Contingency

Crowley talks a lot about contingency (beats us over the head with it really). She embraces contingency because, well, that's part of the theoretical turn (nothing grounded, everything situational/contextual). I agree about the importance of contingency, but I would be curious what, if anything, Crowley might change in her book given the situation today. Her book was published in 2006, but the events she cites seem to go no later than 2004. I have a point here, I swear. Did Toward a Civil Discourse come about, in part, as a reaction to the George W. Bush years? Crowley, as a liberal rhetor, might have looked at the world around her and decided that everything had gone to hell and that someone needed to burden the blame. Crowley chooses to blame fundamentalist/apocalyptic Christians. But was such a focus hasty? No doubt that America is steeped in religion. No doubt that Christians wield political punch. No doubt that hardcore Christian nutjobs make their voices heard? But one of the biggest problems I had when reading Crowley's book is that I never really bought the notion that apocalyptic Christians are achieving anything close to hegemony in American culture. Yes, America currently leans to the right, but not the radical right. Americans might fall asleep at the wheel sometimes (2004 Presidential election anyone?), but they eventually wake up--they always do. Americans resist extremes; Americans are centrist. The recent 2006 elections show this, with Republicans losing many seats in the House and Senate. Missouri voted in McCaskill. All this is just a way of saying that, yes, a rhetor is always tied to a specific moment, and perhaps the moment from which Crowley wrote wasn't quite the moment she thought it was--or maybe that moment changed for the better. Maybe apocalyptic Christians are not the ones we need to be worrying about.