Conceptual flipsiding and reversal of liberal-democratic notions: discursive-political strategies in/and the normalisation of illiberal public imagination

Abstract

The process of strategically redefining key liberal-democratic and other widely accepted social and political concepts by the far-right and other illiberal actors has recently become a widespread, cross-national phenomenon. Seeing it as integral to both the ongoing mainstreaming of the far right and the ever more pervasive, social-wide normalisation of illiberalism, we define this process as “conceptual flipsiding” and elaborate on it here from a set of interdisciplinary perspectives and in various contexts. We view “conceptual flipsiding” as the key component of illiberal “discursive shifts” in the public sphere that facilitate durable infusion of illiberalism into public discourse by changing the ways of speaking and thinking about key social and political ideas and issues. Exploring both theoretically and empirically the multiple dynamics, trajectories and intricacies of “conceptual flipsiding,” we approach it as a strategic process wherein various public actors contribute to the ongoing illiberal discursive colonisation of liberal-democratic and key social and political concepts. Through our analyses of the discourse-conceptual dynamics surrounding the “conceptual flipsiding”, we observe it as a long-lasting process wherein many of the (once) widely accepted core meanings of key liberal-democratic and other socio-political concepts are not only persistently diluted or weakened but often outright replaced with “new”, illiberal understandings that eventually persist in both public discourse and in public imagination.