This text presents a lite approach to the issue of fake news, considering the case study of the german populist and far-right party AfD and the spread of panic among Germans against immigrants and refugees.

It is consensual in our contemporary political studies that moral panic became central in the growth of populist and radical parties’ social alignment. This moral panic was born during the social disrupture of the 1960s. Minor groups and moral changes generated alarm in the majority groups, which started to look into them as a threat to the order and dominant values. In consequence, nationalist right-wing movements gained importance and space to operate. More than inner diversity, the struggle against immigration plays a vital role in their ideology and narratives. Border protection, criminality, terrorism, the situation of women’s rights, and the critics of multiculturalism became the vectors for their struggle to protect the culture and European identities since the 1970s.  Consequently, restricting immigration has been critical for radical right-wing movements. However, according to several reports, the success of anti-immigration politics was fewer due to the fact the States rarely can establish or determine the dynamics of migrations or the labor needs and also faces illegal chains and schemes.  More than labor issues, however, the desire to protect national identities with a protectionist cultural horizon generates support for populist parties. According to the European Social Survey on Right-Wing, Visegrad countries, and Portugal have higher cultural fears. In consequence, the debate on immigration is a code for cultural threat since ‘culture’ is considered static rather than a dynamic and plastic reality based on negotiations and hybrid events.  Thereby, we are now living in a tension between the legal and political will to protect minorities – in the frame of plural and liberal democracy and the rule of law – and the desire to reinforce the will of the majority and the national identities with its cultural basis.  Fake news as propaganda  It is now claimed and considerably consensual that pro-Russian propaganda is linked to migration-related fake news growth. There is a narrative that connects immigration to (a) terrorism, (b) criminality growth, and (c) the consequent…

This article examines Antonio Gramsci’s key theoretical proposals, legacy, and some of the critics.

Antonio Gramsci is an essential thinker of the 20th century, one of the most influential authors of his time, whose proposals remain central in present days academic and political modus pensandi. Born in 1891 in Sardinia, Italy, Gramsci was educated in Turin and became involved in the socialist movement while still in his twenties. The Italian fascist regime imprisoned him in 1926, and died in 1937 still in prison. Gramsci read many books during that period, mainly on Economy and Philosophy. His focus, his theoretical obsession, as a Marxist, was the bourgeois hegemony. His readings and subsequent reflections were written in his Prison Notebooks. Gramsci’s production and thinking cross different themes, composing an enormous and prolific work – from the theory of History (Marxism) to the role of the Catholic Church in Italian society, the development of the Italian bourgeois, popular literature, common sense, folklore, Fordism, among other subjects. Giovanni Gentile’s Marxism comes to be truly inspirational in Gramsci’s thinking, making the intellectual a follower of the idea of Marxism as a historicist critical theory. His Notebooks are a serious attempt to systematize a certain Marxism antieconomicist but mostly antiscientificist, criticizing the false belief in scientific objectivity. This came to be, as we know, the basis of Critical Theory, the most influential school of thought and methodology in post-War western societies. Gramsci’s theoretical approach to reality is mainly linked to his famous Theory of Cultural Hegemony. According to this theory, the dominant class in society employs its power and control not just through economic and political means but also through the cultural and intellectual institutions shaping how people understand and make sense of the world around them. This includes things like the education system, the media, and religion. The dominant class maintains its power and control by establishing and preserving a dominant cultural ideology that supports its interests and repressing alternative perspectives and ideas. Thereby, to overthrow the dominant class…

The present post presents tendencies of political and social Afro-Latin-American thinking, showing that there is no unique black community or black thinking.

From civil rights to Black Lives Matter, we are being addressed to this basic idea that Black people are all, from the very beginning, part of “The Struggle” in the exact and unique terms of Critical Race Theory and woke ideology. This post takes Frank A. Guridy and Juliet Hooker’s writings to stress the tendencies of political and social Afro-Latin-American thinking. From the beginning of the XX century, the Independent Party of Color in Cuba had an essential outlook on what it meant to be an afro-Cuban. Alongside the condemnation of scientific racism and the defence of racial equality, the party was committed to a sense of black respectability that included the subordination of women and full integration of black people into society with the adoption of European cultural patterns. According to Critical Theory, this kind of social accommodation is interpreted today as part of coloniality but can be accepted as a political and social choice by the black community. This example illustrates the main argument: that Afro-Latin-American thinking (i.e. western black thinking) is not monolithic. This is an important statement that has been disregarded in those people’s thinking history. As the authors say, Afro-Latin-American intellectuals disagree on the most effective way to contest social and political inequalities. They also differ in terms of the reasons for that inequality and whether black people should mobilise themselves as a specific group or not. This is both theoretical and politically relevant in a time of monolithic woke antiracism thinking. Afro-Latin American intellectuals engaged with a variety of sources and ideas, rejecting and adapting them, engaging in the central debates of Latin American politics: disputes over the meaning of freedom and citizenship, as well as over the forms of political community that would best serve new nations in the postcolonial period. Those different approaches were expressed in the various political movements. Most tended to gravitate toward political movements that advocated racially inclusive visions…

The post presents a systematic approach to the concept of post-truth.

