The Action, “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. To investigate the BCCs in this historical moment, the Action examined political and civil discourses in three contexts: the 2016 U.S. presidential campaigns; the Brexit referendum’s Leave and Remain campaigns; and the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in 2015 and the backlash protests it precipitated during the first quarter of 2024.
