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DEMAGOGUERY AND DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION: THE SEARCH
FOR RULES OF DISCURSIVE ENGAGEMENT
J. MICHAEL HOGAN AND DAVE TELL
F
or democracy to work,” as Patricia Roberts-Miller writes, people “have to
talk,” and “the ability of the general public to make appropriate decisions
depends to a large degree on the quality of public discourse.” If democratic
deliberation is to produce sound collective judgments, people must look
beyond their own “self-interest and limited points of view” and join with others in determining the “general interest” or the “common good.” Moreover,
there must be “rules” to guide our deliberations, lest they degenerate into
name-calling, confrontation, or even coercion and violence. Roberts-Miller is
right: for democratic deliberation to work, we must have “rules” for what constitutes “good public discourse.”1
Yet there is a dilemma. Too often, the “rules” of public deliberation have “acted
(in consequence, if not intention) to exclude already marginalized groups,” as
Roberts-Miller observes. Indeed, such rules have tended to dismiss, a priori, “the
very kind of rhetoric most likely to effect social change by or on behalf of the
oppressed”: the rhetoric of “populist” social movements. In her view, this is
because the rules for “good public discourse” have, in the past, upheld an “objective” ideal, privileging unemotional, materialist, and quantifiable discourse.
Quoting Linda Alcoff, Roberts-Miller worries about the “tyranny” of a “subjectless, value-less” conception of objectivity, for such an ideal has the “effect of
authorizing those scientific voices that have universalist pretensions and disauthorizing personalized voices that argue with emotion, passion, and open
political commitment.”2 Hence the dilemma. On the one hand, we need rules of
discursive engagement if our deliberations are to be civil and productive. On the
other hand, such rules may exclude those voices already marginalized or silenced.
Roberts-Miller has raised some important questions, and we applaud her
commitment to reinvigorating our deliberative democracy. Yet she largely
ignores a whole tradition of scholarship that has long grappled with the
dilemma between rules and inclusion, and her attempt to resurrect “demagoguery” as the key term of a new critical rhetoric does not really resolve that
dilemma. Contrary to Roberts-Miller’s assertion, interest in “demagoguery”
“
J. Michael Hogan is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State
University in University Park. Dave Tell is Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at the
University of Maryland in College Park.
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has never “lapsed” in rhetorical studies, although the term—for good reason—
has fallen into disfavor. Students of American public address have always been
concerned with the basic question she raises: how do we draw the line between
responsible and irresponsible (or “demagogic”) discourse in a democratic
society? And in their efforts to accommodate dissent, such scholars already
have “bent the rules” about as far as they can without condoning coercion or
violence.
We begin by reviewing how, since at least the 1960s, students of public
address have addressed the dilemma Roberts-Miller identifies: how do we
uphold rules for “good public discourse” without “condemning all activist
rhetoric?”3 Over the years, as we shall see, rhetorical scholars have gone to
great lengths to legitimize “activist” discourse, even to the point of rationalizing obscenity and threats as rhetorical tactics. In recent years, the pendulum
has begun to swing back the other way, as more scholars have become concerned with the breakdown of democratic deliberation in America. Yet even as
they search for new rules of discursive engagement, scholars have remained
sensitive to the need for inclusion. Resurrecting demagoguery might be useful
in the effort to fashion a new critical rhetoric, as Roberts-Miller suggests. But
unless we dismantle old stereotypes and distinguish carefully between rhetorical and political definitions of the term, “demagogue” will remain “more of an
epithet than an analytical term”—a label that we use simply to “discredit those
who offend our rhetorical or ideological sensibilities.”4
THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT DILEMMA
In communication studies, scholars have grappled with Roberts-Miller’s
“dilemma” since at least the 1960s, when public address scholars first took an
interest in the rhetoric of social movements. In Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in
Method, Edwin Black identified “the movement study” as one of three “distinct
approaches to the practice of rhetorical criticism,” and he praised Leland
Griffin’s pioneering work on the rhetoric of social movements for opening “a
new and exciting prospect for rhetorical criticism.”5 Subsequently, movement
studies exploded in the discipline, with hundreds of case studies and a number of special journal issues devoted to the topic in the 1970s and 1980s.6 In
1988, Stephen E. Lucas declared scholarship on the rhetoric of movements
“moribund,” as the Age of Reagan presumably rendered studies of the New
Left “passé” and refocused scholarly attention on “the rhetoric of the platform.”7 Yet as David Henry and Richard Jensen have suggested, movement
studies did not actually disappear in the 1990s but rather matured, moving
beyond issues of “definition, form, methodology, and meaning” to engage in
more close analysis of particular movements.8
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From the start, movement studies in communication aimed to do precisely
what Roberts-Miller now aspires to do: to rethink the “rules” of “good public
discourse” to accommodate “populist” and other modes of “activist” discourse.
