The New Demagogues

Religion, Masculinity and the Populist Epoch

Joshua M. Roose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429775246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429431197

Focused on the emergence of US President Donald Trump, the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union, and the recruitment of Islamic State foreign fighters from Western Muslim communities, this book explores the ways in which the decay and corruption of key social institutions has created a vacuum of intellectual and moral guidance for working people and deprived them of hope and an upward social mobility long considered central to the social contract of Western liberal democracy. Examining the exploitation of this vacuum of leadership and opportunity by new demagogues, the author considers two important yet overlooked dimensions of this new populism: the mobilization of both religion and masculinity. By understanding religion as a dynamic social force that can be mobilized for purposes of social solidarity and by appreciating the sociological arguments that hyper-masculinity is caused by social injury, Roose considers how these key social factors have been particularly important in contributing to the emergence of the new demagogues and their followers. Roose identifies the challenges that this poses for Western liberal democracy and argues that states must look beyond identity politics and exclusively rights-based claims and, instead, consider classical conceptions of citizenship.

1INTRODUCTION

Introduction

In 2020 the world seems barely recognisable compared with just half a decade before. Political populism, a tactic employed by a new generation of demagogic strong men, has gone some way toward undermining the rule of law and established global order. Exhibiting a nostalgia for imagined past greatness and harbouring a deep animosity towards faceless ‘elites’, a new generation of demagogues have exploited the emotions of those who feel ‘left behind’, democratic processes, mass and social media, and years of benign neglect by career politicians to gain the helm of their national governments or develop formidable opposition movements that threaten to do so. As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the globe, it is evident that many of these demagogues will seek to use sweeping new emergency powers to entrench themselves further.

This book aims to understand how and why Western liberal democracies have become dominated by a new class of demagogic strongmen. It is focused in particular on the emergence of President Donald J. Trump in the United States, the United Kingdom’s ‘Brexit’ from the European Union, and the recruitment of foreign fighters from Western Muslim communities to join the Islamic State Caliphate. Far from ‘one off’ events, these are ongoing developments that signal deep discontent by a significant proportion of the population at the current state of local and world affairs. President Trump has survived a December 2019 impeachment trial in the United States House of Representatives and is, despite his flawed handling of the COVID-19 Pandemic and a Presidency defined by controversy, in a strong position to be re-elected in 2020. Irrespective of whether this occurs, his election in 2016 resulted in deep-seated change to the composition of American courts and emboldened both far-right and evangelical-Christian actors to move further into the mainstream of American political life. The detrimental impact of the Trump presidency has been felt by key global institutions, including NATO and the World Health Organisation. After over three years of delays, the December 2019 election of Boris Johnson by a compelling margin on a platform of ‘getting it done’ looks similarly set to change the political, economic, and social landscape of Britain – and Europe – for decades, if not centuries, to come. After many years of efforts by Nigel Farage, the demagogic figurehead of the ‘Brexit’ movement, Britain commenced withdrawal from the European Union at 11:00 p.m. on the 31st of January 2020. Some other nations, including Italy and Poland, are reconsidering their EU membership. The March 2019 land defeat of the Islamic State and the death of its demagogic leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in October 2019 appear to signal the defeat of the radical self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate, yet the expansion of the movement into other war zones and simultaneous resurgence of Al Qaeda indicate that the threat of global Islamist extremism and terrorism is far from over. As the COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath, including deep economic impacts, will likely reveal, we may not yet have seen the worst of the highly politically charged, dynamic decade. Rather, as the book title suggests, we may be at the beginning of an era: a populist epoch.

This book investigates how the decay and corruption of key social institutions, including (but not limited to) trade unions, churches, and formal political parties, in the context of the enactment of neoliberal economic policies has created a vacuum of intellectual and moral guidance for working people and deprived them of hope and the upward social mobility long considered central to the social contract of Western liberal democracy. This vacuum of leadership and opportunity has been skilfully exploited by new demagogues who have proven particularly adept at exploiting social media as a force multiplier for their campaigns.

I explore two important yet overlooked dimensions of this new populism: the mobilisation of both religion and masculinity by the new class of demagogues. By understanding religion as a dynamic social force that can be mobilised for purposes of social solidarity and by appreciating the sociological arguments that hyper-masculinity is caused by social injury, I consider how these key social factors have been particularly important in contributing to the emergence of the new demagogues and their followers, how this poses challenges for Western liberal democracy, and how states must look beyond identity politics and exclusively rights-based claims and, instead, consider re-engaging classical conceptions of citizenship.

