Chicago Leadership

ABSTRACT
As representatives of the government, U.S. politicians are tasked with inciting and sustaining the
American people’s belief in the system. Their speeches work to reinforce the policy trajectories
and ideologies that construct the political paradigms which may last, across presidencies, for
decades. This thesis describes and analyses how Barack Obama utilized his presidency to sustain
the last great political paradigm to grip America – that of the globalist ‘New World Order’ project
(1990 – 2017) established in America under George H. W. Bush – and how he ultimately failed
when Donald Trump successfully challenged this paradigm, most markedly within his 2016
presidential debate performance against opponent Hillary Clinton. Utilizing an innovative mixed-
methods research design combining corpus linguistics and qualitative coding with argument
reconstruction-based critical discourse analysis, this study employs advanced methods to
illuminate the complex ways in which political rhetoric is used to sustain institutional power over
extended periods of time. A new research approach, based on the analysis of complex argument
trajectories through critical comparison and the identification of linguistic patterns, is additionally
introduced and applied to examine long-term political policy trajectories as well as the conflicting
mainstream and alternative media narratives currently being produced in reference to the political
and economic sectors. The results of this study show that the Obama administration’s inability to
produce an even economic recovery despite the doubling of the national debt, the failure of the
Affordable Care Act and the White House’s covert funding of the Caliphate in Syria have resulted
in a severe degree of corrosion in the population’s belief in institutional power, a decline that
largely began under George W. Bush due to the fallout from the 2003 Iraq War and the 2007-2008
Great Recession. Largely as a result, a general paradigm shift has been triggered and is manifesting
among the American people; this shift is now being narrated by a new alternative media sector –
including ‘QAnon’ – which is introducing and promoting political, economic, and occult-based
theories such as New World Order Theory, Deep State Theory and Global Oligarchy Theory,
which heavily influenced Trump’s successful election campaign. This situation is having a
profound effect on the nation as it additionally concerns a broader scientific shift out of the
materialist construct of ‘reality’ which has defined the globalist model and into a quantum-based
ontological construct; this new model broadly overlaps with the view of reality upheld within the
spiritual and religious systems which have traditionally defined the belief structures of the
American people. In short, the current political paradigm shift is a result of a greater consciousness
shift unfolding within the United States today, and while a destabilizing time of transition, this is
also a period of transformation and great hope.