Rewriting Truth and Establishing a New Sovereign Epistemological Center: The Alternative Für Deutschland and its Fight Against Ideology, Irrationality and Backwardness

The concept of “post-truth“ has gained attention across Europe and the United States in the context of the increasing relevance of right-wing populist candidates and parties based on the broad public and (social) media resonance and election results of their campaigns, platforms and slogans. This paper is interested in the different forms of “post-truth“ that can be found in the manifestos of Western European right-wing populist parties. The main objective is to trace how, by way of what practices, knowledge and truth claims are constructed and on what epistemological basis sense-making is accepted as valid, sound and normal or rather defined as erroneous, corrupt, deviant or even dangerous. It is argued that while the respective discursive practices replicate the patterns of construction of a modern regime of truth (as conceptualized by Foucault), in their most extreme form they assert a rivalling epistemological authority and reference object. The study begins by conceptualizing the idea of “post-truth“, differentiating between (and proposing a preliminary systematization of) the diverse understandings of the term, including concepts of inaccuracy, disinformation, misrepresentation or de-prioritization of factuality on the one hand as well as the pluralization of interpretations of social realities or notions of relativism on the other. While the latter notions have (in highly problematic ways) been associated with postfoundational perspectives, it is precisely a poststructuralist-inspired approach that is instrumental in the study of the conditions for and the implications of the stabilization and objectivation of knowledge through its focus on knowledge practices and their potential to close a political struggle so as to produce a (temporarily) dominant meaning and (contingent) truth. Moreover, it is able to analytically capture the mechanisms of the strongest variant of (post-)truth, rendering visible the practices and patterns of establishing an alternative epistemological sovereign center as the sole source of truth and reason that legitmates resulting exclusions. On this backdrop the 2017 manifestos of five European right-wing populist parties – Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), Front National (FN), Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), UK Independence Party (UKIP) – are analyzed and the results are categorized according to the graded post-truth conceptualization. While the discourse contributions of these right-wing populist parties share a series of features, the AfD can be considered an outlier with regard to the establishment of a rivalling authority over knowledge that comprehensively depoliticizes political substance and processes. Thus, it will be demonstrated how logocentric practices stabilize and order social realities (even outside of immigration policy) around key binaries of - common sense and human nature versus ideology and distortion/coercion - rationality versus irrationality - progress versus backwardness Furthermore, on this basis, hierarchizations, marginalizations, de-legitimizations and exclusions are justified as they are ultimately connected to either safeguarding/strengthening or endangering/ undermining a reference group whose intactness is the sole guiding principle for the epistemological authority´s regime, thus depoliticizing the political by boiling it down to an essentialized friend/enemy scheme. Finally, the findings are contextualized and the implications of the related exclusions and disciplining are discussed in terms of political contestation and belonging.