Academic far-right studies carried American populism discourse into European media

Evidence

In the 1970s and 1980s a burgeoning field of far-right studies took up the term, which subsequently migrated to Europe’s media pages. Most researchers in this field drew on the work of the historian Richard Hofstadter, who had portrayed American populism as “proto-fascist” in the 1950s. One of the most influential of these academics was the French political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff, who in 1984 labeled the rising National Front as “national-populist,” rather than the old and outworn “fascist.” By the early 1990s, French academia and media were rife with discussions of “le populisme.” In 1994, the Front’s leader Jean-Marie Le Pen eagerly claimed the term for himself, finding it less tainted than the fascist label—a stigma the party was now anxious to cast off. “If it stands for ‘speaking for the people’,” Le Pen quipped to a journalist, “then I certainly am a populist.” — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 66

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how analytic concepts migrate from political science into activist and media vocabulary, echoing the ‘banana republic’ coinage spread and the lexicon-of-bigotry debates in the reader’s other books. — connects to: Academic definitions of populism have spawned a media industry resembling personality-test astrology — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 48; Academics carried the word populism from America to Europe — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 66
• SEED: A usable angle: how academic rebranding of fringe movements (fascist to populist) launders legitimacy — parallel to Le Pen eagerly adopting the scholar’s softer label.

Broader Connections

• Academics carried the word populism from America to Europe #expands (0.95) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 66