19 Crisis At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an international inclination towards nationalist discourse as countries closed borders to limit the spread of the virus. Alice Weidel, as floor leader of the AfD in the Bundestag, as well as other AfD politicians, used this opportunity to criticise the politics of open borders of the so-called globalist elite. One might, therefore, expect that the COVID-19 crisis would further promote and strengthen populist parties like the AfD, especially as people experience uncertainty and fear in the face of the pandemic. But in contrast, the Corona crisis unexpectedly silenced the AfD (Kleine-Brockhoff 2020) as populist governments around the world have unsuccessfully fought the virus. A deliberative approach to politics, which uses scientific information and commits itself to rational decision-making, has proven more successful at handling this crisis. A civic spirit and the strive for unity have been demonstrably better suited to confronting the virus than irrationality and racist emotional appeals. Moreover, anti-elite thinking is not appropriate effective when scientific excellence is needed to find solutions. The crisis, therefore, has shed a light on the emptiness of the slogans of populists all around the world and has demonstrated that their thin ideological basis is not suited to ensuring reliable political leadership. When facing real problems, the divisive and affective rhetoric reaches its limits as coherence and civic unity are needed. A media logic that is focused on attention and affect proves to be hollow and inadequate when political deliberation and well-considered political measures and communication are needed. However, with the rise of the COVID-19 protests in many European countries, as people find the long lockdowns unacceptable and are distressed by the social and economic situation due to the coronavirus, the AfD has seized its chance to regain influence. After a phase of solidarity and unity within the German people after the first lockdown in March and April of 2020, increasing protests from various political stakeholders reflect the social tensions resulting from the lockdown and have led to continuing polarisation of political discourse. COVID-19 protests cannot be neatly divided into left or right political ideologies, rather they illustrate a split between people who take the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic seriously and others who play down or ignore these dangers.

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In this setting, the AfD aims at becoming the party representing Coronavirus scepticism. With an appeal to common sense as part of its populist worldview, the AfD is trying to raise doubts about complex scientific explanations. The anti-elitism of the populist AfD is now turning into distrust of scientific research, its findings, and its representatives. This pattern, familiar from the right-wing denial regarding the climate crisis, is becoming more visible as the AfD tends towards nationalism, affective politics and favouring emotion over analysis and deliberation in the COVID-19 pandemic. On 26 November 2020, Weidel identified herself in an interview on national TV with the Coronavirus protests in Germany and did not distance herself from right-wing tendencies and slogans among the protesters. Yet, the populist ignorance and distrust of scientific findings, a politics of racism and fear cannot really take up the challenge of reality and the hard facts of the Corona pandemic. As of autumn 2021, the support for the AfD among voters is declining.

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The Rhetorical Strategy of Moralisation: A Lesson from Greece Sophia Hatzisavvidou

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the idea that austerity measures were the only prudent response to the 2008 global financial crisis emerged as a key aspect of policy planning and implementation in Europe. Perhaps no other case illustrates better the advance of this ‘There is No Alternative’ (TINA) logic than the case of the Greek sovereign debt crisis. In one of the most characteristic declarations of the era that sought to establish the TINA logic as common sense, the then President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso (2010) declared in a statement to the European Parliament that ‘Greece will undertake painful efforts. But we all know that there is no alternative to these efforts’. To achieve fiscal consolidation and to honour the country’s debts, successive Greek governments between 2010 and 2015 agreed to receive financial assistance through three Economic Adjustment Programmes (also known as memoranda of understanding).

S. Hatzisavvidou (B) Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, University of Bath, Bath, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Kock and L. Villadsen (eds.), Populist Rhetorics, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6_6

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This chapter scrutinises the attempt of the Syriza-led Greek government to challenge the construction, and promotion as common sense, of the idea that there is no alternative to austerity. The period of analysis is the first half of 2015, a period that the Greek government referred to as the period of ‘honest negotiation’. Three events of this period form the background of this chapter: Syriza won the general election in January and formed a coalition government with the right-wing Independent Greeks; Syriza negotiated with Greece’s creditors (namely the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund-IMF, and European Central Bank-ECB, collective also known as Troika) on the terms of any further bailout agreements; Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called a referendum on whether the Greek government should accept the bailout terms of the memorandum offered by the creditors. Throughout these months central aspects of Syriza’s strategy was a challenge to the implementation of austerity as the commonsensical response to the exigence of ‘the crisis’ and the attempt to offer an alternative interpretation of this situation. As leading Syriza member Yiannis Dragasakis (2015) stated during a conference organised by The Economist, Syriza did not intend to ‘acknowledge memoranda’ and ‘the Troika’. This statement encapsulates the crux of Syriza’s disposition towards the situation the country was in. The chapter is based on the analysis of six statements and speeches by Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras: two election campaign speeches, three speeches delivered through the period of ‘honest negotiation’, as well as an article he penned for Financial Times. Although these rhetorical artefacts seem different, taken together they spotlight the vocabulary, arguments, and ideas that informed Syriza’s position towards ‘the crisis’. The analysis fleshes out the Greek government’s endeavour to persuade the country’s creditors that austerity is futile and unfair and that therefore an alternative route should be sought if Greece was to recover from ‘the crisis’. The chapter proposes that Syriza’s rhetorical strategy in these negotiations can be identified as moralisation and suggests that we can discern three intertwined rhetorical devices that materialised it: a populist argumentative frame, epideictic speech, and an ethos of good will. The argument of the chapter is that in attempting to appropriate the exigence—‘the crisis’—Syriza’s leader presented a policy problem as a moral dispute; at the same time, he offered an alternative vision to the austerity agenda, a vision that combined social and political reform with national self-assertion. The chapter concludes by assessing the ambiguity of this strategy: while initially it enabled the party to win the January 2015

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election and to pursue an alternative social and political vision, this same rhetorical strategy trapped Syriza in a moralising horizon-one which foreclosed the possibility of success in the negotiations that lasted until July 2015, when the government ‘capitulated’ and agreed to sign a bailout agreement. Ultimately, the chapter argues that this strategy can obscure the political nature of public issues and preclude the possibility of social and political transformation. The chapter makes two distinct theoretical contributions. First, it shows how, when considered from a rhetorical perspective, populism ‘frames’ and organises meaning; but to do so, it has to lean on other rhetorical devices. By taking as its starting point Ernesto Laclau’s (2005) conceptualisation of populism as a ‘logic of articulation’ that constitutes a political subject or community by dividing a social terrain, the analysis attends to the argumentative frame (the form) of Syriza’s rhetoric. More specifically, the chapter scrutinises how in the period under examination Tsipras sought to constitute ‘the people’ rhetorically as a virtuous, morally superior entity, clearly distinct from ‘the elite’ of the Troika technocrats. At the same time, I propose that a rhetorical analysis of populism can offer insight into the particular qualities of this ‘logic of articulation’; indeed, it can illuminate how epideictic rhetoric can serve political purposes aiming at the construction of ‘the people’ and how a particular ethical quality can help the persuader achieve this aim. This doesn’t mean that these rhetorical tools (epideictic speech and a certain ethos) ‘belong’ to populism; rather, the case examined in the chapter illustrates how these conceptual tools can be used to better understand the rhetorical workings of political agents who aspire to constitute ‘the people’ in an antagonistic social terrain. By taking up a rhetorical approach to populism, the analysis offered here complements and extends the rich scholarship on populism in Greece (e.g., Katsambekis 2016; Markou 2020; Mudde 2017; Pappas 2014; Stavrakakis 2015; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014). Second, my analysis proposes that populism (as ‘a logic of articulation’) functions within the context of rhetorical strategies that are defined by the exigence they address. This is different from suggesting that populism is necessarily a political strategy, a position that assumes a rigid distinction between ‘the people’ that follow ‘the leader’ who strategically appeals to it to gain power (Jansen 2011; Weyland 2017). Although this latter formulation may be useful in explaining the appeal of ‘the leader’ to his or her electorate, it doesn’t account for occasions where ‘the leader’ appeals to ‘the people’ while also seeking to influence audiences beyond or outside

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‘the people’. By considering populism within a broader rhetorical strategy, analysts can understand better the virtues and limits of populist rhetoric. Hence, the chapter introduces the rhetorical strategy of moralisation and shows how Syriza employed it in its effort to appropriate the exigence of ‘the crisis’ and to shape common sense, by introducing in the discursive field an alternative doxa. The analysis points to the ambiguous role that this strategy can have in political life: although it opens possibilities for political change by creating alternative possibilities for identification, at the same time it creates too rigid lines of opposition that leave little room for political bargaining. By treating Syriza’s ‘honest negotiation’ as an instance of rhetorical strategising, the discussion illustrates the virtues and limits of moralisation and links this strategy to the attempt to forge common sense, thus placing the analysis of populism within a broader political context. Syriza’s populist rhetoric succeeded in forging an antiausterity common sense which was shared among the majority of Greeks, but within the broader context of negotiations with the Troika, the moralising strategy adopted by the Greek government failed to compete with the common sense that Greece’s creditors advanced.

The Exigence of ‘The Crisis’ The global financial crisis that erupted in 2008 is conventionally described and referred to in the international press as a ‘fiscal crisis’ and indeed as a crisis of sovereign debt. This narrative erases or suppresses from collective memory the fact that ‘the crisis’ started off as one of subprime mortgages and then led to a global financial crisis threatening the banking system worldwide. This particular interpretation of the crisis shifted the burden of responding to it away from the financial system and onto the state. The latter responded by employing policies of ‘fiscal austerity’, and ‘cutting the state’s budget to promote growth’ (Blyth 2013, p. 2). The logic behind this policy is that by reducing wages, prices and, primarily, public spending, the state can restore economic competitiveness, inspire ‘business confidence’ and provide social and economic stability. However, as Blyth shows (2013, p. 10), this reasoning is flawed. In practice austerity policies neither support growth nor contribute to the reduction of debt. In fact, they produce the very outcomes that they are supposed to prevent. In 2007 Greece’s debt to GDP ratio was 103 per cent. By 2015 this had increased to 176 per cent and remained at the same high levels until 2020 (source: Trading Economics). As both Blyth

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(2013, p. 246) and the Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz (CNBC 2015) put it, the medicine that Europe gave to Greece was poisonous; it caused the debt to grow and the economy to shrink. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the politics of austerity was advanced as the ultimate solution to ‘the crisis’. European political leaders (see, for example, Draghi 2012) and analysts in the press argued that austerity was a ‘sound’ political and economic choice that would create the necessary ground for future growth, thus feeding public perceptions of ‘the crisis’ as a temporary problem that could be overcome through the reduction of government expenditure. Especially the role of the mass media was instrumental in advancing and supporting viewpoints in favour of fiscal consolidation (Mercille 2013). The argument for the necessity of fiscal austerity acquired the status of a widely accepted scientific truth, promoted and sustained by the authority of economics, which was presented as an empirically testable science, independent from ideological and moral commitments (Dow 2015). Yet paradoxically, at the same time the argument for austerity was simultaneously endowed with a moral quality. According to this line of thinking, austerity would work correctively against ‘profligacy’, and it was therefore a justified moral choice in the sense that it would resolve the problem by restoring the balance between ‘virtuous’ Northern European countries and ‘undeserving’ countries of Southern Europe (Fumagalli and Lucarelli 2015). Eventually, austerity evolved into an instrument of government in a state of permanent crisis with fiscal prudence constituting a universal and univocal truth. The politics of austerity, as policy, attitude and moral argument, became conventional wisdom, common sense to which ‘there is no alternative’ (Fumagalli and Lucarelli 2015, p. 57). Urged by a flawed synecdoche that confuses macroeconomics with microeconomics and conflates states and households, the politics of austerity became a tool for state governance. However, the argument that austerity was unavoidable was not positively received everywhere, particularly in South European societies where economic hardship had an especially detrimental effect on citizens’ lives. For conservative policymakers ‘the crisis’ was the outcome of years of imprudent public spending. But for a host of other political actors, it was only a symptom of an unsustainable, failing system that was struggling to perpetuate its hegemony. Amidst this contestation between two competing worldviews, new protest movements and governing models, infused by ideas about horizontality and autonomy, emerged in Southern

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Europe (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2013). With them came new sites of political resistance, new forms of political identification and enactment and new political figures. For these movements, and especially for their leaders who pledged to transform the terms of political reality, the task of re-appropriating the situation that paved the way to their rise to power was vital.

Negotiating Doxa The strategic use of persuasive language is of paramount importance for the task of appropriating an exigence. Bitzer (1968, p. 4) defines exigence in a rhetorical situation as ‘a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which ‘strongly invites utterance’. An exigence calls for rhetorical intervention which can organise the meaning of this particular situation by assigning subject positions and proposing action. The Greek case illuminates the uses of rhetoric as a form of political strategising that aims at the rhetorical appropriation and transformation of the political exigence of ‘the crisis’. As we shall see, the Greek government attempted to appropriate the terms of political discourse employed to describe ‘the crisis’ by seeking to define the doxa of the Greek people and appeal to it in its negotiations with the country’s creditors.

Doxa and Persuasion Effective persuasion, collective decision-making and ultimately the very possibility of co-existence in an organised political community presuppose the sharing of common beliefs and perceptions, or doxa. As Castoriadis (2007) maintains, doxa (as opposed to episteme) is the matter of politics. However, he explains, there is not a single doxa in politics, but multiple, competing, non-equivalent doxai. Neither is doxa a stable, pre-existing background against which processes of judgement formation take place. It is ambiguous, unstable, and always related to kairos, the particular yet fleeting situation amidst which it is called forward. In the tradition of rhetoric, this is what sophists like Gorgias taught (Poulakos 2001, p. 68). Their teaching demonstrated in practice how doxa, or common opinion, belongs not to the sphere of Truth, as Plato (2004, p. 455a) argued, but to the realm of politics. Therefore, those who aspire to form judgement and forge a political community need to appeal to doxa. In so doing they do not merely reproduce doxa; they constitute it. In his work on the

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ontological status of audiences, Charland (1987) shows how constitutive rhetoric can create new subject positions through a series of ideological effects arising from the structure of this particular type of rhetoric. Charland helps us understand that newly constituted subjects are not created in a discursive vacuum: as he notes, constitutive rhetorics ‘work upon previous discourses’ (1987, p. 142). Following from this, populist rhetorics do not constitute ‘the people’ from nothing: they rework established viewpoints and positions, which they seek to enhance, inform, or undo. For actors who aspire to change, as in the case of the new political actors that emerged in Southern Europe in response to ‘the crisis’, the goal to create an alternative common sense—one that would differ from and contest austerity—involved the constitution of ‘the people’ as a certain type of subject. Gramsci’s work on common sense further helps us clarify the relation of doxa to persuasion and politics. Gramsci (1972, p. 330) argues that the concept of common sense refers to the ‘diffuse, uncoordinated features of a general form of thought common to a particular period and a particular popular environment’. He also argued that common sense is fragmentary and polyvalent: it is ‘ambiguous, contradictory and multiform’,’strangely composite’, ‘disjointed’ (Gramsci, 1972, p. 324). For this reason, common sense is the object of political struggle between competing arguments and therefore subject to persuasion; it is the task of political orators to interpret, shape, and ferment it. Indeed, as Hall and O’Shea (2013) argue, the struggle over the determination of common sense is constitutive of political life. Attempts to negotiate, express, and construct common sense take place through the articulation of claims that persuade through their wide acceptance and appeal. Both doxa has an ambivalent relation with persuasion—it participates in the function of persuasion and is also subjected to it. Common opinion is a salient element in the production of collective judgement and the advancement of political vision. This is dramatically reflected when competing positions are being negotiated and therefore different doxai conflict. The occasion of such a conflict creates an opportunity and challenge for agents of political speech to appeal to doxa and amplify, negate, or revise it through persuasion. This is the opportunity that Syriza tried to seize in employing populist rhetoric.

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The Struggle Over Doxa The negotiation of the Greek government with the country’s creditors in the first half of 2015 is an exemplar of how the battle of competing doxai can be organised and manifested. On the one hand, audiences in Greece and abroad were exposed to the doxa promoted by institutions such as the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Bank. At the centre of this doxa was the argument that austerity was the only solution to Greece’s debt problem. This doxa was also shared by citizens of many European countries (Buchanan 2015; Higgins 2015). On the other hand, the Syriza-led Greek government attempted to establish and advance an alternative doxa, shared among the majority of the Greek people, who experienced the detrimental effects of austerity and longed for an assertive political vision that would enable the re-arrangement of social and political relations. By presenting itself as the agent of an alternative doxa, the Greek government had the opportunity to redefine the exigence and therefore to articulate this alternative doxa to and for the Greek people. The need to clearly distinguish this alternative doxa from ‘the elite’ doxa advanced by Greece’s creditors necessitated a rhetorical strategy that would clarify the division between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ foreign technocrats. The analysis that follows shows how in promoting its own doxa, Syriza offered a particular interpretation of the anti-austerity doxa, one that operated within a moralising horizon and emphasised the ethical superiority of the anti-austerity front against the forces of austerity. In this sense, the negotiations of Greece with its creditors took place as a struggle over the determination of common sense in a certain occasion or exigence. In the rhetorical tradition one of the most effective tools for achieving this are commonplaces (or topoi), literally places or sources of proofs and arguments (Aristotle 2001, p. 69). The appeal to commonplaces was, indeed, central to Syriza’s negotiation strategy: the emphasis on the need to put an end to corruption, political favouritism, and clientelism served as frequent reference points in Tsipras’s rhetoric (e.g., Tsipras 2015b). However, commonplaces are useful primarily when appealing to already accepted and shared beliefs: by appealing to commonplaces that summarised and organised people’s indignation, Tsipras was able to exploit popular dissatisfaction and channel it against the politics of austerity and its agents. Yet, the creation of an alternative doxa requires a far more inventive strategy.

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To the indignation effected by the politics of austerity, Syriza attempted to add a positive political vision for the future. To achieve this aim, its leader articulated and advanced the idea that a politics beyond austerity is both needed and possible; at the same time, he also sought to restore the Greek people’s sense of dignity. In this sense, Tsipras did not merely interpret a belief widely shared among the Greek public; he also attempted to reconstruct this doxa by providing the people with opportunities for unity and identification. Indeed, a factor that contributed to Syriza’s transformation from an assemblage of social movements and protest groups into an electable political force and finally a governing party was precisely its success in persuading the Greek electorate that Syriza could transform their accumulated indignation into positive political change. Syriza continued to present itself as an agent of political transformation during the period of ‘honest negotiation’ when its task was dual: to make the anti-austerity doxa appealing both to the Greek people and to the country’s creditors. In what follows I analyse the strategy employed by the Greek government in its attempt to construct an alternative doxa and therefore to redescribe and redefine actors, relations and the exigence, aspiring to attribute value and blame and also to defend a particular political position. Ultimately, the Greek government failed to achieve its primary objective, namely, to avoid a further bailout agreement with the country’s creditors. Although its strategy was by no means the sole cause of this failure, it played a role in foreshadowing the outcome of the negotiations. Even though moral claims cannot and should not be abandoned in the negotiation of antithetical political positions, the case of Syriza demonstrates the limitations of moralisation as rhetorical strategy, when political stakes go beyond simply constituting of ‘the people’. This study thus shows how rhetorical analysis provides a methodological framework for probing, as well as for evaluating, political strategies that employ populist rhetoric.

The Rhetorical Strategy of Moralisation One of the functions of persuasion, and indeed a salient aim of those who aim to persuade, is the appropriation of a specific situation or exigence in order to create possibilities for materialisation of certain policies or ideas. By ‘appropriation’ is here meant the task of successfully intervening in a rhetorical situation so as to define or exploit it. Therefore, one of the forms that rhetoric takes is that of strategic action (Hauser

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2002, p. 244). As goal-directed discourse, rhetoric adapts to particular occasions or audiences. Placing this more specifically in the context of political studies, Martin (Martin 2015) proposed ‘rhetorical strategy’ as an operating concept to describe the attempt to selectively appropriate— and thus make manageable—an exigence by creatively combining existing and familiar rhetorical material (narratives, frames, metaphors, etc.) with ‘projectile-like’ ideas that shift the terms of deliberation. Rhetoric mediates between the contingent and the static and affords political actors with opportunities to intervene in occasions (Martin 2015, p. 29). Rhetorical strategy helps the agent of persuasion to re-orient an audience with regard to a rhetorical situation in order to encourage it to receive or affirm the exigence in a certain way; therefore, rhetorical strategy can motivate collective understanding and action. It is a way to appropriate or reconfigure a rhetorical situation, as well as an attempt to forge an alternative common sense or common ground for interpreting the exigence. One form that rhetorical strategy can take is moralisation. Moralisation refers to a process or project that refuses the moral ambivalence involved in political claims, personifies evil, and directs outrage against certain social and political actors. It adopts a didactic style insisting that politics be based on norms of morality. Bennett and Shapiro (2002, p. 4) propose that moralisation can take several forms and that it thus manifests itself as disposition, mood, or discursive tendency. As a rhetorical strategy moralisation is employed by agents of persuasion who seek to advance the superiority of their claims and positions by presenting them within a binary moral logic. This is distinct from the use of moral argument that aims to achieve consensus in the realm of politics (Atkins 2010). Moralisation involves the appeal to the supposed superiority of one’s position as justified by reference to its moral supremacy and permeated by a binary logic; this is why I suggest that it is a rhetorical strategy particularly relevant to studies of populism. The adoption of this binary structure enables political actors to advocate for the superiority of their position visa-vis a discernibly antithetical one by appealing to norms and terms that belong to the moral realm. Hence this strategy seeks to ‘instruct, inspire, or unite’ (Bennett and Shapiro 2002, p. 8). According to Wendy Brown (2001, p. 29), when moral claims are reduced to moralising complaints, then political doctrine becomes a substitute for political thinking. The outcome of moralisation is the construction of enmity whereby ‘opponents are no more defined in political terms but in moral’; as a result, ‘moral condemnation replaces a proper political analysis and the “moral

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disease” is quarantined to avoid spreading the infection’ (Mouffe 2005, p. 76). The danger here is dual: with its appeal to the psychological, emotional, or aesthetic, the strategy of moralisation not only creates an unbridgeable gulf, but it can weaken one’s political appeal. And by articulating affective and ethical appeals in strong binary terms, it negates or diminishes the possibility of more assertive approaches that would enable the formation of strategic coalitions or would leave room for bargaining one’s demands. I suggest that we can read the political strategy of the Greek government during the period of ‘honest negotiation’ through the lens of moralisation. I also suggest that it is possible to identify three rhetorical devices that materialised this strategy in the Greek case: the use of a populist argumentative frame, the use of epideictic discourse, and the appeal to an ethos of good will. Even though other rhetorical tools can also be part of the operation of a moralising strategy, these three rhetorical means decisively shaped and defined the Greek government’s strategy and its outcomes. As discussed below, these tools do not function separately; they overlap, informing and sustaining one another, thus participating in an attempt at persuasion which operates within a moral horizon. In seeking to appropriate the exigence—‘the crisis’—the Greek Prime Minister presented a policy problem as a moral dispute and, simultaneously, advanced an alternative vision to the austerity agenda, a vision which combined a social and political reform with national self-assertion. In following a moralising strategy, he articulated his viewpoint in a nonnegotiable fashion that left little room for political manoeuvring and bargaining. The following section analyses these rhetorical tools more closely.

