The anti-authoritarian revolt: Right-wing populism as self-empowerment?

Missing the authoritarian moment: Right-wing populism and the pandemic

It is a truism that crises often serve as catalysts for changes that were long in the making. This one is no exception. Among the many things that the covid-19 pandemic has laid bare, one of the more obvious ones is how much the ideological grounds occupied by the left and the right in modern democracies have shifted. This is particularly true for the modern right. While many of its major objectives remain the same (law and order; preservation of traditional social hierarchies; protection of ethnic homogeneity and culture; resistance towards radical change), it has, beyond these ideological continuities, adopted a mindset that would strike its intellectual forbearers as highly unusual at best.

We are by now maybe too used to the seemingly erratic behaviour of some of the most prominent political leaders on the right, that we may miss how truly unorthodox many of the reactions to the pandemic had been. A deadly and alien virus, emanating in the country of the fiercest geo-political rival, containable only by restricting civil liberties through the swift reaction of a strong state: if there was ever a crisis tailored to trigger the fears and provoke strong counter reactions of conservatives and authoritarians – it should have been this one. After all, a plethora of research in social psychology has shown that conservative voters are generally more threat sensitive and more risk averse (Crawford, 2017; Jost et al., 2003). Parties on the right should have been the first in line to call for draconian measures to protect the health of the nation, a political body that conservatives have traditionally described as a living organism that needs protection from outside influences. In the words of two influential voices about the supposedly authoritarian tendencies of modern-day populism: ‘The politics of fear drives the search for collective security for the tribe – even if this means sacrificing personal freedoms’ (Norris & Inglehart, 2019, p. 7).

But that, of course, is not what happened. The reactions of right-wing political parties and politicians have been far from uniform, except for the fact that all of them called, unsurprisingly, for shutting down borders. But the commonalities end right there. Some, like Gert Wilders and Thierry Baudet in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, had at least initially indeed called for stronger measures to fight the spread of the virus. And right-wing autocrats like Victor Orban in Hungary have wasted no time to exploit the crises and to further eliminate constitutional checks and balances on their executive powers.

Most right-wing populists, however, have not reacted according to the authoritarian-conservative script. Flouting social distancing rules, spreading conspiracy theories about the origin of the coronavirus and politicising the wearing of a face mask, many right-wing populist movements, like the AfD in Germany or Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy, have been among the staunchest critics of measures to protect the public health. Instead of calling for discipline, order, restrain and responsibility (as we would expect from ‘right-wing’, or ‘conservative’ or ‘authoritarian’ parties), they have celebrated civil disobedience and a spirit of resistance. Instead of stressing the need for community and the prerogative of the collective, they have focused on the (alleged) needs and wants of the individual, whose freedom shall not be infringed upon. It is tempting to assume that all of this might be explainable by their role as chronic opposition parties in their countries, who, as such, simply resist any actions taken by the ‘elites’ or the ‘establishment’. But how to explain then the initial reluctance of the governing British Conservative party (itself a hybrid between classic conservatism and the new brand of right-wing populism) to take the threat serious, or the way that Brazil’s president Bolsonaro (who some, however, have described as a downright fascist) has ridiculed the public health crises in his country?

The ambiguous nature of right-wing populism was most fervently at display in the United States and in the words and the deeds of its 45th president. By first ridiculing the concerns about the virus, and by then (after a brief interphase of taking the threat seriously) cheering on protesters that suspected a ‘deep state conspiracy’ behind the pandemic, Donald Trump has become something of the (global) cheerleader in the imagined fight against power-hungry bureaucrats and scientific experts that try to steal people’s civil liberties.

This, then, is the puzzle: Why would many leaders of a party family described as ‘authoritarian’ be so resistant to really exercise their authority and to lead the effort to protect the public health, even if that meant asking to sacrifice some personal freedom (see also Swyngedouw in this special issue)? Precisely because, as I will argue in the following, the interpretation of right-wing populism as ‘authoritarian’ is in many ways misleading. My argument is that modern day populism is a strange hybrid between authoritarian and antiauthoritarian elements, and it is because of the latter that it represents a historical break within the tradition of conservative/right-wing ideology. At the core of right-wing populism, we find, as counterintuitive as it might sound, a narrative of individual self-empowerment, that makes it difficult for its supporters to accept any kind of authority outside the inner experiences of the self (see also Butzlaff in this special issue). Right-wing populism is both a counter reaction to enlightenment and emancipation as well as it is its spoiled but nevertheless legitimate child. Many right-wing populists today speak the language of emancipation, even though they reject many of the liberalisation efforts that were emblematic of the (left-wing) emancipatory project of the 1960s and 1970s. They have reshaped and reconfigured the idea of emancipation in a way that now suits their own political agenda (Blühdorn & Butzlaff, 2019).

