This highly original work considers the rhetoric of political actors and commentators who
identify digital media as the means to a new era of politics and democracy. Placing this
rhetoric in a historical and intellectual context it provides a compelling explanation of the
reinvention and thematic recurrence of democratic discourse. The author investigates the
populist sources of rhetoric used by digital politics enthusiasts as outsiders inaugurating new
eras of democracy with digital media such as Barack Obama and Julian Assange and explores the
generations of rhetorical and political history behind them. The book places their rhetoric in
the context of the permanent tensions between insiders and outsiders between the political
class and the populace which are inherent to representative democracy. Through a theoretical
and conceptual research that is historically grounded and comparative it offers rhetorical
analysis of candidates for the 2016 presidential election and discusses digital democracy
particularly discussing their origins in American populism and their influence on other
countries through Americanization. Uniquely it offers a sceptical assessment of epochal claims
and a historical-rhetorical account of two of the defining figures of twentieth-century
politics to date and reveals how modern rhetoric is grounded in an older form of anti-politics
and mobilises tropes that are as old as representative democracy itself.
