Post{o} de Vigia

It is consensual in our contemporary political studies that moral panic became central in the growth of populist and radical parties' social alignment. This moral panic was born during the social disrupture of the 1960s. Minor groups and moral changes generated alarm in the majority groups, which started to look into them as a threat to the order and dominant values. In consequence, nationalist right-wing movements gained importance and space to operate. More than inner diversity, the struggle against immigration plays a vital role in their ideology and narratives. Border protection, criminality, terrorism, the situation of women's rights, and the critics of multiculturalism became the vectors for their struggle to protect the culture and European identities since the 1970s. 

Consequently, restricting immigration has been critical for radical right-wing movements. However, according to several reports, the success of anti-immigration politics was fewer due to the fact the States rarely can establish or determine the dynamics of migrations or the labor needs and also faces illegal chains and schemes. 

More than labor issues, however, the desire to protect national identities with a protectionist cultural horizon generates support for populist parties. According to the European Social Survey on Right-Wing, Visegrad countries, and Portugal have higher cultural fears. In consequence, the debate on immigration is a code for cultural threat since 'culture' is considered static rather than a dynamic and plastic reality based on negotiations and hybrid events. 

Thereby, we are now living in a tension between the legal and political will to protect minorities - in the frame of plural and liberal democracy and the rule of law - and the desire to reinforce the will of the majority and the national identities with its cultural basis. 

Fake news as propaganda 

It is now claimed and considerably consensual that pro-Russian propaganda is linked to migration-related fake news growth. There is a narrative that connects immigration to (a) terrorism, (b) criminality growth, and (c) the consequent decline of the Western world. The Kremlin's cultural war against the West's multicultural paradigm demands the spread of an idea of multiculturalism as the decline of western civilization to reinforce the narrative of the Great Mother Russia of Christian values. This idea of western cultural winter acts symbolically as an alarm and a tool to strengthen the strength and vitality of Russian civilization. The presence of Russian media or the support of radical right parties is crucial in spreading a moral panic against the refugees and migration, and thus against European Union. 

The German case: the AfD and anti-immigration fake news

The 2015 refugees crisis in German was a critical moment for the growth and establishment of the radical right party AfD. Circa 1 million refugees crossed the borders of Germany. The need to properly integrate them into german society challenged German authorities. It gave room for the far-right AfD party and its anti-immigration and anti-Islamic rhetoric, becoming the 3rd major party in the german 2017 elections. This election was gained by exploiting security and cultural fear via the massive spread of fake news and conspiracy theories, especially on social media. Fake news on crimes committed by refugees, on special treatment for refugees vis-à-vis the native germans, and the theory of the great replacement (which is associated with the idea that the globalist elites are conspiring to create a multicultural Germany) gained significant relevance, creating panic among the germans and suspicion against democratic institutions - the primary purpose of fake news strategy.However, most crimes committed by immigrants are shoplifting and mostly non-violent crimes, rather than sexual crimes, fake news in Germany and Sweden. Also, crimes are more likely to be reported if committed by outgroup members.

Solutions

There is an ongoing debate on possible solutions to stop the spread of fake news. However, this complex issue deals with cultural and geographical challenges. One of the evident challenges is free speech as a constitutional and fundamental right. The balance between both is crucial since it also affects the safety of communities and democracy. The second obstacle to combating fake news is the limited resources available; Fact-checking and verifying information requires time, money, and resources that small media may not possess and is not readily available to ordinary citizens. Another significant problem is the need for more trust in media and institutions; people consuming fake news and conspiracy theories against the state hardly accept fact-checking, primarily due to the political polarization, which involves them in a cultural and spiritual war.Thus, stopping the spread of fake news demands increased transparency on sources, reinforcement of the fact-checking tools, encourage responsible sharing, mainly in social media (prompts that remind the user to verify the accuracy of the information), collaboration between media, social media, and institutions, legal actions to media and individuals for a permanent share of fake news, and invest in the education system, where it is possible to develop a critical spirit and the ability to distinguish between credible and fake news sources.

As Mattelart wrote in History of Information Science (2006), the notion of information overload refers to a high rate of information input in urban societies, making effective treatment impossible. Thus, we are facing a social circumstance in which the flow of information is excessive, and the frenzy of obsolence and the ethics of the instant, terms from Chesneaux, in Modernity-World (1996), have not complied with the verification of sources, facts and the need for individual reflection on the phenomena. This situation is responsible for producing the concept of "post-truth", the most striking aspect of the digital society in which we live.

