Populist Style Liberals: MBL's Argumentation on YouTube

Abstract

The use of social media for the proliferation of populist messages has shown a great impact on the political communication, and argument plays a central role in this strategy. In recent years, the Movimento Brasil Livre has established itself as one of the main representatives of the country's new right, driven, above all, by the success of its posts on social media. To investigate the way MBL communicates, the essay proposes an argumentative analysis of MBL videos on YouTube that deal with with the decision of the Federal Supreme Court that prevented arrest after a court decision in the second instance and Social Security. By categorizing the argumentative elements into populists or technocrats according to the concept of political style proposed by Benjamin Moffitt, the study identified that MBL composes its argumentation as a way to dramatize and polarize its communicative performance to engage and convince the audience in a way more efficient.