Social media and the promotion of populism

From its advent as a virulent discourse, social media have played a significant role in the rise of populism and populist political figures from Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen to their imitators from the Global South, Brazil’s Bolsanaro and more recently Argentina’s Javier Milei. Not all populisms are alike. Thinking about these differences, for example, between strongmen such as India’s Modi and Hungary’s Orban and the Netherland’s Geert Wilder’s Party for Freedom, the focus of this chapter is on the use of social media to engage and mobilise political allies in support of political opportunities. Using Ernest Laclau’s On Populist Reason, this chapter will demonstrate the link between populism and the logic of its ideological motifs. Laclau argues that populist movements are progressive – not ideologically, but rather in the sense that they move in stages in tandem with the unfolding of political developments (for example, the deposing of a dictator, the defeat of an army). The irony here is that this may work in reverse to include the installation of a dictator. Laclau’s view is that it may be more profitable to invert the general analyses of populism by looking for dimensions of populist movements that cut across the social differences that tend to be at their social base. The denigration of populism is for him a slippery slope that would exclude populism from a rational politics. The election of Trump may not be the seemingly irrational mass psychological behaviour accorded to some of historically celebrated riots. A focus on the “rhetoric and grammar of motives” and Roland Barthes’ seminal account of myth, may suggest how social media’s propaganda strategies of amplification may be at the epicentre of these populist revolts.