scholarly journals The ‘changing’ face of media discourses on poverty in the age of populism and anti-globalisation: The political appeal of anti-modernity and certainty in Brazil

2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
Jairo Lugo-Ocando

This article analyses how the political right in parts of the Global South has appropriate agendas and issues that in the past were often associated to the political left and presented them instead as their own. It does so by articulating narratives around poverty and social exclusion in the context of anti-globalisation and nationalistic discursive regimes that appeal to popular ‘common sense’. The piece explores this argument by examining the case of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Reviewing a sample of Brazilian news media outlets and the type of messages in relation to poverty during the most recent presidential elections, it is suggested that by linking themes of social exclusion with nationalism in the news media, the political right has been able to explain poverty by means of increasing globalisation and liberalism and co-opt this agenda.

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Willem van Prooijen ◽  
André P. M. Krouwel

Dogmatic intolerance—defined as a tendency to reject, and consider as inferior, any ideological belief that differs from one’s own—is often assumed to be more prominent at the political right than at the political left. In the present study, we make two novel contributions to this perspective. First, we show that dogmatic intolerance is stronger among left- and right-wing extremists than moderates in both the European Union (Study 1) as well as the United States (Study 2). Second, in Study 3, participants were randomly assigned to describe a strong or a weak political belief that they hold. Results revealed that compared to weak beliefs, strong beliefs elicited stronger dogmatic intolerance, which in turn was associated with willingness to protest, denial of free speech, and support for antisocial behavior. We conclude that independent of content, extreme political beliefs predict dogmatic intolerance.


2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-370
Author(s):  
Matti Peltonen

Sweden and Finland reviewed their alcohol control policies in the 1950s at more or less the same time. Sweden abolished its ration book system and lifted restrictions on the sale of medium strength beer, Finland in turn revised its mechanisms for controlling the purchase of alcohol, a version of the Bratt system. In Sweden, alcohol consumption increased sharply and the number of drunkenness offences doubled. In Finland, by contrast, nothing happened. Why? History provides one possible source of explanation. The Swedish version of the Bratt system was much stricter (with monthly rations allocated on the basis of social class and sex) and therefore there was greater pressure towards a liberalisation of alcohol policy than was the case in Finland. During the war and in the post-war years Finland had a strong labour movement, which was keen to underline and demonstrate that the working class were in every respect decent and upright people. The debate that was touched off by the General Strike in 1956 is particularly interesting. On the political right, workers were frequently portrayed as heavy drinkers; the political left worked hard to fend off this propaganda attack. In this kind of atmosphere it was impossible to seriously call for a liberalisation of alcohol control policy in Finland.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Zimmerman

Universities are usually considered bastions of the free exchange of ideas, but a recent tide of demonstrations across college campuses has called this belief into question, and with serious consequences. Such a wave of protests hasn't been seen since the campus free speech demonstrations of the 1960s, yet this time it is the political Left, rather than the political Right, calling for restrictions on campus speech and freedom. And, as Jonathan Zimmerman suggests, recent campus controversies have pitted free speech against social justice ideals. The language of trauma--and, more generally, of psychology--has come to dominate campus politics, marking another important departure from prior eras. This trend reflects an increased awareness of mental health in American society writ large. But it has also tended to dampen exchange and discussion on our campuses, where faculty and students self-censor for fear of insulting or offending someone else. Or they attack each other in periodic bursts of invective, which run counter to the “civility” promised by new speech and conduct codes. In Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Jonathan Zimmerman breaks down the dynamics of what is actually driving this recent wave of discontent. After setting recent events in the context of the last half-century of free speech campus movements, Zimmerman looks at the political beliefs of the US professorate and students. He follows this with chapters on political correctness; debates over the contested curriculum; admissions, faculty hires, and affirmative action; policing students; academic freedom and censorship; in loco parentis administration; and the psychology behind demands for "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces." He concludes with the question of how to best balance the goals of social and racial justice with the commitment to free speech.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
Adam Wielomski

DIALECTICS ‘WE’–‘ALIENS’ IN RIGHT-WING POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 1789–1945 The aim of the author of this text is to polemicize with the stereotype according to which nationalism is a synonym of the “extreme right.” For this purpose the method of historical exemplification was used. Part I of this text is devoted to defining the concept of the “right” and to present the supporters of the French Revolution and other 19th-century revolutions, their idea of nationalism, the nation-state and sovereignty of the nation. This presentation shows that up to 1890 nationalism is located in the revolutionary left. The first nationalists are Jacobins. The counter-revolutionary right is opposed to nationalism. For this right, nationalism is combined with the idea of empowering nations to the rights of self-determination, which is closely connected with the idea of people’s sovereignty. This situation persists until 1870–1914, when the ideas of national sovereignty are implemented in the politics of the modern states. However, the liberal state does not meet the expectations of nationalists, because it neglects the interests of the nation as the highest value. That is the cause for them moving from the political left to the right part of the political scene, replacing the legitimist right. The latter is annihilated with the decline of aristocracy. In the 19th century, the left is nationalistic and xenophobic. We find clear racist sympathies on the left. The political right does not recognize the right of nations to self-determination, the idea of ethnic boundaries. It is cosmopolitan.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Campbell Jones

This paper arises from a request to report to the Future of Work Commission on the question of the value of work in the past, present, and future politics of the Left. This task is complicated, however, by the complexity of the meaning of the terms Left and Right. It is only when we are clear about the meanings of Left and Right that we can be clear about the very different kinds of politics that will result from taking a Left position on work. This paper seeks to clarify what a Left politics of work might look like today. This requires in the first place an analysis of the respective value of work to the political Left and Right, to which end I argue that what distinguishes the Left and the Right regarding the value of work is not simply the quantity of value or dignity that is attributed to work. Rather, Left and Right depart in a fundamental ontological confrontation regarding the nature of what work is and the existence of the bodies from which work issues. This analysis therefore raises deeper questions regarding the very distinction between the Left and the Right.  


