Journal articles on the topic 'Presidential Rhetoric 1'

Conceptual metaphors continue to receive scholarly attention from discourse analysts taking political discourse seriously. Studies are often interested in the versatile discourse functions of metaphors; how political leaders deploy them as powerful weapons in their armory of political oratory. Therefore, this study extends the current knowledge by exploring conceptual metaphors in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political rhetoric. It was guided by two major questions: (1) What types of conceptual metaphors does President Muhammadu Buhari deploy in his political rhetoric? and (2) What rhetorical functions do the Conceptual Metaphors deployed in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political rhetoric perform? The study’s theoretical impetus was Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), and Charteris-Black’s (2009) Contemporary Model of Metaphor and Political Communication was also applied in the analysis. The speeches analyzed include: (1) Muhammadu Buhari’s Presidential Primaries Speech, (2) Muhammadu Buhari’s Acceptance Speech, (3) Muhammadu Buhari’s Victory Speech and (4) Muhammadu Buhari’s (First) Presidential Inaugural Speech. The results show that President Buhari, in his political rhetoric, mostly uses HUMAN metaphors (32%), WAR metaphors (21%) and JOURNEY metaphors (16%). Moreover, further analysis revealed that Buhari mostly uses conceptual metaphors to establish his ethical integrity, heighten emotional impact and communicate his anti-corruption and political ideologies. The study concluded that conceptual metaphors are vital resources for construction of persuasion in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political rhetoric.

AbstractConventional theories of presidential representation suggest that presidents avoid courting African Americans for fear of alienating white voters, leading to the underrepresentation of “black interests.” We argue that presidential representation of black interests is conditional: when (1) African Americans prioritize issues other than economic redistribution and civil rights and (2) when these priorities overlap with those of whites, presidents should provide considerable representation of those interests. We test our theory using two new sources of data: a dataset of black and white perceptions of the US's most important problem between 1968 and 2012; and a quantitative content analysis of over 200 major presidential speeches from 1969-2012. We find that presidents provide substantial representation of black interests, but only when these interests center on non-racialized concerns and overlap with the priorities of whites. We also find that presidential priorities are often independent of the chief concerns of both African Americans and whites.

The theory of presidential influence over public opinion is used to predict the impact of presidential rhetoric on crime over the public’s concern for crime being “the most important problem facing the nation.” It is hypothesized that the more attention presidents give to the policy area of crime in the their State of the Union Addresses, the more concerned the public becomes with crime. Utilizing a time-series regression analysis of data collected from a content analysis of presidents’ State of the Union addresses on the Gallup Poll’s Most Important Problem series from 1946 to 1996, the analysis demonstrates that presidential mention of crime seems to elicit a public response, thus influencing public opinion of crime with a decay effect of approximately 1 year.

The 2016 US Presidential Campaign was followed worldwide due to the dynamic nature of the candidates and the controversy surrounding them. This study takes a unique look at the candidacy of Donald Trump through the eyes of his followers. Using both qualitative data collected from campaign speeches and quantitative data collected from followers, our study examines (1) the positive/negative valence of the rhetoric used by both presidential candidates and (2) the relationship between follower characteristics, perceived threat of social groups, and attributions of charisma and effectiveness to Donald Trump. The results of this study suggest that Trump’s rhetoric was significantly more negative, hostile, and aggressive than Clinton’s. In addition, quantitative analyses show a direct relationship between followers’ attitudes toward gender and attributions of charisma and effectiveness to Trump. Finally, followers’ perceived threat of social groups mediated relationships between follower self-esteem, romance of leadership, gender attitudes, and attributions of charisma and effectiveness to Trump. Our results shed further light on the important role that follower characteristics and perceptions play in predicting social constructions of leadership and attributions of charisma. Implications for both organizations and scholars of leadership are discussed.

In this study we assess whether the two major political parties and their presidential candidates played any role in mobilizing public support for environmentalism, as compared with economic issues. Our empirical analysis is based on (1) content analysis of the party platforms, (2) content analysis of campaign rhetoric, and (3) identification of ‘attentive’ publics in the electorate. Over the period 1972–92 no fewer than 12% of respondents mentioned economics but no more than 3.9% mentioned purely environmental concerns. We conclude that the environmental policy agenda did not originate from two-party electoral competition.

BackgroundSevere stressors can induce preterm birth (PTB; gestation <37 weeks), with such stressors including social and economic threats, interpersonal violence, hate crimes and severe sociopolitical stressors (ie, arising from political leaders’ threatening rhetoric or from political legislation). We analysed temporal changes in risk of PTB among immigrant, Hispanic and Muslim populations targeted in the US 2016 presidential election and its aftermath.MethodsTrend analysis of all singleton births in New York City from 1 September 2015 to 31 August 2017 (n=230 105).ResultsComparing the period before the US presidential nomination (1 September 2015 to 31 July 2016) to the post-inauguration period (1 January 2017 to 31 August 2017), the overall PTB rate increased from 7.0% to 7.3% (relative risk (RR): 1.04; 95% CI 1.00 to 1.07). Among Hispanic women, the highest post-inauguration versus pre-inauguration increase occurred among foreign-born Hispanic women with Mexican or Central American ancestry (RR: 1.15; 95% CI 1.01 to 1.31). The post-inauguration versus pre-inauguration PTB rate also was higher for women from the Middle East/North Africa and from the travel ban countries, although non-significant due to the small number of events.ConclusionSevere sociopolitical stressors may contribute to increases in the risk of PTB among targeted populations.

This study examines the Japan-China rivalry and independent foreign policy (IFP) rhetoric of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Using both AntConc (concordance program) and conventional reading, this study identifies the themes and aspects as to how he used words related to China and Japan in his speeches. Data analysis reveals that his rhetoric centered on several themes, such as historical relations, brotherly and friendly relations, strategic partnership, China as an economic and military superpower, development assistance, and as point of reference, among others. Contrary to what Duterte portrays as IFP, the study shows that even after two years into his presidency, nothing has really changed in the Philippines. His promise of pursuing an IFP policy has neither taken the form of a concrete plan nor materialized as a policy. This paper argues that the ambivalence in Duterte’s foreign policy rhetoric is just a strategy to accommodate China’s influence while maintaining his nationalist narrative. His IFP rhetoric is just a manifestation of continuing dependency to outside powers. No matter how different it initially seemed to be from previous administrations in the way that it entertains other powers such as China and Japan apart from the US, it still cannot be considered as IFP.Keywords: Independent foreign policy, Japan-China rivalry, Philippine foreign policy under Duterte, presidential speech analysis, Rodrigo DuterteCite as: Garcia, L.S.S. (2018). The Philippine president’s rhetoric on Japan-China rivalry and independent foreign policy. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 3(2),1-16.http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol3iss2pp1-16

The 2016 U.S. presidential election brought many reactions on a global scale. World leaders, national leaders, and everyday citizens experienced intense emotions on varying levels. Latinx communities in the U.S., specifically, were impacted significantly, with rhetoric about immigration and issues regarding border security (i.e., build a wall). While much about these sentiments have been reported at the journalistic level, little has been published at the research level to date: specifically, how Latinx community members reacted on an individual level, how they confronted concerns related to fear and adversities (i.e., their resilience), and what the impact may be for their future. The current study employs a community-based, qualitative approach that involved conducting semi-structured focus groups with self-identified Latinx community members in a U.S., West Coast town. Participants were asked about their emotions and reactions, as well as plans regarding the results of the election. Emergent themes included three broad categories: (1) perspectives on the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election; (2) observed impacts of the U.S. presidential election, and (3) ways of dealing with the election results. Sub and tertiary thematic categories were also identified.

The weakness of the antigun lobby in the United States is attributed to the “collective action problem” of trying to mobilize “free riders” behind a public purpose. But the Coalition for Gun Control emerged in Canada to successfully lobby for the Firearms Act of 1995. If the “collective action problem” is not limited to the United States, then are its effects “mediated” by political culture? To address this research question, we content analyze (1) media coverage, (2) party platforms, (3) presidential, and (4) ministerial rhetoric. Three frames represent “restrictive” gun policies that ban or regulate firearms, “punitive” gun policies that penalize the person for the unlawful use of firearms, or “lenient” gun policies that encourage gun ownership and gun rights. Marked differences in framing the gun debate help explain why an antigun coalition emerged in Canada but not the United States.

This study aims to analyze the rhetoric of the thoughts and ideas of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) as the sixth President of the Republic of Indonesia. Through his speech (July 24 ‘18), on YouTube, and later written on CNN online media, related to the process of forming a political party coalition that brought Prabowo Subianto as a presidential candidate in the 2019 election. The theory used in this study was qualitative-descriptive with an analytical approach critical discourse from Teun A. Van Dijk seen in dimensions; (1) text structure, (2) social cognition, and (3) social context, then associated with mass communication theory from HarollD Laswell. The results of this study are summarized with the mass communication model in form, function and meaning. The results obtained from this study create a model of mass communication with text structure (form), social cognition (function) and social context (meaning).

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign rhetoric about violence in Chicago spatialized a narrative that branded the city as the poster child of urban disarray. His bombast lacked any contextual understanding of the issue and offered no productive pathways for collective solutions. Alternatively, I argue in this paper that a rising collection of Chicago hip hop artists were producing musical discourses in 2016 that not only challenged Trump’s negative rants, but also spatialized a multilayered narrative of the intersections between hip hop and activism in the city. Through textual analysis of three tracks from three breakout artists in 2016, my goal is to show how hip hop enables audiences to imagine Chicago’s 1) structural resistance to violence in the city’s communities of color, 2) a sense of place and belonging among the city’s youth, and 3) a loving and unapologetic “black liberation” lens to social movements in the city.

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, research on Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s linguistic styles has witnessed an exponential increase, with a lopsided focus on Trump in particular. This study compared Clinton’s and Trumps’ campaign speeches during the general election using a corpus-based approach. Discourse analysis of the corpora was conducted using the textual analysis software AntConc 3.2.4. The results showed that Clinton used a more diverse vocabulary compared with Trump, and that both candidates stuck to their core campaign messages in their speeches. Three major differences between Clinton’s and Trump’s linguistic styles were identified: 1) Clinton was inclined towards rational discussions of public policy, while Trump was adept at appealing to voters’ emotions; 2) Clinton was more positive and focused on her vision of the future, while Trump was more negative and fixated at depicting a dystopian reality; 3) Clinton aimed to find commonalities with the American people, while Trump aimed to highlight differences between himself and his opponents. By putting Clinton’s rhetoric on a par with Trump’s, this study highlighted their linguistic style differences as part of their grand campaign strategy, which could contribute to current understanding of the two candidates’ rhetorical preferences, political beliefs and strategies in their 2016 campaigns.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the approaches of the presidents of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky to the issue of resolving the conflict in Donbass. The election of Vladimir Zelensky in 2019 as president of Ukraine gave rise to hope among some politicians and experts regarding the possibility of resolving the conflict that has been ongoing in 2014 in the Donbass. This was explained by the fact that, unlike his predecessor, he had no previous relation to politics, was not related to the outbreak of the conflict, and also that V. Zelensky actively used peace-loving rhetoric in his election campaign. In this regard, more than a year after V. Zelensky’s victory in the presidential election, the aim of the article was to compare his approach with P. Poroshenko’s approach to resolving the conflict in the Donbass. The study sequentially examines the approaches of the Ukrainian government in 2014-2019 to the conflict in the southeast of the country, the current Ukrainian political class approaches to the Donbass problem and directly the politician V. Zelensky himself regarding the settlement of the conflict. Taking into account Russia’s involvement in the events in Ukraine, Kiev’s policy towards Donbass is also considered in the context of Ukraine’s foreign policy towards Russia. As a result of the study, the conclusion is drawn about the significant continuity of the policy of V. Zelensky regarding his predecessor. At the same time, the material notes differences in the approaches of the two Ukrainian presidents and gives the forecast regarding the further development of Ukraine’s policy regarding the settlement of the conflict in the Donbass.

The paper studies the cognitive and pragmatic aspect of functioning particularities of precedent names in multimodal videotexts of Russian political advertisement. The importance of investigating the meaning-making mechanisms involving precedent names as cultural signs in political discourse determines the research topicality. Special attention is devoted to the issues of actualization of extralinguistic information with the help of precedent onyms and concomitant non-verbal signs. The study raises the question of semantic diversification of precedent names in the context of Russian political advertisement. The research material involves the texts of political advertising video clips created during the presidential campaigns in Russia from 1990s to the present time. The analysis of the text corpus in compliance with the cognitive and discursive approach has allowed to determine the main concepts represented by the precedent names and characterize their role in the worldview conveyed in the studied videotexts. The research has revealed a wide range of spheres of concepts encompassing the studied precedent names, such as history, politics, geography, international conflicts and wars, art, fairy tales and cartoons, economy and mass media. Different ways of correlation of verbal and non-verbal signs that actualize precedent onyms in the studied videotexts are discovered in the research. The analysis of pragmatic impact of the text involving precedent names has unveiled certain sense transformations: the intensification of particular semantic components aimed at addressing certain pragmatic tasks. The main functions of precedent names are expressive, emotive, illustrative and pragmatic ones. The majority of precedent onyms under consideration relate to European, North American and Asian culture-bound elements. The worldview represented by these precedent names reflects political opinions of the participants in the communicative events as well as topical trends in Russian political rhetoric.

The past few years have seen an emerging discourse on Chinese social media that combines the claims, vocabulary and style of right-wing populisms in Europe and North America with previous forms of nationalism and racism in Chinese cyberspace. In other words, it provokes a similar hostility towards immigrants, Muslims, feminism, the so-called ‘liberal elites’ and progressive values in general. This article examines how, in debating global political events such as the European refugee crisis and the American presidential election, well-educated and well-informed Chinese Internet users appropriate the rhetoric of ‘Western-style’ right-wing populism to paradoxically criticise Western hegemony and discursively construct China’s ethno-racial and political identities. Through qualitative analysis of 1038 postings retrieved from a popular social media website, this research shows that by criticising Western ‘liberal elites’, the discourse constructs China’s ethno-racial identity against the ‘inferior’ non-Western other, exemplified by non-white immigrants and Muslims, with racial nationalism on the one hand; and formulates China’s political identity against the ‘declining’ Western other with realist authoritarianism on the other. The popular narratives of global order protest against Western hegemony while reinforcing a state-centric and hierarchical imaginary of global racial and civilisational order. We conclude by suggesting that the discourse embodies the logics of anti-Western Eurocentrism and anti-hegemonic hegemonies. This article: (1) provides critical insights into the changing ways in which self–other relations are imagined in Chinese popular geopolitical discourse; (2) sheds light on the global circulation of extremist discourses facilitated by the Internet; and (3) contributes to the ongoing debate on right-wing populism and the ‘crisis’ of the liberal world order.

There has been a burgeoning interest in the sociology of the Frankfurt School as well as the oeuvre of Theodor W. Adorno since the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. The objectives of this study are to both illustrate the enduring importance of Adorno and to provide an important theoretical outline in making sense of Trump’s 2016 United States presidential campaign. Using Adorno’s understudied textual analysis of the radio addresses of Martin Luther Thomas and data from Trump’s 2016 US presidential campaign, we find that Trump’s own discourse can be condensed into three of Adorno’s rhetorical devices: (1) the lone wolf device or anti-statism/pseudo-conservatism, reflecting his criticism of “special interests” and his appraisal of business and (self-)finance; (2) the movement device, which amounted to glorification of action; and (3) the exactitude of error device which amounted to xenophobic, ethnonationalist hyperbole.

A good speech has the power in presenting the rhetorical argument, therefore it is required a study corresponds to the speech preparation with rhetorical techniques to argue, especially in the presidential speech of the President of the Republic of Indonesia Joko Widodo of reform era in the field of education. The research method was the critical discourse analysis method of Norman Fairclough model. Data collection techniques used were documentation techniques, note-taking techniques, and interviews. Data analysis techniques were administered by connecting micro, meso, and macro elements in dimensions: (a) text, (b) discourse practice, and (b) socio-cultural practices. The results show that President Joko Widodo and his team used the argument technique: 1) The introduction has two patterns: (a) claim and ground; and (b) claims. 2) The trunk or content section has a pattern: (a) claim and ground; (b) claim, ground, and claim; (c) claim, ground, and warrant; (d) claim, ground, and possible; and (e) claim, ground, warrant and backing with each sub topic or argument, minimally and dominantly comprising claim and ground. 3) The closing section has a pattern: (a) claim, ground, and claim; (b) claim. The rhetorical technique of arguing in a presidential speech aims at explaining the plans of educational programs, undertaken educational programs, and the promise and expectation to improve the quality of education in Indonesia during the reform era.

This study investigated about persuasive power and rhetorical style in Barrack Obama’s and John McCain’s speeches to answer two problems: how Barrack Obama’s and John McCain’s political speeches conveyed persuasive power as reflected in their rhetorical styles and what the differences of Barrack Obama’s political speeches from John McCain’s speeches are in terms of: persuasive power of the message conveyed and the rhetorical style from eighteen speeches during Presidential Election Campaign of United States in 2008. The researcher used rhetorical criticism as the technique in analyzing the data. The data of the present study were sentences which were considered to have persuasive power that were created by using rhetorical style. Having analyzed the data, the researcher revealed the following findings: (1) The researcher found that both Obama and John McCain used rhetorical style to convey the meaning in their speeches. Yet, they produced the rhetorical style differently in case of the time they brought into the speeches; Obama brought the future but McCain brought the past; (2) Obama had more persuasive power in his speech comparing with John McCain since he produced more frequent and more various rhetorical style.

[Title: The Jargon of Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidate; Nurhadi-Aldo in the Pre-Election Discourse in Indonesia in 2019] This study discusses the phenomenon of the emergence of the fictional vice-presidential candidate Nurhadi-Aldo in the midst of the heat of the situation in 2019 pre-election Indonesian politics with a number of unique jargon. The uniqueness of jargon is the result of the words that are used so it is interesting to discuss the meaning and structure of the sentence. This study uses a theory that is discourse analysis theory to find the meaning of these jargon. The theory of discourse analysis consists of three structures, namely (1) macro structure, (2) superstructure, and (3) microstructure. The macro structure consists of thematic observation domains or themes. The superstructure consists of a schematic field of observation, namely how the structure and elements of the discourse are arranged in full text. The micro structure consists of the domains of observation (a) semantics, (b) syntax, (c) stylistics, and (d) rhetorical. However, in this study the realm of syntactic observation is not used because it is considered that no data can be examined.

This article investigates the metaphorical conceptualization of terrorism by president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who came into power soon after the biggest terrorist attack in Spain on March 11th, 2004. Specifically, it examines how terrorism is conceptualized via metaphors through the notion of fight, and their conceptual implication in discourse. I will refer to these as Fight Metaphors. The research questions addressed are as follows: 1. What Fight Metaphors are used in the discursive construction of terrorism? 2. How do Fight Metaphors contribute to support Zapatero’s anti-terrorism political agenda? I follow a combination of a cognitive and a pragmatic approach from a corpus-based analysis perspective. The cognitive approach is based on Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (1993), and the pragmatic one is based on Charteris-Back’s Critical Metaphor Analysis (2004). The corpus of investigation comprises 58 Spanish political speeches over a three-year period (2004-2007). Findings reveal that Fight Metaphors constitute the pivotal node that simultaneously performs various functions at several levels: cognitive, rhetorical, and ideological in order to promote his anti-terrorism political ideology.

This study examines data from a 2016 presidential debate in Taiwan to explore the use of first-person narrative in political discourse as a rhetorical device, and how public reactions to its credibility are influenced by the narrative’s context. While previous studies of political debate discourse (e.g. Kuo 2001) investigate, for example, the use of “constructed dialogue” (Tannen 2007), there is a lack of studies focusing on first-person narrative in political debates. Using three-level positioning as outlined by Bamberg (1997), I analyze a narrative featuring a grandma character told by presidential candidate Eric Chu, also comparing it to another candidate James Soong’s “grandma narrative.” I argue that the context places constraints on the effects of their narratives. Whereas Chu’s narrative, a traditional Labovian first-person story, is widely ridiculed with memes for its lack of credibility, Soong’s narrative, a habitual narrative, receives little attention.The analysis shows how Chu’s narrative serves his rhetorical purposes and suggests why the public doubts its credibility. At level 1 (characters positioned vis-à-vis one another), Chu presents himself as non-agentive with constructed dialogue, thereby excusing an earlier decision he made -- failing to keep his promise to finish his term as a mayor. At level 2 (speaker positioned to audience), he switches from Mandarin to Taiwanese, a local dialect, which can be seen as an appeal to his current audience. At level 3 (identity claims locally instantiated), the grandma character draws on the archetype of elderly women in Taiwanese culture, fundamental to national economic growth, while his description of praying at a temple casts him against the local tradition of religious practices in Taiwan. The study helps fill the knowledge gap regarding first-person narrative in political discourse, while highlighting the context in which political narratives are embedded and contributing to understanding positioning in Taiwanese public discourse.

This study aims to describe the daily frame of Kompas against President Joko Widodo. Data was excavated from Kompas daily news published in 2016/2017 using referring method and record technique. Data analysis was done by using framing analysis of Pan and Kosicki model. The result, (1) from the schematic element: Golkar’s decision to nominate Joko Widodo as presidential candidate in 2019 proves that Golkar is in a state of cadre crisis and fails, (2) from the script elements: Golkar does not have a great cadre, (3) from thematic elements: (b) Golkar Party “always fails” to deliver its cadres to become RI-1, (c) Golkar can not be separated from the “shackles” of government / power, (d) Golkar has no cadres, ) Golkar has a “curse”, (e) there is an error in the regulatory system in Golkar, (f) Golkar is playing srtategy with Joko Widodo’s nomination, (g) power-hungry Golkar, and (h) Golkar, as a big party, is very unfortunate because it can not play its role to determine the national political constellation; and (4) from the rhetorical element: sentences that are used are “meaningless”.

