Description
This paper seeks to shed light on the complex relationship between how insecurity is understood and felt in the everyday and how security encounters are manipulated by political agents for political gain through engaging with populist dystopian narratives. An analytical focus on ontological security in populism recently provided first insights into how populist discourses and performances constitute popular sentiments of anxiety (Browning 2019), and establish a new paradigm of popular sovereignty as real, authoritative and reflecting common sense (Homolar and Steele 2019: 215) as well as how they construct narratives of nostalgia, historic continuity and national belonging (Kinnvall 2019, Suzuki 2019), and how they promote a sense of crisis that may tilt the electoral scales in favour of ‘outsider’ populist candidates (Homolar and Scholz 2019). This paper argues that populist security narratives centred on threat, belonging, and exclusion instil a sense of ontological insecurity by intertwining nostalgia for an idealised past of national greatness with anxiety about economic and demographic change a dystopian future. The ‘seductive rhythm of tragedy and triumph’ (Homolar 2019) integral to such fantasies creates an ‘emotional tension’, turning abstract notions of insecurity into compelling affective narratives of biographical rupture, loss of social status, and elite betrayal that help to mobilize political support.
