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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Throughout the world, democracy is under assault from various populist movements and ideologies. And, throughout the world, the same enigma: why is it that political figures or governments, who have no qualms about aggravating social inequalities, enjoy the support of those whom their ideas and policies affect and hurt the most?

To make sense of this enigma, the sociologist Eva Illouz argues that we must understand the crucial role that emotions play in our political life. Taking the case of Israel as her prime example, she shows that populist politics rest on four key emotions: fear, disgust, resentment, and love for one's country. It is the combination of these four emotions and their relentless presence in the political arena that nourishes and underpins the rise and persistence of populism both in Israel and in many other countries around the world.

This highly original perspective on the rise of populism will be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand the key political developments of our time.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

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Leseprobe

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Worm Inside the Apple

Structures of Feeling

Emotions, Character and Politics

Notes

1 Securitist Democracy and Fear

Israel and Security

The Effects of Fear on the Political Body

Conclusion

Notes

2 Disgust and Identity

Disgust as Fear of Mixing

Disgust and the Logic of Racism

Disgust Entrepreneurs and Fear of Contamination

Conclusion

Notes

3 Resentment, or The Hidden Eros of Nationalist Populism

An International Political Style

Why Is Victimhood So Successful?

Conclusion

Notes

4 National Pride as Loyalty

Nationalism and Community

Israeli Nationalism

Conclusion

Notes

Conclusion: The Emotions of a Decent Society

The Emotions of a Decent Society

From Solidarity to Fraternity

Fraternity and Universalism

Jews and Universalism

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Worm Inside the Apple

Begin Reading

Conclusion: The Emotions of a Decent Society

Index

End User License Agreement

Pages

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The Emotional Life of Populism

How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy

EVA ILLOUZ

with Avital Sicron

polity

The right of Eva Illouz to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in English in 2023 by Polity Press

First published in German in 2023 by Suhrkamp Verlag AG as Undemokratische Emotionen. Das Beispiel Israel

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5820-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948539

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press.However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Dedication

To the memory of my father Haim Illouz, who loved Israel so much.

Acknowledgements

This book was researched and written long before the profound political and constitutional crisis faced by Israel as of March 2023. Tragically, its analysis has turned out to be more than amply confirmed by current events: what we can only call a new form of Jewish fascism is in power, threatening to turn Israel into a full-blown religious dictatorship. By the time this book is published, it is possible that civil society will have won and that Israel will have returned to the status quo ante. Or not. But whatever the outcome of the crisis pitting a fascist government against hundreds of thousands of protesters, two key points of this book remain valid: populism is the antechamber of radical and authoritarian political regimes. And some emotions come to saturate the political arena so that they obfuscate facts, evidence and self-interest. Despite overwhelming evidence that Israel will see its economy and security seriously jeopardized if the government stays on course, this path is the one preferred by a large proportion of the population.

The study of populism has, reluctantly, made me return to a notion I have rejected for most of my sociological career – that of ideology. Cognitive psychology has accumulated considerable evidence that our thinking is full of flaws and biases. Sociology cannot ignore these powerful findings, however different cognitive psychology may be from our discipline. These biases and errors in thinking are effects of the inherent limitations of our attention and reasoning, but they are also systematically shaped by the set of ideas spread through various organizations funded by conservative and libertarian billionaires who aim to undermine and destroy democracy. Jeff Yass and Arthur Dantchick – two Jewish billionaires who have financed the highly conservative think tank Forum Kohelet which masterminded the regime change in Israel – provide examples of the ways in which money distorts and undermines democratic processes. Ideas become ideology when they serve so crudely a small group at the expense of the majority.

This book would not have seen the light of day without generous funds from the Van Leer Institute, which helped support Avital Sikron, a PhD candidate at Hebrew University and a crucial researcher for this book. It was also supported by the Institute for Israeli Thought and by its generous fellowship.

Shai Lavi was a privileged interlocutor early in the project, long before it turned into actual text on a page: he encouraged and supported it when it was only an idea; he deconstructed and reconstructed the argument numerous times. My gratitude goes to him. Avner Ben-Zaken and Mordechai Cohen have also played an important role in probing my thinking on the faults and flaws of identity politics and on the ways in which real victims go astray with the politics of victimhood. Tamar Brandes has been an ongoing source of inspiration, as a colleague and as a friend. Her thinking about the nature of constitutional culture has profoundly enriched me. Finally, Boaz Amitai – who has enabled me to probe questions about the decent society – is an inspiration for us all and a model of what a decent citizen is.

