Right wing populism in the West: Social media discourse and echo chambers.

• Author: Khosravinik, Majid
• Position: COMMENTARY - Essay

ABSTRACT The commentary examines the roots of electoral shifts towards right wing populist parties and groups in the West. It shows how legitimate economic grievances of lower classes have been strategically appropriated by political elites to project xenophobic discourses and how globalist-capitalist parties capitalize on such sentiments. It discusses the British Brexit vote as a quintessential example of strategic misplacement of migration issue as the main problem to disguise the democratic deficit of a hyper-normalized neoliberal economic order. The commentary also examines the links between technological design of Social Media technologies and the notion of post-politics era.

Introduction

Nativist/nationalist discourses have been on the rise in the European sphere in recent decades. Wodak and colleagues in their large scale edited volume bring together a variety of Western/European case studies of right wing populist parties/movements and discourses and warn against the rising trends of such views in Europe. (1) These studies range from discussing the theoretical foundations and conceptualization of the nature of populist rhetoric to explaining the unprecedented changes in the working class electorates and their economic grievances in several European countries. In the years following the publication of the book, a new wave of right wing populist parties and groups across Europe have made significant inroads in popular support, be it in the form of entering the structure of governments or making significant gains in their vote shares. Most of these populist discourses are characterized in terms of their vociferous claims to being anti-establishment, anti-elitist and anti-globalization. These calls are made within a Western context where economic globalization and global capitalist movement have been the order of the day in politics within the last decades.

The right wing populism discourses are characterized in a set of common and recurring discursive strategies, albeit in varying degrees of intensity and scale. Firstly, there is the call for a swift and radical shift from a globalization rationale towards a national and nativist politics. This discursive strategy criticizes the normalized economic politics in the West i.e. economic liberalism, free movement of capital and labor, and deregulation of financial markets--even though, all these are reduced to an anti-immigration rhetoric in populist discourse. In doing so, the right wing populist discourse deliberately collates the economic globalization--that is neoliberalism at the global level, with socio-cultural globalization that is comprised of supra-national regulatory practices on environmental laws, judiciary and human rights regulation, standardization of labor conditions etc., as well as trade laws. It is within this very amalgamation that right wing populism can take on an overtly anti-global, anti-diversity and simply xenophobic overtone. In many ways, the populist discourse equates the perceived disastrous economic realities with the perceived encouragement of more immigration and diversity. This is most acutely realized in areas of the country where economic globalization and financialization of politics have hit the hardest. Extreme economization of politics views poorer sections of society as unimportant layers of social order and hence it is bound to leave them behind in its obsession with economic growth indexes rather than distribution of wealth and opportunities. The profiles of the Brexit vote in Britain and the U.S. presidential election in 2016 show that sizable sections of working class have casted their protest vote in favor of a shakeup in an attempt to presumably reclaim lost power of the 'ordinary,' marginal, rural, poorer, local populations from the dominance of the elite, central, urban, cosmopolitan, richer populations. During the course of the Brexit campaign, the leading figures in the Leave camp--themselves rich establishment figures--quickly figured out that it is by capitalizing on this misguided understanding of immigration and globalization that they can win the Brexit vote hence they deliberately concentrated on reducing/simplifying the referendum vote to a question of immigration. The deliberate alignment of economic grievances of certain disenfranchised electorates culminated in a Brexit vote platform which had already turned into a xenophobic platform. Within a populist frame, the Leave campaign managed to reduce the British EU referendum debates into predominately a matter of social and cultural changes and perceptions of immigration albeit within an intentional truncated manner. The gist of the matter is that the erosion of real distinctions between mainstream parties in British/European politics i.e. neoliberalism as an uncontested assumption, has heightened fears of immigration. (2) This has paved the ground for the rise of right wing populist discourses which effectively appeal to what has been a traditional support camp for the 'left.' (3)

Hyper-normalized Economic Order

British nationalism has been in play throughout contemporary history (4) from colonialism, World Wars, to EU formation and the Brexit vote. Yet, the recent rise/success of British xenophobic nationalism relates more directly to recent context of global geopolitics, economic concerns and broadly speaking a democratic deficit of late-modern democracies in the global North. Instead of finger pointing and demonizing certain electorates, e.g. lower classes, the issue should be looked into in terms of the processes which may have led to this vote among various electorates including the working class vote. The formation and meaningful resonance of parties and movements such as UKIP and Brexit campaign can be viewed as a failure in effective democratic process in empowering disgruntled economic classes through meaningful representation. When (neoliberal) economy is religiously taken as an all-encompassing rational basis of politics then it is only logical to consider political demonstrations such as the Brexit vote as a product of such economic policies in return. What goes around comes around. Rather than doing that, the economic establishment tends to redirect the protest vote away from economic grievance and associate it to cultural and social trends within that particular community i.e. blaming the vote to racism of working classes and effectively perpetuating the classist discourse; two birds with one stone.

Despite the crucial differences in social fabrics and political practices in global contexts, the breeding ground, characteristics and discursive strategies of populist nationalist discourses have striking similarities. In essence, populist nationalist discourse pivots around a real or constructed problem in the social, economic and political status quo. It revolves around discursive construction of a homogenously perceived Self, e.g. Us (the British), vs. a homogenously perceived Other, e.g. Them (the immigrants, Muslims (5) or by extension EU nationals). Nevertheless, the core message is nationalistic. (6) Such discourses often 'fill the gap created by the public's disenchantment with [official] politics' (7) while presenting themselves as the indigenous, socially relevant, and righteous alternative to world-views of the establishment. Nationalist rhetoric is overtly preoccupied with the notion of (re)gaining the (lost) power to actualize a romanticized perception of the past. The perception of powerlessness is central to nativist discourses not only in the structurally 'democratic' societies (e.g. Britain) but also in the extreme identity politics at play in developing countries (e.g. Iran), which have gone through some forms of European colonization. While the democratic deficit in the late modern contexts may have arisen due to dominance of neoliberalism and its argued lack of relevance to certain electorates, many countries in the global South suffer from structural authoritarian politics leading to structural democratic deficit. While these contexts are admittedly different in terms of domestic mark up, in one way or another, in both cases nativist discourses are founded upon a form of outcry for a radical change by taking back control, bringing back the glories, and restoring a constructed perfect past. (8)

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The leading argument here is that the global neoliberal North suffers from a degree of democratic deficit in its democratic practice. The main unresolved challenge is to operate within an egalitarian model of development in which justice and fair distribution of wealth and power are equally important in the long term imaginary of a developed nation-state. The deficit comes about by obsession with typical indexes of economic growth and assigning a pivotal role to markets and any processes whereby growth can be achieved. From a neoliberal point of view, globalization is practically a facilitated flow of goods, services and labor within markets...