Pandemic, Demagoguery, and Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Vol. 30 - 2023, No. 1
Guest Edited by Robert L. Ivie
Dissenting Democratically from Trump’s Toxic Tropes
The discourse of democracy is displaced, and authoritarianism advanced, by Donald Trump’s demagogic trope of racial warfare. Democratic agency is further eroded by images of disease, deployed by both Trump and his critics and contextualised by a viral pandemic. To the extent Trumpism is a rhetorical phenomenon, there is reason to consider its toxic tropes in relation to healthy figures of democratic polity. Democracy itself is a slippery term that revolves around various notions of popular sovereignty, self-rule, community, equality, pluralism, reciprocity, and deliberation. It is a politics of contestation in which deliberation does not occur when adversaries are alienated and common ground is vacated or destroyed. The question, then, is which tropes might political actors draw on to rebuild and occupy common ground, especially to defuse the divisive figure of racial warfare promoted by Trumpism. One answer is that democratic dissent’s affirming gesture (as counterpart to its discordant gesture) can draw on a commonplace of complementarity. This is well illustrated by Stacey Abrams’ reply to Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the Union Address, a response in which she located racial complementarity within a complex of democratic values of inclusion, fairness, hard work, opportunity, community, justice, and mutual benefit.
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"Health Dictatorship" and "Civil Disobedience": Political Extremists and French Debates on Democracy During Covid-19
This paper explores a polemical debate that took place in France during the Covid-19 crisis, around two formulas: “health dictatorship” (dictature sanitaire) and “civil disobedience.” It first analyses the arguments that justify their use; it then explores the verbal confrontation where Proponents and Opponents attack each other’s stance, thus shedding light on important issues that underlie the discussion on the anti-Corona health measures: the nature and limits of democracy, the question of authority and obedience in a democratic regime. In the third step, the paper examines the actors behind the roles of Proponent and Opponent, namely, political figures and movements. A difference is drawn between the extremists and the candidates for the 2022 Presidential elections who supported the protest but did not adopt the formulas for fear of compromising themselves. However, the fact that the extremist voices and the voices of ordinary citizens merged in the same protest threatens to whitewash trends that used to be outside the Republican consensus and to bring the French closer to them. This risk calls for a better training in rhetorical analysis allowing the citizens to protect themselves from the manipulation of the authoritarian politicians who pose as the champions of Liberty.
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At the Boundaries of Authority and Authoritarianism in the Welfare State: News Coverage of Alt. Health Influencers During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Battles over who holds authority to speak on health issues have been recurrent since the outbreak of Covid-19. This article investigates how the voices of alt. health influencers have been handled within the news-mediated public sphere during the pandemic. Alt. health influencers illustrate how new forms of authority are claimed and negotiated on social media, and how their ideas circulate quickly in the broader public discourse with potential risks to health, security, and stability. We focus on the Nordic welfare context, which is characterised by citizens putting great trust in societal institutions such as politics, healthcare, and professional news media. In the news coverage, the arguments of alt. health influencers have been consistently disputed by the experts and authorities of the welfare state, including the news media themselves. This has created a polarised debate. Alt. health influencers have criticised the news media, health authorities, big tech, etc. for having authoritarian traits. Meanwhile, they themselves have promoted authoritarian lines of thinking by contesting democratic forms of governance, professional news media, and scientific knowledge. This study ultimately shows that even in a high-trust, consensual welfare state, the boundaries between authority and authoritarianism are up for debate.
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Neofascist “Thugs” Pandemic Protests Populisms: Giorgia Meloni’s Cerchiobottismo and the Rise of Fratelli D’Italia During the Pandemic
In this essay, I examine the rise to power of Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), the populist far right Italian party led by Giorgia Meloni, in the 2022 election. I first situate FdI’s victory in the complex context of the Italian experience of the pandemic—exploring the erosion of the democratic sentiment in Italy after COVID-19 and the mutual influences of crises and the shaky anti-establishment and anti-intellectual epistemologies of populisms. I then proceed to examine Meloni’s recurring rhetorical strategy to deal with FdI’s problematic relationship to fascist heritage during the electoral campaign. Specifically, I analyse Meloni’s rhetorical maneuvers as instances of cerchiobottismo. Cerchiobottismo is an Italian term that explains the practice of strategic ambiguity typical of seasoned politicians that can juggle two sides, telling both sides that they are partially wrong, without compromising too much of the rhetor’s own position. In the second part of this essay, I unpack Meloni’s cerchiobottista rhetorics in a set of three significant examples in relation to the 2022s election and the controversies over fascism to illustrate how Meloni rejected the repeated public accusations of fascist nostalgia in her party, while boosting FdI’s electoral appeal among a moderate electorate and also reassuring international stakeholders.
