I the People
The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States
Description:... "Moving from the early 1960s to the presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump, I, The People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States draws on theoretical work in rhetorical studies and political theory to examine a variety of texts ranging from speeches and campaign advertisements to news reports and political pamphlets, to outline the populist character of conservatism in the United States. Johnson's study makes several contributions to this robust and thriving area of research and scholarship. It argues that conservatism is not a coherent, studious ideology: rather, conservatism names a particular brand of victim-focused, white and male identity politics that exerts disproportionate influence on American politics and ever-tightening dominion over the Republican Party. I, The People emphasizes that discussions of the intellectual character of American conservatism should be mindful of its populist nature, which often limits the potential for conservative intellectuals to shape and control the very movement to which they belong. The study also challenges the long tradition of scholarship on conservatism that celebrates this tradition's seeming multiplicity, especially the tendency to suggest conservatives are uneasy with capitalism. While some self-identified conservatives oppose capitalist materialism, in practice conservatism's populist vocabulary has tilted the grammar of the United States in favor of a 'freedom' friendly to the market. Such 'freedom' is defined against some parts of the state's regulatory apparatus and/or a coalition of marginal persons thought to embody threats to national unity. In practice, because conservatism traditionally relies on negative definition to imagine its exclusion from the American political system, American conservatism ends up defining both 'the people' and the market as forces with a mutual skepticism of an overweening political order. Johnson also tackles the suggestion that conservatives learned to practice identity politics from social progressives. From the beginning, conservatism was an identity politics. U.S. conservatism relied on a rhetoric of victimhood, whether critiquing the liberal Cold War consensus or fears about Barack Obama's electoral success. Finally, the manuscript makes an important contribution to conversations about populism. Just because conservatism invokes 'the people' does not make it a collective, public-facing enterprise. 'The people' of conservatism is fundamentally hostile to the idea of the public, and any study of populism should account for the way that conservatism plays on a hostility to democracy with sources in the infrastructure of the United States itself"--
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