Introduction

Wherever we look today it seems that the phenomenon of polarization is on the rise. Whether it’s the ascendance of nationalist parties, the weakening of multinational cohesion, increasing socio-economic inequality, a rekindling of tensions between the West and Russia, or the division of political opinions and attitudes within and between Western societies into dichotomous and mutually exclusive camps—examples of us vs. them frameworks, in-group and out-group dichotomies, and rival camps of public opinion are easy to find. Clearly, the phenomenon of polarization is nothing new: tribal identities have always been central to our social existence, and polarized conceptions of us vs. them have likely been used to frame and shape politics and society since the very beginning. The Latin doctrine of divide et impera (divide and rule) illustrates that division and polarization have been used as strategic tools of governance and warfare at least since Ancient Rome.1

But the concept of polarization seems to have increasing salience in politics, society, and discourse around the world today. In the European Union (EU), divergent opinions have driven politics into polarized camps on issues ranging from immigration to economic integration, European regulations, and national sovereignty. One need only point to the tensions between the European Union and the United Kingdom following Brexit, or the dichotomous positions of some Western EU countries and some Eastern EU countries with regard to refugees and the rule of law. Political, social, and discursive polarization seem to be increasing within individual EU countries as well, as EU-skeptical parties on both political extremes have used highly divisive frameworks and provocative, exaggerated language to help them make electoral gains at the expense of established parties that are seen as more moderate and more centrist. Prominent examples in Scotland, Spain, and Flanders illustrate that separatist movements have also sought to literally divide their countries using similar strategies to drive public opinion formation.2

In the United States, polarization has become an almost universal buzzword when it comes to politics and society. As one recent commentator put it in a detailed article titled “American Politics has Reached Peak Polarization”:

For a long time in American politics, we’ve been trapped in a cycle of ever-escalating political polarization. As measured by voting patterns in the US Congress, the two parties have pulled apart to distances we’ve never seen before. As measured by consistent partisan positioning among voters, the split in the electorate has reached a historic level of divisiveness.3

Others have declared that Americans are living in an “Age of Polarization.”4 Indeed, the sheer quantity of recent scholarly studies on the phenomenon of polarization in American society and politics is impressive. New attention has also been drawn to polarization as a communicative phenomenon, and some of this research will be discussed in depth Chapter 2.5 In his final State of the Union address in 2016, U.S. President Barack Obama bemoaned the divided state of politics and political discourse in America:

Democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice. It doesn’t work if we think that our political opponents are unpatriotic or trying to weaken America. Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise, or when even basic facts are contested, or when we listen only to those who agree with us. Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get all the attention.

As frustration grows, there will be voices urging us to fall back into our respective tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background. We can’t afford to go down that path. It won’t deliver the economy we want. It will not produce the security we want.6

Perhaps one reason that the term polarization has become such a buzzword in recent years is because of its vagueness as a concept. Depending on who you ask and the context in which it is used, the various forms of the word polarization can refer to a state of nature (e.g., the polarized nature of American politics), a process (e.g., increasing or decreasing opinion polarization around a topic), a goal (e.g., when someone tries to polarize), a strategy (of polarization), or a type of communicative artifact (polarizing text). It is also clear that there are differences between everyday uses of the word and academic terminology. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, scholarly concepts of polarization have been particularly common in the fields of political science, psychology, social psychology, and sociology. Over the past 50 years, the concept of polarization has also received considerable interest from communications scholars, and rhetoricians, and a significant portion of this work will be devoted to reviewing this research and integrating it into the contemporary theory of rhetoric.

To provide a brief definition at the start, the following work considers the phenomenon of polarization as a rhetorical strategy that involves using specific textual structures in appropriate contexts to divide an audience into two mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed opinion groups: a positive, virtuous in-group and a negative, evil out-group. Although polarizing communication can certainly be found in other areas of public discourse, this work focuses exclusively on the use of polarizing strategies in political discourse and electoral politics. Ultimately, this work seeks to establish and develop new theoretical and analytical categories for contemporary rhetoric, to update and refine the concept of polarization as a rhetorical strategy, and to illustrate the practical applicability of these theoretical considerations by providing a case study of polarizing strategies in a political movement of significant relevance to contemporary American history: the tea party.

As will be discussed in detail in Chapter 1, such theory building is necessary because the scholarly discipline of rhetoric has largely been “the victim of academic differentiation” since the beginning of the nineteenth century.7 In a few remaining places of scholarship, however, significant effort has been devoted to reestablishing the field of rhetoric as a legitimate and differentiated scholarly discipline.8 Following this tradition, Chapter 1 of this work seeks first and foremost to solidify and expand on core concepts of rhetorical theory—in particular the concepts of orator and rhetorical strategy.

