Vicarious Consubstantiality: How Mike Pence Helped Save Donald Trump from Electoral Defeat

Abstract

This essay is a close analysis of then Vice-Presidential nominee Mike Pence’s October 2016 speech in Charlotte, NC, where he aimed to rescue Donald Trump’s presidential campaign from the damaging impact of the Access Hollywood Tape. In his speech, I argue that Pence enacted what I call a vicarious consubstantiality, a form of consubstantiality taken from Kenneth Burke’s theories on identification and division that refer to a “one-ness” between people. As there were breaches in consubstantial bonds linking Trump to voters abandoning him in the wake of the Access Hollywood Tape, Pence served as a third party to re-establish these bonds. I suggest, in vicarious consubstantiality, that this third party must bridge differences by using key terms from a shared substance to define differences away from one party and toward another party – a shared enemy. This action demonstrates that the Burkean notion of consubstantiality is not only understood by how one party identifies with a second party, but how a third party can vicariously reestablish identification between two parties who sever ties.

Keywords:

• consubstantiality
• vicarious consubstantiality
• identification
• division
• exemplar

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel K. Merwin

Daniel K. Merwin is a Ph.D student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas.