“Montag ist wieder Pegida-Tag!”
Pegida’s Community Building and Discursive Strategies
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Abstract
Pegida plays upon the intersectionality of popular discontent in its outrage against cosmopolitan political elites, by using the internet and social media as platforms for a repudiation of traditional parliamentary mechanisms. We may regard this conceit of a virtual polis as a form of antipolitics, expressing impatience with, and contempt for institutional democracy. Far right bloggers exhort followers to violent action across a transnational field of operations as a form of “legitimate” warfare against states they believe to be corrupt. They stage their own identity as a fluid performance of rebellious discontent with government and globalization. Although they invoke an autonomous subjectivity and direct political mandate, they in fact opt for a theatrical simulation of such engagement. The internet and social media allow for the creation of multiple niche markets for reactionary discontent across the lines of age and class. Pegida supporters present a paradox in that they are anti-modern identitarians pining for a mythic Central Europe, regressively protectionist towards the German economy in their demands to close the borders to international trade, exit the Eurozone, and expel refugees, even as they orchestrate a sophisticated event-based, highly modern post-democratic “New Politics 2.0.”
Contributor Notes
Helga Druxes is Professor of German at Williams College. Recent publications include the co-edited volumes Digital Media Strategies of the Far Right Across Europe and North America (Lanham, 2015) and Navid Kermani (Bern, 2016), and articles on female labor migration in documentary film, and literary critiques of neoliberalism.