Resilience of the Authoritarian? Mechanisms of Selective Science Perception, Protest Formation and Democracy Conception in the German 'Querdenker' Movement

Among the many aspects of social life that changed during the pandemic, the area of social movements represents a particularly interesting part. In the first time and during the first lockdown, civil society activists often argued that the pandemic had set civic activism on hold, which could lead to a democratic decline. No long after that, however, protest activism increased - but it was activism and protest against state measures of pandemic containment. Starting in Mai 2020, the ‘Querdenken’ movement in Germany and similar movements in other countries increased, forming a broad coalition of political sceptics, as well as their own particular interpretation and argumentation schemes. Since then, the ‘Querdenken’ movement, which was active with demonstrations in numerous cities, is characterized by strong heterogeneity and currently consists of a wide variety of social groups. Initial studies such as the Basel Study on the Political Sociology of the Corona Protest (Nachtwey et al. 2020) were able to show that participants in these protests are predominantly from the middle class, relatively often have an academic education, and in some cases pursue very conscious lifestyles - such as anthroposophy. Xenophobic or authoritarian attitudes were not overly pronounced, but a strong alienation from democratic institutions, parties, media, and procedures was obvious. One of the most interesting aspects of this movement is its particular approach to science and knowledge: some of the movement activists are physicians or scientists who deny the danger of the virus, or they are autodidactically committed laypeople who in part intensively acquire scientific knowledge that supports their argumentation. However, the space of counter-knowledge built up in this way is highly selective, since it fundamentally eludes the method of dialogical contradiction or questioning of existing knowledge. The question therefore arises how this counter-knowledge is produced by selective scientific perception and how it is used for mobilization. The article focuses not only on the scientific-medical perspective, but also on social-scientific knowledge about structures and procedures of complex democratic systems. The alienation of large parts of the movement from the democratic political system points to a "democratic illiteracy", as Margret Canovan (1999) has called the stimulus of authoritarian populism. To what extent, then, does the construction of medical-scientific and social-scientific counter-knowledge have the effect of reinforcing authoritarian attitudes? The central thesis of the paper is that the selective framing of scientific knowledge as part of mobilization contributes to the radicalization and thus the resilience of authoritarian and anti-pluralist movement patterns.