Since antiquity, the field of rhetoric has been concerned with the strategic use of language by goal-oriented communicators to influence the behavior of others. Such strategically acting speakers (orators) have been called the “Archimedean point” of rhetorical theory, and the theoretical category of orator has always been central to any rhetorical analysis of communication.9 But significant holes remain in oratorical theory, particularly when it comes to ‘collective’ orators. Although some work has been done regarding hierarchically organized orator complexes, rhetoric lacks a theoretical category to deal with broader groups and diffuse entities that consist of a wide range of different individuals and collective orators. As a result, the contemporary theory of rhetoric cannot deal with strategic communication by collective entities such as social and political movements. In short, it cannot analyze “environmentalists,” or “separatists,” or “EU skeptics” as coherent, strategically acting communicators: the categories are too broad, the individuals too diverse, and assigning critical qualities such as intention and strategy to such collective entities is fraught with difficulty.

In order to help fill this gap, this work will develop a new category of the oratorical network. This concept allows rhetoric to approach collective entities such as social movements as more than just a group of individual orators, but rather as emergent oratorical entities in their own right. More explicitly, the model presented here is derived from the network theory of political communication developed by Jarol B. Manheim, theories of identity formation and ‘constitutive’ rhetoric developed by Kenneth Burke and others over the last few decades, and work on the spontaneous emergence of group identities through mirroring and matching tactics.10 As will be illustrated by the real-world case study on the tea party movement in Chapter 3, the concept of oratorical networks provides rhetorical scholars with more than just a vague theoretical category: it is a practical tool that allows for the analysis of persuasive communication in broader social movements while retaining the central concept of a strategically acting orator.

Chapter 1 will also devote significant space to discussing and solidifying other core elements of rhetorical theory such as strategy, text, and process. To put it briefly, it will be shown that rhetorical strategies are plans made by orators to use communication in a specific way to try and generate a specific effect on an audience or to implement a specific speech act. Such strategies are then translated into texts that contain specific elements and structures associated with a given rhetorical strategy. When presented in appropriate contexts, these texts generate specific (persuasive) rhetorical processes in audience members that lead them to behave in the orator’s intended manner. When discussing established theories of polarization in Chapter 2, it will be shown how and why polarizing rhetorical strategies have been used by orators, how these strategies have been translated into texts with specifically polarizing textual structures, and how these texts have generated and driven the process of polarization over time. In other words, a central goal of this work is to find out what the rhetorical strategy of polarization looks like, to find out how it works and what it does, and to describe why orators choose to use it.

Perhaps most importantly, this work will demonstrate the practical usefulness of the theoretical models developed in Chapters 1 and 2. Without showing how they can actually be applied to real-world rhetorical situations, the concepts of oratorical network and polarization developed here would be significantly less useful for further research. Chapter 3 will thus provide an analysis of polarizing rhetorical strategies in the tea party movement, one of the most important political forces in recent U.S. political history. In a very real sense, the tea party oratorical network—and the polarizing rhetorical strategies it implemented—represents a precursor to and preview of the current political and discursive situation in the United States. Indeed, as will be illustrated, individual orators and orator complexes that were closely associated with the tea party network play major roles in the U.S. federal government today. As an analysis of the tea party, this work joins a wide range of existing scholarly literature about the movement. Vast oceans of journalism, public polling, and texts produced by tea party orators are also available as primary source material, and this study will integrate work from both academic scholarship and such sources as necessary.

But it is important to emphasize that the case study provided here takes a specifically rhetorical perspective on the movement. It will demonstrate how a theory of oratorical networks can be used to describe social movements as strategically communicating entities, and it will illustrate polarization as a practical rhetorical strategy in action. Using network theory and mapping, the case study will describe each node in the tea party oratorical network separately and will shed light on the rhetorical connections and relationships between individual nodes. The study will also provide a rhetorical analysis of concrete texts produced by tea party orators associated with each node, identifying and highlighting the textual structures associated with the strategy of polarization. It will demonstrate how the parallel use of polarizing communication based on a makers vs. takers framework by orators across the movement helped constitute a common tea party identity (and thus the tea party oratorical network) by creating and solidifying a shared in-group social identity and a shared out-group enemy. Ultimately, it will detail how such strategies helped the network (and individual orators within the network) set polarizing processes in motion to meet real-world goals, and will describe the concrete effects of the tea party’s polarizing strategies on U.S. politics and political discourse.

From a practical perspective, by the end of this work, readers will be able to apply the lessons from the case study to analyses of other rhetorical communication. They will be able to identify and characterize oratorical networks and rhetorical strategies, and how the latter are translated into texts that trigger rhetorical processes in real-world situations. Further (and more broadly) they will understand the rhetorical strategy of polarization, its constitutive textual characteristics, and the necessary oratorical considerations for its use in political communication. Indeed, although it is not intended as such, readers of this work could use it as a user’s manual of a sort for implementing polarizing strategies, formulating polarizing texts, and triggering polarizing processes in audiences.

Finally, this work represents a beginning. While it provides a firm foundation for the concepts of oratorical networks and polarization as a rhetorical strategy, there is clearly a significant amount of work left to be done to fully establish and define these categories as robust theoretical entities. Ultimately, this work raises a series of interesting questions and sets the stage for further research on oratorical theory, on the theory of rhetorical strategies, texts, and processes, and on the status of polarization as a tool in an orator’s proverbial toolbox.