Right-wing populism
Right-wing populism, also called right populism and national populism, is a political ideology that combines right-wing politics with populist rhetoric and themes. Its rhetoric employs anti-elitist sentiments, opposition to the Establishment, and speaking to or for the common people. Recurring themes of right-wing populists include neo-nationalism, social conservatism, economic nationalism, and fiscal conservatism. Frequently they aim to defend a national culture, identity, and economy against perceived attacks by outsiders.
Right-wing populism has associations with authoritarianism, while some far-right populists draw comparisons to fascism. Right-wing populism in the Western world is sometimes associated with ideologies such as anti-environmentalism, anti-globalisation, nativism, and protectionism. In Europe the term is often used to describe groups, politicians and political parties generally known for their opposition to immigration, and for Euroscepticism. Some right-wing populists may support expanding the welfare state, but only for those they deem fit to receive it; this concept has been referred to as "welfare chauvinism". Since the Great Recession, European right-wing populist movements began to grow in popularity, in large part due to increasing opposition to immigration from the Middle East and Africa, rising Euroscepticism and discontent with the economic policies of the European Union.
From the 1990s, right-wing populist parties became established in the legislatures of various democracies. Right-wing populism has remained the dominant political force in the Republican Party in the United States since the 2010s. Although extreme right-wing movements in the United States are usually characterised as separate entities, some writers consider them to be a part of a broader, right-wing populist phenomenon. Donald Trump, an American businessman and media personality, won the 2016 and 2024 United States presidential elections after running on platforms founded on right-wing populist themes.
Definition
Right-wing populism is an ideology that primarily espouses neo-nationalism, social conservatism and economic nationalism.The political scientist Cas Mudde argues that what he calls the "populist radical right" starts with the idea of 'the nation'. He however rejects the use of nationalism as a core ideology of right-wing populism on the ground that there are also purely "civic" or "liberal" forms of nationalism, preferring instead the term nativism: a xenophobic form of nationalism asserting that "states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group, and that non-native elements are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation-state". Mudde further argues that "while nativism could include racist arguments, it can also be non-racist ", and that the term nativism does not reduce the parties to mere single-issue parties, such as the term anti-immigrant does. In the maximum definition, to nativism is added authoritarianism—an attitude, not necessarily anti-democratic or autocratic, to prefer "law and order" and the submission to authority—and populism—a "thin-centered ideology" that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, "the pure people" versus "the corrupt elite", and which argues that politics should be an expression of the "general will of the people", regardless of human rights or constitutional guarantees. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser reiterated in 2017 that within European right-wing populism, there is a "marriage of convenience" of populism based on an "ethnic and chauvinistic definition of the people", authoritarianism, and nativism. This results in right-wing populism having a "xenophobic nature".
Roger Eatwell, emeritus Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bath, writes that, "whilst populism and fascism differ notably ideologically, in practice the latter has borrowed aspects of populist discourse and style, and populism can degenerate into leader-oriented authoritarian and exclusionary politics." According to left-wing media Vice, for populism to transition into fascism or proto-fascism it requires a "nihilistic culture and an intractable crisis".
opulism is like fascism in being a response to liberal and socialist explanations of the political. And also like fascism, populism does not recognize a legitimate political place for an opposition that it regards as acting against the desires of the people and that it also accuses of being tyrannical, conspiratorial, and antidemocratic.... The opponents are turned into public enemies, but only rhetorically. If populism moves from rhetorical enmity to practices of enemy identification and persecution, we could be talking about its transformation into fascism or another form of dictatorial repression. This has happened in the past... and without question it could happen in the future. This morphing of populism back into fascism is always a possibility, but it is very uncommon, and when it does happen, and populism becomes fully antidemocratic, it is no longer populism.
Erik Berggren and Andres Neergard wrote in 2015 that, "ost researchers agree that xenophobia, anti-immigration sentiments, nativism, ethno-nationalism are, in different ways, central elements in the ideologies, politics, and practices of right-wing populism and Extreme Right Wing Parties." Similarly, the historian Rick Shenkman describes the ideology presented by right-wing populism as "a deadly mix of xenophobia, racism, and authoritarianism". Tamir Bar-On also concluded in 2018 that the literature generally places "nativism" or "ethnic nationalism" as the core concept of the ideology, which "implicitly posits a politically dominant group, while minorities are conceived as threats to the nation". It is "generally, but not necessarily racist"; in the case of the Dutch Party for Freedom for instance, "a religious instead of an ethnic minority constitutes the main 'enemy'".