Materialising Moralisation The mobilisation of a populist argumentative frame—and hence the use of populist rhetoric—was a key component of Syriza’s strategy; yet, the rhetorical analysis offered here demonstrates that this frame wasn’t enough in furthering the claim that the Greek people ‘deserved’ better than austerity. In order to appropriate the exigence of ‘the crisis’ and interpret it in its own way, Syriza needed to craft powerful points of reference and identification for those who rejected the politics of austerity and its advocates. This is why the use of epideictic speech was the overarching rhetorical device in Tsipras’s rhetoric both during the election

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campaign period and the months of the ‘honest negotiation’. Therefore, I start the analysis of Syriza’s strategy with the discussion of its epideictic rhetoric: it played an imperative role in redefining ‘the crisis’ as a humanitarian one and in crafting ‘the people’ as a victim of externally imposed austerity, thus moralising the debate on Greece’s debt. I then discuss how the use of a populist argumentative frame clarified the virtues of ‘the people’ vs. its (discursively created) opponents and attempted to enter a new commonplace in Greek doxa. Finally, I show how the creation— through speech—of a strong and challenging ethical argument, and more specifically an ethos of good will, complemented and even accentuated the moralising strategy. The combination of these three rhetorical devices enabled Syriza to appeal to a public riven with uncertainty and to respond to this public’s need for an assertive political vision structured around commonplaces that is already accepted as part of its common sense. From ‘Economic’ to ‘Humanitarian’ Crisis Epideictic rhetoric is particularly prominent in discourses of moralisation because it responds to the need to address a crisis through the creation of a sense of community or unity. This kind of rhetoric aims primarily at either praise or blame (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1358b, 2001, p. 80). In ancient Greece the panegyric, the occasion for blaming or praising acts and actors, was also an opportunity ‘to address fundamental values and beliefs that made collective political action within the democracy more than a theoretical possibility’. As such, epideictic was an important tool of statecraft, associated with opportunities to display and reinforce the community’s ‘timeless values distilled from past experience’ (Duffy 1983, p. 85) and hence to shape public morality. Evidently, the function and success, namely the persuasiveness, of political rhetoric depends on the establishment of a vocabulary that expresses issues of public concern and the very idea of publicness, a task accomplished exactly through epideictic rhetoric (Hauser 1999, p. 6). As Frank (2014, p. 656) argues, ‘effective communal action in fact requires epideictic discourse’. In order to make collective action imaginable, a persuader needs to employ epideictic rhetoric. The functions of such rhetoric have been schematically presented by Condit (1985) in three pairs: definition/understanding, display/entertainment and shaping/sharing of community. Whereas the first term in each pair refers to the function that the speech serves

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for the speaker, the second term indicates the function for the audience. We can see how the first and third pairs underwrite Syriza’s moralising strategy. On several occasions during the period studied here, Tsipras took the opportunity to define and interpret the idea of austerity to the Greek people, shaping their understanding of its politics and fostering their aversion towards it and its agents. Using the power of metaphors (Charteris-Black 2011), he described austerity as ‘a noose’ that had turned Greece into ‘a guinea pig’ (Tsipras 2015b) and into a ‘debt colony’ (Tsipras 2015c). By presenting a series of policy measures as a dangerous experiment, he sought to explain to people how the agents of austerity perceived them, shaping people’s understanding of Greece’s creditors. He consistently sought to amplify the effects of austerity beyond Greece’s borders, as for example when he said that austerity ‘leads Europe to absolute economic and political deadlock’ (Tsipras 2015a). Austerity was blamed for having ‘crippled the economy and left almost a third of the workforce unemployed’, leading to ‘a humanitarian crisis’ (Tsipras 2015c). Ultimately, with the use of epideictic Tsipras attempted to redefine ‘the crisis’ as a ‘humanitarian’ one, thus shifting emphasis from the economy to the people and their suffering, thus enhancing his emotional appeal. Austerity was presented as a failed programme, imposed on the Greek people by previous governments as well as by the country’s external partners, even though they knew that it ‘would mathematically lead not to a temporary recession but to a long-term deterioration of the country’s growth potential and to an unprecedented shrinkage of the Greek economy’ (2015d). Epideictic speech also allowed Tsipras to describe austerity and its politics in dramatic terms. He attempted to interpret the politics of austerity as a particular moral choice, rather than the result of economic necessity, while at the same time taking on the role of a leader who informs and even educates his audience. The epideictic genre of speech has a didactic nature, in the sense that it provides an opportunity to reflect ‘on public norms of proper political conduct’ (Hauser 1999, p. 17). As agent of epideictic rhetoric, Tsipras attempted to shape his audiences’ morality (see Poulakos 1987, p. 318), their understanding of acceptable civic behaviour, as well as of ethical political decisions and practices. To the politics of austerity, he juxtaposed Syriza’s vision of governing the country: a politics of solidarity, justice, democracy, rule of law, equality, meritocracy, dignity, transparency (Tsipras 2015a). Such a politics was presented as being more pertinent

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to the actual crisis that the country was confronted with, as well as more desirable because it was of higher moral value. To the foreign agents of the politics of austerity Tsipras juxtaposed what he euphemistically branded as a ‘government of “social salvation”’ which was promising to end ‘the memorandum barbarity of the last five years’. Syriza’s programme, in contrast to the externally imposed programme of austerity, would not only respond to the humanitarian crisis that tormented the country, but it would also restore social justice and the people’s dignity (Tsipras 2015d). Tsipras used epideictic rhetoric not only in order to blame the politics of his opponents, but also to praise the politics of his government, which he associated with an assertive and inspiring vision for political and social change. Framing ‘The People’ The function of epideictic speech that Condit identifies with the shaping of community operated to bring into Syriza’s rhetoric ‘the people’ as a single political agent. This persistently idealised, purifying perception of ‘the people’ was the second defining element that participated in Syriza’s rhetorical strategy. Rhetorically, this took the form of a populist argumentative frame, a structure that enables the appeal to, and mobilisation of, a certain group (Lee 2006, p. 363). Canovan (1981) and Laclau (1977) argue that the overarching theme in populism is the division of the political field into two antagonistic groups, ‘the people’ vs ‘the elite’. Yet, as Lee (2006) demonstrates, by approaching populism as an argumentative frame it is possible to attend to the complexities of the interactions between the poles that constitute this binary. Framing is a particularly important rhetorical tactic because it creates necessary connections between words and concepts, assisting audiences to make sense of events, agents, and courses of action. Kenneth Burke (1984) created a taxonomy of frames or organised systems of meaning, broadly distinguishing between frames of acceptance and frames of rejection. Whereas in the first case ‘a thinking man gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it’ (1984, p. 5), what characterises frames of rejection is ‘an attitude towards some reigning symbol of authority, stressing a shift in the allegiance to symbols of authority’ (1984, p. 21). The two types of frame are closely related since, according to Burke (1984, p. 21), rejection is ‘but a by-product of acceptance’,

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involving ‘primarily a matter of emphasis’. To reject a certain authority or order is already to accept a different doctrine. Syriza’s rhetorical strategy was deployed primarily through a frame that rejected the authority represented by Greece’s creditors and their authoritative interpretation of the exigence as a certain form of fiscal crisis. At the same time Syriza attempted to impose its own frame of understanding, within which austerity was not a necessity but a moral choice. Its frame of acceptance aspired to locate ‘the people’ within the exigence as virtuous agents who pursued a just and honourable vision. This frame had the qualities associated with populism, in the sense that it consisted of four interrelated and mutually reinforcing themes: the constitution of a virtuous people, its juxtaposition to a powerful enemy, the rejection of the ‘establishment’, and the promise of change through a process of confrontation (Lee 2006, p. 358). This populist argumentative frame was integral to Syriza’s moralising rhetorical strategy. It was a defining factor for the election of Syriza, when Tsipras pledged to restore the people’s pride for their country—for which he chose not the word country (chora) but the far more sentimental ‘fatherland’ (patrida). This appeal to national pride was also employed during the election campaign, where Tsipras clearly set out his intention to foster ‘a new popular unity, a new patriotism’ (Tsipras 2015a), and hence pledged to create a new commonplace in the Greek doxa that would combine national selfassertion with social reform and justice. The constitution of ‘the people’ who would bear this new patriotism from the left was the outcome of rhetorical labour that took the form of epideictic rhetoric, was infused by an ethos of good will, and was supported by a populist argumentative frame. It was the reigning element in the government’s programmatic statements following its election, where Tsipras identified the ‘united and sovereign people’ as the only force that can realize the ‘vision for a financially self-reliant, socially just, and nationally proud Greece’ (Tsipras 2015d). This ‘virtuous’, ‘united’, and ‘sovereign’ people was the agent of the decision to put an end to ‘the strict and humiliating austerity’ and to pursue an alternative way of living, not austere but dignified, and proud. Tsipras’s moralising strategy elevated the Greek people to a higher moral position, which he claimed to be in position to personally understand, interpret, and represent. By using this frame in his epideictic, Tsipras was able to construct rhetorically ‘the people’ as a group that shares the deleterious effects of the politics of austerity and hence to create a sense of social unity among

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those hit by its policies. This rhetorical construction was a process of subjectification, not in the sense of creating a subject ex nihilo, but in that of transforming identities that are already rigidly defined and allocated into experiences of a dispute (Rancière 1995, p. 36). Indeed, in the speeches that he delivered in the period under scrutiny, Tsipras repeatedly resorted to concepts and ideas that enabled him to create the image of a united people which he presented as agent of certain moral virtues. More specifically, rigidly distinguishing them from the corrupted political establishment, Tsipras referred to the Greek people as victims of ‘powers that plunged the country into the crisis and international scorn’ (Tsipras 2015d), but at the same time as determined actors ‘who want to take their lives into their own hands’ (Tsipras 2015a), a people ‘who want to feel not shame but pride’ (Tsipras 2015b). For these people austerity resulted not only in great social injustices, but also humiliation and a feeling of subjugation. Through his epideictic, Tsipras praised the Greek people and their values, describing them in highly moral terms and juxtaposing them to the corrupted political elite. This identification of ‘the people’ with ‘purity’ aimed at overturning the prevailing perceptions of Greeks in the European media and at enhancing the sense of community among Greeks, who were tormented socially and politically. The ‘overidealisation of purity’ (Bennett and Shapiro 2002, p. 13), one of the most distinctive traits of the politics of moralising, also informed Syriza’s populist argumentative frame. Indeed, ‘the people’ had a clear place and role in the formation of the anti-austerity front. During the election campaign period (December 2014–January 2015) one of Syriza’s central messages was ‘United people, undefeated people’, an anaphora that created a linkage between the constitutive political agent of democracy and its characteristic qualities. In his first speech to the Greek Parliament as Prime Minister in January 2015, Tsipras attempted to elevate the people to one of the partners in the negotiations with the country’s creditors, stating that: ‘It is not only the technocrats that exist in this negotiation. There is another important factor. The people’s factor. The Greek people and the European people’ (Tsipras 2015d). In this—emotionally heightened—speech, Tsipras interpreted the values of the Greek people, praising their determination, passion, and dignity using, again, the figure of anaphora: During the dramatic developments of the last days, the final word was expressed by the Greek people.

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They did not delegate responsibility. They pledged their soul. They did not authorise anyone. They took their fate into their own hands. They did not vote against. They honoured the previous generations that resisted and supported this country and safeguarded the hope for the coming generations. They did not simply defy the blackmail and the ultimatums. They stood up. This people only deserve admiration. They deserve to walk proudly, they deserve to live with dignity. In exhorting what he perceived as the virtues of the Greek people, the then-newly elected Prime Minister did not merely attempt to improve their morale and restore their credibility in the eyes of foreign audiences; he actually sought to shape the Greeks’ moral character, their perception of what constitutes praiseworthy acts and actors. In this spirit, he took the opportunity to remind the people that it is ‘the patriotic responsibility of each and every Greek woman and man to support this national effort’, by paying the last tax instalments of 2014. By branding citizens’ tax obligations as a manifestation of ‘patriotism’ Tsipras sounded a chord that is one of the most appealing to the Greek people’s sentiments. He also retreated from one of Syriza’s most popular-turned-ambiguous theses, namely its identification with grassroots movements that called Greeks to abstain from payments towards the Greek state in any form (tolls, tickets, taxes). What makes Tsipras’ epideictic moralising was not his explicit references to principles of moral action or his invocation of commonplaces of morality. Rather, it is the way that he weaved narratives that amplified the moral quality of the experiences of ‘the people’ even as it was being urged by agents of the politics of austerity to lead more austere lives. In weaving this narrative, Tsipras at the same time crafted a ‘them’ to which ‘the people’ could be juxtaposed, namely the technocratic elites of the international banking system, whose motives and moral quality he sought to denigrate by describing them as ‘blind, conservative forces’. Syriza’s rhetoric attempted to change the terms of the possible and the practical according to the desirable, to what would appeal to the emotional state of the Greek people; it attempted to restore dignity and hope for the Greek, as well as the European, people. Although he needed to employ a populist argumentative frame to constitute these subjects as of a certain

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moral quality, at the same Tsipras also needed to create a solid ethical proof that would position him as a suitable agent of populist rhetoric. Crafting an Ethos of Good Will A crucial task for epideictic orators is to successfully create the impression that their character or ethos is of a certain type: that they are ‘creditworthy as regards virtue’ (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1366a; 2001, p. 104). A speaker employs ethical proof when he attempts to present himself as worthy of credence. In the Aristotelian rhetorical tradition ethos is inherent to speech, it flows from it and is not exhaustive given by any preconceived opinion that the audience already holds about the speaker. This does not mean that persuasion is entirely disconnected from these opinions or that Aristotle was naive enough to believe that our preconceptions or ideological beliefs do not participate in the formation of our judgments. Rather, his aim was to stress the importance of the speech act itself as being of a certain type: one that projects the speaker’s moral and intellectual qualities and communicates his knowledgeability, good will, and phronesis, or practical wisdom. Essentially, Aristotle (Rhetoric, 1366a; 2001, p. 74) affirmed ethos as belonging to the art of rhetoric, as being entechnic: it is crafted and produced, rather than given and preconceived. In the case of Syriza’s young leader ethos was indeed an entechnic issue, in the sense that it was bound to the task of crafting the image of a fresh and uncorrupted politician whose speech embodies good will and honesty. Employing the rhetorical device of juxtaposition, which Aristotle (Rhetoric, 1405a; 2001, p. 234) considered as one of the greatest stylistic concerns of the orator because it makes the argument memorable, Tsipras was able to clarify his position and distinguish himself from the corrupted political establishment. Indeed, juxtaposition functions by calling for choice between two contradicting values, situations, or actors, and therefore by urging judgement and taking positions. Tsipras craftily constructed his ethos by juxtaposing himself to the ‘bankrupt political establishment that slashed wages, skyrocketed unemployment, and left Greece facing poverty’ (Tsipras 2015a). In contrast to previous political actors, who he held accountable for the country’s position, Tsipras argued that his party represented ‘hope for the extensive and necessary changes that need to be discussed and occur in Europe’ (Tsipras 2015d). Already in his first address to the parliament as prime minister he stated that his government was ‘determined to impose a new authority, style and ethos’;

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his aim was to be different from any previous government. In accordance with this new ethos, the members of the government took their oath of office not on the Bible, as is customary, but on the Greek Constitution, sealing their popular power by appealing to the civic authority of the demos. As Tsipras put it in his panegyric that day using yet another anaphora: We are flesh out of the flesh of this people, we originate from the pages of the history of this people; it is this people that we will serve. We are each word of the Constitution of this country. It is on this Constitution that we took our oath. It is this Constitution that we will serve.

The ethical nuances of this ‘new authority style’ became more evident as the negotiation process advanced and peaked when Tsipras called the referendum in June 2015. In the speech he delivered to announce the referendum, Tsipras (2015e) abandoned the carefully balanced rhetoric he had kept for the negotiators—until then referred to as ‘partners’ or ‘institutions’—and he adopted a more aggressive rhetorical style. Following the sudden closure of banks, Tsipras shifted tone, stating that ‘this is no longer merely a legal issue, nor only a political issue. The financial asphyxiation of the country is now a moral issue as well—and it conflicts with the basic, founding principles of Europe’. In order to justify his choice to continue opposition to the politics of austerity he chose to interpret the demands of the Greek side as ‘just’, whereas those of the creditors as ‘unreasonable’. Furthermore, to the ‘honest’ efforts of the Greek government he juxtaposed the ‘cruel’ and ‘socially unjust’ neoliberalism that interprets virtues as a sign of weakness. In those dramatic moments, Tsipras condensed in a pair of rhetorical questions the strong aversion that the Greek people felt towards the creditors: ‘Is the negotiation being conducted in good faith and parity? Are these tactics ones that Europe can feel proud of?’ (Tsipras 2015e). For the agent of moralising rhetoric and politics, virtues such as good faith and pride function as referencing points. The ethos of good will of the Greek side of the negotiation was on no other occasion more dramatically defended and exhorted than in the speech that Tsipras delivered at Syntagma square outside the Greek Parliament in July 2015 in support of the “NO” campaign. The whole speech is an example of high style rhetoric, a panegyric that sought to unify a

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deeply divided people by appealing to a higher moral purpose. In this speech Tsipras did not seek merely to enhance the morale of ‘a small nation which is fighting without swords and bullets’; he sought also to elevate the nation’s very ethos or authority, projecting its image to audiences abroad as one ‘fighting with the most powerful weapon that exists on earth: Justice’. According to the ethical premises of the argument advanced by Tsipras, there is only one thing that matters: ‘We have justice on our side. We will win’. Borrowing the words of Kalvos, one of the greatest Greek poets, he declared: Freedom requires integrity (arete) and bravery. We, you, all of us have both integrity and bravery. And we are free. We breathe the air of freedom. Whatever happens, we are the winners. We will be the winners. Greece won. Democracy won. The blackmail and threats were defeated.

In this fight against the gatekeepers of austerity, Greece had a higher moral role to play; it was the agent of justice, virtue, and freedom. Its ethos was not to be challenged; it belonged to a higher moral plane.

Conclusions Political reality is far more complex than any analysis can suggest; its richness exceeds our attempts to interpret and analyse even a specific political episode. I am fully aware that the analysis presented here does not account for every aspect of the events; for instance, it doesn’t consider the internal division and strife that Syriza’s strategy caused within Greece (Aslanidis and Kaltwasser 2016; Boukala and Dimitrakopoulou 2017). Populist rhetorics have a powerful role in political life and perform many different functions. In this chapter, I approached this instance of rhetoric as an argumentative frame and therefore as a way to organise meaning around the idea of ‘the people’ in a terrain that is characterised by a struggle over the determination of common sense. Syriza’s version of populism during the first half of 2015 sought to constitute the Greek people as a virtuous subject that resists the logic of austerity and its agents. As Laclau (2005, p. 33) clarifies, ‘a movement is not populist because in its politics or ideology it presents actual contents identifiable as populistic, but because it shows a particular logic of articulation of those contents – whatever those contents are’. It is this logic of articulation that

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I placed under scrutiny here, showing how it was materialised through an argumentative frame, but also through a particular kind of rhetoric (the epideictic) and through appeal to a benevolent ethotic proof. It is important to clarify that I am not suggesting that these rhetorical devices are populist; rather, what I hope that I have showed is that populism requires a particular type of speech and ethos to perform its functions. A core argument of this chapter is that in order to understand the complex workings of populist rhetoric, the analyst must place it within a broader context of discussion. This is because, as the Greek case illustrates, although the logic of populism helps explain the constitution of ‘the people’ in a social space divided into two antagonistic camps, it doesn’t necessarily account for the effects of employing or appealing to ‘the people’ in broader political contexts. In extending the scope of analysis, I looked into the place of populist rhetoric in the context of a rhetorical strategy that aimed at persuasion beyond the immediate social space within which ‘the people’ are constituted. My analysis identified Syriza’s rhetorical strategy as that of moralisation and argued that this strategy afforded Syriza with opportunities to redefine the terms of the exigence, constitute the Greek people as a moral agent, and offer a political doxa that resisted the logic austerity. Yet, the analysis also shows that moralisation is a double-edged sword. Although it can help to clarify positions and unify diverse constituencies, it also sets limits to political projects. In the Greek case, these limits were hit when Tsipras had to ‘capitulate’ and to sign a bailout agreement with stringent terms despite his pre-electoral promises (Wearden 2015). Even though the outcome of a negotiation process depends on several factors, strategies employed by negotiators play an important role as they shape the terms of the debate. In opting for a populist argumentative frame, Tsipras presented a policy problem as a moral dispute, thus allowing for the ambiguity inherent in democratic politics to hinder his task of persuading Greece’s creditors on the righteousness of his position. To his projection of the Greek people’s right, the European (also democratically elected) governments legitimately juxtaposed the very same argument: the right of their people. Although his epideictic and his benevolent ethos unified the majority of the Greek people, mobilised a new commonplace for a revitalised doxa, advanced a positive national vision, and found some international support, at the same time this very strategy hardened opposition from those who remained unmoved by Tsipras’s appeal to Greece’s higher moral status. In overly relying on the enthymeme ‘we have justice

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on our side –we will win’, Syriza drew too rigid a line between Greece and its creditors, a line that it placed not on the level of the political, but on that of morality. Eventually, the strategy of moralisation, with its emphasis on a morally pure, superior ‘people’, precluded political manoeuvring and bargaining, leaving the ground of negotiation an open playground for those who had far more elaborated political plans.

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Victorious Victimization: Orbán the Orator—Deep Securitization and State Populism in Hungary’s Propaganda State Miklós Sükösd

To be Hungarian is a collective neurosis. Arthur Koestler, Hungarian-British writer (1905–1983)

Few significant politicians remain in Central and Eastern Europe who have been continuously present in frontline politics since the region’s breakthrough to democracy in 1989–1990. Viktor Orbán is the only one who has been in power continuously for several election cycles since 2010, so by now, a whole Orbán-era or Orbán-regime is named after him. Orbán appeared on the Hungarian political scene as one of the founders of a liberal youth movement in 1989. From 1993 he gradually shifted to the center-right, then in the 2000s to the right. Today, in the 2020s, Orbán is widely considered a far-right populist leader. But despite his several political transformations, some key patterns of his discourse remain surprisingly unchanged.

M. Sükösd (B) Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Kock and L. Villadsen (eds.), Populist Rhetorics, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6_7

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I will argue that a successful speech that Orbán gave in 1989 at the fall of communism as part of a major national media event, and which catapulted the hitherto unknown young activist into fame, made a long-term imprint on the formation of Orbán as an orator and the formulation of his successful populist strategy. Discursive adaptability and ideological flexibility combined with stable populist patterns help explain Orbán’s unique, persistent presence over the decades, leading to years of unquestioned national dominance. To begin, I recall the context, situation and characteristics of that formative speech in 1989 when young Orbán demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, representing the whole nation against an illegitimate foreign occupying power. Then I discuss how the middleaged Orbán since the 1990s strategically strove to recreate that unique, victorious speech situation by instituting four major regular “state of the union” speeches annually that aim to dominate the media agenda, and public space in general, in Hungary. I explore also two related main themes in his rhetoric: massive fear-mongering and enemy creation (targeting migrants, George Soros, the EU/“Brussels”, domestic democratic opposition or any critical speakers). I argue that these elements of populist rhetoric solidify into a rhetoric of “deep securitization” in which mobilization for Orbán and his party-state against perceived existential threats by the enemies of Hungarians is fortified by a rigorous and powerful system of propaganda media. Securitization is a concept in political science and international relations, introduced by the so-called “Copenhagen school” of security studies, led by Ole Wæver (1998). Securitization may be defined as a rhetorical strategy—a speech act—that creates a state of insecurity. In the words of Senn (2017, 608), “(in)security is an intersubjective state which results from actors using speech acts to designate an issue as an existential threat”. Securitization theory is an example of how political science (in this case, the study of populist political communication) may benefit from integrating insights from rhetorical theory, along with speech act theory. However, Senn, among others, while contributing to this development, also acknowledges a criticism that has been raised against the Copenhagen school, namely its one-sided emphasis on the purely discursive aspect of securitization. To understand how and why a specific instance of securitization works, for example in the case of Orbán, there is also a need to integrate an understanding of political, historical, social, cultural, and media systemic contexts. This chapter will make a suggestion in that regard.

