Demagoguery and `Re-visioning' Democracy

Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

10-1-2006

Communication, College of

Demagoguery, Democratic Dissent, and "Revisioning" Democracy

Steven R. Goldzwig Marquette University, steven goldzwig@marquette edu

Published version. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 2006): 471-478. DOI. © 2006 Michigan State University Press. Used with permission

DEMAGOGUERY, DEMOCRATIC DISSENT, AND “RE-VISIONING” DEMOCRACY

STEVEN R. GOLDZWIG

Iapplaud Professor Roberts-Miller’s call for a new look at demagoguery.

Rather than engage in particular observations and arguments attending Professor Roberts-Miller’s call,I would like to begin with her closing remarks: “I am not claiming I have settled the dilemma ofrules and inclusion,nor even to have conclusively demonstrated what demagoguery is,let alone what should be done about it.My intention is to raise interest in the research project and revivify scholarship on demagoguery.”1

To my mind,one ofthe most important implications in Professor RobertsMiller’s essay is that a refocused agenda on so-called “demagogic”rhetorical practices and products may give scholars and public alike a better handle on “deliberative democracy.”2 While she provides a credible account ofwhy rhetoricians may have turned from studies focusing on demagoguery,she also indicates that scholars in other fields seem to have a growing interest precisely because such studies have great promise in advancing our knowledge of democratic deliberation.3 One place to begin,however,is to probe some ofthe existing rhetorical literature for helpful critiques ofdiscursive formations that might point more clearly to exactly how rhetoricians have already contributed to the discussion ofdiscursive democracy.

Professor Roberts-Miller indicated earlier in her essay that part ofthe dilemma associated with sparse treatments ofdemagoguery can actually be traced back to my 1989 essay on Louis Farrakhan.4 She laments,“It is notable, however,the extent to which this scholarly project has lapsed;journals in rhetoric show few or no articles since Steven R.Goldzwig’s 1989 piece on Farrakhan.”5 While there is some truth to this observation,I think the exceptions to this generalization are important and naming them is actually one way ofacknowledging and advancing Professor Roberts-Miller’s call.

In particular,I believe that current ongoing attempts to understand folks who have been labeled by scholars and publics alike as “demagogues”are helping us realize new ways ofinterpreting such rhetors,advancing our knowledge ofoppositional rhetorics and,ultimately,our understanding ofthe nuances of our emerging rhetorical democracy.In the briefspace allotted for this response,

Steven R.Goldzwig is Professor ofCommunication Studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee,Wisconsin.

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I would like to give some examples ofcurrent scholarship that support this argument.While the following exemplars are not meant to be exhaustive nor necessarily representative ofan ongoing major trend in current scholarship, they seem to me to be demonstrativeofthe shifting character ofthe contemporary treatment ofdemagoguery.Traditional categories and assumptions are being reformed and retooled,ifnot supplanted by recent work.

Patricia A.Sullivan points to the need to pay special attention to the unique contours ofAfrican American rhetoric to avoid misinterpreting its thrust and intent.She indicates that during the 1988 presidential campaign,media coverage ofJesse Jackson’s bid for the presidency “was greeted with frustration by media representatives and political pundits.”6 These opinion leaders attributed to Jackson those characteristics we often associate with demagogues and demagoguery,“charg[ing] that he was overly emotional,dishonest,and vague during presentations on the campaign trail.”7 By rereading Jackson through the culturespecific lens ofAfrican American patterns ofsignification,those negative public assessments seem much less convincing and more likely a case ofmisinterpretation.Using as her case study Jackson’s Democratic National Convention address “Common Ground and Common Sense,”Sullivan demonstrates conclusively that Jackson employed a “speakerly text,”which was ripe with the “double-voiced words and double-voiced discourse”associated with various forms of African American signification.8 In Sullivan’s account,simple assessments of demagogic practices are rendered problematic.For example,“‘Lying’within the context ofthe black oral tradition does not necessarily connote dishonesty or insincerity.”9 Indeed,“from the standpoint ofAfrican-American patterns ofsignification,[Jackson] was using ‘figurative discourse,’or symbolically adapting his story for the audience.”10 Thus,the “truth”ofthe narrative lies in its symbolic resonance for the intended audience rather than in any particular truth-telling “in a traditional sense.”11 In like manner,charges ofbeing “overly emotional”are conclusions often made by whites when they are exposed to African American discourse,but those judgments are not necessarily shared by black audiences who may be more interested in a rhetor’s ability to ground his or her argument in “common sense and personal experience”through various forms ofculturebased signification.12 These kinds ofdifferences do matter,especially in our attempt to interpret and understand the ongoing discourses ofa democracy. Thus culture-specific address and its critical appreciation are dependent on the norms ofthe cultural contract in force at the time.Text,context,cultural contract,and norms for performance all play crucially interdependent roles in determining the quality,value,and ethicality ofdiscursive practices.

