Dr. Adam M Blood

In the United States context, racist political discourse has changed over time, broadly moving from explicit race-baiting appeals to implicit forms of race-card play. In the pre-civil-rights era, rhetorical actors often embraced racism as a political ideology. In the period after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, racial appeals now predominantly appear in two forms: either as code language or as accusations of reverse racism. Appreciating the generic and particular is indispensable for evaluating this race-card play. There is a generic expectation for the presidential statements following such a tragic event. The pronouncements ought to offer an unambiguous reaffirmation of the principle of equality. In cultural context, impugning the intelligence of a minority group member, or comparing that person to an animal is racist. Argumentation around public accusations of racism offers a particular intersection between burdens of proof and presumptions.

This chapter examines loyalty as a civic virtue and demonstrates that sign reasoning advances disloyalty claims through the rhetorical topos of the visible and the invisible. It argues that the rise of the lone-wolf terrorist has made invisible signs increasingly salient. Among the flammable elements, loyalty is dry kindling because its virtuous status rests on problematic, contingent relationships that inevitably clash with rights-based limits on sovereign authority. Scholars often conceive the concept of loyalty as a public obligation, a moral virtue with a dispositional attachment to some end apart from the self. Like Oceania and the political philosophy of Ingsoc, the post-9/11 world of lone-wolf terrorism relies on increasingly robust systems of surveillance to make visible those signs of disloyalty. The chapter concludes that invisibility is a key premise in justifying aggressive counterterrorism policies as a defensible exception to liberal democratic norms.