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Richard ShortenTerms like 'Islamo-fascism', the 'anti-totalitarian' case for war in Iraq and the description of religiously motivated political extremism as a 'new totalitarianism' were all remarkable features of the political discourse organised around the response to the events of 11 September 2001. They share in common the attempt to ground political commitments and allegiances in two morally charged political languages: anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism. But why did they fail to connect with the public imagination? This article argues that they were not constructed for present purposes so much as appropriated. Yet their projected consumption by a broader public turned on the feasibility of effecting conceptual change to accommodate new meanings and applications. The failure, in this case, to meet the standards thereby required suggests that an important dimension of the response to September 11th is the failure of political argument. It is proposed that this has implications more broadly for the relation between political theory and political rhetoric.
A useful tool for learning more about the ways in which the hard Right communicates and integrates is the reactionary diatribe. This is significant in a political context where the hard Right not only is experiencing success, but the default categories of interpretation and criticism can lack bite. A fresh direction for research would link present politics back to historical practice but channel contemporary methods for rhetorical study, picking out reactionary writings as a stable object for inquiry. Therefore, this article (1) revives the category of reaction by re-picturing it as a 'second-order' ideology encompassing all those right-wingers professing to stand on the 'wrong side of History'; (2) draws lessons from some defects of 'populism' theories; (3) places a methodological proposal in relation to earlier theories of reaction, which are confounded most of all by reactionary contradictoriness a feature that rhetorical analysis is far better able to accommodate, inasmuch as messy, chaotic, sometimes ugly communication is grist to its mill. Lastly, (4) the diatribe model itself is described (key properties being digression, repetition and point-dwelling), and then laid out as groundwork for further, indepth inquiry. In the meantime, an important truth surfaces: bad books matter.
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