You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric

Introduction: Presidential Rhetoric and the Challenge of a Diverse Democracy

Presidential Rhetoric and the Challenge of a Diverse Democracy  INTRODUCTION Presidential Rhetoric and the Challenge of a Diverse Democracy O n September , , as I listened in disbelief to news of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I could not stop asking myself two questions: What was happening to us, and what might we do in response to the attacks? Like most people, I asked these questions in part because of the attacks’ obvious geopolitical implications. Surely these were calculated acts of aggression , meaning that the United States was likely to go to war, even if it was not immediately clear against whom. Yet as an observer of language, I was also struck by something else as I heard myself and others ask these two questions all day. Although I had been studying the rhetoric of citizenship and national identity in the United States for almost ten years, I had never before felt the weight of the pronouns “us” and “we” in quite the same way as I did that Tuesday. The “we” I uttered and, more to the point, felt so profoundly on September  was a different “we” than I might have used on September . It was not a “we” that referred to my most immediate and pragmatic everyday alliances —my family, my friends, my colleagues, and so on—but instead to something larger, something almost ridiculously ephemeral that was somehow, on that day especially, overwhelmingly meaningful nonetheless. My September  “we” was, in effect, the same “we” of the U.S. Constitution, the monosyllabic signifier of a national political community. But how is this “we,” this sense of civic camaraderie, created? In this book I ask how such a sense has been constructed rhetorically in the United States. More specifically, this book asks how U.S. presidents have used language to try to develop and maintain feelings of shared national identity within a wildly
  diverse democracy. In other words, this book asks who presidents have told the American people they are. Although I completed the research presented in this book before September , , such questions about the relationship between presidential rhetoric and national identity perhaps have taken on a renewed sense of importance after that date. Many of us might recall, for instance , waiting anxiously that evening to hear President George W. Bush speak to the nation in a televised address. On September , perhaps more than on any other date in recent memory, the American people needed to hear from their president. They needed to hear a message of reassurance, resolve, and unity that only a president of the United States could provide. Before September , however, it might have been more difficult to speak so plainly about the American people’s needs. I certainly would not have presumed to make such sweeping statements about an “us” or a “we” that might constitute “the American people.” In fact, I would have used the quotation marks around those phrases primarily to reveal my intellectual awareness that these phrases are themselves reifications, words that generate the feelings that make nationalism possible in the first place.1 Within rhetorical studies especially , many scholars have been persuaded by Benedict Anderson’s claim that nations are only “imagined communities.” Even in the smallest of them, Anderson has explained, compatriots “will never know most of their fellowmembers , meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”2 Similarly, Michael Walzer has suggested that the concept of “the people” is necessarily only a symbolic one that has “no palpable shape or substance.”3 Nevertheless, as imagined as this fellowship may be, it represents nothing less than the “starting point for politics,” according to Walzer.4 The events of September  and their aftermath have demonstrated Walzer’s point in obvious ways by showing how powerful the felt communion of a national “we” can be; it is compelling enough for people to willingly sacrifice both their livelihoods and their lives in its name. Although feelings of nationalism are most obvious during times of war and turmoil, they can also be invoked to great effect during more peaceful times, when citizens may take pride in their nation’s Olympic athletes, for example, or light fireworks on the Fourth of July or Bastille Day. As these examples reveal, feelings of nationalism can sow powerful seeds of connectedness where there might otherwise be none. Yet nationalism has an undeniably evil side as well. The ghosts of...