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Record W4412566654 · doi:10.1386/eme_00234_1

Reactionary speech in the digital age

2025· article· en· W4412566654 on OpenAlex
Jason Hannan, Matthew McManus

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueExplorations in Media Ecology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicDigital Communication and Language
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Winnipeg
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsReactionaryPolitical scienceLawPolitics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

It has been over thirty years since the publication of Albert Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction . Hirschman’s tripartite model – the perversity, futility and jeopardy theses – offers a powerful lens through which to read the historical corpus of conservative thought. Yet we must ask whether a new model of reactionary rhetoric is needed today, given the very different political atmosphere and media environment from the ones in which Hirschman originally formulated his argument. This article is premised on the view that we urgently require a new conception of reactionary rhetoric. It proposes a different analytical approach from Hirschman’s. First, it adopts a conception of conservatism as a reaction against democracy, a defence of the rich and powerful, and the preservation of hierarchy. Second, it makes a case for incorporating a media-ecological perspective to make sense of reactionary rhetoric. Synthesizing political theory with media ecology, this article proposes that if conservatism is an antidemocratic, antiegalitarian and counterrevolutionary movement, then two central and inevitable elements of conservative rhetoric are denialism and mythmaking . Conservative rhetoric, we propose, has both a negative and an affirmative dimension. The negative dimension consists of (1) the denial of social injustice, (2) the demonization of a wildly exaggerated or completely fictitious enemy and (3) the distortion of the relationship between the powerful and the victims of power. The affirmative dimension consists of (1) the sublimation of populist sentiment, (2) the naturalization of hierarchy and (3) the mythologization of social and political order.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.899
Threshold uncertainty score0.179

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.285
Teacher spread0.260 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it