“More rain and less thunder”: Substitute vocabularies, Richard Nixon, and the construction of political reality

Through an analysis of the Nixon administration's rhetoric concerning Native Americans, this essay provides a framework for understanding rhetorical reconciliations between democratic political principle and repressive, even oppressive, political action. Our argument proceeds in three parts. We first provide a brief sketch of a key mechanism whereby practitioners of democracy seek to reconcile contradictions between principle and practice. We then identify, by way of illustration, the Nixon administration's political principles regarding Native Americans as articulated in various of Richard Nixon's speeches. Finally, we turn to an examination of the Nixon administration's efforts to reconcile their explicitly articulated principles and their subsequent practices.