We Will Be Great Again: Historical Victimhood in Populist Discourse
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. Omar Al-Ghazzi argues 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. He focusses on the cases of the United States and Turkey and examines two key speeches delivered by presidents Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2017. His 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.
