Abstract
Adapting a Burkean approach to rhetorical tropes, this essay argues that polysyndeton comprises a significant trope shaping political communication via social media. We argue that polysyndeton reflects the cultural dynamics of liquid modernity and furnishes an organizational logic to a particular domain of human symbolic action, namely, social media. Because polysyndeton dually stresses amplification and association, grouping things that do not have a necessary relationship and delivering them to an audience as an undifferentiated mass, it is perfectly suited to serve as a lens for interpreting the political and cultural complexities of our present era, including the Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021.
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Introduction
Social media have utterly remade American society. From ordering food (Uber Eats) to getting news (Twitter/X) to getting inspiration (Instagram) to getting around (Lyft) to sustaining friendships (Facebook) to finding love (Hinge) to finding sex (Tinder) to searching for jobs (LinkedIn) to getting ideas (Pinterest) to getting gossip (Yik Yak) to getting money (Venmo) to entertainment (TikTok) to everything else (OnlyFans), there is literally an app for any desire that one might possess. To understand how political events are interpreted in such a context is quite the challenge. To take a step toward that goal, this paper analyzes the structure of discourse that underpins much of social media and the digital world writ large. To do so, it makes recourse to an old, indeed ancient, tool of rhetorical analysis and invention: tropes.
We argue that polysyndeton operates as a rhetorical trope that can do much to explain how political messages are crafted and received in the digital age, as exemplified in the coverage of the January 6 hearings. Polysyndeton comprises an excess of connective conjunctions, typically expressed as an overabundance of the word “and.” For example, in his speech “The Strenuous Life,” Theodore Roosevelt (1889) called on men “to dare and endure and to labor” and praised “all men and women who are themselves strong and brave and high-minded.” Polysyndeton is a device that amplifies while also defying hierarchical organization. It slows comprehension, drawing attention to each phrase or word joined together (Phillips, 1980, 35). It devotes, in the words of George Campbell (1963, 368), “a deliberate attention to every circumstance, as being of importance.” While there are specific instances of social media posts that deploy polysyndeton as a figurative device—not an especially difficult claim to prove given the millions of users on these platforms—we contend that polysyndeton structures the nature of discourse on most social media platforms. That is, polysyndeton animates the organizational logic of these platforms and structures how human users interface with them, with “non-obvious” (Federman, 2004) ramifications for the global convergence of politics and culture.
The intersection of social media and politics is worth investigating. Social media has profoundly changed American politics. Colin Delany (2023), a former legislative staffer and political digital strategy consultant, writes, “Nowadays, the political machine includes tech companies, data vendors, ad platforms, ad buyers, creative agencies and independent expenditure orgs aplenty, plus the staff and consultants who’ve grown up professionally trying to run them.” Social media provides a gateway for political leaders to directly access audiences, radically reshaping the art of campaigning, governing, communicating, and voting in the United States. House Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY) earned the moniker “Queen of the Clapback,” for example, for how she uses Twitter to pan or “takedown” her political opponents (Jacuinde, 2019). Ocasio-Cortez likewise employs Instagram Live to explain her voting choices to her millions of followers, in the process disseminating talking points across the country in a matter of minutes. Similarly, Donald Trump used Twitter when he was president to rally supporters, volley accusations, and broadcast his messages in a personalist style (Khamis & Fowler, 2022). Like AOC and Trump, most successful politicians in the United States use social media to build a brand, reach followers, increase their name recognition, and attack opponents.
This dynamic, in turn, reflects the broader structure of liquid modernity. As Zygmunt (2000) suggests, the principles of liquid modernity permeate the very core of our modern political experience. This transient nature of social structure and rhetorical associations is emblematic of how politicians and news organizations leverage social media. The “lightness” and “extraordinary mobility” of fluid appeals mean that political messages are crafted for the moment, with their impact measured by immediate reactions over long-term resonance, which speaks to the broader intersection of culture, politics, and social life (Zygmunt 2000, 1–2).
Our argument has three aims. First, we seek to extend the tropological turn in political communication scholarship exemplified by Hahner (2017) to furnish an analytic vocabulary for assessing how social media impacts how political messages crafted, disseminated, and received. To be clear, social media has disrupted industries from fashion to farming, and each platform in use today makes a distinct impact on society. We agree with the observation of Gauthier (2020, 194) that developments within media technology “cannot be understood in isolation from the encompassing culture and society.” YouTube, Twitter/X, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Tumblr, Reddit, Twitch, and Nextdoor—or Weibo, WeChat, Telegram, Douyin, Tieba, or Careem for that matter—are not all the same. Still, however, there are common threads as to how political arguments operate across these platforms, and we contend that polysyndeton can help explain those dynamics in the context of the United States.
Second, the intersections of social media, January 6, and the Capitol Riot’s aftermath deserve additional scholarly attention, and this paper contributes a fresh perspective to ongoing academic discussions of these issues. Diep and Nguyen (2023) analyze Trump’s rhetoric during the attack on the Capitol through the lens of “weaponized communication.” Erickson et al. (2023) perform a semantic network analysis of 3.4 million comments reacting to January 6 across three subreddit pages. Chen et al. (2023) analyze several hundred thousand Parler, Facebook, and Twitter posts using various methodologies to discover violent cues related to January 6. Kovacs et al. (2024) categorized 1.3 million #Election2020 Twitter through a model trained on the Unhealthy Comment Corpus, finding that approximately 42% of tweets met an unhealthy threshold. Adding to this growing conversation is Kunde (2024), who argues for the centering of comedic frames over tragic ones to elevate democratic discourse surrounding January 6. Following Kunde, who draws on the work of Kenneth Burke, we offer a tropological framework through which to understand the nexus of politics, communication, and social media following the Capitol Riot to add to this rich tapestry of scholarly perspectives.