Hoax often appears with massive political momentum, such as the atmosphere of the Presidential Election campaign. Its appearance is often related to other issues and can lead to confrontations on social media such as hatred, blasphemy, and humiliation. On October 2, 2018, the news of Ratna Sarumpaet being persecuted appeared on the internet. It was linked to imposing another camp after her several political colleagues echoed the report everywhere. It didn't take a long time for the police officer to uncover the truth, which turned out to be a hoax. The formulation of this research problem is how Detik.com's online news portal frames, selects, and highlights the news about hoax cases created by Ratna Sarumpaet. This study aims to determine the 1) syntactic structure of the online news portal Detik.com through the hoax case about Ratna Sarumpaet, 2) to know how journalists tell the facts (scripts) used by Detik.com by referring to their vision and mission in emphasizing hoax about Ratna Sarumpaet, 3) to understand the thematic structure by identifying the involvement of Detik.com media in reporting hoax cases of Ratna Sarumpaet, and 4) to find out the rhetorical structure by emphasizing the fact in the case of Ratna Sarumpaet's hoax. The researcher used a qualitative research method, with data collection techniques through online media data tracking techniques and by reviewing documents and archives. The analysis theory used was the framing analysis by Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M. Kosicki. This research indicates that Detik.com focuses more on high site traffic and a massive amount of visitors or readers. The profit from the income received can maintain good relations between the company and the stakeholders.

As ações políticas do governo Temer (PMDB), após o afastamento e impeachment da presidenta Dilma Rousseff (PT), a Medida Provisória 746/2016, e posteriormente a Lei nº 13.415, de 16 de fevereiro de 2017, ao reformular o Art. 36 da Lei nº 9.394, de 20 de dezembro de 1996, incidiu no denominado Novo Ensino Médio. Observaram-se nas mídias propagandas sobre o Novo Ensino Médio. Nessa direção, o objetivo deste artigo consistiu em analisar os discursos subjacentes às propagandas do ‘novo’ Ensino Médio produzidas pelo Ministério da Educação do Brasil. A análise qualitativa dos discursos veiculados a partir do método do Materialismo Histórico Dialético possibilitou constatar: (1) o uso das propagandas políticas com discursos estratégicos para conquistar o apoio da população para os programas, projetos e ideologias políticas, bem como para legitimar e reforçar as iniciativas do governo por meio do controle político do que é mediado, construindo imagens do real que distorcem a realidade concreta; (2) o uso predominante da retórica e argumentos afetivos; (3) o alinhamento da formação para o Mercado de Trabalho no sentido de formação de Capital Humano e mão de obra barata, exército de reserva de trabalhadores. Este artigo não esgota as discussões sobre o discurso mediado pelas propagandas, mas conclui-se com a emergência de pensar e questionar como o governo Temer (PMDB) têm gestado as Políticas da Educação, especialmente o Ensino Médio, para que a população tenha claros os porquês das propagandas e da reforma, e que Modelo de Sociedade está pautado nestas iniciativas e formas de reprodução social.Palavras-chave: Capital e trabalho; Ensino Médio; Políticas educacionais; Propaganda; Trabalho e educação.ABSTRACT: The political of the Temer government (PMDB), after the removal and impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff (PT), the Provisional Measure 746/2016, and subsequently Law No. 13,415 of February 16, 2017; by rewriting Article 36 of Law 9,394 of December 20, 1996, focused on High School New. Advertising on the New High School was observed in different medias. Therefore, the objective of this article was to analyze the underlying speech in advertising of the Ministry of Education of Brazil. The transcription and qualitative analysis of the discourses conveyed from the method of Historical Materialism Dialectic made it possible to verify: (1) The use of political advertisements with strategic discourses to gain mass support, conquer the population for political programs, projects and ideologies, As well as to legitimize government initiatives through political control of what is mediated, constructing images of the real that distort concrete reality; (2) the predominant use of rhetoric and affective arguments; (3) the alignment of training for the Labor Market in the sense of the formation of Human Capital and forming an reserve army of workers. This article does not end the discussions about the discourse mediated by the advertisements, but it concludes with the emergence of questioning how the Temer government (PMDB) have developed the policies of education, especially high school, so that the population is clear about the reasons for the advertisements and the reform, and that the Model of Society is based on these initiatives and forms of social reproduction.Keywords: Capital and work; High school; Educational policies; Advertising; Work and education.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Social media has made it possible for maps to reach massive audiences outside of traditional media sources. In some cases, social media maps are original designs crafted by users, in other cases they are modified or replicated from previous sources. It is now relatively easy for novice Internet users to create new maps or manipulate existing images, and social media provides a vehicle for these maps to become visible in ways that were simply not possible even a decade ago. In addition, traditional media sources now harvest content from social streams, and in some cases may amplify what was originally a socially-shared map.</p><p>Maps that rapidly reach popularity via social media can be considered viral maps. A key element of virality in social media is the structure of how content becomes viral. The concept of structural virality suggests that the nature of how media are shared is more important than the raw population that might see something (Goel, Anderson et al. 2016). For example, a social media user with millions of followers can broadcast their content to a large audience, but structurally viral content is media that does not require a major broadcaster in order to reach a large audience.</p><p>Previous work on viral cartography has shown how viral maps may develop conditions in which their audiences begin creating and repurposing maps in response, resulting in large collections of social media maps. For example, Robinson (Robinson 2018) showed how a viral election map resulted in hundreds of maps shared by social media users in response to the original work.</p><p>Viral maps and the maps that emerge in subsequent responses from social media users pose interesting challenges for cartographers to address. Understanding their design dimensions and the ways in which these maps are disseminated (often outside of the social media stream where they may have originated) are two key areas of potential research inquiry. Knowledge of design and dissemination in social mapping is necessary as well if we wish to understand the capability of social media maps to inform or actively disinform the public. We argue that the latter topic is of utmost importance given the relative ease of making maps today versus their clear rhetorical power in public discussion and debate.</p><p>New methods are emerging to characterize the design elements of social media maps and their context on the internet. For example, proprietary machine learning services such as Google Cloud Vison and Amazon Rekognition are used for real-time detection of faces, text, sentiment, image structure, and relevant web results. While the primary use case for these services is to support image moderation on social media, to improve search results, and to support marketing activities, these methods can also be applied to the study of social media maps in support of cartographic research.</p><p>For example, we have used Google Cloud Vision to characterize the design and dissemination of a viral map created and shared by Kenneth Field, a cartographer at Esri. In March of 2018, Field tweeted an image of a dot-density map showing the 2016 United States Presidential Election results. A unique aspect of this map was its ability to show one dot for each of the more than 60 million votes cast in the 2016 election. Field’s tweet was liked more than 10,000 times and retweeted over 4000 times, reaching millions of potential viewers.</p><p>Google Cloud Vision analysis of Field’s map highlights a range of election and cartographic entities that it finds relevant to the original posting (Figure 1). Field’s map generated website content that focused on both its meaning in terms of interpreting the 2016 election, as well as its technical execution in terms of cartography. It could be argued that these are not terribly surprising results, but this demonstrates nevertheless that an automated routine has the power to deliver sensible contextual information about map images. Extrapolating from one map to the millions that appear each year on social media, it becomes plausible then to apply machine learning methods to characterize their design and web context, even from streaming sources, as these methods are already built to support real-time analysis of streaming data.</p><p>The dissemination of a viral map can be characterized by the number of engagements via social means in both direct and indirect forms. Direct forms of engagement may include user actions to like, share, or reply directly to a social media post. Indirect types of engagement can include the number of people who saw an item in their social media feed, and the potential audience who may have the opportunity to see an item in their social media feeds. In addition, viral maps can become the focus of media attention from traditional news sources, and amplified further to their respective audiences. Finally, users may blog about a viral map or share them in private messages or group chats.</p><p>One way to understand the dissemination of a viral map is to take advantage of image analysis service capabilities to produce URLs that show full and partially matching versions of an image. Google Cloud Vision provides this capability along with its other image analysis functions. In the case of the Field dot density map of the 2016 election, webpages that reference the exact image from Field’s original tweet include media stories about his map, blog postings, e-commerce sites that sell printed versions of the map, and message forum discussions that reference the map. Partial image matching results reveal only a few sites that have derived versions of Field’s original maps, and all of those we reviewed were simply resampled versions of the original. Other partial image matching results included other types of dasymetric and thematic maps located on the web. For example, multiple cellular phone coverage maps are highlighted as partial matches to Field’s original work (Figure 2).</p><p>We hypothesize that there is considerable potential for social media maps to be sources of disinformation. Map remain a powerful means of communication, and it is easier than ever to create a new map or modify an existing map to convey misleading information. Future research may be able to leverage the attributes and links derived from machine learning image analysis services such as Google Cloud Vision to assess the potential for a viral map to be an agent of disinformation. For example, being able to quickly identify the original source for a map image and to characterize the constellation of websites on which it has been shared may aid users in evaluating the credibility of what they are seeing.</p><p>In November 2018, climate scientist Brian Brettschneider shared a map on Twitter that purported to show regions of the United States and their preferred Thanksgiving pie. This map went viral, drawing attention from traditional media sources as well as Twitter users with large audiences of their own, including one U.S. Senator. Many who saw this absurd map argued about its content because they incorrectly assumed it was based on real data. Brettschneider reflected on the power of creating and sharing fake viral maps in a subsequent article for Forbes (Brettschneider 2018), stating, “We cannot let maps, as a medium for communicating information, be co-opted by people with nefarious intentions. I pledge to do my part by clearly noting if a map is a parody in the future.”</p>

Nothing can rouse fury in even the most apathetic voter or stir the vitriol of American political discourse like the healthcare debate. From the run-up to the 2008 Presidential Election—when then-Senator Barack Obama made the creation of a revamped healthcare system the crux of his platform—through the present, the President’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”) has been under siege. Obstreperous members of Congress on both sides of the debate levied traditional lines of criticism, concerning themselves with the law’s perceived socialist leaning 1 or the associated financial burden.2 Still other critics believe the healthcare plan will grant undocumented immigrants unmerited access to the benefits of a public healthcare system. Collectively, the narrative surrounding the healthcare debate has been so overly contentious and hostile as to obviate any remaining comity within the political discourse surrounding the problem. 3 But, behind all this white noise and livid rhetoric there still remains the central issue: without an adequate proposal that addresses the undocumented immigrant ‘problem,’ President Obama’s healthcare plan is incomplete.

Abstract Since the presidential election of 2016, bias-related incidents, hate-filled rhetoric, and extremist violence have been increasing in the United States. Because social workers are often working with individuals and communities affected by these incidents, practitioners may have increasing responsibility to confront social injustice and oppression. However, limited evidence on the preparedness of social workers to assume this responsibility, particularly among those who are still students, exists. To address this gap, this study used focus group and survey data from the Diversity and Oppression Scale to explore the preparedness of MSW students (N = 22) to confront oppression. Six themes were identified as integral to student experiences in their programs: (1) social worker responsibility to confront oppression, (2) use of dominant group discourse on oppression, (3) variation in faculty preparation and comfort, (4) a focus on knowledge of oppression versus skills and process, (5) role of personal responsibility and experience in student preparation, and (6) strategies to increase student preparedness to confront oppression. Factors identified to enhance students’ level of preparedness include faculty opportunities for development, changes to the explicit and implicit curriculum, and creating a formalized way to integrate topics on oppression and diversity into all facets of the curriculum.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: "President Can't Swim". —Lyndon B. Johnson Introduction The term “spin” implies manipulating the truth, and this concept, along with “spin doctoring,” is now common in media and public discourse. The prevalence of “spin zones” in American politics is undeniable; media outlets themselves, such as Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone” on Fox News, now run segments on the topic. Despite this apparent media certainty about what constitutes “spin” there is a lack of conceptual clarity regarding the term among those who study media and politics. This article will draw on previous literature to identify two competing yet overlapping spin zones in American politics: the media’s spin zone and the President’s spin zone. Highlighting examples from the two most recent American presidential election campaigns, the article will evaluate the interplay of these zones and the consequences for future campaigns. Spin Zones In the United States, the press and the President are engaged in a struggle over providing information. Ever since the Watergate Scandal, the media is increasingly expected to be a “watchdog” that informs citizens and keeps the Executive accountable (Coronel 13) The President, conversely, may attempt to use the power of his position to set the discursive agenda or frame the political debate in his favor. Furthermore, with the rise of multi-media access and information provision, the lines between the spin doctoring of the Executive and the media have become even more blurred. Because of the complexities of these overlapping spin zones, many scholars disagree on how to define and/or precisely measure these effects. The following section briefly describes the ‘spin zone’ tools of agenda setting, framing, and priming, and then considers the example of a candidate who failed to prime his negative evaluation and a President who primes his image and successfully counterattacks his negative evaluation. The literature recognises two separate, yet interrelated zones that are integral to understanding these media/presidential relations: what we term the presidential spin zone and the media spin zone. The interplay between these zones comes together around three key concepts—agenda setting, framing, and priming. A key difficulty for scholars is that the President, his electoral challengers, and the press are engaged in agenda setting, framing and priming, sometimes simultaneously. Agenda setting is a broad concept and refers to focusing on certain issues to the exclusion of others. Framing is defined as the decision by the news media to “emphasise certain elements to define the ‘public’s belief’ about social and political issues” (Van Gorp 488). Other scholars describe priming as “a disproportionate amount of public comments with the hope . . . of causing voters to base their selection among the candidates on [that] issue” (Druckman et al. 1181; see also Druckman “Framing Effects”; Nelson, Clawson and Oxley; Van Gorp). Candidates may also undertake “image priming,” which is proposed by James Druckman et al., as a tool that can be used to counteract negative candidate evaluations (1182–1183). The definition of the media spin zone is, in most instances, synonymous with priming. Defining the presidential spin zone is more complex. Clearly the presidential spin zone involves both the previously-discussed “issue framing abilities of the president” and how he “set[s] the agenda” (Miller and Krosnick 301; see also, Gamson and Modigliano, Baumgardner and Jones; Druckman, “Framing Effects”). Mark Rozell, for instance, found that the Ford and Carter administrations had difficulty controlling the public agenda since many issues were either beyond their control, or because the president and his advisors lacked the strategy or skill to affect media coverage. The Reagan White House however was able to use his “image” to control the media (85–86). Similarly, George W. Bush’s administration was able to implement policies concerning the invasion of Iraq after the 9-11 through “issue framing” scare tactics, which were constantly reinforced by media outlets (Kellner 643). However, the President can also be engaged in priming at any given time. In other words, the President (or candidate) may attempt to prime what the media has already spun about him/her. A problem, of course, is that the President or candidate, in attempting to prime an issue that has already been spun in a sense tacitly admits they have lost the opportunity to set the agenda in the first place. However, this is when he can seize the aforementioned opportunity to use “image priming” to counterattack the media. In the examples that follow we examine whether the President or candidate can use priming to effectively counterattack the media spin zone, with a focus on two political tools that have been historically reserved for the President or candidates, namely, holding the base and wedge issues. Holding the Base and the Media Spin Zone Holding the base has been defined as a way in which candidates or Presidents can use the media to strengthen support among voters who already identify with their political party (Iyengar and McGrady 246). A classic example of this is the 1984 Reagan/Bush re-election campaign, the “The Bear.” This featured a bear in the woods that “some” could “see” and others didn’t “see at all” which was an implicit threat regarding Soviet communism and a reminder that Reagan was tough on foreign policy (“The Bear”). However, the evidence indicates that the media has increasingly begun “holding the base” on its own to facilitate its partisan framing and priming of candidates or Presidents. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack advertisements on 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is a key example of a media attempt to “hold the base.” In these advertisements, former “Swift Boat Veterans attack[ed] his [Kerry’s] military record” (Muravchik A17). While this initiative began as a means to collect Republican donations, Shanto Iyengar and Jennifer McGrady maintain that the amount was “trivial” and that the real impact came with “the torrent of news reports across the country” (150). Indeed, Kathleen Jamieson and Joseph Capella found that by August 2004, “viewers of Fox News were more likely than other network viewers to say that candidate John Kerry did not earn his Vietnam medals” (279). Their evaluation of this data demonstrated the power of the media spin zone: “He (Limbaugh) employs intense language, disparaging information and negative framing to distance perceptions of the Democratic candidate from those of the anointed Republican candidate” (Jamieson and Capella 228). The coverage of disputes surrounding Kerry’s military record was augmented by the media’s simultaneous coverage of the threat of terrorism. This priming “in the media continued, reaching a high peak of 55 threat messages in August 2004, a month later 25% of the public was very concerned about another major terrorist attack in the US—two months before the presidential election” (Nacos, Bloch-Elkon and Shapiro 120). Both President Bush and Candidate Kerry acknowledged that their respective win/loss could be attributed in some measure to the press coverage of the “war on terror” (Nacos, Bloch-Elkon and Shapiro 124). While questions loomed about his military experience against the backdrop of the war on terror, Senator Kerry won the first two Presidential debates by significant margins. Alec Gallup and Frank Newport suggested that the Kerry camp had “won the spin contest … to characterize their own candidate as the winner” (406). So, what happened to Kerry? The media spin zone stopped him. The presidential debate wins were 30 September 2004 and 8 October 2004, respectively. Iyengar and McGrady demonstrate that before the debates even began the number of Swift Boat veteran stories primed in the national and international press went from under 100 to over 500 (151). According to Kim Fridkin et al. the media’s spin was a significant factor in the third debate. They found that media coverage concerning Senator Kerry’s response to one question on whether homosexuality was a choice affected citizens’ evaluations of the candidate. In the post debate coverage, the tone “in newspapers, on the Internet, and on television was uniformly negative in its assessment of Senator Kerry’s comments” (Fridkin et al. 30). The impact of this negative framing was sufficiently strong to override positive evaluations of Kerry held by those who watched the debate. In sum, the “perfect storm of media coverage lessened the bounce that Senator Kerry received from the actual debate and led people to develop negative impressions of Kerry a mere three weeks before Election Day” (Fridkin 43). Despite these liabilities, Kerry should have counterattacked the media spin zone. He should have “counterpunched,” as noted by Drew Westen, priming the media that he was “a different kind of Democrat”—“one who knows when it’s time to take off the gloves” (337). Westen’s advice is echoed in Druckman’s call for further research in this area as well as by his own research findings. The media’s framing and priming led to negative evaluations of Kerry, which afforded him the opportunity to prime his “image” in a counterattack, as Druckman suggests (1183). Overcoming the Wedge Issues of the Media Spin Zone President Obama, however, orchestrates a different outcome in dealing with the media spin zone attack against him which centered on a “wedge” or “us verses them” issue. Iyengar and McGrady note that “wedge issues are designed to pit groups against each other, to appeal to voters’ sense of group identity” (145). However, they define wedge issues within the context of presidential spin zones; thus, the candidate or the president would be framing the “us versus them” topic. In this instance, the media framed a wedge issue, the status of President Obama’s citizenship, against him. In this case the birther movement, oft-promoted by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, argued that President Obama was not a US citizen. This issue became so prominent that it was soon adopted by the media spin zone. The media framing demanded proof in addition to the short form birth certificate that the President had already released (Wilson 109). For his part, President Obama handled the media spin zone’s wedge issue with great aplomb, responding in a brief statement to the public on 27 April 2011: “We do not have time for this kind of silliness” (Shear). Moreover, he did not alienate the media for framing the birther movement, but he placed the blame implicitly on Donald Trump who had taken up the birther gauntlet thrown down by Rush Limbaugh. It was “clearly Trump” he was priming when he indicated that he did not want to be “distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers” (Shear). Moreover, his strategic focus on “silliness” is an illustration of “image priming”. He did not allow himself to be drawn into the race-baiting or religious controversy that was a component of some of the media talk show discussions. The Washington Post reported after Obama’s speech that the percentage of Americans who questioned his legitimacy to serve as President dropped from 20% to 10%—thus legitimating his choice to address the nation. This result meant that the President responded to an attack from the media spin zone with a counterattack of his own; he effectively counterattacked to prime his image. Interestingly, Stephen Ansolobehare and Iyengar have indirectly demonstrated the efficacy of counterattacks in presidential spin zone situations by evaluating situations where one candidate attacks another and the “victim” of the attack either, does not respond, responds with a positive message or responds with a counterattack (143). They found overwhelming evidence that voters prefer their party’s candidate to counterattack rather than be victimised. Conclusion In this paper we have furthered the call for conceptual clarity in the field by joining Druckman et al. in emphasising the need for more research on “image priming” on the part of candidates and Presidents in the interplay between the press and the presidency. If used properly, image priming seems a viable way for the presidency to counterattack against media framing and priming, but squandered opportunities may irreparably harm candidates. President Obama faced a difficult wedge issue that had undercurrents of both racial and religious tensions, but he deftly avoided those issues and found a way to “use Trump as a foil and present the president as a more serious leader” (Shear). His counterattack against the wedge used by the media spin zone was successful. Senator Kerry, on the other hand, failed to counterattack the media spin zone’s rallying of the base. His silence allowed the media to generate both issue and image frames and priming against him. This is an important lesson for future candidates and presidents and the media and presidential spin zones are important topics for further research. References Ansolabehare, Stephen, and Shanto Iyengar. Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate. New York: Free Press, 1995. Baumgardner, Frank, and Bryan D. Jones. Agendas and Instability in American Politics. Chicago, Illinois: U of Chicago P, 1993. Cappella, Joseph N., and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Coronel, Sheila S. “The Media as Watchdog.” The Role of the News Media in the Governance Realm 29–31 May 2008. 18 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Conference/Conference%20papers/Coronel%20Watchdog.pdf›. Druckman, James N. “On the Limits of Framing Effects: Who Can Frame?” The Journal of Politics 63.4 (2001): 1041–1066. ——. “The Power of Television Images.” The Journal of Politics 65.2 (2003): 559–71. Druckman, James N., et al. “Candidate Strategies to Prime Issues and Image.” The Journal of Politics 66.4 (2004): 1180–1202. Esser, Frank, Carsten Reinemann, and David Fan. “Spin Doctoring in British and German Election Campaigns: How the Press Is Being Confronted with a New Quality of Political PR.” European Journal of Communication 15.2 (2000): 209–239. Fridkin, Kim L., et al. “Spinning Debates: The Impact of the News Media’s Coverage of the Final 2004 Presidential Debate.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 13.1 (2008): 29–51. Funk, Carolyn. “Bringing the Candidate in Models of Candidate Evaluation.” The Journal of Politics 61.3 (1999): 700–720. Gallup, Alec M., and Frank Newport. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion in 2004. Lanham, Maryland: Rowland & Littlefield Publishers, 2006 Gamson, William A., and Andre Modigliani. “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach.” American Journal of Sociology 95.1 (1989): 1–37. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1974 Iyengar, Shanto, and Jennifer A. McGrady. Media Politics: A Citizens Guide. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Iyengar, Shanto, and Donald R. Kinder. News That Matters. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Jacobs, Lawrence R., and Robert Y. Shapiro. “Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness.” Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Joseph N. Capella. Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Kellner, Douglas. “Bushspeak and the Politics of Lying: Presidential Rhetoric in the War on Terror.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37.4 (2007): 622–645. Miller, Joanne M., and Jon A. Krosnick. “News Media Impact on the Ingredients of Presidential Evaluations: Politically Knowledgeable Citizens are Guided by a Trusted Source.” American Journal of Political Science 44.2 (2000): 301-315. Muravchik, Joshua. “Kerry’s Cambodia Whopper.” Washington Post 24 Aug. 2004: A17. Nacos, Brigette L., Yaeli Boch-Elkon, Robert Y. Shapiro. “Post 9-11 Terrorism Threats, News Coverage, and Public Perceptions in the United States.” International Journal of Conflict and Violence 1.2 (2007): 105–126. Nelson, Thomas E., Rosalee A. Clawson, and Zoe M. Oxley. “Media Framing of Civil Liberties Conflict and Its Effect on Tolerance.” American Political Science Review 91 (1997): 567-583. Rozell, M.J. “Presidential Image-Makers on the Limits of Spin Control.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 25.1 (1995): 67–90. Scheufele, Dietram A., and David Tewksbury. “Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models.” Journal of Communication 57.1 (2007): 9–20. Shear, Michael D. “With Document, Obama Seeks to End Birther Issue.” New York Times 28 April 2011. 18 Oct 2011 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/us/politics/28obama.html›.“The Bear.” 4President TV 2 Oct 1984. 18 Oct 2011 ‹http://tv.4president.us/1984/reagan1984bear.htm›. Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science 211.4481 (1981): 452–58. Van Gorp, Baldwin. “Where Is the Frame: Victims and Intruders in the Belgian Press Coverage of the Asylum Issue?” European Journal of Communication 20.4 (2005): 484–507. Westen, Drew. The Political Brain. New York: Public Affairs, 2007. Wilson, John K. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh’s Assault on Reason. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric generated by the sociopolitical climate under the current U.S. presidential administration has exacerbated the fear of deportation and family separation within the unauthorized Latinx community. Consequently, millions of families, including U.S. citizen children living in mixed-status households, are experiencing stressful environments as they adapt and respond to their social context. This study explored how harsh immigration discourse impacts mixed-status families living in a new-immigrant destination. Twenty-two unauthorized mothers participated in semi-structured interviews regarding their experiences as immigrants raising children in the U.S. Two main themes arose from this analysis: (1) ever-present fear and stress and (2) obeying the law and avoiding others. Parents explained how they had been living in fear since the elections took place, and the different scenarios they had to prepare for in case of deportation. Moreover, some parents choose to minimize conversations around incidents happening in their community to avoid additional stress for children, whereas others addressed children’s concerns to reassure them and placate their apprehension. Participants also reported avoiding unnecessary trips outside of the home to prevent interactions with others, especially law enforcement. These results provide important insights regarding the experiences of unauthorized Latinx immigrant parents in the context of sociopolitical adversity. Due to the limited resources often available in new immigrant destinations, social workers must leverage their networks to support families undergoing difficult transitions with special attention to altered family structures and parenting practices. As unauthorized parents attempt to withstand the double burden of basic survival and effective parenting, it is imperative that practitioners provide tools for parents to effectively engage with their children to sustain healthy environments.