The excess of information has generated a particular need, accelerated by social networks and their reduced characters, emphasising the impact of "fat" newspapers (headlines and subheadings) and soundbites. As McCallam in his article "Les "petites phrases" dans la politique anglo-saxonne" (2000) and Le Séac'h in "La petite phrase: d'où vient-elle? Comment se propagage-t-elle? Quelle est sa portée réelle?" (2015), the soundbite presents itself as a kind of modern proverb of political action, which functions by itself and as an end in itself.

This conjugation shows that the non-verification of informative contents is a "snowball" problem. We know that such content is massively shared and produces an excessive flow of misinformation and factual errors since many of the media fail to present news headlines that correspond to the content of the information, a deontological fault and journalistic ethics of solid social repercussion.

With this, we have a media and social broth favourable to sprouting the "post-truth". Well, "post-truth" is understood in terms of the Priberam Dictionary of the Portuguese Language,

Set of circumstances or context in which great importance is attributed, mainly social, political and journalistic, to false news or credible versions of facts, appealing to emotions and personal beliefs, to the detriment of verified facts or objective truth (...). Information that is spread or accepted as fact due to the way it is presented and repeated has no factual basis.

From this clear and objective definition, two major analytical categories emerge verisimilitude and personal beliefs. From this combination of alternative facts, i.e. that possess verisimilitude and personal beliefs, the devastating but operative effect on political activity of "post-truth" is understood.

In his book Post Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It (2017), Davis shows the need for individual and anonymous citizens to position themselves vis-à-vis public actors and the once again Manichean and polarised world we live in is more important than the unravelling of facts. In other words, political discourses are increasingly relevant not because of their ability to access the content of the facts and, therefore, the truth they contain, but rather because they embody the set of personal and group beliefs. In this sense, social phenomena are manipulated to give meaning to discourses rather than discourses reflecting social facts. "Post-truth" corresponds to the interpretation and adulteration of data and facts to compose an alternative narrative or make them fit into an idea of reality. It is, therefore, the ideology of a group that wants to be guaranteed, no longer by the recomposition of the past that Triaud spoke of in "Lieux de mémoire et passés composés" (1999), but by the reconfiguration of the present.

All this has been present in the political actions of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and Andre Ventura, to name a few cases.

Their voters have had no problem declaring that lying does nothing to change their political confidence or voting intention. There are recognised political values in lying for electoral purposes. This is consistent with a new form of citizen political participation, more ideological than in recent decades. The news and content produced for disinformation (fake news) are now at the service of electing politicians who claim nationalist values and policies and take advantage of prejudices that were once silent.

Neither the manipulation of unemployment figures nor the influence peddling that underlies the current impeachment process are problematic for Donald Trump's loyal electorate, most of whom are rural, poorly educated, economically unstable, evangelical and racist, who understand Trump's soundbites better than Obama's speeches. In the final days of the 2019 election campaign, several Boris Johnson voters declared that they were not concerned about the incongruities of the Conservative leader's speeches; the most important thing was to deliver Brexit. André Ventura's voters did not seem worried about the paradox of his PhD thesis and his speeches about the Roma, nor that those speeches were discordant with reality, or that he advocated a fight against corruption and presented European candidates with court cases for corrupt practices. It was not problematic that André Ventura had been surprised by his party's programme of destruction of the welfare state. Bolsonaro's voters were not concerned about his apology for military dictatorship or the radical solutions in his government programme on privatising all the country's natural resources and attacking education. In both cases, the most relevant thing was the presence of narratives that translated racism, homophobia, and the attack on multiculturalism, coinciding with the aspirations of such electorates.

The era of post-truth, verisimilitude, and alternative facts, can be summed up in a classic phrase: don't let the truth spoil a good story.

