Prof. Dr. Ferruh Yilmaz (Tulane University,USA): "The Global Rise of the Far Right: Populist Strategy, Crisis and Affect"

We live in a state of “ontological anxieties” that fuel a sense of hopelessness often expressed as anger towards perceived elites. The leading question for this presentation is: why and how do some people channel their grievances and anxieties into supporting populist far right?

Grievances and anxieties are often diffuse sentiments expressed in inconsistent and contradictory ways. The populist far right channel these otherwise diffuse sentiments into a political direction by provoking on ongoing series of moral panics about moral and cultural issues by offering clear threats: the so-called ‘folk devils’ in the form of immigrants, Muslims, transgender people, or teachers and academics who are said to undermine the shared moral and cultural values that undergird ‘our’ community or nation. Moral panics play on anxieties about moral and cultural decline and create a feeling that “our way of life is under attack.”

These panics are often mapped together to create a widespread and ongoing sense of systemic crisis for which the ‘corrupt elites’ can then be blamed. Elites, thus, are defined by their cultural and moral characteristics or attitudes rather than, for example, by their class (economic) status. Moral panics also produce strong emotions and affective investment in cultural identities (solidarities) formed around defending “our” norms and values against those elites who our society, country, or nation. The intense focus on “cultural solidarities” have thus displaced class or other types of solidarities, making cultural antagonism the basic ontological fault line of society.

Bio:

Prof. Dr. Ferruh Yilmaz is Associate Professor in the Communication Department specializing in populist and far right communication strategies. His research interests include rhetorical nature of human communication, the centrality of immigration, culture and Islam to far right populist rhetoric and liberal and mainstream responses. His latest book, “How the Workers Became Muslim: Immigration, Culture, and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe” (2016) examines the far right’s populist strategies in Europe that enabled them to successfully turn immigration from a labor issue into a cultural threat, and made immigration and cultural values the central issues for the mainstream parties appeal to the voters. As a result, social/political identities (e.g. social/political divisions) are now re-envisioned in ethnic and cultural terms. Before becoming an academic, he worked as a journalist for a number of news organizations in Britain, Denmark and Turkey.