(PSM7b) The Populist Radical Right: Old Hatreds, New Hatreds II

While the rise of the populist radical right around the world is reminiscent of the 1930s, today’s actors and organizations have adapted their discourses and styles to fit the 21st Century (Rydgren, 2018). Marked by what Mudde (2019) terms an increasing meanstreamization of radical right ideas that blurs the lines between rightwing and radical right politics, this adaptation has been helped by the radical right’s ability to seize current issues and impose its narratives, sometimes even hijacking and distorting certain causes long championed by liberal and left-wing forces. In recent years, scholars have pointed out the way large parts of the radical right have wielded women or LGBT+ rights against minorities through femonationalism (Farris, 2017) and homonationalism (Puar, 2007); implemented robust yet exclusionary social welfare policies (Scheppele, 2022); embraced a secularised Christianity and a common ‘European identity’ (Brubaker, 2017); or instrumentalized “anti-antisemitism” against Muslims (Kalmar, 2020). Scrutinizing the ways various forms of racisms, such as anti-migrant politics, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and antitziganism, interplay with discourses of national and civilizational belonging, welfare and class, and gender and sexuality, this panel seeks to provide an intersectional and comparative analysis of contemporary populist radical right politics, movements, parties, and organizations. Tags: Politics, Social Movements

Organizers: Adrien Beauduin, Central European University, Sara Swerdlyk, McMaster University

Presentations

Sara Swerdlyk, McMaster University

Mapping competing visions of welfare amongst rightwing populist projects

This paper offers a preliminary exploration of new and competing visions of gendered work and social welfare developing amongst contemporary rightwing populist movements. The paper builds off the scholarship of feminist sociologists using social reproduction theory to analyze the crisis of care endemic to neoliberalism, asking: to what extent is the rise of the far right intertwined with the relations of social reproduction engendered by neoliberal capitalism? As rightwing populist movements gain traction through promises of wealth redistribution, supporting families, and renewed welfare chauvinism, what new relations of social reproduction congeal within these emerging rightwing ideologies? The main task of the research is to map and analyze the specific gendered and racialized regimes of social welfare and responses to the care crisis offered in the ideas and practices of far-right political projects. While feminist sociologists continue to unpack the role of gender in consolidating illiberal political ideologies, the task remains to locate gender analyses of rightwing populist movements within the political economy dynamics of work and social reproduction structured by financialized capitalism, particularly the tensions that manifest between the neoliberal retreat of the welfare state and the competing reclamations as well as condemnations of social welfare and state spending amongst rightwing populist movements. The paper thus builds a comparative overview of contemporary rightwing populist projects and their response to the care crisis, their stance on social spending, and their proposals for social welfare. Ultimately, this research underscores the relationship between rightwing populism, neoliberalism, and social reproduction, calling attention to the issues of social spending and state welfare as relevant factors in the agendas of rightwing populist political projects.

Adrien Beauduin, Central European University

Gender and sexuality as intrinsic to the far right : the cases of Poland and Czechia

