The Ordinariness of January 6

Rhetorics of Participation in Antidemocratic Culture

Dados Bibliográficos

ID22264409
AutoresDiren Valayden (0000-0001-9625-9794, Binghamton University), Belinda Walzer (Binghamton University), Alexandra S Moore (Binghamton University)
Ano2024
Volume2
Fascículo1
Data de publicação2024-07-02
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Right-Wing Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2770-9698 • E-ISSN: 2770-9698
EditoraCalifornia Digital Library (CDL) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5070/rw3.1512
OpenAlexW4400223067
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas27

The January 6, 2021, Capitol riot appeared as an extraordinary and shocking event to many American citizens. In fact, the various framings of the riot such as “insurrection,” “sedition,” or “domestic terrorism” seem to confirm the unprecedented nature of the day. By contrast, in this article we argue that January 6 can be understood in terms of its ordinariness, that is, as “the most ordinary thing that could happen” when viewed in the context of right-wing politics. We first argue that the reliance on a universalized dichotomy between authoritarianism and democracy in current research on right-wing politics in the United States tends to reify those terms, and thus miss the ordinary and routine dimension of antidemocratic practices. We subsequently propose the concept antidemocratic cultures to understand how right-wing political dispositions are fabricated through and mediated by rhetorical acts including speech, written texts, and embodied everyday practice. We analyze the rhetoric of participation of riot participants by reading their text messages, social media posts, and interviews with law enforcement and news media, as detailed in their arrest sheets. The rhetoric of participation of riot participants reveals how political dispositions are fabricated through ordinary language use and how these identities congeal in antidemocratic cultures. In the last section, we further discuss how a theory of antidemocratic cultures provides a novel framework to understand contemporary right-wing politics

Political science · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Populism, Right-Wing Movements