USA Today - "The Tea Party shutdown"

From the October 2nd USA Today editorial clarifying that the government shutdown is not the result of both parties in Congress behaving badly; rather the shutdown is entirely attributable to the Tea Party "fringe".  The editorial board notes:

This shutdown, the first in 17 years, isn't the result of two parties acting equally irresponsibly. It is the product of an increasingly radicalized Republican Party, controlled by a disaffected base that demands legislative hostage-taking in an effort to get what it has not been able to attain by the usual means: winning elections. 

Call it the Tea Party shutdown. The group will wear the badge proudly.

Pressed by this uncompromising fringe, Republicans leaders in the House are making demands that are both preposterous and largely unrelated to budgetary matters in return for keeping government running. Most absurdly, they want President Obama to undermine the health care law that he ran on in 2008 and 2012, and now considers his signature domestic accomplishment.

No president of either party could accept that kind of badgering. No president should. (Emphasis mine).

More fanatical (as opposed to useful or practical) Tea Party opposition to the symbolic Obama devil - in this case "Obamacare".  And USA Today also points out that this is coming from the "disaffected base" of the party - which is a primary component of a fanatical movement (the disaffected audience) according to Eric Hoffer.

A reporter for MSNBC (find name) similarly noted last week that those in opposition are "True Believers" who really do believe Obamacare is dangerous - it is not merely a political strategy to oppose the Democrats.  

Which is even scarier - because as Hoffer so clearly outlines, fanatical movements cannot be persuaded by reason and logic because they are not concerned about the rational basis of a policy position. There can be no compromise for them because they are on a "holy quest" that is more important than any practical policy concern.  True Believers will sacrifice anything for their Holy Cause and for the Tea Party this is opposing "the devil" Obama and all of his works (e.g. Obamacare).

 So in this case, what gets sacrificed to the "holy cause" that Hoffer explains is the American budget and the entire functioning of the government.  Nevermind how much this hurts workers and citizens who are furloughed or denied access to federal landmarks because of the shutdown.  The Tea Party doesn't care:  we are just collateral damage in their holy quest to oppose their devil (i.e. Obama).

My 2 cents:

If Speaker Boehner is waiting for this disaffected base to come around and support a straight vote on the budget, it will never happen.  He'll have to take a stand and split the party into two distinguishable components:  The GOP (who cares about America and Americans) and The Tea Party (who care about nothing but their fanatical quest to oppose President Obama).  Perhaps faced with the choice of being part of the un-American Tea Party or part of an American GOP, there could be a shift for some into the "American" brotherhood.

Symbolically, rhetorically, that is the only solution to the fanatical Tea Party problem in the GOP and Congress.

Don't hold your breath.  Everytime Boehner has had a chance to jettison the Tea Party and elevate the GOP he has balked.  I can't help but wonder - what are they holding over his head that he is so paralyzed by their influence?  Is remaining Speaker of the House so important that he will collude and empower the fringe in order to assure his position - thus refusing to become part of the solution (the American GOP) and joining the problem (the anti-American Tea party).  Is he really that weak?

How does he not get that Americans love a hero more than they love House Speakers?  Directing his party to do a straight up and down vote on the budget and the debt ceiling for the good of America makes him a hero.  Not doing so just makes him a Tea Party tool.

Welcome to the Rhetoric Goat!

Welcome!

Eric Covington and I started this blog in the Spring of 2010 as we prepared to see Sarah Palin speak at the first Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, Tn.  Thanks to the generosity of then MTSU Associate Dean of Liberal Arts, Mark Byrnes, we had been able to purchase two tickets to the dinner and her keynote speech at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel.  We started this blog as a place to talk about our ideas and refer others who might be interested in what we were studying, too.

This all grew out of a class project that developed in my COMM 4650 (Rhetorical theory, history, and criticism) class in the Spring of 2009.  On April 15th, the first ever "Tea Party" rallies were held around the country, and I was fascinated - pretty soon everyone was.  What on earth were they protesting?  Why?  What was their goal?

