Abstract
Wodak’s highly readable comparative study of right-wing populist rhetoric focuses on the mainstreaming strategies and anti-immigration rhetoric employed in the context of the European far right, extending to the US Tea Party and Republican anti-abortion debates. What distinguishes her insightful analysis of broadly shared trends across Europe and America is not only its geographical range, but also an innovative format that operates on two levels at once, alternating between macro-rubrics such as identity politics, exclusion, nationalism or patriarchy and their particular situative micro-contexts. Fifteen vignettes provide detailed snapshots of political situations in specific countries, ranging from Austria to Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States. These vignettes are embedded in cogent discussions of the overarching rhetorical strategies of the New Right (all too familiar from fascism) that serve to foment moral panics about cultural invasion or takeover, then refocus these inchoate fears onto specific scapegoats. Also useful for quick orientation among the large spectrum of right-wing groups in such a large array of countries is an appended glossary of populist right parties.
Wodak uses the rapid trajectory of charismatic Austrian populist HC Strache from the far-right fringe to the center as a touchstone to illustrate the mainstreaming of formerly taboo attitudes toward ethnicity and national belonging, coupled with a new climate of de-solidarization. Wodak argues that bellicose rhetoric and an aggressive debate mode can only work in conjunction with underlying beliefs and imaginaries. Therefore, she delves into the post-1989 and post-9/11 darkening of the collective mind. Islamophobia and phobias about Near Easterners as potential terrorists revived a phantasm of fundamental East–West cultural and religious divergence and clash of civilizations, one that much of Western Europe had not succumbed to so eagerly since Spengler’s apocalyptic ravings. How is it that such a regressive politics of fear once more takes hold of the educated and affluent elites, as well as less economically secure classes? Wodak explains this nostalgic drift toward Whiteness, homogeneous nation states and traditional families as fueled by globalization anxiety, neoliberal pressures and a widespread disenchantment with the professional political class. Renationalizing tendencies attempt to reduce complexity into simplistic dichotomies, as rhetorical strategies of calculated ambivalence address multiple and contradictory audiences via a single, layered message.
In Wodak’s analysis, the transition of former East Bloc nations to capitalism is an important early catalyst for these developments: Eastern European countries have to contend with a dual legacy of communism and fascist occupation, and the Western post-war preoccupation with the Holocaust was not necessarily shared by them. For example, the Ulbricht and Honecker governments in the German Democratic Republic ritually invoked their own antifascism, while tacitly condoning anti-Semitic behavior toward the country’s few returned or remaining Jews. With the collapse of the East Bloc, anti-Semitism once more became explicitly speakable in reaction against the communist mantra and, as Wodak shows, forms part of an ‘explicitly xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic politics of exclusion’ (p. 185).
In the USA and Western Europe, a ‘softer’ coded politics of exclusion has taken hold, more focused on securitization and welfare chauvinism. Gendered discourses of masculine, aggressive leaders supported by submissive women (who embrace full-time motherhood) reclaim the ‘lost old architecture of manliness’ (p. 153), while projecting fears of ‘white career women and women [in general] as “Other” onto the veiled Muslim woman as metonym of the post-modern stranger’. In the USA, Wodak also traces reflections of such misogyny in the rhetoric of the Republican abortion debates. This ideology rewrites who or what a person is by championing prenatal rights and criminalizes women by evacuating their ownership of their own bodies. Similar to Jasbir Puar’s notion of ‘assemblages’, Wodak emphasizes the intersectionality of exclusionary ideologies with identity politics: in other words, what such practices shore up or re-legitimate through the demarcation of strict boundaries, and how they interact. A rhetorical strategy of victim/perpetrator reversal enables blame avoidance with the ideological dividend of naturalizing scapegoating.
Chapter 3 deconstructs discursive elements and manipulative argumentation schemes, taking apart step-by-step the deliberate fallacies and logical short circuits induced by leaps between disparate topoi, shored up by repetition and scandalization to elicit conditioned responses. To my mind, this is the most valuable chapter in Wodak’s seminal study, as it draws attention to readily observable speech patterns in recent right-wing speech, traces their systemic provenance back to Aristotelian categories of rhetoric and collates and illustrates them. Wodak provides a systematic overview of effective, if fraudulent, simplification strategies such as metonymic naming (‘Merkel’ instead of the German government), perspectivization (through quotation marks) and denial, as well as the liberal use of endoxa, commonly held beliefs that represent traditional knowledge but that are not necessarily true. All these serve to solder community out of a disparate amalgam of individuals and groups disaffected by politics as usual.
An anti-intellectual ideology Wodak aptly names the ‘arrogance of ignorance’ dictates that amateur strong men and vocal, disgruntled plebs must take the lead. And they ought to do so by direct mandate, rather than government through elected representatives or other more complex and time-intensive democratic mechanisms that would require negotiation, deliberation and compromise. Such a rejection of established democratic procedures creates a new kind of anti-democratic politics based on (violent) street actionism. Its paradigm is politics as a form of instant-gratification consumerism, facilitated by the Web. Successful right-wing leaders embrace low-cost social media such as Facebook and Twitter to harness the loyalty of local followers at the grassroots level, even as they simultaneously use the Web to broadcast their ideology, to enhance their ‘brand’ through logos and youth-affine styles such as rap, and not least, to establish transnational linkages with other right-wing parties. For specialists in discourse studies and political scientists, Wodak unpacks the consequences of reactionary ideologies, providing sophisticated analytic tools to understand their allure. In extrapolating the blueprints for these general constructs, she also affords the general reader strategies for dismantling them.