In 1968, for example, public address scholar Mary G. McEdwards proclaimed
the “jolting, combative, and passionate” rhetoric of the agitator “a necessary
drivewheel of a dynamic democracy” and celebrated both Wendell Phillips and
Malcolm X as agents of positive social change.9 In 1969, Robert L. Scott and
Donald K. Smith published their now-classic defense of the “rhetoric of confrontation,” announcing that a rhetorical theory “suitable to our age” had to
recognize that “civility and decorum” often served as “masks for the preservation of injustice.”10 A few years later, Theodore Otto Windt Jr. even proclaimed
the obscenity-laden diatribes of the Yippies an expression of their sincere
“moral commitments” and a necessary response to circumstances, at least as
they perceived them.11
A handful of early social movement scholars tried to hold the line against
activists who violated the law, impinged upon the rights of others, or advocated coercion and violence. In 1967, for example, Franklyn S. Haiman
reflected on “The Rhetoric of the Streets” and concluded that many of the protestors of the 1960s had crossed the line of protected free speech by substituting “power and coercion” for “reason and democratic decision-making.” Like
most social movement scholars, Haiman sympathized with protestors’ claims
that the “channels of rational communication” had been closed to them, yet he
resisted “a lowering of the standards to be espoused for the ideal conduct of
public discussion and debate.” For Haiman, the right of free speech had to be
weighed against the rights of other citizens and concerns for public safety. And
under no circumstances could the advocacy of violence be justified “within the
framework of a democratic society.”12
James R. Andrews came to the same conclusion in his study of the rhetoric
of antiwar protests at Columbia University in 1968. Distinguishing between
“persuasive” and “coercive” rhetoric, Andrews argued that rhetoric “becomes
less persuasive and more coercive to the extent that it limits the viable alternatives open to the receivers of communication.” The protestors at Columbia had
crossed that line, he argued, giving “no choice” to those who “dissented from
the protest.” For Andrews, the protests at Columbia thus raised the “quintessential problem” of how far one could go in condoning coercive rhetorical
strategies in the service of “worthy causes.” Quoting Scott and Smith, Andrews
agreed that “civility and decorum” should never be allowed to “serve as masks
for the preservation of injustice.” Yet neither should they be “discarded for
ends that are not obviously and unquestionably just.”13
Notwithstanding these reservations, social movement scholars have, for the
most part, been sympathetic to the voices of protest, particularly “populist”
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voices. The whole thrust of social movement studies over the past 40 years has
been to accommodate those who, in Roberts-Miller’s terms, argue with “emotion, passion, and open political commitment.” In all of this literature, one
would be hard-pressed to find a single scholar guilty of what Roberts-Miller
describes as an “objective” or “positivist” view of rhetoric, privileging “scientific” over “personalized” voices that speak with passion and open political
commitment. To the contrary, virtually all social movement scholars have
sympathized with the activists they study, agreeing with Parke G. Burgess that
confrontational rhetoric is often the “only strategic choice” for agitators whose
legitimate “moral demands” have been silenced or suppressed.14
In light of this sympathy for “populist” agitation, it hardly seems surprising
that the term “demagoguery” has fallen out of favor. In rhetorical terms, as
Stephen R. Goldzwig argued in 1989, it is difficult to distinguish between what
traditionally has been called “demagoguery” and the rhetorical strategies of
many “populist” social movements. With the rise of social movement studies,
as Goldzwig observed, rhetorical tactics that were once “automatically” condemned came to be viewed as part of an “overall strategy of agitation.” Thus
“demagoguery”—a phenomenon once viewed as a “pervasive and leprous sore
on the body politic in a free democratic society”—came to be seen as “a special kind of lesion that precedes healing and renewed health in public debate.”
