When Ruth Wodak submitted the original manuscript for The Politics of Fear in late 2014, as she relates in the preface to this updated and expanded second edition, she did so in what seems like a different world. This was a time and place before Brexit, before the presidency of Donald Trump, and before a plethora of right-wing parties across Europe had built electoral successes on the backs of nativist anxieties about their nations as soft targets for grasping refugees. There is a sense in which critical discourse analysis is still struggling to catch up with these historical developments, which came so thick and so fast. And yet in many ways Wodak has been a clear-sighted herald of the contemporary political landscape. The spectre of a resurgent racist and anti-Semitic populism being normalised in the media and carving out mainstream political space in contemporary democracies has been the focus of her forensic and influential discourse analytical work since the late 1980s. The Austrian experience, from the Waldheim affair through the electoral advances of Jörg Haider's Freedom Party and the rise (and recent fall) of Heinz-Christian Strache, has anticipated developments elsewhere, and reflected broader trends in Euro-American politics. The ever right-wards drifting political spectrum in a number of these contexts has been a special focus for Wodak and the scholars she has worked with over three decades. Arguably, no other scholar is quite so well positioned to disentangle the discursive snarls and Feindbilder of the contemporary far right.
This book thus bristles with analytical tools, case studies, and concepts. While much of the argument laid out in the first edition has been retained, with the aim to explain ‘what right wing populist discourses mean’, a shift of focus is reflected in a new subtitle: ‘the shameless normalization of far-right discourse’. And shamelessness is indeed touched on repeatedly, as Wodak unpacks a profound shift in discursive norms. Her aim is to explain the discursive dynamics that have made what was once unsayable such a regular feature of political communication. New sections offer compelling accounts of anti-genderism, the rejection of politeness conventions, the role of social media, anti-Sorosism, and a new chapter explores the menace of ‘illiberal democracy’ in Viktor Orbán's Hungary.
For all its expansiveness in exploring a number of national contexts and political formations, the book remains focused on rhetorical analysis of the micropolitical level of far-right electioneering. Wodak is interested in the ways in which politicians construct the people as imminently threatened by a racial Other, and she traces the specificity of discourses which work to racialize space through border and body politics. The racial Other becomes the scapegoat for all that stands between the ‘people’ and their hopes for the future. Fear of losing out is stoked by politicians to reset the norms of the public sphere, which now becomes a space where ‘anything goes!’ (15). Historical standards of evidence and authority are circumvented by a ‘fictionalization’ of politics, and its sensationalization in the media. Scandal and public outrage are bent in their favour by far-right politicians, who feed off a ‘perpetuum mobile’ (26) that keeps them in the headlines. Public umbrage serves as evidence of victimization by elites of brave truth-tellers only trying to defend the nation. Once they have (inevitably) survived the scandal, and possibly issued a quasi-apology, the domain of the sayable has shifted.
The politics of fear pivots on an idealized homeland, or retrotopia, the defence of which supports diverse ethnonationalisms in their rejection of a political establishment that has sold out to globalization and multiculturalism. At the leading edge of these rejections is a charismatic indigene, typically male, who leads a hierarchical structure that mobilises social media and an ideology defended with the ‘arrogance of ignorance’ (27). These strategies have notched up a number of successes, and there is little reason to believe they will not continue to do so.
After laying out this framework in the first chapter, Wodak connects her argument to various theories of populism in the second. She disambiguates right from left populism, taking a clear normative stance against the former. Her own approach is built on Frankfurt School models that diagnose an authoritarian personality as susceptible to right-wing politics, and the entry point for irrational incursions into the public sphere. Her perennially popular CDA toolkit, the discourse-historical approach (DHA) is introduced in the third chapter. DHA tracks discursive moves over time between fields and across textual genres, providing an account of the growth, adaptation, and spread of populist ideas. Their constituent argumentation schemes, which contain specific topoi (common sense conclusion rules) and fallacies, can be traced across contexts. These are powerfully evoked in a series of fourteen vignettes strung throughout the book, dissecting the scandals and lies of politicians from Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to the SVP in Switzerland.
The chapters that follow address the dynamics of right-wing populist discourses. Chapter 4 deals with the constituent elements of ethnonationalism, including the body politics of nations that produce themselves as bounded entities containing specific national languages and ethnic identities. Chapter 5 presents anti-Semitism in the form of anti-Sorosism as one among a number of Iudeus ex Machina strategies, the true character of which must be denied. Chapter 6 addresses the politics of charisma, mobilising Goffman's notion of performance to deconstruct the appeal of big men such as Donald Trump and Heinz-Christian Strache. Chapter 7 unpacks how the far-right often articulates an ostensibly progressive gender politics in contrast to ‘patriarchal’ Islam, while at the same time advancing an ‘anti-genderist’ agenda rooted in misogyny and anti-intellectualism. Chapter 8 explores the ongoing emergence of ‘illiberal democracy’ in Hungary, while the ninth and final chapter offers a useful map of the ‘new normal’ and suggests ways to surpass the current far-right populist moment through refocusing on values such as equality, diversity, and solidarity, setting ‘alternative frames’ for democratic politics (263).
The explanatory power of the argument is in my view hindered by two factors, which are two sides of the same coin: an unrelenting rationalism, and an insufficiently theorised model of emotions in political discourse. It is surprising that a book with ‘fear’ and ‘shame’ in its title does not engage with the affective turn. For Wodak, emotion in political discourse is always suspect. This distrust is evident throughout the argument, but clearest in her endorsement of Floris Biskamp's rejection of emotional appeals in left-wing populism as ‘inciting the emotions of the masses’ (38). The emotion-bad/reason-good dichotomy prevents nuanced analysis of discursive complexity. Any affective attachments to specific social visions are rendered politically inert, thus blocking much of the path to the ‘alternative frames’ of the conclusion. How are we supposed to build solidarity across difference without appealing to each other as both rational and emotional beings?
If emotion is anathematised, rationality is presented as self-evident and unproblematic. And yet rationality is deeply implicated in ‘shaping the hidden violences of a secular, liberal humanism as modernity and the Enlightenment marched across the world’ (Macgilchrist Reference Macgilchrist2016:269). While decolonial scholars such as Aimé Césaire saw in this march the roots of the Holocaust (see Bhambra Reference Bhambra2021) critical theory has stuck to thinking of the Nazis as an aberration in reason's otherwise smooth progress. Thus, Wodak hopes that European nations today regain the moral vigour of the post-war supranational project, and rediscover ‘the civilization they have in common’ (257). From other parts of the globe this civilization might seem like a retrotopia with its own set of problems.
Scholars including Wendy Brown and Chantal Mouffe argue that reducing the realm of the political to economic and/or scientific questions with right or wrong answers is precisely the place in the current neoliberal order that right-wing populism creeps in. Preoccupation with the logical fallacies of right-wing discourse thus raises troubling questions. If the right were better at logic, would we have to agree with them? And what is achieved by calling them irrational, other than confirming their narrative of owning the ‘real’ politics, while elites fiddle with opaque calculating machines?
Ultimately, however, Wodak's rich and detailed descriptions of right-wing populist rhetoric and identification of its key tropes, continuities, frames, strategies, and topoi make this book indispensable for any discourse-based approach to the topic. It is certainly possible to theorise the current conjuncture differently, but the depth of her engagement with far-right politicians and their utterances across national contexts and time frames is profoundly valuable. We can surely agree that, faced with these reprehensible figures, we ought to cry: ‘Shame!’.