Introduction: The Worm Inside the Apple

In a lecture he gave in Vienna in 1967, Adorno offered his audience remarks strikingly relevant to our times,1 and this despite the vast differences which separate us from his period. Although fascism had officially collapsed, the conditions for fascist movements, he averred, were still active in society. The main culprit for this was the still prevailing tendency towards concentration of capital, a tendency which “still creates the possibility of constantly downgrading strata of society that were clearly bourgeois in terms of their subjective class consciousness, and want to cling to, and possibly reinforce, their privileges and social status.” It is the same groups of bourgeois moving down who “develop a hatred of socialism, or what they call socialism; that is, they lay the blame for their own potential downgrading not on the apparatus that causes it, but on those who were critical towards the system in which they once had a status, at least in a traditional sense.”

In these short lines, Adorno packed some of the key insights of critical theory. Fascism, for him, is not an accident of history. Nor is it an aberration. Rather, it works inside democracy and is contiguous with it. It is, to use a worn-out metaphor, a worm lodged inside the apple, rotting the fruit from within, invisible to the naked eye. As an anthology on the Frankfurt School put it: “It was a major theme of the early Frankfurt School that no sharp line could be drawn between the extremity of political fascism and the more everyday social pathologies of bourgeois capitalism in the West.”2 This also means that fascism need not be a full-blown regime. It could in fact be a tendency, a cluster of pragmatic orientations and ideas which work from within the framework of democracies. Contained in Adorno’s remarks is also the claim that capitalism deploys tendencies towards a concentration of capital and power (a rather unsurprising idea for a Marxist which even non-Marxists would have a hard time disputing). Adorno had not yet witnessed the spectacular way in which democratic electoral processes would be hijacked by concentrated capital. He was thus referring to the class dynamics which the concentration of capital created inside liberal societies. Such dynamics threatened to constantly downgrade the very same bourgeois classes who had previously contributed to and benefited from the capitalist system. Note that Adorno focuses on the bourgeois (a mixture of segments of the upper and middle classes) and not on the proletariat as the agent for this new fascism. Echoing a tradition in sociology that viewed fascism as the expression of fear of downward mobility,3 Adorno suggests that the same class which had, and continues to have, privileges is the same one which, when it sees these privileges threatened, will support it. Loss of privilege thus seems to be a key motivation for endorsing anti-democratic leaders. (In the 2016 election, support for Trump tended to be higher among groups with high and middle incomes. People with very low salaries were more likely to side with Clinton.)4 Desire to maintain privilege or the fear of losing privilege is, as Adorno suggests, a driving force of politics in general and of fascist politics in particular. The third and perhaps (at least for this book) most significant move contained in Adorno’s succinct remarks suggests that identification with fascism finds its roots in a certain way of thinking about causes (how we think about why things are the way they are) and a certain way of assigning blame and responsibility. The downgraded bourgeois class will not blame the very capitalist system of economic concentration which undermines its loss of status and privilege. Instead, it will transpose blame onto those who criticize that same system. Adorno is laconic, but we are left to understand that they will grasp their social world as if in a camera obscura, an inverted image of the outside world. Continuing the Marxist tradition of Ideologiekritik, Adorno identifies here a very important cognitive process at work in proto fascism: the lack of capacity to understand the chain of causes which explain one’s social situation. Perception of the social world, Adorno suggests, can be fundamentally distorted. The bourgeois (and probably other classes) cannot properly identify the causes of their losses and thus cannot rally behind those who, without exactly defending their interests, at the very least question the system responsible for their downgrading.

In these short lines, Adorno thus makes a claim about the persistence of fascist tendencies in our societies, due both to economic processes of accumulation and concentration of capital and to certain distorted or incomplete forms of thinking, to be found particularly in the ways in which we build causality, make events intelligible, and attribute blame, pointing to what in another context Jason Stanley has called a flawed ideology.5 A flawed ideology – as Stanley defines it in How Propaganda Works – robs “groups of knowledge of their own mental states by systematically concealing their interests from them.”6 What the real interests of a class or group of people are, of course, is not self-evident. Any judgment about this is based on certain presuppositions on the part of the researcher who makes distinctions between real and false interests, thus claiming a certain epistemic authority for herself. When trying to understand the social world, adopting such a position of epistemic authority seems inevitable. As a citizen, I do not believe the theories advanced by QAnon and other conspiracy groups. Pretending their view of the world is the same as that of a piece of investigative journalism would amount to bad faith. Thinking, all thinking, contains erasures, displacements, errors, and denials. Recovering these denials and erasures remains the vocation of critical social analysis.

