Words, language, discourse: these are the typical terms people use in everyday life. “It is what it is,” one might say. However, their definition within sociological discourse involves some difficulties. Discourse is, above all, the set of stories we use to describe the world around us. Sometimes those stories are idealized, that is, they are a mixture of reality and desire. We say not only what we see, but also what we wish to see: “the economy is strong,” “we are a global city,” “we are a green nation,” “this is how things have always been done here.” Therefore, our stories, our discourse, do not merely describe our society, our cities, our streets, and our lives; they also shape them and help make them real (performative language). Ultimately, they push society in one direction or another: toward more or less democratic societies, more or less sustainable ones, more or less technocratic ones, and more or less authoritarian ones.
Naturally, within any society there are different discourses about how society is or should be: “raise taxes on high incomes” versus “cut taxes,” for example. Even internally, within ourselves, there may be conflict: “I should vote for A or for B.” In other words, our language, our words, our stories, are never free from conflict. In fact, each discourse, each discursive identity, constitutes what Norbert Elias called a “survival unit” (The Society of Individuals, 1987). We all struggle so that the idea of society we desire will prevail. Society is not uniform. At best, we can speak of dominant discourses, that is, preferred versions of what reality should look like: “we do not want bike lanes,” “we need to keep oil and gas flowing,” “economic growth must come first.” But dominant does not necessarily mean shared by the majority of the population; it may simply be the preferred opinion or version of the dominant class, as Marx would have put it.
Therefore, our discourses, our everyday stories, are immersed in relations of power. While some people’s preferred version of how a city should be governed never goes beyond a conversation in a bar, a post on social media, or a family discussion, others enjoy privileged access to the mass media, shaping which interpretations become visible, legitimate, and influential.
A practical case can be found in Donald Trump’s discourse on climate change. Rather than presenting climate change primarily as an ecological crisis requiring structural transformation, Trump has repeatedly framed energy and climate politics around “common sense,” lower prices, national strength, and energy dominance. In his inaugural speech on January 20, 2025, he said he would declare a “national energy emergency” and added, “We will drill, baby, drill,” explicitly linking fossil-fuel expansion to inflation, prices, and national recovery. Reuters also reported that, on his first day back in office, he moved again to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord and rolled back or suspended several climate-related measures associated with the previous administration.
This matters because such language creates a frame, a dominant version of what climate politics is supposed to be about, in which the central question is no longer how to decarbonize the economy or reduce ecological risk, but how to produce more energy, more cheaply, and with fewer restrictions. Within that frame, climate policy is recast as an obstacle to prosperity, while fossil-fuel expansion appears practical, patriotic, and realistic. In April 2025, Reuters reported that Trump signed an executive order aimed at blocking state climate policies, including measures in states such as New York, Vermont, and California that sought to curb fossil-fuel use or impose climate-related liability on energy producers.
Thus, this discourse kills two birds with one stone. First, it creates a frame in which the political problem of climate change is reduced to a question of management, supply, and administrative efficiency, while avoiding its transformative dimension: moving away from fossil fuels, reorganizing transport systems, confronting corporate power, changing urban planning, or accepting limits to carbon-intensive growth. Second, within that very frame, Trump and those aligned with him can present themselves as the realistic defenders of jobs, energy security, and national interest, while those calling for stronger climate action are portrayed as naïve, extremist, or economically irresponsible. In this way, what is in fact an ideological struggle over the future of society is made to appear as a neutral question of practical governance. This last point is an interpretation, but it is grounded in the framing documented by Reuters’ reporting on Trump’s energy and climate agenda.
Another example can be found in Denmark with Mette Frederiksen. In Denmark’s March 24, 2026 election, Reuters reported that key campaign issues included the economy, the environment, healthcare, and immigration, and that Frederiksen faced criticism from the left for her hard immigration line while also defending proposals such as a wealth tax and limits on pesticide use. Reuters also reported that, despite a major electoral setback, her Social Democrats remained the largest party and Frederiksen entered coalition talks after the vote.
This is sociologically important because it shows how discourse can reorganize political space. A party historically associated with social democracy can retain the language of welfare, solidarity, and collective protection, while redefining who is being protected, from what, and under what conditions. In that frame, politics is no longer centered only on redistribution or equality, but also on order, belonging, and responsible stewardship of the national community. What appears as pragmatic governance is also a discursive operation: it shifts the meaning of welfare from a more universal social right toward something increasingly tied to questions of identity, control, and acceptable membership. That interpretive claim goes beyond the reporting itself, but it is supported by Reuters’ description of how welfare, immigration, cost of living, environment, and national political identity were bundled together in the 2026 Danish campaign.
Seen together, these examples help us understand that discourse is always bound up with power. Some visions of society are dismissed as unrealistic before they can even enter the mainstream debate, while others are amplified by politicians, corporations, and major media outlets until they begin to feel like common sense. This is why discourse analysis matters: it reveals that what often looks like mere description or technical problem-solving is actually part of a struggle to define reality itself.
From this perspective, when we analyze electoral outcomes, what we are not really analyzing is simply whether a given leader has delivered “good management.” What we are analyzing is the extent to which established political and economic powers are able to rearm themselves discursively and through the media, and in doing so prevent social change. Discursive domination can become so strong that even political opponents end up apologizing for not having “managed” things properly, which is already to accept the terms of the game.
In my view, the only genuinely progressive analysis, that is, the only analysis available to those who seek social change, is to deconstruct the dominant discourse and expose the way it reduces our reality to a mere question of “getting things done,” while sidelining deeper questions of inequality, democracy, sustainability, and justice. This can be seen across many countries. In the United States, climate action is often reframed as a threat to growth or consumer prices. In Denmark, debates over welfare, migration, agriculture, and environmental policy are also shaped by competing discourses about who should bear the costs of change, who belongs within the national community, and whether policy should be driven by social justice, ecological necessity, or economic competitiveness.
Here, then, one could carry out a quantitative discourse analysis based on a word cloud, in which the size of each word is proportional to the number of times it appears in a speech, interview, or news article. Excluding the interviewer’s questions and merging related terms into a single category, such a visualization can help show which concepts dominate the discourse and which political priorities are being reinforced.
