Shadows of Democracy in Presidential Rhetoric: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

This special issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly adopts a rhetorical perspective to focus attention on the presidency as it operates in the hyper-symbolic political milieu that is contemporary public culture. It asks us to consider the question of democracy's prospects within the present state of presidential rhetoric. By engaging the theme of the shadow, it suggests that democracy's mythic representation in the current presidential idiom is troubled. Myth is taken variously to designate imaginary phenomena, falsehoods, and traditional stories, allegories, images, and archetypes that express a people's worldview, including the popular beliefs that comprise national attitudes, ideals, and identities. It serves as a vehicle to engage presidential discourse for the purpose of assessing its significance to public culture. In this regard, public culture is understood to be a complex of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, values, and habits that constitute a political way of life governed by a shared system of meaning and persuasive practices. The opening essay by Robert Ivie and Oscar Giner examines the archetypal recesses of terror and the mythic projection of evil in presidential rhetoric as it articulates a primal motive for the global war on terrorism. The devil figure embedded in U.S. political culture and triggered by presidential war rhetoric empties democracy of its political content and transforms it into a virulent signifier. In this regard, George W. Bush's discourse is a manifestation of unresolved issues of national identity played out in a mythic ritual of redemptive violence. The unmet critical challenge, which begins with recognizing the mythic force of the archetype, is to reclaim or at least confound the rhetorical projection of this dark, demonic shadow if we hope to pursue a more democratic and less violent future. But has presidential rhetoric already regressed too far to entertain any realistic hope of achieving a healthier democratic culture? Stephen Hartnett and Jennifer Mercieca maintain that we have entered an era of deception, a post-rhetorical presidency that spells the death of democracy. This new dark age of anti-democratic imperial ambition reflected in George W. Bush's presidential discourse is cluttered with stupefying disinformation that confounds public deliberation. Indeed, Bushspeak constitutes a politics of fear and mendacity aided and abetted by corporate media, according to Douglas Kellner. Presidential leadership, as it operates through the discourse of a war on terror, is dangerously reduced to a manipulative spectacle. The consequences for democracy seemingly could not be worse. Mary Stuckey and Joshua Ritter scrutinize the ideological work of Bush's presidential rhetoric to argue that it undermines freedom and democracy in the very way it affirms human rights. The anti-democratic bent of this Orwellian effect is compounded in what Bryan Taylor diagnoses as a hypocritical rhetoric that touts American virtue by demonizing nuclear opponents. Moreover, a discourse of technological autonomy renders nuclear weapons themselves immune to public deliberation. The exigency of an open-ended war on terror evokes narratives of unitary executive power, Marouf Hasian, Jr. …