Editor's Note

In Rhetoric & Public Affairs volume 8, number 3 (Fall 2005), Professor Patricia Roberts-Miller called for a new engagement with "demagogic" discourse, which she defined as "polarizing propaganda that motivates members of an in-group to hate and scapegoat some out-group(s), largely by promising certainty, stability, and what Erich Fromm famously called an 'escape from freedom.'" During the course of setting forth her argument, Roberts-Miller specifically referenced the work of James Darsey and Steven R. Goldzwig. I have invited Darsey and Goldzwig, along with J. Michael Hogan, whose recent work on Huey P. Long appeared in this journal, to respond to Roberts-Miller's essay. If the terms "demagogue" and "demagoguery" are to have any critical or analytical value, we must continue to explore what that value might be and how it might best be discovered and put into practice.