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The rhetoric of evil, so prominently evident in contemporary presidential public address, articulates a primal motive for the war on terrorism by projecting democracy's shadow onto the external enemy. In this regard, the president's discourse is a manifestation rather than aberration of U.S. political culture, a reflection of the nation's troubled democratic identity. Upon close inspection, it reveals the presence of the mythos of a democratic demon contained within the republic, various ways in which the unconscious projection of this devil figure is rhetorically triggered, and the cultural significance of its lethal entailments. The diabolism of presidential war rhetoric, we suggest, functions as an inducement to evacuate the political content of democracy, leaving a largely empty but virulent signifier in its place, which weakens the nation by reproducing a culture of war.
America's chronic impulse to war is provoked by democracy's shadow, which lurks at the far reaches of the nation's political soul. Democracy casts a dark veil of anxiety over the public disposition-so much so that it constitutes a national phobia. This deep distrust of the people, or "demophobia," confounds the identity and bewilders the political will of a self-proclaimed exceptional nation (Ivie 2005a, 14, 34, 43-44, 90-91). It produces nothing short of a cultural tension that is resolved in presidential rhetoric as a commanding motive for war.
There are several continuous phases in democracy's impulse to war. We-the people-fear the enemy within: an impassioned ogre of mob violence, a deformed Mr. Hyde who reflects the common fear and shared anxiety about democracy. This demon-forged in the crucible of collective weaknesses, misshapen by national ambivalence toward the political system Americans claim to honor-is readily projected onto external sources which are then conjured as evil and defined as the public enemy. A discourse of diabolism swiftly follows to paint a threatening picture of the enemy's evil savagery and goad the nation to defend its holy democratic soul against civilization's wicked foes. The projection of a troubled identity, the displacement of the nation's own seeming vileness onto others-"in order to wipe it out with their blood" (Miller 1987, 337)-is a recurring goad to fight.
This demonic impulse to war assumes many guises in U.S. presidential rhetoric. The devil, as an essential antagonist in the nation's...