Whiteness is a long-term system, from ancient colonialism to present-day capitalism. Thus, it determines the value of people in the labour market, reproducing the opportunity to exploit third-world countries, migrants, and racial minorities. Because we are now living in a period of racial struggle between deconstruction and reinforcement of white privilege and whiteness as ideology, I cannot finish this essay without looking into a paper that stresses the intersection between whiteness, populism and the working-class (the most racialised category). I am choosing Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter’s 2018 article for that.For the authors, following precedent work, 2016 was a turning point “in the mainstreaming of reactionary and particularly racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic political movements, agendas and discourses” (p. 1). Both Trump’s election and Brexit were grounded on the so-called “working-class”, seen as alienated, white and indigenous. This unidimensional imaginary about the working-class allowed their construction as “the people”, as pointed out by the authors (p.3) and many others. As argued, since the 2008 crisis, we saw a growth of a racialised nationalism based on a “deep sense of loss of prestige; a retreat from the damaging impact of a globalized world that is no longer recognizable, no longer British’.” (idem). This placed a severe trauma on white people since it meant a decline of whiteness and a vulnerability to victimisation by others.As a consequence of this racial destabilisation, the campaign for Brexit was focused on the slogan “We want our country back”. For Farage, the victory of the leave was for the good, decent, and ordinary people. In other words: a victory for the British against dangerous immigrants.  In line with a consensus in the literature, Cardoso (idem: 622) places this struggle against immigrants as part of cultural racism embodied in racial nationalism. The concept of immigrant would replace the category of “black” in this racial process. Then, cultural identity was placed in a higher rank than economic aspects, albite immigration was presented as Resource-absorbing, even though immigration is the essential financial resource for the United Kingdom and a significant part of European countries. For Trump supporters, ‘Make America Great Again’ was presented as nostalgia for an industrial plentiful jobs period, a time of white men (Mondon/Winter 2018: 4). As pointed out by Jason Stanley in his How Fascism Works (2018), the golden days of Trump’s narrative referred to a period when the USA was embracing the most fascist policies of its history. The narrative of taking the country back or the strike-back of the working-class is linked to whiteness both as ideology and as a policy of racialisation.

In fact, the rhetoric of the left-behind white working-class, which helps to explain the alienation of far-right parties, is linked to whiteness and the sense of loss of privilege and dominancy. The white working-class became more a metaphor than reality since the working-class is not such white as that, and second, whites who voted for Brexit and Trump are not all working-class members. Following the literature, the authors argue that Trump “offered a solution to the dilemma” of the white, native-born heterosexual men (p. 5). They also discuss the concept of methodological whiteness as producing distortion in social sciences analysis of Brexit and Trump since it “sought to focus on the “legitimate” claims of the “left behind” or those who had come to see themselves as “strangers in their own land”. Furthermore, they argue that this methodological whiteness, “not only accepts but legitimises the narrative of loss, disenfranchisement and victimisation, but also that of its original entitlement and the nationalism and racism that underpins and flows from it” (p. 5). This is a fascinating and critical discussion; cultural loss of the white mainstream rural people as a scientific object tends to legitimate it, by giving “voice” to it. But, on the other hand, not recording it isn’t denying the role of science? We must recognise that all methodology is a positioning. The choice for the place of speech of once-silenced minorities is also a methodological option. Should science choose to hide these voices, even if their voices are biased and distorted? Is this not the appeal of political correctness and a way of politicising academia? Though ultimately wrong, the representatives of white cultural loss need to be heard to apply the contradictory. They are, in fact, voices of a white panic of an influential but dominant minority. To cancel their means to lose part of the debate, I believe.

Racialisation of the working-class

As publicly known, the left-behind working-class assumes a central role in the growth of new far-right populism.  Second, to be efficient in the political speech, this working-class was racialised, becoming synonymous with the “white working-class”. Mondon and Winter debate this fallacy. As they claim, the working-class is not white, and the socio-economic consequences suffered by the white working-class people are experienced by people of colour with more impact (p. 7-8). Even more, the white working-class is – following an anthropological speech – a plastic category since it is “subject to historically contingent definitions of whiteness and racialised or ethnicised divisions (e.g. Jewish, Polish and Irish Catholic), often around immigration, labour and reactionary political movements and ideologies” (p. 7). Digesting Virdee’s ideas in his Race, Class and the Racialised Outsider (2014), Mondon and Winter sustain that Irish and Jewish immigrants in Great Britain became white amid the construction of the working-class in the development of British Industry and the negotiation of Britishness and whiteness. In the United States, the working-class “has been shaped through a history of slavery and racism, immigration and specifically both external and internal labour migration” (p.7).Thereby, as the authors defend, despite Brexit and Trump’s election having been presented as a working-class revolt, there is a long-term process of whitening the working-class by ignoring its diversity, thus promoting an essentialist narrative based on white (male) experience (p. 13). Therefore, the so-called revolt of the left-behind, they argue, was led by racial and wealth privileged. Consequently, social problems arose. First, dividing the society into a racialised white decent working-class against racialised minorities and immigrants who find themselves both working-class status-denied and negatively classified as labour competitors and drainers of increasingly scarce resources neo-liberal UK and USA. Second, the racial construction of the (white) working-class privileges racial interests above class and enforces racial and cultural stigma right-wing populist parties and actors strategically use in the combat against immigration and elites (that they often belong to). Third, it normalises racism as a vox populis demand and finally serves establishment political and economic interests by dividing the society and the intersectional working-class.

