The Committee for the Defence of Democracy’s Self-Creation of Its Political Roles in the Mythical Universe of the Polish Political Scene

Abstract

The article aims to identify the myths of political roles that were used by the Committee for the Defence of Democracy (CDD) to create the language image of its creation and to explain the importance of these semantic structures’ configuration for the self-creation of political roles, which proved to be an effective incentive for the grassroots mobilization of the opponents of the Law and Justice party. They will be performed with the source analysis, qualitative relational content analysis, and a typology of myths. The secondary objective of the article is to verify the analytical usefulness of the theoretical tool in the form of a typology of myths created by the criterion of political roles. The research examines the theoretical framework that consists of four pairs of ideal types of myths: anthropolatrizing and diabolizing, theophanic and demonizing, divine and devilish mesistes, katechon and antichrist. The use of these theoretical categories to identify and distinguish the discursive creations and self-creations of the social movement has shown that they divide the semantic field of the political role myth in such a way that its ideal types are separable and allow us to recognize the basic semantic constructs of political roles. It has also revealed that the CDD did not use the extreme positive and negative valuation of itself and its political opponents. The movement used theophanic, divine mesistes, and katechon myths to self-legitimize discursively in the political system. It employed demonizing and antichrist myths to delegitimize the ruling political subjects. The image of the movement’s creation was the expression of the sense of necessity for the emergence and activities of a good katechon which would stop the antichrist from destroying the democratic system in Poland and contribute to the protection and preservation of its constitutive values.