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The Birth of an Orator: The Imprint of 1989 I knew Orbán personally in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. As one of the few hundred democratically minded young people who started to actively participate in the democratic transition in Hungary, I became one of the early members of the pluralist, liberal youth movement called Fidesz (Alliance of Young Democrats) in the summer of 1989. Fidesz then involved young activists—mostly university students—with diverse political convictions, including social liberals, market liberals, democratic socialists, but mostly with progressive, alternative cultural and political ideas. Our common ground was the demand for a “Western type”, multiparty, liberal democracy based on human rights, constitutionalism, and rule of law—and the independence of Hungary after decades of Soviet occupation. Fidesz had been established in the previous year, in 1988, by 37 young people (the official upper age limit was 35 years). I knew most of Fidesz’ founders, including Orbán, as we participated in soul-searching opposition meetings, political events and related activities together in the late 1980s. By 2021, more than 30 years later, Fidesz has become a far-right populist party. Hungary, under the uninterrupted leadership of Orbán since 2010, has become the first non-democratic, authoritarian hybrid regime in the European Union (Bozóki and Heged˝ us 2018). It is still the only member state of the European Union that is defined as only “partially free” by Freedom House, a status to which it fell from “Free” in 2019. In the most current Freedom House report (2021), Hungary is down to a score of 69 for “global freedom” and a “democracy” score of 45, with a status as “Transitional or Hybrid Regime” (Freedom House 2021). What does populist rhetoric, such as Orban’s famous 1989 speech, have to do with Orbán’s shift from being a liberal democrat to an authoritarian right-wing populist? To understand the story of Orbán as a powerful orator, we need, as suggested, to go back as far as 1989. The young unknown student activist Viktor Orbán sprang into fame at one blow and became a wellknown political figure by delivering his highly mediatized key speech in June 1989. It became the most important political speech during the Hungarian democratic transition from communism to democracy. This speech, and the media event that was its platform, established Orbán as an influential and successful orator. One may argue that for several decades,

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Orbán sought to repeat this momentous, victorious experience by strategically and regularly re-establishing similar speech situations and using similar rhetorical patterns (Szilágyi and Bozóki 2015). Despite major turnabouts in his political ideology, some key elements of his long-term populist rhetoric were established when he threw himself into politics during the post-communist transition, and these key elements have been continuously present since then. To understand the central importance of oratory in Orbán’s political universe and some characteristics of the deep structure of his rhetoric, we need to comprehend how his political and orator persona was born when he delivered that key national address in 1989. What were the political context and the speech situation, respectively, of this first, famous oration? When Orbán entered Hungarian politics as a 26 years old law student in 1989, the Cold War had not yet ended, and Europe was still divided by the Iron Curtain. All countries in the communist Eastern bloc, including Hungary, were still one-party dictatorships, covered by the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact, the communist military organization, and its economic counterpart, the communist international COMECON. These were states with a dogmatic, official communist ideology, an almost exclusively state-owned, state socialist planned economy and a highly centralized, censored propaganda media system. Most countries behind the Iron Curtain, including Hungary, had been continuously occupied by the Soviet Union’s Red Army since the last stages of World War 2 in 1944–1945. Red Army garrisons occupied strategic positions in the country, and Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, targeting the United States, were stationed in the forests of Western Hungary. A related personal reminiscence to indicate the atmosphere of this period: as a high school student in the 1970s I once hitchhiked from Lake Balaton to Budapest. A Soviet military jeep stopped and a uniformed officer with that characteristic high Soviet army cap invited me in. I hesitated, but then jumped into their jeep. The officers in the jeep insisted I speak Russian with them and were kind to me even though my Russian was poor—despite the fact it was obligatory to study Russian in elementary and high school. One could sense the winds of change from the mid-1980s, especially those blowing from the East. The novel policies of perestroika (reconstruction, rebuilding) and glasnost (publicness) introduced by reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev (who was General Secretary

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of the Soviet Communist Party from 1985) aimed to overcome stagnation and vitalize the Soviet Union. An unintended consequence was that these reforms challenged the other Eastern Bloc leaders who had been more conservative than Gorbachev. Meanwhile, the underground democratic opposition in some of the communist countries also became more active and effective. Most progressive was Poland, where Roundtable Talks between the communist government and the democratic opposition (including the formerly illegal “Solidarno´sc´ ” trade union) took place in the spring of 1989, followed by a landslide victory for the opposition in the elections on June 4, 1989. In Hungary, the conflict-ridden National Roundtable Talks, a face-to-face series of negotiations between the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party and the democratic opposition, began on June 13 (ending on September 18, 1989), paving the way for multi-party elections to be held in 1990. But in the summer of 1989, all that was still in the making. East Germany and Czechoslovakia were still intact communist states, while Romania agonized under the hardline dictator Ceaucescu. Both the Warsaw Pact and COMECON were what they had always been. The key symbolic event of the Hungarian transition took place at Heroes Square in Budapest on June 16, 1989. In the massive presence of some 250,000 people, the coffins with the remnants of the leaders of the anti-communist, anti-Soviet revolution of 1956 were displayed and prepared for a formal funeral ceremony, recognizing their martyrdom for a democratic Hungary. The event focused on the re-burial with full state honors of Imre Nagy and other martyr leaders of the 1956 revolution. Imre Nagy, a reform-communist politician, became Prime Minister during the anti-Soviet revolution in October 1956 and proceeded to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact, dissolve the secret police and admit non-communists to the government. The Soviet invasion followed in early November. Nagy sought refuge at the Yugoslavian embassy, was lured out, apprehended and deported. In June of 1958, he and other leaders of the 1956 revolution were tried by the communist regime, executed for treason and buried in unnamed graves in Budapest. The June 16, 1989, public events revolved around the four-hour rehabilitation and commemoration of Nagy and his dead associates. Five leaders made speeches. The most junior among them, 26 years old Viktor Orbán, represented “the Hungarian youth” according to his symbolic role in the lineup. Of the five key speakers, Orbán gave the most memorable speech. The part most often recalled dealt with the Hungarian national

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demand for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. I was there on Heroes Square with my friends and talked to Orbán just minutes before he was to deliver his speech. After that I was standing in the crowd with another quarter of million people, listening and cheering. The whole ceremony, including Orbán’s speech, was followed by the whole nation live on television or radio and became part of collective national memory. This key media event symbolized Hungary’s post-communist turn as the country embarked on the path toward pluralist democracy and prepared for free elections in 1990 (cf. Dayan and Katz 1992). The speech, of course, constituted a eulogy for the heroes of the 1956 revolution. Significantly, Hungarian history was invoked as the background. What Orbán did was to create a historical continuity between the leaders of the 1848 anti-Habsburg revolution, the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution and our own post-communist generation: My Fellow Citizens! Since the beginning of the Russian occupation and the communist dictatorship 40 years ago, the Hungarian people once had an opportunity, once had adequate courage and strength to attempt to reach the objectives articulated in 1848: national independence and political freedom. To this day our goals have not changed, today we still have not relented on ’48, just as we have not relented on ’56 either. Those young people who today are fighting for the establishment of liberal democracy in Hungary bow their heads before the communist Imre Nagy. (Orbán 1989)

In this construction, history not only is on his side, but the young generations represent continuity and actualization of the goals of revolutions and independence struggles, the best of Hungarian history. As Orbán embodies the voice of this young generation, he positions himself as the key agent for change, who represents and acts for the fulfillment of historical demands of past centuries. And the role in which he cast the generations prefiguring his own, that of 1848 and 1956, was a dual one: they were heroes and victims. At the commemoration, the bodies of five main figures of the 1956 revolution (Imre Nagy, Miklós Gimes, Géza Losonczy, Pál Maléter, and József Szilágyi) were reburied. However, six coffins were displayed in an act of staged dramatization. The sixth coffin was empty and symbolized all the lesser known people (including young street fighters) killed during the 1956 revolution or executed after it. And in fact, Orbán’s focus was

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not Nagy and his associates. Notice that Orbán called him “the communist Imre Nagy” even while commemorating his death at the hands of Soviet and Hungarian communist oppressors. Orbán instead singled out the young victims of 1956 and victims of his own generation not yet victimized: We know well that the majority of the victims of the revolution and the retribution were young people of our age and kind. But it is not only for this reason that we feel the sixth coffin to be ours. Until the present day, 1956 was our nation’s last chance to step onto the path of Western development and create economic prosperity. (Orbán 1989, italics added)

Representing the democratic transition that has just become a potentiality in 1989, Orbán identifies with the deceased and victimized young fighters. At the same time, he acts in the name of the future generations: …they suppressed our revolution in blood and forced us back into that Asian impasse from which we are again trying to find a way out. It was, in truth, then that the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party [the official name of the Hungarian Communist Party] deprived us, the young people of today, of our future. It is for this reason that not only the corpse of a murdered young person lies in the sixth coffin, but our next 20—or who knows how many—years lie in there as well. (Orbán 1989, italics added)

If the democratic regime change for “western development and … economic prosperity” can succeed, then the empty space in the last coffin could burst into life instead of remaining just empty space, a dead void. In other words, new life could be brought to the wasted generations of victims who are symbolized by the empty coffin. This indirectly implies a powerful Savior construction. If Orbán’s mission succeeds, the coffin will represent life instead of death. In fact, in the period of the personality cult of Orbán during his uninterrupted reign after 2010, Viktor the Savior became a recurrent trope. (Just for the record, the sixth coffin was in fact empty. Envisioning human remnants in that coffin was only Orbán’s dramatic exaggeration, his hyperbole.) The speech is highly antagonistic, naming the communist party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, as responsible for “the corpse of a murdered young person … in the sixth coffin”. On the one hand, Orbán presents himself as the young, spotless savior without a compromising past: “We young people do not understand many things that are perhaps

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natural for the older generations …”. On the other hand, he assumes that the Hungarian communist party did not only kill past generations, it also may kill future generations. He also envisions that it could have acted as Li Peng did, the Chinese Prime Minister who played an important role in crushing the Tienen-men Square revolt on June 3–4, 1989, just 12 days before the commemoration in Budapest—or as Pol Pot did in the killing fields of Cambodia—or as Jaruzelski did, the Polish military dictator who declared martial law against the “Solidarno´sc´ ” trade union movement in 1981—or as Rákosi did, Hungary’s widely hated Stalinist dictator, who reigned from 1949 to 1953. These are Orbán’s words: It is not the merit of the Hungarian political leadership that it has not acted against those demanding democracy and free elections, though the weight of its weapons would permit it to do so, using methods similar to those of Li Peng, Pol Pot, Jaruzelski or Rákosi. (Orbán 1989)

It is important to note that when Orbán talks about the current Hungarian communist leaders of 1989, he describes them by mentioning what they could have done as dictators. In a way, this is a version of the rhetorical figure that consists in bringing up something by denying it, or saying that one will not mention it. A Latin name for this device is praeteritio, while Greek names are apophasis and paralipsis. In fact, none of the horrible violence associated with Li Peng or Pol Pot, or the oppression connected with the names Jaruzelski and Rákosi, occurred. The whole Hungarian transition from communism to democracy took place peacefully, without any trace of violence. In this sense, Orbán indirectly portrays his opponents as the worst kind of bloody dictators by what they did not commit —but what they, according to him, could have committed. Theirs is guilt by association. This exaggeration creates fear. It is a truly fearful situation if your opponents are like Li Peng, named “the butcher of Tienanmen” in Western media, or Pol Pot, Jaruzelski or Rákosi. Orbán does not only present a black and white world—on the one hand, bloody, terrorist dictators as angels of death, on the other hand wasted, innocent young generations of the past and future—he also impersonates a savior-like young figure speaking on behalf of martyrs with the promise of eradicating the forces of evil.

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Orbán’s Propaganda State Speechmaking has remained crucial in Orbán’s political career and has contributed to his total dominance of Hungary’s political life. His activity as an orator has been prolific, systematic and central to his populist political project. The massive impact of his 1989 breakthrough speech undoubtedly helped create a belief in him that widely mediatized public speeches where he is supposed to represent the nation as a whole were an instrument that he mastered, and which might serve him exceptionally well. Which it did. With a unique know-how, Viktor Orbán has developed four regular series of key public speeches over the decades—each series covering one season of the year. The first group consists of his annual “state of the nation” addresses. Orbán started his serialized “state of the nation” events in 1999 and continued uninterrupted for over 20 years until 2020 (in 2021, in the 23rd year, the speech was canceled owing to the Covid19 pandemic). These formal, programmatic addresses (called évértékel˝o, literally meaning “evaluation of the year”) have been his most important, regular speeches. In these, he assesses political developments of the previous calendar year and looks ahead. Delivered in the late winter season every February for over two decades, these addresses constitute highly publicized media events, with live television coverage (Dayan and Katz 1992), and followed by lively public discussion. After delivery, pundits interpret the trend-setting new terminologies and discursive strategies of Orbán in all political media channels, news sites and newspapers. Opposition politicians also react to these speeches, and social media discussion follows suit. Orbán has been successful in setting agendas and framing the discussion over decades with these annual media events both in the periods when he was in power (1999–2002 and 2010–2021) and, significantly, even when he was in opposition (2002–2010). Notably, the model for the “state of the nation” is often recognizably the 1989 “withdraw the Russian troops” speech. The second series of regular speeches includes annual speeches delivered on March 15, an official patriotic holiday (one of the two most important holidays in Hungary), commemorating the starting day of the Hungarian anti-Habsburg revolution of 1848. The democratic revolution and subsequent war of independence of 1848–1849 became one of the defining events of Hungary’s modern history and a cornerstone of its national identity. With progressive social reforms, modern social

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transformation, as well as a struggle for self-determination and national self-defense, the revolution became part of the national mythology. The revolution and the national war of independence in 1848–1849 enjoyed wide popular support, so the Habsburg Monarchy was only able to quell it with the help of a military intervention by the Russian Empire. This lost revolution became one in a long line of suppressed uprisings and revolutions as well as lost wars in the history of Hungary—a traumatic series of recurrent victimizations of the struggling Hungarian people. In terms of the speech situations, March 15 is a spring holiday where citizens often take a walk in Budapest and other cities and towns in Hungary to enjoy the nice weather and honor and celebrate the national heroes who started the suppressed 1848 revolution. March 15 is also a popular occasion for politicians of all parties to deliver speeches in various districts of Budapest throughout the day. Similarly, in all cities and towns, and even in many villages, local mayors and other public figures deliver addresses, often as part of larger holiday programs involving musical performances, communal singing, children reciting poems and performances of dramatized episodes of the 1848 revolution, etc. During the years when Orbán has been in power, he has given these speeches in formal official state celebrations as Prime Minister. When he was in opposition, he addressed the crowds at various sites in Budapest. The third group of serialized speeches includes speeches given annually by Orbán in the spa resort of Tusnádfürd˝ o in Transylvania, Romania. (The Romanian name of the place is B˘aile Tus, nad; I will use the two names interchangeably.) This tiny town is home to a Hungarian summer university and student camp, hosted by ethnic Hungarian organizations in Romania. Orbán’s speeches here are often strategic statements regarding foreign policy and geopolitics as well as issues of nationhood and Hungarian ethnicity. But the location B˘aile Tus, nad itself is also relevant because of the large Hungarian ethnic minority in the area and the resulting ethnic dynamics between Hungarians and Romanians and the other neighboring peoples in East Central Europe—as well as for historical reasons. Transylvania has a mixed population of ethnic Romanians and Hungarians, with a Romanian majority as well as a history that has been contested by two nations for a long time. Hungary is a nation of 9.6 million people, while another 2.2 million ethnic Hungarians live in areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 (the peace settlement after World War 1, where Hungary was shorn of two-thirds of

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its former territory and two-thirds of its inhabitants). These regions are now parts of Hungary’s neighboring countries, among them Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine. The ethnic composition of Harghita county, where Tusnádfürd˝ o is located, includes a majority of Hungarians (82.9%) and a minority of Romanians (12.6%), Roma (1.7%) and others. In a controversial decision right after assuming power in 2010, the Orbán government offered dual citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries, including Romania. Even more controversially, ethnic Hungarians with such dual citizenships have voting rights in Hungary (although they do not pay taxes in the country) and form a distinct pro-Orbán voting bloc. This means that most of the people in the audience of Orbán’s speeches are dual Romanian and Hungarian citizens and vote in parliamentary elections in both countries, so there is a real political stake. Orbán regularly uses this summer meeting in Romania to introduce new political terms and related strategy. It was in B˘aile Tus, nad in 2014 that he first pronounced and elaborated his famous terms “illiberal state” and “illiberal democracy”, the heart of his recent populist political worldview. His first attacks against “foreign-paid civil organizations” also date from the same 2014 speech, to be translated into action just three o that he pledged years later. It was similarly in B˘aile Tus, nad/Tusnádfürd˝ support to Republican candidate Donald Trump in 2016. In 2018 Orbán here offered his critical vision of the EU and promised to take an active role in European Union politics. Add to this that the week-long event in Tusnádfürd˝ o always takes place in late July, when the political “silly season” creates plenty of space in the Hungarian public sphere for the discussion of Orbán’s new ideas and agendas. As mentioned, Orbán invented his serialized winter “state of the nation” events in 1999 and continued uninterrupted for over 20 years. Similarly, the spring (March 15) and summer (Tusnádfürd˝ o) speeches are delivered as annual rituals, with predictable regularity. In fact, there is a fourth series of regular speeches. Orbán delivers these every year in early fall (usually in September) in a mansion in Kötcse (Western Hungary). A difference is that the venues for these speeches are closed strategy meetings for the Fidesz faithful (party leaders, MPs and MEPs, pro-Orbán artists and journalists, state officials including the Hungarian National Bank president, etc.). However, the details of Orbán’s speeches are purposefully leaked after each fall meeting in Kötcse, to be followed up by the same media interest as the other three annual speeches. The Kötcse

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meetings started in 2004 and continued uninterrupted (in 2020, the meeting was canceled because of Covid-19). Thus, the Kötcse speeches could be added to the other three series of speeches by Orbán in terms of their strategic importance and agenda-setting power. It is indeed unusual that a political leader delivers four key addresses every year. Orbán has delivered four key speeches per year according to this pattern for decades: one every season. This means over 40 strategy speeches just since 2010, when he took over and started to build his authoritarian regime. These 40+ seasonal speeches constitute the core content and terms of a semi-official populist ideology that defines a hegemonic discursive agenda for Hungary. Moreover, in the Orbán regime, the leader’s seasonal messages are actualized, elaborated, custom-tailored and distributed by several layers of a complex state-controlled media and communication system—amounting to a propaganda state. Some further structural elements of this include the following: Orbán has institutionalized his giving of regular radio interviews on state radio every Friday morning since 2010. These prime ministerial interviews are not dialogues. The radio host does not pose any challenging or even independent questions, but uses the regime’s up-to-date agenda and frames in her/his discourse. The goal is rather to provide free airtime for the Prime Minister to roll out his timely messages, explain his positions, set goals, praise his government’s achievements, attack the opposition, George Soros and Brussels, etc., in a regular, ritualized manner. The weekly interviews are broadcast by the “Kossuth” channel (the news channel) of Hungarian Radio, which has been transformed from a European-type public service institution into a government mouthpiece under strict party-state control.

Massive Fear-Mongering: The Leading Theme In the last 20 years, four themes have dominated Viktor Orbán’s state populist discourse: fear, enemies, nationalist sovereignty and militarism. A large-scale quantitative, longitudinal content analysis that explored the trends of themes and tropes in a full sample Orbán’s seasonal public speeches over twenty years found that these four themes constitute the central elements of his discourse (Magyar et al. 2018).1 The analyzed 1 The longitudinal research project above was carried out and published by four Hungarian linguists. However, as Orbán’s speeches constitute a politically sensitive topic

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corpus of a total of 41 key speeches included twenty “state of the union” speeches (between 1999 and 2018), ten official national holiday speeches given on March 15 (between 2007 and 2018, no speech in 2013 and 2014) and eleven strategy speeches (2007–2017), delivered by Orbán in Tusnádfürd˝ o in Romania. Among Orbán’s four major themes over the last two decades, fear is usually incited by a multitude of verbs and nouns that generate worry, anxiety or fright in relation to generalized risks and dangers, as well as specific and imminent, perceived threats. These dangers and threats are often concretized or even personalized as enemies. The Hungarianborn multi-billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, “migrants”, and “Brussels” (the leadership of the EU) are among the prime enemies and objects of antagonism and suspicion. A third key theme has been nationalist sovereignism, the rhetorical emphasis on national independence and mobilization against foreign forces in the name of the sovereign Hungarian nation. In the rhetoric of sovereignism, “Brussels” becomes a hated enemy, represented in Orbán’s speeches as the evil power center of the European Union that tries to invite “migrants” and forces external, alien interests on the sovereign Hungarian nation. Finally, a gradual militarization with a vivid vocabulary of war, armed conflict, combat, soldiers and military strategy including metaphors, characterizes Orbán’s discourse. All four themes structurally interrelate in multiple ways. Any analysis of the vast corpus of Orbán’s speechmaking will easily identify him as a through-and-through populist. He constantly refers to himself as representing, to Hungarians and the international community

and the researchers have academic jobs in a state-controlled research environment, they had to use pseudonyms to protect their identity against reprimands, character assassination in the government-controlled propaganda media, harassment, or losing their jobs (all of these happen to independent critics, including academics, in the authoritarian environment of the Orbán regime in contemporary Hungary). On the context and main results of the linguistic research project, see Magyari, Péter (2018). Tudományosan bizonyították, hogy Orbán Viktor egyre inkább paráztat [It has been scientifically proven that Viktor Orbán increasingly creates fear] 444.hu, July 4, 2018. https://444.hu/2018/07/04/tudomanyo san-bizonyitottak-hogy-orban-viktor-egyre-inkabb-paraztat (last accessed June 24, 2021). On government-sponsored character assassination and harassment targeting independent critics, including academics, in the Orbán regime, see Sükösd, Miklós (2021). A céltáblák visszal˝ onek. Propagandaállam és karaktergyilkosság [The targets shoot back. Propaganda state and character assassination]. Élet és Irodalom, 65(13), April 1, 2021. https://www.es. hu/cikk/2021-04-01/sukosd-miklos/a-celtablak-visszalonek.html (last accessed June 24, 2021).

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alike, “Hungary”, “Hungarians”, “the nation” as a monolithic block. These terms account for a total of just over 2% of all words in his speeches (Magyar et al. 2018). Of course, the use of such terms would be standard in national leaders’ speeches or semi-formal annual addresses, but rarely in such numbers. More importantly, a quick look at any selection of the speeches as well as on the official website of the Hungarian government will show that he incessantly speaks, to any audience, in the name of “the people” as such of Hungary. As a consequence, any foreign criticism of the Orbán-government is routinely treated as a criticism or even an attack on the Hungarian people or the Hungarian nation in general. As the government and the autocratic political regime is regularly identified with the people and the nation as a whole, the agency of political actions becomes fuzzy and responsibility is redirected. Foreign criticism of the regime, reframed as a case of Hungarian-bashing, reinforces the trope of victimization of the Hungarian nation. Even more noteworthy is how often and how vigorously Orbán’s rhetoric evokes negative associations of fear, insecurity, threats, anxiety and failure. In the vast corpus, a rich and massive vocabulary of verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs express various feelings, moods and concepts related to loss, defeat, and the evil treatment of Hungarians by others. It is remarkable how passionate, eloquent and intense Orbán the orator can become as he paints this black and frightening universe. A list of words Orbán has used at least six times in the corpus includes a vast amount of negative terms (Magyar et al. 2018, 5). The list of words that relate to fear, anxiety, submission and loss is the second most numerous main category of words in the corpus, with almost 2% of the total words (following the group of words related to “Hungarian” and “nation” [Magyar et al. 2018, 6]). In his major speeches over twenty years, Orbán has used expressions denoting frightening problems, obstacles and even collapse more than 3000 times in the corpus charted. The group comprised of words that relate to fear includes the following (in some cases, I translate the original Hungarian terms with two English equivalents to convey the nuances of their connotations): worries, obstacle, victim, trouble, bow to/yield, insecure, downfall/failure, felony, crime, criminal, punishment, unpunished, cynicism, bankruptcy, frustrated, opponent, abandon, reject, lose, violence, painful, afraid, forget, irresponsible, revolt, eliminate/liquidate, threaten, coward, weak, hate, decline, lying, liar, lack/shortage, mistake, injustice,

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damage/harm, coercion, unable, doubt, provoke, tell off, pusillanimous, defenseless/naked/vulnerable, risk, conflict, constraint, fiasco/repulse, crawl/bring up the rear, struggle, revolt, defeat, impossible, break off, break down, fail, ransom/sack, defend, heavy, pressure, arbitrariness/autocracy, self-pity, collapse, captive/prisoner, tug/jerk, hopeless, tremble, destroy, deteriorate, bad, unsuccessful, carry away, drift, sink, poverty , shame, suffer, fall apart, servant, feel anxiety, deny, attack, burden, terror, err, ruin/wreck, wild, crisis, unexpected, defenseless, end, beat, danger, lose, confusion. (Magyar et al. 2018, 6)

By constantly repeating and belaboring defeats, violations and losses affecting and victimizing Hungarians, Orbán creates a threatening universe surrounding a frightened, weak, suffering Hungarian nation. Comparable rhetorical strategies have of course been practiced by populist leaders in the past, and certainly with frightening success in the present. But why does this kind of rhetoric prove so extraordinarily effective in Hungary? Why does Orbán’s rhetorical intent resonate so deeply and precisely with a majority of Hungarians? A significant part of the answer is undoubtedly that Orbán has managed to grasp and rhetorically address a deep current and longstanding historical pattern in many Hungarians’ collective self-image: that of a sad, suffering, frightened, suppressed nation—and of individual existence as similarly marked. Themes of fear, suffering and gloom occupy central places in Hungarian national identity and culture. Hungary, this self-image implies, was ever the guiltless victim of contempt, assault and injury perpetrated by others. As an example, even the Hungarian national anthem itself expresses suffering as the key characteristic of the nation (the text was written in 1823 by the romantic poet Ferenc Kölcsey): O God, bless the nation of Hungary With your grace and bounty Extend over it your guarding arm During strife with its enemies Long torn by ill fate Bring upon it a time of relief This nation has suffered for all sins Of the past and of the future! (Author’s translation, italics added)

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The tune of the national anthem is also solemn, sad, and slow and has often been compared to funeral music (it is from 1844, by the romantic composer Ferenc Erkel). Needless to say, as it is played at every national holiday celebration (including March 15 holiday celebrations, school ceremonies or television broadcasts on New Year’s Eve) and at international sports events where Hungarians participate, it too has a significant impact on the nation’s self-perception with long-time suffering and victimization at its center. Similarly, in the area of popular culture, the #1 popular Hungarian song in the world is an extremely sad ballad of loss, grief and nostalgia, with references to suicide. Gloomy Sunday was composed by JewishHungarian songwriter and pianist Rezs˝ o Seress in 1933. It has been translated into at least 17 languages, recorded and performed by well over a hundred international artists, including Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, Etta Jones, Elvis Costello, Serge Gainsbourg, Marianne Faithfull, Sinéad O’Connor, and Björk (who also performed the song in 2010 at the funeral of her friend, the fashion designer Alexander McQueen). Just like the Hungarian national anthem, its text wallows in feelings of loss and depression: Gloomy Sunday with a hundred white flowers I was waiting for you, my dearest, with a prayer. A Sunday morning, chasing after my dreams, The carriage of my sorrow returned to me without you. It is since then that my Sundays have been forever sad Tears my only drink, the sorrow my bread … Gloomy Sunday. This last Sunday, my darling please come to me There’ll be a priest, a coffin, a catafalque and a winding-sheet. There’ll be flowers for you, flowers and a coffin Under the blossoming trees it will be my last journey. My eyes will be open, so that I could see you for a last time. Don’t be afraid of my eyes, I’m blessing you even in my death … The last Sunday. (Lyrics by László Jávor, author’s translation, italics added)

The original lyrics of the song were titled The End of the World, invoking the despair caused by World War 1, with a prayer for people’s sins. Then the poet László Jávor wrote the current lyrics, titled Gloomy Sunday,

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where the protagonist wants to commit suicide after her lover’s death. This is the most popular Hungarian song ever and has been widely dubbed “the Hungarian suicide song”. Recurrent urban legends from the 1930s to the present day suggest that many people committed suicide when listening to this song, and it may actually have motivated people to kill themselves. It is a fact, at any rate, that the composer, Seress, did that. “I lived in a house with Rezs˝ o Seress for a while, just the floor below his. I remember he always listened to Gloomy Sunday, every day from exactly two to six PM, one cover after another”—thus reminisces a onetime downstairs neighbor of Seress, the famous popular music composer and singer Gábor Presser.2 In 1968, Seress threw himself off the balcony of his apartment. Although he survived the fall and was taken to a hospital unconscious, he later strangled himself in the hospital with a piece of surgical wire. Despite, or perhaps because of its unnerving lyrics and context, Gloomy Sunday remains popular in contemporary Hungarian popular culture and is often covered by new performers.3 Viktor Orbán’s corpus of speeches, along with Hungary’s most cherished national and popular songs, at their heart express and evoke emotions of suffering, loss and anxiety. Both in national elite and popular culture, fear, tragedy and hopelessness feature so prominently that it has caused a self-ironic backlash; an example is the name of the leading annual film festival, Titanic, http://titanicfilmfest.hu/archivum, that ran without interruption in Budapest for 26 years, 1993–2019.

