Progressives can redeploy left vocabulary to defend an autocratic populist regime.

Evidence

Meanwhile, defenders of the Erdoğan project scrambled to declare that the situation here was very different from the movements it was echoing. In an article for Al Jazeera entitled “Taksim Square Is Not Tahrir Square,” two university professors pointed to the presence of radical Kemalists in the square and claimed they were using the revolt to overthrow a government that had “revolutionized center-periphery relations.” This was the language of the intellectual left, being deployed to shore up Erdoğan’s AKP. “As anthropologists and Marxist academics,” they wrote, “we observe that the AK Party still holds the support of the subaltern, the real subjects of a possible revolution. Since 2002, the people on Turkey’s periphery have become the centre. Today’s chaos threatens to reverse this.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 351

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the pattern from earlier protest chapters where regimes absorb and repurpose movement language; also parallels the anti-imperialist justifications of authoritarian states in other books in my library. — connects to: Populist enthusiasts can convert into informants against their former allies — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 11; The alt-right inverted sixties antiestablishment defiance against progressive institutions. — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 451; What was progressive in one era can become politically backward in another — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 130 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The alt-right inverted sixties antiestablishment defiance against progressive institutions. #exemplifies (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 451
• Populism can be mobilized either against or in service of the power bloc #qualifies (0.79)
• What was progressive in one era can become politically backward in another #complicates (0.78) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 130
• The populist left sought to re-democratize democracy, not abolish capitalism #complicates (0.75) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 122
• Populist enthusiasts can convert into informants against their former allies #expands (0.74) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 11