[This text is part of a more extended essay available here]

The concept of Culture Wars was brought from the German term kulturkampf, created in the context of the dispute between Bismarck and the Catholic Church in the 19th century. It refers to the opposite perspectives on life, the role and place of religion in daily affairs, societal models, and values. According to Hunter (1991, 1996) and Wuthnow (1996), the designation of culture wars is related to conflicts about issues related to nonnegotiable conceptions embodied in cultural and moral spheres. As Hunter (1991) points out, the polarisation in American society presents a high risk to democracy since each side positions itself as the owner of the truth.

For that reason, I use the idea of the great divide (Ferreira Dias 2022, under press), referring to incompatible worldviews between a globalist left and a nativist right. The core of this division is not based on economic issues but post-material ones. As Fukuyama (2018) stated, if 2oth century left was embracing workers’ rights, welfare programs and redistributive policies, it is now involved in the agenda of marginalised groups – ethnic minorities, immigrants, refugees, women, LGBT. The same operates to the right that once focused on reducing the size of government and promoting the private sector and is now engaged in traditional patriotic identity. The struggle is thicker due to last decade's globalisation, a world phenomenon that created societies experiencing drastic economic and social changes, becoming diverse and multicultural. The 2008 financial crisis gave room to the emergence of populist parties, both on the left and right. However, Populist Radical Right (PRR) parties and actors played a central role in directing discontent and resentment from a white working class that feels to be left behind and “stolen” by a “corrupt elite” (v.g. Taggart, 2000; Mudde, 2004; Moffitt, 2020). A significant example is the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit (v.g., Mondon/Winter 2018).

Thus, the last decades have experienced significant changes in public politics. At the same time, activism moved from demands for equality to the request for specific treatment for every separate entity from mainstream society: disabled, native Americans, LGBT people, immigrants, transgender people, and racialised groups of each ethnic-racial marker (Fukuyama 2018). This activism produced essential changes in western societies, with public policies and laws affecting once invisible and marginalised groups. However, on the other hand, by focusing on those groups, society faces a fragmentation that produces consequences in the idea of common ground in the social contract model of society and, more importantly, on the political level, leads to a conservative wave.

As Fukuyama put it, “perhaps the worst thing about identity politics as currently practised by the left is that it has stimulated the rise of identity politics on the right. This is due in no small part to the left’s embrace of political correctness, a social norm that prohibits people from publicly expressing their beliefs or opinions without fearing moral opprobrium” (ibidem).

Identity politics, white fragility, post-gender, radical feminism, political correctness and cancel culture, cultural Marxism, and similar terms are now at the heart of social debates. There is no room for consensus, only for radical agendas. As Fukuyama debates, “In both the United States and Europe, that debate is currently polarised. The right seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send immigrants back to their countries of origin; the left asserts a virtually unlimited obligation on the part of liberal democracies to accept all immigrants.” (ibidem).

Thereby, culture wars mean a battle in western societies between a leftist cosmopolitan globalist citizenship and a rightist nativist nationalism. The core themes are individual identity (gender and sexual identity), self-determination (abortion), and equal treatment with particular attention to the protection of fragile individuals in a logic of proportionality (gay marriage, minorities’ rights, affirmative actions). As Turner (2018) states, the Moral Majority in the USA arises side-by-side with the left agenda for sexual issues and the advent of a perception of an Islamic threat.

