The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in The Digital Age
Subtitle: Insiders & Outsiders in Democratic Politics
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: Nov 23, 2016
Language: eng
Format: hardcover
Number of pages: 259
ISBN-13: 9789811021602
Description: This highly original work considers the rhetoric of political actors and commentators who identify digital media as the means to a new era of democracy. PLacing this rhetoric in a historical and intellectual context, it provides a compelling explanation of the reinvention and thematic recurrence of democratic discourse. The author investigates the populist sources of rhetoric used by digital politics enthusiasts as outsiders inaugurating new eras of democracy with digital media, such as Barack Obama and Julian Assange, and explores the generations of rhetorical and political history behind them. The book places their rhetoric int he context of the permanent tensions between insiders and outsiders, between the political and conceptual research that is historically grounded and comparative, it offers rhetorical analysis of candidates for the 2016 presidential election and discusses digital democracy, particularly discussing their origins in American populism and their influence on other countries through Americanization. Uniquely, it offers a sceptical assessment of epochal claims and a historical-rhetorical account of two of the defining figures of the twentieth-century politics to date, and reveals how to modern rhetoric is grounded in an older form of anti-politics and mobilises tropes that are as old as representative democracy itself.
Notes: Source title: The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in The Digital Age: Insiders & Outsiders in Democratic Politics (Rhetoric, Politics and Society)