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2016 | Book

Introduction Read chapter Read first chapter

The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in The Digital Age

Insiders & Outsiders in Democratic Politics

Author: Mark Rolfe

Publisher: Springer Singapore

Book Series : Rhetoric, Politics and Society

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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About this book

This highly original work considers the rhetoric of political actors and commentators who identify digital media as the means to a new era of politics and democracy. Placing this rhetoric in a historical and intellectual context, it provides a compelling explanation of the reinvention and thematic recurrence of democratic discourse. The author investigates the populist sources of rhetoric used by digital politics enthusiasts as outsiders inaugurating new eras of democracy with digital media, such as Barack Obama and Julian Assange, and explores the generations of rhetorical and political history behind them. The book places their rhetoric in the context of the permanent tensions between insiders and outsiders, between the political class and the populace, which are inherent to representative democracy. Through a theoretical and conceptual research that is historically grounded and comparative, it offers rhetorical analysis of candidates for the 2016 presidential election and discusses digital democracy, particularly discussing their origins in American populism and their influence on other countries through Americanization. Uniquely, it offers a sceptical assessment of epochal claims and a historical-rhetorical account of two of the defining figures of twentieth-century politics to date, and reveals how modern rhetoric is grounded in an older form of anti-politics and mobilises tropes that are as old as representative democracy itself.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction
Abstract
This chapter sets out the overall argument, which is that both Obama and Assange were fitted to established narratives of the outsider, one based on the Robin Hood theme and the other on a motif of the ingénue to Washington. Both promised a return of democracy to “the people” through digital media. However, they used an old American populist rhetoric that was reinvented in the 1980s and 1990s for the internet by American writers and activists and eventually was used to locate events ranging from the Zapatista movement in 1994 to the Arab Spring in 2011 in a democratic myth of great internet revolutions. This anti-politics rhetoric has intellectual lineage that stretches to the eighteenth century and has had widespread use in America, England, and Australia.
Mark Rolfe
Chapter 2. Insiders, Outsiders, Populism, and Rhetoric
Abstract
Chapter 2 is the methodological chapter linking theories and history of rhetoric, political myth, populism, and democracy. It connects the rhetoric of insiders and outsiders to populism and the tensions between the redemptive and the pragmatic sides of representative democracy. Ethos is the keystone concept and is recognised by the audiences of democracies who confer legitimacy upon claimants. It is the means for analysing claims made by people who must convince voters that they are worthy of government. Such claims for political leadership and legitimacy are advanced in a dynamic environment of debate about their credibility and character for the jobs. The internet is the latest iteration of a tendency for rhetors to espouse technologies as means of overcoming problems and return democracy to the people.
Mark Rolfe
Chapter 3. Obama: The Narrative of a Man of the People for New Politics
Abstract
This chapter explores Obama’s successful construction of ethos in 2008 as a political outsider who could be trusted with power. He invoked Lincoln, King, and Kennedy as part of his jeremiad but also technology as part of his narrative and his ethos in order to acclaim the return of power to the grassroots. He was tilling 20 years’ worth of participatory political language that had grown around the internet. Yet his campaign involved an attenuated vision of political participation that was geared towards the election of a representative. Obama perfected his rhetoric through years of practice and repetition, like many accomplished political rhetors, and reinvented the traditional American campaign biography through digital means. There is a narrative and thematic recurrence to these biographies.
Mark Rolfe
Chapter 4. Obama and Old Fashioned Anti-politics Rhetoric
Abstract
Anti-political rhetoric was a feature of every political campaign of Obama’s career. He was like many predecessors who sketched a lurid anti-political portrait of current affairs as a prelude to promising a restoration of democracy. This feature worked in combination with claims to innocence of Washington ways as means of establishing ethos with voters. This rhetoric has origins in early eighteenth-century Britain from where it travelled first to America and then to Australia. These three countries share adversarial party systems and admonitory and hortatory rhetoric. There political discourses frequently include allegations of lies, corruption, and betrayal of the public interest. Accordingly, ad hominem accusations along such lines have potency because people generally are prepared to believe the worst of politicians and politics.
Mark Rolfe
Chapter 5. Assange: The Narrative of the Digital Robin Hood Against the Elites
Abstract
This chapter uses Assange to open discussion of the populist language and ethos of the hacker examined in Chap. 6. This aspect is most apparent in the narrative of his life fashioned by Assange and by journalists from the 1990s, particularly from 2007. They were drawn to him by shared anti-politics beliefs. The telling of Assange’s life followed a familiar pattern, presenting him as a ‘Robin Hood of hacking’ who was raised in a nomadic, rebellious but intellectual lifestyle. He was another example of the American hacker narrative but with Australian elements. Crucially, the lesson is that it was not the release of volumes of information that attracted publicity, as Assange thought, but the selection and fashioning of data by journalists into narratives of anti-politics sentiment.
Mark Rolfe
Chapter 6. Hacker: Creating the Narrative of the Digital Robin Hood
Abstract
The ethos of the hacker fighting for justice and the people is a populist reinvention originating in America of the 1980s. This was political myth-making that recast the first hackers as Robin Hood-style activists committed to a democratic vision of the internet. The context to the creation of the hacker ethos was a conflict during the 1980s and early 1990s between hackers and government authorities. Their cause was taken up by American writers who perpetuated an anachronistic lineage attaching ideas of freedom, anti-authoritarianism, individualism, sixties counter-culture, and the outlaws of the Wild West to hackers and the internet. This was a set of American ideas that was spread amongst first American and later overseas hackers in what amounts to another phase of Americanisation.
Mark Rolfe
Chapter 7. Globalising the Narrative of Peoples Uprisings on the Web
Abstract
A populist political myth was created about the internet and a series of revolts from the Zapatista movement to the Arab Spring. They were formed into a single narrative of global insurrection from below. However, this was political myth-making related to the historic tendency to weave local events into an evolving universal story of liberation beginning with the American revolution. Mostly American knowledge elites adapted ideas of the internet and lifted the events out of their contexts using narratives of villains and victims, powerful and powerless, and US imperialism and the global justice movement. The result is a more complicated form of representative democracy involving competition between knowledge elites using anti-politics rhetoric and elected political elites who make justifiable claims on behalf of “the people”.
Mark Rolfe
Chapter 8. Conclusion: The Populist Bonanza of the 2016 Election
Abstract
In office, Obama did not successfully navigate between pragmatism and redemption and inconsistently used populist language. During his first term, most populist momentum was captured by the Tea Party, whose reactionary populist, views did not necessarily align with Republican Party elites and were the culmination of the path taken by the Grand Old Party (GOP) since the 1960s. This situation partly explains the success of Donald Trump who was the lead populist in a surfeit of populists on the GOP side contesting for the 2016 presidential candidacy. However, Democrats surpassed Republicans in expertise with digital campaigning technology, although it was Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, who was more successful with the associated use of populist rhetoric. Like Obama in 2008, both of them advanced biographies as appeals to ethos. Meanwhile, Edward Snowden became the next Robin Hood of hacking after Julian Assange.
Mark Rolfe
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in The Digital Age
Author
Mark Rolfe
Copyright Year
2016
Publisher
Springer Singapore
Electronic ISBN
978-981-10-2161-9
Print ISBN
978-981-10-2160-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2161-9