The Evolving Authoritarian Populist Playbook: Embracing "Intersectional" Othering
Original illustration by Jacopo Oliveri for Fine Acts x OBI
It was a few days before International Women’s Day. I decided to check Marion Maréchal’s Twitter. I will admit I have long held a sort of frightened fascination with Maréchal. Young, articulate, and immaculate, her image—much as that of other female leaders of far-right parties—likely softens the harshness of her words. Currently, the French far-right’s Reconquete candidate to the European Union elections, founder of the Institut de Sciences Sociales Economiques et Politiques (a far-right “summer camp”, for lack of a better description), and family member of the Le Pen dynasty (although candidate for an alternative far-right party), her appeal is far more limited than that of her aunt Marine Le Pen, yet she’s always been adept at articulating the intellectual thinking of the far right.
Ahead of March 8, Maréchal was running a campaign under the slogan “touche pas à ma fille,” (“Don’t touch my daughter)” alerting about the decline in women’s security. She took to X (Twitter). According to her, in France, “crime and rape are exploding, we have lost control over immigration, we are invaded, largely replaced, Islamized, farmers are committing suicide, our economy is collapsing but the government's priority IVG [abortion] is in no way threatened.”
Perhaps giving more credit than deserved to pro-democracy and social justice activists’ ability to build allegiances, Maréchal proceeded to share a video where she identified the real victims (white men) and pinpointed the enemies of the people: “to kill the “Western Christian white male”, Islamists, Wokists, blue-haired women and LGBT activists are ready to form an alliance even if it comes at the expense of common sense.”
It immediately dawned on me. The far right is nothing if not intersectional. In articulating the ideas that fuel their rhetoric and politics, authoritarian populists never shy away from connecting issues.
Far Right Intersectional
Authoritarian populists have realized that instead of treating topics as siloed issue-areas that compete with each other for attention, they can all become part of a composite worldview that makes sense of an uncertain world and proactively pushes forward their vision of what the world ought to be. Authoritarian populists are rarely single-issue politicians, even if some issues—such as migration—have proven to bring them closer to power.
In the authoritarian populist worldview, women’s rights are inextricably connected to immigration, as migrants pose a threat to women (immigration often serving as a placeholder for race), climate change policy is a delusional ideology pursued by an out-of-touch elite, and the economy is obviously collapsing and at the service of the wealthy. The connective tissue across issues is othering as a lens and process for identity- and sense-making but also the fact that while scapegoating is their tactic of choice, they are touching on something that has at least a kernel—if not a lot—of truth, an economic system and reality that is leaving many behind.
Scapegoating is a political strategy that constructs a “them” that is blamed for societal problems. The escalating fear of destruction caused by rapid technological and demographic change, climate disaster, and an economic system that treats some lives as disposable (what Achille Mbembe refers to as the rendering of some human beings as waste) is transposed and translated into fear of the Other, mostly embodied by non-normative and racialized people. The Other is falsely accused, and people’s fears and anxieties are manipulated, while many of the societal problems affecting people are real. Authoritarian populists then provide a neatly packaged and comprehensive story to both activate and alleviate fears, which serves their political goals.
The fear of the Other is then solicited to fortify authoritarian populist powers and justify anti-democratic practices that further endanger those more marginalized and can later expand to other collectives. Scapegoating, in that sense, engages fears that prop up authoritarian powers and practices.
The organization Over Zero, whose mission is to prevent identity-based violence and other forms of group-targeted harm, has recently investigated the inner-workings of LGBT scapegoating. In a fascinating publication, they have unpacked how this kind of scapegoating–not to be confused with unsavory “politics as usual”–currently serves six interconnected and overlapping goals: to stigmatize, mobilize the base, win elections, polarize, distract from other critical issues, and normalize political violence.
Yet intersectional scapegoating is not the only part of the equation. Authoritarian populists not only benefit from social ailments, they also fuel them or even fabricate them.
Already back in the 1970s, sociologist and Marxist cultural theorist Stuart Hall theorized how authoritarian populists nurture and spread moral panics in response to social problems that didn’t inevitably warrant the dismay. In that decade, Hall explored this in the context of mugging and the overblown reaction to it based on the actual statistics of the extent of the phenomenon. In Hall’s understanding, moral panics were instrumentalized to persuade the public that migrants and racialized citizens were to blame for existing problems rather than a consequence of the capitalist system.
