La crise de la COVID-19 et les ambiguïtés de la construction de la figure de « l’expert médical » dans la grammaire politique populiste: le bon, la brute et le truand

The chapter sets out the shed light on the complex politico-ideological embeddings of expertise in the context of the current crisis. The pandemic has brought to the forefront the role of public health experts, who have become instrumental in suggesting policies to counteract the spread of the novel coronavirus. These experts range from internationally renowned researchers to anonymous frontline workers in healthcare such as nurses, paramedics or family practitioners. This emphasis on expertise and highly technical know-how sometimes came at the expense of elected political personnel, with democratic mechanisms temporarily supplanted by technocratic decision-making. However, the narrative that emerged on expertise and the place of experts was far from monolithic. We will focus henceforth on the crystallisation of a counter-narrative violently denouncing the newfound power of experts and the scientific consensus undergirding it. The notion of “epistemological populism” acts as a theoretical bridgehead between the traditional political understanding of the populist label and the wider cultural-epistemic implications of the semiotics of defiance that populism enacts in modern societies. The recent focus on “epistemological populism” fruitfully intersects with a century-long reflection on the rise of technostructures and dis-ideologisation, providing a fresh, heterodox perspective on the backlash to these phenomena.