In the name of the nobility of the cause, what I did is right
Legitimating the use of force via the hero-protector narrative used as argument
Discourse-focused analyses of political communication show a complex interplay between narration and
argumentation. Yet, current analytical tools fall short of accounting for the multifarious ways in which narratives perform as
arguments. This paper adopts the notion narrative argument, developed in argumentation theory, to examine the ways the
‘hero-protector’ narrative serves as argument. The paper analyzes four speeches given by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, whereby the
use of force on foreign grounds is justified via the ‘hero-protector’ narrative. The analytical framework combines the
argumentation strategies of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) with pragma-dialectics’ argumentation schemes. The analysis
shows that each narrative sequence constituting the ‘hero-protector’ narrative constructs specific argument schemes, and the
logical connections between these sequences link arguments in chains to collectively justify the rightness of claims. The paper,
thus, seeks to illustrate the possibility of conceptualizing narrative discourse as an effective way to argue for or against a
claim.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Narratives in the DHA and argumentation theory
- 3.Operationalizing the hero-protector narrative as argument
- 4.Data and analysis
- 4.1Current aggression sequence
- 4.2Past aggression and past reaction sequences
- 4.3Current reaction sequence
- 4.4Future idealized end state sequence
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (2)
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2024.
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Journal of Social Service Research 50:5
► pp. 857 ff.
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