In the following, I want to consider the establishment, stabilisation and semantic weighting of borders of normality as part of the education dispute in Baden-Württemberg. Within the spectrum of the normal, borders require both legitimisation and semantic solidification to obtain societal validity. I will focus on symbolic boundaries, which permeate social order and create hierarchies between groups in society. “Symbolic boundaries are often used to enforce, maintain, normalize, or rationalize social boundaries as exemplified by the use of culture markers in class distinctions […] or cognitive stereotyping in gender inequalities.” (Lamont/Molnár 2002: 186) Such boundaries manifest as part of a society’s social order and entail consequences of in- and exclusion. They cause a classification and aggregation of individuals, which imply social difference and real-world effects for those affected. My analysis explores the question of how symbolic borders are drawn in the aforementioned dispute and how the separation as well as differentiation among two groups – homosexuals and heterosexuals – are constructed and legitimized. For this purpose, I refer to the results of a discourse analysis conducted with newspaper articles about the education dispute in Baden-Württemberg.

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On November 8th, 2016, Republican nominee Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America. On November 9th, 2016, Twitter was flooded with messages hashtagged #TrumpsAmerica which narrated various ways that marginalized groups were being attacked, verbally or physically, by self-proclaimed Trump supporters whose inappropriate actions had been legitimized by Trump’s election into office. Many Americans were in shock upon receiving the news of the new President Elect. Jon Ronson, journalist and author of The Elephant in the Room: A Journey into the Trump Campaign and the Alt-Right, stated in the closing remarks of his book that “the alt-right’s small gains in popularity will not be enough to win Trump the election […] but if some disaster unfolds […] and Trump gets elected […] that is terrifying” (2016: 793). Ronson’s book was published before the election had concluded, and his closing remarks haunt many Americans who are now just that—terrified. Still others ponder at how the country transitioned from the progressive era of the Obama administration to the election of a man who helped inspire the 2016 word of the year, “post-truth”. What many believed was a joke in the Republican primaries has suddenly evolved into a Presidency that is all too real. Many Americans believed Trump appeared out of nowhere, ran his mouth carelessly during his campaign, and was elected by the racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and homophobic population of America, more specifically known as the Alternative Right Movement. Matthew Lyons, author of “Ctrl, Alt, Delete: The Origins and Ideology of the Alternative Right”, defines the Alt-Right movement as “a loosely organized far-right movement that shares a contempt for both liberal multiculturalism and mainstream conservatism [which] combines White nationalism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and authoritarianism in various forms and in political styles ranging from intellectual argument to violent invective” (2017: 2). He continues to note the Alt-Right maintains, “a belief that some people are inherently superior to others; a strong internet presence and embrace of specific elements of online culture; and a self-presentation as being new, hip, and irreverent” (Lyons 2017: 2). However, this alt-right rhetoric which Trump stands for has always been a counter-narrative throughout American political history, quietly lingering in the shadows until the moment it could finally reveal itself. My paper will be focusing specifically on this counter-narrative that has pervaded throughout American political history and how the alt-right has evolved and harnessed this rhetorical narrative to create an environment that has lent itself to the election of a man such as Donald Trump. By first establishing the necessity of using a rhetorical lens with which to evaluate the 2016 American Presidential election, I will then trace the rhetorical genealogy in order to show the gradual ascension of alt-right rhetoric through American political history, concluding with the election of Trump.

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Deleuze closes his study of the shift in Foucault’s work from the archive to the diagram with a consideration of the outside of the outside, maybe too affirmative a conclusion for Foucault; maybe not yet fully facing what would be the full realization of the diagram only pointed to in the “Postscript.”

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