Vindicating the Right? Populism and the Origins of the Tea Party Movement analyses the founding process of the Tea Party movement using the framework of populism theory. At the centre of populism theory stands the claim that populist movements frame politics as confrontation between the virtuous ‘people’ and powerful elites. The work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe further argues that populism is used to articulate hegemonic projects. As scholars have found, in contemporary liberal democracies populism articulates hegemonic projects that claim to represent ‘the people’ against unresponsive governments often in response to widespread dissatisfaction with democratic processes. Tea Party populism is no exception. This thesis argues that the foundation of the Tea Party took place in the context of a multi-layered crisis related to the economic downturn, the crisis of contemporary conservatism, rising party polarisation, growing inequality and declining faith in government and democratic institutions. I contend that the initial appeal of the Tea Party was due to the movement’s capacity to respond to this crisis and channelled a deep seated distrust of government into populist anti-elite resentment. With the help of a wide range of sources, including Tea Party literature, blogs, websites, videos and accounts from periodicals this thesis demonstrates how the movement constructed a collective identity of ‘the people’ as defenders of constitutional right, national values and free market capitalism. The Tea Party’s reliance on the themes of conservative Americanism also relates it to the hegemonic project of American conservatism and this thesis demonstrates that the Tea Party movement is as much an outcome as it is a part of the conservative movement’s attempt to use populism to rearticulate its hegemonic claims in the aftermaths of the defeat of the Republican Party in the elections of 2008.

Struggles for Freedom: Afghanistan and US Foreign Policy, 1979-2009 looks at discourses of freedom in US foreign policy towards Afghanistan. It considers the politics that surround the keyword ‘freedom’ in US foreign policy discourse by comparing and contrasting discourses employed during the Cold War and the Global War on Terrorism. For example, during the former Afghanistan was symbolically linked to ‘freedom’ in US political discourse and the insurgents were characterized as ‘freedom fighters’; while during the latter Afghanistan was cast and portrayed as a threat to ‘freedom’, and many of the same insurgents were now characterized as ‘enemies of freedom’. At heart this thesis ask the question: how do we go from the first discourse to the second, while holding the keyword through which US foreign policy is narrated constant? What is the nature of this ‘paradox of freedom’? The overarching research question that drives and guides this study, then, is: what role does ‘freedom’ play in US foreign policy towards Afghanistan between 1979-2009? This study provides an original contribution to knowledge in that it is the first attempt to theorise and conceptualise the role that ‘freedom’ plays in US foreign policy discourse through an innovative within-case, over-time, most-similar comparative case study. It does so, moreover, through engaging with a substantial and original evidentiary base, whether in the form of extensive archival research or dozens of elite interviews. That is, freedom is not just conceptualised and theorised, but also historicized. This thesis, then, also makes a further contribution in that it synthesizes insights from a number of literatures and research strengths from a number of disciplines to provide a genuinely inter-disciplinary, problem-driven contribution. This study argues that operating outside any particular policies done in its name, ‘freedom’ plays in an important role in the co-constitution of American national identity, in enabling and legitimating certain courses of foreign policy action, in the construction of hierarchical international social relations, and in the reproduction of American common-sense. Freedom, then, is in many ways the ‘golden thread’ of US foreign policy discourse, in that it connects the past with the present, and the present with the future.

This thesis analyses the ways in which U.S. policy toward Iraq was dictated by its broader Cold War strategy between 1958 and 1975. While most historians have focused on ‘hot’ Cold War conflicts such as Cuba, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, few have recognized Iraq’s significance as a Cold War battleground. This thesis shows where Iraq fits into the broader historiography of the Cold War in the Middle East. It argues that U.S. decisions and actions were designed to deny the Soviet Union influence over Iraq and a strategic base in the oil-rich Gulf region. This was evident in the Eisenhower administration’s response to Iraq’s revolution in 1958, when it engaged in covert action to prevent communists from gaining control of the state; in the Kennedy administration’s efforts to bolster the first Ba’th regime during its war with the Kurds in 1963 because it perceived it as anti-communist; in the Johnson administration’s support for the anti-communist, Arab nationalist regimes during the mid-1960s; and in the Nixon administration’s decision to support the Kurdish rebels in 1972-75 after the second Ba’thist regime drew Iraq partially into the Soviet orbit. This suggests a clear pattern. Using newly available primary sources and interviews, this thesis reveals new details on America’s decision-making toward and actions against Iraq during a key part of the Cold War. Significantly, it raises questions about widely held notions, such as the CIA’s alleged involvement in the 1963 Ba’thist coup and the theory that the U.S. sold out the Kurds in 1975. Finally, it argues scholars have relied excessively and uncritically on a leaked congressional report, the Pike Report, which has had a distorting affect on the historiography of U.S.-Iraqi relations. This thesis seeks to redress these historiographical deficiencies and bring new details to light.