In what follows, I will first very briefly outline the original concept of authoritarianism as it was developed by the Frankfurt school and then, just as briefly, review how the concept has been applied empirically to assess the authoritarian dispositions of the supporters of right-wing populist parties. My primary aim, however, is to analyse the role that authority plays in the internal discourses of right-wing populist leaders and their followers: how populists try to make sense of the world and how they integrate their idea of legitimate authority into it. My point of comparison will be a largely historical one, as I will contrast the mindset of modern-day populism with the world views of classic conservatism and of fascism – two ideologies with indeed very unambiguous authoritarian outlooks. While many see them as close ideological relatives of right-wing populism, there are two important ways in which they diverge and that are crucial to my overall argument. Populism has, first, a distinct and unique epistemology: a different understanding of what constitutes the ‘truth’, from where that truth emanates and who has access to it. Secondly, populism also has a different idea of authority when it comes to political leadership: how much to trust leaders at all, what kind of ‘authorities’ can be accepted and what the relationship between the individual and the collective should look like.

Authoritarianism and ‘authoritarian populism’: A concept and its history

The idea that the global rise of right-wing populism represents at the same time a new wave of ‘authoritarianism’ is very widespread. In many cases, however, the connection is made almost habitually and without much reflection, a more or less intuitive and highly normative charge that binds together what is both considered corrosive to liberal democracy. But there does exist a string of research where the connection between authoritarianism and populism is made with full intent and, allegedly, central to the overall argument. Maybe most prominently, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have branded the current surge of right-wing parties and movements in advanced democracies as ‘authoritarian populism’. ¹ But even here, we find very little in terms of a theoretical argument of why the two should be logically connected. Maybe that is because, in some way, the authors think that they are not. For Inglehart and Norris, populism is merely the ‘external patina disguising authoritarian cultures and practices’ (Norris and Inglehart, 2019: 6). Leaders like Victor Orban, Marine Le Pen or Matteo Salvini might claim to speak for ‘the people’ and to be champions of popular sovereignty, but what they really aim for is authoritarian leadership and, ultimately and once they are in power, the transformation of liberal democracy into a more authoritarian regime type. Others have defined ‘authoritarian populism’ as a method of ‘pitting the people against elites in order to have the power to drive out, wipe out or otherwise dominate Others who are not the people’ (Morelock, 2018, p. xiv). However, if one understands populism with its Manichean dichotomy between the ‘pure’ people against the ‘corrupt elites’ as inherently anti-pluralistic, then the conclusion that authoritarian practices must necessarily follow the populist rhetoric might indeed have a certain logic to it (Müller, 2017).

There is one thing that both the more intentional and the more intuitive approach towards linking populism with authoritarianism have in common. Too often, the political agenda of right-wing populist parties, their emphasis on law-and-order, the rejection of diversity, the mistrust towards representative forms of democracy, are considered as definitive evidence of their authoritarian character and of those who support them. In this view, authoritarianism is either a political practice to dismantle democracy, or it is itself something akin to an ideology, closely resembling conservative or even fascist world views (Glasius, 2018).

Both definitions are not per se illegitimate. But they fail to unlock the true potential of the concept and what the term authoritarianism originally indented to explain. When it was born in the Frankfurt School in the early 1930s (and finding something of its culmination with the publication of the ‘Authoritarian Personality’ by Theodor Adorno and others in 1950), its aim was to better explain the construction of anti-Semitic and fascist world views (Adorno et al., 2019). Instead of being an ideology, authoritarianism describes a pre-ideological level of consciousness. Inspired by Freud’s psychoanalyses, it set out a set of personal dispositions, most of them learned through childhood and early adolescence, that were thought to accurately predict a person’s political belief system. Before people would form political allegiances, their character was formed in ways that would later on in life determine their politics. For Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, the pioneers of authoritarianism studies in the 1920s and 1930s, the eminent place where the authoritarian character was formed was the ‘authoritarian family’ with its emphasis on traditional social mores, gender roles and obedience towards the omnipotent father. Sons learned to obey their fathers in the world of patriarchy and would later submit to everyone who promised to give them what their father gave them: order, security and their own, assured place in a world of fixed hierarchies and statuses (Fromm, 1941; Reich, 1933).

The work of the Frankfurt school was seminal because it added an important level of analysis to our understanding of reactionary world views, one that went beyond the study of class structure or political ideas: It linked personal dispositions to political preferences, a ‘marriage of Marx and Freud’, as some have called it. And even though Adorno’s study was criticised early on methodological grounds, it remained an important paradigm that over the next few decades would be further refined and developed, most prominently by Bob Altemeyer and Karen Stenner. Altemeyer’s contributions, who shifted the research from a Freudian to a more behavioural perspective, were seminal because of the ‘Right-Wing-Authoritarianism (RWA) scale’ he produced and that was widely used to predict right-wing orientations. He found that among the many dispositions that Adorno at al. had considered, only three constantly correlated with each other: a strong adherence to the dominant social norms of a society (conventionalism); submission to traditional authority; and a high level of aggression and animosity against out-groups (Altemeyer, 1981). Stenner’s major contribution was the insight that latent authoritarian dispositions did not always materialise politically or otherwise. They needed to be activated in times of crises through an elevated level of threat perception (Stenner, 2005).