Overview: The new populism

The global demagogic and populist surge is not limited to Western, English-speaking, liberal democratic nations. From Hungary, Poland, and Turkey to India, the Philippines, and Brazil (not to mention the many parties across Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America that are electorally successful but not yet in power,), a new breed of strongmen has emerged, replacing liberal predecessors with vitriolic politics centred on various forms of ethno- and religious-nationalism. These leaders promote nostalgia for imagined past national glories and claim to stand against a raft of internal enemies (elites) and external enemies (international organisations, other nations, migrants, minority religions) that have allegedly held their nation back from greatness.

Despite considerable recent progress, scholarship is yet to adequately grasp the dimensions of this new and profoundly modern form of demagoguery and populism. Indeed, the study of both has only recently re-emerged from an extended hibernation. For historians, political scientists, sociologists, and interdisciplinary scholars, the new demagoguery and, in particular, new populism represent significant conceptual challenges as they seek to grapple with how they are constituted, key social and intellectual influences, the extent to which there are parallels with the emergence of Fascism and National Socialism in the twentieth century, and the extent to which demagoguery and populism pose an existential threat to Western liberal democracy.

The majority of emerging scholarship on populism is theoretical. Defining the challenge is a critical element of shaping further questions. Yet this quest for a definition extends back at least half a century. In 1967 the London School of Economics (LSE) hosted a conference, To Define Populism, which featured some of the twentieth century’s great social and political theorists, including Alain Touraine, Donald McCrae, Ernest Gellner, and Isiah Berlin. The latter noted the difficulty of a singular definition of the concept at one of the conference sessions:

I think we are all probably agreed that a single formula to cover all populisms everywhere will not be very helpful. The more embracing the formula, the less descriptive. The more richly descriptive the formula, the more it will exclude. The greater the intension, the smaller the extension. The greater the connotation, the smaller the denotation.

(London School of Economics 1967: 139)

Long serving LSE Professor of Sociology Donald McCrae noted that the roots of populism are found in the relationship between men and social harm:

Populism cannot be a consciously minority movement. Whether falsely or truly, it stands for the majority of man, the majority of men who have somehow been damaged. By whom have they been damaged? They have been damaged by an elite, either economic, political, or racial, some kind of secret or open enemy – capitalism, Jews, and the rest of it. Whoever the enemy is, foreign or native, ethnic or social, does not much matter.

(London School of Economics 1967: 141)

These individual characteristics may sound remarkably cogent today. Yet as Allcock argues, the major feature absent from lists of characteristics of this type is any understandable connection between the diverse elements included in them. They are ‘arbitrary, eclectic, and theoretically isolated’ (1971: 379). This is a problem that has, in large part, remained to the present day.

It is telling that 50 years later at the 2017 Potsdam International Conference on Citizenship and Populism, which brought together leading scholars on the topic, there was a unanimous acknowledgment of the difficulty in defining populism, noting its ‘lack of conceptual and analytical clarity’ (Rucht 2017). Rogers Brubaker considered the concept to be ‘defined so broadly as to be ubiquitous’ and that scholarship is almost resigned to the proposition that you can ‘recognise it when you see it’ (2017). Muddying the waters for scholars is the fact that populism is an integral component of the election cycle in liberal democracies; the party with the highest electoral appeal (popularity) wins office. Furthermore, the new populism may be cloaked in traditional notions of ‘right’ and ‘left’ activism as well as contemporary labels such as ‘alt-right,’ not to mention the increasing, yet under studied, dimension of religious populism.

Despite the conceptual challenge, contemporary scholarship has converged on key elements defining the new populism, including mobilisation against faceless and ‘corrupt’ elites (McCarthy 2017), public attacks against migrants (Wodak 2017; Berezin 2017; Yuval-Davis 2017), ‘superfluous populations’ (Snow 2017), attacks on women’s rights (Moghissi 2017; Hadj-Abdou 2017), and an imagined national community comprised of the ‘majority’ (Snow 2017; Brubaker 2017; Bulli 2017). Moffitt asserts that populism is a political style that is performed, embodied, and enacted across diverse political and cultural contexts (2016). Brubaker goes so far as to consider new populism to consist of a ‘discursive and stylistic repertoire’ including ‘antagonistic depoliticisation’, ‘majoritariansim’, ‘anti-institutionalism’, and ‘anti-intellectualism’ (2017).

