Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Adorno’s psychological technique: Content analyses of authoritarian populism
- 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.
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| Author: | Timothy Haverda, Jeffrey A. Halley |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-543464 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v17i2.1077 |
| ISSN: | 1726-670X |
| Parent Title (English): | TripleC |
| Publisher: | Unified Theory of Information Research Group |
| Place of publication: | Vienna |
| Contributor(s): | Theodor W. Adorno |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of Completion: | 2019 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2019/07/29 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2020/05/04 |
| Tag: | 2016 US Presidential Election; Donald Trump; Theodore W. Adorno; authoritarian populism; content analysis; critical theory |
| Volume: | 17 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Page Number: | 19 |
| First Page: | 202 |
| Last Page: | 220 |
| Note: | tripleC is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal (ISSN: 1726-670X). All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Austria License. |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 466162502 |
| Institutes: | Gesellschaftswissenschaften / Gesellschaftswissenschaften |
| Philosophie und Geschichtswissenschaften / Philosophie | |
| Angeschlossene und kooperierende Institutionen / Institut für Sozialforschung (IFS) | |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften |
| 3 Sozialwissenschaften / 32 Politikwissenschaft / 320 Politikwissenschaft | |
| Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell-Keine Bearbeitung 3.0 |
