A New Social Contract Deep in the Anthropocene: Discourse and Emotional Mechanisms in the Building of and Contesting the Illiberal Social Contract

The (counter) hegemonic new right challenges the status quo because it precisely seeks to offer a new social contract. It claims that the bases of the current order are illegitimate. The elites in power – or the liberal elites in multinational organisations – are remote from the people, making the current contract with liberal democracy and the few remaining welfare states not valid. This article discusses the dimensions of the social contract: disregard for the climate change, neo-conservative family values, selective welfare, military social contract, alter-science attitudes and illiberal democracy. It investigates what are the bases of the arguments for and against the new illiberal social contract, recognises the way in which this has been argued through emotional mechanisms of ressentement, stolen pride and jouissance. The paper particularly draws on data from the European Parliamentary Elections in 2024 gathered in the horizon projects CO3 and PLEDGE, and the ways in which the red-green contestation of the illiberal stance and the discursive bases of the social contract was visible in the short videos circulating around in three types of different political feeds in various countries in the European public sphere. It also uses the LaclauGPT LLM pipeline results of this TikTok and Instagram data and demonstrates how a populist discourse is operationalised in the putting forward of the vision. Finally, the paper gives evidence of how policy measures in EU and its member states, as well as the illiberalising democracies or electoral autocracies around the world implement the vision for an illiberal social contract.