Finally, because amplification comprises a key component of polysyndetonal rhetoric, this paper takes steps toward more fully theorizing how social media may be contributing to political polarization and political burnout in American society. McCarty (2019, 8) defines political polarization as a state “where the public and its leaders have become increasingly divided… over public policy, ideological orientations, and partisan attachments.” Many scholars, including studies by Silver et al. (2020); Zhuravlev et al. (2020); and Bútorová (2009) have investigated the intersections of political polarization with societal, cultural, and populist politics. Similarly, Wall Street Journal journalists Restuccia and Collins (2024) report that younger Americans, who are more likely to spend more of their time online, feel more pessimistic, possess lower confidence in public institutions, and disengage from political and civic activity at higher rates than previous generations. While these are much larger issues than can be addressed in a single paper, we advance a framework for understanding the intersection of social media and political discourse in this study that illuminates how these forces may be intertwined.
This paper unfolds over several stages. First, it discusses how tropes structure language and thus predispose particular orientations toward reality. Next, it identifies polysyndeton as a trope that plays a significant role in structuring social media discourse. Then, it analyzes press and political interpretations of the January 6 Capitol Riot, showing how the polysyndetonal elements of social media discourse refracted the synecdoche-based arguments made by the Days of Rage documentary, U.S. House of Representatives January 6 investigative committee, and right-wing press and political voices for how Americans should interpret the events of January 6. It finally concludes by offering several closing thoughts on how social media may be changing the way that political events are interpreted by audiences in the United States.
Rhetorical Tropes: Discourse, Representation, and Truth
Tropes are commonly defined as a word or expression used as a component of figurative language. For example, when a person states the common idiom, “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,” English language users in the United States understand that the speaker is engaging in hyperbole, a trope of exaggeration that indicates to the listener that the speaker is not literally starved to the point of considering an equine appetizer. Understood in this way, tropes are features of figurative (i.e., artistic or literary) language. Of course, to posit that tropes are properties of figurative language is to assume a distinction between literature on the one hand and everyday language on the other. This distinction has been called into question by numerous scholars. Terry Eagleton (2008, 9–10), to cite one example, argues that literature must ultimately be classified as “highly valued writing,” a definition which is subject to the “notoriously variable” and unstable preferences of society throughout history. One implication of Eagleton’s view is that language constitutes even ordinary human experiences, not just the exceptional instances that society classifies as literature; as Alastair Fowler (1990, 111) observes, “ordinary speech is itself full of schemes and tropes.”
Because the meaning of everyday occurrences is mediated through language as much as with literary texts, rhetorical scholars such as Denise Bostdorff (1994, 4) place a premium on understanding the linguistic constructions that constitute shared experiences of the world. As she writes, “Cities, weapons, the elderly, wildlife, and oil fields certainly exist; meaning, however, does not lie in these entities themselves, but in the language used to interpret them and the events in which they are involved.” Put differently, tooth decay, photosynthesis, and plate subduction occur regardless of the labels applied to them, but rhetoric works to arbitrate our understanding of reality by privileging one set of interpretations over another. Hence, tropes, or organizational logics of linguistic depiction, play a vital role in shaping human perceptions of the world. Tropes furnish the vehicles through which thought is expressed in language, and thus, they matter to how we cognize our experiences and come to an understanding of reality—including political reality.
Kenneth Burke (1969) elaborated on how tropes can provide logics of discourse that affect how messages are composed, sent, and received in his discussion of the “master tropes” of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Each trope orients human comprehension of the world in a distinct way by privileging a particular interpretative disposition toward reality. For example, Burke defines metaphor as “a device for seeing something in terms of something else.” Insofar as metaphor presents Character A from the viewpoint of Character B, it functions as a tool for apprehending the nature of A by recourse to B’s perspective upon A, such that to describe an attorney’s words in court as a “defense” of her client is to see a trial from the perspective of warfare. Since metaphor is productive of perspective, it encourages a mode of symbolic interaction that sees the world as a set of relations wherein depth of meaning grows via the increase of possible angles to view a character. By the same token, Burke deems metonymy to facilitate reduction, since it substitutes a one word or phrase for another that is less complex or abstract (e.g., “White House” for president, “the heart” for emotions, or “sword” for military power). He considers synecdoche to facilitate representation, since the whole stands in for the part or vice versa in a manner that symbolizes the character’s key dimensions (e.g., “law” for police officer or how a topographic map captures one aspect of a given territory). And Burke argues that irony requires two contrasting perspectives between literal and non-literal meanings, and thus, it generates dialectical pairs (e.g., chaos-order) that ridicule monolithic dogmatism and breed disengaged detachment through the consideration of multiple perspectives at once.
Taken together, Burke’s master tropes overlap and impinge on each other as they give symbolic form to ideas through language (Biesecker, 2017; Murray, 2002). As they do so, each one orients language users toward reality in a unique way. The inner symbolic logic, or grammar, of each trope works to filter, foreground, or select for certain perceptions that structure human understanding. Metaphor works to effect perspective, metonymy works to effect reduction, synecdoche works to effect representation, and irony works to effect dialectic. According to Burke, these dynamics mean that each master trope gains purchase and tends to underwrite different rhetorical contexts, such that metonymy tends to predominate scientific discourse and irony lends itself to a postmodern, multiperspectival outlook that questions dogmatic beliefs or principles. Put simply, the manner in which we articulate our ideas matters, and so tropes matter because they are not rhetorically or symbolically neutral.
