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2. A Presidential Rhetoric of Shared Beliefs
- Texas A&M University Press
- Chapter
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, CHAPTER 2 A Presidential Rhetoric of Shared Beliefs I n the preceding chapter I noted that, despite the many factors that could ostensibly pull the American people apart, for centuries scholars and other observers have agreed that the people of the United States are somehow bound together by ideational models of national identity. The working hypothesis behind most explanations of American nationalism has therefore been what I have referred to as the shared beliefs hypothesis, the notion that Americans are Americans because they share certain ways of thinking, even if there has been debate about exactly what these ways of thinking are. In this chapter I argue that U.S. presidents have also promoted the shared beliefs hypothesis of American nationalism. By itself, this claim is hardly surprising . As I have already noted, chief executives clearly have a great interest in making sure that the American people feel united, even if citizens’ actual demographic, economic, and psychological conditions would suggest otherwise . Likewise, supposing that U.S. presidents have tried to promote shared beliefs through ritualistic discourses such as inaugural addresses and state of the union messages is probably not all that surprising either. Scholars as dissimilar as political theorists and linguistic anthropologists have suggested that such discursive moments are of extreme importance within a culture, as they reinforce notions of identity and community.1 But which version of the shared beliefs hypothesis have U.S. presidents been most likely to favor on these occasions? Which versions of American national identity have they most often promoted within these two genres? In this chapter I will suggest that presidents , unlike scholars, seem to be largely in agreement about the types of beliefs that constitute American identity. Although chief executives sometimes draw upon Tocquevillian themes of equality, Lockean themes of liberalism, and some of the other popular themes discussed in chapter , my reading A Presidential Rhetoric of Shared Beliefs suggests that they most commonly associate American national identity with Puritan notions of an American civil religion. The American people are uniquely united, presidents have repeatedly argued , by nothing less than providence; as God’s chosen people, Americans have a collective identity based on shared beliefs that are both sacred and sanctified .2 This version is, of course, the same account of American identity once offered by John Winthrop, who asked an audience of pilgrims to remember God’s need for their community to represent a “city on a hill” and thus a beacon for all other nations. And it is also the same explanation of American nationalism that, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, has been used repeatedly throughout U.S. history to control Americans’ impulses by manufacturing a sense of ideological consensus. When presidents speak of the American people as “one nation under God,” then, perhaps they are doing nothing more than we would expect them to do. They are using the words and symbols of the historic Puritan errand to rhetorically enact another “rite of assent,” to use Bercovitch’s celebrated phrasing, and thus to envelop the American people into the rhetorical folds of a particular mythos. Yet to say only that U.S. presidents’ rhetorical promotion of shared beliefs in this manner is unsurprising is to miss an important part of the story. Specifically, as I will argue throughout this chapter, when we take a closer look at how presidents have used these themes in the inaugural addresses and state of the union messages studied here, we can get a sense of at least two critical and interrelated findings. First, U.S. presidents can use these themes in order to manage a diverse democracy. This usage is a function of civil religious rhetoric that has largely gone unnoticed by scholars of U.S. political communication, and it is also a feature of presidential rhetoric that may make this discourse different from other social leaders’ responses to Americans’ diversity. For reasons I will detail in this chapter, civil religious themes can be an especially efficient way for presidents to accommodate difference within a democratic nation. Second, U.S. presidents can use these themes not only to speak about allegedly constitutive American ideals, the backbone of the shared beliefs hypothesis, but also to promote more specific attitudinal postures that these ideals necessitate. In other words, presidents can use these themes to describe American identity in terms of both principle and pose, a combination that allows their particular rhetoric of American national identity to be more complicated than we might have...