Democracy Review on the Ideologies of America

Democracy as political ideology is later interpreted differently among those who are liberal, socialist, and communist. Liberal democracy stresses the rights and liberty on the individual. It means that democracy is ruled by the majority of people as long as those in majority do not try to take away individuals or minorities of their basic rights. The three basics rights are to speak and to worship, to run for public office, and the rights to own property. Whereas social democ racy denies that people‘s freedom or fair political competition cannot be acquired if there are great inequalities of wealth and power. So, they believe in the need of wealth redistribution in promoting equality. However, in the view of the communist countries which hold People Democracy, the common people are the proletariat and working class. Therefore, democracy will not be fully accomplished until the government rules in their interest. Ball and Dagger, 2007

3. Nationalism

People tend to project their experiences onto the past and see all governments and political communities as states, in the same way as they tend to ascribe to the people of the past national identities Greenfeld, 2005. Following Hans Kohn‘s definition of nationalism as a feeling of supreme loyalty to the nation-state 1965, American nationalism, then pertains to beliefs regarding loyalty to the United States. Scholars such as Hans Kohn often argue that the U.S. g overnment institutionalized a ―civic‖ nationalism, based on political principles such as legal and rational concepts of citizenship, rather than an ‗ethnic‘ nationalism, based on common language and cultural traditions. They based their understanding of American nationality not on common descent or religion, and not on a unique literary or legal tradition for the United States shared a common intellectual and cultural heritage with England, but rather on beliefs in natural rights, namely, ―that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.‖ Of course, not all members of the American population were granted equal rights. In addition, Greenfeld 2001 states that Nationalism is a form of social consciousness: a way of cognitive and moral organization of reality. As such it represents the foundation of the moral order of modern society, the source of its values, the framework of its characteristic —national—identity, and the basis of social integration in it. She also adds that nationalism is also the factor responsible for the reorientation of economic activity toward growth and the unprecedented position of the economic sphere in the modern consciousness is a product of the dynamics of American society, in turn shaped by the singular characteristics of American nationalism.

D. Review on Related Studies

Former studies related to this study will be discussed together. This chapter is needed to show the recent development of the language studies, especially on the Critical Discourse study. Besides, it also provides the relevant theories which later support the analysis.

1. Study on President Barack Hussein Obama‟s Address

The critical discourse study which has been done on the similar topic is entitled, A Criti cal Discourse Analysis of Barack Obama’s Addresses by Junling Wang. She is from the School of Foreign Languages, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, China. She shows that the Critical Discourse Analysis is applicable to analyze political discourse including the public address, in which the speaker wins favorite response from the audience. She bases her writing on Critical Discourse Analysis theory and Systematic Functional Linguistics. She analyzes Barack Obama‘s presidential addresses mainly from the point oftransitivity and modality. In the analysis, she proves that language is a way to serve the ideology and power. She reveals also the political purpose of these addresses. In the conclusion part, she finds that Obama‘s address are structured in a such way to shorten the distance between him and the audience, to have the audience understand and accept his political and to persuade the public to accept and support his policies. The text of the address as data source leads to theses significances from the structure of the language itself. The address may employ colloquial words and short sentences instead of the complicated structures. From transitivity analysis, it applies on process of doing. Modality is analyzed to refer to a speaker‘s attitudes towards or opinion about the truth of a proposition expressed by a sentence. Wang‘s study develops the same approach to what the writer is going to use in this study. The transitivity analysis is then proven to be a useful device in Critical Discourse Analysis to collect and categorize the language items that are