While I am more interested in this article in the specific role of authority in the internal discourses of right-wing populists, it needs at least brief mentioning that quantitative research trying to identify authoritarian attitudes among the supporters of right-wing populist parties is, given how much this is part of the conventional wisdom, surprisingly ambiguous. The case is relatively clear for Eastern Europe, where, after decades of communist rule, authoritarian dispositions seem more widespread and parties such as ‘Fidesz’ in Hungary and the Polish PiS (‘Law and Justice’) capitalise on sometimes openly anti-democratic attitudes to dismantle representative democracy and the constitutional checks and balances (Duriez et al., 2005). But this fact actually strengthens the argument of my article. The sort of antiauthoritarian populism that I will try to delineate in the article is a product of specific circumstances, that were largely absent in Eastern Europe: the silent revolution of the 1970s in the West with its new ideas of participation and what some have called the rise of the ‘critical citizen’, who internalised the idea that mistrust and suspicion towards authorities were civic virtues. The paradox that results from this could only develop under circumstances that were mostly non-existent in the East.

For right-wing populism in Western Europe and the United States, however, the picture is more complicated. Despite an impressive amount of research on the causes of support for right-wing populist parties, studies that explicitly focus on psychological foundations like authoritarian dispositions are relatively rare. Whereas some scholars have found a clear correlation between authoritarian dispositions and populist vote choice particularly among working class voters (Hetherington & Weiler, 2009; Scheurregger & Spier, 2007; Vasilopoulos & Lachat, 2018), others, like Dunn and Tillmans, have come to a much more ambiguous conclusion by differentiating more clearly between the three major dispositions (Dunn, 2015; Tillman, 2015). Dunn, in his study of voters of populist parties in several European countries, found a correlation only for one trait usually associated with authoritarianism: a strong aggression towards out-groups and a strong attachment to the own in-group. Both conventionalism and submission to authority, however, showed no or indeed a negative correlation with voting for right-wing populist parties. And the interesting aspect of this is that a strong aversion against out-groups represents an already more genuine political statement to begin with, since it can be easily translated into xenophobia and racism, the major drivers of support for right-wing populist parties. But to say that voters who vote for xenophobic parties are xenophobic is one of the tautologies that empirical political science produces all too often. Conventionalism and obedience to traditional authority, on the other hand, seem not quite in the same way ideologically preconditioned and more connected to the kind of pre-ideological and pre-political psychological dispositions that the original idea of authoritarianism tried to capture.

The epistemology of populism

Again: my primary concern here is not with the empirical literature about authoritarian dispositions among the supporters of right-wing populist parties. But it seems notable that the picture is more complicated than the conventional wisdom of the alleged inextricable connection between populism and authoritarianism would suggest. The observation that both conventionalism and submission to authority might not be as correlated to a preference for populist parties as commonly assumed is an interesting point of departure for what I truly intend: to explain how populists (both leaders and their supporters) try to make sense of the world and how they integrate their idea of legitimate authority into it. And this means, in a first step, to do something that is rarely done: to take what populists and their followers say serious and to reconstruct the populist world view from within. What is the populist self-image when it comes to questions central to the idea of authority? Evidently, that self-image can never be taken at face value. Right-wing Protesters in Germany who claim to fight an imaginary dictatorial ‘Merkel-Regime’ and believe to live the spirit of rebellious nonconformism, while at the same time carrying around counterfeits of Vladimir Putin, are obviously living in a world of internal contradictions. But without starting from trying to understand the populist narrative of self-empowerment, a deeper understanding of the underlying mentalities, dispositions and, yes: maybe pathologies, seems impossible. Those who say that there is a gulf between what populists say and what populists do, are, of course right. But without truly acknowledging what they really say, the nature of that divergence can never be properly understood.

There is one difficulty, though, in analysing what populists say. Populism, as is well understood (Müller, 2017), is not an ideology such as socialism, conservatism, liberalism and so on. It does not have a canon of big masterpieces that can be studied. There is no single authoritative text (or actually any text) that we could consult. It has produced no great thinker claiming a specific intellectual tradition. There is no populist equivalent to Edmund Burke, Karl Marx or John Locke. Whereas some have called it a ‘thin ideology’ (Mudde, 2004; Stanely, 2008), meaning that even though it does possess a certain conceptual core, it lacks both the depth, the comprehensiveness and the coherence of ‘thick’ ideologies, it seems more plausible to label populism a mentality (Priester, 2012, p. 98), or an impulse (Kazin, 1998), an almost intuitive reaction to certain events that are unfolding, and that is well captured by Cas Mudde’s seminal definition of the topic (even though Mudde, indeed, considers populism an ideology): as a mindset ‘that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the pure people versus the corrupt elite’ (Mudde, 2004, p. 543). To study populism, therefore, is different from studying, say, conservatism. The lack of an intellectual tradition means that there is simply no alternative then to analyse what the ‘practitioners’ of populism say: in their speeches, their campaign slogans and yes: in their tweets. Equally important seem the soundbites emanating from the media echo chambers of the modern right and their allies. An eclectic world view calls for an eclectic approach.

