This dissertation re-theorizes the people as a syntactic effect or hegemonic temporality that abides amidst disagreement or dissensus in the usual sense. In Chapter One I read the if, then conditional syntax of the too big to fail post-financial crash discourse in order to argue that the syntax habituated the public to the status quo: the liberal democratic fantasy of state and the market working together for the common good. In Chapter Two I read the has been past imperfective syntax of the controversy over plans for an Islamic Community Center and Mosque in Lower Manhattan in the summer of 2010 in order to argue that the syntax re-animated the trauma of 9/11 and pressed it into the service of a national and bipartisan (a)politics of victimage. In turn, the controversy re-constituted an American national identity that was much needed following not only the financial crisis but also the failure of the war on terror (which, as I will discuss, were intimately related). Chapter Three looks at the dramatic shift in the national ethos just a few months later. In this last case study, I read the historical present syntax of the Restoration Rallies of Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck in the fall of 2010 in order to suggest that the keep calm and carry on administrative ethic of the rallies of Sanity and Honor re-civilized the nation once again, suturing the necessary dis-joint or constitutive anachronism at the non-heart of the nation. I conclude the project by suggesting why contemporary rhetorical and critical/cultural theory tends to ontologize particular syntaxes as the way things are and how a syntactic reading strategy offers a more nuanced, if frustrating, approach to thinking a present that is not always lived in the present tense.