This article critically examines the visual and mediated communication of vice presidential candidate and now vice president, Kamala Harris, and Harris’s political surrogates leading up to the 2020 presidential election. As a launching point, we build on our 2016 election retrospective, where we analyzed “Hillary Through Time” and found that political women were not only primed to “take advantage of the democratization of visual rhetorical presentations” but also, political women could challenge normative coverage “through a mediated image of her own making.” Fast forward 4 years, we offer such agency through the visual communication of Kamala’s campaign-mediated image. Drawing from the philosophy of Susanne K. Langer, we argue that Kamala Harris intentionally advances “artful political communication” as a method for challenging gendered aesthetic tropes of political women; ultimately shifting the narrative of “2 for the price of 1” from deferential to empowered.

This paper aims to examine the effects of public debt on economic growth by using a regression method of a fixed effect model with the data of 58 developed countries (high-income countries) and developing countries (low and medium income countries). The analysis shows that public debt (both in terms of scale and rate of increase), inflation, government spending and unemployment are negatively associated with economic growth. A reasonable expenditure plan (in this case, consumption expenditure) can control the impact of public debt on economic growth. More particularly, public debt has a positive impact on economic growth if consumption expenditure is larger than 14-16% of the GDP. Other factors such as TFP (Total-Factor Productivity), trade and public investment can stimulate growth in the observed sample. Interestingly, for high-income countries, economic growth rate in Assembly-elected President countries is higher than that in the Presidential countries.
 Keywords
 Public debt, consumption expenditure, economic growth, developing countries, fixed effect model
 References
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After descending an escalator of his hotel at Central Park West on a June day in 2015, Donald Trump ascended a podium and proceeded to accuse Mexico of "sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us (sic). They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists" (Time 2015). It was a moment that marked the launch of his bid for president of the United States. From that point forward, Trump made immigration restriction one of the centerpieces of his campaign. Paired with an economically populist message, the nativist rhetoric shaped a narrative that helped launch him to the White House. His effectiveness partly lay in his ability to understand and exploit preexisting insecurities, partly in his outsider status, and partly in his willingness to tap into apparently widespread public sentiment that is uneasy with, if not overtly hostile to, migrants.This paper will try to make sense of the restrictionist logic that informs the Trump administration’s worldview, alongside some of the underlying cultural, philosophical, and political conditions that inspired support for Trump by millions of Americans. This paper contends that the Clash of Civilizations (CoC) paradigm is a useful lens to help understand the positions that President Trump has taken with respect to international affairs broadly, and specifically in his approach to migration policy. This paradigm, originally coined by the historian Bernard Lewis but popularized by the political theorist Samuel Huntington (Hirsh 2016), provides a conceptual framework for understanding international relations following the end of the Cold War. It is a framework that emphasizes the importance of culture, rather than political ideology, as the primary fault line along which future conflicts will occur. Whether Trump ever consciously embraced such a framework in the early days of his candidacy is doubtful. He has been candid about the fact that he has never spent much time reading and generally responds to problems on instinct and "common sense" rather than a conceptually defined worldview developed by academics and intellectuals (Fisher 2016). Nevertheless, during the presidential campaign, and continuing after his victory, Trump surrounded himself with high-level advisers, political appointees, and staff who, if they have nothing else in common, embrace something roughly akin to the Clash of Civilizations perspective (Ashford 2016).[1]The paper will focus primarily on Trump’s approach to refugee resettlement. One might think that refugees would elicit an almost knee-jerk sympathy given the tragic circumstances that drove their migration, but perceptions of refugees are often tied up with geopolitical considerations and domestic political realities. Following 9/11, the threat of Islamic-inspired terrorism emerged as a national security priority. With the onset of the Syrian Civil War and the significant refugee crisis that ensued in its wake, paired with some high-profile terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe, the “Islamic threat” became even more pronounced.The perception that Islamic-inspired terrorism is a real and imminent threat has contributed to a growing antagonism toward the resettlement of refugees, and particularly Muslims. When viewed through the lens of the CoC paradigm, victims of persecution can easily be transformed into potential threats. Insofar as Islam is understood as an external and even existential threat to the American way life, the admission of these migrants and refugees could be deemed a serious threat to national security.This paper will begin by examining some of Trump’s campaign promises and his efforts to implement them during the early days of his administration. Although the underlying rationale feeding into the contemporary reaction against refugee resettlement is unique in many respects, it is rooted in a much longer history that extends back to the World War II period. It was during this period that a more formal effort to admit refugees began, and it was over the next half century that the program developed. Understanding the historical backdrop, particularly insofar as its development was influenced by the Cold War context, will help to clarify some of the transitions that influenced the reception of refugees in the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.Such an exploration also helps to explain how and why a CoC paradigm has become ascendant. The decline of the ideologically driven conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union has, according Huntington’s thesis, been superseded by culturally based conflicts that occur when competing civilizations come into contact. The conceptual framework that the CoC framework embodies meshes well with the cultural and economic dislocation felt by millions of Trump supporters who are concerned about the continued dissolution of a shared cultural and political heritage. It is important to keep in mind that the CoC paradigm, as a conceptual framework for understanding Donald Trump and his approach to refugee resettlement and migration more broadly, is at its core pre-political; it helps to define the cultural matrix that people use to make sense of the world. The policy prescriptions that follow from it are more effect than cause.[1] It is worth noting that proponents of the CoC worldview are just one bloc within the Trump administration, albeit at the moment an influential one. Other competing blocs (e.g., establishment Republicans) are also in the mix.

One of the most crucial decisions political candidates make ahead of an election is whether they want to focus on their image or that of their their political opponents in their advertisement (Lau and Rovner , 2009). During electoral campaigns, candidates need to decide whether they use political advertisement to display a positive image of themselves or whether they try to make the opponent look bad. The first strategy is referred to as Acclaim or Positive Ads. The second approach, according to Surlin and Gordon is called Negative Campaigning and is applied by a political candidate when (s)he “attacks the other candidate personally, the issues for which the other candidate stands, or the party of the other candidate” (1977, p. 93). However, measuring negative campaigning poses a challenge to academic research since content analyses often fail to address the grey areas of this concept. To begin with, many political ads compare positive characteristics of a candidate against opponents’ more negative ones. (Lau & Rovner, 2009). Ads that contain both strategies, shedding positive light on the candidate while also highlighting negative aspects about the opponent’s character or policies are called Comparison or Comparative Ads. These comparisons are difficult to code with straightforward approaches. For example, analyzing campaigns along a positive/negative dichotomy by discounting attacks to the opponent from positive self-presentations may equate strongly positively and negatively charged political advertising to neutral campaigns. Also, negativity in political campaigning is studied in different contexts and has been extended as a number of studies on negative campaigning look in particular at Attacks and Rebuttals/Defense from opponents after an attack (Benoit, 2000; Benoit & Airne, 2009; Erigha & Charles, 2012; Lee & Benoit, 2004; Torres, Hyman, & Hamilton, 2012). This distinction raises other important methodological and theoretical implications. Sweeping measures of negativity based on common scholarly definitions do not consider voters’ tolerance towards the use of certain forms of negativity by candidates (for example, rebutting an attack from an opponent) that may be perceived as legitimate. Not accounting for such nuances is what makes many negativity measures unable to accurately gauge the effects of negative campaigning among the electorate (Sigelman & Kugler, 2003). Field of application/theoretical foundation: Negative campaigning and its related constructs (such as attacks or rebuttals) have been often associated with current trends in political communication of modernization and professionalization of election campaigns (Voltmer, 2004). Negative campaigning is indeed a development that can be observed across many different political contexts (Kaid & Holtz-Bacha, 2006). Campaign strategies using negative messages about a political opponent have been studied relying on theories from social and cognitive psychology (Kahn & Kenney, 1999; Lau, 1985) and mostly in regard to their potential consequences for a healthy democracy (Lau & Rovner, 2009). Their operationalization follows a simple schema by coding whether a certain construct is present in a given advertising piece or not. Alternatively, it is coded which kind of category best reflects on the content of a given political advertisement. References/combination with other methods of data collection: Negative campaigning and related constructs have been studied through content analysis both of paid advertisement (Benoit, 2000) and news coverage by the mass media (Lau & Pomper, 2004); The features and effects of negative campaigning have also been analyzed through voter surveys (Brader, 2005, 2006) and interviews with campaign managers (Kahn & Kenney, 1999). Its effects were furthermore more precisely measured through numerous experimental studies (Ansolabehere, Iyengar, Simon, & Valentino, 1994; overview see: Lau et al., 2007). Example studies: Table 1: Overview exemplary studies measuring of negative campaigning and related constructs Authors Sample Unit of analysis Constructs Values Reliability Benoit (2000), Benoit & Airne (2009), Lee & Benoit (2004) Television ads, direct mail, newspaper ads, and candidate web pages Acclaim Acclaims portray the sponsored candidate in a favorable light, both his/her character and/or policy (Benoit, 2000, 281, 295) 0 = not present 1 = present Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Erigha & Charles (2012) Television and web advertisements Non-negative/ advocacy A non-negative/advocacy ad favors a party’s candidate, focusing solely on that individual. 1 = non-negative / advocacy 2 = comparison 3= attack ads (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Torres et al. (2012) Presidential candidate–sponsored TV ads Non-comparative ad If the ad simply mentions positive attributes of a particular candidate without mentioning an opponent, the ad is coded as a non-comparison (positive) ad (p. 196) 1 = comparative ad 2 = negative ad 3= non-comparative ad (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .98 Steffan & Venema (2019) Campaign posters Textual negative campaigning Visual negative campaigning Based on Lau and Pomper’s (2002), textual/visual negative campaiging indicates whether the image / text on the campaign posters referred to other political parties or candidates. (p. 273) 0 = not present 1 = present Visual negative campaigning: Krippendorff’s α = .82 Textual negative campaigning: Krippendorff’s α = .84 Torres et al. (2012) Presidential candidate–sponsored TV ads Negative ad If the ad criticizes the opposing party and/or candidate but offers no alternative (in essence, the ad presents negative information about an opponent but no information about the candidate on whose behalf it is run), then the ad is coded as a negative ad. 1 = comparative ad 2 = negative ad 3= non-comparative ad (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .98 Ceccobelli (2018) Facebook posts Negative rhetorical strategy The posts taken into consideration are those in which leaders employ a purely negative campaigning strategy. Cases in which a hypothetic leader A attacks one or more political opponents by comparing his/her own figure or policy proposal with the one(s) of her/his competitor(s) are not coded, since they denote a comparative rhetorical strategy (p. 129) 0 = not present 1 = present Krippendorff’s α average = .85 Benoit (2000), Benoit & Airne (2009), Lee & Benoit (2004) Television spots, direct mail pieces, newspaper ads, and candidate web pages Attack Portrays the opposing candidate in an unfavorable light, both his/her character and/or policy (Benoit, 2000, 281, 295) 0 = not present 1 = present Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Erigha & Charles (2012) Television and web advertisements Attack ads Attack ads criticize the opposing candidate without referencing the sponsoring party’s candidate (p. 443) 1 = non-negative / advocacy 2 = comparison 3= attack ads (exclusive options) Cohen's kappa average = .96 Benoit (2000), Benoit & Airne (2009), Lee & Benoit (2004) Television spots, direct mail pieces, newspaper ads, and candidate web pages Defense Defense responds to (refutes) an attack on the candidate, both on his/her character and/or policy (Benoit, 2000, 281, 295) 0 = not present 1 = present Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Erigha & Charles (2012) Television and web advertisements Comparison A comparison ad weighs two credentials, characteristics, or policystances (p. 443) 1 = non-negative / advocacy 2 = comparison 3= attack ads (exclusive options) Cohen's kappa average = .956 Torres et al. (2012) Presidential candidate–sponsored TV ads Comparative ad If the ad criticizes the opposing party and/or candidate and recommends alternative courses of action by comparing two candidates on specific points so as to present one in a more positive and the other in a more negative light, then the ad is coded as a comparative ad (p. 195) 1 = comparative ad 2 = negative ad 3= non-comparative ad (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .98 References Ansolabehere, S., Iyengar, S., Simon, A., & Valentino, N. (1994). Does Attack Advertising Demobilize the Electorate? American Political Science Review, 88(4), 829–838. https://doi.org/10.2307/2082710 Benoit, W. L. (2000). A Functional Analysis of Political Advertising across Media, 1998. Communication Studies, 51(3), 274–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970009388524 Benoit, W. L., & Airne, D. (2009). Non-Presidential Political Advertising in Campaign 2004. Human Communication, 12(1), 91–117. Brader, T. (2005). Striking a Responsive Chord: How Political Ads Motivate and Persuade Voters by Appealing to Emotions. American Journal of Political Science, 49(2), 388. https://doi.org/10.2307/3647684 Brader, T. (2006). Campaigning for hearts and minds: How emotional appeals in political ads work. Studies in communication, media, and public opinion. Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0622/2005009159-b.html Buell, E. H., & Sigelman, L. (2008). Attack politics: Negativity in presidential campaigns since 1960. Studies in government and public policy. Lawrence, Kan.: Univ. Press of Kansas. Ceccobelli, D. (2018). Not Every Day is Election Day: a Comparative Analysis of Eighteen Election Campaigns on Facebook. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 15(2), 122–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2018.1449701 Erigha, M., & Charles, C. Z. (2012). Other, Uppity Obama: A Content Analysis of Race Appeals in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 9(2), 439–456. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X12000264 Geer, J. G. (2010). In defense of negativity: Attack ads in presidential campaigns. Studies in communication, media, and public opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=319130 Kahn, K. F., & Kenney, P. J. (1999). Do Negative Campaigns Mobilize or Suppress Turnout? Clarifying the Relationship between Negativity and Participation. American Political Science Review, 93(4), 877–889. https://doi.org/10.2307/2586118 Kaid, L. L., & Holtz-Bacha, C. (Eds.) (2006). The SAGE handbook of political advertising. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications. Kanouse, D. E., & Hansen, L. R. (1987). Negativity in evaluations. In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Lau, R. R. (1985). Two explanations for negativity effects in political behavior. American Journal of Political Science. (29), 119–138. Lau, R. R., & Pomper, G. M. (2004). Negative campaigning: An analysis of U.S. Senate elections. Campaigning American style. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Lau, R. R., & Rovner, I. B. (2009). Negative Campaigning. Annual Review of Political Science, 12(1), 285–306. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.071905.101448 Lau, R. R., Sigelman, L., & Rovner, I. B. (2007). The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment. The Journal of Politics, 69(4), 1176–1209. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00618.x Lee, C., & Benoit, W. L. (2004). A Functional Analysis of Presidential Television Spots: A Comparison of Korean and American Ads. Communication Quarterly, 52(1), 68–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463370409370179 Sigelman, L., & Kugler, M. (2003). Why Is Research on the Effects of Negative Campaigning So Inconclusive? Understanding Citizens’ Perceptions of Negativity. The Journal of Politics, 65(1), 142–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2508.t01-1-00007 Steffan, D., & Venema, N. (2019). Personalised, De-Ideologised and Negative? A Longitudinal Analysis of Campaign Posters for German Bundestag Elections, 1949–2017. European Journal of Communication, 34(3), 267–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323119830052 Surlin, S. H., & Gordon, T. F. (1977). How Values Affect Attitudes Toward Direct Reference Political Advertising. Journalism Quarterly, 54(1), 89–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769907705400113 Torres, I. M., Hyman, M. R., & Hamilton, J. (2012). Candidate-Sponsored TV Ads for the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Content Analysis. Journal of Political Marketing, 11(3), 189–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/15377857.2012.703907 Voltmer, K. (2004). Mass media and political communication in new democracies: Routledge.

Introduction Presidents “define who Americans are—often by declaring who they aren’t”, and “by their very utterances […] have shaped our sense of who we are as Americans” (Stuckey, front cover). This advocacy of some groups and policies to the exclusion of others has been facilitated in the United States’ political culture by the country music industry. Indeed, President Richard Nixon said of country music that it “radiates a love of this nation—a patriotism,” adding that it “makes America a better country” (Bufwack and Oermann 328). Country music’s ardent support of American military conflict, including Vietnam, has led to its long-term support of Republican candidates. There has been a general lack of scholarly interest, however, in how country music has promoted Republican definitions of what it means to be an American. Accordingly, we have two primary objectives. First, we will demonstrate that Republicans, aided by country music, have used the theme of defence of “country,” especially post-9/11, to attempt to intimidate detractors. Secondly, Republicans have questioned the love of “country,” or “patriotism,” of their electoral opponents just as country musicians have attempted to silence their own critics. This research is timely in that little has been done to merge Presidential advocacy and country music; furthermore, with the election of a new President mere days away, it is important to highlight the tendencies toward intolerance that both conservatism and country music have historically shared. Defence of ‘Country’ After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush addressed the nation before a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001. During this speech, the president threatened the international community and raised the spectre of fear in Americans both while drawing distinctions between the United States and its enemies. This message was reflected and reinforced by several patriotic anthems composed by country artists, thus enhancing its effect. In his remarks before Congress, Bush challenged the international community: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists;” thus “advocating some groups to the exclusion of others” on the international stage (20 September 2001). With these words, the President expanded the definition of the United States’ enemies to include not only those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but also anyone who refused to support him. Republican Senator John McCain’s hawkishness regarding the attacks mirrored the President’s. “There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” McCain said the next morning on ABC (American Broadcasting Company) News. Within a month he made clear his priority: “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. Later he yelled to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!” (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/17/america/mccain.php). Bush’s address also encouraged Americans at home to “be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat” (20 September 2001). The subtle “us vs. them” tension here is between citizens and those who would threaten them. Bush added that “freedom and fear” had always “been at war” and “God is not neutral between them” (20 September 2001) suggesting a dualism between God and Satan with God clearly supporting the cause of the United States. Craig Allen Smith’s research refers to this as Bush’s “angel/devil jeremiad.” The President’s emphasis on fear, specifically the fear that the American way of life was being assailed, translated into public policy including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. This strategic nomenclature strengthened the power of the federal government and has been used by Republicans to suggest that if a candidate or citizen is not a terrorist then what does he/she have to fear from the government? The impact of Bush’s rhetoric of fear has of late been evaluated by scholars who have termed it “melodrama” in international affairs (Anker; Sampert and Treiberg). To disseminate his message for Americans to support his defence of “country,” Bush needed look no further than country music. David Firestein, a State Department diplomat and published authority on country music, asserted that the Bush team “recognised the power of country music as a political communication device” (86). The administration’s appeal to country music is linked to what Firestein called the “honky-tonk gap” which delineates red states and blue states. In an analysis of census data, Radio-Locator’s comprehensive listing by state of country music radio stations, and the official 2004 election results, he concluded that If you were to overlay a map of the current country music fan base onto the iconic red-and-blue map of the United States, you would find that its contours coincide virtually identically with those of the red state region. (84) And country musicians were indeed powerful in communicating the Republican message after 9/11. Several country musicians tapped into Bush’s defence of country rhetoric with a spate of songs including Alan Jackson’s Where Were You? (When the World Stopped Turning), Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American), and Darryl Worley’s Have You Forgotten? to name a few. Note how well the music parallels Bush’s attempt to define Americans. For instance, one of the lines from Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American) speaks of those who have given their lives so that other Americans may rest peacefully. This sentiment is reiterated by the theme of Worley’s Have You Forgotten? in which he talks of spending time with soldiers who have no doubts about why they are at war. Both songs implicitly indict the listener for betraying United States soldiers if his/her support for the Iraqi war wanes or, put in Bush terms, the listener would become a supporter of “terrorism.” Country music’s appeal to middle-America’s red state conservatism has made the genre a natural vehicle for supporting the defence of country. Indeed, country songs have been written about every war in United States history; most expressing support for the conflict and the troops as opposed to protesting the United States’ action: “Since the Civil War and Reconstruction, ‘Dixie’ has always been the bellwether of patriotic fervour in time of war and even as the situation in Vietnam reached its lowest point and support for the war began to fade, the South and its distinctive music remained solidly supportive” (Andresen 105). Historically, country music has a long tradition of attempting to “define who Americans were by defining who they weren’t” (Stuckey). As Bufwack and Oermann note within country music “images of a reactionary South were not hard to find.” They add “Dixie fertilized ‘three r’s’ – the right, racism, and religion” (328). Country musicians supported the United States’ failed intervention in Vietnam with such songs as It’s for God and Country and You Mom (That’s Why I’m Fighting In Vietnam), and even justified the American massacre of noncombatants at My Lai in the Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley (328). Thus, a right-wing response to the current military involvement in Iraq was not unexpected from the industry and the honky-tonk state listeners. During the current election, Republican presidential nominee McCain has also received a boost from the country music genre as John Rich, of Big and Rich, wrote Raising McCain, a musical tribute to McCain’s military service used as his campaign theme song. The song, debuted at a campaign rally on 1 August 2008, in Florida, mentions McCain’s ‘Prisoner of War’ status to keep the focus on the war and challenge those who would question it. Scholars have researched the demographics of the country music listener as they have evaluated the massification theory: the notion that the availability of a widespread media culture would break down social and cultural barriers and result in a “homogenised” society as opposed to the results of government-controlled media in non-democratic countries (Peterson and DiMaggio). They have determined that the massification theory has only been partially demonstrated in that regional and class barriers have eroded to some extent but country music listeners are still predominately white and older (Peterson and DiMaggio 504). These individuals do tend to be more conservative within the United States’ political culture, and militarism has a long history within both country music and conservatism. If the bad news of the massification theory is that a mass media market may not perpetuate a homogenous society, there is good news. The more onerous fears that the government will work in tandem with the media to control the people in a democracy seem not to have been borne out over time. Although President Bush’s fear tactics were met with obsequious silence initially, resistance to the unquestioning support of the war has steadily grown. In 2003, a worldwide rally opposed the invasion of Iraq because it was a sovereign state and because the Bush doctrine lacked United Nations’ support. Further opposition in the United States included rallies and concerts as well as the powerful display in major cities across the nation of pairs of combat boots representing fallen soldiers (Olson). Bush’s popularity has dropped precipitously, with his disapproval ratings higher than any President in history at 71% (Steinhauser). While the current economic woes have certainly been a factor, the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain can also be viewed as a referendum on the Bush war. The American resistance to the Bush rhetoric and the Iraq war is all the more significant in light of research indicating that citizens incorrectly believe that the opposition to the Vietnam War was typified by protests against the troops rather than the war itself (Beamish). This false notion has empowered the Republicans and country musicians to challenge the patriotism of anyone who would subsequently oppose the military involvement of the United States, and it is to this topic of patriotism that we now turn. Patriotism Patriotism can be an effective way for presidential candidates to connect with voters (Sullivan et al). It has been a particularly salient issue since the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ironically, George W. Bush, a man whose limited military service had been the subject of debate in 2000, was able to employ the persistent patriotic themes of country music to his electoral advantage. In fact, Firestein argued that country music radio had a greater effect on the 2004 election than any ads run by issue groups because it “inculcated and reinforced conservative values in the red state electorate, helped frame the issues of the day on terms favourable to the conservative position on those issues, and primed red state voters to respond positively to President Bush’s basic campaign message of family, country, and God” (Firestein 83). Bush even employed Only in America, a patriotic anthem performed by Brooks and Dunn, as a campaign theme song, because the war and patriotism played such a prominent role in the election. That the Bush re-election campaign successfully cast doubt on the patriotism of three-time Purple Heart winner, Democratic Senator John Kerry, during the campaign is evidence of Firestein’s assertion. The criticism was based on a book: Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (O’Neill and Corsi). The book was followed by advertisements funded by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth which included unsubstantiated claims that Kerry lied or exaggerated his combat role in Vietnam in order to obtain two of his Purple Hearts and his Bronze Star; the testimony of Kerry’s crewmen and Navy records notwithstanding, these ads were effective in smearing Kerry’s service record and providing the President with an electoral advantage. As far as country music was concerned, the 2004 election played out against the backdrop of the battle between the patriotic Toby Keith and the anti-American Dixie Chicks. The Dixie Chicks were berated after lead singer Natalie Maines’s anti-Bush comments during a concert in London. The trio’s song about an American soldier killed in action, Travelin’ Soldier, quickly fell from the top spot of the country music charts. Moreover, while male singers such as Keith, Darryl Worley, and Alan Jackson received accolades for their post 9/11 artistic efforts, the Dixie Chicks endured a vitriolic reaction from country music fans as their CDs were burned, country radio refused to play their music, their names were added to an internet list of traitors, their concerts were protested by Bush supporters, and their lives were even threatened (http://www.poppolitics.com/archives/2003/04/Bandwagon). Speaking from experience at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Kerry addressed the issue of patriotism stating: This election is a chance for America to tell the merchants of fear and division: you don’t decide who loves this country; you don’t decide who is a patriot; you don’t decide whose service counts and whose doesn’t. […] After all, patriotism is not love of power or some cheap trick to win votes; patriotism is love of country. (http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2008/08/27/full-text-john-kerry-speech-democratic-national-convention/) Kerry broached the issue because of the constant attacks on the patriotism of Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama. At the most basic level, many of the attacks questioned whether Obama was even an American. Internet rumours persisted that Obama was a Muslim who was not even an American citizen. The attacks intensified when the Obamas’ pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, came under fire for comments made during a sermon in which he stated “God damn America.” As a result, Obama was forced to distance himself from his pastor and his church. Obama was also criticised for not wearing a United States flag lapel pin. When Michelle Obama stated for the “first time [she was] proud of her country” for its willingness to embrace change in February of 2008, Cindy McCain responded that she “had always been proud of her country” with the implication being, of course, a lack of patriotism on the part of Michelle Obama. Even the 13 July 2008 cover of the liberal New Yorker portrayed the couple as flag-burning Muslim terrorists. During the 2008 election campaign, McCain has attempted to appeal to patriotism in a number of ways. First, McCain’s POW experience in Vietnam has been front and centre as he touts his experience in foreign policy. Second, the slogan of the campaign is “Country First” implying that the Obama campaign does not put the United States first. Third, McCain’s running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, insisted in a speech on 4 October 2008, that Barack Obama has been “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” Her reference was to Obama’s acquaintance, Bill Ayers, who was involved in a series of Vietnam era bombings; the implication, however, was that Obama has terrorist ties and is unpatriotic. Palin stood behind her comments even though several major news organisations had concluded that the relationship was not significant as Ayers’ terrorist activities occurred when Obama was eight-years-old. This recent example is illustrative of Republican attempts to question the patriotism of Democrats for their electoral advantage. Country music has again sided with the Republicans particularly with Raising McCain. However, the Democrats may have realised the potential of the genre as Obama chose Only in America as the song played after his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. He has also attempted to reach rural voters by starting his post-convention campaign in Bristol, Virginia, a small, conservative town. Conclusion Thus, in the wake of 9/11, Republicans seized the opportunity to control the culture through fear and patriotic fervour. They were facilitated in this endeavor by the country music industry with songs that that would questions the motives, defence of “country,” and patriotism, of anyone who would question the Bush administration. This alliance between country music and the right is an historically strong one, and we recommend more research on this vital topic. While this election may indeed be a referendum on the war, it has been influenced by an economic downturn as well. Ultimately, Democrats will have to convince rural voters that they share their values; they don’t have the same edge as Republicans without the reliance of country music. However, the dynamic of country music has changed to somewhat reflect the war fatigue since the 2004 campaign. The Angry American, Toby Keith, has admitted that he is actually a Democrat, and country music listeners have grown tired of the “barrage of pro-troop sentiment,” especially since the summer of 2005 (Willman 115). As Joe Galante, the chief of the RCA family of labels in Nashville, stated, “It’s the relatability. Kerry never really spent time listening to some of those people” (Willman 201). Bill Clinton, a Southern governor, certainly had relatability, carrying the normally red states and overcoming the honky-tonk gap, and Obama has seen the benefit of country music by playing it as the grand finale of the Democratic Convention. Nevertheless, we recommend more research on the “melodrama” theory of the Presidency as the dynamics of the relationship between the Presidency and the country music genre are currently evolving. References Andreson, Lee. Battle Notes: Music of the Vietnam War. 2nd ed. Superior, WI: Savage Press, 2003. Anker, Elisabeth. “Villains, Victims and Heroes: Melodrama, Media and September 11th.” Journal of Communication. 55.1 (2005): 22-37. Baker, Peter and David Brown. “Bush Tries to Tone Down High-Pitched Debate on Iraq.” Monday, 21November 2005, Page A04. washingtonpost.com Beamish, Thomas D., Harvey Molotch, and Richard Flacks. “Who Supports the Troops? Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Making of Collective Memory.” Social Problems. 42.3 (1995): 344-60. Brooks and Dunn. Only in America. Arista Records, 2003. Bufwack, Mary A. and Robert K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice The Saga of Women in Country Music. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993. Dixie Chicks. “Travelin Soldier.” Home. Columbia. 27 August 2002. Firestein, David J. “The Honky-Tonk Gap.” Vital Speeches of the Day. 72.3 (2006): 83-88. Jackson, Alan. Where Were You? (When the World Stopped Turning) Very Best of Alan Jackson. Nashville: Arista, 2004. Keith, Toby. Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American). Nashville: Dreamworks. November 9, 2004. Olson, Scott. “Chicago remembers war dead with 500 pairs of empty boots.” 22 January 2004. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-22-chicago-boots_x.htm O’Neill, John E. and Jerome L. Corsi. “Unfit for Command Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.” Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. and Peter Di Maggio. “From Region to Class, the Changing Locus of Country Music. A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces. 53.3 (1975): 497-506. Rich, John. Raising McCain. Production information unavailable. Sampert, Shannon, and Natasja Treiberg. “The Reification of the ?American Soldier?: Popular Culture, American Foreign Policy, and Country Music.” Paper presented at the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 28 February 2007. Smith, Craig Allen. “President Bush’s Enthymeme of Evil: The Amalgamation of 9/11, Iraq, and Moral Values.” American Behavioral Scientist. 49 (2005): 32-47. Steinhauser, Paul. “Poll: More disapprove of Bush that any other president.” Politics Cnn.politics.com. 1 May 2008. Stuckey, Mary E. Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2004. Sullivan, John L., Amy Fried, Mary G. Dietz. 1992. “Patriotism, Politics, and the Presidential Election of 1988.” American Journal of Political Science. 36.1 (1992): 200-234. Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. New York: The New Press, 2005. Worley, Darryl. Have You Forgotten? Nashville: Dreamworks, 2003.