It particularly means to take seriously the world of internet subculture, the production of memes and other digital artefacts, which – particularly in the United States – have so strongly shaped the modern right (Nagle, 2017) and where the self-image of activists is at full, unmediated display. We therefore start our journey into the antiauthoritarian mindset of right-wing populism with a trip to a world that, before 2016, could have been considered the outer periphery of our political universe. An interesting pop-cultural allegory has for some time now circulated through the media ecosystem of the Alt-Right movement in the United States: the concept of ‘redpilling’. To give someone the red pill means, symbolically speaking, to open his or her eyes about the lies of liberal mainstream society and to convert him to the political truth of the own movement (Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019).

The red pill metaphor is borrowed from the movie ‘The Matrix’, released in 1999, where the world as we know it is nothing but a giant computer simulation that most people, however, accept as their unequivocal reality. Only few people feel that not all is as it seems – like Neo, the movie’s hero. When he finally meets Morpheus, the leader of the rebellion, Morpheus gives him the choice between two pills: a blue one that will keep him in the fake but comfortable reality of the matrix; or the red pill that will make him wake up in the real, albeit depressing world, to fight against the machines. The truth, Morpheus tells him, is that ‘you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind’.

The irony is that when ‘The Matrix’ was released in 1999 and became a huge hit at the box offices, it was celebrated by the left as a Marxist inspired enlightenment narrative about the false consciousness of a working class that was caught in superficial distractions – and a lesson on how to break free from it. A few years later, it started an equally remarkable career in the transgender community, where it was interpreted as an allegory on the possibility of radical individual change and liberation (Currin et al., 2017).

But for some time now, the allegory is obsessively used on the right. First popularised by the ‘men’s rights movement’ that lamented the oppressive nature of feminism, it now circulates widely within the general conservative movement in the United States where it manifests itself in multiple ways. It is telling that the YouTube channel of Candace Owens, the figurehead of the so-called ‘Blexit Movement’, whose African-American ‘converts’ claim to have broken free from their ‘Democratic slaveholders’ and now embrace conservatism, bears the title ‘Red Pill Black’ (Turner, 2019). But it also spread to Europe, where it was quickly adopted by various right-wing intellectuals, among them the main intellectuals of the ‘identitarian movement’ in Germany (Lichtmesz & Sommerfeld, 2017, p. 206). Once aware of the narrative power of the ‘red pill’ metaphor within right-wing discourse, it is actually hard to ignore its ubiquity.

The red pill metaphor is only the most widespread and popular of the many narratives of ‘liberation’ that circulate in the right-wing media ecosystem. Another familiar trope is the description of ‘mainstream’ liberal society as the ‘Cathedral’. The ‘Cathedral’ has all the bearings of an official secular religion and its gospel, political correctness, has become a totalising system of mind control. Everybody who wishes to be accepted as a member of the Cathedral has to go through a process of initiation and after that constantly needs to repeat prayer like its fundamentals: multiculturalism, social justice and anti-discrimination (Aikin, 2019).

Of course, only the more committed and more activist ‘true believers’ of the movement might live in a narrative universe this dense. But the rhetoric of populism is scattered with familiar, albeit less colourful tropes. In their own self-image, populists are the ones that defy the conventional wisdom of mainstream society and are capable of seeing things like they really are, whereas the majority of people follow the herd like sheep. One of the more popular slurs that German right-wing activists throw at everyone they disagree with is ‘Schlafschaf’ – ‘sleeping sheep’, or ‘sheeples’, the somewhat freer but more accurate translation into English, very much in keeping with the idea of the Matrix and its dichotomy between the many that are doomed to live in a convenient but faked realty and the few enlightened ones who woke up and know the truth (Lamberty, 2017).

The call for enlightenment is also a constant part of the rhetoric of Germany’s AfD. It’s ideal is the ‘mündige Bürger’, a word that does not travel easy into English, but might be translated as the ‘independent’, ‘autonomous’ or ‘mature citizen’ (Blühdorn & Butzlaff, 2020), who has freed himself from the arrogant presumptions of elites and the establishment. In fact, the word ‘Mündigkeit’ is the central term in Immanuel Kant’s enlightenment-philosophy, where it represents the essence of human freedom and human rationality. Like other populist claims, it speaks to the belief that the ‘people’ need no mediating institutions, and no representatives that tell them what’s right and what’s wrong (see also Blühdorn as well as Butzlaff in this special issue).

