Vulnerability and the discourse of ‘forgotten people’: populism, population and cultural change

ABSTRACT

Contemporary populist political rhetoric often makes use of a concept of a ‘forgotten people’ or a ‘silent majority’, who are constructed as a subset of population and often utilized as an electoral base by populist leaders, particularly in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The concept emerged in the Twentieth Century and has undergone substantial re-configuration alongside other cultural emerges of the past fifty years. Among them is the re-configuration of the ‘forgotten people’ from being positioned to perceive themselves as a stoic, hard-working, domestic and normative middle-class to a group figured through a racial or ethnic ‘authenticity’ yet called upon to perceive themselves as vulnerable, precarious and at risk to both intellectual elites and marginalized groups including particularly migrants. Using cultural studies approaches, this paper examines some of those shifts in Australian and United States political discourse, how the concept of vulnerability is imputed for political ends, and the value of a more nuanced investigation of the affectively felt attachment to populist discourse among supporters as a form of identity practice. The paper aims to provide a more nuanced framework for scholarly understanding of, and intervention in, contemporary western populism.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• population
• identity
• cultural studies
• vulnerability

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

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Rob Cover

Rob Cover is Professor of Digital Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is Chief Investigator on a current Australian Research Council Discovery Project investigating the role of on-screen representation of gender- and sexually diverse themes narratives in the production of social change, inclusivity and diversity, and an ARC Linkage Project investigation health, support and mobility of internal migrants. Recent books include: Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (Routledge 2012), Vulnerability and Exposure: Footballer Scandals, Masculine Identity and Ethics (UWAP 2015), Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self (Elsevier, 2016), and Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Gender and Relationships in a Digital Era (Routledge 2019), Flirting in the Era of #MeToo: Negotiating Intimacy (with A Bartlett and K Clarke, Palgrave 2019) and Population, Mobility and Belonging (Routledge 2020). He is co-editor of the anthology Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship (Routledge 2019).