The Democratic Decay Within: The GOP and QAnon as a Digital Surrogate

• In Event: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: Connective Action & the Rise of the Far-Right

Abstract

This paper documents and analyzes the uptake of QAnon symbols and narratives by Republican Party candidates during their 2020 electoral bids. Our empirical analysis revealed that candidates used 45 discrete QAnon symbols during the 2020 cycle organized around six central themes: Christianity, opposition to elites, opposition to marginalized groups, nationalism, revolution, and a form of corrosive skepticism. Analytically, the chapter shows how QAnon offers a set of symbolic resources to Republican candidates that center on fundamental(ist) ideas of religion, morality, and white, Christian, masculine, and heteronormative identity that accord with the party’s main coalitions. In doing so, it reveals how QAnon is a digital surrogate organization for the Republican Party, creating a discursive order that is advantageous for it, and offers an interrelated, yet flexible set of themes that people can identify with and take up on a personal basis in multiple ways. The Republican Party, in turn, potentially offers QAnon validation, symbolic and stylistic outcomes (as opposed to policy outcomes), and access to broader audiences and institutional levers of power.

Authors

• Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Aaron Sugarman, Global Disinformation Index