As Mattelart wrote in History of Information Science (2006), the notion of information overload refers to a high rate of information input in urban societies, making effective treatment impossible. Thus, we are facing a social circumstance in which the flow of information is excessive, and the frenzy of obsolence and the ethics of the instant, terms from Chesneaux, in Modernity-World (1996), have not complied with the verification of sources, facts and the need for individual reflection on the phenomena. This situation is responsible for producing the concept of “post-truth”, the most striking aspect of the digital society in which we live. The excess of information has generated a particular need, accelerated by social networks and their reduced characters, emphasising the impact of “fat” newspapers (headlines and subheadings) and soundbites. As McCallam in his article “Les “petites phrases” dans la politique anglo-saxonne” (2000) and Le Séac’h in “La petite phrase: d’où vient-elle? Comment se propagage-t-elle? Quelle est sa portée réelle?” (2015), the soundbite presents itself as a kind of modern proverb of political action, which functions by itself and as an end in itself. This conjugation shows that the non-verification of informative contents is a “snowball” problem. We know that such content is massively shared and produces an excessive flow of misinformation and factual errors since many of the media fail to present news headlines that correspond to the content of the information, a deontological fault and journalistic ethics of solid social repercussion. With this, we have a media and social broth favourable to sprouting the “post-truth”. Well, “post-truth” is understood in terms of the Priberam Dictionary of the Portuguese Language, Set of circumstances or context in which great importance is attributed, mainly social, political and journalistic, to false news or credible versions of facts, appealing to emotions and personal beliefs, to the detriment of verified facts or objective truth (…). Information that is spread or accepted as fact due to…

This text discusses how populism constructed the idea of the working-class based on racial criteria of “whiteness”.

Whiteness is a long-term system, from ancient colonialism to present-day capitalism. Thus, it determines the value of people in the labour market, reproducing the opportunity to exploit third-world countries, migrants, and racial minorities. Because we are now living in a period of racial struggle between deconstruction and reinforcement of white privilege and whiteness as ideology, I cannot finish this essay without looking into a paper that stresses the intersection between whiteness, populism and the working-class (the most racialised category). I am choosing Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter’s 2018 article for that. For the authors, following precedent work, 2016 was a turning point “in the mainstreaming of reactionary and particularly racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic political movements, agendas and discourses” (p. 1). Both Trump’s election and Brexit were grounded on the so-called “working-class”, seen as alienated, white and indigenous. This unidimensional imaginary about the working-class allowed their construction as “the people”, as pointed out by the authors (p.3) and many others. As argued, since the 2008 crisis, we saw a growth of a racialised nationalism based on a “deep sense of loss of prestige; a retreat from the damaging impact of a globalized world that is no longer recognizable, no longer British’.” (idem). This placed a severe trauma on white people since it meant a decline of whiteness and a vulnerability to victimisation by others. As a consequence of this racial destabilisation, the campaign for Brexit was focused on the slogan “We want our country back”. For Farage, the victory of the leave was for the good, decent, and ordinary people. In other words: a victory for the British against dangerous immigrants.  In line with a consensus in the literature, Cardoso (idem: 622) places this struggle against immigrants as part of cultural racism embodied in racial nationalism. The concept of immigrant would replace the category of “black” in this racial process. Then, cultural identity was placed in a higher rank than economic…

The concept of Culture Wars was brought from the German term kulturkampf, created in the context of the dispute between Bismarck and the Catholic Church in the 19th century. It refers to the opposite perspectives on life, the role and place of religion in daily affairs, societal models, and values. According to Hunter (1991, 1996) and Wuthnow (1996), the designation of culture wars is related to conflicts about issues related to nonnegotiable conceptions embodied in cultural and moral spheres. As Hunter (1991) points out, the polarisation in American society presents a high risk to democracy since each side positions itself as the owner of the truth. For that reason, I use the idea of the great divide (Ferreira Dias 2022, under press), referring to incompatible worldviews between a globalist left and a nativist right. The core of this division is not based on economic issues but post-material ones. As Fukuyama (2018) stated, if 2oth century left was embracing workers’ rights, welfare programs and redistributive policies, it is now involved in the agenda of marginalised groups – ethnic minorities, immigrants, refugees, women, LGBT. The same operates to the right that once focused on reducing the size of government and promoting the private sector and is now engaged in traditional patriotic identity. The struggle is thicker due to last decade’s globalisation, a world phenomenon that created societies experiencing drastic economic and social changes, becoming diverse and multicultural. The 2008 financial crisis gave room to the emergence of populist parties, both on the left and right. However, Populist Radical Right (PRR) parties and actors played a central role in directing discontent and resentment from a white working class that feels to be left behind and “stolen” by a “corrupt elite” (v.g. Taggart, 2000; Mudde, 2004; Moffitt, 2020). A significant example is the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit (v.g., Mondon/Winter 2018). Thus, the last decades have experienced significant changes in public politics.…

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