This lack of neutrality extends in the framework of liquid modernity to encompass the fabric of society itself. Whereas irony produces satire, metaphor inspires “poetic realism” (Burke, 1969, 504), and metonymy and synecdoche distill amorphous concepts into comprehensible elements, Bauman’s idea of liquid modernity (2000, 60–61) suggests that these elements are in a constant state of dissolution and reformation; as “the question of objectives” is “thrown wide open,” the loss of a shared commonality and the move toward an individualistic, free, and liquid associative state generate “the unnerving feeling of unmitigated uncertainty” for citizens and a “state of perpetual anxiety.” Stability in social associations and symbolic logics are replaced by a modern world of perpetual transformation. The consequent loss of shared social, interpersonal, and political meaning signals a world characterized by a multitude of shifting associations and decay of a sociocultural order in which traditional master tropes hold absolute sway.
Other scholars have contributed to this line of research, demonstrating how other tropes function as organizational logics of symbolic exchange in various contexts or eras of human society. Joshua Ritter (2012, 407) recovers hyperbole as a trope that may “describe a mode of thought or a form of philosophical inquiry that transcends its more technical uses as a linguistic trope.” Pruchnic and Lacey (2011, 487) argue that “network” comprises a trope through which “to theorize the operations of social power in the post-Empire, post-disciplinary, or post-postmodern present.” Michael Kaplan (2011, 202) contends that “allegory is a suitable master trope for the Rhetoric Culture project” in his review of Hariman’s chapter in Culture + Rhetoric: Studies in Rhetoric, for allegory “can transform excess from an epistemology problem into an inventional resource.” Lastly, Eleanor Cook (2001, 352) calls enigma a master trope of Christian writing and teaching, because it is “a trope of the human condition.”
Following these thinkers, we locate polysyndeton as a trope that exerts outsized influence in the organization of discourse on a relatively new arena of human society: social media. To make this case is not a direct matter of tracking how often and in what way users invoke the trope of polysyndeton, but rather requires excavating the symbolic logic that governs discourse on social media and asking how that logic orients language users toward reality in the particular way that polysyndeton offers. This trope does not replace but rather refracts how other tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, or irony mediate human experience on social media platforms—including human experience of political events like the January 6 Capitol Riot.
Polysyndeton: The Trope of Social Media
It is important to define polysyndeton before explicating how its symbolic logic can help explain how social media shapes public perception of political events. Polysyndeton comprises an excess of connective conjunctions, most often expressed as a surfeit of the word “and.” For example, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou (2009, 129) writes, “Let the whitefolks have their money and power and segregation and sarcasm and big houses and schools and lawns like carpets, and books, and most – mostly let them have their whiteness.” Her use of polysyndeton builds toward a crescendo of cascading privilege by the close of the sentence. Shakespeare similarly employed polysyndeton when his character Othello (Hudson, 1890) lists out ways to die when expressing anxiety over whether his wife has been unfaithful: “If there by cords or knives, poison, or fire, or suffocating streams, I’ll not endure it.” This compounding list stresses Othello’s escalating sense of unease as the conjunction “or” links an ever-growing number of ways to unpleasantly perish. Finally, Joan Didion (1968, 336) deploys polysyndeton not to build toward a plateau, but rather to juxtapose disparate sensations in her description of eating fruit in uptown Manhattan: “I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume.” In each of these instances, polysyndeton connects discrete phenomena, ideas, or things and delivers them to an audience as a singular mass of undifferentiated experience.
Polysyndeton is a device that conveys amplification while also resisting hierarchical organization. It slows comprehension, drawing attention to each phrase or word joined together. For example, the King James translation of Genesis 1 contains 99 instances of the word “and.” This repetition, according to John Phillips (1980, 35), “is used to slow us down” as readers and “to have us weigh each word and phrase.” Something similar could be said of Joshua 7:24 (ESV), which recounts the gathering up of Achan and his family for punishment: “And Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the cloak and the bar of gold, and his sons and daughters and his oxen and donkeys and sheep and his tent and all that he had. And they brought them up to the Valley of Achor.” Whether it appears in scripture, literature, journalism, or elsewhere, polysyndeton challenges audiences by crying “this is important!” as it points to multiple referents. It links discrete phenomena, guides attention to them, and transmits them as an assemblage of subjects, happenings, or objects linked by the word “and.” It is thus a trope of amplification and also of association, joining things that do not have a necessary relationship and delivering them to an audience as a muddled but magnified whole. As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969, 140) note, the rhetorical process of associating different phenomena works to “appreciate or depreciate” how human actors perceive them and thus “profoundly influences the meaning” of what they represent.
The 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once gives an excellent illustration of how polysyndeton can function as an animating logic of symbolic action rather than a mere figure of speech in a manner akin to how Burke (1969, 506) describes metonymy, which functions “to convey some incorporeal or intangible state in terms of the corporeal or tangible” and thus lends itself to scientific discourse by privileging a materialist metaphysics that reduces the realm of spirit or consciousness (the abstract and immaterial) to the more scrutable language of motion (the concrete and material). The film follows the character of Evelyn Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh, a dejected laundromat owner who steadily realizes that she is the key to saving the omniverse from the anarchic, destructive power of Jobu Tupaki. As she learns to “verse jump” between dimensions and battle this malevolent force, Wang has to overcome Tupaki’s magnetic violence as well as generational trauma to choose compassion and love over judgmental rejection. Cinematically, the movie’s frenetic pace is layered with “playful cuts” between universes that “seamlessly connect” scenes remote not only in space and time but also human anatomy (Gates, 2023). As Justin Chang (2022) describes, “Imagine a very long, unusually surreal Choose Your Own Adventure novel in which all the pages have been torn out and glued back together at random, and you’ll have some sense of how this movie plays.” Hence, the film’s jumps among parallel and not-so-parallel universes—besides being rather funny and visually jarring—follow the tropological organization of polysyndeton, as the characters bounce from a setting in which humans have hotdogs for fingers in one scene to another in which an oddly compelling black hole-esque everything bagel threatens to consume every universe in existence, all shot through with sly homages to past cinematic hits. It is thoroughly polysyndetonal in its organizational logic: association and amplification to the extreme.
