Abstract
This article explores historical victimhood as a feature of contemporary populist discourse. It is about how populist leaders invoke meta-history to make self-victimising claims as a means for consolidating power. I argue that historical victimhood propagates a forked historical consciousness – a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil – that enables the projection of alleged victimhood into the past and the future, while the present is portrayed as a regenerating fateful choice between humiliation and a promised golden age. I focus on the cases of the United States and Turkey and examine two key speeches delivered by presidents Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2017. My case-study approach aims to show how the same narrative form of historical victimhood, with its temporal logic and imaginary, latches on widely different contexts and political cultures with the effect of conflating the leader with the people, solidifying divisions in society, and threatening opponents.
Highlights
With the global rise of populist politics since the 2016 Brexit vote and the US Trump election, tropes of self-victimisation have become a common discursive feature across different political systems
I focus on US President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to examine how populist leaders make the same discursive use of history as a temporal template of collective decline versus ascent in order to mobilise their base against political opponents
My aim is to explain the logic of historical victimhood and how it gets deployed in political speech
Summary
With the global rise of populist politics since the 2016 Brexit vote and the US Trump election, tropes of self-victimisation have become a common discursive feature across different political systems. The choice of these two vastly different countries is to demonstrate how their leaders rely on the same narrative form of historical victimhood and how that interacts with each country’s political culture (Taş, 2020).
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