Description
This paper examines how right-wing political rhetoric fuses joy and cruelty as mutually constitutive affective forces in the performance of community and power. Contributing to ongoing debates in International Relation on the politics of emotion, affective publics, and the role of language in shaping political behaviour, this paper shows that the emotional life of the contemporary far right cannot be understood solely through negative affects such as anger, resentment, or fear. Instead, moments of shared enjoyment—whether in ironic memes, transgressive humour, or collective rituals of humiliation—form an affective infrastructure that both binds far right communities and legitimates exclusionary politics. Through comparative analysis of far right rhetoric, we show how joy functions not as the antithesis of cruelty, but as its affective companion: a mode of pleasure derived from domination, derision, and the symbolic reassertion of order. This “cruel optimism,” we suggest, underwrites the affective resilience of right-wing political imaginaries and helps sustain the appeal of nationalist and authoritarian projects.
