Recontextualising partisan outrage online: analysing the public negotiation of Trump support among American conservative
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Recontextualising partisan outrage online: analysing the public negotiation of Trump support among American conservatives in 2016 Anthony Kelly1 Received: 11 May 2020 / Accepted: 29 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article conceptualises the role of audience agency in the performance of American conservative identities within a hybridised outrage media ecology. Audience agency has been under-theorised in the study of outrage media through an emphasis on outrage as a rhetorical strategy of commercial media institutions. Relatively little has been said about the outrage discourse of audiences. This coincides with a tendency to consider online political talk as transparent and "earnest," thereby failing to recognise the multi-vocality, dynamism, and ambivalence—i.e., performativity—of online user-generated discourse. I argue the concept of recontextualisation offers a means of addressing these shortcomings. I demonstrate this by analysing how the users of the American right-wing partisan media website TheBlaze.com publicly negotiated support for Donald Trump in a below-the-line comment field during the 2016 US presidential election. These processes are situated with respect to the contested, dynamic, and creative construction of partisan identities in the contemporary United States. Keywords Affective polarisation · American conservatism · Hybrid media systems · Identity · Online outrage · Performance · Recontextualisation · Social media · Traditional media · User-generated discourse
1 Introduction This article analyses the public negotiation of support for Donald Trump among American conservatives during the 2016 US presidential election. In so doing, it conceptualises online political talk as a mode of political performance. President Trump’s election was a result that few commentators predicted and indeed was viewed by many as an unimaginable outcome (Martin and Krause-Jensen 2017). His election has nonetheless created a new drive to scrutinise the content and articulation of American conservative identity amongst scholars of American politics, particularly as this relates to matters of race, gender, geography, and religion (Hanson et al. 2019; Kreiss et al. 2017). This new interest in the form and dynamics of American conservatism has foregrounded the relation between affective polarisation and the formation of American partisan identities (Iyengar et al. 2019; Mason 2018). Trump’s election has likewise underlined the important role played by the mediation of partisan * Anthony Kelly [email protected] 1
Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
outrage in shaping negative attitudes towards the opposition and the stereotyping behaviours of partisans (Abramowitz and Webster 2018; Mason 2018). Empirically, in spite of the growing interest in contemporary American conservatism, particularly as this relates to the Trump presidency, there are still only limited treatments of the controversies that existed around Trump
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