The reinterpretation ofthe so-called “demagogue”also has increased our knowledge ofprotest rhetoric.Mark Lawrence McPhail’s 1998 article on Louis Farrakhan in the Quarterly Journal ofSpeech is a case in point.13 McPhail seeks

to amplify earlier work,including my own,14 through a key assumption:“The manner in which knowledge is conceptualized and articulated in protest rhetoric often mirrors and thus sustains the very values and norms it calls into question.”15 In that light,McPhail employs complicity theory in an effort to extend our understanding ofFarrakhan’s discourse.He argues that Farrakhan employs “racial reasoning in his public discourse”that “relies heavily on appeals laced with racial essentialism.”As a result,not only does Farrakhan’s discourse “undermine the powerful possibilities ofhis message ofhope and atonement,”it tends to “reif[y] and invigorate ...conflict and division”which, in turn,has the “potential to reinscribe [negative] social norms,practices,and values.”16 In essence,McPhail finds Farrakhan fully engaged in a “politics of complicity”and argues persuasively against any assumption “that oppositional rhetorics are inherently emancipatory.”17 In Farrakhan,McPhail encounters a rhetor whose “appeal to racial essentialism,coupled with his exploitation of the discursive tension between white racism and black resistance,creates a climate ofopposition in which the emancipatory possibilities ofprotest are obscured and undermined.”18 The larger lesson in the essay is that any “oppositional discourse that fails to interrogate its underlying assumptions too often remains complicit with those systems ofoppression it calls into question.”19

John Arthos Jr.has reinterpreted Farrakhan’s rhetoric as well.20 Like Sullivan’s treatment ofJesse Jackson,rather than writing Farrakhan offas a sophist or an ethically suspect rhetorician,Arthos claims that Farrakhan is also perhaps better interpreted within the framework ofAfrican American culture. In his analysis ofFarrakhan’s discourse at the Million Man March,Arthos encounters a rhetor practicing the “shaman-trickster’s art ofmisdirection.”In that light,Farrakhan is evaluated as a “master ofthe art of‘gettin ovuh,’”which was utilized in his call for “black atonement”as a key theme for the march.In issuing his call in a “double-voice,”Farrakhan assured the black community that “the most subversive meanings”ofhis message would indeed be theirs alone.Thus,Farrakhan offered his audiences the promise ofspiritual delivery while performing the rites ofthe traditional role ofpriest-magician.In this instance,Farrakhan’s discourse wove a complex web,the totality ofwhich was largely unseen by white audiences.In this way,Arthos,like others involved in the contemporary reinterpretation ofthose whose public discourse has been associated with the term “demagogue”by scholars and public alike,gives us a new lens with which to investigate an old topic.Therefore,demagoguery is receiving renewed attention,but the old explanations for so-called demagogic discourse are being reformulated.These reinterpretations do not necessarily remove rhetors from charges ofdemagoguery nor do they necessarily remove what can seem,to many at least,the production ofprejudiced and divisive discursive action in the world.But what they can do and have done is to lend

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additional insight into controversial and often marginalized rhetorical attempts.In the long run,I firmly believe,such studies enrich our understanding ofthe complexity ofdemocratic discourse in the United States.As Arthos notes,“The Janus face ofblack identity continues to play an important and productive role in the negotiation ofa hostile world.The Million Man March enacted in an exemplary fashion this very bifurcation.”21 In interrogating these kinds oftension points in our democratic republic,rhetoricians are engaged in the common scholarly community’s concern with democratic practices and products.By focusing on how and why different communities create space both to announce and to reinforce their vision ofa better life,we help to unearth what has previously been unseen and unacknowledged;we prepare each other for future engagement and growth.