I. First Brexit, then Trump: Has the past year or so ushered in a “wave” (Weisberg), a “barrage” (Desmond-Harris) or a “deluge” (Sidahmed) of that notoriously noxious affect, hate? It certainly feels that way to those of us identified with progressive social and political causes—those of us troubled, not just by Trump’s recent electoral victory, but by the far-right forces to which that victory has given voice. And yet the questions still hanging over efforts to quantify emotional or affective states leaves the claim that there has been a clear spike in hate moot (Ngai 26; Massumi 136-7; Ahmed, Promise 3-8). So let’s try asking a different question. Has this same period seen a rise, across liberal media platforms, in the rhetorical work of “hate-attribution”? Here, at least, an answer seems in readier reach. For no one given to scrolling distractedly through liberal Anglophone media outlets, from The New York Times, to The Guardian, to Slate, will be unfamiliar with a species of journalism that, in reporting the appalling activities associated with what has become known as the “alt-right” (Main; Wallace-Wells; Gourarie), articulates those activities in the rubric of a calculable uptick in hate itself.Before the U.S. Presidential election, this fledgling journalistic genre was already testing its wings, its first shudderings felt everywhere from Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’s widely publicized documentary, Hate Rising (2016), which explores the rise of white supremacist movements across the South-West U.S, to an edition of Slate’s Trumpcast entitled “The Alt-Right and a Deluge of Hate,” which broached the torment-by-Twitter of left-wing journalist David French. In the wake of the election, and the appalling acts of harassment and intimidation it seemed to authorize, the genre gained further momentum—leading to the New Yorker’s “Hate Is on the Rise After Trump’s Election,” to The Guardian’s “Trump’s Election led to Barrage of Hate,” and to Vox’s “The Wave of Post-Election Hate Reportedly Sweeping the Nation, Explained.” And it still has traction today, judging not just by James King’s recent year-in-review column, “The Year in Hate: From Donald Trump to the Rise of the Alt-Right,” but by Salon’s “A Short History of Hate” which tracks the alt-right’s meteoric 2016 rise to prominence, and the New York Times’ recently launched hate-speech aggregator, “This Week in Hate.”As should already be clear from these brisk, thumbnail accounts of the texts in question, the phenomena alluded to by the titular term “hate” are not instances of hate per se, but rather instances of “hate-speech.” The word “hate,” in other words, is being deployed here not literally, to refer to an emotional state, but metonymically, as a shorthand for “hate-speech”—a by-now widely conventionalized and legally codified parlance originating with the U.N. Declaration to describe “violent or violence-inciting speech or acts that “aim or intend to inflict injury, or incite prejudice or hatred, against persons of groups” because of their ethnic, religious, sexual or social affiliation. And there is no doubt that, beyond the headlines, these articles do incredibly important work, drawing connections between, and drawing attention to, a host of harmful activities associated with the so-called “alt-right”—from a pair of mangled, pretzel-shaped swastikas graffiti-ed in a children’s playground, to acts of harassment, intimidation and violence against women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, and LGBTQ people, to Trump’s own racist, xenophobic and misogynistic tweets. Yet the fact that an emotion-term like hate is being mobilized across these texts as a metonym for the “alt-right” is no oratorical curio. Rather, it perpetuates a pervasive way of thinking about the relationship between the alt-right (a political phenomenon) and hate (an emotional phenomenon) that should give pause to those of us committed to mining that vein of cultural symptomatology now consigned, across the social sciences and critical humanities, to affect theory. Specifically, these headlines inscribe, in miniature, a kind of micro-assessment, a micro-geography and micro-theory of hate. First, they suggest that, even prior to its incarnation in specific, and dangerous, forms of speech or action, hate is in and of itself anathema, a phenomenon so unquestioningly dangerous that a putative “rise” or “spike” in its net presence provides ample pretext for a news headline. Second, they propose that hate may be localized to a particular social or political group—a group subsisting, unsurprisingly, on that peculiarly contested frontier between the ideological alt-right and the American Midwest. And third, they imply that hate is so indubitably the single most significant source of the xenophobic, racist and sexist activities they go on to describe that it may be casually used as these activities’ lexical proxy. What is crystallizing here, I suggest, is what scholars of rhetoric dub a rhetorical “constellation” (Campbell and Jamieson 332)—a constellation from which hate emerges as, a) inherently problematic, b) localizable to the “alt-right,” and, c) the primary engine of the various activities and expressions we associate with them. This constellation of conventions for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movement has coalesced into a “genre” we might dub the genre of “hate-attribution.” Yet while it’s far from clear that the genre is an effective one in a political landscape that’s fast becoming a political battleground, it hasn’t appeared by chance. Treating “hate,” then, less as a descriptive “grid of analysis” (Sedgwick 152), than as a rhetorical projectile, this essay opens by interrogating the “hate-attribution” genre’s logic and querying its efficacy. Having done so, it approaches the concept of “alternatives” by asking: how might calling time on the genre help us think differently about both hate itself and about the forces catalyzing, and catalyzed by, Trump’s presidential campaign? II.The rhetorical power of the genre of hate-attribution, of course, isn’t too difficult to pin down. An emotion so thoroughly discredited that its assignment is now in and of itself a term of abuse (see, for example, the O.E.D’s freshly-expanded definition of the noun “hater”), hate is an emotion the Judeo-Christian tradition deems not just responsible for but practically akin to murder (John 3:1). In part as a result of this tradition, hate has proven thoroughly resistant to efforts to elevate it from the status of an expression of a subject’s pestiferous inner life to the status of a polemical response to an object in the world. Indeed, while a great deal of the critical energy amassing under the rubric of “affect theory” has recently been put into recuperating the strategic or diagnostic value of emotions long scorned as irrelevant to oppositional struggle—from irritation and envy, to depression, anger and shame (Ngai; Cvetkovich; Gould; Love)—hate has notably not been among them. In fact, those rare scholarly accounts of affect that do address “hate,” notably Ahmed’s excellent work on right-wing extremist groups in the United Kingdom, display an understandable reluctance to rehabilitate it for progressive thought (Cultural Politics). It should come as no surprise, then, that the genre of “hate-attribution” has a rare rhetorical power. In identifying “hate” as the source of a particular position, gesture or speech-act, we effectively drain said position, gesture or speech-act of political agency or representational power—reducing it from an at-least-potentially polemical action in or response to the world, to the histrionic expression of a reprehensible personhood. Yet because hate’s near-taboo status holds across the ideological and political spectrum, what is less clear is why the genre of hate-attribution has achieved such cachet in the liberal media in particular. The answer, I would argue, lies in the fact that the work of hate-attribution dovetails all too neatly with liberal political theory’s longstanding tendency to laminate its social and civic ideals to affective ideals like “love,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” and, when in a less demonstrative humor, “tolerance”. As Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions has recently shown, this tradition has an impressive philosophical pedigree, running from Aristotle’s philia (16), John Locke’s “toleration” and David Hume’s “sympathy” (69-75), to the twentieth century’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its promotion of “tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.” And while the labour of what Lauren Berlant calls “liberal sentimentality” (“Poor Eliza”, 636) has never quite died away, it does seem to have found new strength with the emergence of the “intimate public sphere” (Berlant, Queen)—from its recent popular apotheosis in the Clinton campaign’s notorious “Love Trumps Hate” (a slogan in which “love,” unfortunately, came to look a lot like resigned technocratic quietism in the face of ongoing economic and environmental crisis [Zizek]), to its revival as a philosophical project among progressive scholars, many of them under the sway of the so-called “affective turn” (Nussbaum; Hardt; Sandoval; hooks). No surprise, then, that liberalism’s struggle to yoke itself to “love” should have as its eerie double a struggle to locate among its ideological and political enemies an increasingly reified “hate”. And while the examples of this project we’ve touched on so far have hailed from popular media, this set of protocols for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movements is not unique to media circles. It’s there in political discourse, as in ex-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s announcement, on MSNBC, that “Americans will unite against [Trump’s] hatred.” And it’s there, too, in academic media studies, from FLOW journal’s November 2016 call for papers inviting respondents to comment, among other things, on “the violence and hatred epitomized by Trump and his supporters,” to the SCMS conference’s invitation to members to participate in a pop-up panel entitled “Responding to Hate, Disenfranchisement and the Loss of the Commons.” Yet while the labor of hate-attribution to which many progressive forces have become attached carries an indisputable rhetorical force, it also has some profound rhetorical flaws. The very same stigma, after all, that makes “hate” such a powerful explanatory grenade to throw also makes it an incredibly tough one to land. As Ahmed’s analysis of the online rhetoric of white supremacist organizations should remind us (Cultural Politics), most groups structured around inciting and promoting violence against women and minorities identify, perversely, not as hate groups, but as movements propelled by the love of race and nation. And while left-wing pundits pronounce “hate” the signature emotion of a racist, misogynist Trump-voting right, supporters of Trump ascribe it, just as routinely, to the so-called “liberal elite,” a group whose mythical avatars—from the so-called “Social Justice Warrior” or “SJW,” to the supercilious Washington politico—are said to brand “ordinary [white, male] Americans” indiscriminately as racist, misogynistic, homophobic buffoons. Thus, for example, The Washington Post’s uncanny, far-right journalistic alter-ego, The Washington Times, dubs the SPLC a “liberal hate group”; the Wikipedia mirror-site, Conservapedia, recasts liberal objections to gun violence as “liberal hate speech” driven by an “irrational aversion to weapons”; while one blood-curdling sub-genre of reportage on Steve Bannon’s crypto-fascist soapbox, Breitbart News, is devoted to denouncing what it calls “ ‘anti-White Racism.’” It’s easy enough, of course, to defend the hate-attribution genre’s liberal incarnations while dismissing its right-wing variants as cynical, opportunistic shams, as Ahmed does (Cultural Politics)—thereby re-establishing the wellspring of hate where we are most comfortable locating it: among our political others. Yet to do so seems, in some sense, to perpetuate a familiar volley of hate-attribution. And to the extent that, as many media scholars have shown (Philips; Reed; Tett; Turow), our digital, networked political landscape is in danger of being reduced to a silo-ed discursive battleground, the ritual exchange of terminological grenades that everyone seems eager to propel across ideological lines, but that no one, understandably, seems willing to pick up, seems counter-productive to say the least.Even beyond the genre’s ultimate ineffectiveness, what should strike anyone used to reflecting on affect is how little justice it does to the ubiquity and intricacy of “hate” as an affective phenomenon. Hate is not and cannot be the exclusive property or preserve of one side of the political spectrum. One doesn’t have to stretch one’s critical faculties too far to see the extent to which the genre of hate-attribution participates in the emotional ballistics it condemns or seeks to redress. While trafficking in a relatively simple hate-paradigm (as a subjective emotional state that may be isolated to a particular person or group), the genre itself incarnates a more complex, socially dynamic model of hate in which the emotion operates through logics of projection perhaps best outlined by Freud. In the “hate-attribution” genre, that is, hate—like those equally abjected categories “sentimentality,” “worldliness” or “knowingness” broached by Sedgwick in her bravura analyses of “scapegoating attribution” (150-158)—finds its clearest expression in and through the labor of its own adscription. And it should come as no surprise that an emotion so widely devalued, where it is not openly prohibited, might also find expression in less overt form.Yet to say as much is by no means to discredit the genre. As legal scholar Jeremy Waldron has recently pointed out, there’s no particular reason why “the passions and emotions that lie behind a particular speech act” (34)—even up to and including hate—should devalue the speech acts they rouse. On the contrary, to pin the despicable and damaging activities of the so-called “alt right” on “hate” is, if anything, to do an injustice to a rich and complex emotion that can be as generative as it can be destructive. As Freud suggests in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” for example, hate may be the very seed of love, since the forms of “social feeling” (121) celebrated under the liberal rubric of “tolerance,” “love,” and “compassion,” are grounded in “the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification” (121; italics mine). Indeed, Freud projects this same argument across a larger, historical canvas in Civilization and its Discontents, which contends that it is in our very struggle to combat our “aggressive instincts” that human communities have developed “methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love” (31). For Freud, that is, the practice of love is a function of ongoing efforts to see hate harnessed, commuted and transformed. III.What might it mean, then, to call time on this round of hate-attribution? What sort of “alternatives” might emerge when we abandon the assumption that political engagement entails a “struggle over who has the right to declare themselves as acting out of love” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics 131), and thus, by that same token, a struggle over the exact location and source of hate? One boon, I suggest, is the license it gives those of us on the progressive left to simply own our own hate. There’s little doubt that reframing the dangerous and destructive forms of speech fomented by Trump’s campaign, not as eruptions of hate, or even as “hate-speech,” but as speech we hate would be more consistent with what once seemed affect theory’s first commandment: to take our own affective temperature before launching headlong into critical analysis. After all, when Lauren Berlant (“Trump”) takes a stab at economist Paul Krugman’s cautions against “the Danger of Political Emotions” with the timely reminder that “all the messages are emotional,” the “messages” she’s pointing to aren’t just those of our political others, they’re ours; and the “emotions” she’s pointing to aren’t just the evacuated, insouciant versions of love championed by the Clinton campaign, they’re of the messier, or as Ngai might put it, “uglier” (2) variety—from shame, depression and anger, to, yes, I want to insist, hate.By way of jump-starting this program of hate-avowal, then, let me just say it: this essay was animated, in part, by a certain kind of hate. The social critic in me hates the breathtaking simplification of the complex social, economic and emotional forces animating Trump voters that seem to actuate some liberal commentary; the psychologist in me hates the self-mystification palpable in the left’s insistence on projecting and thus disowning its own (often very well justified) aggressions; and the human being in me, hating the kind of toxic speech to which Trump’s campaign has given rise, wishes to be able to openly declare that hatred. Among its other effects, hate is characterized by hypervigilance for lapses or failings in an object it deems problematic, a hypervigilance that—sometimes—animates analysis (Zeki and Romoya). In this sense, “hate” seems entitled to a comfortable place in the ranks of what Nick Salvato has recently dubbed criticism’s creative “obstructions”—phenomena that, while “routinely identified as detriments” to critical inquiry, may also “form the basis for … critical thinking” (1).Yet while one boon associated with this disclosure might be a welcome intellectual honesty, a more significant boon, I’d argue, is what getting this disclosure out of the way might leave room for. Opting out of the game of hurling “hate” back and forth across a super-charged political arena, that is, we might devote our column inches and Facebook posts to the less sensational but more productive task of systematically challenging the specious claims, and documenting the damaging effects, of a species of utterance (Butler; Matsuda; Waldron) we’ve grown used to simply descrying as pure, distilled “hate”. And we also might do something else. Relieved of the confident conviction that we can track “Trumpism” to a spontaneous outbreak of a single, localizable emotion, we might be able to offer a fuller account of the economic, social, political and affective forces that energize it. Certainly, hate plays a part here—although the process by which, as Isabelle Stengers puts it, affect “make[s] present, vivid and mattering … a worldly world” (371) demands that we scrutinize that hate as a syndrome, rather than simply moralize it as a sin, addressing its mainsprings in a moment marked by the nerve-fraying and life-fraying effects of what has become known across the social sciences and critical humanities as conditions of social and economic “precarity” (Muehlebach; Neil and Rossiter; Stewart).But perhaps hate’s not the only emotion tucked away under the hood. Here’s something affect theory knows today: affect moves not, as more traditional theorists of political emotion have it, “unambiguously and predictably from one’s cognitive processing,” but in ways that are messy, muddled and indirect (Gould 24). That form of speech is speech we hate. But it may not be “hate speech.” That crime is a crime we hate. But it may not be a “hate-crime.” One of the critical tactics we might crib from Berlant’s work in Cruel Optimism is that of decoding and decrypting, in even the most hateful acts, an instance of what Berlant, herself optimistically, calls “optimism.” For Berlant, after all, optimism is very often cruel, attaching itself, as it seems to have done in 2016, to scenes, objects and people that, while ultimately destined to “imped[e] the aim that brought [it to them] initially,” nevertheless came to seem, to a good portion of the electorate, the only available exponent of that classic good-life genre, “the change that’s gonna come” (“Trump” 1-2) at a moment when the Democratic party’s primary campaign promise was more of the free-market same. 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Pat Buchanan’s infamous speech to the 1992 Republican convention (Buchanan), has often been understood as a defining moment in the US culture wars (Hartman). The speech’s central claim that “there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America” oriented around the idea that the US was a nation divided between two opposing values systems. On one side were Democrat defenders of “abortion on demand” and “homosexual rights” and on the other those who, like then Republican presidential candidate George Bush, stood by the “Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built.”Buchanan’s speech helped popularise the idea that the US was riven by fundamental cultural divides, an idea that became a media staple but was hotly contested by scholars.The year before Buchanan’s speech, James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America advanced a “culture wars thesis” based in claims of a growing “political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding” (Hunter 42). Hunter cited increasing polarisation in debates on “abortion, child care, funding for the arts, affirmative action and quotas, gay rights, values in public education, or multiculturalism” (Hunter 42) and claimed that the defining religious divides in the US were no longer between religions but within them. In the intense scholarly debate that followed its publication, as Irene Taviss Thomson has summarised, little empirical evidence emerged of any real divide.Yet this lack of empirical evidence does not mean that talk of culture wars can be easily dismissed. The culture wars, as I have argued elsewhere (Davis), were and are a media product designed to sharpen social divides for electoral gain. No doubt because of the usefulness of this product, culture wars discourse remains a persistent feature of public debate across the west. The symbolic discourse that positions the culture wars and its supposedly intractable differences as real, I argue, deserves consideration in its own right.In what follows, I analyse the use of culture wars discourse in two defining documents. The first, Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture wars” speech, reputedly put the culture wars front and centre of US politics. The second, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’s 2016 article in Breitbart News, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” (Bokhari and Yiannopoulos), sought to define its moment by affirming the arrival of a new political movement, the “alt-right”, as a force in US politics. With its homage to Buchanan and written in the belief that “politics is downstream from culture” the article sought to position the alt-right as an inheritor of Buchanan’s legacy and to mark a new defining moment in an ongoing culture war.This self-referential framing, I argue, belies deep differences between Buchanan’s rhetoric and that of Bokhari and Yiannopoulos. Buchanan’s defence of American values, while spectacularly adversarial, is at base democratic, whereas, despite its culturalist posturing, one project of “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” is to reinstate biological notions of race and gender difference in the political agenda.Culture Wars ThenBuchanan’s speech came after decades of sniping. The emergence of the “counterculture” of the 1960s helped create a basis for the idea that US politics was defined by an irreducible clash of values (Thomson). Buchanan played a direct role in fostering such divides. As he famously wrote in a 1971 memo to then President Richard Nixon in which he suggested exploiting racial divides, if we “cut … the country in half, my view is that we would have far the larger half.” But the language of Buchanan’s 1992 speech, while incendiary, is nevertheless democratic in its emphasis on delineating rival political platforms. Much culture wars discourse focuses on the embodied politics of gender, sexuality and race. A principal target of Buchanan’s speech was abortion, which since the Roe versus Wade judgement of 1973 that legalised part-term abortion in the US has been a defining culture wars issue. At the “top” of Democrat candidate Bill Clinton’s agenda, Buchanan claimed, is “unrestricted abortion on demand.” Buchanan singled out Hillary Clinton for special attack:friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America–abortion on demand … homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat … is not the kind of change America wants.Buchanan then pledges to support George Bush, who had beaten him for the Republican nomination, and Bush’s stance “against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” He also supports Bush on “right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools.” Buchanan’s language here references essentialist ideas of morality and contrasts them against the supposed immorality of his opponents but is ultimately predicated in the democratic languages of law-making and rights and the adversarial language of electoral politics. Through these contrasts the speech builds to its famous centrepiece:my friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.Buchanan, here, sharpens and maps the contrasts he has been working with onto differences in identity. Politics, here, is not about the distribution of resources but is about identity, values and a commensurate difference in belief systems. On one side are righteous Americans, on the other a culture of immorality that threatens the proper religious basis of the nation. Notably, the speech makes no direct mention of race. It instead uses code. Evoking the LA riots that took place earlier that year, Buchanan sides with the troopers who broke up the riots.they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage … and as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.Unsaid here is that the “mob” were black and reacting against the injustice of the beating of a black man, Rodney King, by police. The implication is that to “take back our culture … take back our country” is to vanquish the restive black enemy within. By using code Buchanan is able to avoid possible charges of racism, positioning the rioters not as racially different but as culturally different; their deficit is not genetic but patriotic.Culture Wars NowSince the 1990s culture wars discourse has become entrenched as a media staple. Supposedly intractable values divides between “conservatives” and “liberals” play out incessantly across a conservative media sphere that spans outlets (Fox News), platforms (Breitbart News), broadcasters (Rush Limbaugh), and commentators such as Ann Coulter, in debate over issues ranging from gun control, LGBTQI rights, American history and sex education and prayer in schools. This discourse, crystalised in divisive terms such as “cultural Marxist,” “social justice warrior” and “snowflake”, is increasingly generated by online bulletin boards such as the 4chan/pol/(politically incorrect) and /b/-Random boards, which function as a crucible for trolling and meme-making (Phillips) that routinely targets minorities, women and especially feminists. As Angela Nagle has said (24), Gamergate, the 2014 episode in which female game reviewers and designers critical of sexism in the gaming industry were targeted with organised trolling, played a pivotal role in “uniting different online groups and spreading the tactics of chan culture to the broad online right.” Other conduits for extremist discourse to the mainstream include sites such as the white supremacist Daily Stormer, alt-right sites, and “men’s rights” sites such as Return of Kings. The self-described aim of this discourse, as the white nationalist Jared Swift has said, has been to move the “Overton window” of what constitutes acceptable public discourse far to the right (in Daniels).The emergence of this diverse conservative media sphere provided opportunities for new celebrities willing to parse older forms of culture wars discourse with new forms of online extremism and to announce themselves as ringmasters of whatever circus might result. One such person is Milo Yiannopoulos. Quick to read the opportunities in Gamergate, he announced himself a sudden convert to the gaming cause (which he had previously dismissed) and helped turn the controversy into a rallying point for a nascent alt-right (Yiannopoulos). In 2014 Yiannopoulos was recruited by Breitbart News as a senior editor. Breitbart’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, is perhaps most famous for his dictum that “politics is downstream from culture”, an apt motto for a culture war.In 2016 Yiannopoulos, working with Bokhari, another Breitbart staffer, published, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right”, which, written with Andrew Breitbart’s dictum in mind, sought to announce the radicalism of a new antiestablishment conservative political force and yet to make it palatable for a mainstream audience. The article claims the “paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan” as one of the origins of the alt-right. Donald Trump is praised as “perhaps the first truly cultural candidate for President since Buchanan.” The rest, they argue, is little more than harmless online mischief. The alt-right, they claim, is a fun-loving “movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet,” made up of people who are “dangerously bright.” Similarly, the “manosphere” of “men’s rights” sites, infamous for misogyny, are praised as “one of the alt-right’s most distinctive constituencies” and positioned as harmless alongside an endorsement of masculinist author Jack Donovan’s “wistful” laments for “the loss of manliness that accompanies modern, globalized societies.” Mass trolling and the harassment of opponents by “the alt-right’s meme team” is characterised as “undeniably hysterical” and justifiable in pursuit of lulz.The sexism and racism found on bulletin boards such as 4 chan, for Bokhari and Yiannopoulos, is no less harmless. Young people, they claim, are drawn to the alt right not because of ideology but because “it seems fresh, daring and funny” contrasted against the “authoritarian instincts of the progressive left. With no personal memories or experience of racism, they “have trouble believing it’s actually real … they don’t believe that the memes they post on/pol/ are actually racist. In fact, they know they’re not—they do it because it gets a reaction.”For all these efforts to style the alt-right as mere carnivalesque paleoconservatism, though, there is a fundamental difference between Buchanan’s speech and “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the Alt-Right.” Certainly, Bokhari and Yiannopoulos hit the same culture wars touchstones as Buchanan: race, sexuality and gender issues. But whereas Buchanan’s speech instances the “new racism” (Ansell) in its use of code to avoid charges of biological racism, Yiannopoulos and Bokhari are more direct. The article presents as an exemplary instance of how to fight a culture war but epitomises a new turn in the culture wars from culture to biologism. The alt-right is positioned as unashamedly Eurocentric and having little to do with racism. Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also seek to distance the alt-right from the “Stormfront set” and “1488ers” (“1488” is code for neo-Nazi). Yet even as they do so, they embrace “human biodiversity” ideology (biological racism), ethnic separatism and the building of walls to keep different racial groups apart. “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the alt-right” was written in secret consultation with leading white supremacist figures (Bernstein) and namechecks the openly white supremacist Richard Spencer who is given credit for helping found “the media empire of the modern-day alternative right.”Spencer has argued that “Race is something between a breed and an actual species” and a process of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” should take place by which non-white Americans leave (Nagle 59). He is an admirer of the Italian ‘superfascist’ and notorious racist Julius Evola, who Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also namecheck. They also excuse race hate sites such as VDARE and American Renaissance as home to “an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another.” It is mere happenstance, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, that the “natural conservatives” drawn to the alt-right are “mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.” Yet as they also say,while eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration. Border walls are a much safer option. The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.“Demographic displacement” here is code for “white genocide” a meme assiduously promoted over many years by the US white supremacist Bob Whitaker, now deceased, who believed that immigration, interracial marriage, and multiculturalism dilute white influence and will drive the white population to extinction (Daniels). The idea that “culture is inseparable from race” and that “some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved” echo white supremacist calls for a white “ethno-state.”“An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” also namechecks so-called “neoreactionaries” such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, who according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari regard egalitarianism as an affront to “every piece of research on hereditary intelligence” and see liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism as having “no better a historical track record than monarchy.” Land and Yarvin, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, offer a welcome vision of the conservative future:asking people to see each other as human beings rather than members of a demographic in-group, meanwhile, ignored every piece of research on tribal psychology … these were the first shoots of a new conservative ideology—one that many were waiting for.Culture Wars FuturesAs the culture wars have turned biological so they have become entrenched ever more firmly in mainstream politics. The “new conservative ideology” Yiannopoulos and Bokhari mention reeks of much older forms of conservative ideology currently being taken up in the US and elsewhere, based in naturalised gender hierarchies and racialised difference. This return to the past is fast becoming institutionalised. One of the stakes in the bitter 2018 dispute over the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court was the prospect that Kavanaugh’s vote will create a conservative majority in the court that will enable the revisiting of a talismanic moment in the culture wars by overturning the Roe versus Wade judgement. Alt-right calls for a white ethno-state find an analogue in political attacks on asylum seekers, the reinforcement of racialised differential citizenship regimes around the globe, the building of walls to keep out criminalised Others, and anti-Islamic immigration measures. The mainstreaming of hate can be seen in the willingness of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and as president to retweet the white supremacist tweets of @WhiteGenocideTM, his hesitation to repudiate a campaign endorsement by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, his retweeting of bogus black crime statistics, his accusations that illegal Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug dealers and rapists, and his anti-Islamic immigration stance. It can be seen, too, in the recent electoral successes of white nationalist parties across Europe.For all their embrace of Eurocentrism and “the preservation of western culture” the alt-right revisiting of issues of race and gender in terms that seek to reinstate biological hierarchy undermines the Enlightenment ethics of equality and universalism that underpin western human rights conventions and democratic processes. The “Overton window” of acceptable public debate has moved far to the right and long taboo forms of race and gender-based hate have returned to the public agenda. Buchanan’s 1992 Republican convention speech, by contrast, for all its incendiary rhetoric, toxic homophobia, sneering anti-feminism, and coded racism, somehow manages to look like a relic from a kinder, gentler age.ReferencesAnsell, Amy Elizabeth. New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.Bernstein, Joseph. “Here’s How Breitbart and Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas into the Mainstream.” BuzzFeed News, 10 May 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism>.Bokhari, Allum, and Milo Yiannopoulos. “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” Breitbart, 29 Mar. 2016. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/>.Buchanan, Pat. “1992 Republican National Convention Speech.” Patrick J. Buchanan - Official Website, 17 Aug. 1992. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://buchanan.org/blog/1992-republican-national-convention-speech-148>.Daniels, Jessie. “Twitter and White Supremacy, A Love Story.” Dame Magazine, 19 Oct. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.damemagazine.com/2017/10/19/twitter-and-white-supremacy-love-story/>.Davis, Mark. “Neoliberalism, the Culture Wars and Public Policy.” Australian Public Policy: Progressive Ideas in the Neoliberal Ascendency. Eds. Chris Miller and Lionel Orchard. Policy Press, 2014. 27–42.Hartman, Andrew. A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press, 2015.Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America. Basic Books, 1991.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books, 2017.Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. MIT Press, 2015.Thomson, Irene Taviss. Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas. University of Michigan Press, 2010.Yiannopoulos, Milo. “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” Breitbart, 1 Sep. 2014. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/01/lying-greedy-promiscuous-feminist-bullies-are-tearing-the-video-game-industry-apart/>.

