Feeling American

This paper examines a segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight from 2021 in which Carlson contextualizes the start of the trial against Derek Chauvin, whose killing of George Floyd in 2020 sparked nationwide protests. By employing an analytical framework that includes ‘feeling rules’ and ‘framing rules,’ this study argues that Carlson frames Chauvin’s trial as an existential threat to the United States’ national security, locating notions of (in)security within affective structures of fear. Notions of ‘appropriate feelings’ are promoted through emotive framing and the visual comparison of protest and terrorism. The study also highlights how mass media shape and negotiate the opposing ideas of ‘feeling American’ and analyzes how Carlson employs discourses of (in)security to enable the polarization of two distinct ‘emotional communities’ in the US. This analysis shows that political and cultural divisions in the US might be more deeply entrenched than previously acknowledged, as they constitute fundamentally different experiences of ‘feeling American.’

Emotive · Existentialism · Feeling · Negotiation · Politics · Global Security and Public Health · History of Emotions Research · Rhetoric and Communication Studies