It is not just Germany’s AfD. Wherever populists operate, the idea of self-empowerment runs high. It was in full display during the Brexit referendum, which was in many ways a textbook example of populist mobilisation (Freeden, 2017). The fact that the leave-proponents, aiming to ‘take back control’, constantly pitted expert opinion, which overwhelmingly and often regardless of political affiliation opted for ‘remain’, against the ‘will of the people’ is therefore part of a familiar pattern. What was more revealing than that sort of simple anti-intellectualism (more on that later) was the way in which Michael Gove, probably the spiritus rector of the Leave-campaign, made his case. When asked why he should be more trusted than other elites, Gove responded: ‘I’m not asking the public to trust me. I’m asking the public to trust themselves’ (Dennis, 2017). Gove’s statement calls for a strange inward turn of citizens and promotes the idea that the real truth is not out there somewhere, but can be found within. It is a plea to diminish our confidence in experts, but even more so, to have confidence in ourselves. That shows an important aspect of the populist worldview that is often overlooked: the notion of authenticity (Fieschi, 2019). Authenticity thrives, among other things, because in a world of ‘epistemological chaos’ there is little confidence left in anything else. It is a phenomenon that is similar to the inner retreat that Harry G. Frankfurt has described at the core of the ‘bullshit-phenomenon’ and that has undermined any fixed epistemic authority. Speaking of the surrender of the individual who gave up on modern notions of truth and turning to postmodern scepticism, Frankfurt (2009, pp. 65–66) writes:

Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

It is exactly in this mould that ‘Fox News’ infamous slogan, the one that for decades got liberals enraged, demonstrates its true power: ‘You Decide’. We just report the facts – and you, the viewer, choose what to do with it. For everyone who ever watched Fox News biased opinion formats, this must simply sound like a provocation, intended to subvert (or parody) the idea of objective journalism. But it is also an effective method to capture the expectations of an audience that styles itself as a community of independent minds that need no elite guidance to find their way through the jungle of the 24/7 news cycle. It all is part of the populist worldview that accepts nothing between the self and the world: no intermediary political institutions (like parties), no ‘mainstream media’ that filters what is happening, no experts that defy the ‘truths’ of the inner self.

The objection to the idea that populism is about things like self-empowerment and emancipation seems obvious: is this not just a dramatic play without any substance, a performance act that enables populists and their followers to fashion themselves as the true nonconformists, fighting a powerful establishment? In fact, there is much to this argument. The performance act is obvious and none of it means that, once right-wing populists are in power, they might not resort to authoritarian practices and dismantle liberal democracy in the name of ‘the people’. The same is true for their supporters: believing that they, and only they, represent the true will of the people, they might be willing to limit their opponents’ freedom in the name of ‘true democracy’. More than true ‘mature citizens’, they are ‘true partisans’: ever ready to embrace only the kind of information that is convenient to them and neglect everything else. And while they are extremely distrustful and critical towards any information coming from ‘the other’ side, they surely do not utilise the same scrutiny when it comes to their own beliefs. Perhaps, Plato was right: When democracy has reached a point where all freedoms are maximised and all citizens feel equal towards one another, tyranny looms around the corner.

But the objection is false in that it suggests that the antiauthoritarian attitude is nothing but a charade. It is deeply internalised by populists and their followers and to believe otherwise would mean to assume a self-discipline on their behalf to hide their true agenda that seems highly unlikely. And because it is the reality that they accept as their own, it needs to be taken serious at least in a first step.

This is not to say that right-wing populists are the true nonconformists of our time. The point is not that they are more antiauthoritarian than their liberal counterparts; that, surely, is not the case. It simply means that they act under conditions and start with intellectual premises that are not too different from those of their ‘enemies’ (Blühdorn & Butzlaff, 2019). They, too, have to navigate their lives in a ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000). The real point of comparison, therefore, must be a historical one. Nothing provides more clarity than juxtaposing today’s right-wing populist movements with those clearly unambiguous authoritarian movements of the past to which they are constantly compared: conservatism and fascism. Like most political movements since 1789, they, too, claimed to speak in the name of ‘the people’. But both ideologies, as different as they otherwise were, would have rejected as absurd the egalitarian-populist notion that ‘the people’ are capable of speaking for themselves and to deal with the complexities of politics and society on their own. The ideas at work in conservatism and fascism on the one hand and current populism on the other of what constitutes the truth, how to get there and, maybe most importantly, who could get there, could hardly be more different.

Let us take conservatism. Even for a more moderate exponent of this intellectual tradition, such as Edmund Burke, it was self-evident that not everybody was destined to have an informed opinion about how to run the affairs of the state. What was needed was hierarchy and authority, and the latter could only be achieved through hard won experience. The idea to ‘drain the swamp’ would surely not have found Burke’s approval, since it were (apart from the crown itself, as Burke was a proponent of constitutional monarchy) career civil servants and senior parliamentarians that could be trusted – not the small town lawyers, (‘obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions’) and others from the ‘humblest rank of subordination’ that had plunged France into chaos after 1789 and that Burke so utterly disdained (Burke, 2003, p. 37). Obviously, the masses needed guidance, or otherwise chaos would be the consequence. And while conservatism in the centuries to come did make its peace with the general idea of popular sovereignty, it remained deeply elitist, sceptical of ideas like direct democracy and sympathetic towards systems of representation. The more filters of representation were built into a democratic system, the better. ‘You Decide?’ Better not! And nothing scared Burke and conservatives in his mould more than the free roaming ideas of philosophers, the ‘sophisters’, as Burke called them. Instead of relying on the wisdom of the generations before them, they believed that reason alone was enough and that society could be built from scratch.

