Interplay of Mythic Conceptions of Democracy in Congressional Deliberations over the USA PATRIOT Act

Abstract

From ancient Greece through Alexis de Tocqueville and on through today, democracy has meant a lot of different things to many different people.  The ambivalence surrounding the meaning of democracy and all of the ‘adjectives’ used to ‘precise’ the concept (i.e. constitutional, constitutive, direct, republican representative, deliberative, fugitive, pluralist, parliamentary, multiracial, and electronic) suggests that democracy is a rich discursive site for the study of these competing discourses.  Through contrapuntal analysis, a form of social text analysis informed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s work in dialogism, this study provides a method for discussing ideological conceptions of democracy in fluid tension within the discursive activity of a U.S. Congressional meeting.