Introduction: Meritocracy in Perspective. The Rise of the Meritocracy 60 Years On

Sixty years after its publication, Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy remains one of the most important texts for understanding the changing intellectual politics of postwar Britain. Young’s fictional vision of a meritocratic society explores the consequences of a society where each citizen is judged according to the formula ‘I.Q. + Effort = Merit’. The successful meritocrats hoard ever-greater rewards for themselves, crystallising into a rigid and repressive elite who rule over an increasingly powerless and depressed underclass. While the concept has evolved and adapted, the language of meritocracy is one of the great survivors of postwar British politics. In an age characterised by the rise of populist leaders and movements, as well as a backlash against educated ‘liberal elites’, revisiting, reinterpreting and re-evaluating Young’s influential satire and the central place the concept of meritocracy occupies in the history of postwar Britain has never been more important.     

Asbestos populism in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the changing relationship between asbestos and populism, as both terms travel across different semantic contexts. It argues that this dynamic relationship can help to outline a populist ecology, through which resource actors such as asbestos play a more significant role than either populist leaders or their people anticipate. Drawing on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a site for examining the implications of this asbestos-inflected populist ecology, the essay suggests new ways of linking the recent populism of Donald Trump to an older, more articulate populism, exemplified by Pierre Trudeau.     

“Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way”: imagination,agitation, and raging against the machine in Ali Smith’s Spring

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the third novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Spring. Using Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as a conceptual frame, I analyze Smith’s rendering of a Britain grappling with Brexit in times of transnational populism. As with Autumn and Winter, Smith’s prose is saturated with intertextual borrowings from pop and “high” culture, also interrogating the links between “nanoracism” and the “immunity and community” knot (Dillet). This paper reads Spring alongside Smith’s contribution to and advocacy of the Refugee Tales project regarding the diverse discourses surrounding migration, xenophobia, and indefinite detention. Smith’s writing traces the darkness of our populist present with its rhetorical and material violence, as well as the possibilities for creative response and resistance. I argue that her seasonal quartet to date and her work with Refugee Tales aesthetically and ethically defend the principle that human dignity, both individual and collective, rests on the ability to tell stories.     

From paradigm shift to retooling: the foundation and maintenance of the AKP

ABSTRACT

This article examines the foundation of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi-AKP) after a paradigm shift and its maintenance through retooling, which involves strategic positionings and tactical manoeuvres within its new paradigm. The positionings and manoeuvres that the party took vis-à-vis states of exception have been imperative for its survival in government. The main argument of the article is that the AKP retooled itself in the face of crises rather than going through a paradigmatic change, that is to say, resorting back to the Islamism of the party elite’s origins, in Kuhnian terms. Through the fluidity of its discourse and the unrivalled charisma of its leader, the AKP has -multiple times- changed the center of gravity of its discourse and policies without having to disarticulate its founding political imaginary. Neither its recently increased nationalism nor authoritarianism was the result of an ideological orientation, just like the democratic reforms in its initial years. They were mostly by-products of survival efforts at power positioning, through retooling.     

民间意义的发现与教师角色的转换——陶行知教师知识人角色理论的分析

中国教师自古以来是作为士或知识阶层的一员而存在,以传递或创造精英文化、再生产新的文化人为自己知识人角色与职守的定位.基于民间意义的发现,陶行知消解了传统教师知识人角色的定位,将教师的身份从知识阶层的一分子转变为民间大众的一员,将教师的知识人角色从精英文化的再生产者转变为民间大众文化的学习者与传播者,从书本知识的传递者及真理的代言人,转变为民间教育意义的发现者以及创造性学习活动的指导者.     

Why Right‐Leaning Populism has Grown in the Most Advanced Liberal Democracies of Europe

Immigration and new class divisions, combined with a growing anti‐elitism and political correctness, are often used as explanations for the strong gains for right‐leaning populist parties in national elections across Europe in recent years. But contrary to what we might assume, such parties have been very successful in the most developed and comprehensive welfare states, in nations—such as the Nordic countries—with the best scores on economic equality and social inclusion and long established political and judicial institutions enjoying a high degree of popular legitimacy. As argued in this article, this seems to happen because a duopoly of the centre‐left and centre‐right political establishment has kept issues such as immigration and new class divisions off the public agenda and hence paved the way for right‐leaning ‘disruptor’ populist parties with an anti‐immigration agenda in times of increasing immigration.     

Does counter-mobilization contain right-wing populist movements? Evidence from Germany

Right-wing populist (RWP) movements have been on the rise in Western democracies. Outside of party politics, such movements regularly organize demonstrations against political elites and minority groups. At the same time, civil society coalitions have mobilized against these movements. Yet we know little about the effect of counter-demonstrations on RWP protest activities. We derive competing theoretical expectations from previous work. On the one hand, counter-mobilization reduces mobilization because the original movement is less likely to achieve its goals (expected utility/costs). On the other hand, clashes and standoffs between opposing movements facilitate mobilization through polarization and anger (identity/emotions). We empirically analyze movement–countermovement dynamics using a new city-level event dataset on street protests by the German Pegida movement and its opponents. In our quantitative analysis, we investigate how counter-mobilization is associated with the onset of Pegida protests, their intensity in terms of participant numbers, and their demobilization. Counter-mobilization does not prevent protest onset, but large counter-demonstrations are associated with larger subsequent Pegida protests, and violence against Pegida supporters reduces the likelihood that they will stop protesting.     

‘Democracy under Threat’: The Foundation of the Opposition in Venezuela

This article sheds new light on how the Venezuelan Opposition was created and, more widely, on contemporary Venezuelan politics. By focusing on the Opposition's articulation of democracy, the article examines how this movement became possible and how it succeeded in maintaining support. Opinion articles covering the period October 2001 to April 2002 were analysed using the theoretical framework of logics within discourse theory. The article argues that although the Opposition succeeded in maintaining its support throughout Chávez's government, it contributed to the polarised politics that currently characterises Venezuela.     

The Pegida Movement and German Political Culture: Is Right‐Wing Populism Here to Stay?

This article outlines the rise and fall of the ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West’ (Pegida), a right‐wing populist street movement that originated in the city of Dresden in October 2014 and peaked in January 2015. The Pegida movement combined fear of ‘Islamisation’ with general criticism of Germany's political class and the mainstream media. This ambivalent and largely undefined political profile proved its strength in mobilising a significant minority of right‐wing citizens in the local context of Dresden and the federal state of Saxony, but generally failed to spill over to other parts of Germany. The social profile of the Pegida movement, which included ‘ordinary citizens’ with centre‐right to far‐right attitudes, points to significant overlap between general disenchantment of the political centre ground in Germany with the political system, as outlined in recent sociological research, and the ability of a largely leaderless populism to mobilise in the streets.     

Mainstreaming populist discourse: the race-conscious legacy of neo-populist parties in Australia and Italy

Curran examines the political legacy of far-right neo-populist parties in Australia and Italy. She argues that assessments of their ‘success’ need to extend beyond the electoral decline or organizational implosion of the parties themselves. An important measure of their impact is the influence they have exerted on mainstream political discourse and styles of communication. That they have been successful in having such an impact is well illustrated in the politically expedient adoption of race-conscious, anti-immigration and anti-asylum policies in Australia and Italy. Curran examines the influence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord (Northern League) on the mainstreaming of populist discourse in these two countries. She focuses on some of the populist themes and styles embraced by the Australian political leader John Howard and his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi, and she concludes that, regardless of their political fragility or outright demise, these far-right neo-populist parties have been successful in injecting populist themes and prejudices into the mainstream political discourse in their respective countries.