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.

JAPPEL,
Ctibor.
Energy
Security
of
the
United
States
of
America.
Praha,
2012.
74
s.
 Diplomová
práce
(Mgr.),
Univerzita
Karlova,
Fakulta
sociálních
věd,
 Institut
mezinárodních
studií.
Katedra
amerických
studií.
 Vedoucí
diplomové
práce
PhDr.
et
Mgr.
Kryštof
Kozák,
Ph.
D.

 
 
 Abstract
 The
thesis
deals
with
the
energy
security
of
the
United
States
of
America
at
the
 beginning
 of
 the
 21st
 century.
 The
 first
 part
 of
 the
 thesis
 identifies
 energy
 security
as
a
relatively
new
concept
in
political
discourse,
whose
meaning
is
not
 yet
 firmly
 defined.
 The
 goal
 of
 this
 part
 is
 therefore
 to
 refine
 the
 definition
 of
energy
security
using
an
analysis
of
the
content
of
relevant
academic
sources.
 The
 second
 part
 of
 the
 thesis
 focuses
 specifically
 on
 the
 situation
 of
 the
 United
 States
 of
 America.
 It
 identifies
 the
 challenges
 to
 energy
 security
 the
 country
faces,
mainly
the
high
level
of
dependence
on
petroleum
products,
and
 provides
an
overview
of
available
solutions.
 The
 third
 part
 is
 a
 case
 study
 that
 deals
 with
 the
 presidential
 election
 campaign
of
2008.
This
campaign
took
place
during
a
period
of
extremely
high
 energy
prices,
and
the
energy
security
proposals
made
by
the
major
candidates
...

This dissertation examines how the major television networks, in conjunction with the Reagan administration, launched a lingering cloud of nuclear anxiety that helped to revive the Cold War during the 1980s. Placed within a larger political and cultural post-war context, this national preoccupation with a global show-down with the Soviet Union at times both hindered and bolstered Reagan’s image as the archetypal conservative, cowboy President that could free America from its liberal adolescent past now caustically referred to as “the sixties.” This stalwart image of Reagan, created and carefully managed by a number of highly-paid marketing executives, as one of the embodiment of peaceful deterrence, came under attack in the early 1980s when the “liberal” Nuclear Freeze movement showed signs of becoming politically threatening to the staunch conservative pledging to win the Cold War at any cost. And even if the nuclear freeze movement itself was not powerful enough to undergo the Herculean task of removing the President in 1984, the movement was compassionate enough to appeal to a mass audience, especially when framed in narrative form on network television. In the early 1980s, debates over the possibility of nuclear war and other pertinent Cold War related issues became much more democratized in their visibility on the network airwaves. However, the message disseminated from the networks was not placed in an educational framework, nor did these television productions clarify complicated nuclear issues such as nuclear winter theory and proliferation. I argue this renewed network attention on nuclear issues was not placed in an historical framework and likely confused American viewers because it routinely exposed audiences to both fact and fiction, undifferentiated at the level of the mass media.