Emotions and the ‘truths’ of contentious politics: advances in research on emotions, knowledge and contemporary contentious politics

Abstract

In a world of multiple crises – the heating of the planet, public health emergencies, economic meltdowns, sociopolitical polarisation and so on – truth is often politicised and then weaponised for political gain. This ‘post-truth’ rhetoric currently seems so prevalent that many of us now avoid debating reasonable questions about politics, policy and society. The rhetoric has also led to increasing questions about the role and importance of expertise (Felt et al, 2007; Weible and Satabier, 2009), greater attention paid to authorities’ ideologies, uncertainty, contradictions and mistakes (Durnová, 2019), and sometimes heated arguments about how evidence and ‘truth’ should be used to guide governments and social policy (Torgerson, 2010). The politicisation and weaponisation of truth have additionally rejuvenated portrayals of emotions and reason as opposing forces (Alexander, 2013), constructing a societal division between a purportedly emotional or ignorant public and a supposedly fact-oriented elite (Durnová, 2019). In this way, weaponised truth is both a result and cause of contentious politics. This dynamic is evinced in the discourses of posttruth phenomena, such as the Brexit vote, clashes between liberal cosmopolitanism and socially conservative values, and anti-covid protests. Yet, going beyond this recursive dynamic, the tension between emotions and reason may also be generative of politics, including cultivating and bolstering democratic politics. That is, while the division between masses and elites based on emotions and ‘true’ knowledge appears to threaten social cohesion and the mutual