But it is not just in formal speeches delivered by publicly recognized representatives ofour various political,social,and religious communities where our critical learning curve is now in full arc.Rhetoricians who place an emphasis on “vernacular discourse”or “everyday language”are finding and reinterpreting discursive texts that are helping us refrain from hasty summary judgments on various rhetors as perpetrators of“highly emotional”or ethically suspect discourse.22 We are finding that emotion and reason cannot be easily separated and that displays ofemotion can be read in many subtle ways.Indeed,as Samuel McCormick has indicated,a focus on “everyday talk”can be useful in “enriching rhetorical studies by providing theorists and critics with access to paralinguistic markers such as hesitations,repetitions,repairs,intonations, and emphases”that “bring with them a powerful mode ofanalyzing the subtle,often fleeting displays ofemotion and spur-of-the-moment decisions that riddle public speech [and] that are omitted when [merely] recording the orator’s words.”23 McCormick suggests that a limited number ofrhetorical scholars are now coming to understand that the speech text’s overall influence and force may be a matter that transcends individual persuasive prowess and implicates the “audience’s willingness to recycle and revise figural aspects ofa speaker’s discourse in their everyday talk.”24

The focus on “everyday talk”and the “vernacular”is in conformance with my 1998 call for “critical localism”as a potentially useful locus for rhetorical criticism.25 A subsequent essay I coauthored with Patricia A.Sullivan enacts the call for critical localism by interrogating vernacular discursive practices that could be construed as demagogic without a careful and particularized reading.26 Our study focused on local newspaper coverage ofMilwaukee radio talk show host Michael McGee.McGee is a former Black Panther and Milwaukee alderman who has,over the years,often been labeled a “demagogue”for a number ofdiscursive practices associated with his advocacy on behalfofpoor innercity African Americans.In particular,mainstream newspaper narratives

attacked McGee for his lack of“deportment”and “statesmanship,”and thus dismissed his more salient social and economic messages.We interpreted his messages through theories ofAfrican American discourse,which helped us as critics to reconfigure and apprehend the texts and contexts associated with his discursive practices in a fresh light.McGee mounted a counternarrative to resist mainstream narratives about himselfand the local black community.In this study,then,persuasive tactics traditionally identified with demagoguery are reframed and reinterpreted as a unique African American form ofdemocratic participation.

Much ofwhat passed for demagoguery in the past is now being reinterpreted,reconfigured,and recast.For example,J.Michael Hogan and Glen Williams have challenged the “received view”ofHuey Long as a southern demagogue.They argue that some people who have been “[u]ncomfortable with radical mass politics among poor,uneducated rural folk in the South” have employed the term “demagogue”as an epithet rather than a technical term.Indeed,for these authors,“Long’s reputation as a demagogue reflects a prejudice grounded not in ideology,but in an intellectual aversion to his indecorous,vituperative,and revivalistic brand ofdemocratic populism.”27 As Hogan and Williams remind the scholarly community,“To some,Long was a hero.To others,he was a demagogue.To embrace one label over the other is to oversimplify Long’s complex political persona.More than that,it is to take sides in the perennial class struggle between the ‘haves’and the ‘have nots.’”28

Even when scholars today reinterpret those whose credentials seem impeccable as demagogues,we learn not only about persuasive strategies and tactics, but also receive new and expansive views about our democracy and our culture.James Darsey’s treatment ofJoseph McCarthy,for example,reconfigures McCarthyism’s “apocalyptic rhetoric as a response to the dissolution ofcommunity in America.”29 In finding his “fantastic moment,”McCarthy’s discursive conspiratorial hyperbole points audiences toward dark forces,evil alliances,secret plots,and all manner ofdarkness “imposed from without.”30

Nothing is what it seems and all manner ofsigns are darkly indeterminate.The sense offoreboding is palpable as the generic constraints ofthe fantastic exploit our fears and lead us to an ineluctable moment of“hesitation between beliefand rejection,that moment suspended between the marvelous (the extraordinary,but ultimately credible) and the uncanny (the bizarre and the ultimately untrue).”31 In Darsey’s deft critical treatment,we find a richer and deeper explanation than mere charges ofdemagoguery.