Enemies of the People Among the prime objects of fear in Orbán’s rhetoric are “migrants”. It has become one of the key terms of his speeches, always bearing a negative connotation, and almost always in a generalizing plural form. The word “migrant” (migráns ) was only sporadically used in the Hungarian language (e.g., in academic studies) until Orbán suddenly 2 Cf.: Hallani sem bírta az “öngyilkosdalt” Presser [Presser couldn’t stand the “suicide song”] 24.hu, November 19, 2013. https://24.hu/szorakozas/2013/11/19/hal lani-sem-birta-az-ongyilkosdalt-presser/ (last accessed June 24, 2021). 3 On a personal note, I also lived for a while in the same building, Dob St. 46/B in the center of Budapest. Seress had lived on the 3rd floor, Presser on the 2nd; our apartment was on the 5th. Today, there is a photo exhibition in the building’s staircase to commemorate Seress and the other notable Hungarian musicians who lived on the premises.

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introduced its massive use in 2015 (Magyar et al. 2018, 16). Before 2015, other descriptive, more neutral terms like “immigrant” (bevándorló) or “refugee” (menekült ) had been well-known and used in diverse contexts with varying value judgments. From 2015, Orbán also used another unequivocally negative term besides “migrants”: “livelihood immigrants” (megélhetési bevándorlók). This term clearly suggests crime. In Hungarian right-wing and tabloid language, “livelihood criminals” used to mean poor people who supposedly commit criminal acts to provide basic economic necessities. “Livelihood criminals” in far-right parlance has often been used to refer to Roma people, the largest ethnic minority in Hungary, who are stereotypically represented as criminals. Thus, when Orbán terms “migrants” who supposedly want to settle in Hungary as “livelihood immigrants”, he evokes the frame of crime. Both “livelihood immigrants” and “refugees” are swept under the larger group of “migrants”. The function of this rhetorical synecdoche is to extend the umbrella of negativity to all related groups. Another related term often used by Orbán is népvándorlás, literally meaning “migration of people”, a historical term that had been exclusively used before in academic contexts in reference to the period of the great migrations, such as the Indo-European migrations to Europe or the Barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire. Referring to the present refugee situation as a barbarian “great migration”, Orbán frames presently existing European states in a way that assimilates them with the Roman Empire at the time of its collapse. This implies that present-day states too may likely be destroyed by this ongoing “great migration”, and similarly implies the need to introduce draconian anti-migration policies. Also, the pervasive, intensive atmosphere of threats and anxiety creates a need for draconian policies in a more general sense. Negativity does not only stem from the suggested link with the concept of crime for sustenance. “Migrants” are also linked, implicitly or explicitly, to threats against, and the potential loss of, security of Hungarian by expressions like “all terrorists are migrants”, or references to the fear of “escalation of violence” in the context of “migrants”. Not only are “migrants” seen as wretched people whose odious presence threatens to wreck the economies and the social cohesion of European countries, they are also about to make us all victims of a fate foreshadowed by the fall of the Roman Empire.

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Victorious Populism: Cultural, Social and Political Contexts Arthur Koestler, the famous Hungarian-British writer and thinker, author of the haunting political novel Darkness at Noon and a wealth of other works, has said: “Hungarians are the only people in Europe without racial or linguistic relatives in Europe, therefore they are the loneliest on this continent. This … perhaps explains the peculiar intensity of their existence … Hopeless solitude feeds their creativity, their desire for achieving … To be Hungarian is a collective neurosis ” (Koestler 1952, 297, italics added). That may help sum up the contribution this chapter attempts to make to an understanding of Viktor Orbán’s victorious populist rhetoric. Several factors help explain that victory, still unparalleled in other European countries. This essay has focused on two of them. First, Orbán has systematically evoked the Hungarian people’s past, present and future victimization, whether factual, imagined or most probably a mix of those, in a massive and consistent rhetorical output spanning more than three decades. We might go on elaborating on his objects of fear, his litany of further threatening perpetrators of hurt and injury to the victimized Hungarian people, such as the EU, George Soros, LGBTQ people, and others. However, these fixations of othering and enemy creation are well-known, they have been extensively studied, and they are not peculiar to Orbán’s populism (see e.g., Szombati and Szilágyi 2020). Second among explanatory factors, and just as important, is the deep resonance this kind of rhetoric has found among Hungarians—for the reasons touched on in Koestler’s pronouncement. There is a powerful sense in many Hungarians of loneliness, of being abandoned, subdued and betrayed by circumstances and by everyone around them. The linguistic isolation inherent in speaking a language that has no perceptible similarity to any of the languages of neighboring countries could have contributed to this. (Perhaps less than Koestler suggests: The Finnish or Estonian peoples have also been segregated by their Finno-Ugric languages, but have not developed the sense of vicitimization similar to Hungarians.) However, beyond any doubt, Hungary’s history of centuries of defeat at the hands of Tatar Mongols, Ottomans, Habsburgs, Entente powers and Soviets, among others, contributed to a construction of victimization as a crucial feature of national identity. Beginning with his

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historic 1989 speech against the last of this string of oppressors, Orbán fashioned a key that perfectly fits a very special lock. As suggested in this essay, the concept of deep securitization—strategically designating regular, serialized, systematic speech acts that discursively create existential threats—fits Orbán’s rhetoric very well. It further exemplifies one way in which insights in political science and in discursively oriented disciplines such as rhetoric and speech act theory may enrich each other. Nevertheless, no rhetoric is a magic wand that works in a void. Securitization rhetoric, like Orbán’s obsessive hammering on Hungary’s continuing victimization, works more effectively in some historical, social and cultural contexts than in others. In the terminology of J. L. Austin, the originator of speech act theory (1962), what is interesting about rhetorical practice is not just the “illocutionary force” of what is said, but also its perlocutionary force, that is, the traction it actually gets—and that depends on context in the broadest sense. At the same time, the cultural context could only be relevant as one among many other factors in explaining Hungary’s current authoritarian populist turn. Other factors include the country’s historical path development, class relations and party politics related to tensions of globalization (Scheiring 2020), as well as a mafia-like state organization (Magyar 2016) and a highly centralized and censored media system (Polyák 2019) under the Orbán regime, and others. Hungary has become the first EU member country where populism de facto functions as a state ideology and the system of democratic checks and balances has been dismantled. In Hungary, right-wing populism has become the key, semi-official discourse legitimizing the authoritarian regime of Viktor Orbán. In this sense, one may see Hungary as a successful laboratory of a mature populist propaganda state—unique in some aspects, yet also a laboratory from which to learn.

References Austin, John Langshaw. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bozóki, András, and Dániel Heged˝ us. 2018. An Externally Constrained Hybrid Regime: Hungary in the European Union. Democratization, 25(7), 1173– 1189. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2018.1455664. Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Freedom House. 2021. https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/ scores. 2021 (Last accessed June 24, 2021). Koestler, Arthur. 1952. Arrow in the Blue: Autobiography. New York: Macmillan. Magyar, Bálint. 2016. Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary. Budapest: Central European University Press. Magyar, Hajnalka, István Gulyás, János Kovács, and Emma Világosi. 2018. Van egy magyar Magyarország [There Is a Hungarian Hungary], June 16, 2018 (38 ps.). https://ia803100.us.archive.org/35/items/161189wA1 80616_201807/161189w_a_180616.pdf (Last accessed June 24, 2021). Orbán, Viktor. 1989. Speech on June 16, 1989 at Heroes Square, Budapest. Translated by Sean Lambert. The Orange Files. https://theorangefiles.hu/2013/ 06/20/fill-in-the-blanks/ (Last accessed June 24, 2021). Polyák, Gábor. 2019. Media in Hungary: Three Pillars of an Illiberal Democracy. In Połonska, ´ Eva, and Charlie Beckett, eds. Public Service Broadcasting and Media Systems in Troubled European Democracies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 279–303. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02710-0_13. Scheiring, Gábor. 2020. The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary. New York: Palgrave. Senn, Martin. 2017. The Art of Constructing (In)Security: Probing Rhetorical Strategies of Securitisation. Journal of International Relations and Development , 20(3), 605–630. Szilágyi, Anna, and András Bozóki. 2015. Playing It Again in Post-Communism: The Revolutionary Rhetoric of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 18(sup1), S153–S166. Szombati, Kristóf, and Anna Szilágyi. 2020. Enemy in the Making. The Language of “Anti-Sorosism” in the U.S. and Hungary. Political Research Associates, July 9, 2020. https://www.politicalresearch.org/2020/07/09/ enemy-making (Last accessed June 24, 2021). Wæver, Ole. 1998. Security, Insecurity and Asecurity in the West-European NonWar Community. In Adler, Emmanuel, and Michael Barnett, eds. Security Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 69–118.

The Voice and Message of Hugo Chávez: A Rhetorical Analysis Pierre Ostiguy

Hugo Chávez is one of the world’s most emblematic populist leaders of the 21st century, particularly in left-wing populism. He was also profoundly Latin American. What is incomprehensible, regarding a leader who talked so much—incessantly, in fact—and who had such a worldhistorical importance, is how few analyses exist of his actual rhetoric, that is, his peculiar discourse, his distinctive delivery, his way of addressing his audience. Analyses of Chávez often leave us with a general sense of “anti-imperialism”, anti-neoliberalism, an exaggerated imagery (such as “the smell of sulfur” at the UN after Bush spoke), red berets and a “larger-than-life” personality. To many leftists in Latin America, he simply embodied twenty-first-century socialism and resistance to US power in Latin America, and they were uninterested in his characteristic discursive obsessions. To the democratic center-right, he was another authoritarian, bombastic caudillo whose own words were basically “noise”. Perhaps the sheer number of televised words he uttered as president from 1999 to his death in 2013 is so gargantuan that it discouraged

P. Ostiguy (B) Escuela de Administración Pública, Universidad de Valparaíso, Valparaiso, Chile e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Kock and L. Villadsen (eds.), Populist Rhetorics, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6_8

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systematic analysts. Yet there were clear rhetorical patterns in them, and they were consequential. This chapter is about Chávez’ populist rhetoric. Three established scholarly approaches to populism seem relevant here. There is, first, the “ideational” approach, one of whose leading scholars (Hawkins 2009, 2010) has written abundantly on Chávez. More broadly, Mudde (2004), Stanley (2008), Mudde and Rovira (2012), and Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017) are among the scholars who have developed an approach originally called “ideological”, since renamed “ideational”. Second, there is the ontological approach of Ernesto Laclau, highlighting populist “logic”; one of its leaders has co-authored an article on Chávez (Stavrakakis et al. 2016). Third, there is the relational-performative approach (also called sociocultural), to which I have contributed (Ostiguy 2009, 2014, 2017; Ostiguy and Moffitt 2021), partly inspired by the spectacular way Chávez delivered his speeches and related to “his” people as well as to his adversaries.

A Field That Should Take the Time to Listen The ideational approach to populism claims to be about the worldview of populists as expressed in their discourse. Populism is defined beforehand—often following Cas Mudde’s much cited definition, sometimes with variations, as with Kirk Hawkins—after which speeches are often scored on how much they conform to the a priori definition. However, comparative scores based on the a priori definition may not be of much help in investigating the actual utterances of populist leaders. Such an approach listens little; if only meanings constituting the definition count as populist, challenges or amendments are foreclosed. We learn and understand less than we might about what these populists say, about how they say it, and how and what they seem to think. For example, Cas Mudde emphasizes the notion of the “pure” people, but Chávez never talks about a “pure” people. That may characterize right-wing populism in Europe, but not Latin American populism. Hawkins emphasizes the idea of the “will of the people”, but Chávez does not talk about the will of the people. He does talk—all the time— about “the people”, the people “of Bolívar”, its great destiny, its hard tasks ahead, its greatness, and his love for the people, but not about a particular, given “will” of the people. Similarly, I have never once heard

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Chavez mention a notion of “Anything Goes”, an idea that is discursively absent. Comparing Chávez’ actual discourse with the ideationists’ list of populist features, there are, even more importantly, crucial omissions. The religious mode of Chávez’ rhetoric is clearly apparent, but few scholars have discussed it. A notable exception is the 2008 article of José Pedro Zuquete. Although it is centered on his own particular thesis regarding “missionary politics”, its approach does not make the rhetoric invisible, but foregrounds it to support the thesis. The present chapter is in dialogue with that piece of inductive scholarship. Another major theme, ignored by analysts but omnipresent for most Latin American populists, is love. Non-populist politicians may have a program, but populist politicians in Latin America love the pueblo, the subalterns, the nation. Both Evita in Argentina and Chávez in Venezuela were “consumed by love”. Evita was of course consumed by her love for Perón and for the pueblo, which in her rhetoric are indistinguishable. Chávez, in a different operation, is consumed with love for Bolívar—and the people. Likewise, conventional quantitative content analyses of programs (e.g., the work of Budge et al. 1987) tell us little politically about the actual rhetoric of populists like Chávez. Two constant topics in Chávez’ discourse are the love of the fatherland (la patria) and his devotion to Christ. These “issue positions” would clearly mark Chávez as a rightwing politician in the standard literature in both Europe and the United States. His rhetoric is that of a patriotic lover of Christ and of his country’s flag. Yet no right-wing populists in Europe consider Chávez one of theirs. His non-Venezuelan leftist admirers, for their part, ignore that there is almost no mention of “the working class”, nor of feminism or LGBT rights. Yet Chávez is undoubtedly a leftist. How can these facts be reconciled? Should we calculate the ratio of references to poverty to mentions of patria or Christ? No; one must get inside Chávez’ discourse to grasp the peculiar logic of his rhetoric. This chapter will try just that. Also, what I call his performative mode is key. I will argue that this mode and the peculiar logic of his rhetoric are two sides of the same coin. This point is at the core of the performative approach to populism.1 Stavrakakis et al. (2016), from a different perspective, have written cogently on Chavismo using the theoretical apparatus of Laclau, that 1 See in that regard in particular Ostiguy et al. (2021), as well as the earlier work of Moffitt.

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is, from an “Essx School” perspective. With their notion of “Caesaroplebeian populism” they offer a political and normative analysis of Chavismo’s promises, pitfalls and tensions, rather than a study of Chávez’ actual rhetoric, which is not their main object. But they nonetheless grasp truly central elements of Chávez’ discourse: the appeal to the “people”; Chávez himself as a figure; and, to some extent, “protagonistic democracy” (2016, 58). In contrast, this chapter analyses Chávez’ actual rhetoric, including some notable peculiarities of his performative mode.

An Inductive Analysis As De Cleen et al. state, “the term ‘discourse’ means many different things” (2021, 24). They distinguish between three levels of abstraction. “Discourse” may refer to (a) all meaningful practices in society (the approach of Discourse Theory); (b) “language use typical of a particular institution or field (e.g. medical discourse)”, or more precisely, “discourses, in plural, as structures of meaning”, each “giving meaning to the world in different ways”, in a struggle for hegemony; and (c) stretches of spoken language, speeches, written texts, that is, “different kinds of ‘texts’ giving rise to a ‘more linguistically inspired discourse analytical approach” (2021, 27). This chapter moves on the latter two levels. One of its aims is, in the process, to inductively grasp the “Chavista discourse” as a specific structure of meanings that was part of a struggle for hegemony, both in Venezuela and at the continental level. The approach remains, to be sure, a discursive one, complementary to the usual political science approaches and epistemology. One (largely discursive) approach to populism is the relationalperformative one. The rhetoric and discourse of Chávez (in the third sense, just cited, of “discourse”) fit this approach like a glove. A relational-performative approach allows us to capture and focus on Hugo Chávez´ unique and remarkable performative mode. Watching and hearing Hugo Chávez is an experience; not surprisingly, PBS titled its Frontline documentary on him “The Hugo Chávez Show”. The chapter has three sections. First, I will show how features of the vocabulary of the rhetoric of Chávez, his pronounced taste for personal insults and his deliberate use of swear words are all characteristic of what I have defined as “the low”. Fidel Castro and Chávez were leftists, as is Iñigo Errejón in Spain, but only Chávez lavishly goes “low”.

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Secondly, the chapter focuses on Chávez’ performative mode. Much neglected in studies of Chávez, but central to a live experience of him, is his delivery: the epic intonations and baritone voice, his singing on television, his bodily contact with subordinates, his unmistakable body language. The captivating appeals of Chávez’ discourse originate in his masterful and inimitable mode of delivery. Thirdly, I focus on the charateristic, peculiar logic and the several unusual conceptual operations carried out in Chavez’ rhetoric. I have found the most pronounced version of this pattern in a particularly important and telling speech, given at the peak of his power just after winning the referendum that allowed him to run for re-election indefinitely, delivered from what he called the “balcony of the people” on February 15, 2009. The inductive discussion of such a speech leads the analysis to focus not so much on its substantive content, but on (a) the semantic operations Chávez uniquely performs, and (b) what they tell us about Chávez’ worldview (independently of any a priori, ideational concept) and his role in it. Chávez talked, all the time, for fourteen years. Some political leaders work mainly through backroom deals and carefully hone their public addresses; Chávez was unscripted. He never used a teleprompter; and it was unimaginable that he would. He improvised, following a series of recognizable scripts, reiterating his favorite obsessions, from Simón Bolívar to George W. Bush to the Venezuelan pueblo. A signature feature of Chávez’ presidency was the weekly Sunday TV show Aló Presidente. There, Chávez talked and talked, received phone calls from viewers, sang, explained policies, questioned his ministers, made policies live on television (once deciding to send troops to the Colombian border, to the astonishment of the Minister of Defense). People knew when the show started; nobody knew when it ended. It used to last on average five to six hours, without breaks. A veritable discursive flood. And not just talk, but spectacular public speaking. Chavez was a gifted, complex, public speaker, on the low.

Hallmarks of Chávez’ Rhetoric, 1: The Master of “the Low” The socio-cultural approach to populism revolves around the categories of “low” and “high” (Ostiguy 2009, 2017). Populism flaunts “the low”, generally for mobilizational purposes, antagonistically (Ostiguy 2017).

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“Populist politicians … claim, loudly, politically incorrectly, and often vulgarly, to be the people’s ‘fighting hero’ …Populism as such is almost always transgressive: of the ‘proper’ way of doing politics, of proper public behavior, or of what can or ‘should’ be publicly said” (Ostiguy 2017, 76). That all applies perfectly to Chávez. The adjectives that sociologically and socio-culturally anchor the categories “low” and “high” are “coarse” and “uninhibited” for the low, “well-behaved” and “proper” for the high. It is difficult to find a politician more coarse and uninhibited in public speaking than Chávez. One note of caution. Because of class prejudice, it is an easy temptation to assign lesser intelligence to coarse characters, who are seen as “behaving like brutes” in public, and greater mental sophistication to those with sophisticated language and manners. With several successful populist politicians much on the “low”, such as Chavez or Huey Long in Louisiana, nothing is further from the truth. Chávez possessed a political intelligence rarely equaled among “high” and “sophisticated” politicians, including Vargas Llosa in Peru. In Chávez’ “low” rhetoric, nothing is more striking than his use of direct, coarse insults in referring publicly to his enemies. His more frequent discursive targets were, in the first years of his governments, the “oligarchy”, also referred to as los escualidos (the squalid ones), and then the United States (from 2002 on), referred to geopolitically as “the empire” or, in a metonymic ad hominem way, “George W. Bush”. In September 2008, the Evo Morales government of Bolivia was involved in what was basically a civil-secessionist war between the more right-wing, opposition lowland and the more left-wing and more indigenous pro-Evo highland. Morales expelled the US Ambassador, who he claimed was supporting the opposition. Chávez, in—yet another—massive rally at the Carabobo stadium, in solidarity with Evo’s Bolivia, shouted at the top of his lungs: Go to fucking hell, you shitty Yankees!! (¡Vayanse al carajo, Yanquis de mierda!). This here, this is a dignified people (un pueblo digno)! Here, there is a dignified people, shitty Yankees! Go to hell one hundred times! (¡Vayanse al carajo cien veces!) Here we are, the sons of Bolívar! The sons

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of Guaicaipuro2 ! The sons of Tupac Amaru.3 And we have resolved to be free.

Linking words to practice, he also gave the US Ambassador 72 hours to leave the country. Two years earlier in March 2006, in an episode of Aló Presidente in an outdoor setting that perfectly fit the notion of Venezuela’s heartland, the llanos (the plains) with impressive bulls grazing in the background, Chávez, reacting to the US invasion of Iraq, went all the way in a series of personalized, deliberately improper, coarse insults against Bush, which I believe has no equivalent in modern history: You messed up with me, little birdy! (Te metiste conmigo, pajarito!) You messed up with me, little birdy. You don’t know much about history.4 You don’t know much about anything, you know. A great ignorance is what you have. You are an ignorant, Mr. Danger! You are an ignoramus. You are an ass, Mr. Danger. You are an ass, Mr. Danger. Or to say it to you in my bad English, in my bad English, you are a donkey, Mr. Danger. You are a donkey.5 I am referring, you guys know, to fully spell it out, to Mr. George W. Bush. You are a donkey, Mr. Bush! I’m going to tell you something, Mr. Danger. You are a coward, you know. You are a coward. Why don’t you go to Iraq to lead your Armed Forces. It is easy to command from afar. If one day insanity makes you invade Venezuela, I’ll wait for you in those savannas!! Come on here, Mr. Danger!! Come on here! Coward, assassin, genocider (genocida)…genocider. You are a genocider. You are an alcoholic, Mr. Danger! That is, you are a drunkard. You’re a drunkard, Mr. Danger.

2 Guaicaipuro was an indigenous leader at the time of the Spanish conquest of what today is Venezuela, who ferociously opposed the Spaniards. 3 Tupac Amaru is a famous eighteenth-century figure in what is today Bolivia, who led a major indigenous rebellion against both the Spanish royal authorities and the white social elite. Note the judicious choice of historical figures by Chávez: two indigenous leaders, in honor of the nature of the struggle in Bolivia, one from Venezuela, one from Bolivia. 4 Chávez’ encyclopedic (although not always accurate) knowledge of Venezuelan and Latin American history contrasts sharply with his purposely coarse, rude language. 5 The part italicized is said in English, by Chávez. He wants to make sure Bush understands his insults.

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You are of the worst kind (de lo peor), Mr. Danger. How do you say de lo peor in English? You are the last! The worst that has been on this planet! The worst (lo peorcito) that has ever been is called George W. Bush! Because he is an assassin! A sicko! A man who is psychologically ill. I know it! Personally, he is a coward!

