Final Project

Comparative Analysis of Affective Rhetoric in Tea Party Discourse

In February of 2009, CNBC commentator, Rick Santelli, called for a new Tea Tea Party to protest the Obama Administration’s plan to refinance mortgages.  “How many of you want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgages?” he angrily asked his colleagues on the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange.  The event inspired a series of grassroots protests in response to a number of the Obama administration’s fiscal policies.  Those in the Tea Party argue for limited government, reduced taxes, and free market capitalism based on the vision of the Founding Fathers and a strict interpretation of the Constitution.  As seen by Rick Santelli’s above quote, their arguments have often contained a strong emotional element.  In this project, I will take a closer look at the emotional appeals that appear in Tea Party rhetoric.  Specifically, I will conduct a comparative analysis of three sample discourses coming out of the Tea Party movement in the days and months leading up to the 2010 midterm election. The first is a speech given by former Senate candidate, Christine O’Donnell at the Values Voters Summit on September 17, 2010; the second, a blog post that appeared on the Tea Party Patriots website on October 26, six days before the 2010 election; and the third, the iconic “Don’t Tread on Me” flag often seen at Tea Party rallies.  I found that all three rhetorical acts seek to provoke fear, disdain and anger in their audience by portraying specific values as either threatened or already violated by an ill-defined offender.  This ambiguous offender has a rhetorical effect on the audience; because the object of fear, anger, and disdain cannot be located within one body, negative emotions are allowed to circulate and amplify.  Furthermore, these rhetorical acts placed pathemata within resonant historical moments, or around a network of events that exist in an audience’s shared consciousness as emotionally moving.  

On September 17, 2010 Christine O’Donnell spoke at the Values Voters (VVS) Summit in Washington D.C.  VVS is an annual conference in which conservative politicians and media figures are invited to speak about conservative values.  O’Donnell’s speech is advantageously placed within a kairotic moment.  At the time, O’Donnell was running for a Senate seat in her home state of Delaware and was receiving a lot of media attention for her association with the Tea Party movement.  She had just defeated incumbent, Mike Castle for the Republican nomination, validating the movement’s influence among Delaware’s conservative constituency.  In her speech, she addresses the nature and relevance of the Tea Party, and how Tea Party values could be the key to restoring the United States to its former glory.  Emotions fly freely in O’Donnell’s rhetoric, but the primary ones she attempts to evoke are fear, anger, and disdain.  O’Donnell’s purpose for speaking is to persuade constituents to vote for candidates such as herself.  The interpretation that leads to this emotion is-- Democrats and current leaders threaten American values.  

O’Donnell begins the speech by recreating the fear that she and her audience felt when the Obama administration and the Democratic majority first took office in 2008; she accomplishes this by creating enargeia, or placing the audience in a situation through descriptive language.  “Think about how you felt then. Remember the despondency, the anxiety...” she says.  She then lists a number of policies “crossed off the list” of our “emboldened new leaders,” upon their first year in office, some of which include forcing the American people to pay for overseas abortions, Obamacare, and the stimulus bill.  Listing these policies places her audience back in this time, causing them to re-experience the fear they felt in connection to the initial policies enacted by Democrats and the Obama administration.  In “Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion,” Martha Nussbaum touches on Aristotle’s argument that rational beliefs precede emotions:  “In order to have emotions such as fear and grief, one must first have beliefs of a certain kind” (304).  Nussbaum claims that it is “the way things are seen by the agent, not the fact of the matter, that is instrumental in getting emotions going.... What makes a person fearful is now given in a complex series of reflections, representing the sorts of judgments that might be involved in different cases of becoming afraid” (308).  Likewise, the fear that O’Donnell and her audience felt in 2008 was motivated by a particular belief-- that was that Democratic leaders threatened certain values.  

