The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean

Front Cover
SAGE, Sep 26, 2015 - Political Science - 256 pages
Winner of the Austrian Book Prize for the 2016 German translation, in the category of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Populist right-wing politics is moving centre-stage, with some parties reaching the very top of the electoral ladder: but do we know why, and why now?

In this book Ruth Wodak traces the trajectories of such parties from the margins of the political landscape to its centre, to understand and explain how they are transforming from fringe voices to persuasive political actors who set the agenda and frame media debates. Laying bare the normalization of nationalistic, xenophobic, racist and antisemitic rhetoric, she builds a new framework for this ‘politics of fear’ that is entrenching new social divides of nation, gender and body.

The result reveals the micro-politics of right-wing populism: how discourses, genres, images and texts are performed and manipulated in both formal and also everyday contexts with profound consequences. This book is a must-read for scholars and students of linguistics, media and politics wishing to understand these dynamics that are re-shaping our political space.

From inside the book

Contents

TRANSGRESSING NORMS AND TABOOS
1
THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
25
THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION
46
THE POLITICS OF NATIONALISM
70
THE POLITICS OF DENIAL
97
THE POLITICS OF CHARISMA
125
THE POLITICS OF PATRIARCHY
151
THE NORMALIZATION OF EXCLUSION
177
GLOSSARY OF RIGHTWING POPULIST PARTIES
191
REFERENCES
211
INDEX
231
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2015)

Ruth Wodak is Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University. Her research interests focus on discourse studies; identity politics; racism, antisemitism and other forms of discrimination; and on ethnographic methods of linguistic field work. She was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996 and an Honorary Doctorate from University of Örebro in Sweden in 2010. She has held visiting professorships in University of Uppsala, Stanford University, University Minnesota, University of East Anglia, and Georgetown University (Washington, DC). She is a member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament (at University Örebrö). Ruth is co-editor of the SAGE journal Discourse & Society, and of the journals Critical Discourse Studies and Journal of Language and Politics. Recent book publications include: The discourse of politics in action: 'Politics as Usual' (2011), Critical Discourse Analysis (4 volumes, 2013), Migration, Identity and Belonging (with G. Delanty and P. Jones, 2011), The Discursive Construction of History: Remembering the German Wehrmacht's War of Annihilation (with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, and A. Pollak, 2008), The Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration in Austria (with M. Krzyzanowski, 2009), The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (with B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill, 2010), Analyzing Fascist Discourse: Fascism in Talk and Text (with J. E. Richardson, 2013), and Rightwing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (with M. KhosraviNik and B. Mral, 2013).

Bibliographic information