The Loyalties of American Studies

Abstract

IN THE AMERICA OF GEORGE BUSH AND JOHN ASHCROFT, FOX NEWS TELEVISION and Clear Channel radio, political dissent has not been criminalized, but it has been widely stigmatized. The master trope of the Bush administration is that of loyalty: criticism and dissent, for this White House, are simply forms of disloyalty and must be punished. This trope governs the Bush administration’s approach to governance regardless of whether its critics are former cabinet members and counterterrorism experts like Paul O’Neill and Richard Clarke, political independents like Vermont senator Jim Jeffords, or popular entertainers like the Dixie Chicks. In the Bush lexicon, it would appear, the phrase “loyal opposition” is filed under “oxymorons,” as if the interests of the BushCheney White House were coextensive with the parameters of patriotic political speech in the United States. Accordingly, some dissenters in the United States have given up on the language of patriotism altogether, on the grounds that it is owned by the political right and articulated to discourses of American exceptionalism, religious fundamentalism, and frenetic public flag-waving. As an academic field, American studies has long had a productively ambivalent relation to discourses of patriotism. In the current political climate, however, ambivalent relations to discourses of American patriotism, no matter how productive, risk being construed by the state as disloyalty to the state. The question of loyalty has thus taken on a new urgency in American studies.