More recently, scholar Benjamin Moffitt explained how crises may trigger populism but also, and perhaps more importantly, populists themselves attempt to trigger the sense of crisis and mediate it. The interpretation of social realities as crises and their performance allows “populist actors to pit ‘the people’ against a dangerous other, radically simplify the terrain of political debate and advocate strong leadership.” According to Moffitt, there are several major steps that populist actors use, including identifying an issue, elevating it to the level of crisis by linking it to a wider framework that is used to reinterpret it, using the media to propagate the sense of crisis and in the process divide ‘the people’ from those who are responsible for the crisis, presenting simple solutions and legitimating their own strong leadership to stave off or bring about an end to the crisis.
In this sense, it could be said that authoritarian populists are incredibly opportunistic, either fabricating or exploiting existing crises, as has become evident in the context of the Israel war on Gaza. Far-right leaders, despite an ostensibly anti-semitic record, are capitalizing on the atrocities and tensions. As Diaspora Alliance reports, “political leaders and movements around the world have wielded bad faith accusations of antisemitism to promote authoritarian, racist, and misogynist policies and politics, and to attack and attempt to silence Palestinians and their allies.” In the words of Masha Gessen as it relates to reactions in Germany, “For the AfD [German far-right party], whose leaders have made openly antisemitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era nationalist language, the specter of antisemitism is a perfect, cynically wielded political instrument, both a ticket to the political mainstream and a weapon that can be used against Muslim immigrants.”
Borrowing Tactics
Authoritarian populists are agile, and their strategies are successfully borrowing from other movements. US far-right activist and writer Christopher Rufo explicitly writes about the need to borrow from counter-cultural strategies and community organizing tactics. In Rufo’s words, “the radical Left captured America’s institutions through cultural conquest as well as using civil rights law as a powerful mechanism for formalizing its rule. The solution to this problem, logic would seem to dictate, will require countering both approaches.” Reinterpreting the lessons from Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci on cultural hegemony and the role of cultural institutions in shaping politics, Rufo is pushing the conservative establishment to pursue cultural influence, grassroots organizing and power-mapping, and use the power of the state as a lever.
The deliberate mirroring of progressive strategies for far-right causes has been well-documented in the literature on anti-gender movements. Scholars Phillip M. Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl have researched how a well-coordinated conservative transnational advocacy network has employed many of the same transnational tools that were previously used by LGBTIQ people to advance their rights. They do so, for example, by constructing an imagined past that binds people together and fostering a group identity as victims of LGBTI rights, or borrowing the language of Martin Luther King or Gandhi to challenge the granting of rights to groups marginalized by their sexuality or gender identity (Kristopher Velasco unpacks the interdependent dynamics between opposing transnational LGBT+ networks through a process of expansion and backlash). Jelena Cupack and Irem Ebeturk have explored how anti-feminist NGOs are competitively mimicking feminist NGOs by copying their transnational organizing and how they have used the UN human rights framework to pursue their goals.
What is also striking is that sometimes it is not only the tactics but also the language of far-right influencers that is notoriously similar to pro-democracy and progressive movements. Much like I found myself on Maréchal’s Twitter, for some reason, a few weeks ago, I was watching the trailer of far-right TV personality Tucker Carlson’s original docuseries O, Canada! (which, dedicated to the idea of liberating Canada, was ultimately not released as he left the Fox network). Prefacing the trailer, Tucker Carlson positions himself and the movement he supports as the bulwarks of democracy, despite pushing an agenda that undermines democratic protections, targets marginalized communities, and erodes the rule of law. In his view, they are the ones pushing against authoritarianism and fascism and towards true democracy and freedom. Whether he believes it or his declarations were an act of true cynicism, this allows his followers at least plausible deniability of support for supremacist and anti-democratic movements.
Carlson is not the only authoritarian populist leader to use this language. Spain’s far-right leader Santiago Abascal also speaks of protecting democracy from the left, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has called for unity and the defense of democracy, and like them, many more who lean authoritarian. In what would otherwise seem a stretch of the imagination, a few days ago, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tied a new bill to ban lab-grown meat to his quest to combat what he calls the World Economic Forum’s authoritarian goals (and as an additional note, Carlson is also using the language of systemic racism… against whites.)
What this creates is parallel realities where whether you are consuming mainstream, progressive, or far-right content, you could very well believe that you are on the side of justice and against authoritarianism, which is reason enough to be concerned about political campaigns, such as Biden’s, who rely heavily on a protect democracy message. Analyzing political discourse across the board, everyone seems to claim to be doing so.