For the last seventy years the United States of America has been the dominant political, economic, military, and cultural influence in the world. Under President Obama, this position is being challenged. In politics, academia, and popular media, the established continuity of American leadership is contrasted against the dynamics of an emerging ‘post-American world.’ Elements of Obama’s foreign and security policy, such as ‘leading from behind,’ have raised questions if America still believes in its national exceptionalism, and if it follows a grand strategy designed to secure its global hegemony. Against this backdrop, this thesis aims to make an original contribution to knowledge by moving beyond traditional understandings of grand strategy as an exclusive calculation of material resources, and coherent vision to align means and ends. The main argument is that American grand strategy cannot be reduced to an abstract product of scientific rationality, but must be understood as an identity performing discourse, where a geopolitical vision of a country’s role and position in the world is linked to its national security policy. Drawing from literature in critical security studies and critical geopolitics, the thesis examines how representations of geopolitical identity are intertextually connected across different discursive domains, from popular culture, to academic expertise, and policymaking, and how the cross-discursive interplay of identity and practice confirms and contests dominant concepts of political knowledge. The thesis concludes that, beyond an established identity paradigm of American exceptionalism, indispensability and hegemony, American grand strategy under President Obama is a multidimensional and inherently conflicted discourse, fluctuating between a reconfirmation and reformulation of American leadership. This complex and nuanced geopolitical vision of leadership however, both emphasizing cooperative engagement (‘burden sharing’) and military restraint (‘nation-building at home’) has failed to provide a new consensus on America’s role in the world.

This study analyses the impact of institutional change upon political behaviour. Beginning in 1968 a series of reforms transformed the American presidential nominating process, amounting to the most substantial changes since the inception of national conventions. This study seeks to comprehend the effects of this transformation upon the strategies employed by candidates and in so doing assessing the influence upon the nominating process of various actors - party leaders, voters, interest groups, campaign organisations. The comparative method is adopted to elucidate the impact of change. The content and execution of strategy is compared across continuous periods, the nominations immediately before (1960 - 68) and after (1972 - 1980) reform. A party function, candidate selection, is set within a theoretical discussion of party. Familiar models of party are examined and criticised for their inapplicability to the American case for their omission of an intra-party role for voters. An additional ideal type model is developed of a party dominated by. voters. -; the application of direct democracy to intra-party affairs. This additional type is integrated into the schemes analysed earlier, increasing their relevance to American practice and providing a set of logical, possibilities against which party reform can be measured. Previous reforms of the presidential nominating process are described and recurrent trends identified. The background to the impetus for reform originating in the discontents of the McCarthy campaign-to mobilise voters into the party-dominated selection process is described. The composition and functioning of the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection authorised in 1968 to recommend reform proposals is discussed. The implementation of reform, its unintended consequences, the work of subsequent reform commissions in the Democratic Party, change in the Republican Party and innovations in the regulation of campaign finance are detailed. The combined impact of these reforms transformed the context of nominating campaigns. Primaries became the dominant delegate selection mechanism. The non-primary process was opened to extensive voter participation. In both processes the linkage between the candidate preferences of participating voters and the resulting delegates tightened. The size of campaign donations was limited, federal funds became available, and ceilings were placed on total expenditures for recipients of federal aid. Having depicted the altered context of the nominating contest the study analyses the content and execution of strategy in the two periods. The basis for comparison include the choices of strategies, the form of campaign organisation and their relations with party organisations, the conditions of interest group influence, the role in strategy of the primary and non-primary processes, the content of candidates' appeals and the means employed to communicate the campaign. The conclusion re-states the principal strategic differences between the two periods. The strategic consequences of reform are linked to the effects of previous reform efforts, and the model of parties developed earlier.