The idea of Idiologiekritik has been abundantly criticized, yet recent political developments suggest it is not one we can easily give up. Some have argued that Idiologiekritik is usually conducted in bad faith (criticizing others but not oneself),7 or that it bestows too much authority on the researcher, or that, whatever choice people make, it is always a rational one because their thinking reflects their preferences. Indeed, sociological analysis should respect the reasons citizens have for holding their opinions and choices: it should not mock or dismiss an opinion, but, in an era where outlandish conspiracy theories flourish and obstruct democratic processes of opinion-making, we can no longer afford the luxury of assuming that all points of view are equal or equally knowledgeable; nor can we afford to ignore the manipulations of opinion that are engineered by an increasingly sophisticated political class, extraordinarily well versed in the various arts of the manipulation of opinion and rumor. The power of these arts of manipulation have become decoupled by the rapid transmission of information through social media.8 Thus, against our will, we must return to the idea of Idiologiekritik because, when accounting for reality, not all ideas are equal.

An ideology will be flawed if it meets the following conditions: it contradicts the basic tenets of democracy while citizens actually want political institutions to represent them; its concrete policies (for example, claiming to represent the simple people and yet privileging policies which make home ownership very difficult) conflict with its avowed ideological principles or aims; it displaces and distorts the causes of a social group’s discontent; and it is oblivious or blind to the flaws of the leader (for example, self-serving corruption or his indifference to the welfare of the nation). It should be clear, however, that it is not only the supporters of populist proto-fascists who fall into this cognitive trap and blind spot. There are many illustrations of such cases. Jerome McGann has argued, for example, that romantic poetry denied the material conditions in which it was produced through evasions or erasures.9 The French communists who believed in the Soviet communist regime during the 1950s, when Stalin’s murderousness could have been known, are no less a cogent example of a flawed ideology.10

To pursue Adorno’s thought, fascism continues to work from within the heart of democratic societies because those who are hurt by the logic of economic concentration cannot connect the dots of its causal chain and may actually oppose those who work to expose it, curiously creating antagonism between those who work to denounce injustice and inequality and those who suffer from them. This antagonism has become a key feature of many democracies around the world. The question of flawed ideology is particularly relevant to the present time because everywhere around the world, and especially in Israel, democracy is under the assault of what Francis Fukuyama calls “nationalist populism,” a political form that undermines the institutions of democracy from within and which thus lets the most powerful actors in society – corporations and lobbies – use the state to meet their own interests to the detriment of the demos, which curiously feels alienated from the institutions that have historically guaranteed its sovereignty. As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt claim, democracies do not die only through military coups or other such dramatic events. They also die slowly.11 Populism is one political form taken by this slow death.

Populism is not fascism per se but, rather, a fascist tendency, a line of force which puts pressure on the political field, pushing it towards towards regressive tendencies and anti-democratic predispositions. An enormous amount of research has tried to explain the emergence of such fascist tendencies.12Some explain it by the globalization of the workforce, which has left the working class in a precarious condition, others by a shift in cultural values to which populism is a reaction. False consciousness or flawed ideologies are also explained by the transformation of mediascapes, which in many countries have been consolidated and purchased with the explicit intent of changing the “liberal agenda” of the mainstream press. For instance, in France, the billionaire businessman Vincent Bolloré owns several French television stations, including Cnews, a 24-hour news channel that promotes a decisively right-wing agenda. Bolloré has been named as the funder of the campaign of the far-right French populist Éric Zemmour.13 Another example is the Australian-born American billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who owns hundreds of media outlets worldwide – among them the propaganda machine Fox News in the United States – and has been accused of using these to support his political allies.14 In Israel, in turn, the free newspaper Israel Hayom, financed by a now deceased casino mogul, wields enormous political influence. So the concentration of capital throughout the world has had the effect of forging formidable weapons to distort consciousness.

Along with this increasing control of information, the globalization of the economy has left the working classes in a precarious condition.15 Bill Clinton’s globalist policies, such as signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), angered many working-class voters, with the president of the electrical workers’ union quoted as saying “Clinton screwed us and we won’t forget it.”16 The working classes no longer feel represented by the left and contest its very capacity to articulate their interests, a fact which reflects the implosion of social-democratic ideology throughout the world, and perhaps signaling the very exhaustion of liberalism.17 The combination of these factors explains why, in many countries around the democratic world, we are witnessing the rise of fascist tendencies – not quite fascism yet, but a mindset that certainly predisposes one to it.