What immediately caught our attention were the anti-Obama signs that dominated these events.  Was the Tea Party FOR something or were they just AGAINST newly elected President Obama?

I assigned the class to read Eric Hoffer's work on "the True Believer" and his theory of Mass Movements.  We had some great discussions looking at the Tea Party as well as the "Hope" campaign of Obama.  Did they fit the criteria Hoffer described?  How so?  Why or why not?  And who cares, anyway?

We had also already discussed in class the Republican party's challenge to re-brand themselves following their defeat in the 2008 Presidential election.  How would they use rhetoric to constitute a new identity?  What would they include, what would they change, who would be the voices of leadership?

So naturally, these discussions led us to consider if the Tea Party was going to be  the new face of the Republican party.  Little did we know in the Spring of 2009 how our curiosity about these topics would become political reality in the U.S. throughout the summer at the HealthCare Town Hall meetings and then throughout the next year as the Congress debated Health Care Reform.  And then, in the Fall of 2010, the Tea Party made its formal debut in American politics by capturing a number of Congressional seats.

So the initial insight that prompted me to involve my students in the study of this (then completely) new movement turned out to be amazingly prophetic.  And long before the 2010 mid-term election, we had some insights and predictions gained through rhetorical criticism papers completed for the rhetoric class.  Eric's paper - an analysis of Tea Party ideographs - won the top undergraduate paper award at TCA in 2009.  He continued his research with me during an Independent Study in the Fall of 2009 and the formal paper he finished and submitted was accepted for presentation at the annual Theodore Clevenger Undergraduate Honors conference at the annual SSCA regional convention.

My own work was focused on the application of Hoffer's ideas to the Tea Party movement.  First this required me to turn Hoffer's thoughts about audiences and rhetorical strategies into a theory of fanatical rhetoric.  Then I had to determine how or if it fit the Tea Party movement (and later the OccupyWallStreet movement).  This research and rhetorical theory development is what I am working on now and my papers working through this development have been competitively selected for three major regional conferences (SSCA and CSCA).

I was also interviewed for the NCA online journal, Communication Currents, in the Spring of 2011 about my theories and my perspective on the Tea Party and their "violence-flavored rhetoric" (which was my term for it).  You can watch that interview here:

So throughout the years since we started it in 2010, this blog has become a "dumping ground" of sorts for things we/I found in research and internet journies that related to the study and the development of the fanatical rhetorical theory.  We also share it with others who are interested in studying the Tea Party movement as a "library" of sources.  It is certainly not complete nor does it even have any organization at this time; but the blog gets a significant amount of traffic every month, so somebody must find it useful.

If you search the archives you will find the actual blog posts I wrote along the way describing and explaining what we were seeing rhetorically in the Tea Party.  Most of those posts were in early 2010, but there have been a number of them since then, commenting on signficant developments as the Tea Party gained power.

What tickles us is how right we were.  Our insights may seem like "common sense" now, but they surely weren't in 2009-2010 when this study began.  It's a useful reminder for us about following that "hunch" when it strikes.  I thought this was going to be a huge rhetorical development in American politics, and it was.  It still is.

It's not over.  So stay tuned . . .

Feel free to leave us comments!

p.s. if you want to know the story behind the name, you can find it at the very beginning of the blog - February, 2010.

"The Poignantly Frustrated" . . .

Over and over I keep coming back to this quote by Eric Hoffer about Mass (fanatical) Movements:

“A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness, and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves – and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.” (p. 41)

Although I am still neither a supporter or opponent of OWS, I am still also puzzled by their lack of practicality and their refusal to engage the democratic process as a mechanism of change. In this sense they are significantly different from the Tea Party who doggedly and successfully used existing democratic processes to effect changes they desired by electing candidates who would represent their values and working to defeat candidates who do not. OWS, however, identifies and prides itself on standing outside of the democratic process. In this sense, OWS more fundamentally fits Hoffer's profile of the True Believer and "the poignantly frustrated."

