The widespread understanding of Covid-19 as a threat to public (health) security serves as the discursive foundation for the application of emergency measures – both in terms of public health measures as well as in the field of political decision-making procedures. It has led to a strengthening of the role of (medical) experts for policy-making at the expense of formerly established democratic procedures and public debate. It has also increased the notion that information can be either important or antithetical to security – observable for example in the stark increase in journalistic referrals to fact-checkers and the demonization of what has been labeled mal-, dis-, and mis-information. In this article, we first explore, whether this securitization of Covid.19 has led to disruptions in the societal sub-systems of democratic governance and scientific debate. Second, we examine the role of expertocratic and technocratic thinking in the current crisis discourse against the background of both historical and current trends in political philosophy.

This article argues that the way Covid has been dealt with reinforces one of the major ideological shifts of our time, namely the conflation of immunity and security. This is a process whereby security has been increasingly naturalised as a kind of biological truth and the body imagined as a security system. Exploring the development of this conflation through both the immunological imagination and key texts from within the world of security, the article then turns to the autoimmune disease and asks the obvious question: if the immune system can turn against the very body it is meant to be defending, what does this tell us about the security system and what it will do to its own body politic?

As COVID-19 vaccines were introduced to the public in 2021, nation states employed a concerted propaganda campaign to encourage vaccine uptake. At first, the propaganda claimed that the vaccines would prevent infection and end the pandemic. Once the number of COVID-19 cases grew exponentially shortly after the largest mass vaccination campaign in human history, the propaganda shifted to construct a new minority group called “the unvaccinated” whom it scapegoated for the hardships brought on since March of 2020 by state-enforced lockdowns. This essay analyzes the mediatized macropolitical discourse of late 2021 and early 2022, to show how it created an ideological climate which justified the political repression of persons identified as unvaccinated and the widespread establishment of a two-tiered segregationist society based on vaccination status.

This micro-study, which analyzes a chat history on the topic of mask-wearing in the network "nebenan.de" between the first and the second Covid19 wave in 2020, focusses on the stability of liberal attitudes in Western democracies and the processes threatening them from within. For some years now, two tendencies have characterized public communication in Germany, a discourse of fear and security and a highly tense moralization in defending opposing positions, for which the phrase "That's won't do at all" has recently become an expression. Security discourses perpetuate fear, and fear discourses promote authoritarian attitudes. Together with the prevalent “cancel culture”, these tendencies add up to the emergence of an illiberal deformation of Western democracy that has been boosted massively by corona politics. The study aims to reconstruct these issues in a cross-cut of everyday communication.

The paper argues for placing public communication at the center of critical social analysis, critiques the status quo of media and journalism research, and develops a research agenda that includes ownership, international opinion cartels, the entanglement of states and digital corporations, and the influence of resource-rich actors on media realities.

It is a core idea of deliberative democracy that universal access to information and the unrestricted exchange of arguments can lead to agreement and compromise, so that the solutions found meet the demands of reason in factual and moral terms. The expertocratic society stands in sharp contrast to this ideal; in this article the concept of the managed society will be traced back to antiquity. In the wake of the Scientific Revolution of the early modern era and the development of a materialistic philosophy, this idea evolved into the illiberal project of establishing a technocratically organized society in which the individual is merely part of a disposable mass. The aim of this article is to outline the broad stream of experto- and technocratic ideology as a totalitarian historical constant. In addition, the influence of this strand of thinking on the elites of contemporary democratic societies will be illustrated.