- He identifies other nations such as Mexico and China as enemies of the USA that threatens its national interest;
- He constructs political-economic conflict as a conflict of nations and disregards actual class conflicts.
In reality, US capital exploits labour both inside and outside of the USA. Trump’s nationalism distracts attention from the class antagonism. Adorno helps us to understand nationalism by arguing that demagogues make use of the logic of repressive egalitarianism as featured in nationalist ideology. “They emphasize their being different from the outsider but play down such differences within their own group and tend to level out distinctive qualities among themselves with the exception of the hierarchical one” (Adorno 1991, 146).
Nationalism constructs national identity. It is inherently repressive because it defines the nation’s inner identity against outside enemies. It makes use of the friend/enemy-scheme.
4.4.3 The Friend/Enemy-Scheme
Let us have a look at a tweet by Boris Johnson (Figure 4.3):
This tweet implies works with a combination of the topos of numbers, the topos of weighing down, and the topos of danger (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 77–79): it is claimed
Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism
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Digital Authoritarianism