As a site of ideological and material contest, the future can form a vibrant part of political imaginaries. Actors may, for instance, propagate a particular vision of the future as a means of justifying their role within that vision while legitimating present actions taken to secure it. During the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, the United States, as Dunmire argues in this detailed qualitative study, did just that: it leveraged futurity to legitimate itself, against the spread of communism, as an exemplar of democratic society and to construe its ‘privileged position vis-à-vis the future’ as justification for leading the world (1). Such claims, Dunmire argues, align with the exceptionalist ideology and rhetoric inherent in American national identity, discourse that continues to shape how the US authorizes its geopolitical strategies and actions.
Dunmire situates these arguments in a manifold analytic framework that weds discourse theory and speech acts to the mythopoesis of the American jeremiad and the politics of temporality. Specifically, she views the construal of space-time as discursive, legitimation as moral evaluation, securitization (a form of threat construction) as both constitutive and disciplining, and identity construction—in this case, American national identity—as a spatiotemporal practice. Synthesizing this framework is Dunmire's critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, which she applies to a corpus of Cold War-era political speeches, essays, and foreign policy documents produced at crucial discursive moments of US strategy and identity formulation, enactment, reassertion, and reformulation.
Through her analysis, Dunmire explains how, within the discourses of American exceptionalism, the US legitimized its privileged postwar position to shape the geopolitical future. It did so, Dunmire shows, by discursively constructing self/other contrasts with its Cold War rivals—principally the Soviet Union—to position them discursively in a field of political contestation. Complementing this strategy of polarization, Dunmire identifies, was the use of spatial-temporal constructions, such as aspectual markers and future-indexing lexis, to construct fear (for instance, of the US being outpaced by the Soviets in the postwar march towards global dominance) and relations of difference and identity between global actors. She further shows how deontic modality and conditionals form what she terms an ‘alternative-futures trope, which projects alternative future scenarios and aligns them with different political actors’ (55). Evidenced linguistically, these conceptualizations of the future, Dunmire claims, drove US Cold War foreign policy and rhetoric.
Globally, as challenges to democracy arise alongside calls for a multipolar world, Dunmire's examination of futurity ultimately helps explain the present. Her synthesis of linguistic space-time construals with securitization discourses and rhetorical tropes sheds light on both the discursive legitimation of American power during the twentieth century and contemporary claims of the US's withering status as ‘a model and exemplar of how others ought to live’ (166). These insights not only deepen current understandings of American exceptionalism in the discourses of national security and identity but also the role of futurity in the legitimation strategy of any political actor vying to dominate the global future.