As with this film, polysyndeton also reflects the dynamics of social media. The “endless scroll” of a Twitter or Facebook homepage amounts to an endlessly deferred “and,” inviting users to look at this-and-this-and-this ad infinitum as they keep scrolling down, tacitly instructing users that there’s always additional information—an “and”—simply waiting to be discovered further down. It is not difficult to see the polysyndetonal logic at play in the infrastructure of these digital interfaces as the allure of one more post or one more swipe or one more bit of information always, seemingly, beckons to human users with the promise of another “and.”
Other social media platforms including Snapchat and Instagram rely on visual cues to entice users to gaze at one more image or video post. TikTok, as Abidin (2021) notes, is primarily an audio meme app; it merges mimicry and originality in an endlessly repackaged cycle of music, soundtrack, vocal expression, and remix expressions superimposed on ostensibly visual texts, which creates a viral appetite for the next adaptation of the trend, song, dance, commentary, or movie clip. What each of these platforms has in common is that they all construct their content by literally grouping the inputs of millions of users into a repackaged stream organized by an algorithm and consumed by other social media users. In effect, to use these platforms is to lose untold hours of time viewing just one more video, image, or post (and then another, and then another, and then…). Like polysyndeton in a speech, which might form an association among constituents otherwise unlikely to be linked together, social media connects various posts, videos, or images collated from other users, bots, and brands and delivers them in some visual or chronological sequence to a human consumer.
Consequently, social media not only manifests polysyndeton but deeply relies on this trope as a logic of arrangement, articulation, and expression. If, as Leslie Hahner (2017, 23) argues, “tropes serve an ontological and epistemological function—a mode of representation that… becomes a way of organizing and constituting human expression and knowledge,” then polysyndeton serves as a key trope shaping communication activity on social media, helping assemble and constitute the human experience of these platforms. To participate in social media is to acquiesce to a rhetorical economy premised upon polysyndeton, as the algorithm in question arranges (from the user’s perspective) random posts, videos, images, audio, remixes, or other content into product—a “feed”—for users to consume. It is pure association without hierarchy. Moreover, like a rhetor writing out a polysyndetonal phrase prior to the delivery of an address, it invisibly (and algorithmically) arranges each user’s feed into an individualized site of meaning construction. The social media user lacks full perspective to know why each post, video, or tweet appears in the order that it does, which means each user will have an experience of each platform that does not fully overlap with any other user. Such dynamics encourage the rise of rival siloes of discourse on these platforms rather than comprehensive, authoritative interpretations held by all. The social media feed thus reflects the insight of Tim Hutchings (2015, 148), who argues that digital media operate as “solvents for hierarchies” and “antidotes to authority.”
The feed, in turn, helps explain how the other element of polysyndeton—amplification—is transfigured in the experience of social media. Rather than building toward a loud crescendo, as in the literary examples of polysyndeton above, social media platforms are more subtle. The amplification on these platforms manifests as accumulation, which “makes things matter” on a more gradual, incremental timetable (Farrell, 1998). This form of amplification takes its effect over a longer time horizon. Christa J. Olson (2021, 43) notes that “accumulation draws attention to the stuff that sticks around and creates significance. Just as silt builds up at the mouth of a river or toxins concentrate exponentially as you go up the food chain… [rhetorical magnitude] emerges from the accretion of the seemingly trivial.” Things come to matter to us as they gain our attention, and over time, social media works to train our attention on new topics, trends, or things the more we use it. It is therefore no wonder these platforms are worth such vast fortunes, then, since they deploy the trivial to delicately nudge users to reallocate their attention.
Social media amplifies through accumulation, focusing human attention in a manner that may be imperceptible to the user but ends up magnifying certain phenomena in their mind all the same. If the main purpose of amplification is “to focus the reader’s attention on an idea he or she might otherwise miss,” then accumulation provides a method of achieving this aim no less than anaphora, repetition, or a louder volume (McGuigan, 2007, 190). Social media thereby amplifies via its ability to steadily direct certain issues, trends, or topics into human attention and consciousness. Like an alcoholic whose tolerance requires more drinks to get buzzed, the amplification on social media emerges gradually, acclimating users to new topics, trends, slang, ideas, beliefs, products, texts, or ideologies as time goes on. Operating on the structural logic of polysyndeton, social media platforms introduce users to a bewildering array of videos and voices collated from anywhere on earth in an unending individualized parade of visual, cultural, topical, and audial gratification, thus influencing what issues, persons, and events users find salient; these platforms are societally influential because they wield such associative and amplificative power.
The political ramifications are obvious. The Rutgers-based Network Contagion Research Institute found (2023) that TikTok “systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is aligned with or opposed to the interests of the Chinese Government.” By promoting or demoting certain stances, TikTok introduces issues or perspectives to its users subtly, shaping their perceptions over time. Yet there are non-obvious implications as well. The polysyndetonal dimensions of social media also disrupt attempts to generate a shared cultural interpretation of a major political event. To show how polysyndeton changes the way other rhetorical devices function on social media, we now turn to a high-profile case study: the press and political coverage of the January 6 committee hearings.
