Seemingly, right-wing populism is on the rise almost everywhere and with the evil twins of Donald Trump and “his” propaganda stooge Steve Bannon as the foremost representatives.

In Europe, some of the main proxies of right-wing populism are Hungary’s Orbán, Poland’s Kaczynski, Italy’s Meloni and Salvini, the Dutch Geert Wilders, France’s Le Pen, Germany’s “Nazi-Bitch” Weidel, and the UK-Brexit’s Nigel Farage.

While they all speak different languages, they all have one uniting feature: the rhetoric of right-wing populism. Perhaps ever since the Roman master orator Cicero (106-43BC), rhetoric is seen as being the “art of persuasion”.

However, right-wing rhetoric is not about convincing people through logically coherent and soundly reasoned statements. It is also not about Habermas’ “force of the better argument”.

Using every “rhetorical” trick in the book, right-wing populism seeks to persuade – some say manipulate – people. As such, rhetoric is most suitable for right-wing populists, far-right ideologues, demagogues, and other schemers.

Historically, the classical right-wing populist movement might well have been France’s Poujadism that came to prominence during the 1950s. Right-wing populism isn’t a new phenomenon, in fact, by the late 1970s, right-wing populist movements emerged in several European countries.

And since the 1990s, some political parties in Eastern Europe have also developed right-wing populist traits – mostly as a strategy for securing power.

One of the prime examples of contemporary right-wing populism is the blanket rejection of Islam. In its German expression, it quickly mutated into “Sachsenmut stoppt Moslemflut” [Saxon valor stops the flood of Muslims]. Virtually all right-wing populists oppose immigrants – especially from non-European “cultures”.

These are framed as foreign, dangerous, and alien. The rather positive term “culture”, as used by right-wing populists, seeks to eliminate the – rather well-founded – claim that right-wing populists are racist and Islamophobic.

In addition, right-wing populists demand a commitment to something it calls the “Christian Occident”, a national culture and a national identity. Of course, there is always the “mandated” position of “law-and-order” which, in the hallucination of right-wing populists, is under threat.

In all of this, “the other” (e.g. othering) is made to be perceived as harmful, dangerous, and a threat to the existing national culture.

In the simplistic mindset of Schmitt’s “them-vs.-us”, it is common for right-wing populists to see themselves as the sole mouthpiece for the so-called “silent majority” (us). Right-wing populists claim that this interest is ignored by other (i.e. democratic) parties. They are accused of supporting migrants and ethnic minorities (them).

Right-wing populism also resents the so-called “political class” – but not the capitalist class. This political, cultural, and educated elite is framed as aloof, corrupt, power-obsessed, decadent, cosmopolitan, and distant to “the people”.

The frequent reference to “the people” is intended to suggest that right-wing populists represent the “genuine will of the people”. This has nothing to do with Rousseau’s volonté générale. Instead, only the right-wing populist leader can bring “the will of the people” to light – somehow.

In contrast to outright neo-fascists, the even more cunning right-wing populism camouflages its inherent racism by focusing on “ethnicity” and “culture”. Manipulatively, this is framed as ethnopluralism. Deceitfully, the democratic system is not wholly rejected. Three predominant key elements are filtered out and scorned:

1. Pluralism: the idea that there could be plurality of different interests in a society.
2. Minority Protection: non-whites can be singled out for discrimination and dehumanization.
3. Christian/Religious Freedom: this allows right-wing populists to declare any non-Christian religion as alien and dangerous, and therefore, it needs to be eliminated.

Given all that, right-wing populism can be seen as a kind of “renewal” of the extreme right. In addition, right-wing populism might also well be a reaction to progressive social, political, and economic changes that have emerged in Europe since the 1970s.

Right-wing populist parties also feed on the – often rather irrational and, at times, tabloid-induced – fear of modernization and globalization. Right-wing populists answer this with simple slogans that blame the political class, foreigners, and minorities.

