This essay reads the oratory and policy platforms presented at the 2004 presidential nominating conventions as markers of U.S. national identity. The analysis reveals that Democrats present a complicated, nuanced vision of U.S. national identity, a vision premised upon the toleration and celebration of difference and a value of equality. Republicans, conversely, articulated a more straightforward sense of national identity that was convinced of American superiority, suspicious of government involvement in economic matters, and ultimately guided by a responsibility to protect long-standing values. The essay concludes with a call to reexamine even the most banal and mundane campaign discourse for its capacity to express national values and a sense of U.S. national identity.
For countless ages Nature had been preparing Amm'ca for her new tenant. Stores of metal and beds of coal had been laid down; inland seas had deposited jkrtile plains; riuer vallqs and mountain chains h a d j x e d highways for settlement; forests had stretched over the land, and waterfalls foretold the rumble of mills. All was ready for sentient lije.-Fredrick Jackson Turner, "American Colonization"'Much like the legendary historian Frederick Jackson Turner, famed wordsmith William Safire understands the power of language in public affairs. His widely admired Sujire's New Political Dictionary: The Definitive Guide to the New Language of Politics not only delineates our political vocabulary, but also announces its own presence with authority.2 No self-respecting Euro-American can resist such a title; new is, after all, better than old and nothing could be better than a new dictionary for a new language. The name plays upon the quintessential Euro-American desire to begin again, to leave the Old World and make of the New a "shining city upon a hill," and to disdain that city, in turn, and "light out for the Territory." Inhabiting Safire's "new" language, however, are the same peoples that populated Frederick Jackson Turner's America, John Winthrop's City, and Huck Finn's Territory. Safire discusses sachem, a term used to connote political power among the nations of the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse-often called the Six Nations Confederacy or the Iroquois League), as follows:
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