But did Burke not outline an early version of anti-intellectualism, a mind-set that favours what another British conservative thinker, Michael Oakeshott, more than 150 years later, has called ‘practical knowledge’ over abstract theorising (Oakeshott, 1991)? And isn’t anti-intellectualism what right-wing populism is all about? Partially yes and some of the repulsive rejections of science and the appeal to ‘common sense’, like Michael Gove’s remark earlier in this text, clearly bear a Burkean mark. But contemporary anti-intellectualism has changed tremendously and maybe even beyond recognition since Burke’s days, mostly because the triumph of science has been so profound. Populists, at least in their vast majority, are not simply promoting ‘folk wisdom’. Instead, they rely on ‘counter-knowledge’, by either using or even building alternative knowledge structures. Alternative science is not the same as anti-science (which would be dogma, or religion, or folklore), but a simulation of it. Climate change deniers, an important faction within many modern populist movements, often brag about their studious scholarship. And the texts of ‘alternative science’ are often particularly dense with footnotes and citations. In the age of ‘epistemological chaos’, where some sort of counter expertise on the internet is always easy to have and the power of gatekeeping has radically diminished, you no longer attack the mode of knowledge production per se: you simply choose the one source that confirms your pre-existing opinions. Other than their predecessors on the right, many populists are not romantics rejecting rationality altogether and clinging to the ‘truth of the heart’, but modern-day rationalists that use alternative science to defend their position (Ylä-Anttila, 2018).

Following this line of argument, the difference between populism’s and fascism’s epistemologies are, unsurprisingly, even more obvious. Fascism broke radically with notions of modern rationality. Truth was nothing to be achieved through a process of careful deliberation. It was based on primordial myths and spiritual truths, not so much a matter of cognition but ‘rooted in emotional emanations of the soul’ (Fienchelstein, 2020, p. 53). Even those intellectuals who joined the fascist cause submitted themselves happily to an ideology that rejected rationality and embraced a mythical truth.

Populism and authoritarian leadership

All of this must be logically followed by the next objection: even if right-wing populists attack all kinds of established authority and fashion themselves as highly independent minds, and even if we assume that they believe in their own narrative of empowerment – is this not just a grandiose self-delusion, because, ultimately, there is one single authority that populist voters submit to all too willingly: the populist leader?

For many observers, the central role that leaders play in populist movements is the definitive proof of authoritarian dispositions among their followers. What populists reject, in this interpretation, is authority that they deem illegitimate, whereas legitimate authority coming from their side is happily accepted. The argument would actually be a familiar one to some of the pioneers of the Frankfurt School. Erich Fromm differentiated between the ‘conservative-authoritarian’ and ‘rebellious-authoritarian’ type. Whereas the first one submitted to all kinds of established order, the latter one wanted to actively transcend the existing social order and despised the authorities in power. However, underneath the attitude of the insurgent, the ‘rebellious-authoritarian’ type craved for new submission (somethings that distinguishes him from another, truly antiauthoritarian type: the ‘revolutionary’, Fromm believed) and was always on the lookout both for new authorities and his own chance of domination of others (Fromm & Bonss, 1980). They were, in other words, ultimately authoritarians in rebel’s clothing. Fromm’s initial study about working-class culture in Germany was from 1929 and the future would seem to confirm many of his findings. The young men who first searched for orientation in diverse paramilitary groups and then later constituted the active core of the Nazi movement, despised many of the political and societal authorities of the Weimar Republic – but, that, of course, did not stop them from total devotion to legitimate authorities, chief among them the Führer (Rensmann, 2018).

However, contrary to public perception and many accounts in the media, it is doubtful that the majority of today’s supporters of right-wing populist parties are searching for anything only remotely similar to the experience of submission under a cult leader. For instance, one would expect authoritarian voters supporting authoritarian parties to prefer political organisations that are disciplined, hierarchical and efficient. Obviously, that is a far cry from the reality of the inner workings of most right-wing populist parties in Western Europe that are not an assembly of loyal party soldiers but often a bonfire of narcissism and vanities, often dysfunctional to their very core. Factionalism is a constant feature (Johansson, 2014). On its way to becoming a serious political contender, Germany’s AfD has repeatedly changed its leadership when one faction unseated the other in open revolt; none of these chaotic revolts, however, seemed to have a deterring effect on their supporters.

Not even all populist parties are, contrary to conventional wisdom, centrally organised or personalised (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2014). Some right-wing populist parties in Europe are known to reject centralised leadership, such as the Danish People’s Party or Germany’s AfD. Most who have studied the party structure of populist parties across countries have found organisational diversity and concluded that these parties do not represent a unique and clearly distinguishable type in terms of party organisation (Heinisch & Mazzoleni, 2016). And some populist social movements are indeed intentionally leaderless, such as the Tea Party in the United States emerging after 2009.