Polysyndeton, Political Interpretation, and January 6
On January 6, 2021, a mob of right-wing protestors attacked the United States Capitol building. As a mall protest devolved into a Capitol break-in, replete with hundreds of unlawful (and occasionally costumed) rioters streaming into legislative offices and chambers, social media became the access point through which the American public witnessed the day’s confusing events. Images of broken glass, peaceful meandering through Congressional hallways, violent clashes with law enforcement, chummy interactions between police officers and protestors, and selfies throughout the building invaded user streams across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms in a chaotic panoply of texts that defied a straightforward narrative structure. The subsequent battle to define this event and its political meaning reveals much not only about the state of American politics but also how social media and polysyndeton refract the way political messaging unfolds online, as divergent organizations tried to extract a synecdoche out of the maw of textual confusion to distill the “true” meaning of January 6.
To start, President Trump tweeted 25 times on January 6, 2021 (Trump 2021). His first post about the state of the 2020 election was at 2:45 AM. From there, he continued posting inflammatory accusations directed at Mike Pence, the Democratic Party, and others. Those tweets were polysyndetonal—each another rallying cry, each another shot across the bow. Viral images of the rioters combined with news reports and screenshots of Trump’s tweets to testify to the surreal recklessness of the day. The day was saturated with social media from start to end. Social media swiftly brought attention to the attack on the Capitol, social media comprised the medium through which countless Americans witnessed the sacking of the symbolic center of the nation from a distance in real time, and social media played a key role in reconstructing the day’s events in accord with press and legislative investigations (Leatherby 2021).
Because the events of January 6 were rhetorically arbitrated for American audiences through social media, polysyndeton played an outsized role in shaping interpretations of the Capitol Riot. That means amplification, association, and rival clusters of meaning-making—all polysyndetonal elements of social media—came to dominate public interpretation(s) of the day’s events. Three points of evidence demonstrate how press and political coverage of the January 6 Capitol Riot cohered into this polysyndetonal pattern: the Days of Rage documentary, the House Committee hearings, and the rise of rival right-wing interpretations of January 6.
Days of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol, a 40-min video produced by the New York Times, marked one of the first comprehensive attempts to document the January 6 Capitol Riot in detail (Khavin, 2021). It tells the story of a shocking national calamity, with scene after scene of chaotic rioters, lawmaker evacuations, street conflicts, and battles with Capitol Police officers. Each clip in isolation pales in comparison to the affective weight of the whole. Behind each one is an implied and, an addition, a link to the prior clip and an amplification. This repetition emphasizes the scale of the day’s events. Like the Kuleshov effect, each passing fragment derives its context from the last, building toward an interpretation of the event that emphasizes the violence of the attack. “Psychologically and logically, all association,” Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969, 190) note, “unites various elements into a well-organized whole… present together in the consciousness.” The video (New York Times 2021) then concludes with an ominous reminder that the rioters represented but a small portion of the national body of Trump voters and right-wing Americans who supported the attempt to stop Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election: “None of what happened on January 6 would have been possible without a huge mass of ordinary people who were proud of what they achieved… millions around the country still believe the violence was not only justified but necessary.”
The video’s depiction of the day’s events therefore used synecdoche to communicate the magnitude of the Capitol Riot. It framed the protestors as a small part of the larger whole of Trump supporters who, like their combative compatriots captured on video defacing the halls of Congress, would deploy extrajudicial mob violence to realize their political aims if given the chance. The construction of this synecdoche relied heavily on polysyndeton. First, the video sequenced various texts occurring across space and time, including clips of angry demonstrators outside the Capitol, rioters inside the Capitol building, statements given by Republican officials following January 6, and Trump’s inflammatory tweets and statements before and after the riot, working to associate various fragments into a coherent experience. Second, the documentary’s association of these disparate elements builds toward a crescendo, amplifying over time with each clip, excerpt, or text increasing the total salience of the Capitol Riot. The key synecdoche and warning of Days of Rage, then, relied on polysyndetonal logics for its persuasive impact.
The House Committee charged with examining the January 6 Capitol Riot used a similar rhetorical strategy by leveraging textual fragments as evidence of a different synecdoche. Rather than condemn the protestors and argue that they represented a tiny portion of a larger, dangerous political movement across the country, the committee hearings instead framed January 6 as a distillation of the Trump presidency. From this vantage, the Capitol Riot served as a synecdoche of Trump’s political career as a whole; by revealing Trump’s perfidy in this moment of signal importance, the committee attempted to holistically and definitively discredit his presidency and political future.
To make this case, the committee had an eye to how the hearings, as a rhetorical act, functioned on social media—as pieces, splintered into fragments of testimony, soundbite-sized incriminations, and statements of findings. Just as most Americans experienced the riot as a series of repackaged fragments, so the House investigative committee broadcast its findings in a bite-sized format designed for viral consumption and dissemination online. Relying extensively on digitally captured data and social media posts, Jessica Maddox (2022) observed that the hearings appeared “to be made for social media, given the elements of the presentation…the quick cutaways, pithy sound bites and short interview clips, such as former Attorney General William Barr saying ‘bullshit’ on repeat, are all easily broken off from the larger hearings to be repackaged as social media content.” Other commentators (Chaney & Hart, 2022) remarked on the “unusually polished style of the proceedings” and the handiwork of James Goldston, former head of ABC News, in crafting each hearing “as an episode with a distinct focus” so that the hearings ran “as if they are a docuseries or a scripted piece of true crime.”