This book focuses on one aspect of this complex tapestry: the perception of the social world through flawed social causal frameworks – that is, false explanations of social and economic processes. “Flawed” may seem uncomfortably close to the word “false” and may appear to bring us back to the epistemological and moral pitfalls of Ideologiekritik. And yet, “flawed” should be differentiated from “false” because it does not dismiss and negate the thinking and feeling of citizens. It contains the possibility that, while not perfect, thinking is not false but simply flawed. It is not false in the sense that it contains the trace of a real social experience which must be recovered by the analyst. These traces produce reasons which must be both understood and reckoned with. I am attentive to these reasons, as made clear in interviews I conducted with people who subscribe to right-wing, populist, ultra-nationalist worldviews and tried to understand the inner coherence of their views in order to ask just where and how thoughts about our social environment become distorted. This book focuses on causal frames (how we explain our social world) and the ways in which they profoundly affect political cognition and behavior.

If we want to understand why some frameworks can come to distort our perception of the social world, why we are unable to correctly name a real malaise, we must push Adorno’s thought to new realms and grasp more firmly than he did the intertwining of social thought with emotions. Only emotions have the multifold power to deny empirical evidence, to shape motivation, to overwhelm self-interest, and to be responsive to concrete social situations. Thus, this book follows the suggestion of the Swedish sociologist Helena Flam to look into the influence of emotions on macro-politics and “map out emotions which uphold social structures and relations of domination.”18 Politics is charged with affective structures without which we would not be able to understand how flawed ideologies slip through the social experiences of actors and shape their meaning. This is the broad theme of this book. It takes Israel as its main case study with the hope that its findings can either be generalized or at least compared to those in other countries.

Structures of Feeling

Raymond Williams, the great British literary theorist, coined the expression “structures of feeling” to designate the forms of thinking that were vying to emerge between the hegemony of institutions, the popular responses to official regulations and literary texts accounting for these responses. A structure of feeling19 points to experience that is inchoate, what we may today call an affect, something that is beneath coherent meaning. It is a shared way of thinking and feeling that influences and is influenced by the culture and way of life of a particular group.20 And the notion of structure also suggests that this level of experience has an underlying pattern, which means it is systematic. These structures may play an important role in shaping individual and group identities.21 Politics shapes and is shaped by such structures of feelings,22 whether they come in the form of fear, resentment, disgust or national pride, as studied in this book. Political actors are particularly powerful in shaping narratives which bestow emotional meanings on social experiences.23 They address voters directly with narratives they forge with the help of consultants, experts, and advertisers. These narratives, shaped by political and media elites, may resonate with emotional habitus formed during one’s socialization (for example, indignation at perceived injustice or disdain for ‘lower’ social groups are typically formed through family),24 or they may give meaning to social experiences in process (such as downward mobility). Sometimes emotions sustain material socio-economic interests, and sometimes the latter can be overwhelmed by emotions25 and can even contradict them, as when working-class people vote for leaders who lower taxes for the rich, weaken trade unions, deregulate labor laws, and lower social benefits. Emotions play a crucial role in shaping and influencing voting patterns and other political choices of citizens.26

Emotions can turn into affects or less conscious modes of feeling. Such affects are not only based in one’s social position or social experiences. They also pervade spaces, images, stories that circulate in the social bond, creating public atmospheres to which we respond beneath and beyond our self-awareness.27 We respond to them by absorbing the key emotional associations which words, events, stories, or symbols create. Affect is a non-cognitive or pre-cognitive level of experience. It is “deposited” so to speak in public and collective objects or events, such as public speeches, national holidays, military marches, symbols, and policies of the state.28 It can also be actively engineered by political marketers and the clients they serve. This symbolic and emotional material is both the effect of conscious manipulations by powerful political actors and a kind of raw energy circulating in civil society through social media, interpersonal interactions, and non-state organizations.29 Such emotions have a particular stickiness when they come attached to stories which orient us in social space and shape our social identity and our understanding of the world. In this perspective, then, emotions are sometimes implicit in orienting one’s sense of the issues that matter or explicit when they are manipulated by actors in the political field. They are neither fully rational (since they often disregard self-interest and ignore the real causes of events) nor irrational (since they express one’s position in the social world).30 Because emotions are eudaimonic – they express one’s perception of one’s well-being in a given situation – they do not fit neatly into the rational–irrational divide. In the analysis to follow, then, emotions are understood as responses to social conditions, responses that take the form of collective narratives that deliberately connect causes and effects in a specific way, assign blame, and offer solutions to predicaments. Emotions, as Arlie Hochschild argued in her remarkable study of Louisiana Trump voters, are embedded in deep stories which need neither be true nor rely on any fact, only feel true.31 That emotions guide our political orientations is true for the entire political spectrum, but some leaders, some ideologies, and some historical circumstances make this fact even more cogent, as is the case with contemporary populism. The predominance of emotional orientations may be the reason why, for example, Trump’s popularity has changed very little throughout the years, no matter which new scandal he was involved in.32

Structures of feelings can be said to have a dual property: they can point to a social experience shared by members of a social group, accumulated through time, which may or may not be explicitly named and which may or may not become a part of the political discourse.33 For example, at the turn of the twentieth century, Austrians envied the Jews who were disproportionately present in professions as medicine, law, and journalism.34 That envy probably constituted an important element of the virulent ideological antisemitism which gave rise to Nazism, yet that affective experience, while grounded in the vertiginous social mobility of Jews, did not bear an explicit name – social envy. It took the circuitous route of a demonization of the Jews in pamphlets, newspaper articles, caricatures, rumors, and pseudo-scientific theories. It constituted a climate of opinion and a public atmosphere.

