A Deconstructionist Reading of Populist Claims Related to Covid-19: A Rhetorical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Rhetoric at the ontological level—for instance, the way in which hegemony is structured like speech—is a tool that can be used to give meaning to narratives such as the medical populist claims that arose in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Although these populist claims ranged from explicitly trivial conspiracies to rational demands about healthcare, outside the truth–falsity binaries we can explain how the narratives functioned metaphorically to gain acceptability. While guarding against linguistic reductionism, but considering that hegemony works like grammar, rhetorical discourse analysis, inspired by the work of Ernesto Laclau, is used to read the metaphorical transformation of disinformation into “rational” demands and the construction of enemy outsiders to stabilise this populist hegemony. Through a metaphoric mechanism, disinformation is converted to information and linked to rational demands, which enables what is otherwise irrational to become believable. This linking is achieved through disinformation and rational demands metaphorically substituting each other to become what they are not in their literal form. Thereafter, the metaphorical meaning loses its metaphoricity, allowing the disinformation to become catachrestic and to be taken as literal or genuine knowledge. Several cases are cited to illustrate concrete examples of knowledge generated through metaphorical contamination of rational demands with disinformation.