From the War on Covid-19 to Political Wars: Metaphor as a Mechanism of Polarization in the Early Stages of the 2020 Pandemic

Abstract

This chapter analyses early political responses to the Covid-19 pandemic by three politicians: Pedro Sánchez in Spain, Boris Johnson in the UK and Donald Trump in the USA. All three have been criticized in the media by using war rhetoric. Thus, the chapter seeks to shed light on how the activation of the WAR/CONFLICT frames interacts with FORCE DYNAMICS in the early conceptualizations of the virus, and how these may also eventually justify polarized views of society. For this aim, the statements given by the three politicians in the month of March have been qualitatively analysed. This qualitative analysis has departed from corpus identification of concordances and has also been combined with the identification of instances of militarising metaphors. The analysis shows how the three politicians originally rely on a basic opposition schema between society and the virus. However, intertextual appeals to former historical conflicts are also activated, thus allowing for a construal of the metaphorical war against the virus as being similar to others where enemies were “visible.”