Populism, religion, and distorted communication

Abstract

This paper addresses right-wing populist mobilization against Islam and Muslims. Taking up the example of the 2017 electoral campaigns of the Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany, it highlights that some right-wing parties phrase their rejection of Islam in a decidedly liberal and democratic language: They demand certain constraints for Muslim organizations and Muslim citizens; but rather than phrasing this as an illiberal infringement of Muslims’ rights, they justify these constraints as necessary for the defense of liberal democracy against an anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian, and anti-democratic Islam. This begs the question how to distinguish a legitimate critical discourse on religion that should be welcomed in a democratic public sphere from discriminatory discourse veiled in a democratic language. The paper takes up four theoretical approaches to tackle this problem: the concept of right-wing populism as an ideology centered around a nativist notion of the people, Habermas’s normative political theory of religion in the public sphere, the concept of Islamophobia as prejudice, and the theory of anti-Muslim racism as hegemonic discourse. Each of these approaches contributes to the task of making a distinction between democratic criticism and veiled discriminatory discourse, but each of them has their shortcomings. Therefore, the paper suggests combining their strengths by unifying them under the Habermasian concept of systematically distorted communication. The paper ends with the hypothesis that present-day discursive negotiations around Islam in Germany take place under systematically distorted conditions of communication, producing discrimination and marginalization and that the populist mobilization of the Alternative for Germany builds on an exacerbates this distortion.