Scholars use terminology inconsistently, sometimes referring to right-wing populism as "radical right" or other terms such as new nationalism. Pippa Norris noted that "standard reference works use alternate typologies and diverse labels categorising parties as 'far' or 'extreme' right, 'New Right', 'anti-immigrant' or 'neo-fascist', 'anti-establishment', 'national populist', 'protest', 'ethnic', 'authoritarian', 'anti-government', 'anti-party', 'ultranationalist', 'right-libertarian' and so on". The term authoritarian populism can be used to describe right-wing populism, although it is also used to refer to left-wing political movements.
In regard to the authoritarian aspect of right-wing populism, the political psychologist Shawn W. Rosenberg asserts that its "intellectual roots and underlying logic" are best seen as "a contemporary expression of the fascist ideologies of the early 20th century".
Guided by its roots in ideological fascism... and its affinity to the fascist governments of 1930s Germany and Italy, tends to delegate unusual power to its leadership, more specifically its key leader. This leader embodies the will of the people, renders it clear for everyone else and executes accordingly. Thus distinctions between the leadership, the people as a whole and individuals are blurred as their will is joined in a single purpose. ... In this political cultural conception, individuals have a secondary and somewhat derivative status. They are rendered meaningful and valued insofar as they are part of the collective, the people and the nation. Individuals are thus constituted as a mass who share a single common significant categorical quality – they are nationals, members of the nation.... In this conception, the individual and the nation are inextricably intertwined, the line between them blurred. As suggested by philosophers of fascism... the state is realized in the people and the people are realized in the state. It is a symbiotic relation. Individuals are realized in their manifestation of the national characteristics and by their participation in the national mission. In so doing, individuals are at once defined and valued, recognized and glorified.
According to Rosenberg, right-wing populism accepts the primacy of "the people", but rejects liberal democracy's protection of the rights of minorities, and favors ethno-nationalism over the legal concept of the nation as a polity, with the people as its members; in general, it rejects the rule of law. All of these attributes, as well as its favoring of strong political leadership, suggest right-wing populism's fascist leanings. The historian Federico Finchelstein defines populism as a form of authoritarian democracy while fascism is an ultraviolent dictatorship.
Motivations and methods
According to Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, "National populists prioritize the culture and interests of the nation, and promise to give voice to a people who feel that they have been neglected, even held in contempt, by distant and often corrupt elites." They are part of a "growing revolt against mainstream politics and liberal values. This challenge is in general not anti-democratic. Rather, national populists are opposed to certain aspects of liberal democracy as it has evolved in the West. 'direct' conception of democracy differs from the 'liberal' one that has flourished across the West following the defeat of fascism and which has gradually become more elitist in character." Furthermore, national populists question what they call the "erosion of the nation-state", "hyper ethnic change" and the "capacity to rapidly absorb rates of immigration", the "highly unequal societies" of the West's current economic settlement. They are suspicious of "cosmopolitan and globalizing agendas".Populist parties use crises in their domestic governments to enhance anti-globalist reactions; these include refrainment towards trade and anti-immigration policies. The support for these ideologies commonly comes from people whose employment might have low occupational mobility. This makes them more likely to develop an anti-immigrant and anti-globalisation mentality that aligns with the ideals of the populist party.
Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg see "national populism" as an attempt to combine the socio-economical values of the left and political values of the right and the support for a referendary republic that would bypass traditional political divisions and institutions as they aim for the unity of the political, ethnic and social interpretations of the "people", national populists claim to defend the "average citizen" and "common sense", against the "betrayal of inevitably corrupt elites". As the Front National ideologue François Duprat put in the 1970s, inspired by the Latin American right of that time, right-populism aims to constitute a "national, social, and popular" ideology. If both left and right parties share populism itself, their premises are indeed different in that right-wing populists perceive society as in a state of decadence, from which "only the healthy common people can free the nation by forming one national class from the different social classes and casting aside the corrupt elites".
Methodologically, by co-opting concepts from the left—such as multiculturalism and ethnopluralism, which is espoused by the left as a means of preserving minority ethnic cultures within a pluralistic society—and then jettisoning their non-hierarchical essence, right-wing populists can, in the words of the sociologist Jens Rydgren, "mobilize on xenophobic and racist public opinions without being stigmatized as racists". The sociologist Hande Eslen-Ziya argues that right-wing populist movements rely on "troll science", namely " scientific arguments moulded into populist discourse" that creates an alternative narrative. In addition to rhetorical methods, right-wing populist movements have also flourished by using tools of digital media, including websites and newsletters, social media groups and pages, as well as YouTube and messaging chat groups.