Emotional boundaries in Tea Party Rhetoric
The Tea Party emerged as a national movement in February of 2009 when 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 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 component. In this project, I will take a closer look at the emotional appeals that appear in certain Tea Party discourses. Specifically, I will conduct a comparative analysis of two sample discourses coming out of the Tea Party movement around the time of the 2010 midterm election: the first, a speech by former Senate candidate, Christine O’Donnell and the second, a blog post that appeared on the Tea Party Patriots website on October 26, six days before the 2010 election. Both rhetors attempt to provoke anger and fear in their audience by portraying specific values as either threatened or already violated by an ill-defined offender. The reason for this ill-defined offender is a rhetorical strategy used by the rhetors; in the discourses, fear and anger slide from object to object, amplifying and gaining emotional value with each move.
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. The desired behavior is to get voters to . The interpretation that leads to this behavior 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 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, and Obamacare. Listing these policies places her audience back to 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” Nussbum explains that Aristotle argues that rational beliefs precede emotions in his work, Rhetoric: “In order to have emotions such as fear and grief, one must first have beliefs of a certain kind.” Nussbum also writes 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.” 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 seem to be liberty and freedom. 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 pathematas. Longmaker and Walker define pathematas as “vivid presentation and symbols with strong emotional resonance.” Terms can also act as pathematas. In O’Donnell’s speech, liberty and freedom or emotionally resonant terms situated in a particular associative network. These two terms have a built-in emotional resonance with any American audience due to their long history of use in American rhetorical discourse. O’Donnell does some extra leg work to make sure that these terms are associated with positive events in American history. She connects them with two eras in American history: 1) the founding years and 2) America circa 1980s. 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.” America during the 1980s was also a time when freedom and liberty thrived. O’Donnell describes America during the 1980s as a refuge from communism, a refuge that “only freedom can build.” O’Donnell marries these values with the founding documents (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Federalist Papers).
Fear transitions to anger as O’Donnell reveals that these values 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 elses voluntary action.” The anger turns to 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 time leading up to the emergence of the Tea Party were “dark days,” and the Such emotionally charged language heightens the audience’s response to what would otherwise be straightforward and dull description. Longmaker and Walker (quote about pejorative language).
Another emotional element exists in O’Donnell’s speech. Fear, anger, and disdain-- the three negative emotions that O’Donnell provokes, have more than one object. In her paper “name,” Sara Ahmed discusses the concept of emotional economies . She provides the example of this occurring in a passage from the website of the Aryan nation. In the passage, hate circulates between a variety of non-white bodies, sliding from the blank to the blank to the blank. 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.” Furthermore, Ahmed describes a process by which A similar pattern of economic disdain and sticky symbols occurs in O’Donnell’s speech. The emotion moves from object to object, 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,” which is described as a much 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. # out of # times that she uses the pronoun “they” or “some,” it’s unclear who she’s referring to. This furthers the idea of an indeterminate object of disdain that allows the emotion to circulate freely and fluidly throughout O’Donnell’s speech. This pattern also 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 through O’Donnell’s circulation of signs that they become disdainful.
Ahmed argues that the emotions of love and hate are closely tied. Negative emotions felt towards an “other” usually have corresponding positive emotions that are directed towards another group or person. Tea Party values--liberty and freedom-- are those things that the Tea Party loves. The Tea Party represents and believes in these values, making them a source of love. Ahmed describes love and hate’s symbiotic relationship: (quote). In the same way, O’Donnell’s disdain for the “other” is just as much motivated by love for what the Tea Party represents as it is motivated by disdain for what the “other” represents. The emotional reading of O’Donnell’s speech binds imagined subjects together Just as O’Donnell conveys disdain through pejorative language, so does she employ honorific language to describe 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, eliciting reverence and love from the audience.
The following blog post appeared on the Tea Party Patriots website on October 26, 2010. The poster goes by the name Mike Callahan. He writes to encourage fellow Tea Partiers to vote. To be continued....
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