Journal of Applied Social Theory

The Applied Social Theory of Character Assassination

Sergei A. Samoilenko — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 17:44:19 +0100

Character Assassination on Judge Brett Kavanaugh in his 2018 Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing

William L Benoit, Kevin A Stein — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 17:44:20 +0100

On July 9, 2018, President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court. Republicans were naturally excited at the possibility of a conservative majority on the court; not surprisingly Democrats were opposed. Kavanaugh’s nomination provoked a storm of controversy largely focused on accusations of sexual assault from Christine Blasey Ford. The hearing, held on September 27^th, featured testimony by Ford and pointed comments by Senate Democrats. The Senate voted to confirm Kavanaugh 50-48 as the 114^th Supreme Court justice on October 6, 2018. This essay applies the Theory of Persuasive Attack to criticisms leveled against Kavanaugh during the Senate confirmation hearing. These criticisms argued that Kavanaugh was responsible for the act, enhanced perceptions of the offensiveness of the act, and indicated that Kavanaugh possessed an unfavorable character.

The Bullying Pulpit: The Audience Effects of a Partisan Character-Attacking Speaker

Amy Schumacher-Rutherford, Ashley Muddiman — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 17:44:20 +0100

Campus speakers, and the protests against them, have sparked debate in the U.S. about declining support for free speech. Yet, the content of such speeches has largely been ignored. Do audiences want to shut down a speaker because that speaker holds a disagreeable position, or is it the way in which that position is conveyed? That is, does disagreement generally or only difference delivered with animus—in this case, with character attacks—drive audiences toward retaliatory action? To answer, we draw from Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification to investigate how audiences react to political rhetoric when they encounter character attacks against the political party with which they affiliate. We propose that the very character attacks a speaker uses to achieve identification with a target audience can also cause disidentification that engenders an oppositional audience poised to act against the speaker – in this case, to restrict the speaker’s right to speak. We expect that espousing a different opinion absent character attacks will not have this effect, but we do anticipate differential effects based on the type of character attack. For this, we turn to Burke’s approach to framing to determine whether character attacks presenting one’s in-group party as foolish (comic frame) rather than traitorous (tragic frame) have distinct effects on the audience. We conduct an online survey experiment of U.S. residents to test whether the two types of attacks, compared to arguments that use identification strategies, decrease support for expressive rights in the context of a college campus speech. Our results indicate that character attacks increase the likelihood that participants attribute malevolence to the outgroup political party, which then decreases their support for a speaker’s right to speak. Both comic and tragic attacks lead to the same outcomes. Optimistically, civilly disagreeable speeches that use identification strategies prompt normatively beneficial outcomes, suggesting that not all disagreeable content decreases free speech support. Conversely, character attacks prompt disidentification that leads to retaliatory action. These findings indicate that audiences’ free speech support may be more dependent on a speaker’s use of character attacks than their issue content.

Depth Charges: Does “Deep State” Propagandizing Undermine Bureaucratic Reputations?

Tyler Johnson — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 17:44:20 +0100

In the wake of prominent instances of bureaucratic defiance, supporters of Donald Trump’s presidency have taken to describing said bureaucrats and the departments and agencies they represent as part of a “deep state” seeking to maintain and wield power behind the scenes. Such claims can be understood as an attempt at character assassination with the end goal of undermining the reputations of bureaucracy and bureaucrats alike. Efforts to disseminate this propaganda across varied forms of media have been both sustained and forceful. Do such attempts to shape public opinion lead Americans to think less of prominent agencies, cabinet departments, and their leaders? The author utilizes an original survey experiment to examine if learning about what a deep state is, reading media members debate its reality, or hearing the President’s son declare it to be truth shapes attitudes toward the image of the CIA and the Departments of State, Justice, and Defense. Preliminary results reveal such propagandizing rarely changes how individuals think about bureaucracy. The rare instances in which it does affect attitudes reveal such arguments may be just as likely to improve bureaucratic reputation as they are to diminish it, with presidential approval at times conditioning outcomes.