The original contribution to knowledge of my thesis is a comparative historical analysis of the rhetoric used by four Democratic presidents to expand access to and affordability of healthcare. Specifically, the thesis situates Democratic presidential healthcare reform rhetoric in relation to opposing conservative Republican ideologies of limited government and prioritization of negative liberty and their increasing prominence in the post-Reagan era. It examines how the American moral order and social imaginary has evolved and how Democratic presidential healthcare reform rhetoric was both informed by and responded to it. I employ Aristotle’s tripartite categories of ethos, pathos and logos to undertake rhetorical analysis. I illuminate how each president sought to persuade audiences, what rhetorical strategies they used and how they justified their healthcare reform efforts. I pay particular attention to the compromises entailed by the usage of specific strategies and their rhetorical effects. The thesis illustrates how Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Baines Johnson contextualized healthcare reform within their broader efforts to secure positive liberty and social and economic rights in the Fair Deal and Great Society, respectively. This is in contrast to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who did not advance a comprehensive vision of government guaranteed positive liberty and citizen welfare. Rather, they made arguments for healthcare reform based on pragmatism and economic efficiency and appropriated tropes of conservative rhetoric such as efficiency to critique market failure. They showed deference to the conservative principle of maximizing the role of the private sector in healthcare provision. There is a marked contrast between Truman and Johnson’s explicit expressions of care for economically disadvantaged and working class Americans and Clinton and Obama’s rhetorical elision of these populations, and their focus on the ‘middle class.’ Despite these substantive differences a major continuity in the rhetoric is an enduring appeal to communitarian solidarity.

Post-Cold War US nuclear policies towards India witnessed a major swing as they developed from being a demand for the ‘halt, cap, rollback’ during Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001) to the signing and implementation of the historic ‘civil nuclear deal’ during the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009). This thesis addresses this change in US nuclear foreign policy by focusing on three core categories of identity, inequality and great power narratives. First, building upon the theoretical paradigm of critical constructivism, the thesis problematises the concept of the ‘state’ by focusing on identity-related questions arguing that the ‘state’ becomes a constructed entity standing as valid only within relations of identity and difference. Secondly, focusing on postcolonial principles, it argues that imperialism as an organising principle of identity/difference enables us to understand how difference was maintained in unequal terms through US nuclear foreign policy and that foreign policy is manifested in five great power narratives constructed around: peace and justice; India-Pakistan deterrence; democracy; economic progress; and scientific development. Thirdly, identities of ‘race’, ‘political economy’ and ‘gender’, in terms of radical otherness and otherness were recurrently utilised through these narratives to maintain a difference, which enabled the Bill Clinton and the George W. Bush administrations to maintain ‘US’ identity as a progressive and developed western nation, intrinsically justifying the US role as an arbiter of the global nuclear order. The contribution of the thesis: an interdisciplinary perspective on US state identity as connected to the global nuclear order and implications of nuclear policy towards India; a comparative perspective on great power narratives of the Clinton and the Bush administrations that are historically contingent; and methodological insights into temporal and spatial dimensions of textuality through the discourse analysis of primary material.