Urging rhetorical scholars “to suspend ethical judgment” of alleged demagogues until the “ultimate purpose” of their agitation could be determined,
Goldzwig articulated an ethical relativism that Roberts-Miller apparently
endorses: “Moralistic preferences for order, civility, rationality, and decorum
are still merely preferences. Such preferences may mask injustice, ignore the
marginalized, and become rationales for the powerful.”15
The blurring of the line between “demagoguery” and “agitation” was complete in works such as James Darsey’s The Prophetic Tradition and Radical
Rhetoric in America. Celebrating “radical engagement” as a source of democratic renewal and identity, Darsey announced that the goal of democratic deliberation should not be “a state of restfulness,” but rather “endlessly competing
zealotries.”16 Of course, Darsey did not celebrate zealots of all political stripes.
While praising Wendell Phillips and Eugene Debs, he still denounced Joseph
McCarthy as a “demagogue” and disparaged the “populism” of the Cold War
right—those “populists” who, in Michael Kazin’s words, married a critique of
“high government officials” with “the evangelicals’ persistent horror of moral
anarchy fostered by a cosmopolitan elite.”17 Like most liberal scholars, Darsey
celebrated the radicalism of progressive social movements. Yet he still wielded
the label “demagogue” as a weapon against those “populists” he disliked.
Roberts-Miller claims to define “demagoguery” rhetorically—in terms of
the “kinds of arguments” demagogues make—rather than in terms of the
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“morals and motives of the rhetor.”18 Yet, rhetorically, there is little to distinguish left-leaning populists from those who lean to the right. Throughout
American history, as Kazin has demonstrated, the language of populism has
been deployed by a remarkable diversity of advocates, ranging from Samuel
Gompers and Frances Willard to George Wallace and the young Tom Hayden.
In other words, “populist” agitators come “from every part of the political
spectrum.”19 Like Darsey, Roberts-Miller wants to call Joseph McCarthy a
“demagogue,” and she even labels the “Bush administration’s rhetoric about
Saddam Hussein” demagogic.20 Yet she apparently would apply very different
standards to civil rights activists and other progressive populists who she
believes have been “marginalized” or “oppressed.”
The same rhetorical double standard has long been evident in the literature
on “Southern demagoguery.” While praising “populism” in other contexts,
scholars have been quick to condemn those “splendidly gargoylish, uproarious
old razor-back demagogues of the South’s age of tribal politics”21—populists
like “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, Theodore Bilbo, and Huey P. Long. Reflecting a
“cultural bias, even a sort of elitist stereotyping,” Long in particular has been
the “poster child” for Southern demagoguery, despite the fact that he eschewed
the race-baiting, the scapegoating, and the nostalgia for the “Lost Cause” that
has defined the stereotype. In Long’s case, as Hogan and Williams have argued,
the label “demagogue” reflects little more than a personal distaste for the
Kingfish’s “indecorous, vituperative, and revivalistic brand of democratic populism.” For whatever reason, scholars who praise populist rhetoric in other
contexts seem uncomfortable with “radical mass politics among poor, uneducated rural folk in the South.”22
Roberts-Miller acknowledges that “demagoguery” is often little more than
“a term of abuse that people apply to rhetors with whom they disagree.”23 Yet
in proposing to define it as a “specific kind of rhetoric”— “polarizing propaganda that motivates members of an ingroup to hate and scapegoat some outgroup(s)”—she has only further clouded the meaning of the term and has
done little to advance the search for rules of democratic deliberation. In the
final analysis, Roberts-Miller has provided us with yet another political definition of “demagoguery” that fails to resolve the dilemma between “the goals of
inclusion and the need for rules.”24 In the remainder of this essay, we review
just a few recent works on demagoguery and deliberative democracy that may
hold more promise of identifying such rules.