Government-Sponsored Systemic Character Assassination

Daniel Rothbart — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 17:44:20 +0100

Episodes of character association (CA) among political figures are ubiquitous in the current political landscape of the United States, where political campaigns routinely include ad hominem attacks of one’s opponent. Yet, another form of CA lies beneath the surface of political figures hurling insults at each other. CA is also situated within certain social-political systems that strategically deploy mechanisms to dominate a targeted population group by casting them inherently inferior to society’s so-called pure members. The primary objective of this article is to characterize systemic character assassination [SCA] within the United States as an insidious form of disciplinary control. After identifying certain features of governmental domination over segments of society (section 1), the author introduces the notion of SCA (section 2). A case study is provided of the systemic denigration of migrants seeking asylum in the United States (section 3). This case is followed by an analysis of SCA in terms of the power dynamics between governmental authorities and the targeted population group (section 4). All of which indicates a fundamental tension between the state’s legitimacy as rightful rulers and its illegitimacy from the perspective of those subjected to the insidious manipulations of SCA.

“A ritual civil execution”: Public shaming meetings in the post-Stalin Soviet Union

Svetlana Stephenson — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 17:44:21 +0100

The resurgence of public shaming campaigns in modern societies has important antecedents in the relatively recent past. The paper addresses the practice of prorabotka, a ritual of public shaming that took place in schools, universities and workplaces in the Soviet Union. Prorabotka, whose genealogy can be traced to early post-revolutionary years, was aimed at the reinforcement of social norms challenged by political and moral deviance. Public shaming was applied to a wide range of behaviours, including ideological and moral deviations such as public drunkenness, marital infidelity by party members, planned emigration to Israel, etc. The paper applies a theoretical framework that builds on Durkheimian and neo-Durkheimian approaches to ritual, Garfinkel’s outline of the theory of public degradation ceremonies, and Zizek’s account of split law. It shows that, in addition to an official script, the meetings had a supplementary script that unleashed a jouissance of punitiveness but also generalised guilt and fear in the face of collective justice. It addresses the consequences of shaming for the perpetrators and members of the group. It is based on oral history interviews with individuals who participated in the meetings as denouncers, witnesses or perpetrators.

Advancing Research on Character Assassination and Stigma Communication: A Dynamics of Character

Rachel A Smith, Rosa A. Eberly — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 17:44:21 +0100

Documented occurrences of character assassination and stigmatization like those seen during the COVID-19 outbreak are not unique to the era of COVID-19. In fact, these forms of communication are ancient and ubiquitous in human society. Yet they have gained the sustained attention of communication scholars only in the past few decades. Although stigma communication and character assassination have much in common, they largely have been studied separately. Research on how character is attacked and why some attacks become social facts has not progressed as quickly as needed because these two bodies of scholarship have not shared insights and because character as a concept has gone largely uninterrogated. In this essay, we begin the process of sharing insights across the two bodies of scholarship. Further, by visiting with three ancient conceptions of character, we describe a theory of character dynamics: a process of exclusion in which an evolving, agentic character (tropos) becomes established (ethos) and fixed (χarakter) by others, ephemerally and sometimes longitudinally.

Root Narrative Theory and Character Assassination

Solon Simmons — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 17:44:21 +0100

This paper develops a theoretical device for the analysis of the contexts in which character attacks will take place that can help explain why, when, and how they will succeed or fail. This device is called the root narrative profile, which is based on a narrative theory of conflict and politics that provides a way to simplify the variance in political arguments into a manageable number of representative categories. The root narrative profile is based on the idea that character attacks will be successful when they can be represented as an example of the abuse of social power. Accordingly, there are as many types of character attacks as there are forms of social power to abuse. This insight is useful for practitioners who can use the root narrative profile to either protect themselves before relevant audiences or to advance their interests with more effective attacks on their opponents. This paper develops this concept and provides illustrations of its use in a variety of empirical data.

Character Assassination: The Sociocultural Perspective

Sergei A. Samoilenko — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 17:44:21 +0100

This article offers a fresh view on character assassination as a strategic effort embedded in power and ideological struggles in society. The author uses structuration theory to explain character assassination as a means of both domination and subversion. In the latter, character assassination practices are integrated into modes of signification and legitimation and executed via subversion campaigns. Knowledgeable subversive actors consider character assassination a power resource to challenge cultural hegemony and traditional moral order via strategic and audience-centered protest campaigns. Social networking sites provide strategic actors with resources to realize subversive campaigns in both liberal democracies and authoritarian societies. Although social media allow more active audiences to challenge dominant conventions, the modes and aesthetics of social protest can be easily harnessed and appropriated by power structures for spin and information control. The author calls for more research inspired by the sociocultural view of character assassination to make sense of new social phenomena such as “cancel culture.”

Review of The Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management, edited by Sergei A. Samoilenko, Martijn Icks, Jennifer Keohane, and Eric Shiraev. New York: Routledge, 2020

James M. Jasper — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 17:44:21 +0100