Despite all this, the concept of right-wing populism is in fact, rather difficult to grasp. This is because right-wing populism represents an idiosyncratic, quirky, programmatically often incoherent, even contradictory, and fluid set of rather disjointed ideas.

Unsurprisingly, right-wing populism is blurred and characterized by a certain fuzziness with a distinct lack of substance and internal coherence.

Despite its widespread use in the media, politics, and elsewhere, the term “right-wing populism” can hardly be used in a uniform and generalizing way. Yet, it still has some common features.

One common feature of right-wing populism is the ideological goal to make populism part of the media mainstream. Once this is accomplished, resentment, rejection, boycotts, sudden outbursts, mob violence, and so on can be staged more confidently and even more successfully.

Cleverly, those who reject right-wing populism can now be targeted as enemies of the people, and as enemies of free speech.

In other words, right-wing populists use elements of democracy like free speech against democracy. This, too, is not a new strategy. Hitler’s PR-stooge – Joseph Goebbels –made it clear,

we are entering the Reichstag, in order that we may arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy from its arsenal. We shall become Reichstag deputies in order that the Weimar ideology should itself help us to destroy it.

Those who doubt whether it is a good idea to “debate” the inhumane positions and false claims of right-wing populists openly, might like to realize that right-wing populism is not about democratic and constructive engagement. It is about the reduction or elimination of democracy – as far as possible.

One might also keep in mind that those who argue that it is possible to refute the fomenting of resentment with better arguments are declared “enemies” by right-wing populists. Meanwhile, right-wing populists like to make themselves appear as being the victims. This victim-perpetrator reversal is an established far-right rhetorical trick.

Yet in all this, right-wing populism is by no means limited to the party politics of Orban, Kaczynski, Meloni, Salvini, Wilders, Le Pen, Farage, and so on.

Instead, it is a political phenomenon backed by a semi-plausible ideology and plenty of rhetoric. Yet, right-wing populist communication strategies are not limited to claiming those democratic rights it despises so much.

Right-wing rhetoric is sometimes also practiced in the bourgeois-conservative camp, by Christian-fundamentalists, their political networks, and others.

Overall, however, the concept of right-wing populism should not be trivialized given the sheer stupidity frequently deployed by its leaders and even more so by its followers.

As a political force, right-wing populism should never be underestimated. For one, there are proven positions within many right-wing populist parties that aim at the abolition of liberal democracy.

While there are many characteristics of right-wing populist agitation and rhetoric, there is no single definition of what right-wing populist rhetoric is. In any case, right-wing populism does not automatically fall into one of its more extreme neighbors like right-wing extremism and neo-fascism.

For example, right-wing populism pretends to operate with democracy while neofascists rarely display such claims.

To make things even more complicated, right-wing populism and right-wing extremism have numerous intersections but both should not be equated as being the same.

To make matters worse, they are neither categorically separate nor should they be treated as undifferentiated – as being the same. Right-wing populist parties are, for example, much more electable compared to right-wing extreme and neofascist parties. This is one of the dangers of right-wing populists.

While neofascist rhetoric is much more oriented towards the Führer [the strong leader], right-wing populist rhetoric prefers to pretend to represent the interests of the “common people”. This is always set against “the elites” and “the establishment”. In doing so, a homogeneous hallucination of a “homo-racial people” is rarely made directly.

In a classical dog-whistling fashion, the cunningly used “ethnicity” rhetoric of right-wing populists still sends out specific messages to right-wing followers. The transmitted message of “the people” is that “the people” are unified, white, homogenous, and a racially identical group.

Meanwhile, right-wing populism also – and at least publicly – likes to distance itself from classical and biologistic racism. Instead, it relies on the seemingly unsuspicious concepts of a “cultural identity”. Right-wing populism rarely relies on the idea of racism – at least not openly.

At the same time, right-wing populist rhetoric relies on indignation, hatred, fear, and resentment. Among all the emotions that right-wing populist rhetoric conjures up, inducing “fear” remains the most important communication strategy.

