scholarly journals Varieties of populism

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Tushnet

AbstractContemporary discussions of populism elide important distinctions between the ways in which populist leaders and movements respond to the failures of elites to follow through on the promises associated with international social welfare constitutionalism. After laying out the political economy of populisms’ origins, this Article describes the relation between populisms and varieties of liberalism, and specifically the relation between populisms and judicial independence understood as a “veto point” occupied by the elites that populists challenge. It then distinguishes left-wing populisms’ acceptance of the social welfare commitments of late twentieth century liberalism and its rejection of some settled constitutional arrangements that, in populists’ views, obstruct the accomplishment of those commitments. It concludes with a description of the core ethnonationalism of right-wing populism, which sometimes contingently appears in left-wing populisms but is not one the latter’s core components.

2021 ◽  
pp. e20200028
Author(s):  
Asa McKercher

Emerging in Toronto in the late 1960s, the Edmund Burke Society (ebs) became a leading far-right outlet. From picketing Model United Nations meetings and gatherings of left-wing groups to staging pro-Vietnam War protests and engaging in racially motivated vandalism, the ebs became a bellwether of what journalists and social scientists identified as a “virtual explosion” of Canadian right-wing extremism. The far right has a long history in Canada, and, in this regard, ebs members’ views reflected long-standing strains of extreme nationalism, racism, anti-statism, and anti-communism. However, the ebs and its successor organizations were very much concerned with issues that were current in late twentieth-century Canada: the expanding welfare state; changes in Canadian immigration policy; multiculturalism and a more civic-based nationalism; and the entrenchment of the rights revolution. Furthermore, the group’s activities were also a response to 1960s counterculture, a counter-counterculture in that it offered a radical challenge from the right, not only to the status quo but also to the New Left. While much of the history of Canada in the 1960s is focused on the left, the emergence of the ebs highlights the growth of activism at the other end of the political spectrum. Providing an important look at Canadian far-right extremism, this examination of the ebs serves as a reminder that the 1960s were not all Trudeaumania and flower power and that societal changes in the later decades of the century did not go uncontested.


Author(s):  
Janet O'Shea

This section contends with a central irony: Americans are among the most competitive people in the world, and yet we are among the least likely to play competitive sports in adulthood. This exercise gap is usually treated as a public health problem; the goal of this section is to treat it as a social and cultural concern. The conclusion therefore investigates the social and political implications of an American tendency to outsource physical play to experts: higher levels of fear, increased preoccupation with success at all costs, decreased creativity, and increasing rigidity of perspective and position. Specifically, the conclusion maintains that a neglect of fair play has dire consequences for democracy, a suggestion born out by the recent swing toward right-wing populism in politics.


Author(s):  
Christel Lane

This chapter analyses inns, taverns, and public houses in their social context, exploring their organizational identity and the social positions of their owners/tenants. It examines how patrons express their class, gender, and national identity by participation in different kinds of sociality. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hostelries afforded more opportunities for cross-class sociability than in later centuries. Social mixing was facilitated because the venues fulfilled multiple economic, social, and political functions, thereby providing room for social interaction apart from communal drinking and eating. Yet, even in these earlier centuries, each type of hostelry already had a distinctive class character, shaping its organizational identity. Division along lines of class hardened, and social segregation increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to World War II. In the post-War era, increased democratization of society at large became reflected in easier social mixing in pubs. Despite this democratization, during the late twentieth century the dominant image of pubs as a working-class institution persisted.


2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (2) ◽  
pp. 538-566
Author(s):  
Sandra Issel-Dombert

AbstractFrom a theoretical and empirical linguistic point of view, this paper emphasizes the importance of the relationship between populism and the media. The aim of this article is to explore the language use of the Spanish right wing populism party Vox on the basis of its multimodal postings on the social network Instagram. For the analysis of their Instagram account, a suitable multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) provides a variety of methods and allows a theoretical integration into constructivism. A hashtag-analysis reveals that Vox’s ideology consists of a nativist and ethnocentric nationalism on the one hand and conservatism on the other. With a topos analysis, the linguistic realisations of these core elements are illustrated with two case studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjetil Klette Bøhler

