Social Distortion: Consubstantiality in John Fetterman’s Social Media Campaign Communications
摘要
This chapter examines the role and rhetoric of Fetterman’s social media campaign communications. After a brief summary of his overall social strategy, we focus on an incident from the general campaign that went so viral that it may have killed the Oz candidacy: the infamous crudité video. We argue that Fetterman not only established common ground (“identification”) with voters through the content he shared, but in fact he established and maintained a state of “consubstantiality” (a more persuasive form of rhetoric) with many who followed his accounts or were exposed to them through mainstream media coverage.