Search results

Recent events such as the US presidential campaign have polarised public opinion, particularly in terms of support for 'populist' political figures, e.g., Donald Trump, and the seemingly non-egalitarian ideologies that they promote. One might anticipate that disempowered social groups, such as women or sexual minorities, would reject 'right-wing populism', as it rarely appears to advocate their interests or facilitate their empowerment. Yet the existence of movements like 'Gays for Trump' and '#WomenWhoVoteTrump' indicate more complex patterns of support. How might we understand this from gender and sexualities perspectives? This paper presents the proceedings of a round table discussion. Our contributors, members of a cross-institutional social psychological Gender and Sexualities Research Group, each presented a brief five-minute interpretation of the phenomenon. They did so from gender and/or sexualities perspectives, drawing upon different social psychological theory. A chaired debate followed. Key themes from the round table are identified which are potentially helpful in understanding the phenomenon. The broader implications of these themes for practice and theory are considered in terms of the concept of 'safe identities'.

The rise of authoritarian, nationalist forms of populism and the implications for rural settings is perhaps one of the most crucial foci for critical agrarian studies today, with many consequences for political action. Responding to this, the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI)1was launched in early 2017, and this book is a compilation of 20 articles published in the 'Authoritarian populism and the rural world' Forum in TheJournal of Peasant Studies (JPS) as part of the Initiative.

The present article is the author's own English translation of a French piece entitled "Le populisme contemporain en Occident : Une autre lecture". ; Drawing upon the extensive literature on populism that has accumulated since the 1960s, this article first tries to characterize contemporary Western populist movements (I). It then details the key points of one of the most penetrating analyses of populism-E. Laclau's On Populist Reason (II)-, with a view to using it in a perspective other than its author's own (III). Having identified "civic" nuances among populist currents of the Left as well as of the Right, and in between them a moderate populist vote expressing disenchantment with government parties, it hypothesizes (on the basis of secondary analysis of existing studies) that the centre of gravity of the populist nebula in the West resides in a reference to the demos, rather than ethnos or plebs, and that the balance of forces within the populist support base is in its favour. It goes on to probe the causes of growing citizen alienation-the main source of populism. It suggests (based on fifteen unstructured interviews) that while the social aspect-the destabilization of the lower-middle classes induced by the neo-liberal order-is important, it does not exhaust the issue (IV). One reason is that the audience of populist themes is much wider than that central segment of societies ; another is that social demands only serve to trigger protests, and are soon followed by institutional demands to remedy a perceived disenfranchisement of majorities that has come about over the last half-century due to the rise of culturally-defined minority groups, accommodated by ruling and expressive elites. The ensuing "tyranny of minorities" has resulted in multiple everyday life constraints and reduced freedoms for the many, generating more frustration than meets the eye (V). The same result is achieved when citizens are treated as minors by a "framed democracy" in which their capacity for discernment is deliberately ignored, ...

Fox Populism offers fresh insights into why the Fox News Channel has been both commercially successful and politically effective. Where existing explanations of Fox's appeal have stressed the network's conservative editorial slant, Reece Peck sheds light on the importance of style as a generative mode of ideology. The book traces the historical development of Fox's counter-elite news brand and reveals how its iconoclastic news style was crafted by fusing two class-based traditions of American public culture: one native to the politics in populism and one native to the news field in tabloid journalism. Using the network's coverage of the late-2000s economic crisis as the book's principal case study, Peck then shows how style is deployed as a political tool to frame news events. A close analysis of top-rated programs reveals how Fox hails its audience as 'the real Americans' and successfully represents narrow, conservative political demands as popular and universal

