Looking at Radicalization and Its Place in the Conventional Political Sphere from a Mobilization Perspective

Author: Yasemin Uluşahin, PhD Candidate at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland; School of Psychology and Neuroscience 

Clark Mccauley and Sophia Moskalenko (2008), two prominent social psychologists known for their work on radicalization, define political radicalization as “increasing extremity of beliefs, feelings, and behaviors in support of intergroup conflict and violence” (p.415). While there is consensus around this definition, we often talk about radicalization as something unique to groups outside of the conventional political sphere. However, recent election results around the world should lead us to question this conception. Since the beginning of the 2000s, we have been seeing a gradual rise in national populist movements all over the globe. Bharatiya Janata Party in India, UKIP in United Kingdom, Trump in America, Austrian Freedom Party in Austria, National Front in France, Social Liberal Party in Brazil, Finns Party in Finland, Northern League in Italy - the list goes on and on. While most of the parties do not win elections, for the first time in decades they make it into parliaments.

The correlation between the increase of hate-crimes and the entrance of parties with strong anti-immigrant stances into the mainstream political sphere makes this especially alarming. For example, FBI reports show that hate crimes in the US. have been rising since 2016, coinciding with Trump’s election (Klobuchar, 2019). It is not only that the number of hate crimes are rising in the US. – it is that they are doing so at a rapid rate. The Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism in California State University, in San Bernardino, indicates that hate crimes in the country’s 10 major cities rose by 12.5 % from 2017 to 2018; marking it as the highest rate of increase in a decade (Levin & Reitzel, 2018). According to the Home Office’s 2018 report on Hate Crime in England and Wales, the same pattern is observable in the UK The report shows a 17% increase in hate crimes and points to a spike after the EU referendum. Similar correlational results are evident in many other places with strong national populist party presence (see: Jacobs, 2016; Madan, 2017; Germany Failing to Tackle Rise in Hate Crime, 2016; Record Increase in Swedish Hate Crimes, 2015).

Research shows that a critical segment of electoral support for national populist movements come from low-skilled and less well-educated white males with blue-collar jobs (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018; Baker, 2017; Gidron & Hall, 2017). While these people are not the poorest, or the least educated in society, they are the ones feeling left out of economic opportunities due to the gradual decrease in low-skilled jobs with somewhat high job security. They are the ones feeling devaluated because of the shift in the value of physical labour for information-based desk jobs and the re-assessment of gender roles and, also, left- behind by the out-of-tune-politicians that are more concerned with the welfare of minorities and immigrants who pose a danger to their way of life (Williams, 2017; Grossman, 2018; Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018). These grievances are exactly the reason why scholars investigating the rise of national populism refer to this portion of the population as the ‘left- behind’. Although scholars are divided on what accounts for the sense of position decline (culture vs. economy), they are aligned on the fact that there is a heightening sense of resentment that accompanies it. The use of the term ‘resentment’ varies across different approaches and disciplines. Some call it ‘politics of resentment’ (Engels, 2010; 2015; Cremer, 2016), others ‘class related resentment’ (Williams, 2017; McKenzie, 2017; Mann & Fenton, 2017; Ware, 2008) or ‘status related resentment’ (Gidron & Hall, 2017; Mutz, 2018), but a sense of collective resentment is always there accompanying the rising expressions of anti-immigrant sentiments.

While it is counter intuitive for most to call this segment of the population radicalized, it is easy to think of their resentment as a direct result of big waves of immigration (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018). It is easier to say immigration is what makes people side with more radical parties, especially when it reminds them (at least in the West) that they will soon be in the numerical minority in their own country (Kaufmann, 2018) – a numerical minority compared to those who they believe get much bigger slices from the pie than they deserve, while they themselves barely get any. When you look at the picture form this frame, what is more normal than people coming together to fight for what they consider to be rightfully theirs? Isn’t this something we’ve seen before? Isn’t this exactly what Samuel Huntington (1993) argued for years ago in his famous work “The Clash of Civilizations”? Aren’t human beings inherently xenophobic anyway? Isn’t this just our nature?