What are these values?  Based on O’Donnell’s speech, they are liberty and freedom.  She claims that, as Democrats began pushing their agenda, conservative Americans “rediscovered the most fundamental value of all-- liberty.”  But liberty and freedom are more than just important values in Tea Party culture; they are pathemata.  In the chapter seven of their book, Rhetorical Analysis: A Brief Guide for Writers, Longaker and Walker claim that pathemata are "things that provoke pathos."  They can further be subdivided into, “vivid presentation and symbols with strong emotional resonance” (214).  Furthermore, Longaker and Walker contend that single terms can also act as pathemata, especially when tied to emotionally resonant concepts, events, and beliefs.  In the same way, liberty and freedom are terms that have a built-in emotional resonance with the audience due to their long history of use in American rhetorical discourse.  Nevertheless, O’Donnell does some leg work to surround the terms with meaningful historical events.  She connects them with two eras in American history: 1) the founding years and 2) America in the 1980s and 90s.  The two values are the basis for the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as well as the fuel behind the American Revolution.  “When our country’s on the wrong track we search back to the first covenant, our founding documents, and the bold and inspired values on which they were based.”  In addition, America during the 1980s and 1990s was a time when freedom and liberty created peace and prosperity at home and abroad.  She describes this America as a refuge from communism that “only freedom can build.” It was a time when the economy prospered, the Berlin Wall fell down, and the family businesses such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot became national chains.

Fear transitions to anger as O’Donnell reveals that the values of liberty and freedom already have been and continue to be violated.  The belief in a potential threat has turned into a belief in an actualized threat, rhetorically transitioning the audience from feelings of fear to feelings of anger.  Nussbaum describes the rational beliefs that precede feelings of anger: “It requires, on the one hand, the belief that one (or someone dear to one) has been slighted or wronged or insulted in some serious way, through someone else’s voluntary action” (311).  This anger quickly morphs into disdain; Democratic leaders do more than act in opposition to Tea Party values, they embody an opposition to Tea Party values.  Thus, the emotional reaction becomes connected with what these agents are as well as what they do.  Pejorative language assists in furthering this disdain.  For instance, the policies of the “ruling class elites” aren’t just a product of different political positions; they are an “assault” on liberty and freedom.  Politicians in Washington D.C. are “cocktail-sippers,” and the first year of the Obama administration are “dark days.”  Such emotionally charged language heightens the audience’s response to what would otherwise be straightforward and dull description.

  Fear, anger, and disdain-- these are the three negative emotions that O’Donnell provokes.  But what’s interesting about her speech is that she doesn't direct these emotions towards a single person or group.  This has the effect of allowing the emotions to circulate and amplify in an economic sense.  Sara Ahmed calls this process an affective economy, providing an example of its occurrence in a passage from the Aryan Nation website.  In the passage, hate circulates between a variety of non-white bodies, sliding from the rapist to the illegal alien to the foreigner receiving aid.  Ahmed contends that, “The impossibility of reducing hate to a particular body allows hate to circulate in an economic sense, working to differentiate some others from others, a differentiation that is never “over,” as it awaits for others who have not yet arrived” (123).  Furthermore, Ahmed describes a process by which signs become attached to other signs, when used in conjunction repeatedly.  A similar pattern of economic disdain and sticky symbols occurs in O’Donnell’s speech.  Disdain moves from agent to agent, creating a divide between an “in” group and an “out” group.  Democrats-- or “bold new leaders” as O’Donnell calls them-- are the first objects of fear and anger.  Then comes “ruling class elites” and next, “D.C. cocktail crowd,” “government workers,” “bureaucrats and politicians in Washington,” and lastly, the “green police.”  Negative emotions slide from agent to agent, creating a distinct boundary between an “us” and a “them.”  O’Donnell binds the “us” together, not only as an imagined group of Tea Partiers, but also as Americans.  “We’re not trying to take back our country.  We are our country!” she vigorously proclaims.  In the speech, the Tea Partiers possess and populate American soil, while the “other”-- a much smaller group-- is relegated to and contained within Washington D.C.  O’Donnell’s tendency to use pronouns with ambiguous antecedents furthers this emotional economy.  Fifteen out of 34 times that she uses “they” or “some” as the subject of a sentence, the pronoun’s antecedent is ambiguous.  This furthers the idea of an indeterminate object of disdain that allows the emotion to circulate freely and fluidly throughout O’Donnell’s speech.  Even still, the pattern facilitates the proliferation of “sticky terms.”  As O’Donnell slides from pronoun to pronoun, terms like “elites,” “cocktail crowd,” “ruling class,” and “police” get stuck to agents and figures.  As Ahmed describes, there is nothing inherently disdainful about those who work in Washington D.C.  It’s the stickiness of signs in O’Donnell’s speech that causes them to become disdainful.

