Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

It's hard to disagree with the introduction to this article, so I'll quote it in full:

"In the last three decades, we have witnessed a gradual but consistent return to prominence of extreme right, authoritarian & #fascist views, values & politics across the world."

"Whereas the #fascist authoritarian extreme right was a marginal political phenomenon in many democratic countries 30 years ago, it has in a relatively short period of time become a strong, powerful and emboldened segment of the mainstream right...

...with ideas and viewpoints once considered deviant and morally repugnant today confidently asserted as 'the new common sense' and increasingly shaping public policy."

"It only suffices to refer to current immigration policies, more frequent attacks on independent judicial powers, the undermining & delegitimisation of democratic processes, the increased curtailment of press freedoms, & the criminalisation of protest as cases in point."
#Rwanda

"This has – in part – been achieved through waging a long-term Gramscian war of position geared towards the re-normalisation of racist and fascist ideologies."

"The focus here is how this normalisation is coupled with a strategic and persistent abnormalisation of those that contest and fight racist, sexist and fascist ideologies."

"The discursive mechanisms through which this abnormalisation is achieved will be unpacked & exposed by analysing the so-called ‘anti-woke culture war’ discourse using a combination of political discourse analysis, discourse-historical approach & discourse-conceptual analysis."

"Empirically the 'war on woke' discourse will be analysed with respect to the UK political context, but this discourse is prevalent in many other countries too."

"The analysis highlights the way in which the anti-woke culture war as metapolitics has permeated and increasingly come to define mainstream public discourse in the UK (but as briefly mentioned above this is not confined to the UK)."

"It focuses on what Krzyżanowski and Ledin (2017) have called ‘borderline discourses’; where civility and uncivility meet, where mainstream politics and media and an anti-democratic extreme right cross-modulate, and where ultimately normalisation is being achieved."

"Since the so-called ‘anti-woke culture war’ is waged by a variety of political actors – or moral entrepreneurs as Cohen denoted them – it was important to construct a corpus comprised of the voices of politicians from the Conservative party who are the driving political force...

pushing the so-called war on woke, but also of journalists from right-wing media who actively mediate & amplify this discourse. In this regard, the start-up of a new national news broadcaster which explicitly calls itself ‘anti-woke’, was also deemed relevant to include."

"Besides newspaper columns, interviews and a speech in Parliament, a more ideological document entitled ‘Conservative Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age’, which extensively deploys the culture war discourse, was also included."