“Mr. Danger”, in English in the original, is a character in a popular Venezuelan novel—a greedy American land speculator in the llanos. Notice also Chávez’ use of the pronoun tu, to address a foreign president he does not know personally. In this case, its use is to flaunt a lack of respect. Male bravado of course permeates the speech, with the “Come on here!”; but also, in the military/populist tradition to which Chávez proudly belongs, with the call to lead his men on the ground (as generals did in the eighteenth Century), not from a desk. Chávez carefully chose insults involving problems Bush allegedly had: alcoholism, poor school performance, a complex regarding his father, etc. As often emphasized, populism typically involves personalism, the other component of “the low”; both Chávez’ leadership of Venezuela and his insults to the American leader are remarkably personalistic. A last example of the recurrent, purposeful and characteristic use of coarse language in public by Chávez is his 2007 press conference after his first defeat at the urns, at the constitutional referendum to make Venezuela a socialist country. Here Chávez crudely enjoined the opposition: “Know how to administer your victory, because you are filling it with shit. It is a shitty victory, and ours, call it a defeat, but it is one of courage!”. The “low” is defined in my work as made up of three discursive elements (inverted from the “high”). The use of coarse and uninhibited rhetoric and of a warm, direct interpersonal mode of relating to the public has already been emphasized here, at the social-cultural level. The two other constitutive elements are the discursive and performative emphasis on the “from here”, and the explicitly personalistic preferred mode of decision-making, as opposed to one respecting procedures (Ostiguy 2017, Fig. 4.2). And indeed, markedly so, a second outstanding element pervading Chávez’ speech is the emphasis on the “from here”, on “home pride”, and at times, more specifically, on what Taggart has called the mythical heartland (2000, 95–99)—in Venezuela, the llanos, from which Chávez

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hails. Chávez’ discourse is peppered with geographic, musical, and historical localisms, intelligible to ordinary Venezuelans but perhaps not to academic readers. In a video circulated in the context of the 2012 presidential elections, one hears Chávez wholeheartedly singing a folksong of Apure, in the heartland of the llanos, accompanied by the folkloric harp of the plains (while images show us Chávez hugging and saluting people from Apure).6 In terms of dress code, Chávez certainly innovated drastically as a presidential figure, dressing up in a jacket made entirely of the Venezuelan flag. Geographically, Chavez’ “from here” is configured in concentric circles: at the center are the llanos (with his own home state, Barinas); then Venezuela, certainly the most important ring; then Latin America, or what Latin Americans call the patria grande (more a project than a reality, but linked to identity) and the Caribbean; last (and least relevant) all “Third World” countries, notably including Palestine and Iran. The third element of the “low”, operating more at the politicocultural level, is personalism both in political leadership and as an explicitly preferred mode of decision-making. This is set against proceduralism and the formalist concern for institutions and rules (reglamentos ), so strong in countries with no or weak populist traditions, like Chile. Taking personalism’s logic to its limit is the mythical fusion, or the “embodiment” (encarnación), of the people as a whole (el pueblo) with the persona of the leader, recurrent in Chávez’ rhetoric. Not only does Chávez’ persona incarnate the people (especially “the popular sectors”7 ) of Venezuela, but as Chávez keeps repeating, “Chávez is the people”. And the individuals plurally making up the people are also Chávez. One of the main televised campaign ads for Chávez during the 2012 presidential election went: Chávez, it’s not me anymore. Chávez, it’s a people (es un pueblo).

6 “Ay, San Fernando de Apure! I will never be able to forget you. When I see your savanna, I feel the urge to cry… in the green immensity, the heart of your people is an eternal memory of love and cordiality.” 7 The “popular sectors” is an academic term routinely used in Latin American social sciences. It refers to the social strata below the middle class. In terms of conventional sociology, it mostly includes the working class, the urban informal sectors (that is, the poor without steady jobs in the formal sector of the economy), the lower-middle class, and, importantly also, the peasantry. In Latin America the default social basis of populism is the popular sectors (almost by definition). The pueblo, in that sense, is mostly made up of the popular sectors.

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Chávez, we’re millions. You are also Chávez, Venezuelan woman. You are also Chávez, Venezuelan youth. You are also Chávez, Venezuelan kid. You are also Chávez, Venezuelan soldier. You are also Chávez, fisherman, farmer, peasant … small business owner. Because Chávez, it’s not me; Chávez, it’s a people!!

It is difficult to adequately translate un pueblo or un peuple from a Romance language into English. It is not just that Chávez is “the people” in an abstract, generic sense. He is a particular people, the Venezuelan people, thus “a people”. He is a people as both (a) the “popular” sectors, in a sociologically stratified, or “vertical” way and (b) a “here versus there” way, as in the people “from here”. In Chávez’ rhetoric, “Chávez” is used metonymically for the collectivity as a whole. This collective, however, is not a community of plural citizens, but a concrete specific body, one that is both popular and from here. In the above ad, the masculine and imposing Chávez can be identical with any demographic among the people, including Venezuelan women, youths or kids. The logic is not demographic or physical similarity, as in Pitkin’s “descriptive representation” (1967), but embodiment (Ostiguy and Moffitt 2021).

Hallmarks of Chávez’ Rhetoric, 2: The Performative Mode (Epic Poetry and Graphic Exaggerations) As important as words spoken, vocabulary used, insults, songs, and level of language flaunted is the way Chávez delivers his discourse, the register in which he frames his public statements. Striking to any listener is how Chávez employs a poetic register, and with apparent delight. As a captivating storyteller, Chávez also draws on images all the time. His favorite poetic register is drawn from epic poetry, which lends his speeches their intonation and their images of horses galloping, legendary historical battles, providential rain, heroic fighters, etc. Probably the most notable feature of Chávez’ performative mode is what rhetoric calls delivery or actio: the intonation, the characteristic cadence or rhythm, the baritone voice, the expressive wave of the arm. This sense of epic is definitely meant to take us (and himself) out of the ordinary, into an enchanted world, with history in the making. There is in that sense a parallel between the

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grandiose, enchanted, at times tragic world of Chávez and Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics and music in Born to Run. Both have kindled, in so many listeners, a strong sense of attachment and class-national identity, nacional y popular. Many Europeans and American liberals tend to associate militarism with authoritarianism, and, as such, with the political right. Chávez is himself a military man: he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, was actually in the field and became Commander of the Battalion of Paratroopers, thus earning quite a “macho” image. Hence, Chávez’ conception of the armed forces is not centered on a hierarchical (bureaucraticauthoritarian) chain of command, but on action, on leading men in battles and challenges. Chávez defined himself “first and foremost as a soldier of the patria”. His favorite trope, most characteristic of his style of rhetoric, is that of the heroic historical battle. Elections for Chávez were not contests between different programs or candidates. They were battles to be won, by massive organization, through tireless effort, tactics, and bravery. One battle does not make a war, but Chávez’ battles succeeded one another at a dizzying pace. Each electoral campaign was named not after a specific goal or program, but after a famous and/or legendary nineteenth-century historical battle—preferably one led by General Bolívar, the liberator of South America, but also at times by Ezequiel Zamora, military leader of the Federales (mostly of the llanos ) against the conservative centralists.8 To Chávez, each electoral victory brought closer the realization of the dream of Bolívar; each constituted a battle on the road to national and continental emancipation. Comandante Chávez, of course, was in front. Before red became the omnipresent color of Chavismo, Chávez used to dress in green military fatigues, often with the now well-known red beret of his parachute regiment. The way Chávez wraps himself in a poetic register, in epic battles and historic heroism, makes him not just an orator, but a captivating storyteller, a performer, in his actio. Chávez’ delivery, unlike conventional politicians’ scripted speeches, also took advantage of fortuitous, at times disturbing occurrences while he spoke. He never used a teleprompter. 8 One of the slogans of Zamora was ‘Land and Free Men’. He was also called the General of the Sovereign People. A similar civil war between Federal forces of the hinterland and more Europeanized, centralist forces occurred in Argentina around the same time.

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Only with Chávez could one experience, as I did in August 2004 at the time of the recall referendum, a celebratory mass rally which began at 4 a.m. and lasted until 6 a.m. After singing the national anthem a capella with the crowd from the Presidential “Balcony of the People”, he said: “It is 4:30 in the morning. This is the good hour for us! We are good at any hour. But especially between midnight and dawn we set on the run one hundred devils (ponemos a correr cien diablos )!” In the cold before dawn, halfway during the speech, it started to rain. Improvising in the face of this setback, Chavez explained: “This shower, we will take it as a holy water that is falling from the sky”. Raising his arm and looking upward he declared: “A gift of God!” Later on in the speech, as it continued to pour down, he said: While the sun is coming out [it was not, P.O.], under this morning rain, and on this day of victory, I want us to remember that verse from Marti, which I recite from the soul: I, on this August 15, have received, once more, from you, a rain of love. A rain of love. You guys have given me an untold strength to continue fighting together with you guys all my life. All that I have left of life, I will dedicate it to the beautiful struggle (la lucha hermosa) that God has allowed us to wage on these days, in these years.

It is difficult to convey the beautiful cadence of his declaration of having received, with the vote, “untold strength to continue fighting together with you guys all my life. All that I have left of life”. Since he had not been recalled, he vowed to work as a “soldier of the Venezuelan people” not only until the end of his mandate (in 2006), but for the rest of his life, dedicating it all to his people. His sense of the situation led him to spontaneously proclaim in that same speech: “I will inform you of something. As I know that all the people [todo el pueblo] of Venezuela has been without rest for the past day (jornada), for more than 24 hours, I have decided to declare tomorrow a holiday!” Realizing a moment later that this had complicated legal entailments, he had to add some necessary specifications and exceptions. Then, jokingly, Chávez said: “They have just informed me that the ball has fallen right in the center of the White House! Right in the middle of the White House! A gift for Bush!” In a different tone, he intoned, in an epic cadence: “The Venezuelan people has spoken!” Gesticulating with vigor: “And the voice of the people is the voice of God! Believe me that I will continue working with greater determination, with greater dedication, to give to God what is of God,

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to Cesar what is of Cesar, and to the people what is of the people, to Venezuela what is of Venezuela!” With epic grandeur he proclaimed: “You have written another heroic page for the great history of Venezuela!” Epic, religious, poetic, and national-folkloric features found their synthesis in the Venezuelan narrative poem (similar to gaucho poetry in Argentina) that Chávez had chosen as a frame for the battle of the recall referendum: the mid-twentieth-century text by Alberto Torrealba, Florentino and the Devil. Florentino, an ordinary rural man from the plains (llanos ), is challenged by the Devil to a duel. Chávez’ campaign ran numerous political cartoons showing the Devil (usually the oligarchy or the United States) as a wolf trying to fool Florentino, drawn in the three colors of the Venezuelan flag. Florentino always unmasks him, full well knowing his material interests, and therefore voting “No”.9 In closing his dawn speech, Chávez proclaimed: Florentino has won. We have defeated the Devil. “Now, sirs, you shall see the Devil having a bad time. San Miguel! Give me your sword, Your lance and your knife. Blessed Child of Atocha”.10 Since you have bathed me with love, I reply to you, with José Marti, to tell you this: Count on me! On me, for all our life (para toda la vida). Love is paid with love. Viva Venezuela!

Chávez’ performative mode often involved rhyming and puns, such as, at the alternative summit of Mar del Plata in 2005 in front of a large crowd: “We are going to say it: ALCA (the name of the FTAA in Spanish), ALCA, al ca…rajo!” [Literally but without the pun: ALCA, the fucking hell with it!] Most strikingly, it extended into song. If insults expressed antagonism and lack of respect, singing, with Chávez, expressed love, bonding and display of affection. Both occurred, in typical “low” style, with extreme informality. In one of the innumerable Aló Presidente 9 Scholars of the ideational approach emphasize the demonization by populists of political adversaries (e.g., Hawkins 2010; De la Torre 1997, 16), but the characterization of the ‘Yes’ side as the Devil in those ads seemed rather tongue-in-cheek, emphasizing how the ordinary Venezuelan was not going to get fooled by powerful interests. 10 The part in quotes is from the poem itself. The Holy Infant of Atocha is an image of Christ as a kid, popular in the Spanish-speaking world.

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episodes, a female caller asked the president to sing a love song from the llanos for her. “I don’t know if Maria is lovesick (está en Guayaba)”, said Chávez, using a colloquial and local term. “But she is asking me to sing to her Lucerito de mi llano”. “Is there are harp around here?” he asked his staff, on the air. (The harp is a main folk instrument in the llanos.) “♪Lucerito ♫de mi llano ♪ ♪Alúmbrame ♫mi camino ♪”. And little by little, a guitar produced out of nowhere by his staff starts playing the tune, adjusting to Chávez’ voice. Chávez starts singing on television, interjecting words of his own into the lyrics to María, the caller. Lucerito, lucerito, look, I am going to cry [Total heartbreak, man! (¡Pura guayaba, compadre!) ♪On the waters of the Arauca River, ♫he went to travel in a local riverboat (bongo). ♪ I dedicate that song to Maria and to Rosa! (he raises his hand, with love) [Meanwhile, the camera shows close ups of women smiling coyly in the audience.] ♪And the foam tells me ♫he will soon forget me. ♪

Love is omnipresent in populist discourse in Latin America. That is true of Chávez, but love was even more central in the discourse of Evita in Argentina and also at the forefront in the electoral ads of Cristina Kirchner. As the iconic Peronist March programmatically put it: “This great Argentine [Juan Perón] works without rest, so that love and equality may reign in the people”. Characteristically, the lyrics of the informal anthem of Chavismo under Chávez (“Uh! Ah! Chávez is not leaving”) go: “a President who truly loves his people” and declare that “the people are happy and full of happiness. That’s why he’ll stay, you’ll see!” I have called the approach to populism that I advocate relational. What is more relational, especially when performed, than love? Populists are generally depicted both popular and scholarly literature as “angry”, as vectors of resentments and/or fear, and as distrustful of culturally different people. Yet love is central in the discourse of Latin American populists. The two facets are not incompatible. Love is indeed generally felt toward something particular: love toward the in-group, toward one’s people, toward the compañeros, the desire (in Latin American populisms) to concretely help the downtrodden; but it may well go together with hostility toward a threatening out-group, a combative attitude toward privileged social elites, annoyance with compatriots who refuse to join

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this movement of love. There is nothing more alien to populism than a cultivated pluralistic indifference toward difference and disagreements.11 Drawing on a recurrent script, Chávez stated with passion: You know that I belong to you (cheers ). What I have left of life, whatever God wants, I am going to turn 49 this year…. All the years I have left of life, I will dedicate them fully to the struggle for the Venezuelan people, which I love more than my life, because you are a heroic people, you are a lovely people (un pueblo bonito), you are a great, heroic, liberating people (Cheers ). (Chávez 2003a, 143)

“Love”, or more precisely “falling in love”, as Freud would have it, is often paradoxically an act of narcissism. Chávez did not express love for anyone in particular, but for the “Venezuelan pueblo”, which happens to be “great, heroic, liberating”, just as he wishes to be himself . The adulation he genuinely received from “his people” reinforced his sense of commitment to this love, which is none other than the Chávez cause. Any limits on reelection, for example, would thus be a severe blow to this bond of eternal love. Chávez later recalled: Someone asked me—I remember clearly twelve years later: “Where are you heading now, Comandante?” And I remember that I answered more or less the following: “Look, we are going to take power, but to take power we’re going to the catacomb with the pueblo, to merge, to fuse together (a fundirnos ) with this beautiful, immense pueblo, the people of Simón Bolívar.” Twelve years later, I ratify that. My life is yours. My life does not belong to me. It is the Venezuelan people’s. Here, we will be in an embrace (estaremos abrazados ) like that, like that embrace, like that until the end of our days. (Aló Presidente 250, 26 March 2006. Italics added.)

This is the fusional language of love. Even more in Spanish than English, is it an extremely romantic, and erotic, image. The language and praxis of populism is distinctively that of proximity, including bodily proximity (Ostiguy 2017, 79; Ostiguy et al. 2021, 6). But with Chávez, it goes beyond that: it is a language and rhetoric of fusion, of bodily love. Liberal 11 There are indeed two possible dyads here: love toward one’s own vs. indifference toward the rest; and the more militant love vs. negative feelings toward those against our love.

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scholars are bound to note that the language of fusion is also the opposite of individuation, alien to rationalistic deliberation and pluralism. Fusion displays the two facets mentioned above: love and antagonism. What liberal democrats may not perceive is that such fusional language is not that of a totalitarian ideological project; ideology (when it is there at all) takes the back seat. It is not “indoctrination”, but it involves a public display of loyalty and love to the leader, and of the dedication and love of the leader toward his people. But unlike cults of personality, where fear is often a motivating factor, in populism and its logic, the sentiments at play (and on display) are love and acrimonious antagonism. To losing an election would contradict the claim that the pueblo actually loves Chávez. Electoral fraud would also undermine that claim. For that reason—and especially in the case of Chávez—every election is an epic battle, where he must win the majority of the people, achieving “victory” and confirming their love. The bond with the people is therefore displayed, for all to see.

Hallmarks of Chávez’ Rhetoric, 3: An Idiosyncratic Logic Chavez’ logic is both powerful and unusual. I find it particularly on display, in an accentuated form, in his February 15, 2009 speech, after winning the referendum that allowed him to continue running for reelection indefinitely, where he spoke from the “balcony of the people”. Here, I consider the logic of what Chávez is saying, as a truly “ideational” analysis should, working bottom-up from Chávez’ own discourse to its analysis. Chávez had been re-elected for the third time in 2006, with a large margin: 63% for him, 37% for the opposition. Around that time, he also moved to a clearly socialist position, forming close ties with Fidel Castro, adopting the color red all over, and so forth. In 2007, in an ambitious move, he proposed a drastic modification of the constitution he himself had written seven years before, in order to turn Venezuela into a socialist state and allow for his own indefinite re-election. That electoral battle was the only one that Chávez ever lost in his fourteen years in power. The margin was close, however: 51% against, 49% in favor. Chávez conceded that he had lost, “for now” (echoing his discourse after his failed coup of 1992, which had “not achieved for now its objectives”). Then, in February 2009, after a surprising and particularly rapid campaign, a new referendum was held, but this time only to (basically)

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allow the indefinite re-election of the president. This time Chávez won 55–45%. With a “no” to the first referendum and a “yes” to the second one, Chávez seemed to be undoubtedly more popular than socialism itself. People voted for him, in a “relational” way, not for a particular program or economic system. Chávez understood it a bit differently, however. In the 2009 speech, Chávez was at the peak of his power, he had been re-elected repeatedly, and a majority had approved indefinite re-election, in line with the slogan repeated ad infinitum over the years by Chávez supporters: “Uh, ah! Chávez is not going away!” This victory fed the Chavista discourse that “Chávez is a people” and had been entrusted to lead the nation’s destiny. At the rhetorical level, four characteristic maneuvers stand out: (1) making key terms, quite different from one another semantically, synonymous; (2) metonymy (which in a way is closely related to the first); (3) daring distortions of world history; and (4) most interesting of all, a conception of time that is not chronological, but prophetic. The preferred terms are the same, as always: the patria, the pueblo, Simón Bolívar, eternity. The speech starts on a rationalist pragmatic note, warning the people that because of the current circumstances, 2009 is a time of consolidation of gains, rather than one of further steps forward: a time “to rectify, to adjust, to strengthen”. Then, in an idiosyncratic frontal attack on representative democracy, alternation, and competing electoral parties, Chávez states that an ill-defined “they” … had imposed on Venezuela and on the people of Latin America a system of rotation of governments so accelerated that they made the rise of a longterm national project impossible. In Venezuela we have brought down these limits! Together we will build a powerful Venezuela!

Chávez, his mandates—the rise of a national project for the long term, and turning Venezuela into a great world power—are to be sure equated. First, limits, whether personal or institutional, are bad, as a road-block for plenitude. Chávez’ ego and the “collective self” of the Venezuelan people are also the same, as the two are not only bound by love, as we saw, but fused; a great, heroic Chávez is a great, heroic Venezuela. His goal, against cynics, is not to take advantage of the people or to enrich himself, but to achieve this merging, “consuming myself in the process”:

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The poor Venezuela of the past had fallen into the hands of cliques, had fallen into the hands of party factions, which dominated her, shrank her, weakened her, diminished her. They distributed amongst themselves the crumbs of power, like hyenas exploiting the patria, weakening her, shrinking her. Now this is over! Here a government for the long term with the people has arrived in Venezuela!!

What becomes eternal here is not Chávez himself as president, but the patria: “the fatherland! The eternal fatherland! The perennial fatherland! The durable fatherland! The Patria grande”. Because it is good for Venezuela and aims for Venezuela’s greatness, he and his project should be eternal, because the patria (identified with him and his project) is and should be eternal and vital, not shrunken and weakened. Both will unfold, in vitalist bliss. Chávez the performer is ever aware of his surroundings. He hears the crowd chanting something like “victory”. “Victory… Ah! History”, he says. “So here we have the students of the History Center of the Universidad Central de Venezuela. Long live the students!” he proclaims, tapping his talent for improvisation and off-script remarks. “Well, you should study history, the full history, and spread it!”. Then starts the part of the speech most worth studying attentively. “Synonimization”, a neologism created for the present purpose, and historical distortions occur on a massive, unabashed scale—in the battle for hegemony—in conjunction with prophetic time: Today, February 15th , it is 190 years since the day on which Simón Bolívar set up the Congress of Angostura, and the Third Republic was born, the Bolívarian Republic, the pre-socialist Republic that died with Bolívar and that today has been reborn at the hands of the pueblo! Bolívar, Bolívar wrote it and said it, speaking about this revolution, the one that he started 200 years ago together with the people and the leaders of that time. Bolívar said it: “The impulse of this revolution is given, nothing nor anybody will be able to stop it; what’s upon us,” said Bolívar, “is to give it the correct direction, to this revolution”. Today this revolution, this correct direction, is called: socialism. Socialism! Socialism: the Kingdom of God on earth, the realm of peace, of justice and equality, what Christ came to announce more than 2,000 years ago. Socialism: a society where we all live as brothers, as equals, a society of social justice and peace, of joy and happiness. Simón Bolívar said it, just like that: “We must triumph only by way of revolution, any other way

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would mean the failure of the patriots”. I want to repeat it today: only through the path of revolution will we have a fatherland (patria), and will we have victory forever.

First, the dates are highly meaningful: on February 15, a new Republic is created twice in Venezuela, by two great heroes of its history: the Third Republic of Bolívar and the Fifth Republic of Chávez, both created for greatness and happiness on that key date. Secondly, we hear that Bolívar, a conservative Republican politician (not unlike George Washington), was a “pre-socialist”, a proto-socialist. But thirdly and most importantly, Bolívar said it, and now it is happening. The greatest prophet and guide of the Venezuelan people, its Moses, said it and announced it, and now it is unfolding. Bolívar, in 1819, spoke about this revolution of 2009 (which after all is just a referendum). Bolívar, in his wisdom, knew that such sociopolitical processes, when unleashed, needed a “correct direction”. And, despite the fact that it had been rejected the year before, Chávez tells us what that direction is: socialism! Bolívar himself, stretching the already stretched message, approves the rebirth of his own revolution under Chávez, with a socialist direction. The fact that the Bolívar of the early nineteenth century would in no way have condoned socialism is irrelevant here. More pertinently, Chavez purposely ignores that just a year and three months before, the Venezuelan electorate had rejected socialism as a socioeconomic system to be institutionalized for Venezuela. Chávez had won. The people loved Chávez. And Chávez knows that the correct direction for the process he leads is socialism. So there, the patria will go. As if recourse to Bolívar was not enough, the project that Chávez wants to make a reality for Venezuela is none other than the project of Christ. In line with liberation theology, socialism is the Kingdom of God on earth. God’s kingdom—a realm of social justice—can be created, here and now, on this earth, through sociopolitical will. The project Chávez is trying to make real is both the project of Bolívar and the project of Christ. And both Bolivar and Christ announced the day of today. Finally, even though Chávez’ electoral contests and victories may look like normal events in the mundane world of politics and elections, they are not. Make no mistake: he sees revolution happening. “Only through the path of revolution will we have patria”, and, “as Bolívar said it: We must triumph only by way of revolution, any other would mean the failure of the patriots”. Bolívar becomes synonymous with Che and Fidel:

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all are socialist revolutionaries, creating a revolution for the long term, with a socialist direction. And as Chávez stated in a 2005 Aló Presidente, bringing Christ (and thus Christianity) on board: Christ was a rebel. Christ lived, he was a human being, he was a rebel, an anti-imperialist rebel; he confronted the Roman Empire, he confronted the economic, political, military and ecclesiastical elite of his time, and he ended up, well, we know this, crucified and resurrected. (Aló Presidente 234, 25 September 2005)

Christ is like Bolívar and Chávez, and Chávez does what Christ did and Bolívar announced. All are socialist revolutionaries emancipating the people and promoting similar projects. The process through which Chávez works and attains power, oddly enough, is more similar, formally, to that of Allende in 1970 than to the armed battles of Bolívar or the armed revolution of Chávez’ “older brother” Fidel. There is however this ominous claim clearly stated by Chávez: “we will have victory forever”. That is, it is inconceivable that Chavismo could lose power, and that the “system of rotation of governments” could be allowed to prevent the project from being accomplished. It would “weaken the patria, shrink the patria”, and imply going back to a system “of party factions” that used to exploit the patria like a pack of hyenas. While Nicolás Maduro, successor of Chávez, has none of Chávez’ talents, and only a diminutive portion of his legitimacy and popularity, he has been faithful to Chávez’ resolve not to give way to this weakening rotation of power. Chávez enunciates the following terminological equivalencies, magisterially, establishing in one single sentence, without a verb, a series of synonyms that would madden Sartori, the master of concept formation, although it is not far from Laclau’s “equivalential” logic and “battles for hegemony”. Emphatically claimed as synonyms are: Socialist Revolution— Revolutionary Democracy— Socialist Democracy— Democratic Socialism. Thus, a key feature of Chávez’ populist rhetoric is to purposely posit as synonyms terms that are far from being so. He takes three concepts that are key to his political project and self-conception: socialism, democracy, revolution, and pairs them in all three combinations possible, making them all commutative and synonymous. A socialist revolution is a revolutionary democracy is a socialist democracy and constitutes a form of

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democratic socialism—because at the end of the day, the maximum form of democracy is socialism, which entails a revolutionary rupture or transformation. The equation could be even simpler, since a full democracy can only be socialist and therefore revolutionary in relation to the past. (The last of the combinations, missed by Chávez, was a “democratic revolution”—also a synthesis of his project.) In the proverbial conflict between “splitters” and “lumpers”, Chávez is such a “lumper” that everything becomes equivalential. With counter-factual aplomb, in light of the 2007– 2009 years, Chávez resignifies: “All those who voted Yes today, voted for socialism, voted for the revolution; and all those who voted for the Yes voted for Chávez, and to vote for Chávez is to vote for yourself!” Of course, the only strictly correct part is that they voted for Chávez, but then, Chávez is socialism and the revolution, and metonymically, Chávez is you (since Chávez is the people, and Chávez and the people are “embraced”, and “you are Chávez”). Every term is a metonymy for the others, and all are politically synonymous. His notion (or use) of prophetic time is stated most explicitly in the next section of the speech: 190 years ago Bolívar ended the Angostura speech flying towards the future, flying towards our time. He said: “Flying through the next ages [“volando por entre las proximas edades ”], my imagination fixes itself on the future centuries”, said Bolívar 200 years ago, 190 exactly, flying through the next ages, I see Venezuela free and great. “I see her!” [Bolívar, in that part of his speech, did say “I see her”, several times.] “Sitting on the throne of justice crowned with glory, showing the world of Antiquity the majesty of the new world.” [The actual speech of Bolívar says: “sitting on the throne of liberty”, not of justice—but “wielding the scepter of justice”. And the sentence ends with “the majesty of the modern world”, not of the “new” world. P.O.] Here we are, Father Bolívar, 200 years later!! Showing the world of Antiquity the majesty of the new man! The majesty of the new society, the majesty of the new man and of the new Patria.

