Between Glamorous Patriotism and Reality-TV Aesthetics: Political Communication, Popular Culture, and the Invective Turn in Trump’s United States and Putin’s Russia

Katja Kanzler; Marina Scharlaj

doi:10.1515/slaw-2017-0015

Article

Between Glamorous Patriotism and Reality-TV Aesthetics: Political Communication, Popular Culture, and the Invective Turn in Trump’s United States and Putin’s Russia

Katja Kanzler and Marina Scharlaj

Published/Copyright: June 1, 2017

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From the journal Zeitschrift für Slawistik Volume 62 Issue 2

Summary

This article proceeds from the observation that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—two politicians frequently correlated and compared since Trump’s bid for the Presidency—have been remarkably successful in mobilizing support for their politics and in seemingly immunizing their rhetorics against vernacular critique. To work toward an understanding of this phenomenon, we propose to look at how political communication by and around the two politicians draws on forms and venues of popular culture. Both contexts, we will argue, have developed new strategies for the instrumentalization of popular culture, strategies that, while actualized differently in the two settings, revolve around an ‘invective turn’ in political communication—a radicalization of the familiar nationalist rhetoric of ‘us versus them’ that seems specifically fueled by pop-cultural forms. To explore this traffic between pop and politics, this article puts into conversation two case studies: On the one hand, of Trump’s campaign speeches which, we contend, symbolically organize around the logic of agôn—of the competitive game—as it has coagulated in the reality-tv genre of the gamedoc. On the other hand, we look at (state-controlled) pop music in the Russian genre of Ėstrada which, thus our argument, advertises a distinct form of patriotism through the principle of ‘glamour.’ Glamour, in Putin’s Russia, operates simultaneously as a style and as an ideology of self-glorification. The article will outline how reality tv’s logic of agôn and patriotic pop music’s aesthetics of glamour each fuel a qualitatively new orientation of political discourse toward the aesthetically charged, affect-saturated denigration of others and valorization of self.

Keywords: Invective rhetorics; popular culture and politics; Trump’s Presidential campaign; Putin’s hooray patriotism; Russian Ėstrada-pop

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Published Online: 2017-6-1

Published in Print: 2017-5-30

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/slaw-2017-0015

Keywords for this article

Invective rhetorics; popular culture and politics; Trump’s Presidential campaign; Putin’s hooray patriotism; Russian Ėstrada-pop