Rhetorical Activism in Politics: Stability Discourse and Pragmatic Practicality in Times of Crisis
Şermin Tekinalp, Seyra KestelThis article aims to investigate how successfully the dichotomy between stability and crisis is used as a medium of effective political activism and power in a critical election. The main question of the article is how the parties took advantage of the political climate in their political rhetoric to activate the mental cognitions of the majority at a time when Turkey was struggling with internal and external problems. In the framework of the research question, it is analyzed whether the parties, which were represented in the Turkish Parliament, utilized the dichotomy between stability and crisis in the context of pragmatic practicality or were lost obsessively in the normative, theoretically inductive long term ideals such as democracy, human rights and gender equality. In this context the term ‘rhetorical activism’ is associated to the term ‘pragmatic practicality’. The principal objective of the article is to help increase consciousness of how the political rhetoric of the ruling party AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/Justice and Development Party) comprising the catchword “stability” contributed to the domination of the mental cognitions of the electorates, and so increased its votes by 10% in five months in November 1, 2015 elections.
The principal objective of the article is to help increase consciousness how the political rhetoric of the ruling party AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/Justice and Development Party) comprising the catchword “stability” contributed to the domination of the mental cognitions of the electorates, and so increased its votes by 10% in five months in November 1, 2015 elections. The article investigates how the political parties made use of the political and social situation of the country in their political rhetoric to activate the voters’ preferences. Drawing on this aim, the article focuses on the contextual critical analysis of the propaganda speeches of the four parties, (AKP/Justice and Development Party, CHP/ Republican People’s Party, MHP/Nationalist Movement Party, HDP/Peoples’ Democratic Party) given on October 31, 2015 on Turkish State Channel TRT1, broadcast just one day before the November 1 general election. TRT1 was chosen, because each party was allowed equal time to make their last propaganda speeches (10 minutes) a day before, on the eve of the elections. The propaganda speeches of each party is analyzed in the context of rhetorical activism, which can closely be associated to pragmatic purposive practicality, reinforced mainly by the theories of context Van Dick’s (2010, p.10), commonsense (Fairclough, 1989, p. 89) and Aristotle’s (1992) master rhetorical tools (pathos, logos) to project how each party utilized these 10 minutes.
Propaganda speeches of four political parties are recorded and categorized to investigate how parties conceptualized the political situation in Turkey, whether they pursued pragmatic practicality in the contexts based on the present or in the contexts of future-based idealistic goals. To analyze how parties conceptualized the political and social issues to get public consent, four discourse analysis tools of Gee (2011, pp. 150-184) are used. Situated Meaning Tool (SMT) covers the analysis of the meanings behind words to capture the parties’ world views and values, Figured World Tool (FWT) helped us to analyze how parties refer to a picture of a simplified world view they take ideal, typical or normal and the Big “D” Discourse Tool (BDDT) refers to how party spokespersons talk as members of the party’s social and cultural background. The discourse topics to be investigated were categorized under six headings. They are ‘stability’, ‘exhortation for voting’, ‘inveigling the voters’, ‘promotion of the party’, ‘condemnation’, ‘woman issues.’
Topics in political speech may influence what people see as the most important information of text or talk (Duin & Grayes, 1988). We have found that topics, if presented in the right time and setting with the right discourse materials (metaphor, metonymy, myth, emotional linguistic references, practical reasoning) correspond to the top levels of people’s mental models. In the context of rhetorical activism and pragmatic practicality, we found that the AKP speaker tried to penetrate into the cognitive framework of the conservative audience by concentrating on facts at hand rather than long term idealistic goals and made the best use of the chaotic political and social situation, in other words, infused into the electorates’ internal thought processes through a powerful Turkey image to end the crisis All the other parties, in the midst of increasing terror, spent more time on the constant criticisms of the AKP, mostly on the lack of democracy, corruption, poor governance, women issues and promotion of their party ideals. Drawing on Chilton’s (2014, p. 204) assumption pointing out to the “fear of intruders and unknown people”, we can claim that fear and rescue dichotomy stimulated automatically mental frames of the voters. We have seen that the AKP categorized its political priorities over and the advantages of a powerful Turkey ornamented with Islamic and nationalist myths. The use of stability metaphor has different connotations in the party messages. We strongly claim that, if controlled with an effective rhetoric, crises benefit a strong government in office and further empower its status.