It also earns them the label of "radical" by non-supporters and presents a significant credibility challenge for attracting "mainstream" supporters.

Hmmm....

Tea Party Devil and Holy Cause redux: "I hope he fails!"

Once again, I assert that the "devil" of the fanatical Tea Party movement is Barack Obama - and Limbaugh's 2009 rallying cry of "I hope he fails!" is their primary identity, their fanatical "Holy Cause" and their one true political goal. There is nothing about this movement rhetoric that is rooted in reality and reaching toward a better future for all Americans. This is once again, as always, about demonizing and obstructing the "un-American" "tyrannical" "socialist" "dictatorial" President of the United States, Barack Obama.

(The democratically elected, majority-winning POTUS, mind you - but, hey, let's not let that annoying fact get in our fanatical way).

Their "Baracknophobia" and fanatical Holy Cause to defeat Obama the devil doesn't get any clearer than this:

"Tea Party Nation urges businesses to stop hiring in order to hurt Obama"

Right Wing Watch writes:

"Tea Party Nation sent to their members today a message from activist Melissa Brookstone urging businesspeople to “not hire a single person” to protest the Obama administration’s supposed “war against business and my country.” Brookstone writes that business owners should stop hiring new employees in order to stand up to “this new dictator,” the “global Progressive socialist movement,” Hollywood, the media and Occupy Wall Street."

Brookstone writes:

Resolved that: The Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Senate, in alliance with a global Progressive socialist movement, have participated in what appears to be a globalist socialist agenda of redistribution of wealth, and the waging of class warfare against our constitutional republic's heritage of individual rights, free market capitalism, and indeed our Constitution itself, with the ultimate goal of collapsing the U.S. economy and globalizing us into socialism.

Resolved that: President Obama has seized what amount to dictatorial powers to bypass our Congress, and that because the Congress is controlled by a Progressive socialist Senate that will not impeach one of their kind, they have allowed this and yielded what are rightfully congressional powers to this new dictator.

Resolved that: By their agenda and actions, those in our government who swore oaths to protect and defend our Constitution have committed treason against the United States.

Resolved that: The current administration and Democrat majority in the Senate, in conjunction with Progressive socialists from all around the country, especially those from Hollywood and the left leaning news media (Indeed, most of the news media.) have worked in unison to advance an anti-business, an anti-free market, and an anti-capitalist (anti-individual rights and property ownership) agenda.

…

Resolved that: Our President, the Democrats-Socialists, most of the media, and most of those from Hollywood, have now encouraged and supported "Occupy" demonstrations in our streets, which are now being perpetrated across the globe, and which are being populated by various marxists, socialists and even communists, and are protesting against business, private property ownership and capitalism, something I thought I'd never see in my country, in my lifetime.

I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped.

And there you have it . . . bat-shit-crazy redux. The Tea Party fanaticism is back and more hyperbolic and vitriolic than ever. Now our democratically elected President - in cahoots with OccupyWallStreet - has created a war within America - "I...resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped."

This will surely be interpreted as a call to the Holy Cause (and most likely violence) for the nuttiest wingnuts - mark my words.

This.is.not.good.

President Obama as rhetorical devil of the Tea Party . . .

This billboard recently covered up by the Tea Party movement makes an important point for our case here:

Hoffer makes clear that a mass movement of "true believers" must have a clear anti-thesis to create the essential identity of the movement. He states, "Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil."

I still maintain that being "anti-Obama" is the primary rhetorical identification of the Tea Party movement, and it has been since day one. Although certainly there are racist elements and members of the Tea Party movement, the identification is not necessarily racist per se, but it IS essentially primarily and anti-Obama. Thoughts?

The Tea Party's frustrated state of mind . . .

