"Why is the US far right finding its savior in Spanish dictator Francisco Franco?" by Jason Wilson (#TheGuardian)
"Some US far-right figures have made renewed attempts to rehabilitate the 20th century Spanish dictator Gen Francisco Franco in recent months, praising him as an avatar of religious authoritarianism, and praising his actions during and after the Spanish civil war as a model for confronting the left in the US."
"The critics of this flurry of neo-Francoism say that the real target of this revisionism is domestic attitudes to US democracy."
"For Faber, parts of the the American right are captured by “the dream of order, where social order is more important than democracy, and democracy is a threat to social order”."
A very interesting article on the "re-emergence" of Franco in Spain: "Francisco Franco Is Back: The Contested Reemergence of a Fascist Moral Exemplar" by Francisco Ferrándiz (#OpenAccess, 2021).
WHITE SIGHT. Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness by Nicholas Mirzoeff (The MIT Press, 2023).
"White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that white sight was not always common practice, we can devise better ways to dismantle it. Spanning centuries across this wide-ranging text, Mirzoeff connects Renaissance innovations—from the invention of perspective and the erection of Apollo statues as monuments to (white) beauty and power to the rise of racial capitalism dependent on slave labor—with ever-expanding surveillance technologies to show that white sight creates an oppressively racializing world, in which subjects who do not appear as white are under constant threat of violence".
Can anyone share a reference (any discipline) to a definition or use of 'politics' / 'political' in the non-technical/metaphorical sense (i.e., not about government) to refer to ideological (or other?) underpinnings?
@serenissimaj
In Spain (and not only in Spain), politicians use the word "political" a lot to refer to "ideological" decisions. Both words (politics and ideology) have ended up having a negative meaning: fantasy, falsehood, partisan interests, etc. And there is no doubt that this way of using these words is contributing to the deterioration of political life.
Obviously, any opinion or decision about how things should be is political and ideological. The definition I like best is that of Chantal Mouffe (On the political, 2005, p. 9):
"I distinguish between 'the political' and 'politics': by 'the political I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by 'politics' I mean the sets of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political".
Transgression is an essential concept for understanding many of today's political dynamics.
POPULISM AS A TRANSGRESSIVE STYLE by Théo Aiolfi (2022).
"As a consequence of its performative turn, the critical literature on populism has dedicated increasing attention to its sociocultural and stylistic features. Among the most prominent concepts underpinning this approach is the notion that populism relies on the “flaunting of the low” or the use of “bad manners.” This article engages in an extensive discussion of the way this concept is used in the literature and showcases its main limitations. In replacement, I then suggest the alternative concept of transgression, understood as the violation of a norm, which has the substantial advantages of being more flexible and versatile as well as less reliant on a normative binary".
DONALD TRUMP AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF TRANSGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR: The role of group prototypicality and identity advancement by Ben Davies, Carola Leicht and Dominic Abrams (2022).
"Overall, the present study identifies the rationalization of transgressive leader behaviors as a novel pathway to their continued support. We also identify identity advancement as a key driver of this effect. These results provide an important extension of deviance credit and indicate that the role of group prototypicality in the context of group serving leaders may need to be reconsidered. These results also have worrying implications for the nature of transgressive leadership and demonstrate how unimpeachable such leadership may become once it is established."
PRÁTICAS DA HISTÓRIA "is an online academic journal published at the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH) with the support of the IHC – Institute of Contemporary History and of CHAM – Centre for the Humanities. The main aim of the journal is the promotion of discussions on historical theory, historiography and the uses of the past".
An interesting journal. The theme of the last two issues (2022 and 2023) is "Political Uses of the Past: Public Memory of Slavery and Colonialism".
Most of the articles have been published in English, but some have also been published in Portuguese or Spanish.
THE “NEED FOR CHAOS” AND MOTIVATIONS TO SHARE HOSTILE POLITICAL RUMORS (Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen and Kevin Arceneaux, 2023)
"Why are some people motivated to circulate hostile political information? While prior studies have focused on partisan motivations, we demonstrate that some individuals circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos to “burn down” the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process. To understand this psychology, we theorize and measure a novel psychological state, the Need for Chaos, emerging in an interplay of social marginalization and status-oriented personalities."
"HOW THE HINDU RIGHT-WING IN INDIA IS UNDERMINING MUSLIM IDENTITY THROUGH HERITAGE" by Maitri Dore.
"In service of the myth of a Hindu golden age, the Hindu right-wing is contorting historical facts and attempting to cleanse the built environment of Muslim heritage. Their meddlesomeness is proof of the pudding that heritage is more than simply brick and mortar. It is about the selection and use of these for political purposes. In this scheme then, architecture–by way of claims to mosques, and public space–through its renaming, are merely convenient props that hold up the cherry-picked narrative."