Exploring the populist ‘mind’: Anxiety, fantasy, and everyday populism
| Author | Catarina Kinnvall,Ted Svensson |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221075925 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221075925
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2022, Vol. 24(3) 526 –542
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481221075925
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
Exploring the populist ‘mind’:
Anxiety, fantasy, and everyday
populism
Catarina Kinnvall and Ted Svensson
Abstract
This article is focused on the appeal of far-right populist politics in the everyday and how this appeal
is related to continuity and change in the global order. Contemporary societies have witnessed
an upsurge of populist movements and groups set on filling a political space by appealing to a
population in search of solutions to an ever-changing political and economic landscape. Here, we
specifically highlight the role of ontological insecurity, fantasy narratives, and emotional governance
as critical for understanding far-right populist politics. The analysis consequently attends to the
centrality of gendered and racialised narratives and to how these are fuelled by feelings of pride,
shame, vulnerability, and insecurity. The aim is to show how structures and emotions work in
tandem to create far-right support and how these developments are similar across Western
and non-Western contexts. Particular attention is paid to far-right narratives that pertain to the
Covid-19 pandemic.
Keywords
anxiety, emotional governance, fantasy narratives, far-right, gender and race, ontological security,
populism
Introduction
We wanted to show these politicians that it’s us who’s in charge, not them . . .
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants . . .
Murder the media . . .
We don’t want Chinese bullshit . . . (Voices from the attacks on the Capitol in Washington on 6
January 2021, reported in The Japan Times, 2021)
Those who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 were merely a fraction of Trump sup-
porters ‘fueled by the words [of the former president] just minutes before and the fervor
of the mob standing behind them’. They were ‘infamous white nationalists and noted
[QAnon] conspiracy theorists’, ‘spread[ing] dark visions of pedophile Satanists running
Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden
Corresponding author:
Catarina Kinnvall, Lund University, Box 52, Lund 221 00, Sweden.
Email: catarina.kinnvall@svet.lu.se
1075925BPI0010.1177/13691481221075925The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsKinnvall and Svensson
research-article2022
Special Issue Article
Kinnvall and Svensson 527
the country’. They were leaders from the Proud Boys with their ‘misogynistic and anti-
immigrant views’, representatives of ‘a collective called “Murder the Media”’, followers
of the National Socialist Club, ‘a neo-Nazi group’, and some belonged to the Three
Percenters, ‘a far-right armed group’ who wore ‘helmets and Kevlar vests adorned with
the group’s symbol, a Roman numeral three’. The mob itself consisted of ‘tens of thou-
sands of Trump’s most loyal supporters’ who were responding to ‘months of false claims’
by the former president of a rigged election (reported in The Japan Times, 2021). Many
of the most fervent attackers were identified as White and males, and gendered and racial-
ised explanations of far-right populism and extremism are crucial to understand some of
the social and psychological issues involved. This is most certainly the case whether we
discuss the rise of far-right1 populist politics in the United States, Europe, Russia, India,
or Turkey – to only mention a few examples.
A few weeks earlier, nationwide protests hit Germany and many other places around
the world, the United States included, against Covid-19 restrictions. In Germany, the
restrictions were met with growing resistance among an increasingly radicalised group of
virus sceptics, of whom some have echoed the conspiracy theories of the QAnon move-
ment while others have allied with Germany’s far right. The so-called Querdenken 711
movement (translated as ‘thinking outside the box’) does not only consist of far-right
supporters, but the German state is increasingly concerned with a large number of their
sympathisers who, it argues, express ‘[e]xtremist, conspiratorial and anti-Semitic content
[that] is increasingly being mixed with legitimate criticism of the state-led measures to
curb the coronavirus pandemic’ (Noack, 2020). In Sweden, the far-right neo-fascist party,
the Sweden Democrats, has similarly advocated that hospital patients during the pan-
demic should be divided in terms of how Swedish they are (Klepke, 2020; SD, 2020).
This stance coheres with its promotion of policies aimed at forbidding the hijab in schools,
removing pride flags from local municipality buildings, and suggestions that books in
foreign languages should no longer be provided by local libraries.
The appeal of the far right is not limited to Europe and the West, however. In India, we
can see how the pandemic has been used as a way for Narendra Modi, the current prime
minister, to expand his power and take an intolerant view to democratic decision-making
and governance. As a result of the lockdown, online vigilantism and violence against
Indian Muslims have intensified, and journalists covering these issues have been targeted
(Meyer, 2020). In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has played on feelings of insecurity by
promoting a strongman masculinist image, strengthening social and cultural divisions and
anti-migration sentiment. His variety of far-right populism has resulted in the reversal of
decades of economic development and climate adaptation and one of the largest death
rates related to Covid-19 (Justino and Martorano, 2020). It is clear that forces belonging
to the far right in Europe, India, Brazil, and elsewhere are successfully using the crisis of
the pandemic to gain a foothold among an increasingly frustrated populace, just as the far
right in the United States is using Trump’s defeat as a prime opportunity to recruit his
disillusioned supporters.
In this article, we analyse the conditions that make such sentiments arise in the first
place – that is, the structural and affective changes that underlie populist mobilisation and
the polarisation of everyday insecurities. This means not only highlighting the centrality
of emotions, but also the reproduction of structural power and power relations at both a
local – individual and social – and a global level. Such an approach, in particular, pays
attention to collective emotions as ‘patterns of relationships’ and ‘belonging’, and posits
that these patterns are related to crises narratives and ontological (in)security that are
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