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.

中文翻译：

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在激进右翼民粹主义时代重新思考公共领域：建立善解人意的公共领域的案例

随着右翼民粹主义运动在全球范围内获得越来越多的关注，人们对解决他们的排他性言论给予了极大的关注。在这篇文章中，我关注的问题是如何在我们的公开辩论中处理这些激进的右翼情绪。相信排斥和包容右翼民粹主义声音都会产生适得其反的效果，我将哈贝马斯的公共领域理论与莫菲的竞争多元主义模型并列，并假设两者最终都不足以应对民粹主义的危险，尽管原因不同。然而，通过将莫菲的模型与齐格蒙特·鲍曼和艾里斯·马里昂·杨的思想相结合，我引入了移情公共领域的概念，作为在右翼民粹主义“自我”和他们反对的“他者”之间建立最小共同点的模型。最后，