Centrist Rhetoric by de Velasco Antonio; Velasco Antonio De; De Velasco Antonio

Author:de Velasco, Antonio; Velasco, Antonio De; De Velasco, Antonio [Velasco, Antonio de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

“The Audience for This Is Huge”

Oklahoma City and the Wages of Transcendence

In chapters 1 and 2, I explored the implications of a proposition set forth in the introduction: In the midst of grounding contrastive appeals to advance particular political objectives, the center has long served as a viable topos for the rhetorical production of political transcendence. As it arranges pleas to move beyond faction, centrist rhetoric nevertheless insinuates divisions into public life in a struggle for assent and strategic advantage with other appeals. The broader significance of this claim about the rhetorical tension inherent in the center arises in resemblance to a similar tension found in democratic rhetoric more broadly: inclusions and exclusions, forms of insight and forms of blindness—they all intermingle when democratic imaginings take flight in the agon of political rhetoric.

Thus, as Russell Hanson and others have rightly pointed out, our “ideas about democracy and the practices implied by them [are] forged in and through political rhetoric.” As such, our working assumptions about the character and limits of democracy are not merely “ideas” at all, but situated acts of intervention into the world; they express a transcendent vision, ironically, as they promote “the desirability of particular political institutions or practices” over others.1 In the vector of the desire for one kind of politics over another, for one set of goals instead of another, divisions take form alongside reaffirmations of the possibility of democratic transcendence more broadly. Centrist rhetoric, I am arguing, epitomizes this rhetorical mélange well. As political actors hail a middle space apart from divisions of party, of race, and of class, they engage in discursive practices that chafe against the realization of the very consensuses they seek to forge.

Indeed, the higher refuge from the partisan implied by transcendence is also one from which to attack with purpose, from which to call to task those who will not themselves agree to “rise above” division. This pattern of urging transcendence while assailing those who seem to contravene transcendence recalls Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s homage to “the spirit of the center—the spirit of human decency, opposing the extremes of tyranny.”2 Contrasting what he called the “fighting faith” of the center to the “extremes” of left and right, Schlesinger used the center as a point of stability from which to defend democracy against threats, both domestic and international, defined by their intemperance, their devotion to ideology, and their inclination toward violence. Such threats were not only threats to particular policies or objectives, but to reason and democracy.

Did centrist rhetoric in lead up to Clinton’s election to the presidency perform a similar “fighting” function? In part, yes. The Cleveland DLC speech used the center not only to form the vision of a “new” politics, but to name an adversary in terms of its perilous power to divide and distort. If the “idle rhetoric that has paralyzed American politics” were to continue, Clinton warned, the American Dream could perish as politics grew increasingly irrelevant to people’s deepest needs and wishes.3 In the

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