Daniel Little
A democracy allows government to reflect the will of the people. Or does it? Here I would like to understand a bit better the dynamics through which radical right populism has come to have influence, even dominance, in a number of western democracies -- even when the percentage of citizens with radical right populist attitudes …
Continue reading "Democracy and the politics of intolerance"
Social Europe is a vibrant publisher of current progressive thought in Europe. Readers can find data, opinion, and policy analysis on the site, highly relevant to the core priorities of progressives across the continent and Britain -- social opportunity, inequalities, work, the threat of right-wing populism, the refugee crisis, and the future of the European Union. …
Continue reading "Strategies for resisting right-wing populism"
It is apparent, on this first round of the presidential elections in France, that we urgently need to understand better the dynamics and causes of radical populism in democratic polities. What is populism? Why does it have such virulence in the current moment as a political movement? What roles do racism, xenophobia, resentment, and economic …
Why is part of the American electoral system so susceptible to right-wing populist appeals, often highlighting themes of racism and intergroup hostility? Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos address the causes of the radical swing to the right of the Republican Party in Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America. Here is the key …
What kind of political movement does Donald Trump represent? How did we get here? And what will be needed to defeat this divisive and anti-democratic political agenda? There is a tendency to see Trump as a bolt out of the blue, an anomaly -- an extraordinary showman who somehow conned just enough voters to gain …
Earlier posts have addressed the issue of the rise of extreme-right parties and ideologies in many parts of the world, including Western Europe and the United States. A valuable multi-country research project now seeks to shed light on these phenomena based on large-scale surveys of attitudes among young people. MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Public Legacy and …
Continue reading "Survey research on the extreme right in Europe"
Several recent posts have commented on the rise of a nationalistic, nativist politics in numerous contemporary democracies around the world. The implications of this political process are deeply challenging to the values of liberal democracy. We need to try to understand these developments. (Peter Merkl's research on European right-wing extremism is very helpful here; Right-wing …
European research and policy organizations have devoted a fair amount of attention to the rise of extremist movements and intolerance in European countries in the past ten years. Attention has been directed towards both aspects of the problem that have been mentioned in earlier posts -- rising public attitudes of intolerance, and the mobilization and …
Continue reading "Survey research on right-wing extremism in Europe"
In a recent post I addressed the issue of the rise of mass intolerance and hate from the point of view of the public -- the processes through which sizable numbers of members of society come to be more intolerant in their attitudes and behaviors. This involves looking at the problem as being analogous to …
Continue reading "Ideologies and organizations as causes of political extremism"
Richard Hofstadter opened his 1963 Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford with these prescient words: Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. Today this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which …
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