From peculiarity’s rhetoric to disinhibition’s rhetoric: a discursive itinerary of populism

Abstract

The movements for civil rights and sexual or racial equality that lived on American campuses in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged the appearance of political correctness and, with it, the so-called politically correct language, which culminated at the turn of the century with the rhetorics of peculiarity. In these discourses, the incessant attention to difference provokes a continuous split of the electorate/citizenship; collective identification is made difficult by the appeal to individualism. With the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties, similar discursive mechanisms of segmentation of recipients are maintained, but this time the differences that are fostered are reactively (reactionary) constructed, in such a way that minorities are challenged through a disinhibited discourse that seeks identification predominantly through negative, confrontational expressiveness, whose argumentative basis are phobotypes.