Description
Contemporary right-wing populism is usually characterised as a transnational phenomenon in response to economic displacement, voter discontent with political elites that are perceived to no longer enact the interests of the people, or various culture-war issues. Yet populism is frequently not brought into conversation with concepts that allow historicising it more broadly within the context of the modern period (ca. 1789-) as such. To do so, the paper argues that right-wing populism is part of a broader recent trend to re-personalise rule through changed understandings of authority, sovereignty, and expertise. I utilise ontological security theory to elucidate these broader arguments, which theorises ongoing anxieties and insecurities of groups and individuals as response to the alienating and destabilising implications of continuously changing and expanding global hierarchies, and demonstrate them in a case study of right-wing populist politics in the United States and Western Europe in the 2020s.
