The Rise and Fall of Japan’s New Far Right: How Anti-Korean Discourses Went Mainstream

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-402
Author(s):  
Sharon J. Yoon ◽  
Yuki Asahina

Why has right-wing activism in Japan, despite its persistence throughout the postwar era, only gained significant traction recently? Focusing on the Zaitokukai, an anti-Korean movement in Japan, this article demonstrates how the new Far Right were able to popularize formerly stigmatized right-wing ideas. The Zaitokukai represents a political group distinct from the traditional right and reflective of new Far Right movements spreading worldwide. In Japan, concerns about the growing influence of South Korea and China in the 1980s as well as the decline of left-wing norms opened up a discursive opportunity for the new Far Right. By framing Korean postcolonial minorities as undeserving recipients of social welfare benefits, the Zaitokukai mobilized perceptions of threat that has continued to powerfully influence public perceptions of Koreans even following the group’s organizational decline. While past research has focused on the new Far Right’s political influence, this article stresses their roles as ideological entrepreneurs.

Author(s):  
John S. Huntington

Willis E. Stone watched aghast as mid-century liberals expanded the size and power of the federal government. Stone, a former industrial engineer and unbending anti-statist, believed this liberal surge obfuscated and abetted an imminent red tide of communism. He founded the American Progress Foundation and its flagship periodical, American Progress , to spread a hardline libertarian message, hoping to spark conservative resistance against federal power. In the pages of American Progress , Stone and a coterie of other right-wingers published conspiratorial, anti-statist diatribes and promoted Stone’s proposal, the Liberty Amendment, to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. Right-wing business owners joined the fray, sponsoring American Progress through advertisements, and over time Stone’s movement expanded to form a collaborative network with other far-right groups. This article illustrates how American Progress served as an activist and ideological nexus for the broader ultraconservative movement, which helped establish a hardline brand of libertarianism that reverberated throughout the modern American Right. Furthermore, by analysing the scope and influence of radical right-wing publications, this article provides a critical counterweight to the traditional left-wing focus of periodical studies.


Author(s):  
Martin Baekgaard ◽  
Donald P Moynihan ◽  
Mette Kjærgaard Thomsen

Abstract Administrative burdens affect peoples’ experience of public administration but there is, to date, limited evidence to as why policymakers are willing to accept and impose burdens. To address this gap, we draw from the policy design and administrative burden literatures to develop the concept of burden tolerance—the willingness of policymakers and people more generally to passively allow or actively impose state actions that result in others experiencing administrative burdens. Drawing on a survey experiment and observational data with Danish local politicians in a social welfare setting, we find that more right-wing politicians are more tolerant of burdens, but politicians are less willing to impose burdens on a welfare claimant perceived as being more deserving. Politicians with a personal experience of receiving welfare benefits themselves are less tolerant of burdens, while information about the psychological costs experienced by claimants did not reduce burden tolerance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512092663
Author(s):  
Vanessa Ceia

That Twitter is a major form of political mobilization and influence has been well documented. But what is the role of linked media—references to newspapers, photos, videos, and other external sources via URLs—in political Twitter messaging? How are linked references employed as campaign tools and rhetorical devices in messages published by political parties on Twitter? Is there a quantifiable relationship between a party’s ideology and linked media in tweets? With the spread of fake news, threats to a free press, and questioning of the legitimacy of political messaging on the rise globally, the sources on which parties draw to convince voters of their online messaging deserve critical attention. To explore the above questions, this article examines uses of linked media in tweets generated by the official accounts of Spain’s top five political parties during, in the lead-up, and in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish General Elections held on April 28, 2019. Grounded in a corpus of 10,038 tweets collected between March 1 and May 15, 2019, this study quantifies, compares, and critiques how linked media are integrated and remixed into tweets published by the left-leaning Spanish Workers’ Socialist Party (@PSOE), right-wing Popular Party (@populares), left-wing Podemos (@ahorapodemos), neoliberal Citizens (@CiudadanosCs), and far-right Vox (@vox_es) parties. Evidence reveals that each party links to media from somewhat homophilic groups of news outlets, journalists, and public figures, an analysis of which can shed light on how parties construct their digital self-representations, ideological networks of information, and attempt to sway voters.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1407-1429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Bernardi ◽  
James Adams

