The Law of the Excluded Middle: Discourse as Casualty of the Post-Truth Extremist Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic

The unprecedented World Health Organization orchestrated lockdown and public health measures in response to the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic were enacted by virtually every government worldwide. In many countries, but especially United States, long-standing political animosities congealed into a discourse of dehumanization between liberal establishment adherents anti-state revolutionaries. Left out from field plural voices fitting neither camp. Mikhail Bakhtin’s lens Ideologiekritik offers diagnosis, symbolic destabilizing tool carnivalesque provides discursive soften polarization depoliticized technocracy coronavirus state exception. conflagration global governmental often violent counter-responses warrants examining democratic dangers dualistic discourses. Disrupting this explosive requires reintroducing spaces which widen conversation include liminal oblique perspectives via spectacle jest—the carnival—providing potential nonviolent path forward.