This weekend, the front page of USA Today features a story on the Tea Party. The reporters, Page and Jagoda, open the article by noting:

"The Tea Party is less a classical political movement than a frustrated state of mind."

I've been saying since April 15th of 2009 that the Tea Party is what Eric Hoffer describes as a "Mass Movement" comprised of "True Believers." This was my original hypothesis and theory that my students set out to investigate with me in COMM 4650, and I specifically addressed the issue of frustration as a key element of their rhetorical movement when Eric and I were preparing to attend the first annual Tea Party convention in Nashville in February, 2010.

Hoffer specifically states in the introduction to his work, "The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature of Mass Movements" (1951) that:

“This book concerns itself chiefly with the active, revivalist phase of mass movements. This phase is dominated by the true believer the [person] of fanatical fairth who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause - and an attempt is made to trace [their] genesis and outline [their nature]. Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.” (p. xii)

Eric's study of the rhetorical ideographs that structure and inspire the Tea Party movement was one piece of the puzzle for understanding HOW the frustrated are being persuaded to join this particular mass movement. One of the primary rhetorical strategies of Tea Party advocates is the use of a new political ideograph he identified as "security". By fueling an already frustrated public with repeated and ever greater fears for their economic and homeland security, popular Conservative pundits like Savage, Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and Palin have been very successful in promoting and growing the Tea Party mass movement.

The Tea Party really has no consistent or coherent political agenda other than to fanatically oppose the current political status quo and many members "...acknowledge they aren't really sure what that allegiance means". However, I realized early on (ala Hoffer) that this particular movement mostly creates identification specifically and consistently through antithesis to President Barack Obama more than any other theme or goal, making him the scapegoat and target for their insecurities and frustrations. Whatever else the Tea Party may be, our first-hand experience with members at the first national Tea Party convention in Nashville confirmed for us the personal and vehement hatred and opposition to the current POTUS by members attending the convention.

While some have chalked this anti-thesis and opposition up to racism or fascism, those answers are too simple to explain the growing membership and rise of the Tea Party movement. Not all of the Tea Party members are racist per se, but racists are certainly an easy target audience for this particular mass movement. And certainly the members of the Tea Party do not consider themselves fascist, instead projecting this quality onto Barack Obama (another fear tactic).

Instead, the more comprehensive answer to the question of the Tea Party movement must investigate the antithetical rhetorical identifications and the FANATICAL nature of its rhetoric as well as the insecurities and frustrations of its "true believer" membership.

"Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements . . . "

Summary - Eric Hoffer "The True Believer" (1951)

Pasted below is the summary handout I've used in my rhetoric classes to begin the discussions of Eric Hoffer's work on True Believers and Mass Movements. I invite you to read through it and see if you think any of these characteristics apply to popular Conservative Talk Radio/Fox News personalities (aka "wingnuts") and/or the Tea Party movements we have witnessed since Barack Obama became President of the United States. Note particularly Hoffer's key insights at the end - and the essential insight that a mass movement need not have a god, but it MUST have a devil. It is this rhetorical anti-thesis that creates their primary identification as a group. "We are who we are because we are not THAT."

For Hitler's Nazi Germany, they were who they were because they were not Jewish (or any other non-Aryan group). Hitler himself remarked that if the Jews had not existed, he would have had to invent them (to be the devil) for the Nazi identity.

So . . .I wonder: who would Tea Partiers be if there was no Barack Obama?

My friend Genma related her experiences at the convention to me last night...and she was simply amazed that the group was so tightly focused on Obama as the (un-American, un-Christian) devil.

Indeed, this morning the keynote address at the convention is titled: "A comparison of the current administration to Marxist dictators of Latin America." (Okay, I'm stumped. Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama is like a Marxist dictator because . . . ???)

Note the determination to associate President Obama with anything "un-American" . . . birthers say he isn't American outright. Others simply keep calling him a "socialist" while still others refuse to believe the man is a Christian. This repeated mantra of "un-American Obama" serves a clear purpose in the identity (and motivation and fervor) of the movement.