There is a general consensus that key causal factors of contemporary global populism include the 2009 sovereign debt crisis and associated policies emphasising austerity (Berezin 2017), securitisation (Brubaker 2017; Turner 2017), and mass migration (Yuval-Davis 2017; McCarthy 2017). Calhoun (2017) has noted that populism is not just a politics of interests, it is expressly directed against ‘interests’ that divide the people. These interests directly undermine the notion of meritocracy and upward mobility through hard work. Milbank (2017) has adopted a theological perspective and sought to represent liberalism and secularism as culpable for a deeper spiritual dissatisfaction amongst the population that, in turn, drives populism. Milbank collaborator and Blue Labour advocate Adrian Pabst similarly claims that ‘liberalism contains the secular roots of populism’, using the example of identity politics that ‘has tended to celebrate the diversity of difference at the expense of civic ties that bind people together above the divides of class, colour, and creed’ (2018). John Keane claims that populism is a ‘democratic phenomenon’ and a public protest by the demos, who feel ‘annoyed, powerless, and no longer “held” in the arms of society’ (2016).

Populism as tactic

Populism has been described as a ‘thin ideology’ (Mudde 2004; Stanley 2008), elevating ‘the people’ and emphasising their betrayal by elites (Elchardus & Spruyt 2016: 113). This is an inherently problematic framing that leads to the concept of populism having little meaning at all.

The concept of ideology, like populism, has long been considered difficult to define (Converse 1964; Mullins 1972). The French term idéologie was first framed by Destutt de Tracy, a philosopher, with the etymology of the concept stemming from the Greek ideo (of ideas) and logy (discourse or doctrine). The concept was arguably first popularised by Marx in his work The German Ideology. However, Gerring noted the ‘semantic promiscuity of the word’ and that ‘few concepts in the social science lexicon have occasioned so much discussion, so much disagreement, and so much self-conscious discussion of the disagreement …’ (1997: 958–959). Teun van Dijk commented that ‘Ideology has been dealt with in literally thousands of books and articles (but as many authors also conclude) its definition is as elusive and confused as ever’ (1998: vii).

Knight, by contrast, argued that the core definition of ideology in political science as a ‘coherent and relatively stable set of beliefs or values has remained constant over time’, even if the connotations associated with the concept have undergone transformation (2006: 625). For Knight, the utility of the term is situated in its ability to articulate a broad, abstract concept – a set of beliefs – efficiently (2006: 623). After an exhaustive consideration of 27 elements of ideology across literature, Hamilton defined ideology as ‘a system of collectively held normative and reputedly factual beliefs and attitudes advocating a particular pattern of social relationships and arrangements, and/or aimed at justifying particular pattern of conduct which its proponents seek to promote, realise, pursue, or maintain’ (1987: 28).

To view the new populism as a ‘thin ideology’ neglects the fact that both the left and right of the populist political spectrum meet these very same aspects of the definition of populism. These are core characteristics or ‘attributes’ of populism, however beyond rhetorical flourishes about the people and the elites, there is very often no consistent philosophical basis of belief or intellectual consistency. To believe in or at least speak to the supremacy of one social group over another does not in and of itself constitute an ideological orientation. Indeed, those programs put in place by populists very often undermine ‘the people’ and enrich the very elites they state they stand against. Populism is, in effect, an empty shell devoid of belief. One could go so far as to label populism as a form of political nihilism centred on destruction. This does not prevent religious actors and those claiming cynically moral legitimacy from working closely with those deploying populist tactics to further their political agenda. Populism is deployed in equal measure by the political left, right, and independents seeking to make a name for themselves and to mobilise populations through the use of emotion. Populism is a means for those at the fringes of a political system to seek to attain power. It is why very often wealthy men not accepted within their own elite circles – including Trump and Farage – are at the fore of populist movements. Populism is first and foremost a political tactic that targets the centre of gravity of the established system: the consent of the governed. It stokes distrust and undermines social cohesion through dividing society into ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Populism ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Populism in the West: Democratic fault lines and the rise of the new demagogues
• 3 Religion and populism
• 4 Male supremacism
• 5 Brexit and the white working-class
• 6 Trump and blue-collar workers
• 7 Western Islamic State foreign fighters and jihadi masculinity
• 8 Religion, masculinity, and the new populism
• Index