Traditionalizing in political positioning contemporary elites: temporal dimensions

The article examines the role of traditionalizing as an ambivalent process of narrative ordering of collective ideas over time in the political positioning of contemporary political elites. The digitalization of plitical communications increases the variability of “ideas of time”. It requires new ways of thematizing the conflict between the traditional and the innovative in the political and cultural dynamics of contemporary elites. Political elites in different national communities are guided by varying criteria of “repetition” and “continuity” associated with the perception of the pace of political change and expectations of the “present” and “future”. In this regard, the study of the relationship between the “temporal regimes” of political memory and the processes of tradition, the ambivalent process of searching for and ensuring a regime of political continuity, with the binary coding of political communications as “conservative/progressive”, acquires particular significance. Temporal regimes of political communications form according to the homogenization of temporal ideas in communities, creating more stable conditions for a sustainable combination of ideas about the relationship between the past, present, and future. Traditionalizing plays an important role in institutionalizing and maintaining political solidarity, serving as an important cultural resource for the temporal structuring of the political sphere and the opposition to political inversion and arbitrariness in the activity of elites. The processes occurring in the national memory of contemporary communities influenced by the crisis of the temporal regime of the “new time” and articulated by contemporary neoliberal elites, significantly increase the risks of political asynchronization. As a result, political elites and other political actors are increasingly losing the ability to effectively control traditionalizing, replacing it with radical conservative traditionalization or progressivism. Drawing on cultural sociology and anthropology of politics as a methodological basis, I propose new theoretical approaches to the role of temporal dimensions in studying the reproduction of political traditions and the positioning of contemporary elites in the face of neoliberal digitalization strategies.

temporal dimensions, temporal regimes, political memory, digitalization, political positioning, political elites, political traditions, traditionalizing, temporal crisis