Putin’s government is profoundly labelled with culture wars against the west (Robinson 2014). For him, Europe became such liberal geography – with minorities' fundamental rights and multicultural societies – that means both a threat to Russian civilisation and to Europe itself by giving it back to olden days morals and values.

The Chega party gained significant success in the last years in Portugal, following the successful strategies of populist parties and movements in Europe, such as Vox in Spain and Salvini in Italy, and in the United States, with Donald Trump. Academic literature has shown that those movements adopt a discursive strategy based on the division of the society and a claim for a European biocultural identity. According to them, the European culture is “at stake”, threatened by waves of migration, particularly relevant in Muslim cases (the outsiders).Neo-far-right/alt-right movements approach this “emergency” by focusing: (a) the biological aspects, revelling a renewal of the classical racist attitudes or (b) emphasising the cultural and economic aspects of globalisation. However, this distinction presents a fallacy since the late narrative contains traces of racial elements.

For my argument, I am following Mondon & Winter’s 2018 article, “Whiteness, populism and the racialisation of the working class in the United Kingdom and the United States”. According to them, the success of the Brexit campaign and Trump’s election lies in the racialisation of the working class, constructed as “white”. By this, a crucial narrative was fashioned, much in line with populist strategies: giving voice to the left-behind working class. These left-behind are the genuine people of the country, the “us” victims of the elites who are gaining with the globalisation and then accepting the change of the DNA of the country. The immigrants are the “others” who are taking the wives, the jobs, and the culture. “Taking the country back” became a powerful narrative, even though migrants are those who suffer more from the economic crisis, with no social security protection and are unveiled from wages fluctuation. Since the “working-class” is racialised, the immigrants from the real working-class remained outside of the unions, doubly vulnerable. Nevertheless, this racial factor is unconscious and quickly rejected by those who operate it – we are not racists; we are defending ours first. This paradox is highly evident via slogans such as “America comes first”, “taking care of our own”, etc.

The Chega (enough) party assumes the position of an anti-systemic and anti-corruption party, defending a new Constitution and a new type of regime. They are not self-recognised Fascists, despite those public acts being in line with Jason Stanley’s perspective in his book: How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them; and the presence of many relevant figures with an authoritarian profile and claims.

With the emergence of Chega, the Portuguese political scenario became polarised, presenting a new struggle between a sacralised memory of the Portuguese historical events that produced self-esteem and what the Portuguese philosopher Eduardo Lourenço called “hyper-identity”; and a claim for a decolonisation of the collective memory with a need to debate structural racism.

Left-wing parties, movements, and activisms present Chega as a racist party. Not disregarding racist attitudes and speeches from Chega members and its leader, André Ventura, the classification of Chega as a racist party sounds unfruitful. It seems to be an evident illusion from urban leftists. We may not disregard the “gipsy issue”, i.e., a long-term circumstance of stigma from the ingroup and a combative-contrasting identity from the “rom” community, with evident effect on political choices. Yes, the “rom” (gipsy) community and the crime associated with them are the top reasons for Chega’s success. But we may not isolate it and present it as the only explanation. In the countryside, in the Portuguese hinterlands, Chega's success in electoral implantation is due to a joint of reasons:

(1) left-behind communal feeling – in some undeveloped areas, with few job opportunities and a high rank of low schooling, presenting a long distance from the centre of decision, the Parliament;

(2) defence of local traditions and the rural world – cultural practices such as bullfights in the hinterlands are critical for local identity. While left urban parties defend eradicating those practices, Chega is assuming its agenda.

(3) defence of religious-conservative agenda – a critical issue for many rural communities.

(4) defence of concrete laws for the “gipsies” – a critical topic considering the need for abstract laws in a rule of law country.

(5) defence of a more punitive penal system – another critical issue in a country that adopted a humanitarian judicial doctrine in line with the value of human dignity.

 Thus, despite the importance of racial speeches and proposals in Chega’s public making, we may not disregard the other vectors of their success. As we know, Chega is gaining supporters from different ideological fields as a “protest party”, but also a hinterland party, which has conquered voters from CDS-PP, the traditional conservative-Christian-democratic party, now associated no longer with the rural world and its people, but with urban and rural historical elites. Thereby, CDS is the party of the landowners, and Chega is the party of the land workers in some districts. A problematic situation for the Portuguese Communist Party.