Content warning: although it was kept to a minimum, this text displays instances of (anti-Semitic) hate speech. During the 2016 U.S. election and its aftermath, multiple journalistic accounts reported on “alt-right trolls” emanating from anonymous online spaces like the imageboard 4chan (e.g. Abramson; Ellis). Having gained infamy for its nihilist trolling subcultures (Phillips, This Is Why) and the loose hacktivist movement Anonymous (Coleman), 4chan now drew headlines because of the alt-right’s “genuinely new” concoction of white supremacy, ironic Internet humour, and a lack of clear leadership (Hawley 50). The alt-right “anons”, as imageboard users call themselves, were said to primarily manifest on the “Politically Incorrect” subforum of 4chan: /pol/. Gradually, a sentiment arose in the titles of several news articles that the pro-Trump “alt-right trolls” had successfully won the metapolitical battle intertwined with the elections (Phillips, Oxygen 5). For instance, articles titled that “trolls” were “The Only True Winners of this Election” (Dewey) or even “Plotting a GOP Takeover” (Stuart).The headlines were as enticing as questionable. As trolling-expert Whitney Phillips headlined herself, the alt-right did not attain political gravity solely through its own efforts but rather was “Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention” (“The Alt-Right”), with news outlets being provoked to criticise, debunk, or sensationalise its trolling activities (Faris et al. 131; Phillips, “Oxygen” 5-6). Even with the right intentions, attempts at denouncement through using vague, structuralist notions–from “alt-right” and “trolls” to “the basket of deplorables” (Robertson) – arguably only strengthened the coherence of those it was meant to disavow (Phillips, Oxygen; Phillips et al.; Marantz). Phillips et al. therefore lamented such generalisations, arguing attributing Trump’s win to vague notions of “4chan”, “alt-right”, or “trolls” actually bestowed an “atemporal, almost godlike power” to what was actually an “ever-reactive anonymous online collective”. Therefore, they called to refrain from making claims about opaque spaces like 4chan without first “plotting the landscape” and “safeguarding the actual record”. Indeed, “when it comes to 4chan and Anonymous”, Phillips et al. warned, “nobody steps in the same river twice”.This text answers the call to map anonymous online groups by engaging with the complexity of testing the muddy waters of the ever-changing and dissimulative 4chan-current. It first argues how anti-structuralist research outlooks can answer to many of the pitfalls arising from this complex task. Afterwards, it traces the word trump as it was used on 4chan/pol/ to problematise some of the above-mentioned media narratives. How did anons consider Trump, and how did the /pol/-current change during the build-up of the 2016 U.S. elections and afterwards?On Researching Masked and Dissimulative ExtremistsWhile potentially playing into the self-imagination of malicious actors (Phillips et al.), the frequent appearance of overblown narratives on 4chan is unsurprising considering the peculiar affordances of imageboards. Imageboards are anonymous – no user account is required to post – and ephemeral – posts are deleted after a certain amount of activity, sometimes after days, sometimes after minutes (Bernstein et al.; Hagen). These affordances complicate studying collectives on imageboards, with the primary reasons being that 1) they prevent insights into user demographics, 2) they afford particularly dissimulative, playful discourse that can rarely be taken at face value (Auerbach; de Zeeuw and Tuters), and 3) the sheer volume of auto-deleted activity means one has to stay up-to-date with a rapid waterfall of subcultural ephemera. Additionally, the person stepping into the muddy waters of the chan-river also changes their gaze over time. For instance, Phillips bravely narrates how she once saw parts of the 4chan-stream as “fun” to only later realise the blatantly racist elements present from the start (“It Wasn’t Just”).To help render legible the changing currents of imageboard activity without relying on vague understandings of the “alt-right”, “trolls”, or “Anonymous”, anti-structuralist research outlooks form a possible answer. Around 1900, sociologists like Gabriel Tarde already argued to refrain from departing from structuralist notions of society and instead let social compositions arise through iterative tracing of minute imitations (11). As described in Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, actor-network theory (ANT) revitalises the Tardean outlook by similarly criticising the notion of the “social” and “society” as distinct, sui-generis entities. Instead, ANT advocates tracing “flat” networks of agency made up of both human and non-human actors (165-72). By tracing actors and describing the emerging network of heterogeneous mediators and intermediaries (105), one can slowly but surely get a sense of collective life. ANT thus takes a page from ethnomethodology, which advocates a similar mapping of how participants of a group produce themselves as such (Garfinkel).For multiple reasons, anti-structuralist approaches like ANT can be useful in tracing elusive anonymous online groups and their changing compositions. First, instead of grasping collectives on imageboards from the outset through structuralist notions, as networked individuals, or as “amorphous and formless entities” (see e.g. Coleman 113-5), it only derives its composition after following where its actors lead. This can result in an empirical and literally objective mapping of their collectivity while refraining from mystifications and non-existent connections–so often present in popular narratives about “trolls” and the “alt-right”. At the same time, it allows prominent self-imaginations and mythologizations – or, in ANT-parlance, “localisations of the global” (Latour 173-190) – rise to the surface whenever they form important actors, which, as we will see, tends to happen on 4chan.Second, ANT offers a useful lens with which to consider how non-human actors can uphold a sense of collectivity within anonymous imageboards. This can include digital objects as part of the infrastructure–e.g. the automatically assigned post numbers having mythical value on 4chan (Beran, It Came From 69)–but also cultural objects like words or memes. Considering 4chan’s anonymity, this focus on objects instead of individuals is partly a necessity: one cannot know the exact amount and flow of users. Still, as this text seeks to show, non-human actors like words or memes can form suitable actors to map the changing collectivity of anonymous imageboard users in the absence of demographic insights.There are a few pitfalls worth noting when conducting ANT-informed research into extremist spaces like 4chan/pol/. The aforementioned ironic and dissimulative rhetoric of anonymous forum culture (de Zeeuw and Tuters) means tracing is complicated by implicit (yet omnipresent) intertextual references undecipherable to the untrained eye. Even worse, when misread or exaggerated, such tracing efforts can play into trolling tactics. This can in turn risk what Phillips calls “giving oxygen” to bigoted narratives by amplifying their presence (“Oxygen”). Since ANT does not prescribe what sort of description is needed (Latour 149), this exposure can be limited and/or critically engaged with by the researcher. Still, it is inevitable that research on extremist collectives adds at least some garbage to already polluted information ecologies (Phillips and Milner 2020), even when “just” letting the actors speak (Venturini). Indeed, this text will unfortunately also show hate speech terms below.These complications of irony and amplification can be somewhat mitigated by mixing ethnographic involvement with computational methods. Together, they can render implicit references explicit while also mapping broad patterns in imitation and preventing singular (misleading) actors from over-dominating the description. When done well, such descriptions do not only have to amplify but can also marginalise and trivialise. An accurate mapping can thereby counter sensationalist media narratives, as long as that is where the actors lead. It because of this potentiality that anti-structuralist tracing of extremist, dissimulative online groups should not be discarded outright.Stopping Momentarily to Test the WatersTo put the above into practice, what follows is a brief case study on the term trump on 4chan/pol/. Instead of following users, here the actor trump is taken an entry point for tracing various assemblages: not only referring to Donald J. Trump as an individual and his actions, but also to how /pol/-anons imagine themselves in relation to Trump. In this way, the actor trump is a fluid one: each of its iterations contains different boundaries and variants of its environment (de Laet and Mol 252). By following these environments, can we make sense of how the delirious 2016 U.S. election cycle played out on /pol/, a space described as the “skeleton key to the rise of Trump” (Beran, 4chan)?To trace trump, I use the 4plebs.com archive, containing almost all posts made on /pol/ between late-2013 and early 2018 (the time of research). I subsequently use two text mining methods to trace various connections between trump and other actors and use this to highlight specific posts. As Latour et al. note, computational methods allow “navigations” (593) of different data points to ensure diverse empirical perspectives, preventing both structuralist “zoomed-out” views and local contexts from over-dominating. Instead of moving between micro and macro views, such a navigation should therefore be understood as a “circulation” around the data, deploying various perspectives that each assemble the actors in a different way. In following this, the case study aims to demonstrate how, instead of a lengthy ethnographic account, a brief navigation using both quali- and quantitative perspectives can quickly demystify some aspects of seemingly nebulous online groups.Tracing trump: From Meme-Wizard to Anti-Semitic TargetTo get a sense of the centrality of Trump on /pol/, I start with post frequencies of trump assembled in two ways. The first (Figure 1) shows how, soon after the announcement of Trump’s presidential bid on 16 June 2015, around 100,000 comments mention the word (2% of the total amount of posts). The frequencies spike to a staggering 8% of all comments during the build-up to Trump’s win of the Republican nomination in early 2016 and presidential election in November 2016. Figure 1: The absolute and relative amount of posts on 4chan/pol/ containing the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).To follow the traces between trump and the more general discourse surrounding it, I compiled a more general “trump-dense threads” dataset. These are threads containing thirty or more posts, with at least 15% of posts mentioning trump. As Figure 2 shows, at the two peaks, 8% of any thread on /pol/ was trump-dense, accounting for approximately 15,000 monthly threads. While Trump’s presence is unsurprising, these two views show just how incredibly central the former businessman was to /pol/ at the time of the 2016 U.S. election. Figure 2: The absolute and relative amount of threads on 4chan/pol/ that are “trump-dense”, meaning they have thirty comments or more, out of which at least 15% contain the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).Instead of picking a certain moment from these aggregate overviews and moving to the “micro” (Latour et al.), I “circulate” further with Figure 3, showing another perspective on the trump­-dense thread dataset. It shows a scatter plot of trump-dense threads grouped per week and plotted according to how similar their vocabulary is. First, all the words per week are weighted with tf-idf, a common information retrieval algorithm that scores units on the basis if they appear a lot in one of the datasets but not in others (Spärck-Jones). The document sets are then plotted according to the similarity of their weighted vocabulary (cosine similarity). The five highest-scoring terms for the five clusters (identified with K-means) are listed in the bottom-right corner. For legibility, the scatterplot is compressed by the MDS algorithm. To get a better sense of specific vocabulary per week, terms that appeared in all weeks are filtered out (like trump or hillary). Read counterclockwise, the nodes roughly increase in time, thus showing a clear temporal change of discourse, with the first clusters being more similar in vocabulary than the last, and the weeks before and after the primary election (orange cluster) showing a clear gap. Figure 3: A scatterplot showing cosine distances between tf-idf weighted vocabularies of trump-dense threads per week. Compressed with MDS and coloured by five K-means clusters on the underlying tf-idf matrix (excluding terms that appeared in all weeks). Legend shows the top five tf-idf terms within these clusters. ★ denotes the median week in the cluster.With this map, we can trace other words appearing around trump as significant actors in the weekly documents. For instance, Trump-supportive words like stump (referring to “Can’t Stump the Trump”) and maga (“Make America Great Again”) are highly ranked in the first two clusters. In later weeks, less clearly pro-Trump terms appear: drumpf reminds of the unattractive root of the Trump family name, while impeached and mueller show the Russia probe in 2017 and 2018 were significant in the trump-dense threads of that time. This change might thus hint at growing scepticism towards Trump after his win, but it is not shown how these terms are used. Fortunately, the scatterplot offers a rudder with which to navigate to further perspectives.In keeping with Latour’s advice to keep “aggregate structures” and “local contexts” flat (165-72), I contrast the above scatterplot with a perspective on the data that keeps sentence structures intact instead of showing abstracted keyword sets. Figure 4 uses all posts mentioning trump in the median weeks of the first and last clusters in the scatterplot (indicated with ★) and visualises word trees (Wattenberg and Viégas) of most frequent words following “trump is a”. As such, they render explicit ontological associations about Trump; what is Trump, according to /pol/-anons? The first word tree shows posts from 2-8 November 2015, when fifteen Republican competitors were still in the race. As we have seen in Figure 1, Trump was in this month still “only” mentioned in around 50,000 posts (2% of the total). This word tree suggests his eventual nomination was at this point seen as an unlikely and even undesirable scenario, showing derogatory associations like retard and failure, as well as more conspiratorial words like shill, fraud, hillary plant, and hillary clinton puppet. Notably, the most prominent association, meme, and others like joke and fucking comic relief, imply Trump was not taken too seriously (see also Figure 5). Figure 4: Word trees of words following “trump is a” in the median weeks of the first and last clusters of the scatterplot. Made with Jason Davies’s Word Tree application. Figure 5: Anons who did not take Trump seriously. Screencapture taken from archive.4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).The first word tree contrast dramatically with the one from the last median week from 18 to 24 December 2017. Here, most associations are anti-Semitic or otherwise related to Judaism, with trump most prominently related to the hate speech term kike. This prompts several questions: did /pol/ become increasingly anti-Semitic? Did already active users radicalise, or were more anti-Semites drawn to /pol/? Or was this nefarious current always there, with Trump merely drawing anti-Semitic attention after he won the election? Although the navigation did not depart from a particular critical framework, by “just following the actors” (Venturini), it already stumbled upon important questions related to popular narratives on 4chan and the alt-right. While it is tempting to stop here and explain the change as “radicalisation”, the navigation should continue to add more empirical perspectives. When doing so, the more plausible explanation is that the unlikely success of Trump briefly attracted (relatively) more diverse and playful visitors to /pol/, obscuring the presence and steady growth of overt extremists in the process.To unpack this, I first focus on the claim that a (relatively) diverse set of users flocked to /pol/ because of the Trump campaign. /pol/’s overall posting activity rose sharply during the 2016 election, which can point to already active users becoming more active, but is likely mostly caused by new users flocking to /pol/. Indeed, this can be traced in actor language. For instance, many anons professed to be “reporting in” from other 4chan boards during crucial moments in the campaing. One of the longest threads in the trump-dense threads dataset (4,504 posts) simply announces “Cruz drops out”. In the comments below, multiple anons state they arrived from other boards to join the Trump-infused activity. For instance, Figure 6 shows an anon replying “/v/ REPORTING IN”, to which sixty other users reacted by similarly affirming themselves as representatives from other boards (e.g. “/mu/ here. Ready to MAGA”). While but another particular view, this implies Trump’s surprising nomination stimulated a crowd-like gathering of different anons jumping into the vortex of trump-related activity on /pol/. Figure 6: Replies by outside-anons “reporting in” the sticky thread announcing Ted Cruz's drop out, 4 May 2016. Screenshots taken from 4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).Other actor-language further expresses Trump’s campaign “drew in” new and unadjusted (or: less extreme) users. Notably, many anons claimed the 2016 election led to an “invasion of Reddit users”. Figure 7 shows one such expression: an annotated timeline of /pol/’s posting activity graph (made by 4plebs), posted to /pol/ on 26 February 2016 and subsequently reposted 34 times. It interprets 2016 as a period where “Trump shit goes into overdrive, meme shit floods /pol/, /pol/ is now reddit”. Whether these claims hold any truth is difficult to establish, but the image forms an interesting case of how the entirety “/pol/” is imagined and locally articulated. Such simplistic narratives relate to what Latour calls “panoramas”: totalising notions of some imagined “whole” (188-90) that, while not to be “confused with the collective”, form crucial data since they express how actors understand their own composition (190). Especially in the volatile conditions of anonymous and ephemeral imageboards, repeated panoramic narratives can help in constructing a sense of cohesion–and thereby also form interesting actors to trace. Indeed, following the panoramic statement “/pol/ is now reddit”, other gatekeeping-efforts are not hard to find. For instance, phrases urging other anons to go “back to reddit” (occurring in 19,069 posts in the total dataset) or “back to The_Donald” (a popular pro-Trump subreddit, 1,940 posts) are also particularly popular in the dataset. Figure 7: An image circulated on /pol/ lamenting that "/pol/ is now reddit" by annotating 4plebs’s posting metrics. Screenshot taken from archive.4plebs.org (see posts).Did trump-related activity on /pol/ indeed become more “meme-y” or “Reddit-like” during the election cycle, as the above panorama articulates? The activity in the trump-dense threads seems to suggest so. Figure 8 again uses the tf-idf terms from these threads, but here with the columns denoting the weeks and the rows the top scoring tf-idf terms of their respective week. To highlight relevant actors, all terms are greyed out (see the unedited sheet here), except for several keywords that indicate particularly playful or memetic vernacular: the aforementioned stump, emperor, referring to Trump’s nickname as “God Emperor”; energy, referring to “high energy”, a common catchphrase amongst Trump supporters; magic, referring to “meme magic”, the faux-ironic belief that posting memes affects real-life events; and pepe, the infamous cartoon frog. In both the tf-idf ranking and the absolute frequencies, these keywords flourish in 2016, but disappear soon after the presidential election passes. The later weeks in 2017 and 2018 rarely contain similarly playful and memetic terms, and if they do, suggest mocking discourse regarding Trump (e.g. drumpf). This perspective thus pictures the environment around trump in the run-up to the election as a particularly memetic yet short-lived carnival. At least from this perspective, “meme shit” thus indeed seemed to have “flooded /pol/”, but only for a short while. Figure 8: tf-idf matrix of trump-dense threads, columns denoting weeks and rows denoting the top hundred most relevant terms per week. Download the full tf-idf matrix with all terms here.Despite this carnivalesque activity, further perspectives suggest it did not go at the expense of extremist activity on /pol/. Figure 9 shows the absolute and relative counts of the word "jew" and its derogatory synonym "kike". Each of these increases from 2015 onwards. As such, it seems to align with claims that Trump’s success and /pol/ becoming increasingly extremist were causally related (Thompson). However, apart from possibly confusing correlation with causation, the relative presence remains fairly stable, even slightly decreasing during the frenzy of the Trump campaign. Since we also saw Trump himself become a target for anti-Semitic activity, these trendlines rather imply /pol/’s extremist current grew proportionally to the overall increase in activity, and increased alongside but not but necessarily as a partisan contingent as a result of Trump’s campaign. Figure 9: The absolute and relative frequency of the terms "jew" and "kike" on 4chan/pol/.ConclusionCombined, the above navigation implies two main changes in 4chan/pol/’s trump-related current. First, the climaxes of the 2016 Republican primaries and presidential elections seem to have invoked crowd-like influxes of (relatively) heterogeneous users joining the Trump-delirium, marked by particularly memetic activity. Second, /pol/ additionally seemed to have formed a welcoming hotbed for anti-Semites and other extremists, as the absolute amount of (anti-Semitic) hate speech increased. However, while already-present and new users might have been energised by Trump, they were not necessarily loyal to him, as professed by the fact that Trump himself eventually became a target. Together with the fact that anti-Semitic hate speech stayed relatively consistent, instead of being “countercultural” (Nagle) or exclusively pro-Trump, /pol/ thus seems to have been composed of quite a stable anti-Semitic and Trump-critical contingent, increasing proportionally to /pol/’s general growth.Methodologically, this text sought to demonstrate how a brief navigation of trump on 4chan/pol/ can provide provisional yet valuable insights regarding continuously changing current of online anonymous collectives. As the cliché goes, however, this brief exploration has left more many questions, or rather, it did not “deploy the content with all its connections” (Latour 147). For instance, I have not touched on how many of the trump-dense threads are distinctly separated and pro-Trump “general threads” (Jokubauskaitė and Peeters). Considering the vastness of such tasks, the necessity remains to find appropriate ways to “accurately map” the wild currents of the dissimulative Web–despite how muddy they might get.NoteThis text is a compressed and edited version of a longer MA thesis available here.ReferencesAbramson, Seth. “Listen Up, Progressives: Here’s How to Deal with a 4Chan (“Alt-Right”) Troll.” Medium, 2 May 2017. <https://medium.com/@Seth_Abramson/listen-up-progressives-heres-how-to-deal-with-a-4chan-alt-right-troll-48594f59a303>.Auerbach, David. “Anonymity as Culture: Treatise.” Triple Canopy, n.d. 22 June 2020 <https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/anonymity_as_culture__treatise>.Beran, Dale. “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump”. Medium, 14 Feb. 2017. <https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb>.Beran, Dale. It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. New York: All Points Books, 2019.Bernstein, Michael S, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina Panovich, and Greg Vargas. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2011.Coleman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London: Verso Books, 2014.De Laet, Marianne, and Annemarie Mol. “The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology.” Social Studies of Science 30.2 (2000): 225–263. 1 May 2020 <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030631200030002002>. De Zeeuw, Daniel, and Marc Tuters. “Teh Internet Is Serious Business: On the Deep Vernacular Web Imaginary.” Cultural Politics 16.2 (2020).Dewey, Caitlin. “The Only True Winners of this Election are Trolls.” The Washington Post, 3 Nov. 2016. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/03/the-only-true-winners-of-this-election-are-trolls/>.Faris, Robert, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler. “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Berkman Klein Center Research Publication, 2017. <http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33759251>.Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967.Hagen, Sal. “Rendering Legible the Ephemerality of 4chan/pol/.” OILab.eu, 12 Apr. 2020. <https://oilab.eu/rendering-legible-the-ephemerality-of-4chanpol/>.Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. New York: Columbia UP, 2017.Jokubauskaitė, Emilija, and Stijn Peeters. “Generally Curious: Thematically Distinct Datasets of General Threads on 4chan/Pol/”. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 14.1 (2020): 863-7. <https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/7351>.Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.Latour, Bruno, Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin, and Dominique Boullier. “‘The Whole Is Always Smaller than Its Parts’. A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads.” British Journal of Sociology 63.4 (2012): 590-615.Marantz, Andrew. Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. New York: Penguin Random House, 2019.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the White House. Winchester: Zero Books, 2017.Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.———. “The Alt-Right Was Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention.” Motherboard, 12 Oct. 2016 <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jpgaeb/conjuring-the-alt-right>.———. “The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online.” Data & Society, 2018. <https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/1_PART_1_Oxygen_of_Amplification_DS.pdf>.———. “It Wasn’t Just the Trolls: Early Internet Culture, ‘Fun,’ and the Fires of Exclusionary Laughter.” Social Media + Society (2019). <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305119849493>.Phillips, Whitney, Gabriella Coleman, and Jessica Beyer. “Trolling Scholars Debunk the Idea That the Alt-Right’s Shitposters Have Magic Powers.” Motherboard, 22 Mar. 2017. <https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4k549/trolling-scholars-debunk-the-idea-that-the-alt-rights-trolls-have-magic-powers>.Robertson, Adi. “Hillary Clinton Exposing Pepe the Frog Is the Death of Explainers.” The Verge, 15 Sep. 2016. <https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/15/12926976/hillary-clinton-trump-pepe-the-frog-alt-right-explainer>.Spärck Jones, Karen. “A Statistical Interpretation of Term Specificity and its Application in Retrieval.” Journal of Documentation 28.1 (1972): 11-21.Stuart, Tessa. “Inside the DeploraBall: The Trump-Loving Trolls Plotting a GOP Takeover.” Rolling Stone, 20 Jan. 2017. <https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/inside-the-deploraball-the-trump-loving-trolls-plotting-a-gop-takeover-128128/>.Tarde, Gabriel. The Laws of Imitation. Ed. and trans. Elsie Clews Parsons. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1903.Thompson, Andrew. “The Measure of Hate on 4chan.” Rolling Stone, 10 May 2018. <https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-measure-of-hate-on-4chan-627922/>.Venturini, Tommaso. “Diving in Magma: How to Explore Controversies with Actor-Network Theory.” Public Understanding of Science 19.3 (2010): 258-273.Wattenberg, Martin, and Fernanda Viégas. “The Word Tree, an Interactive Visual Concordance.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 14.6 (2008): 1221-1228.


