Defenders of Democracy at the Protest

The paper focuses on the manner people active within the Committee for the Defence of Democracy present their protests. The author analyses the way the protests’ image presented by the interviewees is built, as well as the sources of its form and content. The aim is to identify the applications of discursive strategies used in the positive self- and the negative other presentation. As it is shown, in the process of discursive construction of the protests, the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy, and the specific rules that form the basis for the functioning of the public sphere in Poland are applied. Hence, the distinctions are created with nominations (metaphors, naturalising), predications (positive, negative traits) and representations (examples) referring to the figures of civilised and uncivilised men present in the Polish public discourse. Thus, the analysed presentation of the protests can be interpreted as inscribed in the binary structure of civic discourse.