Fighting Fire with Fire? Passion in Social Movement Resistance to Right-Wing Populism

While connections between populist publics and passion are often made, scholars also associate social forces resisting populists with passion. In fact, resisters to populists are advised, most prominently by Rovira Kaltwasser (2017) to avoid “fighting fire with fire.” Recognizing that “the struggle between populism and anti-populism can become visceral,” the scholar warns those who are worried about populism to not forget that populism’s rise “can be explained to a great extent by the sense in the electorate that the ideas and interests of ‘the people’ are not being taken into consideration.” Fighting fire with fire, Rovira Kaltwasser states, can damage democracy itself. The uniformity of Rovira Kaltwasser’s prescription, however, stands in contrast with the contention that resistance to populism, to be effective, needs to adapt to particular contexts. His colleague in the ideational school of defining populism, Cas Mudde (2019) agues that “There is no single best way to deal with the Far Right,” which he says has become increasingly populist in recent times, and vary in radicality. While resisters “can learn from each other, and across national and even continental boundaries,” at the end of the day, “the strategy should be local or national if it is to succeed.” This paper is interested in the role of passion in social movements’ resistance to right-wing populists both in opposition and in power. Social movements are often analyzed through the lens of framing and other interpretive processes, mobilizing structures and repertoires of contention. This paper, however, focuses on the first – or “the meanings associated with relevant events, activities, places, and actors, suggesting that those meanings are typically contestable and negotiable and thus open to debate and differential interpretation” (Snow, Vliegenthart, and Ketelaars 2019). Indeed, what role does passion play in the framing and other interpretive processes of social movements resisting right-wing populists? What role does passion play in how social movements frame their grievances against right-wing populists – as well as the populist leader/party/movement themselves, the people, the out-group and the establishment? How can passion in their framing processes, as well as the framing processes themselves, be related to the political contexts of social movements and right-wing populists? This paper, part of a research on comparative social movement resistance to right-wing populists in power, looks at the relevant literature to answer these questions. References: Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira. 2017. “Populism and the Question of How to Respond to It.” In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, eds. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803560.013.21. Mudde, Cas. 2019. The Far Right Today. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Snow, David A., Rens Vliegenthart, and Pauline Ketelaars. 2019. “The Framing Perspective on Social Movements: Its Conceptual Roots and Architecture.” In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, eds. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Holly J. McCammon. Wiley, 392–410. doi:10.1002/9781119168577.ch22.