 
 
 This issue of M/C Journal asks what’s your vote worth? And what does citizenship mean now? These questions are pressing, not only for the authors and editors of this special issue, but for anyone who contends with the challenges and opportunities presented by the relationship of the individual to the modern state, the difficulty and necessity of effecting change in our polities, and the needs of individuals and communities within frameworks of unequally representative democracies. And we think that’s pretty well all of us. Talk of voting and citizenship also raise further questions about the relationship of macro-level power politics to the mundane sphere of our everyday lives. Voting is a decision that is decidedly personal, requiring the seclusion of the ballot-box, and in Australia at least, a personal inscription of one’s choice on the ballot paper. It’s an important externalisation of our private thoughts and concerns, and it links us, through our nominated representative, to the machinery of State. Citizenship is a matter of rights and duties, and describes all that we are able or expected to do in our relationship with the State and in our membership of communities, however these defined. Our level of activity as citizens is an expression of our affective relationship with State and community – the political volunteerism of small donations and envelope-stuffing, the assertions of protest, membership in unions, parties or community groups are all ways in which our mundane lives link up with tectonic shifts in national, even global governance. Ever since the debacle of the 2000 US presidential election, there has been intensified debate about the effects of apathy, spin and outright corruption on electoral politics. And since the events of the following September, citizens’ rights have been diminished and duties put on something of a war footing in Western democracies, as States militarise in the face of ‘terror’. (“Be alert, not alarmed”). Branches of cultural theory and political science have redoubled their critique of liberal democracy, and the communicative frameworks that are supposed to sustain it, with some scholars presenting voting as a false choice, political communication as lies, and discourses of citizenship as a disciplinary straightjacket. But recent events have made the editors, at least, a little more optimistic. During the time in which we were taking submissions for this special, double issue of M/C Journal, the citizens of Australia voted to change their Federal Government. After 11 years the John Howard-led Liberal Government came to an end on 23 November, swept aside in an election that cost the former PM his own seat. Within a few weeks the new Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd had, on behalf of the nation, ratified the Kyoto protocol on climate change, apologised to the indigenous ‘stolen generation’ who had been taken from their parents as part of a tragically misconceived project of assimilation, and was preparing to pull Australian combat troops out of Iraq. Australia’s long-delayed Kyoto decision was being tipped at the time of writing as an additional pressure the next US president could not possibly ignore. If the Americans sign up, pressure might in turn build on other big emitters like China to find new solutions to their energy needs. Pulling out of Iraq also left the US looking more isolated still in that seemingly interminable occupation. And the apology, though not enough on its own to overcome the terrible disadvantage of Aboriginal people, made front pages around the world, and will no doubt encourage indigenous peoples in their separate, but related struggles. After so many years of divisive intransigence on these and many other issues, after a decade in which the outgoing Government made the country a linchpin of an aggressive, US-led geopolitics of conflict, change was brought about by a succession of little things. Things like the effect on individuals’ relationships and happiness of a new, unfavourable balance in their workplace. Things like a person’s decision to renounce long-standing fears and reassurances. Things like the choices made by people holding stubby pencils in cardboard ballot boxes. These things cascaded, multiplied, and added up to some things that may become bigger than they already are. It was hard to spot these changes in the mundanity of Australia’s electoral rituals – the queue outside the local primary school, the eye-searing welter of bunting and how-to-vote cards, the floppy-hatted volunteers, and the customary fund-raising sausage-sizzle by the exit door. But they were there; they took place; and they matter. The Prime Minister before Howard, Paul Keating, had famously warned the voters off his successor during his losing campaign in 1996 by saying, at the last gasp, that ‘If you change the Prime Minister, you change the country’. For Keating, the choice embodied in a vote had consequences not just for the future of the Nation, but for its character, its being. Keating, famously, was to his bones a creature of electoral politics – he would say this, one might think, and there are many objections to be made to the claim that anything can change the country, any country, so quickly or decisively. Critical voices will say that liberal democracy really only grafts an illusion of choice onto what’s really a late-capitalist consensus – the apparent changes brought about by elections, and even the very idea of popular or national sovereignties are precisely ideological. Others will argue that democratic elections don’t qualify as a choice because there is evidence that the voters are irrational, making decisions on the basis of slender, or incorrect information, and as a result they often choose leaders that do not serve their interests. Others – like Judith Brett in her latest Quarterly Essay, “Exit Right” – argue that any talk of election results signifying a change in ‘national mood’ belies the fact that changes of government usually reflect quite small overall changes in the vote. In 2007, for example, over 46% of the Australian electorate voted for another Howard term, and only a little over 5% of us changed our minds. There is something to all of these arguments, but not enough to diminish the acts of engaged, mundane citizenship that underpinned Australia’s recent transformation. The Australian Council of Trade Unions’ ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign, which started in 2006, was a grassroots effort to build awareness about the import of the Howard Government’s neoliberal industrial relations reform. As well as bringing down the Government, this may have given Australia’s labour movement a new, independent lease of life. Organisations like GetUp also mobilised progressive grassroots activism in key electorates. Former ABC journalist Maxine McKew, the high profile Labor challenger in Howard’s seat of Bennelong, was assisted by an army of volunteer workers. They letterboxed, doorknocked and answered phones for weeks and were rewarded with the unseating of the Prime Minister. Perhaps what Keating should have said is, ‘by the time you change the Prime Minister, the country already has’. By the time the community at large starts flexing its muscles of citizenship, the big decisions have already been collectively made. In the media sphere too, there was heartening evidence of new forms of engagement. In the old media camp, Murdoch’s The Australian tried to fight a rear-guard campaign to maintain the mainstream media as the sole legitimate forum for public discussion. But its commentaries and editorials looked more than ever anachronistic, as Australia’s increasingly mature blogosphere carried debate and alternative forms of reporting on the election right throughout the year leading up to the long campaign. Politicians too made efforts to engage with participatory culture, with smart uses of Facebook, MySpace and blogs by some leading figures — and a much-derided intervention on YouTube by John Howard, whose video clip misguidedly beginning with the words ‘Good morning’ served as an emblem for a government whose moment had passed. There is evidence this year that America is changing, too, and even though the current rise of Barack Obama as a presidential contender may not result in victory, or even in his nomination, his early successes give more grounds for hope in citizenship. Although the enthusiastic reception for the speeches of this great political orator are described by cynics as ‘creepy’ or ‘cultish’, there are other ways of reading it. We could say that this is evidence of a euphoric affective reinvestment in the possibility of citizenship, and of voting as an agent for change — ‘Yes we can’ is his signature line. The enthusiasm for Obama could also simply be the relief of being able to throw off the defensive versions of citizenship that have prevailed in recent years. It could be that the greatest ‘hope’ Obama is offering is of democratic (and Democratic) renewal, a return to electoral politics, and citizenship, being conducted as if they mean something. The mechanics of Obama’s campaign suggest, too, that ordinary acts of citizenship can make a difference when it comes to institutions of great power, such as the US Presidency. Like Howard Dean before him, Obama’s campaign resourcing is powered by myriad, online gifts from small donors – ordinary men and women have ensured that Obama has more money than the Democrat-establishment Clinton campaign. If nothing else, this suggests that the ‘supply-chain’ of politics is reorienting itself to citizen engagement. Not all of the papers in this issue of M/C Journal are as optimistic as this introduction. Some of them talk about citizenship as a means of exclusion – as a way of defining ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups, as a locus of paranoia. Some see citizenship as heterogenous, and that unequal access to its benefits is a deficit in our democracy. The limits to citizenship, and to the forms of choice that liberal democracy allows need to be acknowledged. But we also need to see these mundane acts of participation as a locus of possibility, and a fulcrum for change. Everyday acts of democracy may not change the country, but they can change the framework in which our conversations about it take place. Indeed, democracy is both more popular and less popular than ever. In our feature article, Brian McNair explores the ‘democratic paradox’ that, on the one hand, democracy spread to 120 countries in the twentieth century while, on the other hand, voter participation in the more established democracies is falling. While rightly cautioning against drawing too neat an equivalence between X Factor and a general election, McNair considers the popularity of voting in participatory TV shows, noting that people will indeed vote when they are motivated enough. He asks whether the evident popularity of voting for play purposes can be harnessed into active citizenship. Melissa Bellanta questions the use of rhetoric of ‘democracy’ in relation to participatory media forms, such as voting in reality TV competitions or in online polls. Bellanta shows how audience interaction was central to late-nineteenth century popular theatre and draws provocative parallels between the ‘voting’ practices of Victorian theatre audiences and contemporary viewer-voting. She argues that the attendant rhetoric of ‘democracy’ in such interactions can divert our attention from the real characteristics of such behaviour. Digital artist xtine explores a ‘crisis of democracy’ created by tensions between participation and control. She draws upon, on the one hand, Guattari’s analysis of strategies for social change and, on the other, polemical discussions of culture jamming by Naomi Klein, and by Adbusters’ founder Kalle Lasn. Her paper introduces a number of Web projects which aim to enable new forms of local consumption and interaction. Kimberley Mullins surveys the shifting relationships between concepts of ‘public’ and ‘audience’. She discuses how these different perspectives blur and intertwine in contemporary political communication, with voters sometimes invoked as citizens and sometimes presented with entertainment spectacles in political discourse. Mark Hayward looks at the development of global television in Italy, specifically the public broadcaster RAI International, in light of the changing nature of political institutions. He links changes in the nature of the State broadcaster, RAI, with changes in national institutions made under the Berlusconi government. Hayward sees these changes as linked to a narrowing conception of citizenship used as a tool for increasingly ethno-centric forms of exclusion. Panizza Allmark considers one response to the 7 July 2005 bombings in London – the “We’re not afraid” Website, where Londoners posted images of life going on “as normal” in the face of the Tube attacks. As Allmark puts it, these photographs “promote the pleasures of western cultural values as a defense against the anxiety of terror.” Paradoxically, these “domestic snapshots” work to “arouse the collective memory of terrorism and violence”, only ambiguously resolving the impact of the 7 July events. This piece adds to the small but important literature on the relationship between photography, blogging and everyday life. James Arvanitakis’s piece, “The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average” opens out from a consideration of Australia’s Citizenship Test, introduced by the former government, into a typology of citizenship that allows for different versions of citizenship, and understandings of it “as a fluid and heterogenous phenomenon that can be in surplus, deficit, progressive and reactionary”. His typology seeks to open up new spaces for understanding citizenship as a practice, and as a relation to others, communities and the State. Anne Aly and Lelia Green’s piece, “Moderate Islam: Defining the Good Citizen”, thinks through the dilemmas Australian Muslims face in engaging with the broader community, and the heavy mediation of the state in defining the “good”, moderate Muslim identity in the age of terror. Their research is a result of a major project investigating Australian Muslim identity and citizenship, and finds that they are dealt with in media and political discourse through the lens of the “clash” between East and West embodied on the “war on terror”. For them, “religion has become the sole and only characteristic by which Muslims are recognised, denying them political citizenship and access to the public spaces of citizenship.” Alex Burns offers a critical assessment of claims made, and theories advanced about citizen media. He is skeptical about the definitions of citizenship and journalism that underpin optimistic new media theory. He notes the need for future research the reevaluates citizen journalism, and suggests an approach that builds on rich descriptions of journalistic experience, and “practice-based” approaches. Derek Barry’s “Wilde’s Evenings” offers a brief overview of the relationships between citizen journalism, the mainstream media and citizenship, through the lens of recent developments in Australia, and the 2007 Federal election, mentioned earlier in this introduction. As a practitioner and observer, Derek’s focus is on the status of citizen journalism as political activism, and whether the aim of citizen journalism, going forward, should be “payment or empowerment”. Finally, our cover image, by Drew, author of the successful Webcomic toothpastefordinner.com, offers a more sardonic take on the processes of voting and citizenship than we have in our introduction. The Web has not only provided a space for bloggers and citizen journalists, but also for a plethora of brilliant independent comic artists, who not only offer economical, mordant political commentary, but in some ways point the way towards sustainable practices in online independent media. Toothpastefordinner.com is not exclusively focused on political content, but it is flourishing on the basis of giving core content away, and subsisting largely on self-generated merchandise. This is one area for future research in online citizen media to explore. The tension between optimistic and pessimistic assessments of voting, citizenship, and the other apparatuses of liberal democracy will not be going anywhere soon, and nor will the need to “change the country” once in awhile. Meanwhile, the authors and editors of this special edition of M/C Journal hope to have explored these issues in a way that has provoked some further thought and debate among you, as voters, citizens and readers. References Brett, Judith. “Exit Right.” Quarterly Essay 28 (2008). 
 
 
 
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The term personalization refers to a news factor and to a tendency of media coverage. Personalization as a news factor means that topics and events, where individuals act respectively are affected by actions or events are more likely to become news than topics and events that cannot be portrayed as actions of individuals. A personalized reporting style puts destinies of individuals (and celebrities) in the foreground and/or connects topics and events on personal stories of individuals. As a tendency of media coverage, personalization means an increasing orientation towards (prominent) people (e.g., Blöbaum, 2013; Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Handstein, 2016). Field of application/theoretical foundation: Personalization is widely analyzed in communication science. Probably most often personalization (as a news factor) is analyzed in news value studies respectively studies that analyze journalistic news selection criteria. Furthermore, personalization as a concept is a considerable issue in political communication research. Here, personalization means that, on the one hand, individual politicians (for example election campaign candidates) are becoming increasingly important in the context of political communication (e.g., Rahat & Sheafer, 2007; Van Aelst et al., 2012), whereas less emphasis is being placed on parties, political institutions and/or political issues and content. This form of personalization is also referred to as ‘individualization’. On the other hand, personalization also means that, in order to describe and evaluate individual politicians, apolitical characteristics, i.e., their personal characteristics and their personal life, are becoming increasingly relevant in political communication and election coverage. This aspect is also known as ‘privatization’ (e.g., Adam & Maier, 2010; Kriesi, 2012; Van Aelst et al., 2012). In principle, personalization can be analyzed in almost all subject areas, for example also in science communication, sports coverage and many more. References/combination with other methods of data collection: The analysis of personalization in media coverage may be combined or compared with (quantitative and/or qualitative) journalist surveys on news selection and processing. Furthermore, input-output-analyses (for example by comparing press releases and media coverage) are possible as well as experimental studies that analyze the potential effects of a personalized style of news coverage on recipients. Example: The concept of personalization lacks an agreed-upon operationalization. Van Aelst et al. (2012) review relevant studies in the field of political communication research and make some recommendations for how the concept might be operationalized for content analyses of, for example, election (campaign) coverage. These recommendations are cited below. Coding instructions (direct quotation) by Van Aelst et al. (2012, pp. 219-220): Individualization General visibility (shift from parties to individual politicians) The relative attention for politicians compared to the total amount of attention for political actors (politicians vs parties; government ministers vs the government). Attention scores: count the total number of references to individual politicians (or candidates, ministers) and parties (government) within the unit of analysis (e.g. article, paragraph, and sentence): 1 How many times is a political party (or government, institution) mentioned within the unit of analysis? 2 How many times is a politician mentioned within the unit of analysis? Additional similar categories can be inserted if the researcher is interested in several specific politicians, parties, institutions or types of politicians, parties or institutions. Note that the total number of references to a certain actor can easily be reduced to binary codes (presence or absence). Concentrated visibility (shift from parties to leaders) The relative attention on leaders compared to the total amount of attention on political actors (leaders vs parties; PM/President vs government). Attention scores: count the total number of references to party leaders (or candidates for highest position, PM/President) and parties (government) within the unit of analysis. The coding category of leaders is similar to that of other politicians, but it refers to leaders. Privatization The characteristics of politicians We have argued for the inclusion of the following set of characteristics in personalization studies: competence, leadership, credibility, morality, rhetorical skills, and candidates’ appearance. Each characteristic has two coding categories: one allows coding the unit of analysis as presenting the characteristic as political (the characteristic is presented in a political context or not); and a second category allows coding it as presenting the characteristic as personal (the characteristic is presented in a personal context or not). The political context refers to all statements and actions made in the political arena (e.g. in parliament, on campaign, during EU-summit) or explicitly related to the public role of the politician. The personal context refers to all statements and actions made outside the political arena (e.g. on vacation, at a family gathering) or experiences before going into politics. 1 Is the characteristic of ‘competence’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a political context? For example: the leader does not understand the office he or she is responsible for. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 2 Is the characteristic of ‘competence’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a personal context? For example: the leader is a poor mother or father. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 3 Is the characteristic of ‘leadership’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a political context? For example: the leader failed to rally his or her party behind him or her. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 4 Is the characteristic of ‘leadership’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a personal context? For example: was the leader seen as a natural person in command in his/her youth by classmates. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 5 Is the characteristic of ‘credibility’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a political context? For example: a broken promise by the candidate in the previous elections, say on lower taxes. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 6 Is the characteristic of ‘credibility’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a personal context? For example: the leader is criticized by a family member for not keeping his or her promises to spend more time with his/her family. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 7 Is the characteristic of ‘morality’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a political context? For example: an investigation against the leader for accepting bribes or undermining the career of a rival. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 8 Is the characteristic of ‘morality’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a personal context? For example: the leader was caught cheating on his or her spouse. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 9 Is the characteristic of ‘rhetorical skills’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a political context? For example: a reference to a great speech by the leader in parliament. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 10 Is the characteristic of ‘rhetorical skills’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a personal context? For example: a reference to a great speech by the leader in a private ceremony or to one made before he or she entered politics. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 11 Is the characteristic of ‘appearance’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a political context? For example: a reference to the ‘presidential appearance’ of the candidate. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 12 Is the characteristic of ‘appearance’ mentioned within the unit of analysis in a personal context? For example: a reference to the past of the leader as a winner of a beauty pageant. (1 = no; 2 = yes) Categories can be repeated for specific parties, institutions and politicians. Personal life of politicians Does the unit of analysis contain references to one of these indicators: Family life. This includes family relationships and all aspects of domestic life. (1 = no; 2 = yes) Past life or upbringing. This includes all biographical information. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 3 Leisure time. This includes all information on hobbies, vacations, and recreational activities. (1 = no; 2 = yes) 4 Love life. This includes all information on sexual relationships, marriage and divorce. (1 = no; 2 = yes) This list can of course vary according to indicators selected. It is possible to code these Indicators at the level of a specific politician (e.g. for the two main candidates). References Adam, S. & Maier, M. (2010). Personalization of politics: A critical review and agenda for research. Communication Yearbook, 34(1), 213-257. DOI: 10.1080/23808985.2010.11679101 Blöbaum, B. (2013). Personalisierung. In G. Bentele, H.-B. Brosius, & O. Jarren (Eds.), Lexikon Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft (2., überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage) (p. 367). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Galtung, J., & Ruge, M.H. (1965). The structure of foreign news. The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2(1), 64-91. Handstein, H. (2016). Personalisierung. Journalistikon. Das Wörterbuch der Journalistik. Retrieved March 27, 2020, from http://journalistikon.de/personalisierung/ Kriesi, H. (2012). Personalization of national election campaigns. Party Politics, 18(6), 825-844. Rahat, G., & Sheafer, T. (2007). The personalization(s) of politics: Israel, 1949-2003. Political Communication, 24, 65-80. Van Aelst, P., Sheafer, T., & Stanyer, J. (2012). The personalization of mediated political communication: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings. Journalism, 13(2), 203-220.

