Contributions by:

Douglas Kellner

Election 2004: The War For The White House And Media Spectacle

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During a media age, image and spectacle are of crucial importance in presidential campaigns. Media events like party conventions and daily photo opportunities are concocted to project positive images of the candidates and to construct daily messages to sell the candidate to the public. These events are supplemented by a full range of media advertising…

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The Crisis of the University and Student Movements

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For me, the current wave of student protests on US university campuses over Israel’s war on Gaza remind me of the horrendous U.S. war on Vietnam in the 1960s and the 1970s and the protest movement rolling from one campus to another. This wave of unprecedented student protests helped to form a New Left, an…

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The Sandy Hook Slaughter and Copy Cat Killers in a Media Celebrity Society: Analyses and Plans for Action

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With the brutal massacre of children and administrators at the Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut on December 12, 2012, following assassination of innocents in an Oregon mall earlier in the week, 2012 may be remembered in part as the year when mass shootings spiraled out of control and shocked the conscience of the nation.…

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Donald Trump as Authoritarian Populist: A Frommian Analysis

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In this article, I discuss in detail how Erich Fromm’s categories can help describe Trump’s character, or “temperament,” a word used to characterize a major flaw in Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), Fromm engages in a detailed analysis of the authoritarian character as sadistic, excessively narcissistic,…

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