This explanation is so intuitive that people rarely take a second to question it. There is a tendency to instantly label right-wing voters as narrow-minded racist bigots without understanding what makes them think the way they do. But is it actually as straightforward as some say it is, or is there more to this story? The work of Katherine Cramer (2016) provides valuable insights to this question. Disturbed by the increasingly polarized state of the American public, Cramer conducted a longitudinal study, that lasted from 2007 to 2012, to understand the perspectives of Tea Party voters living in rural Wisconsin. Talking to various groups from different backgrounds, she discovered the nascence of what she calls “rural consciousness”. This consciousness is characterized by an identification with rural people and rural places, and indignation, or a multifaceted resentment, against cities. In line with previous research, she revealed how much of people’s views are rooted in their identities and values. It is these aspects of their lives that affects how they see the country’s state and economy. She observed that people take political disagreements not just politically, but also personally. This is why they want politicians they vote for to be “like them”, to recognize them and for them to respond to their needs (for a similar point: Hochschild, 2016; Williams, 2017).

When one looks at the current political context, it is easy to see that this is exactly what right-wing populist parties have managed to do. In many places, they were the only ones who recognized the grievances of the low-skilled, less well-educated white males with blue-collar jobs. They were the only ones who spoke directly to their lived experiences and provided them with explanations that made sense to them. This is not to say that the explanation they provided was the accurate one, or that people take on any explanation given to them. It rather means that right-wing populist politicians were able to convince the voters that they were the ones who understood their experiences and that they were the ones looking out for them. As argued in The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power by Haslam, Reicher and Platow (2011), leadership is the dynamic relationship between the leader and the followers. For leaders to be able to lead, they need to create a sense of shared cause and identity where they are able to convince their followers that they are “one of the ingroup” and they will champion for the group and, unfortunately, mobilization of hate and prejudice is one way to consolidate power and influence over the ingroup. 

It is with this relationship in mind that we should talk about the radicalization of the conventional political sphere. Rather than taking it as the resurfacing of human-beings’ innate xenophobic tendencies, we should look at it as a process of mobilization. In order to illustrate this point, I would like to end this blogpost with an example from modern history. In the 1960s, the American president Richard Nixon was facing a lot of pressure from civil rights activists, student movements and anti-war protesters. There were calls for the president to resign, all over the country. While some were expecting this resignation, in November 1969, Nixon did something rather different: he responded to these calls by addressing the nation with a speech that later became one of the defining moments of his presidency. In what is commonly referred to as the “Silent Majority Speech”, Nixon said:

“If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this Nation has no future as a free society(…)Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism. And so tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans-I ask for your support.” (Nixon, 1969)

In this speech, President Nixon portrayed the various protestor groups as forces working against the majority of Americans that he represented. A week later, on Veterans Day, for the first time, thousands marched in solidarity with Nixon. One of the headlines on the next day’s New York Times read “Many in U.S. Back Nixon War Stand on Veterans Day: President’s Silent Majority Holds Parades and Rallies attended by Thousands-DISSENTERS CONDEMNED” (Borders, 1969). People were quoted saying how fed up they were from those “noisy dissenters” and, from there on, tensions started to rise more and more.

You may not think this is a particularly riveting story, but what happened next was much more shocking. The headline of the New York Times on May 9th 1970 was dominated by what is today called the “Hard Hat Riot”. The event occurred in New York City when 200 construction workers attacked a group of anti-war protesters, which were composed of approximately 1000 high-school and college students- the groups who president Nixon pointed at just a few months ago. The construction workers were affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO), whose leader, George Meany, was a big Nixon supporter. During the protests, the rioters were carrying American flags and yelling “All the way U.S.A!.”, “Love it or leave it!” resonating with the president’s famous speech. According to the New York Times, 70 people were injured that day (Bigart, 1970).  

I picked this example specifically to illustrate two points. First, if the definition of radicalization is the increasing support for intergroup conflict and violence (Mccauley & Moskalenko, 2008), it is not unique to groups outside of the conventional political sphere. Rather, it is and has been a common concept surrounding us for a long time. Second is that the objects of prejudice and hate do not have to be immigrants or minorities - it can be anyone. Therefore, I would like to finish off by urging readers to ask themselves again: are people really innately wired to discriminate towards high school or college students the way it is argued that they are wired to do towards what is foreign? Or, just like I argued here, is collective hate a result of the dynamic relationship between followers and their leaders who need their support to stay in power?

References

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