Yanis Iqbal | Clarion India
THE re-emergence of right-wing populism is evidenced by the election of various leaders like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Donald Trump in USA, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. These leaders use a diverse electoral strategy whose framework is complex and includes a wide range of factors. But still, all these politicians have in their stratagem a shared feature which is identity politics.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan uses a blend of Turkish nationalism and religious conservatism. Viktor Orbán’s portrayal of himself as the messianic supremo of Hungary’s Christian identity is an instance of identity politics. Donald Trump instigates white supremacist feelings and aggressively promotes his discriminatory anti- immigration policies. Jair Bolsonaro’s ultra-nationalistic and racist statements also epitomize identity politics.
The right-wing populists have severely exploited the generally overlooked identitarian crises which have been engendered by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is inherently a capitalistic mechanism which is more comprehensive and lethal. Neoliberalism has fractured the communitarianism ethics and this is due to individuation and societal atomisation. People were feeling that their sense of being a member of a particular community has been debilitated. The right-wing populists capitalized on this specific sensibility and the consequent outcome was catastrophic.
Now, new cultural identities are being manufactured which are hermetically sealed off and their external receptivity has been obliterated. Politics of hope has been replaced by politics of hatred and this supersession has a lot of contemporary relevance. The cultural atmosphere of communities is now impregnated with a deep and parochial form of hatred. This will ineluctably lead to polarization and social fragmentation. So, right-wing populists have followed a dualised process: (1) They have deliberately manufactured fissiparous proclivities. (2) They have solidified these divisive propensities by firmly establishing their electoral edifice on this fractiousness.
A paradigmatic illustration of a deeply-ridged society where a right-wing populist is exacerbating this situation for his own benefit can be of Viktor Orbán who has won three consecutive prime ministerial elections. Due to these successive wins, he has skillfully managed to build his own conceptualization called ‘illiberal democracy’ and because of this newfangled governmental form, Hungary ranks as ‘partly free’ in the 2019 Freedom House Report. This kind of administration is fundamentally a semi-fascist government which is in the guise of a democracy.
Through illiberalisation, Viktor Orbán has constructed a façade of democracy. Timothy Garton Ash has stated that Hungary has become a one-party state and its judiciary has been thoroughly penetrated by the ruling dispensation which is the Fidesz party. He has made an important point that ‘illiberal democracy’ is liminality. This means that the next stage in this process of unmooring the conceptual foundations of democracy will be authoritarianism.
Viktor Orbán has also mastered the skill of ‘otherisation’ which entails the espousal of an enemy who is depicted as the ‘other’ who has to be crushed by hook or by crook. His anti-immigration policies validate this theoretical assumption. An elemental component of otherization is the ‘politics of ressentiment’ which serves the singular purpose of providing a moral justification for violence and repression. We have to confront this ‘moralized violence’ which in actuality, blots out the primordial ethics.
Donald Trump’s right-wing populism’s intensity and belligerence is gradually increasing. He is successfully carrying out his programme of the ‘militarisation of consciousnesses. This programme is carried out primarily through his xenophobic dog whistles and highly incendiary tweets. He is attempting to restructure the society so that he can impose his cultural hegemony. The apocalyptic ramifications of this kind of politics can be apprehended by understanding the Rohingya crisis which shares conceptual resemblances with Donald Trump’s project of hegemonizing USA.
The ugly transformation of identity politics into ethno-nationalism and its resultant violence is not an uncommon phenomenon. The crudeness and inhumaneness of the sub-human treatment of Rohingyas exemplifies the category of identity politics which has imprinted in the minds of the hegemonic community, a blinkered identitarian self-awareness. The superbly coordinated action of the Myanmar state and the dominant Buddhist community shows that even the state can work in cahoots with the hegemonic community. This kind of ideological or identitarian fundamentalism is discernible in the myriad statements made by Donald Trump. He brazenly said that a large number of crimes are committed by Blacks and Hispanics. This is a classic example of criminal stereotype which involves the usage of sweeping generalisations.
Another relevant characteristic of right-wing populism is its denigratory and rhetorical repertoire of a prejudiced language. It is quite similar to the concept of performativity which means that the words employed by a particular person actually facilitate the construction of social identities. For example, Donald Trump’s political lexicon characterizes the Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists. These pronouncements develop the insularity and bitterness which is necessary for polarization. Performativity is also a cardinal component of identity politics and it aids the establishment of fidelity to a particular community.
Identity politics is an inherent and integral part of right-wing populism because the process of building an authentic constituency is centered on the indispensable need to assemble a mental landscape in which the self-awareness of constituting a larger identity acquires centrality in the collective imagination of the community. To carry out such a Sisyphean task of ideological indoctrination, the media has to be muzzled.
After silencing the media, pro-government content has to be communicated which will show the physiognomy of one’s country as stable. Again, the example of Hungary is the most felicitous here. The creation of the Central European Press and Media Foundation is an anti-democratic and full-fledged effort to annihilate media pluralism and thereby, maintain a unidirectional ideological flow in the sphere of media. This group is basically a clique of more than 500 media outlets regulated and controlled by the Hungarian government.
The muscular and jingoistic nationalism which we are witnessing is also another constitutive element of right-wing populism. Instead of a democratic or rational attachment which will be imbued with a sense of humanity, we are now practicing a dehumanizing nationalism. We are reduced to mere appendages of the nation when we get immersed in the false forcefulness of this ultra-nationalism. The America First Policy is the disastrous corollary of hyper-nationalism and it has already botched up a democratic nationalistic consciousness.
Identitarian right-wing populism has snowballed into a global phenomenon and the decreasing potency of oppositional politics is an indication of the frightening global trajectory of the myriad democracies. By the active participation of citizens, democracies can be revitalised. This arduous process of democratization has to be carried out by the citizens and for that to happen, the echo chamber in which we all have been captivated has to be shattered.
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The author lives in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh and has not completed his schooling yet. He writes on various issues.
