Code_Flux

The problem/issue addressed:

Cultural Codes in Crisis: Unsettled Civil Spheres in Brexit, the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, and the 2017 German Federal Election, or Code_Flux, investigates the processes by which politics and public sentiments lurched rightward in many European and American countries during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Far-right political candidates and social movements gained support from wider swaths of nations’ publics, who themselves evidenced newfound appetites for anti-establishment and normatively transgressive messaging or “discourse.” Organizations, trade relations, and security pacts designed to cultivate international cooperation and integration came under increasing attack. Public discourse grew replete with themes of redoubling physical and legal barriers to nations’ borders, and expressions of support for multicultural commitments to diversity and inclusion receded or, when expressed, were increasingly met with opposition tinged with conspiratorial accusations of demographic replacement and cultural erasure. Developed in this context, the Code_Flux Action was designed with the objective of investigating such swells of rightwing populism, ethnonational, and isolationism in western democracies, ones which had ostensibly “progressed” beyond such reactionary impulses.

Investigating and understanding these dynamics is important because past iterations of such developments have been marked by democratic backsliding manifest in attacks on, for instance, legal protections for a free press, the autonomy of the judiciary, and the integrity of democratic elections. Such processes have also contributed to the marginalization of minority and out-groups, and entrenched power and resource imbalances rooted in unjust, anti-pluralistic criteria such as primordial or ethnic-identity traits. In their most radical manifestations, they have precipitated armed conflicts between nations, and facilitated the oppression, if not the systematic elimination, of minority publics within nations formally committed to democratic rules and norms. The research performed in Code_Flux’s Work Packages contributes to identifying such processes and preventing such backsliding.

The objectives of Code_Flux have been twofold. 1. Empirically, the Action has aimed to gain a better understanding of how such conditions develop, and to diagnosis if, and the extent to which, contemporary European and North American publics have abandoned their commitments to democratic institutions and inclusive, pluralistic civil societies. 2. Theoretically: the Action draws on Civil Sphere Theory (CST), societalization theory, and the concept of Binary Cultural Codes (BCCs), to specify foundational discursive elements – or especially powerful words and symbols -- that control, anchor, and organize the political and civil sentiments of publics within these western democratic social orders. In this regard, the Action’s objective has been to identify if and how the BCCs are operating in three nations’ political discourses, and to diagnose the extent to which their publics remain committed to democratic sentiments and institutions. In specifying these foundational cultural elements in three national contexts’, the Action lends tremendous insight into a central question animating contemporary cultural sociology.

To locate and investigate the BCCs in this historical moment, the Action examined political and civil discourses in three contexts: 1. The campaigns for the presidency in the United States in 2016 and 2020; 2. The campaigns preceding the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom; and 3. The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in 2015 and the backlash protests it precipitated during the first quarter of 2024.

In terms of research results, regarding case study 1, the work demonstrates how then-presidential candidate Donald Trump introduced flux into the foundational cultural form of the BCCs by asserting that he would conform to its democratic tenets in his relations with his supporters while simultaneously embodying the BCC’s antidemocratic traits in relation to their foreign and domestic enemies. Research results from case study 2, or the Brexit case, contribute to contemporary political analysis by illustrating how the BCCs serve as foundational forms upon which rightwing populist narratives are assembled. In contrast to the U.S. case, by broadly voicing commitments to democratic principles, Johnson resisted persuading his supporters to commit more thoroughly to antidemocratic sentiments. Work on the German case, or case study 3, yielded fascinating and counterintuitive results that explain the success of the AfD to date. As in the U.S. case, the research revealed that AfD leaders are introducing flux with the BCCs by casting themselves as the true carriers of its democratic traits and coding their establishment opposition as antidemocratic and dangerous.

Work performed in WPs 5-8 provided training in the interpretive method of structural hermeneutics and the computational tools of R Studio and Python. Attending multiple training sessions offered via Zoom through Yale University’s Office of Career Strategy and Center for Teaching & Learning, the Fellow acquired new skills in event- and online-identity management, and gained new techniques for improving teaching and mentoring. The Fellow facilitated the transfer of knowledge by assisting two Yale graduate students and a postdoc through the revision of article manuscripts and into publication. During the incoming phase at the University of Trento, the Fellow contributed to a prospective graduate student gaining acceptance to a Ph.D. program, and explained civil sphere theory to graduate students and postdocs seeking to work within the framework. Additionally, during a research dissemination trip to Lund University, Sweden, the Fellow transferred knowledge by guiding an early career researcher seeking to apply for a research stay at Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology.

The research in Code_Flux moves beyond the state of the art by introducing a new approach to populism, one that situates the phenomenon within civil sphere theory, or a broader social theoretical framework than is typically used. Introducing a theory of societalized politics, Code_Flux also moves beyond the state of the art in civil sphere theory by specifying how populist discourse cultivates crisis sentiments within the civil sphere itself. Finally, Code_Flux also moves beyond the start of the art by introducing a comparative dimension to BCCs analysis.

Through its theoretical and conceptual innovations and empirical results, the research in Code_Flux will contribute to future researchers’ capacities to diagnosis if, and the extent to which, nations’ publics may be abandoning their commitments to democratic institutions and inclusive, pluralistic civil societies.