Defining New Populisms: Causes, Characteristics and Trajectories. Australia and Beyond

Adding yet another comparative angle to the discussion, Australian cultural and political historian Stephen Alomes delineates the global development of populisms from an Antipodean viewpoint. In his perception, three “causal explanations” of the “new populisms” are of primary relevance because it is they that shape current discourses: the neoliberal economy; the digital revolution, and in its wake, what Alomes calls the “tabloidization of all media,” including the so-called social media, whose hallmarks are a shift from textual to visual communication, as well as genres such as emotive, negative-attack news stories, memes, and tweets, all of which lend themselves to populist rhetoric favoring images and slogans. According to Alomes, the fear and threat of alleged “dissenters” and “invaders,” such as refugees, mark a continuity from old Cold War populisms to today’s “new populisms” in the global West. The latter includes Australia’s “penal populism” encountered by Asian and Arab refugees that we meet in Behrouz Boochani’s autobiographical literary account (see Deringer, Chapter 16 in this volume). With respect to the Australian scene, Alomes further differentiates between mainstream Right populism, which grew out of established conservative parties, and New Right populism, which constitutes a separate phenomenon.