by Yanis Iqbal 17 May 2021
We live in an age of emotions. The emergence of right-wing populism has breached the barrier between the private and the public, mobilizing varied passions to bring the state closer to citizens. In an online address given on May 14, 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi – while sympathizing with the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic – said, “As your Pradhan Sevak [head servant], I share your every sentiment.” The recurrence of communicative styles like these, which dwell in the symbolic vernacular of everyday sensibilities, calls for further exploration of how emotions have performed a crucial role in aiding the contemporary Right’s process of hegemony formation.
Liberalism
Before the onset of right-wing populism, liberalism advocated a party democracy that treated citizens as equal electoral participants, juridically unified under the rule of law. In this conception, a political subject was differentiated through two mechanisms. Firstly, political mediation through parties ensured that parties functioned as intermediary bodies between society and the state in the sense that they both “reflected” social divisions present at the level of material and ideological interests and “constituted” them politically into competing visions of the common good. Secondly, the procedural conception of political legitimacy disseminated an ethical belief in formal parliamentary and electoral mechanisms and venerated the constitution as a moral enunciation of universal principles.
The generalized grammar of liberalism increasingly came under stress as neoliberal capitalism heavily undermined promises of equality and dignity through the globalization of capital, the establishment of post-Fordist economic arrangements of flexible specialization, and the financialization of the accumulation process. These changes led to the development of a constitutive tension at the very heart of liberalism. In his book “Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology,” Etienne Balibar writes: “Because the human and the political (the ‘rights of man’ and the ‘rights of the citizen’) are coextensive ‘by right,’ the human being cannot be denied access to citizenship unless, contradictorily, he is also excised from humanity. Therefore…the human being can be denied such access only by being reduced to sub-humanity or defective humanity.”
The emergence of the Right
Right-wing populism foregrounded the dehumanizing contradictions of liberalism, exploiting the emerging emotions of discontented subjects to gain power. Neoliberal societies, by promoting feelings of insecurity, powerlessness, and worthlessness, as well as fears of losing status and established living standards, gave rise to actual or anticipatory shame in those individuals who were unable to live up to the standards of hyper-competitiveness. Liberal political parties could not ameliorate this situation since it would have meant going against the ruling elite’s interests. Right-wing politics broke this deadlock by playing on the widespread sense of personal failure – repressing and redirecting shame into anger, resentment, and hatred, aimed at out-groups, such as refugees, immigrants, and certain cultural collectivities. The channelization of shame into xenophobia resulted in solidifying identities such as nationality, ethnicity, religion, language, and traditional gender roles.
The formation of a right-wing commonsense subverted the twin foundations of liberalism. Firstly, right-wing populism highlighted the appealing viscerality of extra-institutional tactics, thus sabotaging the normative pillars on which procedural legitimacy was predicated: the existence of a citizenry united by the abstract values of the rule of law and constitutional morality, supposed to partake in elections as morally equalized human beings. The Right re-defined these values and created an ethnically particularized citizenry and uncommitted to bland liberal universalism. This identitarian re-articulation of the populace led to the introduction new political platforms such as violent street mobilizations. Secondly, right-wing populism replaced the anemic party structure of liberalism with the verticality of strongman politics, using the imagery of a tough leader to soothe people’s insecurities symbolically.
As is evident, right-wing populism has challenged the liberal logic by which citizenship is always imagined individualized, power is imagined properly institutionalized, and popular sovereignty is reduced to voting and representation. The Right has contested each of these as it brings into being “the people” in place of the citizen or voter; a “frontier” of the contest between the people and the elite in place of isolated social problems; and a “populist rupture” in place of transfer of problems to institutions. Political transformations like these necessitate creating an innovative form of subaltern praxis that presents a narrative/vision that is both cognitively coherent and experientially compelling.