Ahmed contends that the emotions of love and hate are closely tied. Negative emotions felt towards an “other” are often driven by positive emotions that are directed towards another group or person.  Because those in the Tea Party represent and believe in the loved-values, they too become objects of love.  Thus, the disdain that O’Donnell conveys towards the “other” is just as much motivated by love for what the Tea Party represents.  In the same way that O’Donnell uses pejorative language to convey disdain, she employs honorific language to express love for the Tea Party.  The Constitution is a “holy covenant,” the Tea Party, a “love affair with liberty,” and Tea Partiers, “common sense patriotic Americans.”  Such glowing descriptions heighten the emotional value of these groups, events, and objects and elicit reverence and patriotism from the audience.

The Tea Party Patriots website allows its members to post blog entries on its website for free.  Many members saw this as an opportunity to voice their opinions in the days leading up to the election, including a member by the name of Mike Callahan who posted his entry on October 26, 2010.  Callahan writes to encourage fellow Tea Partiers to vote on November 2nd.  Despite his many spelling and grammar mistakes, Callahan’s argument is clear: vote for Tea Party-backed candidates in the election to prevent “socialists” (Democrats) from remaining in office.

Just like O’Donnell, Callahan uses the terms liberty and freedom to inspire patriotism in his audience.  However, Callahan characterizes those seeking to harm these values in a slightly different way than O'Donnell.  They are something more insidious than the oligarchic elitist rulers in O'Donnell's speech; they are socialists-- a description that is intended to inspire strong feelings of disdain in Callahan's audience.  Socialist and socialism thus get added to the list of words that inspire pathos, or pathemata.  In fact, liberty, freedom, and socialism are pathemata that hold so much weight in Callahan’s rhetoric that he chooses to capitalize them. He writes, “No where else in the world do I see people doing this same amount of work and giving freely of their time. Unless they are the Dark Destructive forces of Socialism, trying to destroy every Liberty and Freedom given to mankind by God, so their Puppet Masters can gain even more power and control over the masses of citizens they enslave to do the work for them.”  In the quote, Callahan portrays socialism and socialists as acting in direct opposition to liberty and freedom, making them inherently disdainful to a Tea Party audience.  
Just as in O’Donnell’s speech, Callahan does not direct this emotion towards specific bodies.  Instead, it resides within a larger, ill-defined group of “socialists” whose composition is unclear.  This dynamic creates a distinct boundary between the Tea Party and Democrats holding office, shaping the Tea Party as the opposite of Democrats and therefore an object of love.  Lastly, Callahan’s portrayal of Democrats as invaders works to evoke fear.  He writes, “We must rise up in force this November and do our sworn duty to support and defend the Constitution by removing all the socialist Posers from Congress.”  Callahan describes Democrats as “Puppet masters” “enslavers” and “posers.”  They are a threatening force that has breached the political system and who must be removed.

As in O’Donnell’s speech, Callahan situates pathemata within the founding period.  He writes, “I believe the modern day patriots stand shoulder to shoulder with every generation of defenders from the Citizen Soldiers of Revolutionary War to the present day Citizen Soldiers of our modern Military.”  “Citizen soldiers” refers to independent militias that formed during the American Revolution.  This comparison likens the cause of the Tea Party to that of the American Revolution, heightening the movement’s emotional value and inspiring patriotism. 
 

