Exploring Democratic Mobilizations Against Right-Wing Populism: Tapping Historical, Contemporary, and Global Reservoirs of Opposition

This Mini-Conference explores Right-Wing populism in relationship to the various possibilities for democratic dissent that exist in the international order at present, in foundational theories of democracy and critiques of democracy, and in Left populisms present and past. We propose four 3-paper workshop panels unified by a twofold aim: to explore the possibilities for democratic dissent against Right populism and to analyze the affective dispositions that sustain Right populism. We recognize that these dispositions are not distinctive characteristics of our racist “others” but longstanding, multifarious investments in whiteness that have deep roots in democratic global and national institutions.

Within this broad concern with the affective dispositions that fuel Right populism, we propose a varied array of panels.
• A first set focuses on the entanglements between Right populism and Left resistance with examples from Turkey and the US. One paper draws on Melanie Klein's conception of "envy" to analyze Erdogan's populist government's ongoing obsession to delegitimize Gezi protests even at the height of its electoral power. Another asks how and to what effect authoritarian populist governments seek to co-opt practices of resistance that first emerge in dissident mobilizations by examining the particular case of the numerous photos that were serviced by the security forces in the aftermath of the Turkish state's assault on Kurdish towns on Erdogan's orders. And the third paper in this series looks at conspiracy as a political tactic and examines its possibilities for co-optation.
• A second set focuses on the histories and intellectual genealogies of both Left and Right populism, emphasizing in particular the racialization of populist subjectivity by the erasure of black Populism from the history of Left populism on the one hand, and by the constitution of “middleness” as white racial identity on the other hand.
• Our third set of presenters looks at affect and populism. Two papers draw on the analyses of W. E. B. Du Bois to understand the affective attachments that constitute whiteness (e.g. the pleasures in racist violence and the pleasures in luxury that depends on foreign domination) and render it a sustaining force for imperial capitalism. A third looks at the role anxiety plays in populist mobilization, drawing on Hobbes to view anxiety as something that populism does not simply tap but creates.
• A final set of papers assesses the role grassroots political actors can play in soliciting the dispositions and rendering visible new lines of alliance to support broad-based democratic movement against Right populist and neo-fascist regimes.

This mini-conference assembles a range of scholars at various career stages to provide sharp focused critical commentary to advance the participants’ work toward publication. Seven of the ten presenters already participated in a workshop organized at Ohio State by Benjamin McKean and Inés Valdez in November 2018, thus the mini-conference format would allow for the continuation of an ongoing conversation but now addressing significantly more advanced essays. We do not necessarily envision a collective product such as an edited volume but do envision a sustained and focused discussion that can bring each author closer to submitting their work to an academic journal and contribute to a public conversation on these topics. Over the course of a full day, we will conduct our four 3-paper workshop panels on the “Brookings” format: authors will serve as discussant for other authors’ work; discussants will present authors’ papers; which all participating authors, discussants, and chairs will have read. This format will enable us to encourage a focused discussion that aims not only to develop shared themes across the papers but also to raise disagreements among them, recognizing that the arguments of some papers may pose problems for others or may call another’s premises into question.