Download or read book Trump s America written by Liam Kennedy and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald J. Trump's presidency has delivered a seismic shock to the American political system, its public sphere, and to our political culture worldwide.

Download or read book The Spectacle 2 0 written by Marco Briziarelli and published by University of Westminster Press. This book was released on 2017-12-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spectacle 2.0 recasts Debord's theory of spectacle within the frame of 21st century digital capitalism. It offers a reassessment of Debord’s original notion of Spectacle from the late 1960s, of its posterior revisitation in the 1990s, and it presents a reinterpretation of the concept within the scenario of contemporary informational capitalism and more specifically of digital and media labour. It is argued that the Spectacle 2.0 form operates as the interactive network that links through one singular (but contradictory) language and various imaginaries, uniting diverse productive contexts such as logistics, finance, new media and urbanism. Spectacle 2.0 thus colonizes most spheres of social life by processes of commodification, exploitation and reification. Diverse contributors consider the topic within the book’s two main sections: Part I conceptualizes and historicizes the Spectacle in the context of informational capitalism; contributions in Part II offer empirical cases that historicise the Spectacle in relation to the present (and recent past) showing how a Spectacle 2.0 approach can illuminate and deconstruct specific aspects of contemporary social reality. All contributions included in this book rework the category of the Spectacle to present a stimulating compendium of theoretical critical literature in the fields of media and labour studies. In the era of the gig-economy, highly mediated content and President Trump, Debord’s concept is arguably more relevant than ever.

Download or read book The Presidency and the Political System written by Michael Nelson and published by CQ Press. This book was released on 2020-07-17 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Presidency and the Political System showcases the best of presidential studies and research with top-notch presidency scholars writing specifically for an undergraduate audience. Michael Nelson rigorously edits each contribution to present a set of analytical yet accessible chapters and offers contextual headnotes introducing each essay. Chapters represent the full range of topics, institutions, and issues relevant to understanding the American presidency: covering approaches to studying the presidency, elements of presidential power, presidential selection, presidents and politics, and presidents and government. This Twelfth Edition fully incorporates coverage of the Trump administration.

Download or read book Rivalry and Reform written by Sidney M. Milkis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-01-25 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few relationships have proved more pivotal in changing the course of American politics than those between presidents and social movements. For all their differences, both presidents and social movements are driven by a desire to recast the political system, often pursuing rival agendas that set them on a collision course. Even when their interests converge, these two actors often compete to control the timing and conditions of political change. During rare historical moments, however, presidents and social movements forged partnerships that profoundly recast American politics. Rivalry and Reform explores the relationship between presidents and social movements throughout history and into the present day, revealing the patterns that emerge from the epic battles and uneasy partnerships that have profoundly shaped reform. Through a series of case studies, including Abraham Lincoln and abolitionism, Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement, and Ronald Reagan and the religious right, Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor argue persuasively that major political change usually reflects neither a top-down nor bottom-up strategy but a crucial interplay between the two. Savvy leaders, the authors show, use social movements to support their policy goals. At the same time, the most successful social movements target the president as either a source of powerful support or the center of opposition. The book concludes with a consideration of Barack Obama’s approach to contemporary social movements such as Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, and Marriage Equality.

Download or read book The Ordinary Presidency of Donald J Trump written by Jon Herbert and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The presidency of Donald J. Trump is rather ordinary. Trump himself may be the most unusual, unorthodox and unconventional president the US has ever had. Yet, even with his extraordinary personality and approach to the job, his presidency is proving quite ordinary in its accomplishments and outcomes, both at home and abroad. Like most modern US presidents, the number and scope of Trump’s achievements are rather meager. Despite dramatic claims to a revolution in US politics, Trump simply has not achieved very much. Trump’s few policy achievements are also mostly mainstream Republican ones rather than the radical, anti-establishment, swamp-draining changes promised on the campaign trail. The populist insurgent who ran against Washington has followed a policy agenda largely in tune with conservative Republican traditions. The Ordinary Presidency of Donald J. Trump provides a detailed explanation for the discrepancy between Trump’s extraordinary approach and the relative mediocrity of his achievements. Ironically, it is precisely Trump’s extraordinariness as president that has helped render his presidency ordinary.

Download or read book When America Stopped Being Great written by Nick Bryant and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Nick Bryant is brilliant. He has a way of showing you what you've been missing from the whole story whilst never leaving you feeling stupid.' – Emily Maitlis 'Bryant is a genuine rarity, a Brit who understands America' – Washington Post In When America Stopped Being Great, veteran reporter and BBC New York correspondent Nick Bryant reveals how America's decline paved the way for Donald Trump's rise, sowing division and leaving the country vulnerable to its greatest challenge of the modern era. Deftly sifting through almost four decades of American history, from post-Cold War optimism, through the scandal-wracked nineties and into the new millennium, Bryant unpacks the mistakes of past administrations, from Ronald Reagan's 'celebrity presidency' to Barack Obama's failure to adequately address income and racial inequality. He explains how the historical clues, unseen by many (including the media) paved the way for an outsider to take power and a country to slide towards disaster. As Bryant writes, 'rather than being an aberration, Trump's presidency marked the culmination of so much of what had been going wrong in the United States for decades – economically, racially, politically, culturally, technologically and constitutionally.' A personal elegy for an America lost, unafraid to criticise actors on both sides of the political divide, When America Stopped Being Great takes the long view, combining engaging storytelling with recent history to show how the country moved from the optimism of Reagan's 'Morning in America' to the darkness of Trump's 'American Carnage'. It concludes with some of the most dramatic events in recent memory, in an America torn apart by a bitterly polarised election, racial division, the national catastrophe of the coronavirus and the threat to US democracy evidenced by the storming of Capitol Hill.

