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>

ANALISIS POSTER KAMPANYE LEGISLATIF PARTAI RASAMBLEMENT NATIONAL DI PERANCIS TAHUN 2017

Radical right populism is a phenomena that happens in almost every part of Europe, including France. In France, Rassamblement National Party (RN) which used to be called Front National Party (FN) steps up their campaign rhetoric using the anti-refugee agenda to mobilize their voters. Using the concept of Right Wing Populism and Critical Discourse Analysis Method, this paper seeks to analyse whether or not the campaign narrative of Rassamblement National Party meets the characters of Radical Right Populist party. This Paper uses a number of posters as a media to reveal their characteristics of Radical Right Populist Party. This paper argues that even if the use of poster is still one of the most dominant campaign media in France, the party’s characters as a radical right populist party are not being well portrayed in their campaign posters.

The Contingent Effects of Sexism in Primary Elections

Although the landscape for female candidates in U.S. politics has improved, research continues to find that many voters possess sexist attitudes. We rely on a standard political communication framework to help reconcile sexism in the electorate with increasingly favorable outcomes for women in primary elections. Based on two national survey experiments, we first demonstrate that in the absence of gendered campaign rhetoric, sexism is a weak predictor of support for female candidates on both sides of the political aisle. We then show, however, that when a male candidate attempts to activate sexism among voters by attacking a female opponent, gender attitudes become more salient—but not to the woman’s disadvantage. In a Democratic primary, gendered attacks backfire and lead to a significant boost in support for the female candidate. On the Republican side, a male candidate does not face the same backlash, but the attacks do very little to depress his female opponent’s support. While the persistence of hostile attitudes toward women has slowed the march toward gender equality in society, our experimental results suggest that sexism exerts only contingent effects in primary elections and not systematically to female candidates’ detriment.

Trumping Canada? Continuity And Change In Canadian Conservative Campaign Rhetoric

The Conservative Party of Canada has been widely noted for its meticulous branding and tight message control. In contrast, US president Donald Trump, representing the traditionally conservative Republican Party, demonstrates a remarkable lack of message discipline: his infamous unscripted candor often descends into vulgarity. Yet, despite his lack of message discipline, Trump was successfully elected president, suggesting that his distinctive rhetorical style may have contributed to his electoral appeal. This major research paper explores whether Donald Trump’s surprising victory may have inspired Canadian Conservatives to alter their own rhetorical strategies in the hopes of achieving similar success. I conducted a qualitative rhetorical analysis on six campaign speeches delivered by Conservative Party leaders in Canada’s two most recent federal elections (Andrew Scheer in 2019 and Stephen Harper in 2015). The results suggest that the Conservatives’ campaign speech rhetoric does not appear to be converging with Donald Trump’s. However, further investigation into other sites of discourse, such as leaders’ debates, press conferences, or party documents, may reveal otherwise—particularly when it comes to broader ideological orientation and the treatment of minority groups

Trumping Canada? Continuity And Change In Canadian Conservative Campaign Rhetoric

The Conservative Party of Canada has been widely noted for its meticulous branding and tight message control. In contrast, US president Donald Trump, representing the traditionally conservative Republican Party, demonstrates a remarkable lack of message discipline: his infamous unscripted candor often descends into vulgarity. Yet, despite his lack of message discipline, Trump was successfully elected president, suggesting that his distinctive rhetorical style may have contributed to his electoral appeal. This major research paper explores whether Donald Trump’s surprising victory may have inspired Canadian Conservatives to alter their own rhetorical strategies in the hopes of achieving similar success. I conducted a qualitative rhetorical analysis on six campaign speeches delivered by Conservative Party leaders in Canada’s two most recent federal elections (Andrew Scheer in 2019 and Stephen Harper in 2015). The results suggest that the Conservatives’ campaign speech rhetoric does not appear to be converging with Donald Trump’s. However, further investigation into other sites of discourse, such as leaders’ debates, press conferences, or party documents, may reveal otherwise—particularly when it comes to broader ideological orientation and the treatment of minority groups

Generic Fragmentation in Modern Campaign Rhetoric: A Study of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Announcements

This essay suggests that campaign speech genres have transformed in the digital era due to what I call “generic fragmentation.” Speeches that are expected of political candidates have been replaced by discourse that is scattered over a variety of channels, while taking a form that is truncated, fragmented, and unlikely to satisfy generic conventions when analyzed individually. Illustrating this argument, this essay focuses on the campaign announcements from the 2020 U.S. presidential election to show how the classic announcement speech has transformed into the “long announcement,” spread out over a longer period of time and often in scattered fragments, thus challenging the ways such messages can be evaluated by political communication critics.

Investigating the Syrian “Other” in Donald J. Trump’s Twitter Campaign Rhetoric

This study investigates the discursive techniques and processes employed by Donald J. Trump to portray Syrian refugees as a negative out-group and threat in tweets during his 2016 election campaign. The article argues that this anti-immigration argument facilitated and materialized not only as a right-wing populist discourse but also as an actual policy as evidenced by the travel ban of 2017. The data are comprised of 32 tweets from Trump’s personal Twitter account between his first available commentary tweets on the Arab Spring situation in November 2011 and his inauguration in January 2017. The article employs the Ideological Square (van Dijk 1992, van Dijk 1995, van Dijk 2013) and proximization theory (Cap 2008, Cap 2010, Cap 2013) to study how Donald J. Trump employs an ideological “othering” of Syrian refugees and constructs threatening representations of them as a political agenda to set himself apart from competitors and advance his election campaign.

A Leader Normalizes White Extremist Rhetoric

Chapter 5 provides evidence from Trump’s speeches to show that he was indeed the leading race-baiter and exploited the changed political landscape in ways that not only garnered him a loyal base of white supporters but also greatly facilitated in legitimating the mainstreaming of racism. The chapter provides evidence that Trump mainstreamed established white nationalist thinking by echoing the major themes of the new racial outgroup hostility through his repeated targeting of African Americans, Latinx immigrants, and Muslims in his campaign rhetoric.

Grand strategy, grand rhetoric: The forgotten covenant of campaign 1992

The presidential campaign of 1992 is remembered for its focus on the US economy, as George Bush, Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton proposed solutions for the state of the nation’s finances. A key challenge for the Clinton campaign was to present their candidate as a viable commander-in-chief, with a viable foreign policy, without betraying the campaign’s focus on the domestic economy. A consideration of key speeches reveals the evolution of the candidate and his foreign policy, as the campaign served as a training ground for power. What emerges is Clinton’s adoption of foreign policy as a positive force in American domestic political life, in contrast to his many predecessors and successors, who regularly utilised foreign policy to assail foreign nations and entities. In doing so, parallels and contrasts with the Trump’s 2016 message emerge, enabling a greater appreciation of the use of campaign rhetoric in the development of US grand strategy.