Far-Right Populists’ Playbooks for Creating a Convergence of Moral Panics

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Ferruh Yılmaz, whose interest is in far-right strategies for dealing with Critical Race Theory. He begins by noting the differences between culture and policy: people attach themselves to broader political and social identities at least as much as they do to good policies on specific issues.

Far-right populism builds on this by weaponising an affective rhetorical strategy: it promotes moral panics about cultural and moral issues that channels people’s diffused anxieties into a sense of unity against social elites, which transforms their ontological vision of society into a perception of divisions between ordinary, everyday people and intellectual, cosmopolitan elites.

Populism should therefore be understood as an effective rhetorical strategy that produces and articulates an antagonism between two camps: an oppressed people and an uncaring elite. Populist forces gain a foothold especially when there is a sense of crisis amongst the general population – but there is almost always a sense of crisis in society, and people always have various diffuse and poorly articulated anxieties. Moral panics exploit this, pushing an issue onto the public agenda even when ordinary people are actually little affected by the issue and previously did not care about it.

Populist rhetoric also provides a simplistic solution to the crisis, shifting popular thinking in a particular direction. The positioning of Critical Race Theory as a threat to the United States is an example of such rhetoric, and well-organised far-right organisations have been instrumental in pushing this rhetoric; but individual moral panics alone are ineffective, and instead end up being bundled into broader concerns that maintain a sense of fundamental crisis and threat.

This convergence of moral panics creates a sense of systemic crisis, then, and also allows for the rise of perceptions of a general conspiracy by ‘elites’ against ‘the people’, and of calls to defend ‘our cultural values’. The end product is the continuous culture war rhetoric that now pervades mainstream media as much as far-right fora.