Download or read book Handbook of Visual Communication written by Sheree Josephson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-03 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook of Visual Communication explores the key theoretical areas and research methods of visual communication. With chapters contributed by many of the best-known and respected scholars in visual communication, this volume brings together significant and influential work in the discipline. The second edition of this already-classic text has been completely revised to reflect the metamorphosis of communication in the last 15 years and the ubiquity of visual communication in our modern mediated lifestyle. Thriteen major theories of communication are defined by the top experts in their fields: perception, cognition, aesthetics, visual rhetoric, semiotics, cultural studies, ethnography, narrative, media aesthetics, digital media, intertextuality, ethics, and visual literacy. Each of these theory chapters is followed by an exemplar study or two in the area, demonstrating the various methods used in visual communication research as well as the research approaches applicable for specific media types. The Handbook of Visual Communication is a theoretical and methodological handbook for visual communication researchers and a compilation for much of the theoretical background necessary to understand visual communication. It is required reading for scholars, researchers, and advanced students in visual communication, and it will be influential in other disciplines such as advertising, persuasion, and media studies. The volume will also be essential to media practitioners seeking to understand the visual aspects of how audiences use media to contribute to more effective use of each specific medium.

Download or read book Surviving Autocracy written by Masha Gessen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.

Download or read book What Were We Thinking written by Carlos Lozada and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic uses the books of the Trump era to argue that our response to this presidency reflects the same failures of imagination that made it possible. As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read some 150 volumes claiming to diagnose why Trump was elected and what his presidency reveals about our nation. Many of these, he’s found, are more defensive than incisive, more righteous than right. In What Were We Thinking, Lozada uses these books to tell the story of how we understand ourselves in the Trump era, using as his main characters the political ideas and debates at play in America today. He dissects works on the white working class like Hillbilly Elegy; manifestos from the anti-Trump resistance like On Tyranny and No Is Not Enough; books on race, gender, and identity like How to Be an Antiracist and Good and Mad; polemics on the future of the conservative movement like The Corrosion of Conservatism; and of course plenty of books about Trump himself. Lozada’s argument is provocative: that many of these books—whether written by liberals or conservatives, activists or academics, Trump’s true believers or his harshest critics—are vulnerable to the same blind spots, resentments, and failures that gave us his presidency. But Lozada also highlights the books that succeed in illuminating how America is changing in the 21st century. What Were We Thinking is an intellectual history of the Trump era in real time, helping us transcend the battles of the moment and see ourselves for who we really are.

Download or read book Beautiful Country Burn Again written by Ben Fountain and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 808 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping work of reportage set over the course of 2016, New York Times bestselling author Ben Fountain recounts a surreal year of politics and an exploration of the third American existential crisis Twice before in its history, the United States has been faced with a crisis so severe it was forced to reinvent itself in order to survive: first, the struggle over slavery, culminating in the Civil War, and the second, the Great Depression, which led to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the establishment of America as a social-democratic state. In a sequence of essays that excavate the past while laying bare the political upheaval of 2016, Ben Fountain argues that the United States may be facing a third existential crisis, one that will require a “burning” of the old order as America attempts to remake itself. Beautiful Country Burn Again narrates a shocking year in American politics, moving from the early days of the Iowa Caucus to the crystalizing moments of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and culminating in the aftershocks of the weeks following election night. Along the way, Fountain probes deeply into history, illuminating the forces and watershed moments of the past that mirror and precipitated the present, from the hollowed-out notion of the American Dream, to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, to our weaponized new conception of American exceptionalism, to the cult of celebrity that gave rise to Donald Trump. In an urgent and deeply incisive voice, Ben Fountain has fused history and the present day to paint a startling portrait of the state of our nation. Beautiful Country Burn Again is a searing indictment of how we came to this point, and where we may be headed.

Download or read book Audience of One Donald Trump Television and the Fracturing of America written by James Poniewozik and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Book Review • Notable Book of the Year Washington Post • 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2019 NPR.org • NPR 2019 Concierge Slate • 10 Best Books of the Year Chicago Tribune • Best Books of the Year Publishers Weekly • 10 Best Books of the Year Audience of One reframes America’s identity through the rattled mind of an insomniac, cable-news-junkie president.New York Times chief television critic James Poniewozik offers a “darkly entertaining” (Carlos Lozada, Washington Post) history of mass media from the early 1980s to today, demonstrating how a volcanic, camera-hogging antihero merged with America’s most powerful medium to become our forty-fifth president. In charting the seismic evolution of television from a monolithic mass medium into today’s fractious confederation of spite-and-insult media subcultures, Poniewozik reveals how Donald Trump took advantage of these historic changes by constantly reinventing himself: from a boastful cartoon zillionaire; to 1990s self-parodic sitcom fixture; to The Apprentice reality-TV star; and finally to Twitter-mad, culture-warring demagogue. Already lauded as a “brilliant and daring” (Annalisa Quinn, NPR) work that defines a generation, Audience of One emerges as a classic in cultural criticism.

