We will be great again: Historical victimhood in populist discourse

Abstract

This article explores historical victimhood as a feature of contemporary populist discourse. It is about how populist leaders invoke meta-history to make self-victimising claims as a means for consolidating power. I argue that historical victimhood propagates a forked historical consciousness – a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil – that enables the projection of alleged victimhood into the past and the future, while the present is portrayed as a regenerating fateful choice between humiliation and a promised golden age. I focus on the cases of the United States and Turkey and examine two key speeches delivered by presidents Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2017. My case-study approach aims to show how the same narrative form of historical victimhood, with its temporal logic and imaginary, latches on widely different contexts and political cultures with the effect of conflating the leader with the people, solidifying divisions in society, and threatening opponents.

Taming the People: Comparing Protests and Populism in Arab and American Politics

“…(Trump, 2020a). Both leaders conflate themselves with "the people" and their desires (Al-Ghazzi, 2021). Given these parallels, it is unsurprising that both men turn to populist rhetoric when faced with mass protests.…”

Populist everyday politics in the (mediatized) age of social media: The case of Instagram celebrity advocacy

“…Everyday politics is, therefore, a politics of ordinariness and, as such, appeals to individuals and groups from different socioeconomic backgrounds and with different living conditions, allowing them to come together and interconnect (Papacharissi, 2021); it is, like populism, both people-centric and popular (Canovan, 1999). Populism’s appeal to the people, however, is not exhausted through a celebration of ordinariness but crucially involves interpreting ordinariness as a state of enduring injustice (see Norris and Inglehart, 2019; Rothmund et al, 2020) and the (ordinary) people as a political subject upon which this injustice is inflicted; a victim of the past, the present, and the future yet to be vindicated, as Al-Ghazzi (2021) has it. Hence, populism goes with a politics of victimhood which, in the post-recession era, has engineered the “communication, amplification and monetization of vulnerability on and through social media platforms” (Chouliaraki, 2021: 20) to the extent that everyday politics has now almost collapsed into a realm of victimized people.…”