Heathen Earth: Trumpism and Political Ecology looks beyond the rising fortunes of authoritarian nationalism in a fossil-fueled late capitalist world to encounter its conditions. Trumpism represents ...an alternative to the forces undermining the very cosmology of the modern West from two opposing directions. The global economy, the pinnacle of modernization, has brought along a dark side of massive inequality, corrupt institutions, colonial violence, and environmental destruction, while global warming, the nadir of modernity, threatens to undo the foundations of all states and all markets. To the vertigo of placelessness, symptomatic of globalization, is added the ecological vertigo of landlessness. With reality slowly fragmenting, it is only too obvious in this light that Trumpism and other nationalist movements would attract massive hordes of supporters. Promising to expel foreigners and to restore unity and equality by taking power back from the global elites, while utterly denying the climate science that calls ordinary means of subsistence and consumption radically into question, Trumpism can be seen as an antidote to the toxic combination of global markets and global warming. The irony, of course, is that Trumpism only responds to these dangers by doubling down on the reckless expansionist logic that gave rise to them in the first place. This book, composed entirely between November 8, 2016 and January 20, 2017, examines Trumpism according to its regime of political representation (despotism), its political ontology (nativism), and its political ecology (geocide), while laying the groundwork for an alternative politics and a resistant, responsive ecology of the incompossible.
Chaos in the Liberal Order Robert Jervis, Francis J. Gavin, Joshua Rovner, Diane N. Labrosse
07/2018
eBook
Donald Trump's election has called into question many fundamental assumptions about politics and society. Collecting a wide range of perspectives from leading scholars, Chaos in the Liberal Order ...explores the global trends that led to Trump's stunning victory and the impact his presidency will have on the international political landscape.
The former Trump Administration introduced policies focused on tightening national borders and limiting migration. These policies were often prefaced with strong rhetoric designed to disparage or ...derogate international racial, ethnic, and spiritual communities seeking entrance to the United States. In response, the media and members of the general public suggested that Trump's words and actions resulted in a backlash effect by significantly influencing domestic hate crimes; however, these sources are missing the empirical evidence to support such a claim. Using the UCR and multiple analytical techniques, this study aims to explore this relationship further by examining the influence of the former Trump Administration's rhetoric on hate crimes in the United States. Results indicate that, in support of public assumptions, Trump's narrative may promote violence targeting select communities.
Faking the News Skinnell, Ryan
2018, 2018-05-29, 2018-05-01, Letnik:
61
eBook
Donald J. Trump's speaking and writing invite passionate reactions -- maybe he's a bluecollar, billionaire hero who speaks the language of the common man or maybe he's a gleefully illiterate, ...tremendously unqualified idiot. Whatever the case, he was persuasive enough to get himself elected President of the United States and he's been persuasive enough to keep a majority of his supporters behind him. In Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump, eleven prominent rhetoric experts explain how Trump's persuasive language works. Specifically the authors explain Trump's persuasive uses of demagoguery, anti-Semitism, alternative facts, populism, charismatic leadership, social media, television, political slogans, visual identity/image, comedy and humor, and shame and humiliation. Faking the News is written for readers who may not know anything about rhetoric, so each chapter explains a feature of rhetoric and uses that lens to illuminate Trump's rhetorical accomplis.
In the wake of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, considerable ink was spilled on the architecture and interior design of the buildings owned and inhabited by Donald J. Trump. In an effort to ...understand the inner workings of America’s first real-estate-mogul-in-chief, commentators remarked on everything from the president’s fastidious taste in window dressings to the exaggerated floor counts boasted by many Trump-branded towers. Notes on Trumpspace takes this discursive trend as a point of departure. It examines not only key examples of “Trumpitecture” but also works of film, fiction, and contemporary art that center on or otherwise illuminate the psychogeography of “super luxury” real estate. Engaging closely with current political debates, the book takes a critical approach to mainstream liberal reactions to the Trump presidency. It argues that the fascination and horror Trump has provoked is owing in part to the way he lays bare the obsession with status, self-branding, and achievement-at-any-cost that has been part and parcel of the broader neoliberal ethos. Finally, it analyzes the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol through the lens of spatio-political theorizations of settler colonial power and conceptions of home and homeland. A genre-defying work of political and aesthetic inquiry, Notes on Trumpspace is a sustained investigation into the relationship between the built environment, late capitalist fantasy, and national identity. It asks what it means for current and future understandings of home and dwelling that this era’s most notorious peddler of high-end real estate succeeded in peddling his way into the White House in 2016.