Replacing “modern world” with “new world”, to then lead to the “New Man” is particularly witty, as the “New Man” (Hombre Nuevo) was a key slogan of the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s and its attempt to create a New Man. It would seem that the New Man (always a future-oriented project, in Cuba) became a reality in the Venezuela of Chávez in 2009.

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Besides the bombastic transformation of a referendum result (on indefinite presidential reelection) into the proclamation of the reality of a New Man in Venezuela, and the conversion of an outcome at the polls into the realization of the dream of Bolívar, what is striking here is the use of what I will call prophetic time. Bolívar, two hundred years ago, is flying toward the future and sees Venezuela, he sees us. Chávez “waves at him”, from the here and now: “Here we are!” And we have done, “showing the world”, what you were dreaming of! Bolívar, whose prophetic vision in his famous 1815 Letter from Jamaica on the respective futures of the different Latin American countries proved surprisingly accurate one century later, is now—through his “flying through the ages” in the Angostura speech—proven accurate, even prophetic, once more. But this time, it is not a social-science-like prediction (as in the Letter from Jamaica), but a celebratory one, showing the whole world, including the world of Antiquity, the Venezuela of today seated on “a throne of liberty, wielding the scepter of justice”, like a Greco-Roman goddess. Closing the speech, Chávez returns to political synonyms, this time regarding the object(s) of his life’s dedication: “Serving the people! Serving the people! Serving the Revolution! Serving Socialism! Serving the Fatherland! Serving you!” Present again are object(s) of love: “This youth! You are the owners of the patria! Boys and girls, how much I love you! Pueblo of Venezuela, how much I love you!” Finally, Chávez makes the perhaps most unheard-of statement by a politician—going much beyond the merely religious: You have committed me for the rest of my life; this is why, from the balcony of the people, I become consecrated fully to the battle to continue solving the problems of the people and so that we can keep on raising up the patria. So, I swear: I consecrate myself [me consagro] as of today much more fully, much more entirely to the construction of the new Venezuela and, as Saint Paul said: “I will consume myself on the way [me consumiré en el camino] and I will most gladly do so [y me consumiré gustosamente]” because the people deserves it and because, in truth, I have already told you, I don’t belong to myself, I belong to the pueblo of Venezuela. My life is yours. What is left for me? Serving the people. Serving the people.

And as a finale, he crowns it: “What a great victory! Today is one more example that the people of Venezuela, like a great collective Lazaro, has resuscitated from among the dead!”

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In this intensely religious, almost Eucharistic rhetoric (where the body of Chávez is eaten away for collective redemption), Chávez partly paraphrases, partly expands St. Paul, who writes, in 2 Corinthians 12:15: “I will most gladly spend and be spent for you” (King James Version).12 The ladder of power and authority is rhetorically inverted here. While we know that Chávez rules the Venezuelan people, he becomes, in a heavily Catholic twist on democratic theory, a mere servant of the pueblo, and a dedicated, self-consuming, never-resting, but willing servant of the pueblo at that. The Rousseauian frame is of course that the people, as a collective sovereign, rules over the “servant-executive” Chávez, who, in turn, clearly empirically rules over the people as individuals. Above the collective dwells, not God-the-Father, but Simón Bolívar, the Founding Father and continental Liberator. This scheme leaves little place for legitimate dissent. But it does leave room for collective disavowal in—what Canovan has called the “sacred moments” of—elections (and recall referenda), where “the people as a collective” speaks. These are moments Chávez cannot afford to lose. The reason Chávez must “consume” himself to death is that the populist leader not only purportedly embodies “the will of the people”, but must himself enact and set in motion the wheels of a “collective will”, in action. The problem with the Rousseauian framework, when applied to representative democracy and party politics, is that this will never originates from the people (la gente), but from parties or political leaders, amongst whose “wills” the voters choose (“wills” that may change during their time in office). So the will, strictly speaking, comes from the leader running for office; it is by and for his will that he is consuming himself in order to make his will reality, though always with the electoral support of “the people”—which is the difference from authoritarianism. While “the people” as a whole is sacred, the actual people (in plural) certainly are not, and may often in practice be mistreated. For Chávez, that issue is suspended: since he is the pueblo (as confirmed electorally) and “the people are Chávez”, his epic will and the will of the people are simply identical.

12 While the exact translation somewhat varies depending on the version of the Bible, the idea of being consumed “on the way” (en el camino), in the process, is definitely Chávez’ own addition.

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Messianic and “Prophetic” Time: Religion and Redemptive Politics In terms of Canovan’s insightful dichotomy between redemptive and pragmatic politics (1999), Chávez’ rhetoric emblematically embodies the politics of redemption.13 To Canovan, however, “redemptive” seems to be mainly a metaphorical term; in Chávez’ rhetoric, it is most certainly not. When Chávez sees the people of Venezuela, like Lazarus, “resuscitated from among the dead”, his rhetoric is fully and literally redemptive. Implicit in the Weberian idea of charisma as well as in Canovan’s redemptive politics, is the intensely religious nature of such social scientific categories; it is however full-fledged, intense and explicit in the rhetoric of Chávez—arguably the most charismatic redemptive leader of the twenty-first century. The religious mode is repeatedly expressed by Chávez himself. Part and parcel of that religious mode is the notion of prophetic time. The rationalist, secular view of time is, as Benedict Anderson (1983) has shown, chronological, linear. One event happens after another, in a “blank” space, each causing the subsequent event. There is no preordained direction or future. Anderson very much borrowed from Walter Benjamin as well as from Erich Auerbach. From Benjamin, he drew the notion of “homogeneous, empty time” (1983, 24), the opposite of prophetic time and a notion Anderson associated with modern, secular thinking. Anderson, however, much misleads social science readers, well predisposed in that regard, since Benjamin, a modern Marxist, actually criticized “the concept of the historical progress of mankind … through a homogeneous, empty time” (Benjamin 1968, 261). In a way that, rhetorically and otherwise, is rather identical with what Chávez does and performs, Benjamin writes of Robespierre’s notion of historical time as follows: History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit ]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate … . The awareness that they are about to make the

13 This is overwhelmingly true in the case of Chávez, notwithstanding his keen talent for understanding, and dealing with, the necessities and vicissitudes of pragmatic politics.

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continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. (261, italics added)

The “normal” sequence of time—flat, ordinary, pragmatic—stops, and “a blast opens in the continuum of history" (262), that is, the revolutionary “blasts a specific era out of the homogenous course of history” (263). Also in contrast to the passivity often ascribed to religious people believing in destiny, the chosen one, called upon—such as Chávez— “remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history” (262), which is what Chávez does, with Bolivar. The key sentence in Benjamin, which goes in the opposite direction of Anderson (who nonetheless cites him), fits Chávez: he [the “time blaster”] grasps the constellation which his own era [Venezuela as he speaks] has formed with a definite earlier one [that of Bolívar]. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time. (263, italics added) For every second of time [in continuous time] was [for the Jews] the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter. (264, italics added)

For Chávez, “his own era” is precisely shot through with “a definite, earlier one”: that of Bolívar. And indeed, “the Messiah” has entered. Benjamin allows one here to introduce the notion of “Messianic time” (akin to Canovan, but not to Anderson), a notion fully applicable to what Chávez tells us. For Benjamin, Messianic time is, first, the “cessation of happening” (263), that is, of “progression through a homogenous, empty time”. It is Messianic because it is redemptive. Second, as in Chávez’ discourse, Messianic time is “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past ” (263)—not the oppressed present. To put it simply, the source of the anger, of the call for newness, is how bad things were, how “we” were treated. Past indignities force this rupture, this “blast” or refoundational moment (which we also observe in Evo Morales’ Bolivia). It is, in a sense, a fight against our past. Against an inglorious past—here I build directly on Benjamin—there is the reconnection with, the resurrection of, an even more ancient past, made present. This, according to Benjamin, is the Ancient Rome of Robespierre, the Republic of Bolívar conjured by Chávez, or, much more ominously, the Angkor of the Khmers Rouges.

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Interestingly, the relatively recent ignominies in all of these cases are part of ordinary, continuous time, thus making them “doubly depressing”. In contrast, the time that is “blasted out of the continuum of history” (261) is Messianic in a double and euphoric way. It is a time of greatness and/or happiness, messianically “blasted into the present”, creating a sense of connection, accomplishment and meaning. Auerbach, in turn, never did associate “prophetic time” with premodern society (as Anderson repeatedly suggests), nor treated it as a form of time wiped away by the blank, chronological time of modernity. Auerbach writes about interpretations and associates prophetic time with Christianity, in contrast to Antiquity. So again, we are back to Christianity. The Christian scholar “establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first” (Auerbach 2003, 73). Chávez, here as interpreter, connects Bolívar and himself, the continent’s liberation in the early nineteenth century to his project in the early 21st, and precisely by virtue of this connection, “Bolívar” not only signifies Bolívar himself but also Chávez, while conversely Chávez fulfills the dream of Bolívar. Chávez’ rhetoric thus clearly avails itself of what Auerbach calls “figural interpretation”: “a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally—a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension” (73). Of course, for Christians, two events linked neither chronologically nor causally—the essence of prophetic time—are linked “vertically” by “Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and the key to its understanding” (Auerbach 2003, 74), with one event prophetically announcing another in the future, which in turn fulfills the prophecy. In yet another collapsing of functions, Chávez casts himself as herald and redeemer, i.e., as John the Baptist and Jesus.14 Political scientists have been remarkably deaf to the strong religious component in Chávez’ rhetoric, that of a follower of Christ with a direct relation to God. The strongest quote, in my view, is the one examined above: “As Saint Paul said: ‘I will consume myself on the way and I will most gladly do so’”. Chávez not only paraphrases and supplements, but he also resignifies the original extract from 2 Corinthians (for some odd reason, all analysts of Chávez’ discourse mistrace this passage to the

14 In a broader sense, Zuquete (2008) correctly talks of Chavez’ “missionary politics”.

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Epistle to the Romans). Paul says that he will gladly spend or give all he has, including himself, for their sakes (the original for “spend” is dapanᯠo ).15 Chávez, as always, jacks up the sentence’s meaning into a (non-materialistic) self-sacrifice, a self-immolating promise made out of pure love. He rhetorically basically becomes a Jesus: like him, sacrificing his body for the people (a body which no longer belongs to him). As Chávez stated, “I do not belong to myself anymore, I belong to the pueblo of Venezuela. My life is yours.” Fusion with the people involves “being consumed”. That act of love and death, undoubtedly romantic and dramatic, is accomplished in conjunction with (not despite) the pleasure principle: “Lo hare gustosamente” (“I will do so with pleasure”). This fusion of people-centrism and charismatic Christianity is displayed in Chávez’ account of his arrest and his salvation by the people during the Coup of 2002: They wanted to kill me… My death had been decreed. God saved me. And this is why here I carry Christ, my Christ, my comandante, with you I go, with you we go. You decide, we follow your face which is the face of love, which is the face of dignity. You who was born already 2002 years ago, coming to the world to bring us this beautiful and sublime message of Love One Another! Of loving each other from the soul, of looking at each other as brothers. (Cadena nacional, December 5, 2002)

The focus of Chávez’ Christian discourse, certainly, is not on individual morality, but on collective redemption: The poor pueblos of the earth know that in Venezuela a hope is rising … This is our struggle, it is the struggle of God, the struggle of Christ, the redeemer of the pueblos, who today, 2002 years after his birth, is more alive than ever. Long live Christ, the redeemer of the peoples, forever! Long live Christ, my comandante, my pastor and my guide! (Chávez 2003b, 264).

Chávez’ Christianity is both mystical-personal-collective and policyoriented. To the above quote on Christ as “a rebel”, he thus adds: To me the Christian current—and I ask everyone that we delve into authentic Christianity—is one of the most powerful currents feeding the 15 In the International Standard Edition of the Bible, Paul is even translated as saying: “I will be glad to spend my money and myself for you”.

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socialism of the twenty-first-century [the name Chávez adopted for his own brand of socialism, P.O.] … Christ is the man who needs to be at the front of this Revolution … the true Christ, redeemer and martyr … [We cannot] repeat the nefarious experience of…capitalism, or the State socialism of the Soviet type, where the State was the owner and lord of everything, and where the workers ended up often becoming automatons …To me socialism, true socialism, is the Christian one. (Aló Presidente 234, September 25, 2005)

If one turns from Chávez’ discourse to, sorrowfully, the politics of pragmatism, one is left wondering whether utopia, more than a horizon, may not inevitably turn into dystopia when willfully and forcefully implemented in the here and now.

Conclusion Chavismo, an emblematic case of populism, fits all approaches to the study of populism. One is indeed hard-pressed to find a scholarly approach to populism that would not apply to Chavismo. (The only incongruence is the emphasis on the “purity” of the people in Mudde’s definition, the rest of which applies.) What an inductive approach to studying populism as rhetoric provides is a concrete, evidence-based understanding of how populisms are done, of how they work as signifying operations and transactions. The rhetorical approach to populism is, of course and unsurprisingly, closely related to the “discursive” approach; but in my view it is less prone to the “ideological readings” and macro generalizations commonly encountered in critical discourse theory, which also tends to see certain “discourses” as given and as already coherent patterns that struggle for hegemony. It is less explicitly “political” and engagé, more into “looking under the hood” for unexpected findings. It can also show greater empathy and unravel odd combinations of rhetorical techniques and cognitive frames present in all forms of public speaking. Chávez’ public rhetoric is one of leadership and accomplished mass support. His case shows that empirically oriented approaches to populism have much to gain from attending closely to what their object of study is actually saying, and how.

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References Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Auerbach, E. 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 50th ed. Princeton University Press. Benjamin, W. 1968. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Bikel, O. 2008. The Hugo Chávez Show. PBS Frontline. Budge, I., Robertson, D., & Hearl, D. 1987. Ideology, Strategy and Party Change: Spatial Analyses of Post-War Election Programmes in 19 Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Canovan, M. 1999. Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy. Political Studies, 47 , 2–16. Chávez Frias, H. 2003a. Discurso en el acto de entrega de títulos de tierras urbanas en La Vega. In Discursos e intervenciones: Diciembre 2002-enero 2002, 2nd ed., 131–144. Havana: Ediciones Plaza. Chávez Frias, H. 2003b. Discurso en la manifestación popular en Caracas. In Discursos e intervenciones: Diciembre 2002-enero 2002, 2nd ed., 241–286. Havana: Ediciones Plaza. De Cleen, B., Goyvaerts, J., Carpentier, N., Glynos, J., & Stavrakakis, Y. 2021. Moving Discourse Theory Forward: A Five-Track Proposal for Future Research. Journal of Language and Politics, 20(1), 22–46. De la Torre, C. 1997. Populism and Democracy: Political Discourses and Cultures in Contemporary Ecuador. Latin American Perspectives, 94(24), 12–24. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin Book. Hawkins, K. 2009. Is Chávez Populist? Measuring Populist Discourse in Comparative Perspective. Comparative Political Studies, 42(8), 1040–1067. Hawkins, K. 2010. Venezuela’s Chavismo and Populism in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawkins, K., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. 2017. The Ideational Approach to Populism. Latin American Research Review, 52(4), 513–528. Moffitt, B. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mudde, C. 2004. The Populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(3), 541–563. Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. 2012. Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ostiguy, P. 2009. The High and the Low in Politics: A Two-Dimensional Political Space for Comparative Analysis and Electoral Studies. Kellogg Institute Working Paper 360. Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Notre Dame.

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Ostiguy, P. 2014. Exceso, representación y fronteras cruzables: ‘institucionalidad sucia’, o la aporía del populismo en el poder. POSTData: Revista de Reflexión y Análisis Político (Argentina), 19(2), 345–375. Ostiguy, P. 2017. Populism: A Socio-Cultural Approach. In C. Rovira Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo, & P. Ostiguy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Populism, 73–97. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ostiguy, P., & Moffitt, B. 2021. Who Would Identify with an ‘Empty Signifier’? The Relational, Performative Approach to Populism. In P. Ostiguy, F. Panizza, & B. Moffitt (eds.), Populism in Global Perspective: A Performative and Discursive Approach, 47–72. New York: Routledge. Ostiguy, P., Panizza F., & Moffitt, B. 2021. Populism in Global Perspective: A Performative and Discursive Approach. New York: Routledge. Pitkin, H. 1972. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stanley, B. 2008. The Thin Ideology of Populism. Journal of Political Ideologies, 13(1), 95–110. Stavrakakis, Y., Kioupkiolis, A., Katsambedis, G., Nikisiaanis, N., & Siomos, T. 2016. Contemporary Left-Wing Populism in Latin America: Leadership, Horizontalism, and Postdemocracy in Chávez’ Venezuela. Latin American Politics and Society, 58(3), 51–76. Taggart, P. 2000. Populism. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Torrealba, A. A. 2005. Florentino y el diablo. In Antología poetica. Monte Avila. Zuquete, J.P. 2008. The Missionary Politics of Hugo Chávez. Latin American Politics and Society, 50(1), 91–121. http://www.todochavez.gob.ve/todoch avez/1023-intervencion-del-comandante-presidente-hugo-chavez-tras-conoce rse-los-resultados-del-referendo-aprobatorio-de-enmienda-constitucional.

Populism: A Definition Sought and Tested Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen

This volume has presented accounts of rhetoric coming from seven highly diverse political sources—but nevertheless sources that we believe readers will agree offer their audiences instantiations of populist politics. They are indeed a motley crew. Some of them, most would agree, are consistently populist, while others are so in a perhaps more episodic manner or in specific instances. They belong to different contemporary, or nearly contemporary, political settings around the world, and they are, undeniably, so diverse that they highlight, when seen together, the issue of whether populism is in fact a clear, coherent, and usable concept. Even so, we submit that that there will be broad agreement about predicating “populism” of all these seven cases. Given that, we reflect in this concluding chapter on two interconnected questions set forth from the beginning: Considering the analyses offered here, is it possible, despite all the diversity, to point to a common

C. Kock (B) · L. Villadsen University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen S, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] L. Villadsen e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Kock and L. Villadsen (eds.), Populist Rhetorics, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87351-6_9

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denominator that justifies our referring to their subject matter as different versions of populist rhetoric, and to their conclusions as having something to say collectively about the relation between the categories “populism” and “rhetoric”? Is there a red thread that connects them? And can it be argued that this connecting thread pertains to the realm of rhetoric—so that, in that sense, “populism” and “populist” are rhetorical predicates? To present scholarship for considering these questions was our main motivation for organizing this book, together with the hope to foster more interdisciplinary cross-pollination in the study of populism as a discursive phenomenon.

The Enormity and Elusiveness of Populism Populism and populist rhetoric are now phenomena that perhaps more than ever call for deepened understanding. If we accept the assumption that the political leaders and movements whose rhetorics are analyzed in this book are in fact valid examples of populism (thus for a while postponing the questions of how to define that contentious term, and of how to relate the various manifestations of it to a core definition), then one insight already strikes us as standing out: Rhetoric, no matter how that term is defined, has been a central factor in the rise of populisms that recent decades have seen across the world. Populist rhetors incite and energize populist forces everywhere. And clearly the various populisms do not, as sometimes asserted, or implied, solely result from underlying socio-economic and historical developments. To be sure, political developments are in large part conditioned by such factors, but rhetoric decidedly has significantly shaped, strengthened, and changed the populist upheavals that we see. One recent and illustrative example is Donald Trump. While his emergence as a political force and his rise to power undoubtedly were conditioned by political and socio-economic conditions that have been present in the United States, perhaps to some extent unnoticed, for many decades or even centuries, Trump’s rhetoric has without question motivated and exacerbated these factors and caused massive social phenomena as, for example, a rise in hate crimes and the widespread belief that the 2020 election in the United States was “rigged” in disfavor of the people’s will—a belief that culminated in the attack by protesters, partly armed and dangerous, on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

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Long before that, another example among many of how rhetoric has helped cause major upheavals, is Ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Without the incendiary rhetoric coming from figures like Slobodan Miloševi´c and Radovan Karadži´c, with vilification of former neighbors and active creation of division and strife among population groups based on linking ethnicity and alleged superior rights to the land, the civil war in that region and its destruction of lives and property might not have come about or taken the horrific course that it did. In the present volume, the chapters on populist Brexit rhetoric, on the Italian notion of trasformismo or on Viktor Orbán’s rhetorical populism in Hungary point to other instances of how rhetoric has dramatically influenced a country’s political destiny. It thus seems to us uncontroversial to claim that rhetoric, not least populist rhetoric, is often a highly potent factor for political upheaval and change in the world—sometimes for bad, but perhaps sometimes for good. Given that, it is an important challenge for rhetorical scholars to take on the topic of populism, identify its workings, develop a vocabulary for description and analysis, theorize its origin, appeal, and potential antidote, and hopefully present such efforts in terms useful for neighboring disciplines. Our hope for this book is to take the initial steps to offering a meaningful rhetorical definition of populism.

