The Turkish Knowledge Trap: Populist Resentment as Elite-Counterelite Collaboration

We examine how populist politicians in power produce mass resentment of cultural capital-rich counterelites by comparing three battles in Turkey’s culture war. Investigating how these battles unfolded on Twitter and on a very large online forum, we demonstrate that the production of resentment may require the tacit collaboration of the same counterelites that populists demonize. One way for populists to trap counterelites into participation, we find, is by provoking them to participate in encounters that preserve their dominance of objectified cultural capital at the expense of political power. Populism should thus be viewed interactionally: its relative strength is an ongoing, cumulative and uncertain outcome of numerous three-way interactions in specific, highly variable sites. Since the macrosociological orientation of extant scholarship is unlikely to capture the dynamics of those sites, populism studies will benefit from developing a more substantial microsociological component.