President Greenwald's Man

To what degree do serious issues require serious consequences for politicians who fail to address them? Should politicians who fail to keep campaign promises have greater consequences than not being reelected? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Brian Greenwald is running a unique presidential campaign. Not only is he a single-issue candidate for stopping global warming, but an ominous figure follows him everywhere with the promise to kill him at the end of his term if he fails to move the needle. The electorate knows this, and elects Greenwald President in a landslide. Everything he does in office is focused on the single goal of lower greenhouse gas emissions. At the end of his first term emissions have gone flat, but not down. By the end of his second term, even after exceptional efforts, global greenhouse gas emissions have failed to significantly fall. Good to his word, the ominous figure kills him for failing to deliver.

Placing Portuguese Right-Wing Populism Into Context

This chapter examines the discourse of the Portuguese right-wing populist André Ventura and compares it with his close counterparts, Santiago Abascal, Marine Le Pen, and Matteo Salvini. The empirical analysis is focused on the 2021 presidential campaign and looks at Twitter and YouTube as parts of an integrated political communication strategy that are used as tools of exposure and message dissemination. The results show how André Ventura appropriates the features of right-wing populism but adapts those to the Portuguese specific context as a strategy to gain both wider media visibility and popular support.

Pandemia COVID-19 w strategiach komunikowania w mediach społecznościowych głównych kandydatów w wyborach prezydenckich w Polsce w 2020 roku

The presidential campaign in Poland in 2020 took place during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the article is to try to answer the question to what extent the pandemic problem was exposed in candidates’ entries in social media. The subject of the research were messages published on Facebook and Twitter. Particular attention was paid to the content disseminated by Andrzej Duda and Rafał Trzaskowski. The main methods used in the research were content analysis and secondary analysis of existing data. The research proved that the candidates became campaigners like the previous ones, clearly emphasizing the important role of reports from direct meetings with voters. The pandemic thread, especially at the end of the campaign, was only incidentally mentioned in the messages.

Brazil presidential hopefuls gear up for 2022 election

Significance In recent weeks, former Justice Minister Sergio Moro has joined a centre-right party, Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria has won his party’s presidential primaries and former President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, widely seen as Bolsonaro’s main competitor, has completed a successful European tour. Bolsonaro has joined a new party ahead of the election. Impacts Bolsonaro will keep pushing for congressional approval of his pre-election spending measures to improve his prospects. The incumbent will increase his attacks on Lula and 'third-way' candidates, emulating the 2018 presidential campaign. Lula will seize any opportunity to consolidate himself as the focus of opposition to Bolsonaro for both the left and centre.

The Nature of the Alt-Right

<p>The presidential campaign and eventual election of president Donald Trump emboldened and highlighted the existence of a fringe group known as the alt-right, short for alternative right. While the term was coined in 2008 by white nationalist Richard Spencer, it was the campaign rhetoric of Trump which brought national and global attention to an internet fringe group which ideologically aligned with the president’s often racist and hyper-nationalist agenda. This study aims to explain the nature of the alt-right and ask to what degree it can be considered as fascist. An ideal type of fascism has been constructed drawing on authors such as Michael Mann, Robert Paxton and Roger Eatwell and I aim to use this to explore the connections between twentieth century fascism and the alt-right. I argue that the alt-right should be viewed as fascist, acting within a period of history which is reminiscent of the proto-fascist era of interwar Europe. Although independent of Trump, the alt-right’s white nationalist/neo-Nazi agenda is explicitly and implicitly supported and encouraged by the new president.</p>

The Nature of the Alt-Right

<p>The presidential campaign and eventual election of president Donald Trump emboldened and highlighted the existence of a fringe group known as the alt-right, short for alternative right. While the term was coined in 2008 by white nationalist Richard Spencer, it was the campaign rhetoric of Trump which brought national and global attention to an internet fringe group which ideologically aligned with the president’s often racist and hyper-nationalist agenda. This study aims to explain the nature of the alt-right and ask to what degree it can be considered as fascist. An ideal type of fascism has been constructed drawing on authors such as Michael Mann, Robert Paxton and Roger Eatwell and I aim to use this to explore the connections between twentieth century fascism and the alt-right. I argue that the alt-right should be viewed as fascist, acting within a period of history which is reminiscent of the proto-fascist era of interwar Europe. Although independent of Trump, the alt-right’s white nationalist/neo-Nazi agenda is explicitly and implicitly supported and encouraged by the new president.</p>

Dynamics of Values in American Election Discourse

The article presents the results of a corpus-based analysis of axiological characteristics of political discourse. Applying the method of identifying keywords in a corpus the authors described the dynamics of the American election discourse dominant values in the period from 1952 to 2016. The research material comprised the texts of American presidential election commercials from seventeen campaigns. The texts were compiled into three corpora according to three historical periods: period I – 1952–1972; period II – 1976–2000; period III – 2004–2016. It was found that the invariant values represented in the texts of election commercials of all the historical periods are: "prosperity", "patriotism", "progress", "social justice" and "security". The listed values receive a variable linguistic expression in the texts of each period. It is shown that the evolution of the value component in the presidential campaign discourse manifests itself in the change of actors within the opposition "us – them", in variation of their linguistic representations, in modification of value dominants of discourse and in transformation of language means conveying evaluative meaning. The main set of value orientations of the discourse remains relatively constant, the changes are revealed in the model of conceptualization of the values and their influencing potential in the election communication.

Personal and Social Deixis as A Political Campaign Strategy Used in Donald Trump’s Rally

<p>The use of personal and social deixis often has a crucial role in political speeches. This study investigated how personal deixis was used as a strategy to get other people’s support in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign speech. The object of the study was Trump’s speech in his presidential rally on October 10, 2020, and the data were the personal and social deixis in the speech. The occurrences of deixis were counted to reveal the parties to whom Trump gave his attention, and an analysis of the words used was conducted to see Trump’s attitudes toward the parties addressed by the deixis. The study revealed that Trump used personal deixis more than social deixis. There were five big parties to which he gave his attention using the deixis: the audience, Trump himself, the USA and its people, his opponents, and his party and government. Using the deixis, Trump also showed a positive attitude to his side and a negative attitude to the opponents. His use of personal and social deixis was also used as a campaign strategy. The deixis created inclusiveness, positioned Trump in different roles, showed support from several American communities, and influenced the audience’s attitude toward Trump’s opponents.</p>

Partisan Identity and Affective Polarization in Presidential Debates

This study presents the results of a quasi-experiment to assess the effects of viewing the live televised general election presidential and vice-presidential campaign debates. We contribute to a growing empirical record on the polarizing effects of campaign debates by testing some contextual variables that have confounded past researchers. Specifically, we use Trump’s aggressive first debate performance as a test-case of polarizing content and compare it with Trump’s second debate performance along with the other 2020 debates. We also test whether, as some have hypothesized, vice-presidential debates are more polarizing. Finally, we consider Biden—a candidate who has been polarizing and depolarizing in his vice-presidential debates, as a candidate-specific source of uncertainty in existing findings. We find further evidence that campaign debates increase ingroup affection—or the extent to which co-partisans reward the ingroup candidate. Conversely, outgroup hostility did not increase even after Trump’s first debate. We conclude that debates may contribute to polarization, but only through ingroup affection, not outgroup animosity.