DEMAGOGUERY AND
THE
SEARCH
FOR
RULES
Roberts-Miller is hardly the first to call for a “technical” or “rhetorical” definition of demagoguery. As she herself notes, Reinhard H. Luthin proposed just
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such a definition in his classic study American Demagogues,25 and over the
years rhetorical scholars have offered various definitions of demagoguery and
even developed lists of supposedly demagogic techniques. In 1990, for example, communication scholar J. Justin Gustainis cautioned against assuming
that “all agitators are demagogues, and vice versa”; like Goldzwig, he declared
that “agitative rhetoric” was “not, in itself, demagogic.” Yet convinced of the
need to “combat” demagoguery and concerned that the term had become little more than an “attack word” applied to mainstream politicians like Jimmy
Carter and Jesse Jackson, Gustainis came up with a list of seven “rhetorical
techniques” that he claimed were habitually used by demagogues: (1) “personalized appeal,” (2) “oversimplification,” (3) appeals to emotion “to the exclusion of rational thought,” (4) “specious” or “deliberately distorted”
argumentation, (5) ad hominem attacks, (6) anti-intellectualism, and (7)
“political pageantry.”26
Gustainis’s list is, at once, both more specific and more comprehensive than
Roberts-Miller’s proposed definition. Several of Gustainis’s “techniques” may
add up to what Roberts-Miller calls “polarizing propaganda.” Yet the term
“propaganda” itself is loaded and vague, clouding Roberts-Miller’s definition.
Moreover, Roberts-Miller seems to have added some sort of political test to
her definition. Invoking Erich Fromm, she suggests that “demagoguery,” by
definition, promises “certainty,” “stability,” and “an escape from freedom.”27
Does that mean that the term applies only to authoritarian, nationalistic, or
hyper-patriotic movements of the sort that concerned Fromm—German
Nazism? Would her definition exclude anarchistic movements that do not
promise certainty or stability? Would it exclude nonconformist or “liberation”
movements that do promise “freedom”?
Like her attempt to define “demagoguery,” Roberts-Miller’s search for new
“rules” glosses over the political controversies inherent in that project. Many
scholars have agreed with the need for rules. That conviction informed Jürgen
Habermas’s conception of the public sphere,28 John Rawls’s notion of “public
reason,”29 and Richard Rorty’s proscriptions upon religious discourse.30 It also
is the starting point for Alasdair C. MacIntyre’s After Virtue,31 James Davison
Hunter’s Culture Wars,32 and James Bohman’s Public Deliberation,33 which
Roberts-Miller cites approvingly at the outset of her essay. Yet other deliberative theorists argue that discursive rules inevitably silence minority voices or,
at best, disadvantage the already disadvantaged in public debate. According to
Nancy Fraser, for example, democratic deliberation means “being able to
speak in one’s own voice, and thereby simultaneously to construct and express
one’s cultural identity through idiom and style.” In Fraser’s view, any sort of
deliberative rules function to “make discursive assimilation a condition for
participation in public debate.”34
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We raise these issues not to disparage Roberts-Miller’s efforts, but merely to
remind her of the political complexities of her project. Concerned with the
breakdown of civil discourse in America, many might endorse her call for
rules. Yet others sympathize with Seyla Benhabib’s view that “free and unconstrained dialogue” must be the “principle of democratic legitimacy for all
modern societies.”35 Whatever our political leanings, we can all get behind
Robert-Miller’s effort to insinuate rhetoric more into ongoing discussions of
deliberative democracy. As Roberts-Miller suggests, political theorists have
begun to rediscover “demagoguery,” yet their rules for “good public discourse”
recall the rational paradigm of neoclassical rhetorical theory, denying the role
of passion and faith in human affairs.
A few rhetorical scholars have begun to sketch alternative models of deliberative democracy—models that are both rule-governed and inclusive. Robert
L. Ivie makes such an attempt in Democracy and America’s War on Terror,
proposing an “idiom of democracy” in which disputants view each other as
“adversaries” rather than “enemies.”36 In Toward a Civil Discourse, Sharon
Crowley likewise envisions a civil and inclusive deliberative democracy governed by rules drawn from the “ancient art of rhetoric”—a theory of “rhetorical argumentation” that “does not depend solely on appeals to reason and
evidence.”37 In the years ahead, this emerging conversation will no doubt lead
to more mature, rhetorical alternatives to deliberative theories that disparage
“passion” and “open political commitment,” as Roberts-Miller puts it. As we
develop such theories, however, we need to acknowledge that zealots from
across the political spectrum have contributed to the decline of public deliberation in America. And whatever “rules” we decide on need to reflect rhetorical principles, not merely political preferences. As David Zarefsky has argued,
there have always been “two faces” of democratic rhetoric, “one benign, one
threatening,” and if we hope to restore the balance between the two we need to
encourage all of our citizens to “test, compare, and join” in arguments about
public affairs, not close off debate or discourage public discussion. That, in the
final analysis, might be the only sort of rule we can all agree on: a rule against
ending the conversation, a rule that says there are “no final victories.”38
NOTES
1. Patricia Roberts-Miller, “Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric,” Rhetoric &
Public Affairs 8 (2005): 459–60.