Issue ownership theory posits that when social welfare is electorally salient, left-wing parties gain public support by rhetorically emphasizing social welfare issues. There is less research, however, on whether left-wing governing parties benefit from increasing social welfare spending. That is, it is not known whether leftist governments gain from acting on the issues they rhetorically emphasize. This article presents arguments that voters will not react to governments’ social welfare rhetoric, and reviews the conflicting arguments about how government support responds to social welfare spending. It then reports time-series, cross-sectional analyses of data on government support, governments’ social welfare rhetoric and social welfare spending from Britain, Spain and the United States, that support the prediction that government rhetoric has no effects. The article estimates, however, that increased social welfare spending sharply depresses support for both left- and right-wing governments. These findings highlight a strategic dilemma for left-wing governments, which lose public support when they act on their social welfare rhetoric by increasing welfare spending.


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.


Significance Kurz has said he wants a coalition agreement by the end of the month -- probably with the far-right populist Freedom Party (FPOe). Impacts Austria is likely to push for EU reforms on migration, border controls and social welfare benefits. The SPOe is struggling to find a niche in the party system and could face a long spell in opposition. The FPOe's rise to a potential government role will attract unwanted international attention. The political elite could be rejuvenated as younger Kurz supporters are promoted to top jobs in ministries and parliament.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svenja Kopyciok ◽  
Hilary Silver

Given rising populist nationalism and multiplying meanings of “right” and “left,” this paper assesses whether Europeans who identify as extremely left-wing on the political spectrum hold anti-immigrant attitudes. In contrast to right-wing xenophobes, we further examine whether the political left, who conventionally emphasize class conflict, oppose immigrants less for cultural reasons and more for materialist reasons. We also consider whether socioeconomic status and values traditionally associated with the political left—favoring redistributive policies, egalitarianism, or social rights to benefits and services for immigrants—temper left- more than right-wing xenophobia. We find that a surprisingly large share of those who identify as far left do express extremely xenophobic attitudes, and we profile them in contrast to far right xenophobes. With logistic regression analysis of nine waves of the European Social Survey (2002–2018), we find that, all things equal, socioeconomic status influences far left xenophobia more than far right xenophobia, but inegalitarian values, less support for redistributive policies, and welfare chauvinism can only partially account for far left xenophobia and unexpectedly do not distinguish it from far right xenophobia. This implies that far left parties might adopt anti-immigrant policies to try to retain their loyal voters, even though such policies do not comport with broader left-wing values and may increase racial and ethnic inequality. Controlling for demographic and attitudinal differences reduces the probability of xenophobia among the far left by about sixty percent, but there remains some residual anti-immigrant attitudes among this group still to be explained.


Gesnerus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-122
Author(s):  
Hadrien Buclin

In 1974, the Swiss citizens voted against a popular initiative aimed at reforming the health insurance, launched by the Swiss Socialist Party. They refused as well a less ambitious counter-proposal elaborated by the government. This failure of the left-wing reformers is worthy of interest. This was, indeed, the main attempt until now to implement a healthcare subsidization based on social funding that would provide a wide risk coverage. In fact, shortly after the vote, the emerging economic crisis rather reinforced the advocates of a limitation of social welfare benefits. This durably hindered the political Left’s hopes of transforming in depth the Swiss healthcare system. The 1974 failure of the socialist initiative thus contributed to strengthen the conservative model, which received support from right-wing forces and the business community.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-37
Author(s):  
René Nissen ◽  
Kiril Avramov ◽  
Jason Roberts

Most of the scholarship on far-right hooliganism in Europe and Russia mentions only marginally the Russian far-right MMA gear and tournament brand White Rex (WR). A few authors have discussed WR’s right-wing connections and activities. Yet both the structures that enabled WR and, now, other similar brands to exert ideological and political influence and the influence itself bear further examination. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of information from intelligence reports, social media, open media, and interviews to show how WR modeled and cultivated a professionalizing trend in several far-right combat sport tournaments. We argue that WR’s entrance into the Western European far-right combat sport scene was a key development in the emergence of professionally organized, fight-focused events with explicit political messaging targeted at a far-right, primarily trans-European audience and a surrounding infrastructure of far-right organizations shaping the character of this developing scene. The business model that WR developed in Russia proved to be something the emerging European far-right combat sport scene could adopt in order to grow. Finally, we elaborate on how WR’s founder, Denis Kapustin, was able to establish a Western European network that temporarily gave him influence over one of the far right’s most significant cultural scenes.


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.


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