Abstract
Emotions have always been invested in politics. Politicians and politically biased public intellectuals manage citizens’ emotions for various purposes: to alienate them from the rival political camp and to make them participate in elections or in politics in general. <em>Ressentiment</em> is an affective style of great political potential and it is present throughout democratic European societies. By analysing the discourses of the culture war between the political camps in Hungary since 2018, this article presents the components, drivers, mechanisms, and some typical outcomes of <em>ressentiment</em> on the levels of the individual and the political communities. It argues that in political communication both political sides are trying to appeal to the citizens’ <em>ressentiment</em>. Both camps use communicative means to incite, channel, and reorient <em>ressentiment</em> by, e.g., scapegoating, identity work, and transvaluation to attract citizens, stabilize their own support, and nudge followers towards specific political activities.
Highlights
Political communication has always been used to man‐ age emotions
Since ressentiment is accompanied by self‐deception, denial, and repression, those who appeal to ressentiment may do so uncon‐ sciously; it is unlikely that the sentiment and the political communications efforts to manage it can be discerned directly, in contradistinction to primary emo‐ tions, such as joy, anger, or fear
One could see the obsessive sensitivities towards the signs of injustice, the discourses on pow‐ erlessness, and the outcomes of ressentiment: transval‐ uation, self‐contradiction, self‐victimization, and scape‐ goating
Summary
Political communication has always been used to man‐ age emotions. Plato underlined the dangers of dema‐ goguery, Aristotle, in turn, advised on how to influence emotions, reasoning that “the emotions are all those affections which cause men to change their opinion in regard to their judgements” (Aristotle, 1990, 1378a). Since the reception of Damasio’s works (1994) by the social sciences, political science and political communication studies have extensively scrutinized the links between emotions and politics (e.g., Braud, 1996; Demertzis, 2013). Istic of the research so far is the dominance of studies on basic or primary emotions (TenHouten, 2007) such as fear, anger, or joy. Some have studied secondary emo‐ tions, such as hatred or hope, but more complex emo‐ tions or affective states in politics are seldom analysed (e.g., Capelos & Demertzis, 2018; Ciulla, 2020; Hoggett, 2018; Hoggett et al, 2013; Salmela & von Scheve, 2017, 2018; TenHouten, 2018; Wimberly, 2018)
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