The Western Populist Right in 2020: A Purported Clash Between the Public Good and Individual Rights

Abstract

The discourse revolving on the protection and enhancement of supposedly imperiled individual rights is a fixture of conservative actors across western democracies. The Covid19 pandemic represented an occasion for such actors to increase the deployment of said discourse, in order to lament citizens’ rights curtailments on the part of an intrusive state apparatus. This presentation focuses on the cases of Italy and the United States to highlight similarities and differences of the exploitation of the rights talk from crucial right-wing political actors and supportive media or interest groups. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have witnessed an exponentially growing deployment of the narrative based on allegedly threatened religious freedom and freedom of speech. These claims, analyzed in conjunction with the populist, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist agendas of such political actors, cast a light on a transnational populist religious right whose development should be closely monitored.