Echo Chambers and Epistemological Bubbles: Communicative Flirtations with the End of Democracy

Focusing on the Twitter practices of prominent “left-leaning” American political influencers, this monograph operationalizes a "sociolinguistics of morality". Through detailed micro-analyses of stance, deictics, deontics, underspecification, mockery, and chronotopic scaling, Zentz demonstrates how these actors discursively construct and defend an Enlightenment-based, scientistic, and inclusive democratic episteme against contemporary US far-right metapolitical movements. The book concludes with an argument that the traditional "left versus right" American binary is no longer analytically viable; instead, the United States faces a profound epistemological rupture pitting liberal democratic norms against anti-democratic authoritarianism.

This timely volume provides crucial theoretical frameworks for researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, political communication studies and more, for graduate students and researchers seeking to understand the sociolinguistic architectures of modern democratic crises