The other dimension of structure of feeling pertains to the public character of politics and policies and to their capacity to shape the affect of their recipients. It refers to the capacity of leaders, public media and government policies, official political actors, and heads of parties to shape emotions or affective atmospheres more or less consciously and more or less manipulatively by labeling events (past, present, or future) and by bestowing on them public interpretative frames. Political leaders often invoke their own sentiments in order to induce those of their constituents as well as their identification. As Walter Lippman put it in The Phantom Public in 1927:

Since the general opinions of large numbers of persons are almost certain to be a vague and confusing medley, action cannot be taken until these opinions have been factored down, canalized, compressed and made uniform. The making of one general will out of the multitude of general wishes is not a Hegelian mystery, as so many social philosophers have imagined, but an art well known to leaders, politicians and steering committees. It consists essentially in the use of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.35

These two types of frame – deriving from social experience and consciously crafted – sometimes become intricately intertwined and reflect the cognitive and affective meanings with which citizens and constituents interpret their social world. This process of assembling symbols and extracting from them, so to speak, their affective meaning is key to understanding how emotions and affects, once transformed in public speech and images, connect to flawed ideologies. A structure of feeling has thus a double property: it is a social experience shared by people who may have a common economic, cultural, and social experience; and it can also designate the ways in which this experience is named and framed by various groups that control the public arena, these groups being media, political actors, lobbyists, influencers, and politicians. Political structures of feeling consist of the successful encounter between the two. To be sure, a social experience can be one of general and vague malaise. To become politically relevant and operational it needs to be incorporated into a frame of meaning which recodes the malaise into a specific set of ideas and emotions.

Populism is one such (often successful) way of recoding social malaise. This book argues that, in the Israeli context, populist politics recoded three powerful social experiences: one is to be found in the various collective traumas lived by the Jews throughout their history, including the birth of the state of Israel, which entailed a war against the British colonial powers and surrounding Arab countries. These traumas have been translated into a generalized fear of the enemy. The second powerful social experience is the conquest of land, which, since 1967, has increasingly become the object of intense ideological struggles over the nature of Israeli nationalism, while the land has become an economic resource.36 The Occupation generates emotional practices of separation and even disgust between various groups in Israeli society. The third social experience on which runs the powerful emotion of resentment is the long-lasting discrimination and exclusion of Mizrahim, Jews who were born in Arab countries or whose parents or grandparents were born in Arab countries. This resentment in turn operated a radical transformation of the political map, tipping it to the extreme right. These three so-called negative emotions (fear, disgust, and resentment) are all transcended into the love of the nation and/or the Jewish people. These emotions are generated by narrative frames which are anchored in concrete social experiences. In other words, social experiences become translated into emotions and motivations, creating narratives which become operative in the political sphere. These narratives are invoked by political actors and are mobilized by them in their struggles to claim power and authority. Once these emotions are mobilized in the public sphere, they become imbued with what I would call surplus imaginary affects: emotions feed on social experiences as much as on the invocation of imagined narrative scripts – for example, of the enemy or of the true and authentic people – which in turn generate strong affective orientations. The deployment of emotions in the public sphere thus invites the analysis of the ways in which concrete social experiences are framed and recoded in public narratives which yield surplus imaginary affects. Emotions are as much a response to reality as they are to imagined objects.