“I’m saying let’s make it 84 percent turnout in two years, and then see what happens!” …“Oh, yes! Vote! Dress yourself up, and vote! Even if you only go into the voting booth and pray. Do that!” Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toni Morrison on the 2000 Presidential election in June Jordan’s essay, “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage” (2001) On September 17, 2003, Citizenship Day, the United States was to adopt a new version of its Oath of Allegiance. The updated version would modernize the oath by removing cumbersome words like “abjure” and dropping anachronistic references like “potentate.” Thus the oral recitation marking the entrance into citizenship would become more meaningful—and more manageable—for the millions of immigrants eligible for naturalization. The revised version, however, was quickly canned after conservative organizations, senators, and other loud political leaders decried what they saw as an attack on a timeless document and a weakening of the military obligation foundational to entrance into the American citizenry. The Heritage Foundation, one such organization opposing the perceived attack on citizenship, issued an executive statement decrying “the Department of Homeland Security's misguided attempts to make U.S. citizenship more ‘user-friendly’ for those who want the benefits of our country, but don't care to accept the responsibility” (n.pag.). Indeed, the thwarted attempt to make citizenship procedures more welcoming arose at a curious time. Though the proposed changes arose from a long, rather mundane administrative initiative to reconsider various procedural issues, the debate over the Oath of Allegiance politicized the issue within the context of the war on terror and the constriction of entrances into the national turf. The Bush administration responded to events referred to as 9/11 with vigorous efforts to shore up national borders within a language of terrorism, evildoers, and the dire need for domestic security. The infamous Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) became the consumerist, welcome-sounding Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services when it was placed it under the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. The consolidation of citizenship services and disparate border policing programs further bolsters the longstanding scrutiny of immigrants—especially those considered not-white—for their ideological commitment and adherence to current national ideals. Naturalization requires a uniform recitation of unhesitant adherence to official doctrines—and a stated commitment to fight and die for those ideals. War, it seems, and its necessary division of friends and foes (“evildoers”), occupies the dead center of official ceremonies of citizenship. Naturalization procedures demonstrate how the figure of the immigrant undergoes rigorous scrutiny and thus defines the bounds of American citizenship. However, as immigration scholars like Bonnie Honig, Mai Ngai, Linda Bosniak, and Judith Shklar have shown, the specter of the immigrant also serves as an exculpatory device for preexisting inequities by obscuring internal division. While immigrants perform allegiance publicly to obtain citizenship status, birth-right citizens are presumed to have been born with a natural allegiance that precludes multiple allegiances to ideologies, projects, or potentates outside national borders. Ideas about the necessity of pairing exclusive ideological commitment with citizenship are as old as the American nation, notwithstanding the tremendous volume of announcements of a new world order in the wake of 9/11. In all incarnations of the citizenship oath, full membership in the nation-state via naturalization requires a simultaneous oath of allegiance and renunciation. Entrance into the nation-state requires exit—from ideological turf more than geographic turf—from the newly naturalized citizen’s former home country. Though scholars of diasporic and cosmopolitan identities like Aihwa Ong, Phengh Cheah, Bruce Robbins, and Brent Edwards have questioned the viability of the nation-state in postmodernity, official American articulations of citizenship adhere to a longstanding phenomenon whereby inclusion within the polity requires a simultaneous exclusion or renunciation. Or, in the realm of rhetoric, any articulation of a “we” requires a simultaneous citation of a “not-we.” At the heart of citizenship is a cleavage: a coming together made possible by a splitting apart. It is not mere historical curiosity that the notorious utterance of “We” in the Action of the Second Continental Congress popularly known as the Declaration of Independence is forged in direct opposition to a “He” (King George III)—repeated no less than nineteen times in the short document. In contrast, “we” appears only eleven times. What the Declaration shows, and what the Oath of Allegiance insists, is that the constitution of a bounded polity in America emphasizes external difference in order to create the semblance of an internally homogeneous “we.” Thus arises the potency of national documents that announce equality amidst a decidedly unequal social order. These documents provide the ring of broad inclusion for what Rogers M. Smith has described as “civic myths”: ideals of full equality that politicians cite enthusiastically without worrying about their veracity in the everyday lives of the citizenry. Yet American archives and literary histories teem with protest writing that makes visible the internal divisions of American publics. In these literatures arises a figure that threatens the fragile story of a finished “we” based on uniform allegiance: the partial citizen speaking. The partial citizen speaking—from experience, on behalf of others—and addressing the real divisions within a national audience is situated at a strategic site at which to simultaneously claim and critique the inclusive pronouncements of the American Republic in order to make them real. The best example is Frederick Douglass who, having been invited to celebrate the nation in 1848, capitalized on his tenuous claim to citizenship status and delivered the speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In the speech, Douglass excoriates his audience in Rochester, New York on behalf of the slaves absent from Corinthian Hall because they are toiling on Southern plantations. To his “fellow-citizens” Douglass cries, “This Fourth of July is yours not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (116). In contradistinction to leaders’ duplicitous uses of civic myths eschewed by Smith, protesters like Douglass use their partial citizenship to gain a toehold on the viable, but unfinished project of full democracy for all. By claiming the essential American-ness of their projects, protesters like Douglass position their present projects as the fulfillment of previous national promises. In her study of foreigners’ critiques of America, Bonnie Honig shows how “[Foreigners] make room for themselves by staging nonexistent rights, and by way of such stagings, sometimes, new rights, powers, and visions come into being” (101). In the wake of 9/11, we must be interested in the rhetorical means of similar stagings by those already inside presumed national borders who have been denied full access to, or enjoyment of civic, economic, and/or social rights. These partial citizens speaking and writing stage heretofore nonexistent rights by claiming preexisting civic myths by, for, and on behalf of voices that were never meant to speak such civic myths as truths. Sometime after 9/11, President George W. Bush took the virtually unprecedented step of labeling U.S. citizens like Yasir Hamdi and José Padilla “enemy combatants” in order to circumvent the guaranteed legal rights to counsel and trial afforded to all U.S. citizens. The arbitrary nullification of Hamdi’s and Padilla’s citizenship rights was not entirely new given that protest has often been seen as forfeiture of citizenship. In addition to the obvious example of the allegiance-renunciation pairing in the citizenship oath, we can turn to Emma Goldman’s deportation to Russia in 1919, or to the odd favor with which the exit plans of Garveyites and their predecessors have been received. Or, squarely within American borders, Henry David Thoreau’s blueprint of civil disobedience pairs protest with the withdrawal from collectivity (his refusal to pay poll taxes in protest of the Mexican War), a move which bolsters the notion that dissent necessitates a retraction from participation in the public sphere. However, there is another option: collectivity in the face of division. Protesters like Douglass occupy the outposts of real publics that can deliver the ineffable social equality of the modern democratic state. Here, those whose very citizenship is in question are the ones to sift through the promises of the nation-state and to hold them against the evidence of experience—their own and that of others for whom they speak. Participation in the state is more than adherence and renunciation. If Toni Morrison would just as soon have us enter a polling station to pray as to vote; so, too, protesters like Douglass demand hope amidst despairing situations of inequality—often state-sponsored. Their projects are never to simply unveil inconsistency between state promises and the experiences of subsets of its citizenry. Squarely within the circuitous myths that enshroud the state’s turf, these protesters stake claims to the very national myths that threaten their existence. Works Cited Bosniak, Linda. “Citizenship.” The Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies. Eds. Peter Can & MarkTushnet. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 183-201. Cheah, Phengh, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Douglass, Frederick. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” 1848. Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 108-30. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Govindarajan, Shweta. “Criticism Puts Citizenship Oath Revision on Hold; Conservatives Pan Immigration Officials’ Modernization of the Long-Used Pledge.” Los Angeles Times 19 Sep. 2003, sect. 1:13. The Heritage Foundation. First They Attacked the Pledge, Now the Oath. 10 Sep. 2003. <http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/meeseletter.cfm>. Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Jordan, June. “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage.” Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan. New York: Basic Books, 2001. 16-19. Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship and the Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Websites Department of Homeland Security: www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Norman, Brian J. "Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/04-allegiance.php>. APA Style Norman, B. (2004, Mar17). Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/04-allegiance.php>

“...children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents...” — Stephen Kline, The Making of Children’s Culture We live in a world saturated by design and through design artefacts, one can glean unique insights into a culture's values and norms. In fact, some academics, such as British media and film theorist Ben Highmore, see the two areas so inextricably intertwined as to suggest a wholesale “re-branding of the cultural sciences as design studies” (14). Too often, however, everyday objects are marginalised or overlooked as objects of scholarly attention. The field of material culture studies seeks to change that by focussing on the quotidian object and its ability to reveal much about the time, place, and culture in which it was designed and used. This article takes on one such object, a mid-century children's toy tea set, whose humble journey from 1968 Sears catalogue to 2014 thrift shop—and subsequently this author’s basement—reveals complex rhetorical messages communicated both visually and verbally. As material culture studies theorist Jules Prown notes, the field’s foundation is laid upon the understanding “that objects made ... by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged” (1-2). In this case, the objects’ material and aesthetic characteristics can be shown to reflect some of the pervasive stereotypes and gender roles of the mid-century and trace some of the prevailing tastes of the American middle class of that era, or perhaps more accurately the type of design that came to represent good taste and a modern aesthetic for that audience. A wealth of research exists on the function of toys and play in learning about the world and even the role of toy selection in early sex-typing, socialisation, and personal identity of children (Teglasi). This particular research area isn’t the focus of this article; however, one aspect that is directly relevant and will be addressed is the notion of adult role-playing among children and the role of toys in communicating certain adult practices or values to the child—what sociologist David Oswell calls “the dedifferentiation of childhood and adulthood” (200). Neither is the focus of this article the practice nor indeed the ethicality of marketing to children. Relevant to this particular example I suggest, is as a product utilising messaging aimed not at children but at adults, appealing to certain parents’ interest in nurturing within their child a perceived era and class-appropriate sense of taste. This was fuelled in large part by the curatorial pursuits of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, coupled with an interest and investment in raising their children in a design-forward household and a desire for toys that reflected that priority; in essence, parents wishing to raise modern children. Following Prown’s model of material culture analysis, the tea set is examined in three stages, through description, deduction and speculation with each stage building on the previous one. Figure 1: Porcelain Toy Tea Set. Description The tea set consists of twenty-six pieces that allows service for six. Six cups, saucers, and plates; a tall carafe with spout, handle and lid; a smaller vessel with a spout and handle; a small round bowl with a lid; a larger oval bowl with a lid, and a coordinated oval platter. The cups are just under two inches tall and two inches in diameter. The largest piece, the platter is roughly six inches by four inches. The pieces are made of a ceramic material white in colour and glossy in texture and are very lightweight. The rim or edge of each piece is decorated with a motif of three straight lines in two different shades of blue and in different thicknesses, interspersed with a set of three black wiggly lines. Figure 2: Porcelain Toy Tea Set Box. The set is packaged for retail purposes and the original box appears to be fully intact. The packaging of an object carries artefactual evidence just as important as what it contains that falls into the category of a “‘para-artefact’ … paraphernalia that accompanies the product (labels, packaging, instructions etc.), all of which contribute to a product’s discourse” (Folkmann and Jensen 83). The graphics on the box are colourful, featuring similar shades of teal blue as found on the objects, with the addition of orange and a silver sticker featuring the logo of the American retailer Sears. The cover features an illustration of the objects on an orange tabletop. The most prominent text that confirms that the toy is a “Porcelain Toy Tea Set” is in an organic, almost psychedelic style that mimics both popular graphics of this era—especially album art and concert posters—as well as the organic curves of steam that emanate from the illustrated teapot’s spout. Additional messages appear on the box, in particular “Contemporary DESIGN” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. Along the edges of the box lid, a detail of the decorative motif is reproduced somewhat abstracted from what actually appears on the ceramic objects. Figure 3: Sears’s Christmas Wishbook Catalogue, page 574 (1968). Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Sears) is well-known for its over one-hundred-year history of producing printed merchandise catalogues. The catalogue is another important para-artefact to consider in analysing the objects. The tea set first appeared in the 1968 Sears Christmas Wishbook. There is no date or copyright on the box, so only its inclusion in the catalogue allows the set to be accurately dated. It also allows us to understand how the set was originally marketed. Deduction In the deduction phase, we focus on the sensory aesthetic and functional interactive qualities of the various components of the set. In terms of its function, it is critical that we situate the objects in their original use context, play. The light weight of the objects and thinness of the ceramic material lends the objects a delicate, if not fragile, feeling which indicates that this set is not for rough use. Toy historian Lorraine May Punchard differentiates between toy tea sets “meant to be used by little girls, having parties for their friends and practising the social graces of the times” and smaller sets or doll dishes “made for little girls to have parties with their dolls, or for their dolls to have parties among themselves” (7). Similar sets sold by Sears feature images of girls using the sets with both human playmates and dolls. The quantity allowing service for six invites multiple users to join the party. The packaging makes clear that these toy tea sets were intended for imaginary play only, rendering them non-functional through an all-capitals caution declaiming “IMPORTANT: Do not use near heat”. The walls and handles of the cups are so thin one can imagine that they would quickly become dangerous if filled with a hot liquid. Nevertheless, the lid of the oval bowl has a tan stain or watermark which suggests actual use. The box is broken up by pink cardboard partitions dividing it into segments sized for each item in the set. Interestingly even the small squares of unfinished corrugated cardboard used as cushioning between each stacked plate have survived. The evidence of careful re-packing indicates that great care was taken in keeping the objects safe. It may suggest that even though the set was used, the children or perhaps the parents, considered the set as something to care for and conserve for the future. Flaws in the glaze and applique of the design motif can be found on several pieces in the set and offer some insight as to the technique used in producing these items. Errors such as the design being perfectly evenly spaced but crooked in its alignment to the rim, or pieces of the design becoming detached or accidentally folded over and overlapping itself could only be the result of a print transfer technique popularised with decorative china of the Victorian era, a technique which lends itself to mass production and lower cost when compared to hand decoration. Speculation In the speculation stage, we can consider the external evidence and begin a more rigorous investigation of the messaging, iconography, and possible meanings of the material artefact. Aspects of the set allow a number of useful observations about the role of such an object in its own time and context. Sociologists observe the role of toys as embodiments of particular types of parental messages and values (Cross 292) and note how particularly in the twentieth century “children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents” (Kline 96). Throughout history children’s toys often reflected a miniaturised version of the adult world allowing children to role-play as imagined adult-selves. Kristina Ranalli explored parallels between the practice of drinking tea and the play-acting of the child’s tea party, particularly in the nineteenth century, as a gendered ritual of gentility; a method of socialisation and education, and an opportunity for exploratory and even transgressive play by “spontaneously creating mini-societies with rules of their own” (20). Such toys and objects were available through the Sears mail-order catalogue from the very beginning at the end of the nineteenth century (McGuire). Propelled by the post-war boom of suburban development and homeownership—that generation’s manifestation of the American Dream—concern with home décor and design was elevated among the American mainstream to a degree never before seen. There was a hunger for new, streamlined, efficient, modernist living. In his essay titled “Domesticating Modernity”, historian Jeffrey L. Meikle notes that many early modernist designers found that perhaps the most potent way to “‘domesticate’ modernism and make it more familiar was to miniaturise it; for example, to shrink the skyscraper and put it into the home as furniture or tableware” (143). Dr Timothy Blade, curator of the 1985 exhibition of girls’ toys at the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Gallery—now the Goldstein Museum of Design—described in his introduction “a miniaturised world with little props which duplicate, however rudely, the larger world of adults” (5). Noting the power of such toys to reflect adult values of their time, Blade continues: “the microcosm of the child’s world, remarkably furnished by the miniaturised props of their parents’ world, holds many direct and implied messages about the society which brought it into being” (9). In large part, the mid-century Sears catalogues capture the spirit of an era when, as collector Thomas Holland observes, “little girls were still primarily being offered only the options of glamour, beauty and parenthood as the stuff of their fantasies” (175). Holland notes that “the Wishbooks of the fifties [and, I would add, the sixties] assumed most girls would follow in their mother’s footsteps to become full-time housewives and mommies” (1). Blade grouped toys into three categories: cooking, cleaning, and sewing. A tea set could arguably be considered part of the cooking category, but closer examination of the language used in marketing this object—“little hostesses”, et cetera—suggests an emphasis not on cooking but on serving or entertaining. This particular category was not prevalent in the era examined by Blade, but the cultural shifts of the mid-twentieth century, particularly the rapid popularisation of a suburban lifestyle, may have led to the use of entertaining as an additional distinct category of role play in the process of learning to become a “proper” homemaker. Sears and other retailers offered a wide variety of styles of toy tea sets during this era. Blade and numerous other sources observe that children’s toy furniture and appliances tended to reflect the style and aesthetic qualities of their contemporary parallels in the adult world, the better to associate the child’s objects to its adult equivalent. The toy tea set’s packaging trumpets messages intended to appeal to modernist values and identity including “Contemporary Design” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. The use of this coded marketing language, aimed particularly at parents, can be traced back several decades. In 1928 a group of American industrial and textile designers established the American Designers' Gallery in New York, in part to encourage American designers to innovate and adopt new styles such as those seen in the L’ Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925) in Paris, the exposition that sparked international interest in the Art Deco or Art Moderne aesthetic. One of the gallery founders, Ilonka Karasz, a Hungarian-American industrial and textile designer who had studied in Austria and was influenced by the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, publicised her new style of nursery furnishings as “designed for the very modern American child” (Brown 80). Sears itself was no stranger to the appeal of such language. The term “contemporary design” was ubiquitous in catalogue copy of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, used to describe everything from draperies (1959) and bedspreads (1961) to spice racks (1964) and the Lady Kenmore portable dishwasher (1961). An emphasis on the role of design in one’s life and surroundings can be traced back to efforts by MoMA. The museum’s interest in modern design hearkens back almost to the institution’s inception, particularly in relation to industrial design and the aestheticisation of everyday objects (Marshall). Through exhibitions and in partnership with mass-market magazines, department stores and manufacturer showrooms, MoMA curators evangelised the importance of “good design” a term that can be found in use as early as 1942. What Is Good Design? followed the pattern of prior exhibitions such as What Is Modern Painting? and situated modern design at the centre of exhibitions that toured the United States in the first half of the nineteen-fifties. To MoMA and its partners, “good design” signified the narrow identification of proper taste in furniture, home decor and accessories; effectively, the establishment of a design canon. The viewpoints enshrined in these exhibitions and partnerships were highly influential on the nation’s perception of taste for decades to come, as the trickle-down effect reached a much broader segment of consumers than those that directly experienced the museum or its exhibitions (Lawrence.) This was evident not only at high-end shops such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Even mass-market retailers sought out well-known figures of modernist design to contribute to their offerings. Sears, for example, commissioned noted modernist designer and ceramicist Russel Wright to produce a variety of serving ware and decor items exclusively for the company. Notably for this study, he was also commissioned to create a toy tea set for children. The 1957 Wishbook touts the set as “especially created to delight modern little misses”. Within its Good Design series, MoMA exhibitions celebrated numerous prominent Nordic designers who were exploring simplified forms and new material technologies. In the 1968 Wishbook, the retailer describes the Porcelain Toy Tea Set as “Danish-inspired china for young moderns”. The reference to Danish design is certainly compatible with the modernist appeal; after the explosion in popularity of Danish furniture design, the term “Danish Modern” was commonly used in the nineteen-fifties and sixties as shorthand for pan-Scandinavian or Nordic design, or more broadly for any modern furniture design regardless of origin that exhibited similar characteristics. In subsequent decades the notion of a monolithic Scandinavian-Nordic design aesthetic or movement has been debunked as primarily an economically motivated marketing ploy (Olivarez et al.; Fallan). In the United States, the term “Danish Modern” became so commonly misused that the Danish Society for Arts and Crafts called upon the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to legally restrict the use of the labels “Danish” and “Danish Modern” to companies genuinely originating in Denmark. Coincidentally the FTC ruled on this in 1968, noting “that ‘Danish Modern’ carries certain meanings, and... that consumers might prefer goods that are identified with a foreign culture” (Hansen 451). In the case of the Porcelain Toy Tea Set examined here, Sears was not claiming that the design was “Danish” but rather “Danish-inspired”. One must wonder, was this another coded marketing ploy to communicate a sense of “Good Design” to potential customers? An examination of the formal qualities of the set’s components, particularly the simplified geometric forms and the handle style of the cups, confirms that it is unlike a traditional—say, Victorian-style—tea set. Punchard observes that during this era some American tea sets were actually being modelled on coffee services rather than traditional tea services (148). A visual comparison of other sets sold by Sears in the same year reveals a variety of cup and pot shapes—with some similar to the set in question—while others exhibit more traditional teapot and cup shapes. Coffee culture was historically prominent in Nordic cultures so there is at least a passing reference to that aspect of Nordic—if not specifically Danish—influence in the design. But what of the decorative motif? Simple curved lines were certainly prominent in Danish furniture and architecture of this era, and occasionally found in combination with straight lines, but no connection back to any specific Danish motif could be found even after consultation with experts in the field from the Museum of Danish America and the Vesterheim National Norwegian-American Museum (personal correspondence). However, knowing that the average American consumer of this era—even the design-savvy among them—consumed Scandinavian design without distinguishing between the various nations, a possible explanation could be contained in the promotion of Finnish textiles at the time. In the decade prior to the manufacture of the tea set a major design tendency began to emerge in the United States, triggered by the geometric design motifs of the Finnish textile and apparel company Marimekko. Marimekko products were introduced to the American market in 1959 via the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based retailer Design Research (DR) and quickly exploded in popularity particularly after would-be First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy appeared in national media wearing Marimekko dresses during the 1960 presidential campaign and on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. (Thompson and Lange). The company’s styling soon came to epitomise a new youth aesthetic of the early nineteen sixties in the United States, a softer and more casual predecessor to the London “mod” influence. During this time multiple patterns were released that brought a sense of whimsy and a more human touch to classic mechanical patterns and stripes. The patterns Piccolo (1953), Helmipitsi (1959), and Varvunraita (1959), all designed by Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi offered varying motifs of parallel straight lines. Maija Isola's Silkkikuikka (1961) pattern—said to be inspired by the plumage of the Great Crested Grebe—combined parallel serpentine lines with straight and angled lines, available in a variety of colours. These and other geometrically inspired patterns quickly inundated apparel and decor markets. DR built a vastly expanded Cambridge flagship store and opened new locations in New York in 1961 and 1964, and in San Francisco in 1965 fuelled in no small part by the fact that they remained the exclusive outlet for Marimekko in the United States. It is clear that Marimekko’s approach to pattern influenced designers and manufacturers across industries. Design historian Lesley Jackson demonstrates that Marimekko designs influenced or were emulated by numerous other companies across Scandinavia and beyond (72-78). The company’s influence grew to such an extent that some described it as a “conquest of the international market” (Hedqvist and Tarschys 150). Subsequent design-forward retailers such as IKEA and Crate and Barrel continue to look to Marimekko even today for modern design inspiration. In 2016 the mass-market retailer Target formed a design partnership with Marimekko to offer an expansive limited-edition line in their stores, numbering over two hundred items. So, despite the “Danish” misnomer, it is quite conceivable that designers working for or commissioned by Sears in 1968 may have taken their aesthetic cues from Marimekko’s booming work, demonstrating a clear understanding of the contemporary high design aesthetic of the time and coding the marketing rhetoric accordingly even if incorrectly. Conclusion The Sears catalogue plays a unique role in capturing cross-sections of American culture not only as a sales tool but also in Holland’s words as “a beautifully illustrated diary of America, it’s [sic] people and the way we thought about things” (1). Applying a rhetorical and material culture analysis to the catalogue and the objects within it provides a unique glimpse into the roles these objects played in mediating relationships, transmitting values and embodying social practices, tastes and beliefs of mid-century American consumers. Adult consumers familiar with the characteristics of the culture of “Good Design” potentially could have made a connection between the simplified geometric forms of the components of the toy tea set and say the work of modernist tableware designers such as Kaj Franck, or between the set’s graphic pattern and the modernist motifs of Marimekko and its imitators. But for a much broader segment of the population with a less direct understanding of modernist aesthetics, those connections may not have been immediately apparent. The rhetorical messaging behind the objects’ packaging and marketing used class and taste signifiers such as modern, contemporary and “Danish” to reinforce this connection to effect an emotional and aspirational appeal. These messages were coded to position the set as an effective transmitter of modernist values and to target parents with the ambition to create “appropriately modern” environments for their children. 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