ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the match between political arrangements and images of civic virtue. It explores the changes in and focuses on the consequences of the new images of civic virtue. The virtues establish normative criteria by which individuals can judge citizen performance of social roles. The chapter examines the Republican Party with its narrower and more conservative ideological base finds the new political appeals quite compatible with its traditional vision. It also focuses on examples from the discourse of Democratic Party candidates entered in the presidential primaries, 1968-1988. The new political candidates expend considerable rhetorical energy on reiterating the match between their dispositions and the dispositions of the electorate. The conventional wisdom that characterized Reverend Jackson as a more responsible campaigner in 1988 than in 1984 might be understood as the observation that he sacrificed the discourse of opposition for the rhetoric of electoral success.