I'll leave it to @coviner to tell you about what he found in his ideograph research and the connection between popular Conservative pundits and these movements and the rhetorical motivation that works to fuel this association and fanatical opposition to the President.

_____________________________________________________________

COMM 4650 – Long

Hoffer, E. (1951). The true believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements. New York: Harper and Row.

Definition: The true believer = “. . . the man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause” (p. xii)

Rationale:

“It is necessary for most of us these days to have some insight into the motives and responses of the true believer. For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping up the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities. (p. xiii)

“The assumption that mass movements have many traits in common does not imply that all movements are equally beneficent or poisonous. The book passes no judgments, and expresses no preferences. It merely tries to explain…(p. xiii)

Hypotheses:

“Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.” (p. xii)

“ . . . a mass movement . . . appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.” (p. 12)

Potential Followers and ‘True Believers’ = The Disaffected

“Though the disaffected are found in all walks of life, they are most frequent in the following categories: a) the poor, b) misfits, c) outcasts, d) minorities, e) adolescent youth, f) the ambitious, g) those in the grip of some vice or obsession, h) the impotent (in body or mind), i) the inordinately selfish, j) the bored, k) the sinners.” (p. 25)

Content vs. Form:

“A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness, and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves – and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.” (p. 41)

Preface: Part III - United Action and Self-Sacrifice (pp. 58-61)

When we ascribe the success of a movement to it faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, and ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice. It is perhaps impossible to understand the nature of mass movements unless it is recognized that their chief preoccupation is to foster, perfect and perpetuate a facility for united action and self-sacrifice. To know the processes by which such a facility is engendered Is to grasp the inner logic of most of the characteristics attitudes and practices of an active mass movement.

“The reader is expected to quarrel with much that is said in this part of the book….this is not an authoritative textbook. It is a book of thoughts, and it does not shy away from half-truths so long as they seem to hint at a new approach and help to formulate new questions. ‘To illustrate a principle,’ says Bagehot, ‘you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.” (pp. 60).

Factors promoting self-sacrifice (pp. 62-90):

1. identification with a collective whole (44-46)

2. make-believe (47)

3. deprecation of the present (48-55)

4. “things which are not” -

5. doctrine – not meaning but certitude (58-59)

6. fanaticism (60-63)

“What surprises one, when listening to the frustrated as the decry the present and all its works, is the enormous joy they derive from doing so. Such delight cannot come form the mere venting of a grievance. There must be something more – and there is. By expiating upon the incurable baseness and vileness of the times, the frustrated soften their feeling of failure and isolation….(p75)

“The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude…presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth. If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine….simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer.” (pp. 80-81).

“The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual sources – our of his rejected self – but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. The passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the sources of all virtue and strength….He sacrifices his life to prove his worth.” (p. 85)

“The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to reason or his moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause.” (p. 85).

Mass Movements vs. Armies (p. 88-90).

Unifying agents (pp. 91 – 128):

1. hatred

2. imitation

3. persuasion and coercion

4. leadership

5. action

6. suspicion

Key insights/Summary from The True Believer (P. Bsumek, James Madison University, 2000)

• 1. We may be godless, but we are not irreligious.

• 2. Mass organizations appeal to us through appeals of self- advancement.

• 3. Mass movements offer and in fact require self-renunciation.

• 4. The logical content of the message is irrelevant.

• 5. A mass movement should have a god, but it must have a devil. (p.91)

• Characteristics of a devil:

• Devil is ugly.

• Devil is powerful

• Devil is strangely attractive

• Devil is omnipresent

• 6. If you want to stop a movement, you cannot argue against it logically.

• 7. Movements offer freedom, but only deliver brotherhood.

• 8. Proselytizing as a sign of doubt not of truth.

