Description
Populist rhetoric is known for constructing virulent images of insecurity and for portraying countries as facing imminent societal collapse. This paper builds on the growing body of literature in International Relations that explores how populist narratives entwine individual existential anxieties with concerns about economic, societal, and political change at the domestic and global levels. It focuses on how right-wing populist narratives create the imaginary of a present in existential crisis and why this matters for international politics. As this paper shows, populist stories of loss are built around the creation of a rupture between a country’s past greatness and its bleak present. They bring to the fore fundamental questions of autobiography at the level of the individual and the collective Self. This nurtures a nostalgic desire for a simple, stable, and certain storyline that aligns socio-political preferences with the need for reconstructing identity around radical resistance against policies, practices, and people associated with ‘progress’.
