ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the supply-side populist nationalism, focusing on processes of racialization. While the populist nationalist parties do not create prolonged crises of economy and migration, they exploit them. Examining discourses and practices propagated by Ukip’s Brexit campaign and the Trump presidential campaign, the chapter demonstrates how the figure of the non-white, (predominantly) Muslim migrant served to rejuvenate violent imaginaries of ethno-racial and religious-civilizational difference. While local supporters of Ukip primarily expressed concern about the impact of European integration and the free movement on people upon their jobs, welfare and culture, the party translated these grievances into an elevated politics of fear that marked Muslim migrants as ethno-religious threats to imagined sameness. While populist nationalists did not seek to reinforce national identity around a whiteness that was explicitly racially marked, the arguments about the need to protect ‘our cultural heritage and Christian civilization’ reinforced whiteness as a basis of inclusion. Populist nationalist politicians essentialized the ‘ordinary people’, moving them symbolically from the structural margins of society to the forefront of the nation in the image of its ethno-religious defender.