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William Bennett and the rhetoric of the "common culture": The conservative response to multiculturalism in the Reagan era
Abstract
This study explores the discourse of the "common culture" in the Reagan era. Specifically, it examines the discourse as a social conservative response to progressive multiculturalism. In the initial chapters, the political mythology, which underwrites the "common culture," and the political and economic circumstances, which make this mythology salient, are examined. In the middle chapters, William Bennett's virtue-in-education rhetoric is analyzed as an exemplary "common culture" discourse. In the latter chapters, the ideological tensions in the "common culture's" construction of "the people" are displayed and evaluated. Specifically, the contrasts between the "common culture"/"multicultural" conceptions of the public are analyzed in terms of optimism/pessimism, unmediated/mediated, traditional/progressive, and powerful/impotent. In the final chapter, the study addresses the discourse's implications for an authentic public debate over American identity. In exploring these implications, the study argues that the "common culture" is a tacit ritual of socialization, that the "common culture"/"multiculturalism" controversy has become a wedge issue, that the "common culture" may legitimize more harmful racial discourses, and, finally, that the "common culture" shares ideological-rhetorical ground with other Reagan-era discourses, particularly "family values," affirmative action, and political correctness.
Subject Area
Rhetoric|Composition|Education history|Educational theory|Biographies
Recommended Citation
Patterson, Robert Eugene, "William Bennett and the rhetoric of the "common culture": The conservative response to multiculturalism in the Reagan era" (1997). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9815903.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9815903