In fact, the Revolutionary militias seem to be a touch point for much of the emotional rhetoric emerging from the Tea Party.  The Culpeper Minutemen were one of the primary militia groups during the Revolutionary War and the inspiration behind the Tea Party’s iconic “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.  Like O’Donnell’s speech and Callahan’s post, the flag is a rhetorical act that situates its pathemata within the founding period.  That Callahan’s blog and the flag both connect the Tea Party cause to that of Revolutionary militias, indicates that these historical groups are important to how those in the Tea Party see themselves and their cause.  The comparison frames the Tea Party as scrappy upstarts, underdogs, fighting against oppressive rulers.  Combined with the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” this characterization inspires emotions of defiance and patriotism.  

Much of the rhetorical effectiveness of the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag stems from its ability to convey a sentiment that transcends its original rhetorical situation.  In Jenny Edbaur's article “Unframing,” she argues that discourse is not dictated by a single rhetorical situation, but instead exists in an affective ecology.  She gives the example of the popular Austin motto, “Keep Austin Weird,” which, from its creation in 2002, has been re-purposed for a variety of rhetorical situations.  In the same way, the “Don’t Tread of Me” flag is a rhetorical act that exists beyond its original exigence, audience, and constraints.  The rhetoric of “not being tread on” is a structure of feeling in American culture that has effectively been transmitted to the Tea Party’s situation.  The flag is no longer just a response to the exigences of the American Revolution, but now-- over 200 years later-- also a response to the political and economic conditions of 2010.

This project has only looked at three sample discourses produced during the period leading up to the 2010 midterm elections.  As such, the above claims do not characterize all of Tea Party rhetoric.  In order to see if the emotional appeals I describe occurring in the three sample discourses generalize to all Tea Party rhetoric, one would need to include more sample discourses.  Nevertheless, this project presents a window into the specific affective appeals emerging from rhetors in the Tea Party movement  within the months and days leading up to the election.

    As we can see from O’Donnell’s speech and Callahan’s blog, fear and disdain are important emotional appeals in Tea Party rhetoric.  In both texts, these two emotions are directed towards an ambiguous other.  O’Donnell directs these emotions towards a variety of agents, some of which include “bold new leaders”, “green police”, and “DC cocktail crowd”.  With each of these transitions, the emotions increase in value.  Callahan does something similar in his blog post.  Fear and disdain are not located within one object, but rather a group of “socialists” whose composition is never defined.  This tendency reflects Sarah Ahmed’s theory of affective economies which states that, in some instances, fear and hate cannot be contained in one object, but instead slide from object to object.  This dynamic helps to create stronger emotional appeals by creating stark boundaries between “in” groups and “out” groups.  

However, the emotional appeals in the three artifacts are not irrational, but based on certain beliefs about the actions of those in political office.  In particular, the belief that those in office are either threatening or currently harming liberty and freedom, two values revered in all three texts.  Liberty and freedom also act as pathemata, or terms that immediately evoke an affective response from the audience.  They are able to do this because of their long history with American discourse.  Nevertheless, all three rhetors situate the values within particular historical situations that will resonate with the audience, the primary period being the founding of the United States.  This allows the terms to take on more emotional value as those in the audience can directly connect their cause with the cause of the early patriots.  Callahan and the flag make the connection to a very specific group of patriots, that is the independent militias comprised of ordinary citizens that fought against the British.  In the same way, those in the Tea Party identify as ordinary citizens doing their patriotic duty-- fighting for their liberty and freedom.  

Works Cited

O’Donnell, Christine. “There are more of us then there are of them.” Values Voter Summit. Washington D.C. 17 Sept. 2010. Youtube. Web. 6 Nov. 2010. <http://www.youtube.com/?v=3rLBwcajDN8&feature=related>.

Callahan, Mike. "We Are The Modern Day Patriots." Web log post. Tea Party Patriots. Tea Party Patriots, 26 Oct. 2010. Web. 11 Mar. 2011.

“Don’t Tread on Me.”