Democratic Style: An RSVP

When a group of us met at NCA in San Antonio last year to begin discusing Professor Engels’s compelling question of what might constitute a democratic style, I did what any task-oriented, overcommitted conventioneer would do. I answered the question. I made up a model. I mean, I had lists. I even lugged dog-eared copies of some of my favorite books in my convention totebag to take to the panel, just in case. More specifically, I drew upon some of my favorite democratic theorists to propose a three-pronged normative framework featuring the most basic characteristics I thought such a rhetorical style should exhibit. Because I think it is important to acknowledge the trade-offs between normative and empirically based accounts of democracy, I registered my conscious choice to put the theory first, even though some thinkers, including Robert Hariman, might warn against it.¹

Most obviously, democratic style should be reason-giving, I said. Even if the nature and limits of various procedural forums for this reason-giving can be debated, the public articulation of reasons promotes education, legitimation, and accountability, three democratic goals to be sure.² Second, democratic style should offer recognition to its audience members. Here I use the term “recognition” in the self-consciously modernist sense influentially described by Charles Taylor, in which a sense of universal “citizen dignity” is understood as a moral imperative, in the traditions of Rousseau and Herder.³ Last, democratic style should overtly attend to relationships, with emphasis on the imagined more than the real. Even if democratic community can ultimately only be viewed as imagined community, vis-à-vis Benedict Anderson, this imagining itself must be called into being by a rhetoric that activates certain relational commitments to other people whom one does not know.⁴ Specifically, the commitments I have in mind might be part of an a priori sense of a particular subject position, akin to Deweyan intersubjectivity, to promote a notion of justice through a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” and/or emotional capabilities including compassion and trust.⁵

From theory and in theory, then, my position was that a “democratic style” must foreground reasons, recognition, and imagined relationship to promote the discursive environment necessary for the most fundamental democratic processes to flourish. (For the record, I am persuaded by Robert Dahl that these conditions are fivefold: [1] effective participation, [2] equality in voting, [3] gaining enlightened understanding, [4] exercising final control over the agenda, and [5] inclusion of adults.⁶) Even if the relationship between rhetoric and political culture is far more complicated than such plain sentences would suggest, I join Hariman in the Burkean premise that “[d]iscourses both structure our perceptions and are structured by the situations in which they are used.”⁷ We might not be able to approximate or even recognize ideal democracy, but surely we can identify the basic features of rhetoric that could promote its value-laden procedures.

Or at least that’s what I thought last November. To paraphrase Francis Bacon, “reading makes one full, conference makes one ready, and writing makes one exact.” In striving to represent my position more precisely within this forum, I must challenge both the original question and my original response. Allow me to proceed in reverse order, which is to say, to move from theory to practice.

I still like my November answer, and yet now I turn to a question raised by its numerous “shoulds.” Too many shoulds is not necessarily a problem within a normative model of anything, but Professor Engels specifically asked us, then and now, to consider whether or not there were any “actually existing” exemplars. Nevertheless, as idealized as my model is, it was not difficult for me to think of examples from political texts I know well, including speeches by Franklin D. Roosevelt, especially his First Inaugural; Barbara Jordan, especially her 1976 keynote; and William J. Clinton, especially his First Inaugural. But is my version of democratic style less small-d democratic in the theoretical sense than it is capital-D Democratic in a historical sense?

Of course not. Reasons, recognition, and...