This article investigates the role of music in presidential election campaigns and political movements inspired by theoretical arguments in Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, John Dewey ́s pragmatist rethinking of aesthetics and existing scholarship on the politics of music. Specifically, it explores how musical rhythms and melodies enable new forms of political awareness, participation, and critique in an increasingly polarized Brazil through an ethnomusicological exploration of how left-wing and right-wing movements used music to disseminate politics during the 2018 election that culminated in the presidency of Jair Messias Bolsonaro. Three lessons can be learned. First, in Brazil, music breathes life, energy, and affective engagement into politics—sung arguments and joyful rhythms enrich public events and street demonstrations in complex and dynamic ways. Second, music is used by right-wing and left-wing movements in unique ways. For Bolsonaro supporters and right-wing movements, jingles, produced as part of larger election campaigns, were disseminated through massive sound cars in the heart of São Paulo while demonstrators sang the national anthem and waved Brazilian flags. In contrast, leftist musical politics appears to be more spontaneous and bohemian. Third, music has the ability to both humanize and popularize bolsonarismo movements that threaten human rights and the rights of ethnic minorities, among others, in contemporary Brazil. To contest bolsonarismo, Trumpism, and other forms of extreme right-wing populism, we cannot close our ears and listen only to grooves of resistance and songs of freedom performed by leftists. We must also listen to the music of the right.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132
Author(s):  
Hamdi Hameed Yousif

One of the post-modernist approaches to literary criticism is the queer criticism which has not been evaluated properly. Queer criticism can refer to any piece of literary criticism that interprets a text from a non-straight perspective. Therefore, it includes both lesbian and gay criticism. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to trace the social and political reasons behind the emergence of Queer criticism in the late twentieth century till it acquired momentum in the twenty-first century. After trying to define the terms related to the Queer criticism, the paper tries to examine the poetics of queer (gay and lesbian) literary works and to point out the main characteristic features of this critical approach by identifying the criteria and the textual evidence by which a literary work is labeled queer. It, also tries to shed light on the common features between queer criticism and feminism, on the one hand, and queer criticism and the deconstructuralist approach on the other hand. The final section of the study is a critique which points out the negative aspects of this approach.


Author(s):  
Moussa Pourya Asl ◽  
Nurul Farhana Low bt Abdullah

This article attempts to evince the political, cultural and affective consequences of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic writings and their particular enunciations of the literary gaze. To do so, it details the manner in which the stories’ exercise of visual operations rigidly corresponds with those of the Panopticon. The essay argues that Lahiri’s narrative produces a kind of panoptic machine that underpins the ‘modes of social regulation and control’ that Foucault has explained as disciplinary technologies. By situating Lahiri’s stories, “A Real Durwan” and “Only Goodness,” within a historical-political context, this essay aims at identifying the way in which panopticism defines her fiction as both a record of and a participant in the social, sexual and political ‘paranoia’ behind the propaganda of America’s self-image as the land of freedom. We maintain that Lahiri’s fiction situates itself in complex relation to the postcolonial concerns of the late twentieth century, suggesting that through their fascination with a visual literalization of the panoptic machine, and by privileging the masculine gaze, the stories legitimate the perpetuation of socially prescribed notion of sexual difference.  Keywords: Gaze, Sexual difference, Panopticon, A Real Durwan, Only Goodness


2021 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 420-444
Author(s):  
Greg Bak

ABSTRACT Helen Samuels sought to document institutions in society by adding to official archives counterweights of private records and archivist-created records such as oral histories. In this way, she recognized and sought to mitigate biases that arise from institution-centric application of archival functionalism. Samuels's thinking emerged from a late-twentieth-century consensus on the social license for archival appraisal, which formed around the work of West German archivist Hans Booms, who wrote, “If there is indeed anything or anyone qualified to lend legitimacy to archival appraisal, it is society itself.” Today, archivists require renewed social license in light of acknowledgment that North American governments and institutions sought to open lands for settlement and for exploitation of natural resources by removing or eliminating Indigenous peoples. Can a society be said to “lend legitimacy” to archival appraisal when it has grossly violated human, civil, and Indigenous rights? Starting from the question of how to create an adequate archives of Canada's Indigenous residential school system, the author locates Samuels's work amid other late-twentieth-century work on appraisal and asks how far her thinking can take us in pursuit of archival decolonization.


Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.


2020 ◽  
pp. 137-158
Author(s):  
Alexander Cooley ◽  
Daniel Nexon

Right-wing illiberal movements have enjoyed a run of political success. This manifests in Trump’s capture of the Republican Party and subsequent election; the number of illiberal, right-wing parties that hold or share power in Europe; and the largely right-wing coalition that successfully pushed for the UK to trigger withdrawal from the European Union—and thus sent one of the most stalwart, stable great-power supporters of liberal order and the American system into political chaos. This chapter explores how right-wing populism has emerged as a significant counter-order movement, and how the Kremlin has sought to position itself as a broker among wings of the transnational right. These movements also benefit from highly polarized societies, and piggyback on media environments that cultivate polarization. Because counter-order movements within the core are a major way that hegemonic systems collapse or international orders change, these developments matter to the fate of the American system.


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