2. Roberts-Miller, “Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric,” 459–60.
3. Roberts-Miller, “Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric,” 460, 462.
4. J. Michael Hogan and Glen Williams, “The Rusticity and Religiosity of Huey P. Long,”
Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7 (2004): 153.
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5. Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (1965; repr., Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1978), 18, 22.
6. See Herbert W. Simons, Elizabeth A. Mechling, and Howard N. Schreier, “The Functions of
Human Communication in Mobilizing for Collective Action from the Bottom Up: The
Rhetoric of Social Movements,” in Handbook of Rhetorical and Communication Theory, ed.
Carroll C. Arnold and John Waite Bowers (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1984), 792–867. Also
see the special issues of the Central States Speech Journal (Winter 1980) and Communication
Studies (Spring 1991) on social movement criticism.
7. Stephen E. Lucas, “The Renaissance of American Public Address: Text and Context in
Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 243.
8. David Henry and Richard J. Jensen, “Social Movement Criticism and the Renaissance of
Public Address,” Communication Studies 42 (1991): 84.
9. Mary G. McEdwards, “Agitative Rhetoric: Its Nature and Effect,” Western Speech 32 (1968):
36–37.
10. Robert L. Scott and Donald K. Smith, “The Rhetoric of Confrontation,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 55 (1969): 8.
11. Theodore Otto Windt Jr., “The Diatribe: Last Resort for Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech
58 (1972): 3.
12. Franklyn S. Haiman, “The Rhetoric of the Streets: Some Legal and Ethical Considerations,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967): 99–114.
13. James R. Andrews, “Confrontation at Columbia: A Case Study in Coercive Rhetoric,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 55 (1969): 9–16. Legend has it that Andrews had to fight his own
battle over free speech to secure publication of this essay in QJS. Told by the editor that he
could not quote protestors using the “F-word,” Andrews did just what he was urging the
protestors to do: he negotiated and compromised, agreeing to the editor’s demand that he
cut the “F-word” and settling for two “bullshits” and a “son-of-a-bitch.”
14. Parke G. Burgess, “The Rhetoric of Black Power: A Moral Demand?” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 54 (1968): 123.
15. Steven R. Goldzwig, “A Social Movement Perspective on Demagoguery: Achieving Symbolic
Realignment,” Communication Studies 40 (1989): 203–4, 220.
16. James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York: New York
University Press, 1997), x.
17. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books,
1995), 166.
18. Roberts-Miller, “Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric,” 460.
19. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 270.
20. Roberts-Miller, “Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric,” 465.
21. E. Culpepper Clark, “Pitchfork Ben Tillman and the Emergence of Southern Demagoguery”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (1983): 424.
22. Hogan and Williams, “The Rusticity and Religiosity of Huey P. Long,” 151.
23. Roberts-Miller, “Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric,” 461.
24. Roberts-Miller, “Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric,” 460.
25. Reinhard H. Luthin, American Demagogues: Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954;
repr., Gloucester, MA.: Peter Smith, 1959).
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26. J. Justin Gustainis, “Demagoguery and Political Rhetoric: A Review of the Literature,”
Rhetoric Society Quarterly 20 (1990): 155, 158–60.
27. Roberts-Miller, “Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric,” 462.
28. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 36–43.
29. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 212–54.
30. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 148–74.
31. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
32. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic
Books, 1992).
33. James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1996).
34. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually
Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992), 126.
35. Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen
Habermas,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 88.
36. Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2005), 159.
37. Sharon Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 3–4.
38. David Zarefsky, “Two Faces of Democratic Rhetoric,” keynote address at “Rhetoric and
Democratic Citizenship: A Colloquy in Honor of William Norwood Brigance,” Center of
Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, April 2005.