This is the fear of “the other”, the fear of uncertainty, the fear of democracy, the fear of change, the fear of modernity, and so on.

Yet at the same time, right-wing populist agitators present themselves as balanced, fair and serious. To push the rhetoric of being “fair and balanced” even further, right-wing populists even claim to act “beyond right and left”.

As an outcome, their ideological positions are made to appear as being “unideological” and as being “reasonable”. Right-wing populist rhetoric also sells the fairytale story that they represent the “common sense”.

Perhaps most importantly, through the rhetoric of provocations, unfounded and often outrageous assertions and generalizations, political opponents are constantly forced to work “inside” the ideological framework set by right-wing populists.

Forcing others into the ideological mindset and agenda of right-wing populism is one of the most chilling achievements of right-wing populist rhetoric.

In the struggle over agenda setting of the monopoly of opinion, expanding the resonance space for right-wing ideas remains essential. This is about power – not democracy. Cunningly, right-wing populist rhetoric tends to pretend to defend democracy.

At the same time, it delegitimizes basic democratic principles. Parliaments – the central institutions of any representative democracy – are being belittled, ridiculed, and scorned. Laws and constitutions are emphasized. At the same time, the rule of law is being undermined in those areas that do not suit the right-wing populists.

Right-wing rhetoric might even advocate “gender equality” but only in order to distance oneself from “backward migrants” and to promote one’s own culture.

This is never about “gender equality” – it is about attacking migrants. Right-wing populist rhetoric is also directed against certain sciences, especially the humanities and social sciences. Worse, climate science, for example, is defamed as “lying science”.

In right-wing rhetoric, we are dealing with planned, targeted, deeply ideological, and very professional procedures with which society should and will be directed in a reactionary direction.

To secure this and to maintain the façade of respectability, connections to hooligans, neofascists, and neo-Nazis are covered up.

Right-wing rhetoric directs attention away from this and towards black-and-white thinking that divides the world into its “own” vs. “foreign”, into “national” vs. “external”, into “elite” vs. “the people”. What helps in all this are provocations to polarise political debates.

Linked to the black-and-white idea of “them-vs-us”, right-wing rhetoric makes migration and immigration policy central topics of their agenda. This makes the success of right-wing populists possible.

Right-wing rhetoric exists in complete opposition to universalist values such as human rights, to opening up to the outside world, to European integration, to pluralism, and multiculturalism.

Even if right-wing populists repeatedly distance themselves from all too obvious neo-Nazi statements, it, nevertheless, reproduces many of them – now rhetorically reframed to make them more acceptable.

There is no real distancing from neofascists. Such a distancing is pure rhetoric. However, when links between right-wing populists and neo-Nazis have become too obvious, these links are framed as being merely isolated cases and just coincidences.

It is its anti-parliamentarism and “farce politics” that right-wing rhetoric seeks to camouflage. Yet, right-wing populist rhetoric is not a coherent ideological edifice. Right-wing populism is often contradictory. Paradoxically, much of its success is based on this.

In all this, right-wing rhetoric has two goals: stirring up resentment against democracy and linking right-wing populism with an – often rather unsuspecting – middle class.

This is also where right-wing rhetoric locates the “little people”. Yet, in right-wing populism, the people are usually defined “exclusively” – to the exclusion of others.

For right-wing rhetoric, it is all about their “own” people. When right-wing rhetoric talks – over and over again – of “our people”, this dog-whistling sends out specific signals about a racially homogenous white and perhaps even Aryan people.

In the end, right-wing rhetoric lives from simplistic black-and-white statements that conjure up emotions like fear. Its deep-rooted anti-democratic ideologies are camouflaged through the pretense of being in line with democratic values.

Perhaps the most crucial factor in all this is the attempt by right-wing rhetoric to set the agenda for others to follow. This draws democratic forces into the orbit of right-wing rhetoric. With this, right-wing populists are on a winning ticket.

Born on the foothills of Castle Frankenstein, Thomas Klikauer (PhD) is the author of 985 publications, including a book on “The AfD”.

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