Demagoguery and Democratic Deliberation: The Search for Rules of Discursive Engagement

"For 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 "subject-less, 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" 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...