How 'the people' become one. Analysing contradictive constructions of...

Constructions of „us, the people“ are not only important in parliamentary rhetoric, but also in appeals of political actors to their constituency. This is especially foregrounded in analyses of populist discourses, which construct an essential political antagonism between “the people” and “the elite”. More specifically in right-wing populism – the only kind of populism present in Austria – “we, the people” is always simultaneously opposed to “those up there”, the elite, and to “others”. These “others” are not only constructed on grounds of ethnicity, nationality, culture or religion, but also on grounds of an assumed deviant identity more generally (e.g. based on gender, sexuality, family life or work-ethics). Such images of “others” in right-wing populist and right-wing extremist discourses although not necessarily coherent are always functional to the creation of the “we”-group. More to the point, it is exactly by means of the contradictions embedded in these constructions – e.g. calling LGBT a “threat to the family and the nation” and denouncing Islam’s alleged homophobia – that an ambivalent and therefore multifaceted and broad “we” becomes tangible. These ambivalences seemingly allow to incorporate i.a. liberal and democratic as well as conservative and authoritarian values, a rhetoric of freedom of choice and determinism based in biologism or a claim to plebiscitary democracy and to representation by a strong leader.

In our paper – based on findings from two EU-projects – we aim to disentangle some of these incoherent and even contradictory constructions of multiple “others” and to analyse them with regard to the “we”-group that emerge as the flipside of these constructions. Our goal is to exemplify the argumentative means used in right-wing populist discourses to gloss over these ambivalences and arrive at a seemingly homogeneous “people”.