Senator Mitt Romney’s Voting Statement in Trump’s First Impeachment Trial: The Roles of Agonistic Model/Anti-Model Hexads, Progressively Staged Genres, and Enactment in Advocating a Rhetoric of Renewal

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that rhetorics of renewal seek to convince auditors to accept guilt for falling away from golden-age values and respond with mortification (not scapegoating) and hope of a promised “second chance.” Three strategic choices can assist: developing a motivationally complete model/anti-model pair, enacting the model’s golden-age values in a way that participates in shared guilt and mortification to demonstrate the feasibility of and path to renewal, and appropriately incorporating and staging forensic, epideictic, and deliberative genres to guide auditors from guilt to renewal. To establish these claims, I analyze the associational clusters in Romney’s impeachment statement through a hexadic lens, then trace those hexads’ development using cluster-agon’s dramatic arc, thus simultaneously demonstrating the benefits of this methodological combination.

KEYWORDS:

• Cluster-agon
• dramatism
• hybrid genre
• pentad
• piety
• mortification
• minority voting statement

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Editors Fox and Bates and the reviewers for their thoughtful, insightful suggestions and Brian Wismar for his assistance with proofreading the final article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Manuscript history

An earlier version of this essay was presented for the 2020 National Communication Association’s annual meeting.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was provided for this research.