Persona and the Modern Republican: Constituting and Deconstituting Republican Ideals in Two Republican Political Ads

Ronald Reagan’s iconic, 1984 advertisement, “Morning in America,” has served as an ideological pole star for Republican identity for the past four decades. More recently, the political action committee, The Lincoln Project, a group of ex-Republicans, produced a number of ads highly critical of President Donald Trump’s administration. One specific ad, “Mourning in America,” uses the form of the original 1984 ad to communicate a set of radically different ideas from the original. This article fuses Black’s second persona and Wander’s third persona to Charland’s idea of constitutive rhetoric to explore how “Morning in America” constitutes a Republican identity via a matrimonial symbolism that connects candidate to a gauzy, constructed community and imagined culture. We argue that the Lincoln Project’s “Mourning in America” deconstitutes the very ideals promulgated in the original ad through a stark funereal symbolism. The implications of this symbolism on the Republican identity are discussed in the conclusion.

From Save The Crew to Saved The Crew: Constitutive Rhetoric, Myth, and Fan Opposition to Sports Team Relocation

Sports franchise relocation is a hallmark of the American sports landscape. Teams relocate at their owners’ whims, leaving fans with little more to do than voice their angst. When the Columbus Crew of Major League Soccer announced in 2017 that ownership was set to move the team to Austin, a group of the Crew’s most ardent supporters initially seemed resigned to the franchise’s predetermined fate. However, over the course of months, those fans embarked on a grass roots campaign that generated attention worldwide and, ultimately, convinced a new ownership group to purchase the team and keep it in Columbus. This paper analyzes the efforts of these supporters through the lens of constitutive rhetoric, an ideologically-based concept that can galvanize disparate communities, shift their collective perspective, and set them on a course for action. In using this approach, the Save The Crew movement used myth to deploy a unique rhetorical power that successfully opposed the powerful capitalist logic of team relocation.

Authorizing Authority: Constitutive Rhetoric and the Poetics of Re-enactment in Cicero’s Pro Lege Manilia

This paper studies the persuasive strategies in Pro Lege Manilia in conversation with contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing especially on the perspective of constitutive discourse and the interaction between what is in the text and what is outside. Prior receptions of Pompey by internal audiences double as sites of panegyric image construction, which was itself then instrumentalized to influence external groups. The speech self-referentially thematizes this production of authority, disclosing its rhetorical mechanisms as both performed and performative text. Cicero himself, in the process of proclaiming Pompey, crucially participates in the manufacture and mediation of the image, and in constituting ideological cohesion.

The Jeweled Jurist

In this article, I argue that the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum is a persuasive legal text composed in the late antique aesthetic, “the Jeweled Style.” Though the Collatio has been strongly criticized for its apparent lack of sophistication, it represents a legal, textual practice in which the author created an intricate legal display by compiling quotations from the Pentateuch and from Roman legal material. The Jeweled Style, with its themes of juxtaposition, discontinuity, and referentiality, is a useful lens to view the Collatio because it helps us appreciate the aesthetic priorities of the author of the Collatio. Having acknowledged the Jeweled Style in the Collatio, I employ James Boyd White's notion of law as “constitutive rhetoric” to explain why an artistic aesthetic would appear in legal practice. In White's definition, law is an argumentative practice composed in culturally specific settings. These settings condition the practice of law so much so that, when we analyze legal texts, we should be sensitive to their cultural contexts.