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The Appeal of Far Right Pandemic Politics: A Southern Europe Case
The literature associates the pandemic with populist far right parties' growth, creating the conditions for democracy weakening. The pandemic must be seen, thus, as more than a natural or medical-scientific issue given its political impact. In that sense, the pandemic politics, that is, the way governments managed the COVID-19 crisis, can be seen as a kind of “bare-life-politics,” characterised by preserving life for life’s sake. This means that governments, given the urgency of the threat, were less concerned with proposing fairer forms of economy or better modes of living. In this vein, an important political and media hegemonic topic took over discourse: “life vs. economy.” This false dichotomy suggested that the economic means were unimportant for life, given that a bare life does not need much to survive. Meanwhile, far-right politics claimed that mere survival is not enough as a political promise because an economy must promise to life. Far-right politics, given the exceptional pandemic context, appeared opportunistically and paradoxically as infusing more transformative promises for political life than the political parties responsible for managing the pandemic. These far right-wing movements show that politics cannot survive if reduced to a biological business of keeping people simply alive.
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Politicising Death in the Covid-19 Outbreak: AKP Necropolitics and Right-Authoritarianism in Turkey
This study deals with the AKP (Justice and Development Party) right-authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey, as seen from the perspective of necropolitics. It examines the relationships between politics and death, asking the question of how such relationships fell into an authoritarian character adversely influencing democracy and democratic values. For this, the study centres on the AKP government’s response to the pandemic crisis, discussed as a manifestation of necropolitics. The paper explains the concept of necropolitics and underlines two of its fundamental characteristics: state of exception and creation of enemy. The paper focuses on these two traits to frame and critique the AKP’s right-authoritarian politics during the COVID-19 outbreak. The aim of the analysis is to show how AKP politics has politicised death, bearing in mind the social and political opposition’s moves against such politics in Turkey.
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The Soft Homogenisation of Democracy in India: Studying the Role and Long-Term Impact of Right-Wing Demagoguery During the Covid-19 Pandemic
The de-focalisation of reporting and the focalisation of post-truth ideology is antithetical to the tenets of democracy. It reverts to the traditional centralised propagation of one truth, one reality, and one perspective while contracting, negating, or antagonising the possibility of alternative and parallel narratives. The right wing has created a narrative of suspicion, which is based on the conviction that anything deviating from the traditional cultural patterns is a contamination of the ethos of one’s own native values, a deviation from the nativity, and hence an influence that needs to be disposed of. The ongoing Covid pandemic has magnified the narrative of post-truth through the use of sensationalism as an effective modus operandi. The blinding of the truth is rampant as news outlets are being guarded by right-wing gatekeepers and sensationalism is used to reflect the surging emotions of a public already gripped by a precarious reality. This paper examines the three primary and seemingly independent threats to democracy during the pandemic in India: de-focalisation of reporting, coerced homogeneity based on religion and language, and sensationalism. It addresses the question of how adversity is turned into a breeding ground for demagoguery.
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The Mask of War and the War of Masks: The Fabricated Culture War Gets Deadly
In the US, mask wearing, while opposed and evaded by people all over the political spectrum (albeit not equally), was disproportionately associated with reactionary political affiliation, especially in its most demagogic and violent forms. Anti-mask demagoguery associated mask wearing and mask mandates with communism, Nazism, satanism, genocide, suicide and a war on America. This article argues that this demagoguery was not unique to masks or COVID-19, but the rhetorical consequence of the pro-GOP strategic repurposing of twentieth-century anti-communist demagoguery. This demagoguery (which arose after World War I) framed all policy disagreements, not as issues with multiple legitimate perspectives that could be argued qua policies, but as battles in an apocalyptic war between good and evil, and therefore beyond normal political disagreement.
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Holocaust Distortion During the Global Pandemic: An Exercise in Anti-Democratic Demagoguery
Far-right demagogues, including Thomas Massie (R-KY), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) have compared COVID related mandates to Nazi-era policies that restricted the movement of Jewish peoples, have repeatedly evoked the image of the concentration camp tattoo, and have referenced the Nazi’s T4 programme that mandated the forced sterilisation of people with disabilities. This rhetorical strategy is a form of Holocaust distortion, the active excusing, minimisation, or misrepresentation of the Holocaust for political purposes. This essay explores how right-wing politicians use Holocaust distortion as a rhetorical strategy during the global pandemic, to the detriment of democratic deliberation. Our analysis focuses on the tactics of Holocaust distortion: hyperbole, comparison, argument by analogy, and the slippery slope fallacy. We suggest that COVID-19 era related Holocaust distortion has grave consequences for democratic life in the United States. We recommend adaptations in our cultural and scholarly communication practices that may help resist the demagogic logics of Holocaust denial.
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