Although the rise of right-wing populist movements and parties in Europe in the past few decades and the more recent success of the Tea Party in the United States has received ample attention from social scientists, the continuing growth of these parties in Europe and the recent election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States has confounded and surprised many scholars. Ten years ago, very few scholars would have predicted that right-wing populist parties would be actually governing (as in Hungary and Poland); threatening to govern (as in France and Switzerland); forming powerful and influential opposition parties...

The rise of illiberal, authoritarian populist candidates, parties and movements has profoundly unsettled liberal democracies across the globe. This process is epitomized by Donald Trump’s ascendancy – firstly by serving as the candidate of the Republican Party, then to the American presidency – and by dramatic gains of populist contenders in Europe in recent years. They pretend to oppose ‘the establishment’ and propose nationalist and authoritarian policies in the name of ‘the people’ – or rather a very particular, narrow ethnic conception thereof. In light of the scope and depth of the cultural backlash which these actors mobilize and represent, there are few...

We appear to be living in an age of populism. Over the past two decades, we have witnessed the rise of right-wing populist parties throughout Europe such as Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, Victor Orban’s Fidesz Party in Hungary, and the Polish Law and Justice Party. Such an emergence hasn’t been confined to Europe but is a global phenomenon as evinced, for example, by the electoral triumphs of Narendra Modi in India in 2014 and that of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey as early as 2003. But no phenomena more clearly supportsthis thesis than the stunning victory of Donald J....

In this article, I discuss in detail how Erich Fromm’s categories can help describe Trump’s character, or ‘temperament,’ a word used to characterize a major flaw in Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and his rule as President by the end of the first year. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), Fromm engages in a detailed analysis of the authoritarian character as sadistic, excessively narcissistic, malignantly aggressive, vengeably destructive, and necrophiliac, personality traits arguably applicable to Trump. In the following analysis, I will systematically deploy key Frommian socio-psychoanalytic categories to Trump and his followers to show how they...

Karl Marx once quipped that ‘violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one’ (Marx 1967, 751). Just as surely, however, prejudice is the midwife of violence. The bigot embraced this view from the start. Hatred of the Jews goes back to Egypt and Babylonia. Contempt for what the Greeks considered the ‘ barbarian’ – whoever was not of Greece – existed even at the height of the classical period. And Homer already understood the struggles of the outcast and the stranger. What today might be termed ethnic or racial conflicts between empires, religions, tribes, and clans have...

Georg Lukács understood in the 1938 run-up to Germany’s fascist political ferocity that freedom from the reactionary prejudices of authoritarian populism required theoretical understanding that penetrates beneath empirical facts and phenomena, discerning the underlying dialectical systems generating the observable economic, social, cultural and ecological/data. So, when we read a contemporary journalist report the following: ‘Today’s American fascists are far less educated than the fascists of the Third Reich, and they’re proud of their ignorance – they’re defiantly stupid and mediocre and resentful of hard working educated people of colour, immigrants, and women. And that defiant ignorance has gotten into the American...

The rise of populism and its authoritarian variations over the last decade has not been confined to the West. Recent academic literature/debate on populism¹ points out that the global populist surge constitutes a diffuse set of political and economic categories (rhetoric, style, identity, etc.) that can also be perceived at the margins of the West in countries like Hungary, South Korea, the Philippines, Bolivia, Poland, and Venezuela (Sowa and Ciobanu 2016; Nilsson-Wright 2016; Stewart and Wasserstrom 2016; Juego 2017; Nowak 2014; Petkovski 2015). Further, while populist movements may have their most palpable manifestations within the geographical and political parameters of...

Norbert Hofer was the Freedom Party of Austria’s (FPÖ) candidate in the 2016 Austrian presidential election. In the first round, he achieved 35.05% of the cast votes and became the strongest candidate. The second round took place on May 23 and saw a run-off between Hofer and Alexander Van der Bellen. Hofer’s share of the vote was 49.64%. Van der Bellen, who was the leader of Austria’s Green Party leader from 1997 until 2008, won with a voting share of 50.35% in the second round and a lead of just a bit more than 30,000 votes. The Austrian presidential election...

In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx citing Hegel famously writes that history repeats itself, ‘first as tragedy, then as farce’ (1972, 10). Donald Trump’s ascent to power, as the forty-fifth President of the United States, in the most powerful post on earth, can be perceived as a moment in history when tragedy and farce overlap.

The farce aspect is obvious and is illustrated in the ongoing White House circus: Trump’s demagoguery, oblivion, the blunt and effortless ignorance that he exudes in every context, his immeasurable narcissism and his sense of entitlement. The American public is slammed daily with...

It should now be self-evident that internet technologies are not going to usher in a new Renaissance, end ignorance, or whatever other fantasies optimists may have attached to the idea of the Global Village. The essence of technology remains the same as it has since industrialization first began. In the wake of the 2016 US Presidential Election, the challenge of image projection technology (i.e., television or any internet gadget and the software that powers it) – the way in which it represents the world, and the influence it has on our perception of the real – has once again become an issue...