Three Cheers for Democratic Style! (Okay, Maybe Just Two)

Condoleezza Rice faced trouble. Upon arriving in Blackburn, England, in March of 2006, the Secretary of State, accompanied by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, was confronted by protesters. Repeatedly, persistently, loudly, and visibly the dissenters declared “Stop torturing people,” “No torture, no compromise,” and “How many lives per gallon?” Journalists took note as stop after stop during the Blackburn tour became an awkward publicity situation for the foreign secretaries. Eventually, the protests grew so persistent that Rice and Straw decided to cancel a planned trip to a mosque out of fear of being met with “an unruly crowd.”

Still, Rice smiled. Photographs of the trip repeatedly showed Rice and Straw in cheerful poses. Indeed, Rice looked so enthused that she had to explain herself to reporters. Dissent, she claimed, was proof of the validity of the Bush administration’s “freedom agenda.” “People have a right to protest,” she said. “That is what democracy is all about. And I am just delighted that in more and more of the world, those rights to speak your mind are being extended to other people for whom that right has not been there.” In this way, Rice effectively dismissed the moral and political gravity of the particular complaints before her. The protesters were merely speaking their mind.

Interestingly, it was during the same trip to Blackburn that Rice admitted that the Bush administration had made many mistakes in Iraq. She said, “I know we’ve made tactical errors—thousands of them, I’m sure. This could have gone that way or that could have gone that way.” She continued, “I’ve said many, many times I am quite certain that there are going to be dissertations written about the mistakes of the Bush Administration and I will probably oversee some of them when I go back to Stanford.” Still, even with this caveat, Rice was made to regret her remarks about “thousands” of tactical errors in Iraq. So the next day she clarified for reporters: “I meant it figuratively, not literally.”¹

In Political Style, Robert Hariman describes the “realist style” as one that “begins by marking all other discourses with the sign of the text.”² As Hariman notes, drawing attention to the figurative or stylistic character of political expression is an extremely effective rhetorical tactic for asserting a politics that is purportedly based on objectified power. Indeed, at Blackburn, Rice, like Machiavelli, “turned rhetoric against itself.”³ However, this realist tactic has strong kinship with democratic style as well: a vital characteristic of “democratic style” and an essential capacity of the democratic citizen is seen in the ability of a person to move from embracing the textual and aesthetic substance of politics to dismissing it. The ability to dismiss the discourses of democracy as “mere style” is integral to the sustenance of democracy, equally vital to the capacity to endorse, or even exult in, the discursive and performative stuff of politics (and thus democratic style shares strong kinship with the courtly style as well).

In this sense I would argue that Rice’s routine in Blackburn was a virtuoso performance in democratic style. She smiled for the cameras, thus performing democratic style, even as she dismissed the moral and political message of the protesters in her midst by declaring that they are “what democracy is all about.” In the context of the grotesquely disastrous Iraq War, her dismissals are disquieting, even gruesome. Democracy is sometimes horrifying. But the performance itself, in which she simultaneously embraced and dismissed style, nicely enacted the political artistry necessary for democratic citizenship. The Blackburn trip can be read as a case study in the way in which both popular public dissent and elite public disclosures can get marked with the sign of the text. Just as Peter Ramus used rhetorical argument in the sixteenth century effectively to reduce the art of rhetoric to “mere style,” so Rice gleefully interpreted the words of dissenters and even her own words as the expressive effluvia of democratic discourse. Democratic style as mere style.

So be it. Three cheers for democratic style as mere style...