"We need to read Eric Hoffer . . . "

This particular rhetorical criticism project began April 15th, 2009 - the day I was late to my rhetoric class because I was fascinated watching the tea party protests on the noonday local news in Nashville. I was also following blogger Oliver Willis as he began live tweeting from one in Washington, DC. And all I could think about this rhetorical phenomenon as I drove to class was: "we need to read Eric Hoffer."

I began reading and discussing Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" with my rhetoric classes in the Fall of 2001. After 9/11, we spent a great deal of time talking and making sense. And one thing that just didn't make sense was the fanatical nature of Al-Qaeda. It also seemed to me that we needed to be mindful of our own nationalism; that our collective bonding in the face of such horror must not deterioriate into blind fanatical rhetoric and behavior of our own. So, because it helped us make sense of this rhetoric of our time, we would read Eric Hoffer's classic analysis of fanatical social movements at the end of every semester through the spring of 2004.

I've since changed Universities, and I've been teaching other courses since then, so I didn't include Hoffer in my course syllabus when I was assigned to teach a rhetoric course again last spring. It simply didn't seem as necessary to consider his work that winter because fanaticism per se was not so much in the public eye then. Mostly it was celebration and exultation following the election of Mr. Barack Obama as POTUS. And President Obama's rhetoric is not True Believer/fanatic rhetoric. It may be many things, but it is not that. So, I edited Hoffer readings and discussions out of my syllabus in favor of trying some different learning activities that are currently more in vogue with educators (i.e. group projects).

But then came Rush "I hope he fails" Limbaugh . . . and the army of True Believers that followed him. They had a very clear fanatical "devil" = any and all things un-American. And that's fine as far as it goes - I am pretty passionately patriotic, too. But they weren't standing up for American values, they were standing against a very specific un-American devil = the President of the United States, Barack Obama (and his leagues of evil liberal minions).

Jon Stewart captured and confronted the spirit of this developing rhetorical community quite well when he said on the April 7th Daily Show episode "Baracknphobia": "I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing...See, when the guy you disagree with gets elected, he's prob going to do things you disagree with...That's not tyranny, that's Democracy. See, now you're in the MINORITY. It's supposed to taste like a shit taco."


This demonization rhetoric characteristic of True Believer movements intensified throughout the spring, reaching it's first peak and public organization with the Tea Party protests on April 15th, once again prompting a "perspective by incongruity" from Jon Stewart on "Tea Party Tyranny".

To make the President of the United States and the US Government into an Un-American rhetorical devil like this is the hallmark of True Believers and Mass Movements, ala Eric Hoffer. And it was this rhetoric - this increasingly vehement, vitriolic, vengeful and intensely political action - toward our constitutionally elected leaders in the spring of 2009 - that made me throw out the vogue but bland course syllabus and start seriously discussing rhetorical current events with my students again. We voted to scrap the group projects and read Eric Hoffer and take a closer, academic look at this rising mass movement against the POTUS and US Government as our real time rhetorical criticism for the remainder of the semester.

My co-blogger, @coviner, was one of those students - and he has done great research on this topic with me since then, culminating in two conference papers that have used the tools of rhetorical criticism to dispassionately and academically investigate this rhetoric. He began by analyzing popular Conservative pundits, and then turned his attention to the tea parties and other rising true believer voices. His analysis of their ideographs and my application of Hoffer's ideas to this rhetorical discourse community form the core of our ongoing rhetorical criticism project seeking to understand the new social movements that have grown since the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

As luck would have it, the first Tea Party Nation convention is being held in Nashville, and we have the opportunity to study some of the discourse first hand. Thanks to our generous and adventurous assistant Dean of Liberal Arts, and the University mission to support student-faculty scholarship, we have two tickets to their dinner, to enrich and extend the rhetorical analysis we've established this far. We'll share that experience here - as well as some other insights from our ongoing rhetorical criticism project. We invite and welcome your thoughts and ideas, too.

Next up . . . a summary of Eric Hoffer's theories of True Believers and Mass Movements as a method for rhetorical criticism.