Two recent books on the relation between the rhetoric of political discourse and American democratic politics explore the ways that language can shape political outcomes. Political culture has been a woolly subject for political scientists, specifically because explanatory models of political culture tend to oppose the more predominant institutional models of explanation. But both books convincingly make the claim that political culture can and is shaped by the rhetoric of political elites and that this has a deep impact on the ways in which political phenomena are interpreted and understood in a collective sense. Both analyze political discourse and seek to show how it impacts, shapes, and can even predict certain outcomes in political life.

Carol Winkler frames her analysis of presidential discourse on terrorism in the post–World War II era by making a distinction between what she terms a “crime narrative,” which frames terrorist acts as the acts of isolated individuals, and a “war narrative,” which casts terrorism as an ideological struggle between two opposing value-oriented political extremes. Both narratives become central in understanding the ways that presidential discourse has affected the formulation of policy and the ways that Americans themselves understand their relation to the outside world. Presidential discourse on terrorism can be broken down into three different, but interdependent, levels of analysis: “labels,” terms through which the public can associate an act or event “with a particular ideological orientation” (p. 8); “narratives,” which frame the interpretations of events in a particular way; and “ideographs” which are “foundational values that serve as a basis of a culture's identity” (p. 12).

Throughout the course of In the Name of Terrorism, Winkler shows—by close readings of the public papers of the various presidents, their speeches and addresses, and other internal memos and documents—how the discourse of terrorism changes during different presidential administrations. During the Vietnam War, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon all utilized what Winkler refers to as the “Cold War narrative” to understand and communicate about terrorist acts. This narrative viewed terrorist acts as not simply acts of isolated individuals but, rather, acts associated with the ideological conflict between communism and American democracy. This discourse changed with the Carter administration and its response to the Iranian hostage crisis. In order to contain a broader conflict with the Muslim world, Winkler argues, the Carter administration labeled the seizing of American hostages in Iran as a terrorist act, but chose to frame it within a “crime narrative” that focused attention on the specific acts of the terrorists, thereby limiting the scope of the implications of the act.

It is under Reagan's presidency, however, that Winkler sees terrorism turn into an ideograph, one that will have profound implications for the remainder of her analysis. Reagan's rhetorical response to the increase in terrorism during his administration—the linkage of drug traffickers with terrorists—was to reframe the idea of terrorists as neither state actors nor misunderstood freedom fighters, but as “dangerous enemies who plagued American society” (p. 75). This shift in the framing of the terrorist label effected a shift from the “crime narrative” of the Carter administration to the broader ideological terrain of American principles and values and all those who would seek to destroy it. Here, terrorism becomes an ideograph: an entrenched signifier with deep ideological resonance and “a linguistic resource available for all who would follow” (p. 95).

This has grave consequences for the present, as Winkler points out. In the end, she finds that Democratic presidents employ “crime narratives” and thereby seek to confine the scope of conflict, whereas Republican ones tend to utilize “war narratives” that enlarge the scope of conflict beyond the actors themselves into broader political and sometimes—as in the current administration—civilizational terms. Democratic presidents have tended, as a result, to leave themselves open to attacks of being too weak on terrorism. Winkler's excellent study shows how presidential rhetoric changes in response to objective events, and the ways that different presidential ideologies shape those events through the kinds of narrative they employ.

This relation between rhetoric and American political self-consciousness is more deeply probed by Robert Ivie in Democracy and America's War on Terror. Ivie's task is to examine what he sees as the degeneration of political rhetoric in American political culture and the erosion of democratic life, and also to construct a new normative argument for deepening democratic politics through a shift in the style of political rhetoric. Unlike Winkler, who uses the analysis of presidential language and discourse as an analytical tool, Ivie has a much broader and more provocative claim: “Our choices are always between one kind of rhetoric and another” (p. 4). This signifies his methodological as well as theoretical perspective. Ivie pursues two separate but interrelated themes: first, the identification of the way that American democratic culture has eroded into a “republic of fear,” or what he also refers to as America's “democratic deficit”; and second, a vision of how to enrich “democratic culture and practice.”

Ivie's central claim is that the rhetoric on terrorism in America reveals our deeper deficit of democratic culture. Only by conceptualizing foreign and domestic “Others” are we able to construct a conception of national identity. Because of the particular forms of rhetoric available to us—grounded deep in the recesses of American politics—we have been forced into a veritable rhetorical cul de sac wherein we are caught in the simplistic, rigid dualism between selves and others, Americans and terrorists, civilized and barbarians. It has given rise to the excesses of nationalism and stubborn unilateralism, and it has not only provided ideological weaponry to elites but also distorted the very ways that Americans understand themselves and, more importantly for Ivie, done so with a restricted rhetorical strategy that constricts newer forms of democratic politics. The “rhetoric of evil,” he claims, becomes predominant over a more “flexible and robust conception of democratic practice” (p. 5).