Recent scholarship on the far right considers cultural aspects, like anti-migration sentiments, distrust towards supranational institutions and authoritarian tendencies, as the key to understand the far right, displacing other factors like socio-economics (Inglehart and Norris, 2016; Mudde, 2007). According to such scholarship, the transformation of politics in ‘culture wars’ has challenged traditional Left-Right divisions and led to a greater polarisation between fixed groups defined by their identity, and not their socio-economic class. Despite the unquestionable rise of cultural questions in political debates, I argue in this paper that the analytical division between identity and class, between recognition and redistribution, obscures more than explains the dynamics of the far right. Indeed, Instead, I propose a more dynamic use of intersectionality as an analytical approach taking into account multiple facets in their complementarity and interaction (Anthias, 2013), with race, class, gender and sexuality as some key categories coming together in far right ideology and practice. Drawing from my research on the Polish and Czech parliamentary far right, including interview with members, I show how closely imbricated cultural questions – such as the gender and sexual order – and political and socio-economical ones are. While the Polish Konfederacja proposes a strict heterosexist order as part of its paleolibertarian socio-economic and political system, the Czech SPD champions a less strictly defined understanding of the family to be favoured by welfare chauvinism and protected from the alleged excesses of liberalism. In particular, I analyse the two parties’ relationships of resistance to – and complicity with – the neoliberal order. While the Polish case shows the example of an ultra-liberal and ultra-conservative response to neoliberalism, coupling an acceleration of the ethos of commodification, exploitation and competition in economics with the economical, political and cultural empowerment and protection of the ‘traditional family’, the Czech case exhibits a national arrangement with the system, with welfare chauvinism directed against supranational institutions, migrants and the local racialised Roma minority. Drawing from my research’s comparative insights, I claim that both cases show that, while gender and sexuality are subordinated to the central issues of nationalism and xenophobia in the party’s ideologies and communication, they nevertheless occupy a central place in their visions of society. Moreover, going beyond the focus on ideology and policy-making, I look into the ways in which political activism itself taps into the gender and sexual order, among others with the centrality of the figure of the masculinist strongman as embodying a particular heterosexist order (Geva, 2018). As I show in my research, issues of gender and sexuality are not mere instruments, but rather intrinsic aspects of a particular ‘normal’ social order to be defended against outside assaults by the European Union, leftist-liberals, feminists and LGBT+ activists. Shifting the academic focus from the ideological positions of the far right on gender and sexuality, or the importance of these topics compared to other aspects, I adopt a holistic approach to examine the ways a particular gender and sexual order underpins and constructs hierarchies built around other categories, such as race and class. In this endeavour, I pay a particular attention to the ways these axes of difference interact with each other, treating each of them as co-constructed by the others.

Tim Hayslip, York University

From Ebenezer Scrooge to Gordon Gecko: Examining Underlying Reasons for Low Confidence in Banks

The last several years have witnessed a polarization in North American politics. Although Canada lacks a leader who combines Donald Trump’s popularity and divisiveness, many have described the trucker convoy that occupied Ottawa as motivated by a similar brand of rightwing populism. To some degree, conservative media is filling this role, promoting interpretations of reality that encourage distrust of ostensibly respectable or democratic institutions. On this ideological level, the influence of the libertarian Austrian School of Economics within conservative intellectual spaces is aiding the growth of the Canadian populist movement by encouraging a lack of confidence in banks. The Austrian School is at least as distrustful of government and supportive of laissez faire economic policies as other conservatives, but they also identify a scapegoat for persistent economic malaise. Austrian economic theory proposes that credit expansion driven by bank loans produces the boom-bust economic cycle. First, credit expands the money supply and raises the prices of goods higher than they would be in the absence of the loans. Next, these artificially raised price signals guide investment decisions in ways that depart from what the market demands, eventually leading to the production of goods lacking adequate market demand. The resultant crisis in which prices fall and many companies go bankrupt “is in fact the process of readjustment, of putting production activities anew in agreement with the given state of the market data” (Hayek, 2012: 560). This theory is repackaged for popular readers by newspapers like the National Post. Its financial section, known as the Financial Post , carries articles that argue central bank interventions have made borrowing funds far too cheap and, in doing so, sustained businesses that ought to have closed their doors. “The danger is that in our desire to help healthy companies survive [the pandemic] we continue to support companies that, unfortunately, have no future... That way lies zombie-land: too many businesses that cannot... increase our living standards” (Kronick and Robson, 2020). Those influenced by the Austrians are likely to attribute the decades of economic malaise the left associates with neoliberalism to central banks manipulating interest rates in order to produce credit expansions that have sustained ‘walking dead zombie’ companies barely able to meet their operating costs, let alone invest in raising tomorrow’s living standards. Of course, there are many reasons why respondents would indicate having a low level of confidence in banks. One need not be influenced by the Austrians to be wary. In this paper I will present my findings from analysis of the World Values Survey. This survey is an enormous undertaking that has surveyed people in over 100 nations over the last 40 years. Early findings indicate that low levels of confidence in banks correlate with other indicators of populist sentiment. Low levels of confidence in the government, the press, labor unions, and universities all correlate with low confidence in banks. Additionally, those who self-identify as on the political right have lower levels of trust in banks which may be somewhat counterintuitive given traditional notions of the left and right. However, the heightened rightwing distrust that I observed is plausibly explained by adherence to the Austrian interpretation, especially if respondents interpreted the term ‘banks’ as inclusive of central banks. References Kronick, J. and Robson, J.. (2020, May 20). Once the crisis is over, we will have to let the zombie firms go. National Post. Von Mises, L. 1949. Human Action . Yale University Press.