The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in The Digital Age

Insiders & Outsiders in Democratic Politics

Mark Rolfe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9789811021602
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811021619
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Social Sciences

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 discussesdigital 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.

© The Author(s) 2016

Mark RolfeThe Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in The Digital AgeRhetoric, Politics and Society10.1007/978-981-10-2161-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Mark Rolfe¹

(1)

University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Keywords

Digital democracyOutsiderInsiderAmerican populismAnti-politics

End Abstract

The Outsider Is the New Old Black

The two men grew on different sides of the globe, yet they share many attributes. Both were raised by strong women forced to cope as single parents. Both had caring stepfathers who filled the void left by absent fathers. Both emerged from the chinks of society which few knew and many condemned. Both were outsiders enraged by injustices and engaged by politics. Both proclaimed new political eras for peoples empowered by the internet. Both attracted people with charm and cool intellect and both elicited death threats and accusations of anti-Americanism. Neither man left other people indifferent.

Yet one became the founder of Wikileaks and the other became the president of the United States. Julian Assange and Barack Obama share so much but differ so markedly in their political destinations and in their conclusions about the internet as a medium of freedom. One sees participation in government as the means to do good for people, while the other sees it as the means for inflicting injustices upon people. One sees political power as something to be fought by a populace made stronger by the internet, while the other sees political power as something to be gained on behalf of a people made stronger by the internet.

Therefore, these two men present us with major paradoxes about the internet. Their political careers represent the tensions between ideal and practical politics that are inherent to democracy. Yet both men claimed the same medium would inaugurate a new politics that would leave the old politics behind. Their rhetoric was similar, yet their political visions were opposed. Furthermore, their positions as leaders with followers contradicted their own messages that the internet returns power to the people. The resolution of these paradoxes lies in an old American populist rhetoric that was reinvented for the internet.

This book is the first systematic attempt to understand the rhetoric of political actors and commentators who have identified digital media as the means to a new era of democracy. To that end, the book starts with Barack Obama and Julian Assange who both made appeals as outsiders representing the people, fighting the current state of politics and inaugurating a new politics through digital media. They adapted long-standing redemptive rhetoric and in the process attained amongst followers considerable levels of credibility and trust, which are important resources in rhetoric understood through the concept of ethos.

Neither man was completely original. They followed rhetors since the 1980s who had refashioned an old American resource when discussing the internet and who have influenced people in many other countries in what may be classed as another phase of Americanisation. Furthermore, we may place these developments of anti-politics rhetoric in the context of rhetorical and political history of America, England, and Australia since the nineteenth century and of the permanent tensions between insiders and outsiders, between the political class and the populace, between redemptive and pragmatic politics, which are inherent to representative democracy. In effect, Assange and Obama represent the poles of these tensions and therefore allow us to explore this rhetorical history before returning to understand aspects of the 2016 presidential election in the conclusion. Probing these complexities will help to explain the wide disparity between the expectations and the realities of the internet. The book has the effect of diminishing the more utopian claims made about digital media.

Like many others, Obama and Assange promised new eras in politics, an essential element of this populist rhetoric. For Assange, “teeming freedom” had arrived with the Arab uprisings of 2011; the internet offered “a model of insurrection that baffled corrupt authority” and heralded “popular sovereignty over the Internet”. ¹ Similarly, these rebellions were confirmation for many journalists of the essential role of the internet in this new era of democratic participation. ² Time magazine named Arab Protesters Person of the Year in 2011, which resonated with its naming of everybody as Person of the Year in 2006 because of internet use. Commentators immediately jumped to the conclusions that these were Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube revolutions, ³ although such slogans had first aired with the failed Iranian and Moldavian revolutions of 2009–2010. ⁴ These articles cultivated the impression that revolution was as easy as tapping a keyboard from home. Even one year after the events in Egypt, one journalist simplistically thought that the “revolution on the Nile [...] was unleashed by a young internet geek called Wael Ghonim”. ⁵ This was a reference to an Egyptian employee of Google, who acquired global fame as the face of the internet revolution in Egypt and who declared “Revolution 2.0 in Egypt”. ⁶ Absent from this journalistic analysis was any sense of the history and complex background to these events.