Once in power, authoritarian populist leaders also copy legislation and policies from each other. We see this in the spread of “foreign agent” laws to persecute civil society organizations in India, Hungary, or more recently Georgia (and more widely, the inventive use of executive power to hamper the activity of civil society organizations), the banning and censorship of educational content, or attempts to expand terrorism legislation to apply to civil society actors (all of the above, to be fair, are not the exclusive domain of far-right leaders, as other actors within democratic societies are also known to use authoritarian practices, even if to a lesser degree).
Moving Forward
Using intersectional tactics and approaches often pulled from the progressive playbook, authoritarian populists are finding great success appealing to a diverse group of voters and building a broad-based coalition. Indeed, we might now say that an average far-right voter does not exist; the image of the old angry white male as the prototype far-right voter now debunked. In the USA, the latest polls indicate that Trump is making inroads with voters of color (polls suggest that in contrast to previous US elections, as many as 23% of Black voters and 46% of Latino voters may vote for Trump.) In Europe, the youth, and particularly young men, are increasingly voting for the far right (as recently seen in the Portuguese or Dutch elections). For a few, the authoritarian populist agenda resonates with their deeply held beliefs. For many, it is a protest vote. For others, it’s a response to the (far-right cultivated) fear of the Other.
The fringes are back at the center, and the center will not hold. Physics would tell us that for every action there’s a reaction and some may view our times as another pendulum swing, a moment of backlash to recent (limited) advancements in the rights of certain communities. I believe that’s a limited framework. The far right is not simply building against but for a particular kind of world. They have a mission and a vision.
Indeed, there’s much uncertainty and reason to fear. And yet, there’s also possibility of action, of strategic collaboration for a vision of belonging without othering. Possibility that can be informed by what we understand of how authoritarian populist movements organize and act. While there is much we don’t know, we do know that they are deliberate in their strategies and unafraid of testing without full proof of concept, focused on influencing both culture and politics, tapping into emotions, and building an intellectual infrastructure that provides and disseminates the ideas that undergird their vision. We also know that authoritarian populist movements dedicate vast amounts of financial and human resources (often unrestricted and long term funding) to their goals, and that many of the policies and legislation they may come to pass, we have already seen in other locales.
This knowledge can inform us by pushing us to be strategic and apply multiple tactics (I really appreciate this resource on power- and bridge-building from the Horizons Project). Countering this far-right surge and building a world of belonging without othering will necessitate coalition-building and a multi-strategy approach. Sometimes, it will be to block, or bridge, or build, while other times we will have to coordinate across insider-outsider tactics. An ecosystemic approach would tell us that different groups within our movements can have different and complementary roles to play. And for this approach to be effective, we will need to strengthen our bridging muscles and commit to building power by building diverse coalitions that can counter the strength of the global authoritarian populist movement.
In other news…
Spain, Norway, and Ireland have formally recognized the Palestinian state. Spanish members of parliament had already voted almost unanimously in 2014 to push for recognition under the previous conservative government, as had Ireland and France.
In a now classic authoritarian populist move, the Georgian parliament has adopted a controversial law that will likely result in the labeling of Western-backed NGOs and media outlets as “foreign agents.”
After months of negotiations, Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders claims a deal has been reached between four parties to form a new government. The new government is likely to focus on harsher asylum policies and diluting green commitments, while Wilders has also promised lavish spending on healthcare and a lowering of the retirement age (Wilders has heavily relied on anti-immigrant and anti-Islam rhetoric during his long political career). The new Prime Minister, chosen by the four coalition parties, is a longtime civil servant and former spy chief who was largely unknown to the public until recently.
Are we closer to taxing the super rich?
And for the soul…
On a recent road trip in California I really enjoyed listening to interviews with Patti Smith, Jane Fonda, and Fran Lebowitz on the podcast wiser than me. Strongly recommend it.
As read in the Marginalian, “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote.
Connecting the Dots: Musings on Bridging and Belonging is a monthly column by Míriam Juan-Torres. In it, Míriam reflects on current events, connecting the trends and considering the specificities across countries, applying a bridging and belonging lens and translating concepts from academia for a wider audience. In Connecting the Dots, Míriam carefully curates readings and resources to further expand our understanding and shed light on the complexities of our time. Join our mailing list to stay up to date on the latest of the Democracy & Belonging Forum's curated analysis from Miriam and more.
Editor's note: The ideas expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of the Othering & Belonging Institute or UC Berkeley, but belong to the authors.