Popular music was the most immediate way in which the cultural response to 9/11 manifested itself. Initially music offered a way of mourning and coping with grief. As the United States moved toward ...the invasion of Iraq, pop music also began to reflect the divisions in society between patriot-artists who supported the invasion, most notably in country music, and protest-artists who articulated critical attitudes to war. These anti-war songs did not attain the stature of those that characterized the era of protest during the Vietnam War, nor did they offer a musical accompaniment to a social movement with any enduring political significance. One little observed dissonance that a longitudinal survey of the musical response to political violence reveals, however, is that over time the attitudes of protest songwriters and the patriots transvalued. Ironically, interventionist "rednecks" became disillusioned with the endless wars of intervention, whilst the "protest" writers lost their voices after President Obama came to power. Ironically, icons of popular music instead turned their ire on those who voted for an anti-establishment President Trump who vowed not to involve the U.S. in further military adventures.
A nuanced look at the rhetorical narratives used by conservative Republicans and evangelicals to make both personal and political choices As a political constituency, white conservative evangelicals ...are generally portrayed as easy to dupe, disposed to vote against their own interests, and prone to intolerance and knee-jerk reactions. In Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie A. Martin challenges this assumption and moves beyond these overused stereotypes to develop a refined explanation for this constituency's voting behavior. This study offers a fresh perspective on the study of religion and politics and stems from the author's personal interest in the ways her experiences with believers differ from how scholars often frame this group's rationale and behaviors. To address this disparity, Martin examines sermons, drawing on her expertise in rhetoric and communication studies with the benefits of ethnographic research in an innovative hybrid approach she terms a "digital rhetorical ethnography. Martin's thorough research surveys more than 150 online sermons from America's largest evangelical megachurches in 37 different states. Through listening closely to the words of the pastors who lead these conservative congregations, Martin describes a gentler discourse less obsessed with issues like abortion or marriage equality than stereotypes of evangelicals might suggest. Instead, the political-economic sermons and stories from pastors encourage true believers to remember the exceptional nature of the nation's founding while also deemphasizing how much American citizenship really means. Martin grapples with and pays serious, scholarly attention to a seeming contradiction: while the large majority of white conservative evangelicals voted in 2016 for Donald J. Trump, Martin shows that many of their pastors were deeply concerned about the candidate, the divisive nature of the campaign, and the potential effect of the race on their congregants' devotion to democratic process itself. In-depth chapters provide a fuller analysis of our current political climate, recapping previous scholarship on the history of this growing divide and establishing the groundwork to set up the dissonance between the political commitments of evangelicals and their faith that the rhetorical ethnography addresses. Written in an engaging style, Decoding the Digital Church takes readers inside churches across the nation, from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale, and from Orange County to Minneapolis, and provides a distinctive lens for understanding evangelicals in the public square that moves beyond partisan boundaries and stereotypes.
Antisemitism, which has been called the "longest hatred," appeared to be on a sharp decline in the United States in the early years of the new century. Over the past five years, antisemitism has ...surged to life, registering a 100% increase in reports of antisemitic incidents in the United States between 20016-18. That period coincides, and not by accident, with the presidency of Donald Trump, who declared himself to be a friend of Jews and a strong supporter of the state of Israel, has lapsed into stereotypical representations of Jews as beholden to money and loyal only to their own. In this way, the boundary between philosemitism and antisemitism became hard to trace. It is especially noteworthy that Trump arrogated to himself the right to define Jews, a move that calls to mind the infamous declaration of the mayor of Vienna in the late nineteenth century, Karl Lueger: "Who is a Jew-that I determine." This paper explores the naming of Jews not only in the context of Trump's declarations, but also policy formulations such as his Executive Order on antisemitism and the IHRA definition.
This comment argues that President Biden's revocation of Trump's Executive Order 13928, which declared a national emergency and authorized the imposition of various sanctions on officials of the ...International Criminal Court (ICC), does not represent a fundamental reorientation in the relationship between the United States and the ICC. Offering an overview of this vexed relationship, the author argues that the fundamental sticking point remains the United States' untenable insistence that the ICC lacks jurisdiction over the personnel of non-State Parties.