Exploring the populist ‘mind’: Anxiety, fantasy, and everyday populism

Abstract

This article is focused on the appeal of far-right populist politics in the everyday and how this appeal is related to continuity and change in the global order. Contemporary societies have witnessed an upsurge of populist movements and groups set on filling a political space by appealing to a population in search of solutions to an ever-changing political and economic landscape. Here, we specifically highlight the role of ontological insecurity, fantasy narratives, and emotional governance as critical for understanding far-right populist politics. The analysis consequently attends to the centrality of gendered and racialised narratives and to how these are fuelled by feelings of pride, shame, vulnerability, and insecurity. The aim is to show how structures and emotions work in tandem to create far-right support and how these developments are similar across Western and non-Western contexts. Particular attention is paid to far-right narratives that pertain to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Grievance Politics: An Empirical Analysis of Anger Through the Emotional Mechanism of Ressentiment

“…Elaborating on the psychology of anger vs. ressentiment invites the study of emotional mechanisms shaping the political outputs of grievance politics across Western and non-Western populist, nationalist, and authoritarian contexts (Kisić Merino et al, 2021;Sharafutdinova, 2020). The appeal of such rhetoric and narratives, particularly on the far-right, feeds and grows through subjective and intersubjective perceptions of threat and vulnerability (Kinnvall & Svensson, 2022;Salmela & von Scheve, 2017). Crucially, the outputs of grievance in ressentiment are not the outputs of grievance in anger.…”

Governing Emotions: Hybrid media, Ontological Insecurity and the Normalisation of Far-Right Fantasies

“…Instead, scholars point to how ‘being’ is always incomplete and, in Lacanian (1988) terms, bound to narrative desires and fantasies (Browning, 2019; Eberle, 2019; Kinnvall & Svensson, 2022). As Kinnvall and Svensson (2022) argue, a focus on desire and fantasy narratives illuminates how the search for ontological security is a story – a fantasy – that can never be fulfilled. In responding to increased feelings of ontological insecurity, people, groups and state representatives thus temporarily close down categorical identifications.…”

“…Such rules are employed via official rituals and discursive practices (see also Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014; Holland and Solomon, 2014). A particular focus of this literature has been on crisis and trauma as emotional contexts in which ‘sites of affective investment’ arise, manifest in governments’ responses to, for instance, September 11 (Solomon, 2012) or the Covid-19 pandemic (Kinnvall & Svensson, 2022). In more general terms, Richards (2013) has suggested that all leaders, politicians and movements are engaged in reading and responding to feelings that are out there, and how they by these very acts are engaged in emotional governance.…”

“…This has led to arguments that populist far-right leaders are not only passive receivers who channel grievances, fantasies and longings embedded in the political sphere. Rather, they are active agents in the shaping and propagation of failed or successful narratives concerning other political bodies (people, parties, states), often by asserting ‘ownership’ of contentious issues, such as migration, borders and national identity (Agius, Rosamond & Kinnvall, 2020; Benkler, Faris, & Roberts, 2018; Kinnvall & Svensson, 2022; Wodak et al, 2021). Along these lines, emotional governance in the hybrid media system can be addressed from the analytical lenses of ontological (in)security and Lacanian fantasy (Areni, 2019; Kinnvall, 2018; Kinnvall & Mitzen, 2017) 5 .…”

“…5.For a detailed discussion of the relationship between emotional governance and Lacanian fantasy, see Kinnvall & Svensson, 2022.…”