E. Right-Wing Movements

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by T.A. Tran113 views·Updated Dec 9, 2020

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  1. now on to everyone's favorite topic.
  2. Right wing movements.
  3. When I see a right wing movements, I'm kind of
  4. lumping together a lot of different things here, right.
  5. Supremacist movements, the men's rights movement, fascism, nationalisms that are
  6. based on ethnic or religious supremacy.
  7. Religious fundamentalism.
  8. Right now, while all of these are very internally heterogeneous
  9. movements and do have their own dynamics and own explanations,
  10. they are generally united by a couple of different factors.
  11. And so that's why we ca ndy LH with them
  12. in very broadly the same strokes, although again they do
  13. require their own particular analyses and explanations.
  14. So the right wing movements are united by first and
  15. exclusionary politics.
  16. This is the idea of us versus them the prioritization
  17. of your own people.
  18. My own people first sort of idea, right?
  19. Um, right way movements also tend to have authoritarians leanings.
  20. That is, they prioritize a privileged, a strong leader, Um,
  21. and one who can sort of deliver them right, deliver
  22. them from, um to the promised land or Teoh a
  23. better version of society, or to some glorious, imagined or
  24. re riel past that they're trying to return Thio right
  25. wing movements.
  26. Really emphasized law and order, law and order as in
  27. social stability, which then ties into this other trait of
  28. traditional values.
  29. They do value, um, this return right to a simpler
  30. time, Thio Ah, better time in which the power distribution
  31. was more in their favor.
  32. And finally, right wing movements sometimes many times our populist
  33. in that they emphasize the idea of the will of
  34. the people, the will of the pure people versus the
  35. corrupt elite or some other enemy.
  36. Right? So right wing movements require special attention because the
  37. threat factors per the political process model, the threat factors
  38. that contribute to right wing mobilization are quite specific and
  39. different than a lot of the movement that we have
  40. talked about so far.
  41. And so we have to have a whole other theory
  42. to really explain the mobilization in tow, the far right
  43. in particular.
  44. And this is through the power devaluation theory which states
  45. that groups with previous social and economic privileges mobilized when
  46. they experience either a perceived or actual decline in their
  47. political or social economic status.
  48. Now, one way that we've seen this happening is with
  49. um, the current environment of economic pre carrot e of
  50. the working class in the middle classes where due to
  51. perpetual inflation and economic crises and capitalist globalization with the
  52. offshoring and outsourcing of jobs and deindustrialization.
  53. So the loss of well paid, unionized jobs all over
  54. what used to be industrial centers in the West Um,
  55. we have the perpetual experience right off unemployment or underemployment,
  56. and low wages are stagnant wages A ZX well, as
  57. the middle class, sort of teetering right between the cusp
  58. off being more economically, um, in need.
  59. Then they are have gotten used Thio.
  60. And so we have this economic aspect to the to
  61. the explanation for right wing mobilization.
  62. And then we also have this political aspect where there
  63. has been a crisis of democracy all over the world.
  64. Democracy is not really living up to its promises.
  65. And so people are looking towards other means.
  66. For instance, authoritarians means for addressing some of these grievances
  67. that they have.
  68. And finally, we also have the importance of social factor
  69. of demographic shifts where, you know, we might be seeing
  70. women entering into more traditionally male domains and, more crucially,
  71. the influx of immigrants and refugees.
  72. Um, settling into new communities and religious minorities, perhaps getting
  73. more political rights.
  74. And so all of these different demographic, just where groups
  75. that used to be marginalized have more legal protections or
  76. seemingly more power than they used to in the past.
  77. And all of these aspects of the economic parity, the
  78. crisis of democracy, the demographic shifts all together create easy
  79. scapegoats. Where, um, people who are drawn to the right
  80. are finding, you know, scapegoats in women or refugees or
  81. in immigrants or in other minority groups, um two.
  82. And that the scapegoats are the so easy explanations for
  83. their own experience of economic precarious E or their own
  84. disillusionment and democracy.
  85. And so these scapegoats, right, um, come with their loss
  86. of culture or some other threat.
  87. Um, and certainly there, then, is a yearning for a
  88. more secure in simpler world which often or sometimes involves
  89. the reestablishing of the superiority of a certain race, race
  90. or gender or ethnic group.
  91. Right. And this is really where the exclusionary politics off
  92. right wing movements come into play.
  93. And indeed, we have found that right wing militia movements
  94. are more likely to be found in regions with high
  95. unemployment. The industrialization and a threatened loss of patriarchal status.
  96. Thes air the same exact conditions that have actually motivated
  97. Donald Trump's core base, Um, and really helped him thio
  98. when the election in 2016.
  99. Now I just want to go over to myths about
  100. right wing movements I want to dispel here, and the
  101. first myth is that right wing movements tend to be
  102. more associated with a lower class and lower education.
  103. But this is actually not exactly correct, because the class
  104. composition and the educational level of different right wing movements
  105. will vary tremendously across contexts.
  106. And we'll actually see, um, involvement from people from across
  107. different class backgrounds.
  108. Um, but the the role that they play in these
  109. movements could differ a lot based on their costs status.
  110. And another myth that people tend to associate with right
  111. wing movements is that they're full of people who are
  112. socially isolated.
  113. But we have seen that this is not true, that
  114. right wing movement adherents are not more socially isolated than
  115. the rest of the population.
  116. And so we'll have to look at other explanations like
  117. the one that I gave the threefold explanation that I
  118. gave before or other multifaceted explanations in order to really
  119. explain the emergence of right wing movements