Populism as a Rhetorical Notion Defining populism as essentially an attribute of political rhetoric aligns with views advanced by several recent scholars of populism, to the effect that populism is not identifiable as a particular political agenda, and thus that it cannot, for example, be placed anywhere on a traditional left– right spectrum. There are leftist populisms and rightist populisms and some that cannot even, with any plausibility, be placed on a continuum between those two categories. These broadly recognized insights are also demonstrated by the chapters in this book. One authoritative example of scholars who point to rhetoric as the dimension where the essential core of populism is found is a work of two outstanding political scientists, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, the monumental Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (2019). Although their central concern is with empirical and quantitative analysis, not rhetorical analysis, they declare at the outset: “Populism is understood in this book minimally as a style of rhetoric

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reflecting first-order principles about who should rule, claiming that legitimate power rests with ‘the people’ not the elites” (2019, 4; our italics); and they explicitly find that “populism is a form of rhetoric” (14). Marshaling a wealth of data, the two scholars’ overarching argument is that it is “the combination of authoritarian values disguised by populist rhetoric” that constitutes “potentially the most dangerous threat to liberal democracy” (16). We would tend to agree with that position, and we also agree with the way populism is here seen as a rhetorical predicate, and as a separate one—one that correlates easily, but not necessarily, with authoritarian values and which is still conceptually separate from them. We also tend to agree with Ernesto Laclau, who opened his groundbreaking On Populist Reason (2005) by pointedly telling other scholars that “what is specific about populism—its defining dimension—has been systematically avoided” (10: italics in the original). In commenting on some of the influential scholarly characterizations of populism, and on specific alleged instantiations of it, Laclau finds instead a bewildering plethora of attributes that seem to have no common denominator and are often contradictory of each other. It is not possible, he maintains, to find a defining commonality between them on the level of their respective political agendas or platforms. Rather, the defining dimension that unites instances of populism is a “political logic”. The logic he sees is one where rhetorical operations connect a set of differential “demands” existing in a population to an “equivalential chain” and sees this as representing the will of an interpellated “people”—a people that is pitted by populist rhetoric against a mighty oppressive force. The defining features, according to Laclau, is thus talk of a “people”, identified and united by the equivalential chain of demands (we might also say “agenda items”), and of the alleged oppressive force. Common to variously constituted populisms is that the “people” in this logic is interpellated, i.e., constituted rhetorically. In other words, Laclau’s way of stating this “defining dimension” of populism is essentially a way of seeing populism as a rhetorical phenomenon—even though he prefers to speak of political “logic” rather than political rhetoric. Populism, he says, is a “performative act endowed with a rationality of its own” (2005, 18); in other words, it is a communicative or rhetorical act. As we would do, he questions the distinction between “rhetoric” and “ideology”. Explains Laclau: “Rhetoric is not epiphenomenal vis-à-vis a self-contained conceptual structure, for no conceptual structure finds its internal cohesion without appealing to

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rhetorical devices; we are no longer able to dismiss an ideological interpellation as merely rhetorical” (2005, 12). As an example, Laclau, in criticizing Minogue’s account (1969) of the American populists, says: “if through rhetorical operations they managed to constitute broad popular identities which cut across any sectors of the population, they actually constituted populist subjects. And there is no point in dismissing them as mere rhetoric. Far from being a parasite of ideology, rhetoric would actually be the anatomy of the ideological world” (2005, 12–13, emphasis in the original). In short, certain conceptual entities central to an ideology would not have existed without rhetoric to constitute them; in that sense rhetoric is not a “mere” appendix to ideology, but its skeleton, or rather its whole anatomy. One approach to the definition of populism that may be considered vulnerable to the kind of criticism expressed here is Moffitt’s view of populism as a “political style”. Moffitt does not talk about “mere” rhetoric, and he expressly chooses to apply a broad understanding of “style” by “moving beyond its purely communicative and rhetorical elements, and emphasizing the performative, aesthetic and relational elements of contemporary populism” (2016, 4). Above all, the populist leader and rhetor is seen as a performer in this optic. This undoubtedly is a central aspect of many populisms in our time, and Moffitt makes an important contribution by emphasizing their “intensely mediated nature”—as well as, more generally, in his awareness of populism as essentially a communicative phenomenon. But although he believes he widens an unduly narrow notion of rhetoric by including “rhetoric” in his broader concept of “style”, with its emphasis on media and performance, the fact remains that style—like old, narrow notions of rhetoric—even here seems conceived as separable from content, substance, and ideology. Another scholar whose view resembles and anticipates the rhetorical approach that we advocate is Pierre Ostiguy, whom we are pleased to have represented in this book. In a number of writings he has made a strong case for seeing populism as a communicative and performative phenomenon, emphasizing what he calls its “flaunting of the low” as opposed to the “high”. With this terminology, Ostiguy offered what has been in many instances a very useful framework for analysis of populist discourse, but also one that hardly captures all features and instantiations of populist rhetoric. What Laclau does in identifying rhetoric as the “anatomy” of the political world aligns with what other scholars have done: They have,

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regarding the contested notion of populism, laid that notion at the doorstep of rhetorical theory and implicitly asked for its help in answering the questions regarding its “defining dimension”. Only recently has this challenge begun to be taken up in a broad and concerted effort. One example of that is the collection Vox Populi: Populism as a Rhetorical and Democratic Challenge (van der Geest et al. 2020). Another fresh example is Zarefsky and Mohammed (2020). The present collection also aims to be an example. Not that rhetoricians have not over recent decades made valuable relevant contributions. An example that has become a modern “classic” in rhetorical studies shows striking similarities to Laclau’s approach: Maurice Charland’s notion of “constitutive rhetoric”, which focuses on “rhetoric’s constitutive and ideological effect” (1987, 147). Leaning on Althusser’s concept of interpellation (1971), Charland shows, in the case of “Québécois” identity in Canada, how a social group and its very identity as a subject is not just addressed, but constituted by rhetoric—more specifically, by the rhetorical narrative that builds it, requiring those interpellated by it to act in a specific way to embody their identity. In short, “the position one embodies as a subject is a rhetorical effect” (1987, 148). It is also worth noting that in 1970, when Althusser’s notion of interpellation was originally launched, the rhetorician Edwin Black had introduced a closely related idea: the “second persona”. The idea that discourse may work to shape or in fact define the role, even the identity, of its addressee was clearly in the air, with Black and Althusser as pioneers that probably knew nothing of each other, and literary theory following close behind, as in, e.g., Iser (1972) and Prince (1973). An attempt, such as ours, to define populism as a rhetorical attribute, and to present that attempt to scholars in other disciplines, calls for a clarification of what the terms “rhetoric” and “rhetorical” refer to. We apply a broader understanding than many scholars outside rhetoric itself who have used these terms. As rhetoricians themselves understand the term “rhetoric”, the rhetoric of a given artifact or political leader or movement may be packed with ideology through and through. It is not as if there are two separate layers: ideological content with rhetorical (or “stylistic”) flourish on top. The distinction to be drawn should, we suggest as rhetoricians, make a different cut. It might be in place here to reiterate how some of the key terms at issue are generally understood by rhetoricians, and to suggest a clear and consistent terminological practice.

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Rhetoric and ideology are cognate terms, yet they are not the same. Rhetoric is communication; ideology is beliefs and attitudes. Rhetoric may contain, propagate, constitute, and shape ideology, and it is regularly deployed to do that. As for beliefs and attitudes, beliefs are about states of affairs in the world, whereas attitudes are evaluative stances toward the world. With rhetoric one may seek to work on both in the minds of others. When a rhetor makes statements that express and aim to propagate an ideology, all of that is rhetoric; it is not as though part of the rhetor’s statement is ideology, while the remaining, more superficial features make up the rhetorical part. Rhetoric, by propagating beliefs and attitudes, may aim to—and possibly succeed in—promoting an agenda. That agenda and the actions that may result from it constitute the political part. Our understanding is in keeping with the one that has been central in the rhetorical tradition itself, from Aristotle’s Rhetoric onwards. Rhetoric is public communication, in any modality and by any means, that aims to influence the practical decisions and attitudes of all the rhetor’s addressees and interlocutors. That gives the term a much broader content than widespread uses of it, which tend to define rhetoric as “mere” verbal adornment and other stylistic features. Rhetoric is everything a rhetor does communicatively with the aim of obtaining others’ adherence to a position. Rhetoric asserts or implies beliefs of what things are like in the world, and it asserts or implies evaluative attitudes to them, i.e., outlooks regarding what is good and bad. By doing all this, rhetoric promulgates and creates these beliefs and attitudes, it shapes, spreads, and energizes them; in other words, it is a strong co-determinant of ideologies existing in a population, thereby promoting political agenda points (what Laclau calls political “demands”) and political actions. This is something no rhetorician has ever doubted, but it may bear repetition, since a widespread, tacit assumption in much political science, commentary, and journalism—and among politicians themselves—is that what politicians can do in their rhetoric and their agenda is merely to reflect and mirror what is already there in the minds of the citizens they address. They certainly mirror and reflect that, but the process works in the opposite direction as well: Politicians spreading populist rhetoric undoubtedly constitute, shape, and amplify beliefs and attitudes, they do not just reflect them. However, the way we will suggest formulating the “defining dimension” of populism rhetorically is not identical with Laclau’s. We suggest a less complex notion—a minimal one, one might say. We point to one

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rhetorical move or maneuver as the core of what may be meaningfully termed populism. The apparatus of concepts presented by Laclau—the “equivalential chain” of several “demands”, linked together by rhetorical constructs in the form of “empty” or “floating” signifiers, the social dichotomy between opposite camps established thereby—these are certainly helpful in illuminating various historical phenomena, but we would suggest looking at them as epiphenomena, as manifestations or outgrowths that will often, but not always, be found to emerge from the core, the original rhetorical “seed” of populism.

Populism: Toward a Rhetorical Definition This core may be formulated as follows: Rhetors instantiate populism to the extent that they assert or imply that they represent the unison people. To the extent that citizens believe such claims (or implicatures), they have adopted a populist ideology. The etymology of the term populism is worth taking literally. Populist rhetoric is characterized by signifying, in some way, that “the people” is a unified and unison entity, and that the rhetor speaks on behalf of that entity. In suggesting this as an essential and sufficient definition, we align with and single out the first of the features mentioned by van der Geest et al. as characteristic of populist leaders: they tend to be “acting and speaking on behalf of the people” (2020, 3). It follows from this minimal definition that populism may occur in widely varying degrees and that it may be intermittent, i.e., it may at times be strongly noticeable in a rhetoric or movement, and at other times less so. It may be incipient or fullfledged, sporadic, or massive. Any of the “typical” manifestations that populist rhetoric is often found to have may perhaps better be seen as epiphenomena that tend to occur rather than as “obligatory” features— as shown, e.g., in Villadsen’s study (2020) of less typical specimens of populist rhetoric from leaders of the Danish People’s Party. To be sure, it is clear that rhetoric speaking in the name of a unison people implies a natural and latent proclivity to become “illiberal” and exclusionary, precluding and perhaps openly attacking pluralism. That this is so is due to the plain fact that no alleged “people” can ever actually include every single individual or citizen in whose name it purports to speak; such a claim belies diversity of all kinds, and there will always be minority positions. As we discuss below, a populist rhetoric may deal in diverse ways with this fact, ranging from a tacit pretense that the

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dissenting portion of the population exists at one end of a spectrum, over allegations that it is much smaller than it is, or otherwise not to be respected, through active rhetorical antagonism, to active physical exclusion and persecution at the other end of the spectrum. Because there is this range of populist strategies vis-à-vis dissent, we suggest it is conceptually preferable to consider the active antagonism against dissenters as a non-obligatory and separate feature in some populisms, albeit a latent one. A prototypical example of populist rhetoric might be Donald Trump’s inauguration speech from January 2017. It was strewn with passages like the following, where he identified his policies and his presidency as expressing the wish of “the people” as an undifferentiated, unison whole: “January 20, 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again”. As Zarefsky (2019) says, Trump’s claim here is that he embodies the will of the people; he presents himself as the agent of the unison people’s will. An equally contentious idea is, characteristically, signified only by presupposition: the rule that went before was not the people’s rule. Even if Trump’s presidency had not shown other populist characteristics, the inauguration speech was pure populism. Zarefsky, however, describes the rhetorical stance in this speech as “faux populism” because any alleged enemy needs to be real, whereas here it is just a rhetorical construction. We would question the distinction Zarefsky operates here; to borrow Norris’s and Inglehart’s phrase, we still suggest defining populism “minimally”; nothing more is required than that it relies on one criterion: the core rhetorical attribute of claiming to speak on behalf of a unified people. It is not required, for example, that an alleged enemy be “real”, or that “real” and “constructed” enemies can actually be distinguished, or even that the enemy be clearly named; it is already populist rhetoric for a leader to pose as representing the unison people, even without talking about an enemy. Thus, we propose a “minimal” definition of populism that relies on just one criterion. There are many additional features, rhetorical and otherwise, which are somewhat characteristic of political phenomena widely seen as instantiating populism, but none of these additional features is present in every instance of populism. Also, we may see these features in phenomena not considered populist. Avoiding this confounding slipperiness of the concept of populism is, we believe, one advantage of defining the concept minimally.

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Still, it is plausible to assume that certain features tend to appear more often in phenomena instantiating populism, and more markedly in rhetoric that does exhibit the core attribute mentioned above. Zarefsky and Mohammed (2020, 17) name a list of such features: positing deep opposition between the “establishment” and the “people”, the emotionalization of discourse, the democratization of evidence, the normalization of hyperbole, and a predilection for simple explanations for events. In their article, these traits are well observed and well described; however, we see them as frequent but not necessary traits in populism. Proposing a minimal definition like ours is to say that we should not understand populism as a “syndrome” of several attributes or “symptoms”. All attempted definitions that see the concept as a syndrome run into difficulty, as Laclau has made clear, because some phenomena that observers intuitively agree to consider populisms only exhibit some of the symptoms—and some of the symptoms are found in phenomena that we would not intuitively consider instances of populism. Then again, some generally recognized instances of populism have marked features that are not at all present in most other generally recognized instances of it. Laclau names Margaret Canovan (e.g., 1981)—one of the most quoted and respected scholars of populism—as an example of the conceptual quandary caused by these problems. Her attempted remedy is to posit an alleged typology of no less than seven varieties of populism, as historically observed; but this typology, he notes, is hardly “worth the name” because “it lacks any coherent criterion around which its distinctions are established” (2005, 6); and neither does an appeal to Wittgenstein’s concept of “family likeness” help avoid the confusion. It arises inevitably when one tries to define populism as a coherent “bundle” or “syndrome” of features. That is one reason why it may be preferable to see populism as defined by one core feature or criterion. The problems that theorists of populism run into when applying a multi-feature definition to specific instances of what they consider populism recall what the rhetorician Thomas Conley, in a skeptical essay about genre theory and its explanatory power in rhetorical analysis, humorously called “the Linnean blues”. In his Systema Naturae from 1735, the great Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) established a universal classification system for living species. For example, he took, as Conley relates, a species well known to him, the common coot, and based his description of the genus on that species. However, “[w]hen Linneaus later came to know other species that he considered congeneric

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with the original species by their general appearance or the sum of their characteristics, but which diverged from the characteristics of the genus as originally stated in Systema Naturae, he put them in the same genus …, leaving the original generic description as it was” (1986, 62). Hence the blues: The elaborate categorization based on detailed descriptions proved laden with problems in practical use. Similarly, when a rich, multi-feature definition of the genus “populism” is applied to an undeniable species of that genus, some of the original “defining” features are likely to be missing and others will obtrude themselves instead, causing bouts of “the Linnean blues”. While a one-criterion approach to populism obviates much of the difficulty caused by attempts to see populism as a coherent “syndrome”, it does not imply that populism becomes a strictly binary attribute, i.e., an “either-or” quality. As before, and perhaps even more so, it is necessary to see populism as an attribute that may be present by degrees, ranging from intermittent and episodic occurrences in the communication of a rhetor or movement, to massive omnipresence. One artifact may contain populist features and passages, another from the same source may not, or it may even contradict or deny the core populist claim of speaking in the name of the unison people. Our core criterion also implies something else noted by some thinkers and analysts, namely that populism as such is an attribute without a fixed positive or negative valence. Populism is not per se a bad or dangerous thing, nor a good thing. It may more appropriately be said that the core attribute of populism is one whose presence should invite careful inspection and reflection. There will be many cases where this attribute is present in some degree, but where observers who wish to make a normative assessment might find that there is little cause for alarm and in fact much plausibility for claims to be made in the name of “the people”. Rhetors who presume to speak, and agents who mean to act, in the name of “the people” may go down in history as having done good. For example, by our definition the first words of the preamble to the US Constitution, “We the People of the United States”, mark the document as manifesting populism. The Founding Fathers here undertook to express what they claimed to be the univocal will of the entire people of the new nation, the United States—a rhetorical act for which most later American citizens hold the Founding Fathers in high veneration. Likewise, resistance movements in countries occupied by Nazi Germany 1939–1945 tended to speak in the name of the univocal people

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in each of their respective countries, and it was a plausible presumption that they did so—even though there was, in a country like Norway, for example, a segment of the population (a rather small one, the “Quislings”) that supported Nazi rule; what such resistance forces did, in many cases invoking the univocal people, has since been widely considered praiseworthy, even though it involved destruction of life and property. Yet resistance movements were, by the “minimal” criterion we suggest, populist in at least some degree. At the other end of a normative scale, the Nazi regime of the Third Reich was also populist by our criterion, and massively so. It further had several reprehensible features often found in populist regimes: autocracy, violent oppression, massive mendacity in official propaganda, suspension of the rule of law, of press freedom and free speech, murderous scapegoating, and persecution of minorities leading to genocide. But the fact remains that Nazism began with a powerful Austrian rhetor speaking in the name of the univocal German people. What, then, are the differences conceptually between a “good” populism and an “evil” one? Two parts of an answer to that question immediately present themselves. First, a populism is less “false” to the extent that its claim to represent the unison people is nearly, even if not completely, accurate; and its falsity becomes aggravated in so far as the portion of the citizenry ostensibly constituting the “people” is smaller, perhaps a narrow majority or even a minority. But of course, a second factor has more weight: When what is done in the name of “the people” is considered as done for the common good, and/or against what is commonly considered evil, then it speaks for the populism in question as “benign”; a populism promoting what the Third Reich did in the name of the German “people” is to that extent “malignant”. Obviously, such judgments unavoidably bind those who would judge to contestable and subjective notions of good and evil. But since that is unavoidable, it is better that it is made clear. To sum up: An advantage of the minimal definition of populism proposed here is that it makes a one-dimensional criterion and thus avoids the crisscrossing of criteria that, as Laclau and others have complained, leads to heterogeneous phenomena being jumbled together without any clear criterion to unite them, or perhaps to attempts to subdivide populisms into subtypes that have little more in common with each other

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than each of them has with phenomena that are clearly not instantiations of populism. We suggest it is preferable to define populism by one criterion and to consider other attributes that often occur along with populism as conceptually separate.

Populism---Banal and Malignant Another advantage of a “minimal” definition of the concept of populism is that, as suggested above, it may be used to call an early warning—it becomes a sort of canary in the coalmine, telling us that there is reason to observe, study, and assess a phenomenon that may seem small and innocuous, and which might remain so, but which has a potential for morphing into rampant falsehood and malignity. Our definition has much in common with the account of populism proposed by Jan-Werner Müller, according to whom populism is by definition a malignant, anti-democratic phenomenon. His reasoning is that rhetoric which purports to speak for the people, i.e., the unison and entire people, must necessarily be a denial of pluralism and involve an anti-democratic exclusion of dissenters: “The people must be extracted from within the people”, as he has it (Müller 2017)—that is, only some people are allowed to be part of “the people”, and others will have to be excluded and denied membership of “the people”, perhaps cleansed with coercion or violence. In other words, there is, in such an account, always an enemy, a negative “other” (or several). Similarly, in Cas Mudde and C. R. Kaltwasser’s accounts of populisms (2012, 2018), as indeed in Laclau’s, it is a shared feature that any populism posits a virtuous people confronting a powerful, reprehensible opponent. Such a polarization is no doubt a potential entailment of rhetoric that pretends to speak for the univocal people, but it should be noted that polarizing rhetoric may occur without explicitly asserting and actually executing exclusion; populist rhetoric in the “minimal” understanding of the term may just ignore, minimize, or bypass the consideration that there are some in the population in whose name it does not speak, and whom it might want to ignore or exclude. For example, it is common that leaders and movements who have won an election or a referendum, or who perhaps have a lead in opinion polls, adopt an exclusionary rhetoric to the effect that “the people” of their country have chosen this or that, or want this or that—for example “the Brits have chosen to leave the EU” (as a majority did by referendum in

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2016) or “the Danes have rejected the Euro” (as a majority did in 2000). Notice the definite plural article presupposing that all Brits or all Danes have done these things; linguists such as Hawkins (1978) tend to say that a phrase with definiteness presupposes that it refers to the totality of the objects it identifies. Thus, minimal as the linguistic marker the is, it may exemplify “embryonic” populism: The definite phrase “the people” means all the people. This kind of rhetoric is common and is often not noticed or questioned, but it is a kind of rhetoric that should call for comment and be treated as a warning signal, however slight. Indeed, it might be in place to define what we may call, with due reference to Michael Billig (1995), banal populism—the practice of rhetorically assuming or presupposing the unanimity of one’s “people”, but in such ways that this assumption or presupposition is out of focus because the focus is on something else. If the focus is on a fresh opinion poll, or on who has won a referendum, for example, then the practice of saying that the Brits decided to leave the EU may go unnoticed. This practice is common not only among politicians who have agendas to promote, but also in the media, whose main motive may be to produce easily accessible, enticing news. Nevertheless, the practice may rightly be termed banal populism. It is banal in that it is rarely noticed and commented on, but it is still populism by the criterion we have proposed, and it deserves critical notice. Our proposal for this single and minimal criterion of populism should come with a caution. “Banal” populism, in the form of, for example, the use of definite plural forms, presupposing that all individuals are encompassed, may indeed be banal in the sense of being benign and not deserving of alarm. What function is served by the words and phrases we use cannot be determined on the basis of linguistic form alone. A classic study in modern rhetoric is Carolyn Miller’s discussion of “genre as social action” (1984). In that seminal paper, she argued that an utterance should be seen as belonging to a genre on the grounds that it performs a specific social action, not on the grounds of fixed formal criteria in themselves. The utterance performs that action in virtue of a mutual understanding between sources and addressees that such an action is socially instituted and is performed by utterances having certain characteristics—not in virtue of these characteristics alone. Similarly, discursive features that are marks of populism rely on similar understandings in their social context that they interactively rely on and help constitute.

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Populism vs. Pluralism If rhetoric that pretends to speak on behalf of, and possibly to express the will of, the univocal people is the core feature of populism, then it is worthwhile to consider the alternative ways in which populist rhetoric and ideology may deal with the fact that there are portions of the population for whom the populist rhetoric manifestly does not speak. These ways of dealing with dissensus may be placed on a scale. At one end of a continuum is the simplest strategy: to ignore it. Leaders using populist rhetoric may simply bypass or fail to mention it and have nothing to say about the fact that dissenters exist. Rhetoric of this kind has been common, e.g., in parties with an anti-immigration agenda that work fully within the parliamentary system in their country; the Danish People’s Party is an example. This party, like other similar parties seen elsewhere, have at times received around 20% of the popular vote in elections, occasionally even more, yet it has always been a clear minority; even so, some of their spokespersons have persisted in speaking as if their agenda were the will of “the people”. One step along the continuum is a strategy that recognizes the existence of dissenting citizens while at the same time persevering in speaking on behalf of “the people”. An election or referendum where a populist party or side participates will force it to accept that a sizable part of the population, perhaps even a majority, is against it, and yet it may blithely carry on as if it speaks for “all” citizens. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, as portrayed in Ostiguy’s chapter in the present volume, did this although he very well knew that many Venezuelans were against him, and he did not deny having lost a crucial referendum. The contradiction inherent in this is simply not allowed to become a topic, and populist leaders who traffic in tacit contradictions of this and other kinds are unlikely to be held accountable for it by their supporters. They may also make use a vaguer, more ambiguous language, for example expressions implying that their agenda is “best” for the entire people, even if only some people expressly endorse it. There is little doubt that rhetoric referring to the wishes and demands of “the people” may be infectious and not only energize those who already identify with it but also affect non-believers, lured by the promise of belonging to that vaunted in-group, the “people”. Somewhere along the continuum are positions where dissent or nonagreement in some citizens is recognized as a fact, but where dissent

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is seen as a sort of false or absent consciousness, a failure in these citizens to realize or admit that they latently or secretly share the wishes and the agenda of the believers. The populist rhetoric of Donald Trump may be cited as an example of this; his innumerable dismissals of the “fake news” media, those “enemies of the people”, who, along with the “Dems”, have systematically misled an alleged minority of dissenting citizens, exemplify this strategy; so does the similar rhetoric of the “Alternative für Deutschland”, which has hammered incessantly on the vile “Lügenpresse”. Hand in hand with such rhetorical practices we find another strategy systematically used by Donald Trump and his loyalists: claims and implications to the effect that those who, for example, did not vote for Donald Trump as president in 2020, even if they do exist, are a minority benefiting from a huge system of conspiracy and fraud that “stole” Trump’s “sacred landslide” victory. At the other end of the continuum, we find rhetors and parties that explicitly and aggressively deny dissenting citizens status as members of the people; these dissenters are not accepted as “true” nationals although they may formally be so. This is where we find populism as portrayed by Müller’s definition—an explicit denial of pluralism and of recognition as citizens for these individuals, potentially leading to exclusionary measures like denial of formal citizenship, and potentially scapegoating, physical exclusion and violent elimination. An objection to the “minimal” definition we propose of populism’s rhetorical core might be to claim that we cast far too wide a net: Any political movement, using any kind of rhetoric, might be considered populist by our criterion because any political movement purports to do what is best for “the people”. But this misses the point. First, there are many movements which openly declare themselves to appeal to one specific segment or sector of the population, such as, e.g., the rural population, industrial workers, etc.; they do not pretend that the policies they propose are best for the entire people; they propose what they believe is best for the class or sector they claim to represent. Secondly, even to say or pretend that one’s policies are best for the entire people is not to say or pretend that one represents the unison people, let alone that they are the will of the entire people. For example, in various brands of Marxism it is an assumption that even if one pretends to work for the best of the entire people, large segments of the people do not understand what is best for

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them, and they may even oppose it. Marxian theories of “false consciousness”—a phrase introduced by Engels—have been used to undergird such an ideology. With their privileged insight, such leaders—authoritarians all—see themselves as justified in setting aside any ignorance or opposition in the population and also in altogether setting aside the rule of law, the procedures of liberal democracy, the pretense of democracy, etc. Another kind of non-populist belief in representing what is best for the people—one which is in fact compatible with observance of the rules of liberal democracy—consists in believing that although one believes to know what is best for the people, others are known to have other beliefs, and it is the right of these others to have these beliefs and to work for them in observance of the rules of democracy. In short, a belief—asserted or implied—that one’s movement has knowledge, perhaps privileged knowledge, of what is “best” for the people, does not per se amount to populism. Another objection will see us as erring in the opposite direction, casting a net that is far too small. In the case of Donald Trump, for example, one could point out that whereas our definition applies well to some of his rhetoric, such as his inauguration speech, a lot of his other rhetoric strongly negates the notion of a univocal people and instead lashes out vehemently at various nefarious segments of the American people such as “the Dems” (and several others). By this token, Trump would be, at most, an “on-and-off” populist, and it becomes impossible to say whether the movement whose spearhead he is can be called a populism or not. Trump’s rhetoric is a clear instance of a contradictory populism that speaks on behalf of the American people and, almost in the same breath, denounces dissenting Americans in the strongest terms—thus recognizing their existence. We think it better to acknowledge that populist and non-populist attributes may co-exist in the same rhetor and movement, rather than trying to subsume too many political rhetors and movements, each seen in their entirety, under the same term. The result of that may be, in some of Laclau’s opening words, that “conceptual apprehension is replaced by appeals to a non-verbalized intuition, or by descriptive enumerations of a variety of ‘relevant features’” accompanied by “a proliferation of exceptions” (2005, 1). Nothing is wrong with saying that Trump and “Trumpism” sometimes use a populist rhetoric, sometimes one of ingroup/out-group demagoguery, as theorized by Roberts-Miller (2005, 2019), and sometimes something else again. Also, populists may at times

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resort to the rhetorical strategy of denying those who dissent their status of belonging to the people in the “true” sense of the word—in which case we have the belligerent, anti-democratic variety of populism described by Müller’s definition. Such an “on-and-off” character of Trump’s populism might instead signify that it is driven by other deep forces than any sincere belief that this is the will of “the people” as such.