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen L. Morgan

The General Social Survey (GSS) shows that many self-identified white adults continue to hold racial attitudes that can be regarded, collectively, as a persistent social problem. Similar to findings from the analysis of electoral surveys, the GSS also shows that these racial attitudes have more strongly predicted political behavior since 2012. However, and in contrast to group-identity interpretations of these patterns, the increase in predictive power since 2012 is attributable to a positive development: above and beyond the effects of cohort replacement, support for compensatory interventions to address black-white inequalities has increased substantially, while prejudice and bigotry have decreased slightly. Because these changes have been larger on the political left than on the political right, the attitudes have gained in overall predictive power.


Author(s):  
Garrett Hardin

"Every year Malthus is proven wrong and is buried—only to spring to life again before the year is out. If he is so wrong, why can't we forget him? If he is right, how does he happen to be so fertile a subject for criticism?" I wrote those words in the 1960s in an introduction to an anthology of essays on population. How naive I was! I supposed that the voices that were then sounding the alarm about population growth would at last get the public's attention. And so they did for about a decade during which environmentalists made common cause with populationists. But some of the most influential of the environmental activists viewed population as a dangerous and unwanted diversion from what they conceived to be humanity's true problems. Their stifling of public concern for population problems was reinforced during the Reagan years by self-styled "supply-side economists." Soon the predominent population message broadcast by both the political left and the political right was "Not to worry!" In 1968 ZPG, Inc., was founded to promote zero population growth as an ideal both for the United States and for the world. Its membership was confined mostly to 350 chapters on college campuses. Twenty-one years later, in 1989, the number had shrunk to just nine. Though Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb was a bestseller in 1968, worrying about population growth did not become a growth industry. Malthusians saw population growth as a "root cause" of inflation, unemployment, pollution, congestion, unwanted immigration, influxes of heartrending refugees, trade wars, drug wars, and terrorism. Each of these pathologies has many causes; anti-Malthusians belittled population. Common economic experience made it hard to believe that a population gain of 2 to 4 percent per year (which characterizes poor countries) could be serious; the less than one percent annual growth rate found in rich countries seemed even more trifling. Students of population, however, pointed out that the average gain in world population during the past million years has been less than 0.002 percent per year. That "small" rate of increase, operating over a million years, has produced our present five billion people, not a "small" number by any standard. When it comes to rates of increase that are continued indefinitely, no rate that exceeds zero by the most minute amount can be regarded as small.


2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Lucas Poy

AbstractThis article traces the reception of E.P. Thompson’s work in Argentina over the past three decades. It explores the context in which Thompson was read by labor historians as a means to analyse the way in which the country’s labor historiography was shaped over this period. It argues that, in the 1980s and the 1990s, against a context characterized by a crisis of the political left and a downturn in the labor movement, Thompson’s appropriation was focused on his critique of Marxist “determinism”. While this corresponded to similar developments in other countries, Argentinian labor historiography started to show a different path in the early 2000s, when a tremendous social, political, and economic crisis shook the country. The article concludes that recent developments in labor historiography in Argentina show a different pattern to those seen in the “Global North”.


Author(s):  
Jill Stockwell

Since the return to democratic rule in Argentina in 1983, competing claims about how the period of political and state violence of the 1970s and 1980s might be collectively remembered by the nation have caused deep political and societal divisions. This paper explores the personal memories of Argentine women from two ideologically-opposed groups—those on the political Left affected by military repression during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship and those on the political Right affected by the armed guerrilla violence predominantly in the years leading up to the 1976 military coup. In contemporary Argentina, the memories of enduring personal trauma which both groups of women carry are commonly perceived as unable to co-exist in a shared mnemonic space – as if remembering one history of violence is seen as an attempt to forget or violate the other history of violence and trauma.


Author(s):  
Leticia Bode ◽  
Alexander Hanna ◽  
Junghwan Yang ◽  
Dhavan V. Shah

Twitter provides a direct method for political actors to connect with citizens, and for those citizens to organize into online clusters through their use of hashtags (i.e., a word or phrase marked with # to identify an idea or topic and facilitate a search for it). We examine the political alignments and networking of Twitter users, analyzing 9 million tweets produced by more than 23,000 randomly selected followers of candidates for the U.S. House and Senate and governorships in 2010. We find that Twitter users in that election cycle did not align in a simple Right-Left division; rather, five unique clusters emerged within Twitter networks, three of them representing different conservative groupings. Going beyond discourses of fragmentation and polarization, certain clusters engaged in strategic expression such as “retweeting” (i.e., sharing someone else’s tweet with one’s followers) and “hashjacking” (i.e., co-opting the hashtags preferred by political adversaries). We find the Twitter alignments in the political Right were more nuanced than those on the political Left and discuss implications of this behavior in relation to the rise of the Tea Party during the 2010 elections.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document