The present article is the author's own English translation of a French piece entitled "Le populisme contemporain en Occident : Une autre lecture". ; Drawing upon the extensive literature on populism that has accumulated since the 1960s, this article first tries to characterize contemporary Western populist movements (I). It then details the key points of one of the most penetrating analyses of populism-E. Laclau's On Populist Reason (II)-, with a view to using it in a perspective other than its author's own (III). Having identified "civic" nuances among populist currents of the Left as well as of the Right, and in between them a moderate populist vote expressing disenchantment with government parties, it hypothesizes (on the basis of secondary analysis of existing studies) that the centre of gravity of the populist nebula in the West resides in a reference to the demos, rather than ethnos or plebs, and that the balance of forces within the populist support base is in its favour. It goes on to probe the causes of growing citizen alienation-the main source of populism. It suggests (based on fifteen unstructured interviews) that while the social aspect-the destabilization of the lower-middle classes induced by the neo-liberal order-is important, it does not exhaust the issue (IV). One reason is that the audience of populist themes is much wider than that central segment of societies ; another is that social demands only serve to trigger protests, and are soon followed by institutional demands to remedy a perceived disenfranchisement of majorities that has come about over the last half-century due to the rise of culturally-defined minority groups, accommodated by ruling and expressive elites. The ensuing "tyranny of minorities" has resulted in multiple everyday life constraints and reduced freedoms for the many, generating more frustration than meets the eye (V). The same result is achieved when citizens are treated as minors by a "framed democracy" in which their capacity for discernment is deliberately ignored, and their assent dispensed with, by ruling elites in the name of a presumed higher moral good, or directives from unelected faraway power centres (VI). The root cause of the malaise that has set in is the ascent of individualism and relaxation of citizenship norms from the 1960s onwards, which has led to a situation where authority and power are questioned or feared, and political leadership becomes weak. Now reduced to a managerial role, it takes to accommodating activists and militants, delegates policy-making to independent, nonpartisan authorities, expert committees or international organizations, and thus becomes unresponsive to the will of majorities, which (because they had hitherto been passive) it does not fear to ignore or manipulate. In reaction, majorities first went through a phase of apathy (which saw abstention rise), then started resorting to protest votes. Elite deafness or impotence has eventually led to a third stage, in which majorities are now abruptly reasserting their power and demanding a reaffirmation of citizenship. The current surge of populism bluntly informs us that the outer limits of the master-trend initiated in the 1960s have now been reached. Seen in that light, "civic" populism is a response to a deactivation of democracy rather than a threat to it (VII). Systems of representative democracy, put in place over two centuries when the masses were uneducated, are not aging well now that average education have considerably increased and majorities want to make themselves heard. Should that demand be ignored, the problem raised would become structural-and more acute : institutional reform in the direction of redefining the relationships between elites and grassroots, majority and minorities, is thus in order-the sooner the better (VIII).

Suggests that the populist political movement of the 1890s sensed the changing ecology of relations between human organisms & their environments brought about through the creation of large-scale organizations. Lewis Mumford's (1986) notion of the megamachine is used to describe these organizations, whose goal is to produce corporate goods capable of allowing every individual to see themselves as self-constituting agents of industrial democracy. The transformation of wants & needs within this system has created an artificial environment in which authenticity & individuality are difficult to construct. Postmodern populist movements of the 1990s are described as reactions against this artificial environment in an effort to construct local identities & communities. It is argued that the discipline of ecology represents an important effort to put scientific expertise to work in the establishment of genuine communal relations. A wedding of postmodern populism & ecology is described as an important effort to reorder the social ecology that developed within high modernity. D. M. Smith

The present article is the author's own English translation of a French piece entitled "Le populisme contemporain en Occident : Une autre lecture". Drawing upon the extensive literature on populism that has accumulated since the 1960s, this article first tries to characterize contemporary Western populist movements (I). It then details the key points of one of the most penetrating analyses of populism-E. Laclau's On Populist Reason (II)-, with a view to using it in a perspective other than its author's own (III). Having identified "civic" nuances among populist currents of the Left as well as of the Right, and in between them a moderate populist vote expressing disenchantment with government parties, it hypothesizes (on the basis of secondary analysis of existing studies) that the centre of gravity of the populist nebula in the West resides in a reference to the demos, rather than ethnos or plebs, and that the balance of forces within the populist support base is in its favour. It goes on to probe the causes of growing citizen alienation-the main source of populism. It suggests (based on fifteen unstructured interviews) that while the social aspect-the destabilization of the lower-middle classes induced by the neo-liberal order-is important, it does not exhaust the issue (IV). One reason is that the audience of populist themes is much wider than that central segment of societies ; another is that social demands only serve to trigger protests, and are soon followed by institutional demands to remedy a perceived disenfranchisement of majorities that has come about over the last half-century due to the rise of culturally-defined minority groups, accommodated by ruling and expressive elites. The ensuing "tyranny of minorities" has resulted in multiple everyday life constraints and reduced freedoms for the many, generating more frustration than meets the eye (V). The same result is achieved when citizens are treated as minors by a "framed democracy" in which their capacity for discernment is deliberately ignored, and ...