In last week’s post, I considered analyzing either Albert Einstein’s “Peace in the Atomic Era” address or David Hilbert’s call to appreciate mathematics for what it is. Admittedly, such suggestions were somewhat impulsive, brought about by my almost excessive passion for mathematics and physics—let alone mathematicians and physicists. While both speeches are indeed compelling and unorthodoxly civic in nature, I have decided that a thorough analysis would not be nearly as compelling. Rhetorical strategies are in fact integrated, but elements such as audience and constraints are not inherently fundamental to the addresses themselves. Moreover, both original speeches are delivered in German, so an analysis of tone, body language, and emphasis would be rather complicated for a monolingual English speaker.

As such, I have decided to take a more modern approach. Searching for artifacts relating science and mathematics to the civic, I realized that a vast majority of rhetorically compelling artifacts in the human domain are political in nature. After all, one cannot succeed as a politician without being an effective rhetorician. To choose to pursue an over-analyzed Inaugural or State of the Union Address or famous piece of propaganda is to perform no analysis at all: only originality implies a deep understanding of the author’s intentions. With this in mind, I have decided to analyze a facet of a movement that may hav come and gone a decade ago, but the values and goals of which still embody the mindset of conservatives and libertarians alike: the Tea Party Movement.

The Tea Party Movement comprised a series of protests by fiscal conservatives in response to the new Obama Administration and its intentions to raise income and business taxes, impose new regulations of industries, and move in the direction of single-payer health care. The movement gained significant traction with its Tax Day (April 15) Protests of 2009, almost three months after President Obama had taken office. I feel that the respective poster, serving as an advertisement for those very protests, consists myriad rhetorical components and attempts to be the very epitome of the civic, all without being cliche or in the wide public domain where original meaning is lost.

Being a fiscal conservative myself, it may be challenging to abandon my own values and beliefs for a neutral examination of the artifact. I will have to recognize the fallacies and commonplaces that I would otherwise prejudiciously filter out or take for granted. In performing the analysis, I hope to discover the common rhetorical strategies people like-minded to me employ on a daily basis—along with the definition of “civic” that even I, let alone the greatest conservative thinkers, have little understood.