Seven Rhetorical Populisms This book has brought together seven chapters on populist rhetoric in various countries and recent historical contexts. The seven chapters represent different countries but also a diversity of scholarly backgrounds, as described in our introductory chapter. The question now to be asked is whether these very different accounts of different populist rhetorics lend credibility to our proposal for a unifying minimal, rhetorical definition of populism. We argue that the answer to this question is affirmative; however, to make that argument we need to return to the distinction made above between a “core” attribute of populist rhetoric on the one hand, and on the other hand a set of “epiphenomenal” rhetorical features often found in populist rhetoric, but not in all populist rhetoric, and in many cases in rhetoric and movements that we would not call populist. The seven manifestations of populist rhetoric, as discussed in the preceding chapters, do not all exhibit the core attribute with equal clarity and in equally literal forms, but they all exhibit some of the epiphenomenal characteristics, and our contention will be that these epiphenomenal characteristics have a strong correlation with the core attribute. That is, to find these characteristics is more likely and more to be expected in rhetoric that is populist by the core criterion than in rhetoric that is not; moreover, if the core attribute is not very salient in the specific rhetoric studied in a chapter of this book, it is still likely that the core attribute will nevertheless be found elsewhere in the rhetoric of the leader or movement in question. The breadth and diversity of populist rhetoric studied in these pages have the advantage of raising our awareness of diverse manifestations of populism, while at the same time preserving the advantage of allowing us to see all these rhetorics as natural manifestations or outgrowths of a shared core— one that may be more directly visible in some of the rhetorical artifacts studied than in others.

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This dual awareness—that there is great diversity in populisms, but also, if we apply a rhetorical lens, a common core—in turn allows scholars and other observers to keep a watchful, educated eye for that inner core. This we should do on the understanding that any explicit or implicit pretense to speak for the univocal, entire people is in principle false—even if it appears, in its specific instantiations, innocuous, fleeting, or otherwise understandable—perhaps even praiseworthy. Let us now consider the accounts of populist rhetoric offered in the seven chapters in this book. We believe they help make our proposed core definition plausible. Some of the chapters, as the reader will have noticed, do not address or contribute to our minimal definition because they pursue other insights and, in our estimate, contribute significantly to the overall discussion this way. Nevertheless, we see them all as compatible with our definition, which aims to single out the one “obligatory” and distinctive feature of populism. They focus instead on original insights of their own about additional, “non-obligatory” aspects of populism that seem to have a strong and natural correlation with the core. The United States: A Lost People Paul Johnson’s chapter shows how the Republican National Committee’s platform of July 2016—the year Donald Trump was elected president— portrays the entire American people, as well as the nation as such, as fatally and entirely “lost”. Not only is “the American people” as a univocal entity the theme of the document; the platform is also in its entirety a statement uttered as it were in the name of that univocal people. The phrase of the Founding Fathers, “We the People”, is quoted, and the document abounds in assertions like this: “Our most urgent task as a Party is to restore the American people’s faith in their government”—presupposing that the American people, as such and as a whole, has lost that faith. Johnson leans on Freud’s analysis of the concept of “melancholia” as opposed to “mourning” (Freud 1918). What this optic implies is that the Republican party, rather than resorting to political action to redress the iniquities that have allegedly been visited upon the nation, regresses into a transfixed state of imagined existential despair—a despair that may lead, and has led, to desperate positions and actions. Johnson leaves it to readers to draw the obvious connection to Donald Trump’s notorious speech on Jan 6, 2021, on the Ellipse in Washington, DC, where, among other things, he once again accused an unspecified “they” of “defrauding

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the people in a proper election”. He told his audience that “you’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation”, and he warned, ominously, that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”. Clearly a rhetoric that sees “the people” and/or “the country” as entirely and utterly lost (or even “stolen”) is a rhetoric pretending to speak on behalf of that entire people, its will, its desire and its hope to come to life again. The most determined supporters of Donald Trump’s presidency—in particular its last phase with its stream of unfounded claims that the election was going to be “stolen” or had been stolen, leading to the violent storming of the Capitol where lives were lost and leading politicians’ lives were in imminent danger—clearly shows how a populist rhetoric of “We are the whole and univocal people” may create, as an outgrowth, a belief in its holders in an absolute right to set aside any other norms and laws in attempting to promote their agenda. Italy: The People’s Rollercoaster Captain Pamela Pietrucci’s chapter on voltagabbana (“turncoating”) and trasformismo in populist leaders in Italy zooms in on il leader of the Lega, Matteo Salvini. Salvini, we may note at first, passes our core criterion of populism with flying colors, as well as probably all the other conceptions of populism advanced by scholars in the field. Claims to the effect that he, or his party, represents the people of Italy, not just some people in Italy, are a staple feature of his rhetoric. For example, in a great rally on the Piazza San Giovanni in Rome on October 19, 2019, which drew 200,000 participants according to Lega sources (c. 50,000 according to the police), the key message he delivered, in perfect “populese”, was: “Noi siamo il popolo contro le élite”—“we are the people against the elites”. The posts from the Lega on social media systematically assert that “the people is with him!” (“Il popolo è con lui!”) The people is one singular body, standing in unison behind him. Rather than belaboring what is obvious, Pietrucci’s chapter illuminates a much less noticed feature that seems to come naturally in Salvini and other successful populists of our time. The status as the potent leader of a united people that Salvini, like other similar figures, has conferred on himself, seems to lead to an opportunistic preference for saying whatever he reckons will consolidate that imagined power. Apparently for that reason, Salvini’s rhetoric regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, which took a

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horrifying toll in Italy, has been what Pietrucci calls a “rollercoaster” of sometimes abrupt and often confusing and hard-to-track opinion shifts, in short order occupying opposite sides of the spectrum in relation to policy issues. The vacillation may perhaps be seen as a natural, while not obligatory, aspect of populist “leadership” insofar as it may reflect a wish to embrace an imagined univocal people’s will. If a populist leader like Salvini, who likes to refer to himself as “the Captain”, senses a diversity or change in what many people want on a given issue, that leader may try to obfuscate and gloss over that discord by expressing both or all the discordant views—however, it may be done in diverse contexts, to diverse audiences, and in ways that are blurred and ambiguous. By having covered the range of views on an issue, the leader may project an illusion of embracing and representing the entire, concordant people. Another possible explanation of Salvini’s pandemic zigzag may be that if the populist leader senses a swing in the popular sentiment about an issue and quickly reacts by choosing to where the majority seems to be going, or the way the opinion is trending, then that leader may seem, to the superficial glance, to be leading, not following, the popular sentiment, and to represent what “the people” in its entirety wants. Both ways, the voltagabbana behavior may be seen as strategies to blur any sense of discord in the population, thereby supporting the picture of a unison people. A leader who sends contradictory messages on a major current issue, such as the corona pandemic, may conceivably do so to signal, by this equivocation, that he or she is the leader of the entire people, representing its united will, not a leader of one segment whose will contradicts that of other segments. That the equivocal messaging is actually understood in this way by the population might, on the face of it, appear implausible. But if we consider the example of Donald Trump, it seems clear that a large share of the US population felt he was dealing appropriately, competently and in the interest of the whole people with the Covid-19 threat by taking the few half-hearted measures against it that he did, then at one time declaring himself a “wartime president” in the battle and otherwise playing down the pandemic and resisting or omitting effective measures throughout the last months of his presidency. So, in the eyes of a populist leader’s popular base, voltagabbana behavior is quite compatible with, in fact perhaps conducive to, being the agent of the univocal people’s will.

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Be that as it may, the ambiguity and contradictoriness of populist leaders on critical issues, as evident in Donald Trump, may, as Pietrucci emphasizes, clearly help exempt them from responsibility in the eyes of followers for any of their public positions and statements. Further, it may have the potential to induce in followers a focus on the leaders themselves at the expense of specific issues and specific policies on these issues; followers who are already focused on their great leader may tend to see that leader as superhuman and in possession of insight, strength, and leadership qualities beyond what ordinary people can comprehend. This may lead to an unconditional devotion to the leader: the capitano (Salvini) or the “larger-than-life president” (Trump). Astoundingly, after Donald Trump had recovered from Covid-19, helped by massive intervention at a cutting-edge hospital, a supporter quipped that this was less of a matter of Trump recovering from his meeting with Covid-19 than of Covid-19 recovering from its meeting with Trump. Since populism’s essential definition, as we see it, is the claim to represent the unison people, and since the specific content of that people’s will is not specified, a populism may easily slide toward a belief in the unconditional sovereignty of the chosen one. The leader becomes a savior to be implicitly obeyed and a holder of magical powers. The following unexpressed chain of reasoning becomes natural: “We are the people—We have a unison will—We have a chosen one to lead us in executing that will—Our will is whatever that chosen leader directs”. At the end of this line of reasoning we find such slogans from the Third Reich as “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” and “Führer, befehl, wir folgen!” The United Kingdom: A People Finding Itself in Brexit The same summer that saw the nomination of Donald Trump for president and the publication of the Republican platform discussed in Paul Johnson’s chapter had also seen the referendum on EU membership in the United Kingdom. The victory of the “Leave” side was a surprise to many, only to be topped in November of that year by Trump’s election as president. Both events speak to the power of populist rhetoric in mobilizing, swaying, and shaping public opinion. As Alan Finlayson’s chapter shows, Brexit rhetoric was populist by more than one of the current conceptual definitions. It proposed the existence of a “people”— a univocal people—prevented from living its true identity. The Leave campaign posited a blockage between the demand or will of “the people”,

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and, as Finlayson shows, it was not only the will of “the people” that was allegedly being blocked by the EU, it was the will of you, the true, noble, and quintessential Brit. This rhetoric has much in common with the “melancholic” Republican vision of the “lost” American people described by Johnson. Finlayson’s chapter points to the way the Brexit movement’s rhetoric was apt to confer a feeling of a noble, full, heroic identity to followers, and conversely to portray opponents as morally deficient and inferior individuals, driven by despicable motives. We are not far from Müller’s conception of populist rhetoric that “extracts” the true people from the population, leaving behind the remainders (in the United Kingdom the Remainers ) the same way that a butterfly casts off its empty cocoon and becomes what it truly is. The entire Leave conception was built on the idea of one true people finally realizing its selfhood and its unison will. Also, when one reads the chapter, it becomes clear how digital media materially transform rhetorical situations. The chapter illuminates in concrete detail the ways in which social media specifically afford aspiring populist leaders uniquely powerful means to create a strong leadership ethos, and, in a symbiotic relationship, confer a noble identity on followers. In this finding we may also have touched on a key to a certain cult-like aspect of populism; it promises to make sense of things for people and to help them find themselves. Germany: “Not Against Its Own People but for It” Like Finlaysons’s chapter, the study by Anne Ulrich, Olaf Kramer, and Dietmar Till explains the political and rhetorical context of a populist movement, the party “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD), illuminating its rhetorical styles and strategy with a special focus on its use of social media and the resultant effectiveness of the AfD strategy. In Germany as in the United Kingdom, part of the story of the success of populist rhetoric is the inability of the mainstream parties to recognize how social media change everything. The AfD adapts to that and, like Leave rhetoric in the United Kingdom and the “Lega” in Italy, designs rhetoric for digital circulation. Another commonality—also clearly connected with populist rhetoric’s use of social media—is the status of the speaker as a heroic truth-teller or “parrhesiast”. One might again hypothesize, in the case of the United Kingdom as well as the United States, that a key to the cult-like aspect

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of some populisms is the way its rhetoric promises to make people find themselves. In a sense, Björn Höcke—one of the highly adept AfD rhetors that the three authors write about—presents a framework for his audience to absolve themselves of guilt or shame, suggesting that such feelings are imposed up on them by dishonest and self-interested enemies of “the people”. A key piece of evidence is Höcke’s speech in Dresden on January 17, 2017, at an event organized by the youth organization of the AfD. It is an unusually clever reversal of meaning that Höcke performs here in his reference to how the Berlin Holocaust Memorial was placed as a unique “monument of shame into the heart of the people’s capital” (“ein Denkmal der Schande in das Herz seiner Hauptstadt”). As when Shakespeare’s Mark Antony speaks of Brutus as an “honourable man”, the audience may at first take this phrase to express respect, in Höcke’s case for the remorse shown by the German nation after World War II; but we gradually find that his intended meaning is rather, with ambiguous irony, to mark the monument as a shameful act of self-contempt by the German people. In a sense Höcke presents a narrative whose ultimate promise is absolution of the German people from guilt and shame. This is possible because underneath the AfD rhetoric, as powered by social media, we again find the core notion of the united, univocal German people. For example, Höcke declares that “our beloved people” is deeply divided—which is not an admission that there is disagreement within the German population about immigration and other issues, but instead a claim that “the people” is “threatened by falling birth-rates and immigration”—a roundabout way of activating the “displacement” theory, which sees a homogeneous, united people helplessly diminished and finally extinct. Höcke expresses his longing for the AfD to lead a government in policies that are “not against its own people but for it”, and he asserts that “our spiritual state, our mental condition is still that of a totally defeated people”. Whether defeated or hoping to achieve victory at last, “we” Germans are all as one in this. He castigates celebrated speeches by two past German presidents in ways that cause his audience to heckle, condemning these men as “traitors to the people” (“Volksverräter”), and toward the end, is interrupted by cries from the audience of “We are the people!”

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Greece: The Morally Virtuous People Sophia Hatzisavvidou’s chapter considers the rhetoric used by the Greek leftist party Syriza and its leader, Alexis Tsipras, at the time when Syriza was in government and sought to resist the austerity measures taken by the EU in response to Greece’s economic predicament following the 2008 financial crisis. Let us note, in passing, that this example, together with Pierre Ostiguy’s chapter on the rhetoric of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, clearly demonstrates that populism may just as well be found in leftist as in rightist leaders and movements. Hatzisavvidou shows how Syriza rhetoric portrayed “the people” of Greece as “a single political agent”; it referred systematically to “the people” as a unison entity and did what it could to “locate ‘the people’ within the exigence as virtuous agents who pursued a just and honourable vision”. Tsipras, we hear, further invoked one sovereign and united people as “agent of certain moral virtues”. Syriza’s central message was “United people, undefeated people”. Arguably, the government promised Greeks a kind of redemption, a longed-for opportunity to feel pride. Hatzisavvidou criticizes this rhetorical strategy mainly on strategic grounds, arguing that the left-wing populist government chose a problematic course in postulating absolute moral superiority in the name of “the people”: When Tsipras and Syriza, invoking the unison Greek people, sought to justify its demands by a categorical moral principle of alleged absolute validity— one that was capable of outweighing all other considerations—they were guilty of an overreach that did not and could not succeed in practice, but was bound for defeat and surrender. Appeals to some “absolute” authority or justification may be of a moral nature, but they may also invoke principles of other kinds, such as, for example, religion or national identity. They are typical epiphenomena or outgrowths of the “core” populist claim of speaking for the entire and univocal people. “Absolutism”, understood as an appeal to some absolute “warrant”, in Stephen Toulmin’s sense of the term (1958)—a warrant that irrefutably trumps every other consideration—may also be found in historical and political phenomena that are not populist; an example is the absolute sovereign right claimed by the Catholic church in the Middle Ages to set aside, in the actions of the Inquisition, all other considerations in the name of the faith. The sentence “The end sanctifies the means”, misleadingly ascribed to the Jesuits, encapsulates the appeal to such an absolute justification. A modern version of this thought is the

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German jurist Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of the “sovereignty” of the state to initiate a state of exception—key concepts in his “political theology” (2005, original 1922). The Greek example in Hatzisavvidou’s chapter does not, we should note, show that appeal to moral principles is per se out of place in political actions and negotiations; rather, it shows that no appeal to any consideration should in principle be advanced as an absolute and categorical warrant. Moral warrants are of course often of relevance in political deliberation and negotiation; but what matters, strategically as well as philosophically, is that other warrants may just as relevantly be invoked, stating other, countervailing moral principles or principles belonging to non-moral but perhaps equally relevant dimensions. Revenge of a Victimized People: Hungary’s Orbán There can be little argument as to whether the regime of Hungary’s “Fidesz” party under its long-time leader Viktor Orbán is a textbook instance of populism. That is indubitable on any definition of populism, including the minimal one that we have proposed here. The rhetoric of Orbán, his party and the state apparatus that they have built with great efficiency is permeated with the omnipresent notion that they represent the unison Hungarian people, indeed they are the Hungarian people. This is true of the whole range of their communication efforts for internal as well as for external uses. A landslide victory for Fidesz in the 2010 elections resulted from a campaign in which Orbán and his part had hammered on the need for “a government and governing which again turns towards the people”. The delegates that Fidesz was able to send to the European Parliament were hailed by Orbán as a sign that the Hungarian people wanted delegates who would “represent the interest of the Hungarian people in Brussels and not the interest of Brussels in Hungary”. The list of declarations which pretended in this way to speak for “the people of Hungary” could be extended endlessly. The chapter by Miklós Sükösd is an essay by an author who was once personally acquainted with Orbán and was among the earliest witnesses to his mastery of infectious, polarizing rhetoric. Sükösd was there when Orbán, an unknown law student, sprang into instantaneous fame and became a political figure by delivering a highly mediatized key speech in June 1989, boldly calling on behalf of the Hungarian people for the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

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As touched on in the introduction, two takeaways in particular remain with readers of Sükösd’s essay: First, that Orbán knew from this very moment about the effect that “old-school” speechmaking can have, in particular of course when amplified by a range of media controlled by the speaker; second, that there was a deep susceptibility in the Hungarian people for speechmaking and other forms of rhetoric that continually plays on and amplifies a widespread feeling in the audience of having forever been suppressed, humiliated, and betrayed. Consequently, all the factors that may, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as threatening to subject the Hungarian people to such victimage again will be relentlessly portrayed in the vilest colors. These threats dominate Orbán’s discourse to such an extent that the presupposed total unanimity and consubstantiality of the Hungarian “people” will tend to fly under the radar. Orbán’s astounding success in exploiting these mechanisms make Hungary, as Sükösd has it, “a successful laboratory of populism”. Venezuela: “Chávez, It’s a People” The second example in this book of populism from the left is that of Venezuela’s onetime leader, Hugo Chávez, whose rhetoric is studied in Pierre Ostiguy’s chapter. Ostiguy, who has already published extensively on populism, with a main focus on its Latin American manifestations, chooses in his analysis to follow what he calls an inductive approach. This basically accords with the approach we have taken in editing this book: We have, essentially, said: “Let’s take a broad and diverse selection of sources that intuitively and indubitably qualify as populist; let’s then ask a diverse handful of knowledgeable scholars to write about their rhetoric without setting any conditions; then let’s see what they find and take it from there.” Such a method can also be called exploratory, and Ostiguy, in inductively exploring an “emblematic” populist leader, Chávez, finds himself in pronounced opposition to several of the most current definitions of populism—as does Laclau, as we saw at the beginning of the present chapter. But neither will a Laclau-style, “Essex School” account capture the populist essence of Chávez. The Venezuelan leader blatantly contradicts, as Ostiguy points out, a priori formulae that mainly seem relevant to right-wing populists in Europe. Some of the alleged classic hallmarks of populism are conspicuous by their absence in Chávez, but other eyeopening features emerge. Among the most striking is the way Chávez’

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torrent of communication seems to have been one continuous ad-lib stage performance. One effect of it was clearly to establish a particular bond or relationship between himself and his people. It is a bond of nothing less than mutual love—a notion that is notably scarce in most other varieties of populist rhetoric. Not only are Chávez and his “people” in a love relationship, they merge and become one entity: Chávez is the people, the people is Chávez. This seems to be the truly distinctive character of his particular populism, and it is also one that fully aligns with the minimal “definition” we have proposed. Chávez is an emblematic populist because in his boundless rhetoric he not only speaks for the Venezuelan “people” as if it were a unison entity; more than that, the people and he are one and the same. This loving relationship is not in principle an ideological one, as love relationships generally are not, but Ostiguy interestingly highlights how it becomes imbued, in one mind-boggling maneuver, with the legacy of the liberator Simón Bolívar, with revolutionary socialism (a notion that would do doubt have alienated Bolívar), and with the religious fervor of devoted followers of Christ. Chávez died in office in 2013, but there is much in his brand of populism and the popular following it found that we may see as foreshadowing Donald Trump and “Trumpism”. Little understood by academic analysts and enemies of Trump, the bond between him and his base of fervent believers is to a large extent one of love—at least in the way his followers see him, even if observers may see his frequent declarations of love for those followers as meaning, more precisely, that he loves their love of him. Even so, the forces that fueled the love of so many Venezuelans for Chávez may tell us something about Trump loyalists’ love of Trump.

Populism as a Rhetorical Artifice We have asked whether the different accounts found in this book of different populist rhetorics lend credibility to our proposal for a unifying, rhetorical definition of populism. It is a “minimal”, i.e., “one-feature”, definition according to which populism is most meaningful predicated, not of ideology or of political actions, but of rhetoric in which it is claimed or implied that the source speaks for the unison “people” of the polity addressed. We suggest that the studies constituting this book do confer such credibility. However, to do that we need to return to the distinction

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made above between a “core” attribute of populist rhetoric on the one hand, and on the other hand a set of “epiphenomenal” rhetorical features often found in populist rhetoric—but also in many cases in rhetoric and movements that we would not call populist, and not in all populist rhetoric. The seven manifestations of populist rhetoric, as discussed in the seven chapters, do not all exhibit the core attribute with equal clarity and in equally literal forms, but they all exhibit some of the epiphenomenal characteristics, and our contention will be that these epiphenomenal characteristics have a strong correlation with the core attribute. That is, to find these characteristics is more likely and more to be expected in rhetoric that is populist by the core criterion than in rhetoric that is not. Moreover, even if the core attribute is not very salient in the specific rhetoric studied in a chapter of this book, we contend that the core attribute will nevertheless be found elsewhere in the rhetoric of the leader or movement in question. The breadth and diversity of populist rhetoric studied in these pages have the advantage of raising our awareness of diverse manifestations of populism, while at the same time preserving the advantage of allowing us to see all these rhetorics as natural manifestations or outgrowths of a shared core—one that may be more directly visible in some of the rhetorical artifacts studied than in others. This dual awareness—that there is great diversity, politically and rhetorically, in populisms, but also, if we apply a rhetorical lens, a common core—in turn allows scholars and other observers to look out with a careful eye for that inner core. This we should do on the understanding that any explicit or implicit pretense in a democratic society to speak for the entire people—even if it appears, in its specific instantiations, innocuous, fleeting, or otherwise understandable, perhaps even praiseworthy—is in principle false. “The people” of a polity is always a rhetorical construct, an artifice, an “imagined community”, in the famous phrase coined by Anderson (1983). Rhetoricians, being aware of this, should make that insight a banal and ever-present one in the public sphere. Populism, even in its embryonic form—“banal” populism—should always be viewed, by scholars and the general citizenry alike, with a rhetorical awareness and with vigilance.

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