Of course, the aims of the committee amounted to far more than a fact-finding mission. Liz Cheney, arguably the most prominent member of the committee, declared, “Donald Trump knows that millions of Americans who supported him would stand up and defend our nation were it threatened. They would put their lives and their freedom at stake to protect her.” She continued, “And he is preying on their patriotism. And on Jan. 6, Donald Trump turned their love of country into a weapon against our Capitol and our Constitution” (Cathey, 2022). According to her, the aim of the committee was to demonstrate that Trump “preyed” on the patriotism of his followers in this signal moment, which represented the predatory nature of his political career as a whole and thus rendered him unfit to be president. This synecdochal line of reasoning that figured the chaos and violence of January 6 as a representation of the chaos and violence Trump brought to U.S. politics again shows a reliance on polysyndetonal storytelling. The committee deployed a wide circulation of images, videos, and fragments from the attack in rapid and well-edited succession, each drawing rhetorical weight from the last to build to an amplified sense of outrage at Trump. While the committee’s persuasive aim, like Days of Rage, was synecdochal, their presentation of evidence was richly polysyndetonal.
In addition to generating association and amplification, polysyndeton also reflects the dynamics of social media in the curated feed that each user consumes. For political events such as January 6, this means that citizens, as Pablo Barberá (2020, 34) observes, “are only exposed to information that reinforces their political views and remain isolated from other individuals with opposing views, in part due to the filtering effects of ranking algorithms.” He continues, “The outcome of this process is a society that is increasingly segregated along partisan lines due to rising mistrust of public officials, media outlets, and ordinary citizens on the other side of the ideological spectrum.” Like social media trends that only circulate among a cluster of users with shared interests, competing interpretations of the Capitol Riot unfolded along partisan lines.
The emergence of rival right-wing understandings of January 6 illustrates this dynamic well. Outlets like Fox News depicted the day’s events in a much less chaotic fashion, pointing to clips of protestors calmly walking through Capitol hallways, police officers holding open doors or peacefully interacting with the demonstrators, and eyewitness accounts that described entering the building as an orderly, even welcoming process. In contrast to Days of Rage, which cited cellular tracking data cataloguing the steps of the rioters in the Capitol used by law enforcement officials to prosecute them (Warzel & Thompson, 2021), media coverage sympathetic to the protestors entertained very different theories as to meaning and political ramifications of January 6. Conservative-leaning media outlets cooperated with Republican officials to contest mainline interpretations of the Capitol Riot even to the point of asking whether the FBI bore responsibility for the Capitol break-in (Jackman, et al. 2024). Claiming to have reviewed 40,000 hours of security recordings made available by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–CA), media figure Tucker Carlson avowed, “The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress.” Rather, he argued, pointing to clips of protestors walking around the Capitol, “It shows police escorting people through the building” (Smith & Sinneberg, 2023). Each of these arguments drew on fragmentary evidence—clips of non-violent interactions, composed demonstrators, and respectful protest—to tell a quite different story of a largely peaceful event whose confusion was being manipulated to demonize Trump supporters and Republicans at large.
Thus, like the House Committee investigating the January 6 riot and the New York Times, political commentators sympathetic to Trump and the protestors relied on polysyndeton to stitch together evidentiary fragments that they then claimed operated in a synecdochal manner. In doing so, they assembled a rival armory of images to support their case, pursuing a rhetorical strategy premised on synecdoche refracted through polysyndetonal storytelling. This view of January 6 framed FBI efforts to pursue and prosecute rioters through facial recognition software, combing through reams of private cellular data, and “enhanced” sentencing as unjustly vindictive (Carpenter, 2022; Lebowitz, 2024). In that sense, right-wing interpretations of January 6 centered on two interlocking synecdoches: first, that the peaceful clips of friendly protestors characterized the Capitol Riot as a whole and second, that the unfair treatment of specific January 6 demonstrators represents the overall prejudice the federal government exhibits toward Trump supporters. And, as with the other examples referenced above, polysyndetonal logics of depiction played a key role in the development and dissemination of this interpretation of January 6.
In sum, the political coverage of January 6, regardless of partisan affiliation, relied on amplification to unite chosen textual fragments into a moving, vital whole. As an endothermic reaction absorbs heat to produce a change, polysyndeton’s amplification unites disparate units into an affective whole. A key factor in polysyndeton’s rhetorical power is its ability to constitute a suasory logic through repetition and amplification. Each successive fragment, united in a series, can inherit a warrant from the last, becoming part of a larger cohesive argumentative structure that in these instances culminated with a pivotal synecdoche. When performed successfully, each individual text becomes emblematic of a larger case, capable of functioning detached from the whole and thereby operating ideographically to convey the thought and argument of the wider argument (McGee, 1980). Critical media coverage juxtaposed the chaos of the riots with screenshots of social media posts, linking the fragments together to amplify their importance to a larger argument that was then picked up during House Committee investigative hearings (Khavin, 2021). By the same token, defenders of the rioters such as Carlson amassed their own battery of images, anecdotes, social media posts, and witness testimonies—their own fragments—to construct rival interpretations of the political meaning of January 6. In the “hyper-partisanship” of the polysyndetonal world of contemporary social media, amplification and association become how messages gain salience—a game of signal and noise, with everyone watching (Maddox, 2022, Erickson et. al 2023). While the advent of social media in some ways levels the playing field between dissident and mainstream interpretations, it also works against the ability of any given understanding of a political issue to gain full primacy. Moreover, social media is likewise subject to the same rules of agenda-setting and earned media attention that govern traditional press outlets—Trump tends to generate much more organic, passionate fan support online than Biden, for instance—which speaks to the importance of identification in generating a robust social media presence; this is a game in which populist politicians exploiting supporter grievances have an advantage (Khamis & Fowler, 2022).
