We live in an age of global, right-wing populism(s). A migratory bird riding populist winds could spread its wings from Florida to France, pivoting to Poland, Hungary, and Turkey before proceeding, via Pakistan and India, to the Philippines. Buoyed by Manilla’s recent elections, the bird might then brave the Pacific, re-alighting in Bolsanaro’s Brazil (among many potential destinations across the Americas). This bird’s eye view encompasses every world region, impelling us to question long standing assumptions within Western scholarship and public opinion which posit “Western” or “Northern” political cultures as intrinsically pluralist vis-à-vis an allegedly authoritarian global “East” or “South.” Populists, it seems, are everywhere pursuing similar strategies.
A core component of the populist playbook is to tell stories in stark binary terms — tales of “us” versus “them” — which pit the populist and his “people” against “degenerate” elites and “dangerous” women, as well as “deviant” sexual, ethnic and religious minorities. These frames enable the charismatic leader to position as savior of the imagined “moral majority” who will restore greatness to the corrupted collective. Such stories are disingenuous, to be sure, given the blatant impiety of many would-be populists. Yet, they are effective in that they help to politicize the emotive energies and organizational capacities of religious constituencies from evangelicals in Trump’s America to Hindu nationalists in Modi’s India. And while populists’ primary purpose is to capture the ballot box, their derisive frames also embolden radicals, as attested to by recent atrocities committed by white/Christian and Hindu nationalists.
Yet as my ongoing research on the relationship between populism and political religion canvases, there is no default reason why religiously-informed political platforms need be harnessed to exclusionary causes. On the contrary, from the Jesuit principles of “radical hospitality” towards and respectful “accompaniment” of interlocutors, to Daoist or Hindu conceptions of cosmic relationality — there is a “golden rule” across spiritual traditions which mandates mutuality not only despite our differences, but precisely because of our diversity. Thus, despite populism’s growing prominence, the pages of our unfolding political histories are enlivened by emancipatory movements which draw inspiration and mobilizing capacity from religious sources. From Gandhi’s principle of ahmisa (non-violent resistance), and its reverberations within many strands of Black activist theology, to indigenous pleas for planetary justice, there are spaces within — and across — all spiritual traditions for engagement of vulnerable “others”. The challenge, as such, in our age of right-wing populism, is to cultivate coalitions for pluralism between (non-)believers across camps.
Nora Fisher-Onar is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests include the theory and practice of international relations, foreign policy analysis, comparative area studies (Turkey, Middle East, Europe), political ideologies, gender, and history/memory. She received her doctorate from University of Oxford and holds master’s and undergraduate degrees from Johns Hopkins (SAIS) and Georgetown universities, respectively. She speaks five languages, has traveled to over 80 countries and lived in eight. Fisher-Onar is editor of the volume Istanbul: Living With Difference in a Global City.
