This article argues that folklore (orally transmitted group knowledge) shapes far-right voting by inculcating feeling rules that resonate with nativist and autocratic ideas. Drawing on recently rediscovered archives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklorists, we pair a dataset of local support for the far-right in all Reichstag elections in Germany’s Weimar period, with unique information on the prevalence of ethnic bogeymen in local folktales. Using spatial autoregressive models, we find a robust and considerable effect of the presence of fearful folktales on radical right voting. These effects are particularly strong for localities where citizens face political and economic threats. We use an instrumental variable analysis drawing on folklore data from the 1860s to establish the long-term roots of this pattern, disentangle the effect of folktales from contemporary political influences, and establish causal order. Our findings suggest that folklore plays a key role in aligning the supply and demand for far-right movements by shaping how citizens see and feel the world around them. In addition, we illustrate that folklore archives provide a unique opportunity to unpack affective-discursive canons across space and time.

In texts, films, paintings and speeches, New Deal policymakers and allied intellectuals deployed biblical language and images to evoke contrition for environmental “sins.” The sins of the fathers, namely the exploitative land use on the part of settlers and agro-capitalists, were now being visited on the Depression generation in the catastrophes not only of wind-born soil erosion (as in the Dust Bowl) but also the more extensive threat of gullying and water-born erosion. New Deal uses of the Bible, we argue, were not an instrumental conceit designed to manipulate hearts and minds. Rather, New Deal environmental thought, even at its seemingly most technocratic, was profoundly embedded within Christian imaginaries of sin and redemption. Scientific and religious modes of authority merged with the offices of state. As such, the soil Jeremiad is one illustration of both the need for and potential benefit of thickening “inter-field” religious and environmental methodologies—a potential we explore in this essay. In historicizing the soil Jeremiad, we also offer an example of how we might better understand the importance of religion for the history of the environmental movement beyond stories from activists’ biographies and move toward a religious-environmental history of the public sphere itself.