However, it still seems fair to assume that a noticeably high number of populist parties and movements do indeed have strong centralised leadership. Some are ‘personal parties’ without any real party organisation, a concept maybe best embodied by Geert Wilders ‘Freedom Party’, whose only party member is Wilders himself. Internal party democracy is certainly not held in high regard. Some have attributed this to the trivial fact that in their formative phase, parties are always depending on extroverted leaders to attract media attention and populist parties, still a relative newcomer, are no exception (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2014). Additionally, there is the inherent logic of populism that in a certain sense demands strong centralisation: since the idea of an undivided, general will is central to the populist persuasion, a vibrant and participatory party culture, expressing a plurality of opinions, might seem contradictory. And the same of course is true for the society at large: Because it is impossible to hold a daily plebiscite to elicit the will of the people, the only practical way to find its manifestation is through the leader. He or she channels in his or her person what otherwise must remain chaotic and incoherent. Personalisation is the only way to preserve an idea that is ultimately fictional (Priester, 2012).

The propensity to see the embodiment of the will of the people in one single leader surely resembles the authoritarian logic of fascism. But there is one crucial difference. Fascist leaders like Mussolini or Hitler exercised charismatic leadership in the sense described by Max Weber. Their legitimacy rested on the quasi-religious belief of their followers that they were chosen, gifted with extraordinary skills not available to ordinary men. The Fox News slogan ‘You decide’ would have seemed not only utterly strange to the adherents of totalitarian mass movements of the 1920 and 1930s but also highly undesired. Eric Hoffer in his book ‘the true believer’ portrayed the disciples of the totalitarian mass movements of the 1920s and 1930 as exhausted, overwhelmed individuals, unable to cope with modernity and therefore happy to obliterate their miserable self and join the collective consciousness of a totalitarian mass movement (Hoffer, 1951).

It all bears little resemblance to the self-perception of the majority of today’s right-wing partisans, who fashion themselves as autonomous individuals who call their own shots. And it is why the populist leader has to work with a different epistemology than the leaders of the totalitarian mass movements of the past. The knowledge of the populist leader is the knowledge of the everyman. He sees and states the obvious. He is not above the people: he is their ‘incarnation’ (Priester, 2012, p. 77). He is the ‘amplifier’ of the popular will, as Beppe Grillo, the founder of Italy’s ‘Five Star Movement’ expressed the idea of populist (non)leadership (Vignati, 2015, pp. 48–49.). The idea of the connection between the populist leader and its followers is probably still best captured by a campaign slogan that the Austrian FPÖ ran in the 1990s and that featured its frontman Jörg Haider: ‘He says what we think’.

All that, however, is not the same as charisma and in some sense even its exact opposite. Obviously, populist leaders are capable of generating extreme loyalty. Donald Trump, who once claimed that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue, shoot someone and still not lose a single voter, is a case in point. In fact, the nearly unbreakable bond between him and his base seemed the strongest proof of the authoritarian desire for absolute submission. But even with Trump, surely the most authoritarian right-wing populist in the West by character, things are a little more complicated than the over and over repeated claim of a ‘Trump-cult’ suggests. To begin with, Trumps popularity surely does not lie in his ‘extraordinariness’ but in the exact opposite: his ordinariness, the myth of the ‘blue-collar-billionaire’ that his followers can relate to (Lütjen, 2020a). But more importantly: The seemingly unbreakable bond between Trump and his base is a peculiar one. It certainly applies to any possible accusations and attacks of the other side, which indeed only help to confirm the devil’s bargain between the president and his supporters. Trump has managed what all populists dream of: convincing his voters that an attack on him is actually an attack on them. He really is the incarnation, a symbol of defiance against the mainstream, as some have noted also ‘a lifestyle choice and a vehicle for self-expression – a way to continually flip the middle finger at big media, big business, big government…anything big’ (Vandehei & Allen, 2020).

But at least until 2019, when the United States. came closer and closer to the brink of a constitutional crisis or maybe even worse and the partisan animosity reached a point that guaranteed that his base stopped questioning anything the president did, there actually was suspicion in the echo chambers of the American right: that he abandons the ‘Make America Great Again’ agenda, that he acts too weak or reconciling towards Democrats, that, secretly, he might sell them for some phony political deal (Lütjen, 2020a). Trump, in other words, was always right to be obsessed with his standing among his core supporters: that was the rational core of a political strategy that never made any serious effort to expand his political appeal beyond that very base. And just like him, today’s right-wing populists do not act as truly autonomous authoritarian leaders that impose their iron will on their constituency, but rather according to the motto of one of the protagonists of the French February revolution of 1848, Alexandre August Ledru-Rollins: ‘I must follow them, for I am their leader’.