South Carolina offers a history of defiant politicians who sought to protect their state from federal interference. With the Supreme Court handing down some of the most important rulings in US history, including Brown (1954), Baker (1962) and Miranda (1966), three South Carolinian Senators – Olin Johnston, Strom Thurmond and Ernest ‘Fritz’ Hollings – waged war on the Court through the judicial nominations process. In scrutinising presidential nominations and attempting to restrict the power of the Court, these Senators played leading roles in the most explosive confirmation battles in recent history, including those of Thurgood Marshall, Abe Fortas and Clement Haynsworth. The South Carolinians defied not only the Democratic Party leadership but also time-honoured Senate traditions of hierarchy and seniority. In maintaining their conservative credentials, they ensured continuous re-election, yet the dominance of the state’s conservative segregationist political establishment, which maintained control of South Carolina’s legislature, drowned out the moderate voices that remained critical of each Senator’s obstructionism. A comparative lack of violence has been identified in South Carolina’s transition to ‘integration with dignity’, but the behaviour of the state’s Senators in the nominations process in Washington, DC was anything but dignified or peaceful. In fact, South Carolina has played the most important, and overlooked, role in the development of Supreme Court nomination hearings into political, and confrontational, public events. The state’s war on the Court would transcend ‘massive resistance’ to civil rights, highlighting questions of law and order, obscenity, communist subversion and school prayer in a radical, ground-breaking response to the Court’s role as the final arbiter of policy. Furthermore, the South Carolinian experience suggests that existing studies of Supreme Court nominations as ‘one-off’ events are narrow and restrictive, and the practice of emphasising the final vote on a nominee’s confirmation or rejection is unhelpful in understanding this complex process.

This thesis analyses the rhetoric which President George W. Bush used to meet the demands resulting from the atrocities of 9/11, during the immediate aftermath and in days and weeks following those atrocities. Bush’s presidential rhetoric was far more than just words it was an entire performance, and it is that performance and the people behind the construction and dissemination of the language and performance with which this thesis is interested. This research adds knowledge to the field of presidential rhetoric by adopting the analytical approach of a rhetorical critic to scrutinize Bush’s post 9/11 rhetoric. The analysis reveals a sophisticated interpretation of the various levels of meaning available to the American public and the wider audience given the social and cultural period in which the atrocities and rhetoric transpired. The same analytical approach is utilized to distinguish previous presidential rhetoric after unique attacks with that of Bush post 9/11. This delivers a nuanced understanding of the influence of the media, speechwriters, presidential personality and the historical period in the formation and presentation of presidential rhetoric. This is achieved by scrutinizing the events (‘rhetorical situations’ (Bitzer, 1968)) including the sinking of the Lusitania, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the xii Iran hostage siege and comparing and contrasting these to 9/11 and Bush’s response to the demands of that situation. The thesis characterizes and analyses the way presidential rhetoric incorporated the ‘rhetoric of otherness’ (Otto, 1973) through religious myths to delineate the boundaries for the American public to gain an understanding of why the attacks occurred and how they needed to respond. This may be referred to as the patriotic discourse.

The history of the United States’ revolutionary origins has been a persistently prevalent source of reference in the public speeches of modern American presidents. Through an examination of the character and context of allusions to this history in presidential rhetoric since 1945, this thesis presents an explanation for this ubiquity. America’s founding heritage represents a valuable – indeed, an essential – source for the purposes of presidential oratory. An analysis of the manner in which presidents from Harry Truman to Barack Obama have invoked and adapted specific aspects of this heritage in their public rhetoric exposes a distinctly usable past, employed in different contexts and in advancing specific messages. Chapters devoted to the references of modern presidents to the Declaration of Independence, to the Constitution, and to four of the nation’s Founding Fathers, demonstrate that distinct elements of the founding heritage can be invoked in different ways. In sum, however, they reveal that allusions to this history have served three, sometimes overlapping, purposes in modern presidential discourse. Firstly, and most commonly, this history has proved an essential source on the numerous occasions in which presidents have reflected upon and reaffirmed the enduring character of American national identity. Secondly, such is the prominence of the founding heritage in the collective memory of Americans that presidents have been able to invoke elements of this familiar history pertinent to their discussion of a diverse range of contemporary concerns. Finally, and most significantly, this rhetoric has very often been applied for more pragmatic and partisan reasons. Given the veneration of the founding heritage in American culture and the acceptance that the democratic ideals then established remain essential to the purpose and direction of the nation, this thesis argues that presidents have found political value in implying their own inheritance of the Founders’ incontestable legacy. In speeches delivered across the shifting contexts of the post-war period, presidents have explicitly aligned their policy goals with the values and vision of the nation’s first leaders, interpreting and adapting the Founders’ words in a manner supportive of their public message.