Chains of White Grievance: Mouffe, Hegemony, and Ethno-Nationalist Strategy

• In Event: Constituting Nationalism: Populism, Whiteness and Pluralism

Abstract

Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy has had profound influence on both the study and the strategy of international leftist movements for the last several decades. Indeed, Mouffe’s subsequent work detailing how opposition movements can establish “chains of equivalence” between distinct struggles in order to achieve political hegemony furnished one of the foundational theoretical and strategic insights around the phenomenon of post-Marxist “new social movements.” But as these movements have been succeeded in turn by a generation of “newest social movements”—assemblages like the Occupy and anti-globalization/global justice movements that often eschew the pursuit of hegemonic power within the statist models of politics described by Mouffe—the continued utility of Mouffe’s concepts to leftist and radical forms of politic theory and strategy have become less clear.

However, even as many of these “newest” social movements increasingly abjure statist politics, Mouffe’s strategic insights have found an unlikely second life in the establishment of ‘chains of equivalence’ between ethno-nationalist parties riding the "populist wave" across the Global North. This paper uses Mouffe’s theories—developed with an explicit normative commitment to leftist politics in mind—to examine the theoretical and strategic significance of the international connections emerging between ethno-nationalist populist movements in Europe and the United States. Focusing in particular on Mouffe’s understandings of coalition-building in pursuit of hegemonic political power and the dangers inherent in her uptake of German jurist Carl Schmitt, this paper examines how populist movements have developed shared articulations of racialized grievance now deployed across the Global North to sharpen lines of democratic inclusion/exclusion and to construct ‘chains of equivalence’ between various ethno-nationalist projects.

Author

• Garrett FitzGerald, University of Notre Dame