Ivie traces four interconnected points of argument throughout the text. The first is that America's idea of deliberative democracy—one “reserved for experts and privileged political leaders” (p. 5)—results in what he calls “demophobia,” a fear of the public and of public reason. A second, and related, point is that this results in the rhetorical symbol of a “distempered demos” in American political culture, where Americans see the public as “prone to popular rage and fits of passion, convulsions of factionalism that poison public deliberations” (p. 6). As a result, America's republican institutions were founded on the basis of the “fiction of representation,” rather than on a more expansive form of participatory democracy. This rigid form of political culture leads to a third problem, that of a fear of any kind of political ideology outside liberal democracy and, therefore, to a discourse of war and peace. Universal peace can only be achieved, Ivie claims, “by a desire to expand the domain of liberal democracy in order to contain the forces of disorder” (p. 6). This leads to the fourth and final problem that plagues contemporary American democracy: the creation of a “republic of fear” produced by the previous three problems in American democratic culture, which have now led us to a situation of “open-ended war on international terrorism” (p. 6).

Few would deny that American political rhetoric has often veered toward a populist discourse of fear of terrorism and even, in some respects, an outright racism with respect to certain ethnic and religious groups, both domestically and internationally. But unlike Winkler, whose analysis of presidential rhetoric is clearly linked to her theoretical claims, Ivie lacks sufficient empirical evidence for the broad claims he puts forth. It could be that reading presidential speeches and addresses can give us a glimpse into the messages of the current administration, but to expand this into a broader claim about American political culture is a questionable strategy. History is a good place to look for counterfactuals, especially when we consider the relative lack of xenophobia after the 9/11 attacks in contradistinction to previous eras in American history. (I am thinking here of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Restriction Acts of 1921 and 1924, the Anti-Japanese Alien Land Laws in California during the same period, etc.) Viewed long range, Ivie's claims to the damaging prevalence of the “Other” seems to have weakened as liberal democracy deepened in American history, not the reverse. In addition, the extent to which Americans actually favor aggressive foreign policy is also not clear from most political polls and surveys. The case he makes is hardly cut and dried if one scrutinizes the empirical data; and this should not be a surprise, since his emphasis is wholly on an analysis of discourse (or “rhetoric”) at the expense of institutions, interests, and the ways that—in terms reminiscent of E. E. Schattschneider—elites can pressure certain policy choices that do not harmonize with the broad strokes of public opinion.

Ultimately, Ivie's is not an empirical case study. His intention is to be polemical, to call for a reinvention of democratic thought and practice. To his credit, this is dearly needed, but the central thrust is a critique of the institution and ethos of deliberative, liberal democracy, one formed around republican institutions of representative government. It is an argument that eschews institutional concerns and reduces its theoretical claims to “rhetoric.” This is an all-too-familiar argument from the not-yet-dusty pages of academic postmodernism. The argument stems from Nietzsche's argument that there exists a tension between “rhetoric” and “reason”; and that rationality, in the final analysis—reversing Plato's argument in his Gorgias that philosophy, or reason, was in fact superior to rhetoric—is nothing short of an ideological mask for elite power.

America's democratic culture can be renewed, Ivie claims, by pursuing new rhetorical strategies, opened up to more diversity and expanded to include new forms of difference by embracing an explicitly postmodern notion that emphasizes the decenteredness of liberal democracy as a totalizing narrative in American political culture. In this postmodernist reading, liberal, representative democracy is a hegemonic ideology that, through its dominance in American political culture, ultimately leads to the exclusion of opposing argument, a facile degeneration of political discourse, and a stultifying conformity of thought and action that erodes democratic principles and practice. Of course, one need not look toward postmodernism for such an argument; one can simply recall Louis Hartz's thesis in his 1955 Liberal Tradition in America that as a result of America's “liberal consensus,” times of crisis would lead American liberalism into its political opposite. What institutional form this will take, Ivie does not tell us. Political culture is important, but institutions are as well, and it is questionable whether one can be fruitfully discussed without the other. We are left with the option of an open-ended invention and reinvention of political rhetoric.

Both Winkler and Ivie analyze the rhetorical framing of politics. Winkler's analysis is an insightful case study of the “evolution” of the discourse of terrorism in the post–World War II era, and convincingly shows how discourse can shape the justifications for certain policies taken by different administrations. Ivie's broad claims are provocative and lead us to areas of concern that are insufficiently debated. Each book shows how political scientists can learn a great deal from an examination of political discourse and the way that political culture can constrain, or perhaps even enhance, different aspects of political life and the creation of policy.