{"title":"The Voice of the People: Populism and Donald Trump’s Use of Informal Voice","authors":"Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen","doi":"10.1007/s12115-024-00969-7","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Many studies have examined characteristic verbal aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political communication, from his authoritarian rhetoric to his preference for short words and simple sentences, as expressions of his populism. This article focuses on his use of non-verbal voice quality. In analyzing the “Trump rallies” and other materials from his successful campaigning before the 2016 United States presidential election, I argue that Trump’s evocative and meaningful uses of pitch, amplitude, speech rate, rhythm, and other vocal measures combine to make his paralanguage exceptionally and counter-normatively informal, and that this informality amplifies his explicitly populist messaging. I conclude by suggesting that Trump’s informal voice solves an important problem for him: It allows him to express his populism with a deeply personal undertone, and thereby potentially to make his claims to popular identification ring intuitively true.</p>","PeriodicalId":47267,"journal":{"name":"Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Society","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-024-00969-7","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Many studies have examined characteristic verbal aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political communication, from his authoritarian rhetoric to his preference for short words and simple sentences, as expressions of his populism. This article focuses on his use of non-verbal voice quality. In analyzing the “Trump rallies” and other materials from his successful campaigning before the 2016 United States presidential election, I argue that Trump’s evocative and meaningful uses of pitch, amplitude, speech rate, rhythm, and other vocal measures combine to make his paralanguage exceptionally and counter-normatively informal, and that this informality amplifies his explicitly populist messaging. I conclude by suggesting that Trump’s informal voice solves an important problem for him: It allows him to express his populism with a deeply personal undertone, and thereby potentially to make his claims to popular identification ring intuitively true.
期刊介绍：
Founded in 1962, Society enjoys a wide reputation as a journal that publishes the latest scholarship on the central questions of contemporary society. It produces six issues a year offering new ideas and quality research in the social sciences and humanities in a clear, accessible style.
Society sees itself as occupying the vital center in intellectual and political debate. Put negatively, this means the journal is opposed to all forms of dogmatism, absolutism, ideological uniformity, and facile relativism. More positively, it seeks to champion genuine diversity of opinion and a recognition of the complexity of the world''s issues.
Society includes full-length research articles, commentaries, discussion pieces, and book reviews which critically examine work conducted in the social sciences as well as the humanities. The journal is of interest to scholars and researchers who work in these broadly-based fields of enquiry and those who conduct research in neighboring intellectual domains. Society is also of interest to non-specialists who are keen to understand the latest developments in such subjects as sociology, history, political science, social anthropology, philosophy, economics, and psychology.
The journal’s interdisciplinary approach is reflected in the variety of esteemed thinkers who have contributed to Society since its inception. Contributors have included Simone de Beauvoir, Robert K Merton, James Q. Wilson, Margaret Mead, Abraham Maslow, Richard Hoggart, William Julius Wilson, Arlie Hochschild, Alvin Gouldner, Orlando Patterson, Katherine S. Newman, Patrick Moynihan, Claude Levi-Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, David Riesman, Amitai Etzioni and many other eminent thought leaders.
The success of the journal rests on attracting authors who combine originality of thought and lucidity of expression. In that spirit, Society is keen to publish both established and new authors who have something significant to say about the important issues of our time.
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