Emotions, Character and Politics

This book aims to characterize Israeli populist politics by viewing it as a politics which blends four specific emotions – fear, disgust, resentment, and love – and makes these emotions dominant vectors of the political process. Despite its very unique problems and geography, Israel can be seen as paradigmatic of the nationalist and populist political style that has unfolded throughout the world. No doubt it is, in many ways, an outlier because it is a Jewish state tucked within a predominantly Arab area, with a significant Palestinian minority, thus creating a breeding ground for military conflict, which is absent or played in a minor key in many countries in which populism has become a dominant voice. Yet, this makes it also a prime case for the development of populist movements because, as the Israeli political scientist Dani Filc suggests, populism is a “political project supported by some common ideological premises that appear in societies where conflicts around the inclusion or exclusion of subordinate groups prevail.”37 To be sure, this book does not claim Israel is worse than other democracies in its turn to populism. In fact, the opposite is true. Given the considerable number of external conflicts and inner tensions this young democracy has faced, its institutions have been remarkably resilient for an astonishingly long time. (They are now threatened with collapse under the assault of the populist and messianic right.). Especially when compared to such countries as Poland, Hungary, the United States or Brazil, which have no enemies at their borders (the first two are even relatively homogeneous), we can only be impressed by the fact that Israel did not yet resort to a more muscular military democracy. And yet, Benjamin Netanyahu was among the first leaders to adopt a populist style of governance. Choosing Israel is all the more justified in that Netanyahu forged bonds of diplomatic, political, and personal friendship with many anti-democratic leaders of the world, such as Duterte, Bolsonaro, Trump, Putin, Modi, and Orban.38 These leaders share in common a distinctive political style and common interests:39 they are hyper-masculinist (Netanyahu never had any known or visible feminist agenda in an era where all social democratic leaders are committed to this issue); they attack the rule of law and established democratic institutions; they foment conspiracy theories about a deep state (the very same state they are supposed to represent); they identify enemies threatening the borders or integrity of the majority group; they play social groups against each other; and, finally and most importantly, they claim to represent the people against the elites, a point which has often been made in the increasingly large literature on populism. Even though these leaders often control and overwhelm the party they claim to represent, their ideological platform is carried through a party apparatus. All of them distrust international law and organizations, many of them loathe the EU, and they all would like a freer hand to rule their country without a strong parliament or judicial system.

It is often said that the current Likud is an extreme version of its predecessor, the Herut party that was led by Menachem Begin. Yet, we forget that Herut had been viewed, at least initially, as a terror organization, outside the Zionist consensus. On December 4, 1948, a group of American intellectuals published a damning evaluation of the party of Menachem Begin (upon his visit in the USA). Their letter read as follows:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine…. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.

Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.

During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and widespread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.

The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity.40

This letter was signed by such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and Sidney Hook. In the view of these liberal Jews, the Herut party was a dangerous radical right-wing party. It wanted to annex more land, refused to recognize Jordan’s sovereignty, and did not want peace with Arabs. Begin was even likened by Ben-Gurion (to the latter’s discredit) to Hitler, and it was the fact that he joined the unity government in the wake of the Six Day War that started the process of legitimation of the right, which morphed into a moderate version of itself. Netanyahu inherited an ambiguous heritage when he became the head of the Likud party, which was founded in 1973 and which was then in many respects a moderate one, resembling the moderate right of its European or North American equivalents. In the 1990s that party had achieved the capacity to rally the middle classes and be the party of liberals (defending free markets as well as the rule of law and human rights). Netanyahu forever changed that party into a populist one and in many ways took it back to the radical ideology of its predecessor, albeit through a different route.

Israel is a very good case study to understand populist politics for a few other reasons. As Yonatan Levi and Shai Agmon explain: first, “because of the longevity of its populist regime … Israel has been ruled by populist governments for at least ten years … It is, therefore, an instructive example of what a full decade of uninterrupted populist rule looks like.”41 In fact, according to the authors, the key attributes of populism – from the delegitimization of the press and the legal establishment to the politicization of state bureaucracy – have been present in Israeli politics for at least a decade.42 Additionally, “Israel plays a central role in the emerging populist axis on the international stage – as evidenced by its tightening relationship with Brazil and India and the invitation it received to join the Visegrád Group, an alliance of Central European countries led by right-wing populists.”43 I would add another important reason: Netanyahu implemented neo-liberal policies yet has steadily enjoyed the support of a variety of downtrodden social groups44 and, to this extent, is exemplary of the same conundrum which characterizes populist politics at large: it is a politics which has no compunction in lowering taxes for the rich, reducing the public sector, and increasing inequalities – and yet it enjoys the support of those most hurt by these policies. For example, house prices in Israel rose by a whopping 345.7 percent between 2011 and 2021, the highest increase in the world. During this period, Israeli wages increased by only 17.5 percent.45 Clearly, this type of change would benefit only the very top echelons of society and hurts people of lower socio-economic status, as it makes it virtually impossible for them to find affordable housing. Despite this, Likud recruits its followers mostly from the less wealthy sectors of society. This fact clearly indicates that, as has often been noticed by a wide variety of commentators and scholars, populism is able to be immensely attractive despite the ways in which it hurts the economic interests of its supporters.46 It also suggests that populism is mostly a politics of identity: it aims to strengthen the identity of the majority group, to repair symbolic injuries (real or imagined), and to play various identities against one another.

Notes

Theodor W Adorno,

Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism

(Medford, MA: Polity, 2020), p. 2.

Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Axel Honneth,

The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School

(Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), p. xvi.

Seymour Martin Lipset,

Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics

(New York: Doubleday, 1960); Daniel Bell,

The Radical Right

(3rd edn, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, [1955] 2002).

Among people who make under $30,000 a year, 53 percent voted for Clinton and 40 percent for Trump; $30,000–50,000: 51 percent Clinton, 42 percent Trump; $50,000–100,000: 46 percent Clinton; 50 percent Trump; $100,000–200.000: 47 percent Clinton; 48 percent Trump; $200,000–250,000: 48 percent Clinton; 49 percent Trump; above $250,000: 46 percent Clinton and 48 percent Trump. Statista Research Department, “Exit Polls of the 2016 Presidential Elections in the United States on November 9, 2016, Percentage of Votes by Income,” November 9, 2016,

www.statista.com/statistics/631244/voter-turnout-of-the-exit-polls-of-the-2016-elections-by-income/

Jason Stanley,

How Propaganda Works

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

Ibid., p. 5.

Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,”

Critical Inquiry

, 30/2 (2004): 225–48.

D. M. Lazer, M. A. Baum, Y. Benkler, et al., “The Science of Fake News,”

Science

, 359/6380 (2018): 1094–6.

Jerome J. McGann, “Romanticism and its Ideologies,”

Studies in Romanticism

, 21/4 (1982): 573–99.

10.

David Scott Bell and Byron Criddle,

The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

11.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt,

How Democracies Die

(London: Penguin, 2018).

12.

Jan-Werner Müller,

What Is Populism?

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Ronald F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris,

Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash

, Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP16-026 (2016); Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall, “The Politics of Social Status: Economic and Cultural Roots of the Populist Right,”

British Journal of Sociology

, 68 (2017): S57–84; Dani Rodrik, “Populism and the Economics of Globalization,”

Journal of International Business Policy

, 1/1 (2018): 12–33.

13.

Brian McCulloch, “Who Owns France’s Media and What Are Their Political Leanings?,”

The Connexion

, January 19, 2022,

www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/Who-owns-France-s-media-and-what-are-their-political-leanings

14.

Liam Stack, “6 Takeaways from The Times’s Investigation into Rupert Murdoch and His Family,”

New York Times

, April 3, 2019,

https://web.archive.org/web/20200812014550

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/magazine/murdoch-family-investigation.html

15.

Rodrik, “Populism and the Economics of Globalization.”

16.

Erica Etelson, “How Liberals Left the White Working Class Behind,”

Yes! Magazine

, December 16, 2019,

www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2019/12/16/book-politics-divide

17.

Patrick J. Deneen,

Why Liberalism Failed

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

18.

Helena Flam, “Emotions’ Map: A Research Agenda,” in

Emotions and Social Movements

, ed. Helena Flam and Debra King (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2005), p. 19. For another cogent macro-political approach, see Ute Frevert,

The Politics of Humiliation: A Modern History

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

19.

Raymond Williams,

Marxism and Literature

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Paul Filmer, “Structures of Feeling and Socio-Cultural Formations: The Significance of Literature and Experience to Raymond Williams’s Sociology of Culture,”

British Journal of Sociology

, 54/2 (2003): 199–219.

20.

Tony Bennett,

Popular Culture: Themes and Issues (2), Unit 3: Popular Culture: History and Theory

(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1981).

21.

Kevin Hetherington,

Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics

(London: Sage, 1998).

22.

Mabel Berezin, “Secure States: Towards a Political Sociology of Emotion,”

Sociological Review

, 50/2 suppl. (2002): 33–52; Filmer, “Structures of Feeling and Socio-cultural Formations.”

23.

For example, Maéva Clément, Thomas Lindemann, and Eric Sangar, “The ‘Hero-Protector Narrative’: Manufacturing Emotional Consent for the Use of Force,”

Political Psychology

, 38/6 (2017): 991–1008; Cristopher Cepernich and Roberta Bracciale, “Digital Hyperleaders: Communication Strategies on Social Networks at the 2019 European Elections,”

Italian Political Science

, 14/2 (2019).

24.

Vonnie C. McLoyd et al., “Marital Processes and Parental Socialization in Families of Color: A Decade Review of Research,”

Journal of Marriage and Family

, 62/4 (2000): 1070–93.

25.

Jack M. Barbalet, “A Macro Sociology of Emotion: Class Resentment,”

Sociological Theory

, 10/2 (1992): 150–63; Madan M. Pillutla and J. Keith Murnighan, “Unfairness, Anger, and Spite: Emotional Rejections of Ultimatum Offers,”

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

, 68/3 (1996): 208–24.