The events of January 6 were algorithmically distributed to millions of Americans in real time. In as much as it was an image event, the deadly peril was also a kind of content event for the endless scroll. Americans once gathered around televisions to watch the marvel of the moon landing or the horror of the Challenger explosion. The medium was so centrally important to Americans’ lives that, naturally, President Ronald Reagan delivered his response to the Challenger tragedy in a televised broadcast. The chaos of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, by contrast, was experienced as fragmentary fleeting images and videos. These small windows into the chaos at the Capitol not only functioned as points of profit for social media companies that rely on an ever-expanding world of content to keep users engaged. They also show how political arguments in our time are amassed through association, accumulative amplification, and rival clusters of interpretation—in short, polysyndeton. Several insights follow.
To start, whereas Reagan’s television address to the nation in response to the Challenger explosion provided a polished dénouement to the day’s tragic events, encouraging the nation to move on, the events of January 6 have no clear marked end point. Instead, in accordance with the logic of polysyndeton, the attack on the Capitol is constantly revisited visually through one more news report, one more clip, one more court case, one more remembrance, one more Twitter thread, and one more conspiracy theory. The reliance on polysyndeton as a trope through which we increasingly understand the wider world means that no event is truly ended but could always become part of a longer sequence—could always become yet one “and” on the way to another—and so is never allowed to finally close. Polysyndeton sustains past events in a state of suspended animation. While the past is never fully closed to reinterpretation, polysyndeton works to revise civic practices of public commemoration of past events, persons, posts, or images in such a way that it eases the path for them to be resurrected to ground another chain of thought.
Additionally, the relationship between polysyndeton and online circulation can also be fraught with complication. Texts read one way in a progressive, left-wing Twitter community may circulate with entirely differently meaning within a right-wing social media enclave, and scholars should be wary of making claims that oversimplify or overestimate how media content circulates online. January 6 reveals how the fragmented nature of political argument structured through polysyndeton allows even more space for divergent political interpretations of events to emerge. In the case of January 6, there are entirely different schools of partisan thought as to meaning of the day’s events to the extent that there is not even a shared terminology for what happened; was it an insurrection, a riot, a demonstration, a peaceful gathering, an FBI false flag operation, or an attempted coup? Social media, since it relies on the linking of fragments via its polysyndetonal logic, increases the possibility of divergent meaning-making linked to the same event. This, in turn, highlights the importance of polysemy as a corresponding device to decode the politics of a polysyndetonal digital culture.
There is a bewildering divergence in the interpretations of what happened on January 6, 2021. What so many of these examples and communities demonstrate, though, is the common denominator of amplification. It is amplification that provides the stimulation by which disparate fragments unite into cohesive wholes to entertain, persuade, enrage, or exhaust audiences; indeed, this constant drive to amplification could help explain why a near supermajority of Americans always or often feel exhausted by U.S. politics (Pew Research Center 2023). Beyond amplification, polysyndeton’s ability to associate disparate texts, groups, images, or ideas also increases the potential incoherence of ideological constellations operative in political movements or public debate.
Polysyndeton, in short, changes the way other rhetorical devices function in online discourse. The above analysis shows how polysyndetonal elements affected how right-wing media, the House investigative committee, and the New York Times constructed synecdoches—what Burke (1969) might call “a representative anecdote”—to guide audience interpretation of January 6. This example suggests that investigating the interplay of polysyndeton with other major tropes such as metaphor, irony, hyperbole, or metonymy in online contexts might prove a useful line of inquiry to understand how political arguments are made in a social media age. No matter what else, polysyndeton’s rise as a significant trope of internet discourse promises to deliver a future that requires much more discernment, restraint, and patience of judgment on the part of scholars and voters than in past ages of media consumption.
Conclusion: Polysyndeton, Culture, and Politics
The foregoing analysis points to three conclusions regarding social media’s impact on contemporary political argumentation. First, polysyndeton’s emergence refracts how other rhetorical tropes operate in online spaces. As discussed in the January 6 case study, the House Committee members built an argument based on synecdoche. By revealing Trump’s misconduct on this very important day, the reasoning went, the committee’s work would discredit Trump’s political prospects on the whole. This same pattern of thought, long parodied in right-leaning online spaces as “the walls are closing in” meme, has thus far proven ineffective to ending Trump’s political career. While left-leaning audiences tend to interpret this outcome as a sign that right-leaning audiences are hypocritical and perhaps evil, it is also a sign that the polysyndetonal elements of online discourse make political persuasion much more difficult than it once was. Indeed, the possibility of another “and” being added to alter an audience’s interpretation of political events would appear to make argumentation based on spectacular set pieces or milestone moments like the election of Barack Obama, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Desert Storm, the Challenger explosion, the moon landing, the JFK assassination, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor much more difficult to prosecute. Thanks to polysyndeton, those events—or really any individual event—no longer carry the weight they once potentially could to define a generation. Instead, each simply serves as another “and” on the way to another.
Second, this paper helps illuminate how political appeals operate in an era of “liquid modernity.” Bauman notes that while solids have clear dimensions and “thus downgrade the significance of time,” fluid concepts are more impacted by conceptions of time than the “space they happen to occupy.” (2000, 2). In the absence of the governing structure of solid space, political appeals and concepts derive their meaning from their permeable associations at a particular moment in time. This inherent “lightness” reflects “the extraordinary mobility” of fluid appeals in modernity. What works for one argument at one moment in time is all that matters, which is perhaps why politicians who mimic entertainers rather than serious thinkers have seen such success in recent American and European elections. A stream of fragments viewed in succession on social media leverages a kind of associative Kuleshov effect—audiences know a text’s meaning by its placement, its temporary association with a particular argument or movement or rhetor, and then move ephemerally to the next moment.