Nevertheless, the spirit of optimism and possibility was infectious whenever someone discussed the internet. It proved no less with Obama’s staggering campaign for the presidency in 2008. When announcing his candidacy in 2007, Obama declared to the audience “that the ways of Washington must change” and that “this campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us — it must be about what we can do together” ⁷ . The internet was quickly identified as the means for involving everyone and making them feel a part of historic change. Many prominent commentators were captured by this message. Ted Sorenson, John Kennedy’s speech writer, wrote: “Obama embodied change, not only with his skin color, his youth, and his newness to the American national political scene, but also with his fresh approach to politics embodied in the themes of his speeches.” ⁸ Tim O’Reilly is well known in the internet world as a writer who coined the term Web 2.0. With another author he enthused that “The election of Barack Obama has demonstrated how the Internet can be used to transform politics”. ⁹

It was easy for Americans to wrap Obama in analogies with earlier mythologised presidents. The 2008 election result inspired a technology writer for The New York Times to write “One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet”. She went on to quote Arianna Huffington, editor and founder of the popular and influential Huffington Post: “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee”. ¹⁰ On November 5, 2008, the morning after the historic victory, many American newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and the Birmingham News trumpeted on their front pages in bold type Obama’s declaration ‘Change has come to America’.

Such hope and optimism now seem so far away, not only for Obama but also for Assange. They have since fallen from great summits of popularity.

In 2008 Obama was loved by so many to get easily elected; in 2012 he was liked by just enough to get re-elected. It is inevitable that politicians are tarnished after leaving the showrooms of elections, especially after raising expectations as high as Obama did. Like new cars leaving the showroom, their values drop when they pursue their purpose, which in this case is to make decisions in government. This is bound to alienate some sections of the population. Therefore, it is easy to find disillusioned people once he was in power. One commentator thought Obama was “weak and vacillating”. ¹¹ Numerous authors attacked him for betrayal of leftist causes such as a universal health scheme and working class jobs, for exchanging ordinary folk for Wall Street backers, and for seeking an illusory accommodation with Republicans. Critics condemned his prolongation of George Bush’s wars and Guantanamo Bay prisons, and his escalation of drone strikes.

Similarly, Assange has been deserted by numerous close and important collaborators who could no longer tolerate his driven, authoritarian ways. ¹² Supporters were attracted to his crusade and to the major events that propelled Wikileaks from obscurity to global prominence in just a couple of years: the campaign for a whistle-blowers data haven in Iceland, the release of the Collateral Murder video of US helicopters killing innocents in Iraq, and the US State Department database of 250,000 emails. He fell out with many close supporters as well as with The Guardian and The New York Times who partnered his exposés. Now Assange is a fugitive in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, trying to sustain both his peace of mind and the precarious operations of Wikileaks.

For sure, Assange was applauded by some as the brow from which sprung the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring in 2011 and he was honoured with the prestigious Australian journalism award called the Walkley. Media interest flickered with his decision to stand with the Wikileaks Party for the senate in the Australian elections of 2013. But the party imploded shortly after the campaign began because of bitter disagreements and resignations over preference deals with very right wing parties. By then, the media had largely moved on to the next shiny thing, to more captivating moments of people power and their entwined themes of youth, social media, and global revolutions.

Given all this, it may seem long past the ripe stage for a work that explores the faded appeal of Assange and Obama. Actually this is the most sober moment for a scholarly appraisal of the rhetoric by these two men and by others about them and the internet in order to understand a popularity that eventually moved on to other people and events that fitted with certain preconceptions. From an historical point of view, there has been a consistency in the rhetoric used by Obama and Assange and in the positive appraisals of them, of the popular movements and of the internet. But also looking forward from these two men, we find this regularity with current campaigners for the 2016 presidential elections and with admirers of Edward Snowden.

The crucial point is that Obama and Assange are exponents of and entrees into an old political rhetoric about representation of ‘the people’ which is being reinvented with the internet. Their political careers exemplify an anxiety which will not disappear in the internet age: who does the community trust with political power in representative democracies where love of power is a love that dare not speak its name? Any man or woman who is nakedly ambitious for political power in such a society will easily provoke great suspicion in voters. In other words, this is an old argument over the credibility and trustworthiness of politicians, and Assange and Obama allow us to also examine a range of other rhetors of this traditional discourse.

We have been told often by many commentators that the internet dispenses old politics into the dustbin of history for now all governments are at the mercy of connected citizens watching, monitoring, tracking, and ferreting ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Insiders, Outsiders, Populism, and Rhetoric
• 3. Obama: The Narrative of a Man of the People for New Politics
• 4. Obama and Old Fashioned Anti-politics Rhetoric
• 5. Assange: The Narrative of the Digital Robin Hood Against the Elites
• 6. Hacker: Creating the Narrative of the Digital Robin Hood
• 7. Globalising the Narrative of Peoples Uprisings on the Web
• 8. Conclusion: The Populist Bonanza of the 2016 Election
• Backmatter