26.

John Garry, “Emotions and Voting in EU Referendums,”

European Union Politics

, 15/2 (2014): 235–54; Ted Brader, “Striking a Responsive Chord: How Political Ads Motivate and Persuade Voters by Appealing to Emotions,”

American Journal of Political Science

, 49/2 (2005): 388–405.

27.

Larissa Z. Tiedens and Colin Wayne Leach, eds,

The Social Life of Emotions

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

28.

Mabel Berezin, “Emotions and Political Identity: Mobilizing Affection for the Polity,” in

Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements

, ed. Jeff Goddwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 83–98.

29.

Berezin, “Secure States.”

30.

Kennet Lynggaard, “Methodological Challenges in the Study of Emotions in Politics and How to Deal with Them,”

Political Psychology

, 40/6 (2019): 1201–15.

31.

Arlie R. Hochschild,

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

. (New York: New Press, 2018).

32.

“Trump Support Remains Unmoved by Investigations, Poll Finds,”

www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/upshot/donald-trump-approval-poll.html

33.

Williams,

Marxism and Literature

34.

Joseph Epstein,

Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

35.

Quoted in Jason Stanley,

How Propaganda Works

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 48.

36.

A report published by the UN in 2020 named 112 business enterprises worldwide with ties to the settlements. Of these 112 companies, 94 are Israeli, including leading Israeli banks and communications companies, and another 18 are international companies such as Airbnb and Booking.com. See “UN Rights Office Issues Report on Business Activities Related to Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” February 12, 2020,

www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/02/un-rights-office-issues-report-business-activities-related-settlements?LangID=E&NewsID=25542

37.

Dani Filc, “Political Radicalization in Israel: From a Populist Habitus to Radical Right Populism in Government,” in

Expressions of Radicalization: Global Politics, Processes and Practices

, ed. Kristian Steiner and Andreas Önnerfors (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 122;

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65566-6_5

38.

This also could well be the effect of the use of common marketing strategists. Netanyahu’s 1996 victory against Peres had been significantly aided by Arthur Finkelstein, the advisor and pollster of Ronald Reagan and numerous other Republican candidates and nominees. Indeed, there is a political style which, either through formal channels of political advice or through unconscious imitation and informal networks, has spread throughout the world.

39.

Julius Maximilian Rogenhofer and Ayala Panievsky, “Antidemocratic Populism in Power: Comparing Erdoğan’s Turkey with Modi’s India and Netanyahu’s Israel,”

Democratization

, 27/8 (2020): 1394–1412; Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Doron Taussig, “Disruption, Demonization, Deliverance, and Norm Destruction: The Rhetorical Signature of Donald J. Trump,”

Political Science Quarterly

, 132/4 (2017): 619–51; Andrew Arato, “Populism, Constitutional Courts and Civil Society,” in

Judicial Power: How Constitutional Courts Affect Political Transformations

, ed. Christine Landfried (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 318–41; Federico Neiburg and Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, “Ethnographic Views of Brazil’s (New) Authoritarian Turn,”

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

, 10/1 (2020): 7–11.

40.

Isidore Abramowitz et al., “To the Editors of the New York Times,”

New York Times

, December 2, 1948,

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/einstein/1948/12/02.htm

41.

Yonatan Levi and Shai Agmon, “Beyond Culture and Economy: Israel’s Security-Driven Populism,”

Contemporary Politics

, 27/3 (2021): 292–315, at p. 293.

42.

Ibid.

43.

Ibid.

44.

Dani Filc,

The Political Right in Israel: Different Faces of Jewish Populism

(London: Routledge, 2009).

45.

Zev Stub, “Israeli Home Prices Rose 346% in a Decade, Fastest in the World,”

Jerusalem Post

, September 1, 2021,

www.jpost.com/israel-news/israeli-home-prices-rose-346-percent-in-a-decade-fastest-in-the-world-678028

46.

Jan-Werner Müller,

Liberté, égalité, incertitude: puissance de la démocratie

(Paris: Premier Parallèle, 2022).

47.

Filc,

The Political Right in Israel

. It should be noted that the phrase “conservative nationalism” can be used with different meanings. In this case, it means a xenophobic view that ties national belonging to ethnic identity, along with anti-elite sentiment against any force (such as the left wing in politics) that is perceived as siding with “the other.”

48.

Mikko Salmela and Christian Von Scheve, “Emotional Roots of Right-Wing Political Populism,”

Social Science Information

, 56/4 (2017): 567–95.

49.

“Aristotle: Politics,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d.,

https://iep.utm.edu/aris-pol/#H2

50.

Martha C. Nussbaum,

Political Emotions

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 23, 384–7.

51.