Which brings us to the last important point. For Adorno and others, authoritarians had an irremediable fixation on the figure of the ‘strict father’. The father as a protector, a punisher and a moral authority. But as the historian Holly Case has brilliantly noted, today’s populists’ leaders are the opposite of Adorno’s ‘strict fathers’ and of the strongmen of the past, who demanded a certain behaviour from their ‘children’ and asked for total obedience or even sacrifice. None of this characterises the Trumps, Salvinis or Straches of this world. They are acting more like the modern ‘buddy father’ that will protect you from your teachers and tells you that you’ve been pushed around for far too long but that, actually, you are okay the way you are and there is no reason to change: ‘The new authoritarian does not pretend to make you better, only to make you feel better about not wanting to change’ (Case, 2017). With other words: populism does neither exercise nor even possesses the kind of authority that would be necessary to ask for fundamental change. It also – and this has become abundantly clear during the corona crises – does not have the authority to ask for individual sacrifice in the name of the collective good. But if it can’t do that, if it can’t ask for the ultimate price to pay, what kind of authority is left? If there would be a global sign of recognition among the followers of right-wing populism, it would not be the straight right arm up in the air, but two middle fingers in everyone’s face.

Conclusion: Populism, self-empowerment and institutionalised distrust

It certainly seems counterintuitive to use words like enlightenment and emancipation in connection with the likes of Donald Trump, Marine LePen or Matteo Salvini. And the term anti-authoritarianism makes one more likely to think of Woodstock than of a rally to ‘Make America Great Again’. Needless to say that today’s right-wing populists are, of course, not the legitimate heirs of Immanuel Kant. Maybe their character is best captured by a term invented by the French sociologist Daniel Bensaid: ‘Authoritarian individualism’ (Bensaid, 2012: 41–42) a perversion of the idea of the enlightenment: ‘a Chacun sa vérité’.

That, of course, sounds like a contradiction in terms. But it is fitting then, that what drives the populist quest for self-empowerment and at the same time produces deep political antagonisms, is in fact a major contradiction in our modern lives, one that is very real and that affects all of us. On the one hand, our world has become ever more complex, data-driven and science-based, with ever more islands of extreme specialisation, which forces us to delegate more and more decisions of our daily lives (and in the realm of politics) to experts and all kinds of anonymous authorities. When Kant urged his contemporaries to make use of their reason, he had confidence that educated men could be capable of knowing in fact most of what there was to know. In the 21st century, however, that idea has become preposterous. We are entangled in a world of technology that we don’t understand but still completely rely on, and faced with political and social problems that are diagnosed by others (the ‘experts’) and, despite their urgency, are mostly detached from our own experiences.

The problem is only that, one the other hand, we are also told to be always critical, to be independent minds and to take nothing for granted. That is the result of half a century of narratives of empowerment, emancipation and individualisation. This is the dilemma then: How to act when we are told to be the masters of our own lives, that we are the ones in control – but when in reality, most things are completely out of our control and we are constantly forced to trust anonymous institutions? With other words: We need to trust more than ever, but we are also less willing to trust than ever. For the modern, empowered individual, this is an irresolvable internal contradiction; it is also a massive insult to the self (see also Blühdorn in this special issue).

One way that populists try to cope with this problem is that they do not completely abandon modern rationality and fall back on some truly alternative, transcendental and maybe mythical truth – mainly because modern day populism, as ideologically undefined and spiritually shallow as it is, has no such fallback option. Instead, populism tries to merge the two by officially accepting the rationalist world view and its procedures, systematisations and even bearings, while simultaneously attacking all established authorities and sources of knowledge production and dissemination. Why trust the experts when all the necessary information on climate change is out there somewhere on the internet? ‘Conformation bias’ – the inclination to only select the information that conform our pre-existing beliefs – has surely always been a constant trait of human nature, but with the advent of the internet, the opportunities to find the right kind of knowledge have become infinite and unlimited.

The somewhat bitter irony of all this is obvious. When the levels of social and political trust were first declining in the 1970s and raised concern, some political scientists made the plausible argument that this was not by itself a reason to be overly alarmed. Distrust, they argued, could also signify an elevated level of political maturity (Hart, 1978). After all, was it really so unhealthy to be critical of political elites? Was it not a matter of political sophistication to try to take control back from them and to deal individually with the complexities of the world? Was it not the true legacy of ‘1968’ to not blindly trust the ‘establishment’? It was, some argued a little later, the ‘growth of the critical citizen’, and what was so bad about being critical? ‘The Postmodernisation phase of development’, wrote Ronald Inglehart, ‘leads to declining respect for authority among the publics of advanced industrial society – but it also gives rise to growing support for democracy’ (Inglehart, 1999: 256).

That conclusion ignored the dialectics of emancipation, that was the topic of this and other articles in this special issue. We are more aware now of the ambiguities caused by questioning everything and everyone and thereby slowly undermining hitherto accepted norms and institutions. In a world where even the most obscure sources of knowledge are available and always find their community of like-minded people willing to embrace it, the call to break free from traditional structures and to become an autonomous subject has yielded non-intended side effects (Lütjen, 2020b). In a quote from the 1960s that now seems almost prophetic, Niklas Luhmann (2018, p. 80) grasped this aporia with all its bewildering implications:

A person who distrusts both needs more information and at the same time narrows down the information which he feels confident he can rely on. He becomes more dependent on less information. The possibility of his being deceived becomes once more something to be reckoned with.