The "Underdog" versus the Shadowy Power Bloc: An Epistemic Governance Approach to the Right-Wing Populist Discourse Around the "Deep State"

Abstract

Since 2017, the use of the term “deep state” has become widespread in the political discourse of the United States, where the media environment is asymmetrically polarized into hyper partisan outlets that defend president Donald Trump and “mainstream” outlets that remain critical of Trump. The “deep state”, a term that was used before to denote and to criticize an entrenched power elite within governments, has been adapted as a way of attacking the perceived adversaries of Trump in the government and elsewhere (Benkler et al., 2018). This study is an attempt to make sense of the discourse around the term and to understand the strategies of influence utilized by actors on the right aiming to defend or promote Trump and to undermine his perceived adversaries. To understand how these strategies rely on influencing and working on others’ perceptions of reality, I utilize the theoretical framework of epistemic governance. As the starting point of my analysis, I use the so-called “Higgins memo”, a political memo written by an NSC official who was later ousted, while primarily focusing on two hyper partisan sites: Breitbart News and InfoWars. As a complementary effort to the qualitative analysis which draws from the methodological approaches of discourse analysis and rhetorical analysis, I use the Media Cloud platform and social network analysis to examine the networks of “deep state” stories in 2017 and 2018. I conceptualize the discourse around the “deep state” as right-wing populist in that it constructs a Manichean dichotomy between the virtuous “people”, with Donald Trump as their leader and to some extent as their savior, as well as an illegitimate, immoral, amorphous and powerful “other” that is to varying degrees seen to be conspiring against the “people”. The discourse is therefore primarily about identifying the “other” as a means of constructing and uniting an in-group that is struggling against the out-group. The “other” is weaved together and gains its intimidating but illegitimate character through the construction of conspiracy between and within the different elements that it consists of, while Trump and various media and political actors supporting him are portrayed as the underdogs and the true representatives of the "people". Throughout the discourse, the “other” retains its amorphous character which allows for the identification of various individuals and organizations as parts of it. Yet, there is large variance in the explicitness and implicitness and conspiratorial tone of the descriptions, some being directly hostile to the perceived enemies and portraying a vast threat from them, while some reporting on what they do. The arguments that aim to persuade audiences rely on a variety of rhetorical strategies and ways attaching authority to both the claims that are made and the actors that are promoted. While these arguments primarily appeal to or construct charismatic authority, other components of authority are also utilized. At the same time, the rhetoric attempts to undermine the authority of perceived enemies, mainly those currently or formerly in the government and the institutions that they have represented by primarily presenting them as immoral and illegitimate. As such, the discourse reflects a divided society in which right-wing populist discourses provide powerful strategies of influence.