Each associative “and” of polysyndeton not only adds to a narrative’s coherence but also reflects the transient connections between events and ideas within a liquid society. The use of polysyndeton in political appeals reflects the broader social fabric, where change is the only permanence and where certainty (of concept, of association) is replaced by endless possibility, endless optionality. Baudrillard’s famous simulacrum of Ecclesiastes—“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth-it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true”—reflects his assertion that “simulation is…the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” (Baudrillard, 1994, 1–2). In a social media–saturated environment, each “and” of polysyndeton is a simulacrum, a Xerox without an original, reflecting the unsettling realization that political appeals do not represent a deeper truth. They are instead the signs and symbols of a reality that is constantly shifting and under (re)construction and (re)definition in accordance with the dictates of partisan expediency. It is the online technological, hyper-mediated world that drives these furtive connections through algorithmic decision-making and engagement tactics perfected on social media.
Third, this paper provides a partial explanation as to why Trump and other social media–savvy populists have achieved such political success. Gauthier (2020, 189) argues that conditions of hyper-mediatization have fundamentally altered how faith and spirituality operate in the developed world, such that “media is involved in the very definition of the nature of religion today.” Something similar could be said about politics. While the observation that media impacts politics is mundane, it is frequently difficult to detail exactly how contemporary media conditions are shifting the ground of political engagement in real time. Polysyndeton, and tropes generally, furnishes analytically useful conceptual categories for articulating how the swirl of social media interacts with the churn of political conflict. In an era characterized by clashes over preferred perceptions of reality, tropes unlock a vocabulary for understanding how political persuasion unfolds amidst the decay of debate-style argumentation and the corresponding rise of “meme politics” (Konior, 2019, 61).
Indeed, polysyndeton’s twin functions of amplification via accumulation and association can help explain Trump’s success in generating a social media following relative to his political rivals. As Parker (2019) notes, the Trump team approached the 2016 presidential race as a media campaign. This meant that Trump organized his presidential effort around spectacle and memes, allowing carefully choreographed moments from his campaign to go viral as his team released visual and audio texts meant to activate replication, interaction, and imitation across social media platforms among followers who found him entertaining, deserving of ridicule, or identified with his nationalist populist appeal (Rowland 2021). The subsequent sheer volume of the Trump campaign’s presence across traditional and social media exploited the dynamics of social media highlighted in this paper, using accumulation to generate amplification. That Washington Post reporters (Gamio & Borchers, 2016) described Trump’s political persona as “omnipresent” in the summer of 2016 speaks to the forty-fifth president’s early mastery of the polysyndetonal social media landscape.
Finally, the rise of polysyndeton as a significant trope of online political discourse could help explain the exhaustion many Americans feel toward national politics. Rita Kirk’s scholarship on the effects of modern technology provides insight into this point. She builds on the concept of “narcotizing dysfunction” introduced by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton (2000), which held that the overabundance of information produced by a mass media society would breed passivity and “unthinking conformism” in the minds of most media consumers.
Yet, Kirk (2017, 26) argues, “rather than being narcotized by so much information that the public becomes inert, current users have become so engaged in responding to information that they experience frenetic dysfunction: a need to respond without time for contemplation.” For Kirk, social media nurtures a public not that “is passive but that is overactive.” In an era where persuasion is measured by response in the form of clicks, donations, screentime, and retweets, audiences are barraged with constant demands for action. This state, in turn, cultivates frenetic dysfunction, or “much action with little reflection… too much talking and not enough listening and dialogue” (Kirk, 2017, 45–46). To the extent that political discourse such as the January 6 Committee mirrors the polysyndetonal dynamics of social media, it may be replicating the same problems, leading to the extreme levels of both voter burnout and negative affective polarization that define so much of today’s political landscape. Repetition and amplification may have the opposite intended effect—overstimulation can lead to deflation, burnout, and disengagement. From this perspective, it should be no surprise that so many Americans seem eager to opt out of electoral politics altogether (or go full bore into partisan activism). Inescapable amplification will eventually deafen one’s hearing.
After all, it is an exhausting time. As Alan Noble (2021) writes, “modern life feels like billions of people in the same room shouting their own name so that everyone else knows they exist and who they are—which is a fairly accurate description of social media.” The daily experience of social media can at first feel like a release—new notifications, photos, updates, tweets, memes, or bits of news—but can steadily grow into an unsatisfying, boring chore. In that sense, social media might resemble other objects of indulgence such as food, drink, or television, whose gluttonous overconsumption will eventually lead to pain rather than pleasure. If the constant swirl of polysyndeton characterizes social media, then it is little wonder that so many adults and teenagers now report feeling extraordinary levels of stress and weariness as the average time spent on social media continues to grow.
It is a common assertion that social media have changed American society. While this is obviously true, it is the job of rhetorical scholars to excavate how these changes are happening in subaltern or non-obvious ways. In this paper, we have briefly pointed out one possible avenue—polysyndeton’s emergence as a significant trope for social media—for understanding the changes wrought by this technology in American public life. In so doing, we hope to illuminate the ways that political life offline and online is being progressively reshaped by the rhetorical norms of digital discourse.
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Fowler, R., Moist, J.T. Polysyndeton, Social Media, and the Contested Meanings of January 6, 2021. Int J Polit Cult Soc (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-024-09485-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-024-09485-2