Towards a Tyranny of the Minority: Discursive Freeriding of AfD and RN Against Liberal Agnosticism

Liberal democracy promises to cure the perils of earlier forms of democracies – namely the “tyranny of the majority” – by institutionalized minority rights and by the principle of democratic fallibilism, the institutionalized revisability of political action. However, because democracies are dependent on prerequisites they cannot guarantee qua existence, both principles are required to be internalized by its bearers: Political actors need to practice liberal agnosticism. To prevent tyrannic behavior, they must refrain from transcending and enforcing their preferences without regard to and on the cost of other actors. In mature liberal-representative democracies, liberal agnosticism - although it includes a self-limitation in preference enforcement – seems to be internalized by the majority of political actors acting within the democratic regime of institutions, values and norms. However, the internalization of those democratic principles both, in action and ideology, does not seem to hold for modern radical right parties – political actors that are often disadvantaged in party competition. From an ideological perspective, modern radical right parties are still substantially radical despite a superficial discursive normalization. How this contradiction plays out in rhetoric action in relation to the principles of democratic fallibilism, protection of minority rights and its internalization in liberal agnosticism is subject of our interest. By analysing all parliamentary speeches and posts on the official Facebook pages from 2017 to 2019 with computer-assisted qualitative discourse analysis (CAQDA), we show how the French Rassemblement National (RN) and the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) bridge the superficial conflict between substantial radicalism and discursive normalization by creating inversion narratives and victimisation narratives embedded in a consistent populist antagonization between a sociocultural homogenous in-group solely represented and protected by the radical right party against a "betraying" political elite on vertical level and "threatening" sociocultural outsiders on horizontal level. It becomes evident that the superficial discursive normalization is not the effect of a substantial moderation but rather an instrumental discursive act against core pillars of liberal-representative democracy embedded in a still substantial radicality: Starting from the inverting, blurring, victimizing, and antagonizing populist rhetoric that disregards liberal agnosticism, both parties undermine the institutionalized protection of minorities by emphasizing conspiracy and threat scenarios and they undermine institutionalized democratic fallibilism by constructing democratic deficits. Broadening the scope, we develop that radical right parties exemplify tyrannic behavior which in liberal-representative democracy is more likely to be exercised by political minorities rather than by a majority: The tyranny of the minority captures the phenomenon that disadvantaged political actors try to compensate for their political powerlessness by exaggerating their own preferences to withdraw them from political contestation disregarding the self-limiting liberal agnosticism practiced by all other actors. Radical right parties exercise a specific radical tyranny of the minority as they also undermine the principles of protection of minority rights and of democratic fallibilism.