‘Shrieking Sirens’: The proliferation of superlabels in contemporary popular culture and politics

This comment offers insight into the ‘origins’ and implications of the proliferation of terms – understood in social psychology as labels of primary potency – as they have appeared in the rhetoric of Andrew Tate, Viktor Orbán and the discourse surrounding the Brexit campaign. Superlabels foster democratic erosion, societal division and human rights violations at the systemic level. They further create a deeply entrenched climate of resentment, hostility and anger that enables verbal and physical violence in daily life through demonizing individuals by attaching a limited repertoire of derogatory terms and imagery to the group to which they belong.