Download or read book Four Years of Trump written by Mario Del Pero and published by Ledizioni. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unprecedented and unpredictable: this is how US President Donald Trump’s administration has repeatedly been labelled during its first term. Beyond the frequent tweets and bombastic rhetoric, however, lie a more conventional four years, as the United States navigated an ever-evolving international reality, compounded by a global pandemic and one of the deepest economic recessions in over a century.This Report analyses the continuity and changes that occurred during Trump’s first term. Domestically, it investigates the growing political polarization, the country’s pre-pandemic economic performance, Trump’s approach towards regular and irregular migration, and the US’ response to a healthcare emergency. At the international level, this volume looks at how the US stance has changed vis-à-vis China, the Middle East, and Europe.Which long-term trends has President Trump had to ride through? What was his trademark, and what might be his lasting legacy?

Download or read book Donald Trump and American Populism written by Conley Richard S. Conley and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dissecting the populist leadership style of President Donald TrumpPlaces Trump's presidential leadership style within a comparatively historical and political development theoretical framework Considers Trump's use of social media as a form of public politics that represents an adaptation of presidential communication style to new technology while rebuffing the traditional bully pulpitAssesses the impact of Trump's negative rhetoric and efforts to challenge if not delegitimize other national institutions (Courts, Congress), question media truthfulness, and his personalization of political opponents Employs case studies to weigh Trump's political strategy, from mobilizing grassroots support to foreign diplomacy This book evaluates the presidency of Donald Trump from a comparative, historical approach to connect his populist style to his predecessors. Trump's method of communication through social media obviously differs from previous candidates and presidents with populist platforms, but his themes - a disdain for elites, grassroots support, majoritarianism, anti-intellectual discourse, and nativism-borrow variably from such figures as Andrew Jackson, Huey Long, Barry Goldwater, and Ross Perot. As such, Trump's approach to governance falls within a long tradition of populism dating to the 19th Century.

Download or read book Communication and Capitalism written by Christian Fuchs and published by University of Westminster Press. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘An authoritative analysis of the role of communication in contemporary capitalism and an important contribution to debates about the forms of domination and potentials for liberation in today’s capitalist society.’ — Professor Michael Hardt, Duke University, co-author of the tetralogy Empire, Commonwealth, Multitude, and Assembly ‘A comprehensive approach to understanding and transcending the deepening crisis of communicative capitalism. It is a major work of synthesis and essential reading for anyone wanting to know what critical analysis is and why we need it now more than ever.’ — Professor Graham Murdock, Emeritus Professor, University of Loughborough and co-editor of The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications Communication and Capitalism outlines foundations of a critical theory of communication. Going beyond Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, Christian Fuchs outlines a communicative materialism that is a critical, dialectical, humanist approach to theorising communication in society and in capitalism. The book renews Marxist Humanism as a critical theory perspective on communication and society. The author theorises communication and society by engaging with the dialectic, materialism, society, work, labour, technology, the means of communication as means of production, capitalism, class, the public sphere, alienation, ideology, nationalism, racism, authoritarianism, fascism, patriarchy, globalisation, the new imperialism, the commons, love, death, metaphysics, religion, critique, social and class struggles, praxis, and socialism. Fuchs renews the engagement with the questions of what it means to be a human and a humanist today and what dangers humanity faces today.

Download or read book The Constitution of Knowledge written by Jonathan Rauch and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts “In what could be the timeliest book of the year, Rauch aims to arm his readers to engage with reason in an age of illiberalism.” —Newsweek A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood. In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: “cancel culture.” At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony. In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”—our social system for turning disagreement into truth. By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do—and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.

Download or read book Political Rhetoric Social Media and American Presidential Campaigns written by Janet Johnson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Rhetoric, Social Media, and American Presidential Campaigns explores how social media influenced presidential campaign rhetoric. The author discusses media use in American presidential campaigns as well as social media campaigns for Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. This book addresses how presidential candidates adapted their rhetorical performances for newspapers, radios, television, and the Internet. Scholars of rhetoric and political communication will find this book particularly useful.

Download or read book From Pandemic to Insurrection Voting in the 2020 US Presidential Election written by Michael P. McDonald and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-09-05 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pandemic to Insurrection: Voting in the 2020 US Presidential Election describes voting in the 2020 election, from the presidential nomination to new voting laws post-election. Election officials and voters navigated the challenging pandemic to hold the highest turnout election since 1900. President Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the pandemic’s severity coupled with frequent vote fraud accusations affected how states provided safe voting, how voters cast ballots, how lawyers fought legal battles, and ultimately led to an unsuccessful insurrection.