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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Monsters To Destroy? The Rhetorical Legacy Of John Quincy Adams’ July 4th, 1821 Oration, Jason A. Edwards
Monsters To Destroy? The Rhetorical Legacy Of John Quincy Adams’ July 4th, 1821 Oration, Jason A. Edwards
Communication Studies Faculty Publications
This essay examines how the John Quincy Adams’s foreign policy maxim of “we do not go in search of monsters to destroy” has been appropriated in contemporary foreign policy, including the recent 2016 presidential campaign, arguing his aphorism are authorizing words that validate and ratify the positions of pundits, politicians, and policy-makers of not only critics of U.S. foreign policy, but those who defend it. Mapping Quincy Adams’s aphorism allows us to explore the boundaries and direction of America’s role in the world and how it impacts America’s exceptionalist ethos.
Foreign Policy Rhetoric In The 1992 Presidential Campaign: Bill Clinton's Exceptionalist Jeremiad, Jason Edwards
Foreign Policy Rhetoric In The 1992 Presidential Campaign: Bill Clinton's Exceptionalist Jeremiad, Jason Edwards
Communication Studies Faculty Publications
This essay examines presidential candidate Bill Clinton's rhetoric regarding America's role in the world during the 1992 presidential campaign. Despite the fact that foreign policy was George H.W. Bush's strength during the campaign, candidate Clinton was able to develop a coherent vision for America's role in the world that he carried into his presidency. I argue he did so by fusing together the American exceptionalist missions of exemplar and intervention. In doing so, Clinton altered a tension embedded in debates over U.S. foreign policy rhetoric. To further differentiate his candidacy from President Bush, Clinton encased this discourse within a secular …