Rhetorical Activism in Politics: Stability Discourse and Pragmatic Practicality in Times of Crisis

Year 2019, Issue: 56, 153 - 178, 27.06.2019

Şermin Tekinalp Seyra Kestel

Abstract

This 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.

Keywords

Rhetorical activism, crisis, stability, pragmatic practicality, idealism

References

• Aristotle. (1992). The art of rhetoric (H. Lawson-Tancred, Trans.). London, UK: Penguin Books.
• Black, C. J. (2011). Politicians and rhetoric the persuasive power of metaphor. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Carpio, X. V., & Wagner, M. C. (2015). The impact of Syrian refugees on the Turkish labor market : The impact of Syrians refugees on the Turkish labor market. Policy Research working paper; no. WPS 7402. Washington, D.C. : USA. World Bank Group. Retrieved from http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/505471468194980180/The-impact-of-Syrians-refugees-on-the-Turkish-labor-market
• Charteris-Black, J. (2014). Analyzing political speeches: Rhetoric discourse and metaphor. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Chilton, P. (1985). Words, discourse and metaphors: The meanings of deter, deterrent, and deterrence. In P. Chilton (Ed.), Language and the nuclear arms debate (pp. 27-103). London, UK: Pinter.
• Chilton, P. (2014). Language, space and mind: The conceptual geometry of linguistic meaning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Duin, A., Roen, D., & Graves, M. (1988). Excellence or malpractice: The effects of headlines on readers’ recall and biases. In J. Readence, & S. Baldwin (Eds.), Dialogues in Literacy Research (pp. 245-250). Chicago, USA: National Reading Conference.
• Edelman, M. (1977). Political language words that succeed and policies that fail. New York, USA: Academic Press.
• Fairclough, I., & Fairclough, N. (2013). Political discourse analysis: A method for advanced students. New York, USA: Routledge.
• Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London, UK: Longman.
• Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical discourse analysis. In Van Dijk, T. A. (Ed.), Discourse studies: A multidisciplinary introduction (pp. 84-258). London, UK: Sage.
• Gee, J. P. (2011). How to do discourse analysis. London, UK: Routledge. Gibbs, R.W. (1996). Why many concepts are metaphorical. Cognition, 61, 309-319. Retrieved from http:// psychology.illinoisstate.edu/jccutti/psych480_24/readings/gibbs1996.pdf
• Harman, G. (1976). Practical reasoning. The Review of Metaphysics, 29(3), 431-463.
• Lakoff, G. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 203-251). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press.
• McGlone, M. S. (1996). Conceptual metaphors and figurative language interpretation: Food for thought. Journal of Memory and Language. 35(4), 544-565.
• Smitherman, G., & Van Dijk, T. A. (1988). Discourse and discrimination. Detroit, USA: Wayne State University Press.
• Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance communication and cognition. Cambridge, USA: Blackwell Publishers. Turkish Statistical Institute. (2016). Women Statistics: 2015 (Publication no: 21519). Retrieved from http://www. tuik.gov.tr/PreHaberBultenleri.do?id=21519
• Van Dijk, T. A. (1989). New developments discourse analysis (1978-1988). Gazette, 43, 229-253.
• Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London, UK: Sage Publications.
• Van Dijk, T.A. (2002). Political discourse and political cognition. In P. A. Chilton & C.Schäffner (Eds.), Politics as Text and Talk. Analytical approaches to political discourse (pp. 204-236). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Benjamins.
• Van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and context: A sociocognitive approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Van Dijk, T.A. (2010) Political identities in parliamentary debates. In C. Ilie (Ed.), European parliaments under scrutiny.Discourse strategies and interaction practices (pp. 29-56). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Benjamins.
• Yetkin, M. (2016, 23 February). Erdoğan has to find an exit from the Syria situation. Hurriyet Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/opinion/murat-yetkin/erdogan-has-to-find-an-exit-from-thesyria-situation-95558