Rethinking the Public Sphere in an Age of Radical-Right Populism: A Case for Building an Empathetic Public Sphere

With right-wing populist movements gaining ever more traction worldwide, great attention is paid to addressing their exclusionary rhetoric. In this article, I focus on the question how to deal with these radical-right sentiments in our public debates. Believing that both exclusion and inclusion of right-wing populist voices wield counter-productive effects, I juxtapose Habermas’s public sphere theory to Mouffe’s model of agonistic pluralism and posit that both are ultimately insufficient to tackle the populist danger, albeit for different reasons. However, by synthesizing Mouffe’s model with the ideas of Zygmunt Bauman and Iris Marion Young, I introduce the concept of an empathetic public sphere as a model for creating minimal common grounds between right-wing populist “selves” and the “others” they oppose. Finally, I then move this normative model into the realm of media and communication studies and assess how empathetic storytelling might be given shape in today’s fragmented media ecology.