Studies such as Hogan and Williams’s and Darsey’s are also recasting our knowledge ofrhetorical democracy.As the so-called demagogic discursive practices ofthe past are reinterpreted by new scholarship with new theoretical and methodological assumptions and approaches,we are coming to

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understand the rough-and-tumble ofa liberal democracy in new ways.We are also giving voice to new dimensions ofrhetorical activity that have been written offas inappropriate or anathema.

Rhetoricians who are directly involved in the process ofinterrogating and reclaiming rhetorical democracy are revivifying our traditional ways ofknowing.Some are even turning to the ancients to enhance their reclamation project.For example,Karen E.Whedbee’s examination ofGeorge Grote’s influential nineteenth-century work A History ofGreece reveals avigorous defense ofCleon and the Athenian demagogues.32 Historical treatments of Greece written prior to Grote’s work portrayed Cleon as the quintessential demagogue.As Whedbee makes clear,Cleon was treated as a dangerous “rabblerouser”and “his name was synonymous with deception,flattery,and emotional manipulation ofthe ‘ignorant Athenian mob.’”Grote’s historical “defense ofAthens depended in part on defending the demagogue and,by so doing,vindicating popular oratory as a legitimate means ofpolitical decisionmaking.”33 Like Hogan and Williams’s protest ofthe treatment ofHuey Long, Grote’s revisionist ancient history rejects the view that Cleon was a demagogue.Indeed,according to Whedbee,for Grote,Cleon is better interpreted “as a political hero who used rhetoric to challenge the authority ofwealth and unexamined tradition.Cleon’s expressions ofpolitical dissent opened space for public deliberation and for rational consideration ofalternative modes of thought and conduct.”Indeed,Whedbee argues that “[i]n Grote’s analysis,the rhetorical performances ofdemagogues like Cleon represented a kind of‘critical rationality’essential to achieving political liberty.”34 Moreover,Grote “maintained that political authority can be legitimate only when it is submitted to freely and deliberately.But free and deliberate assent means that dissent must always be kept open as a real option for individuals.”35 Such cues are important to our joint realization ofan engaged political community.

Whether the reformulation occurs from a renewed look at the ancients, contemporary reinterpretations ofrhetors that scholars and public alike once labeled demagogues,taking into account new cultural understandings,reinterpreting protest rhetoric,initiating new attempts to understand the vernacular,or attempting to calibrate how audiences interpret figurative language in everyday discourse,it seems clear that rhetorical scholars are mounting studies that are in fact engaged in the interrogation ofour current rhetorical republic.Whether one prefers to investigate rhetorical democracy,democratic practices or products,or new democratic instantiations in the public sphere,or simply tries to append an alternative meaning and power to so-called “demagogic”discourse,there is unique purchase in mounting and sustaining reinterpretations ofthose rhetors who traditionally have been labeled demagogues. Rhetorical critics have been demonstrably unwilling to dismiss oppositional,

divisive,or strident discourse as part and parcel ofthese revisionist accounts. To my mind,this is a healthy development.Issues ofdemocratic dissent are as crucial to our common destiny as issues ofdemocratic assent.Continued study along these lines should enrich both theory and criticism while simultaneously bringing us new ways ofseeing,interpreting,and enacting a vibrant and expanded realization ofthe polis.

NOTES

1.Patricia Roberts-Miller,“Democracy,Demagoguery,and Critical Rhetoric,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (2005):459–76;quotation,474.

2.Roberts-Miller,“Democracy,Demagoguery,and Critical Rhetoric,”459.

3.Roberts-Miller,“Democracy,Demagoguery,and Critical Rhetoric,”462.

4.Steven R.Goldzwig,“A Social Movement Perspective on Demagoguery:Achieving Symbolic Realignment,” Communication Studies 40 (1989):202–28.

5.Roberts-Miller,“Democracy,Demagoguery,and Critical Rhetoric,”461.

6.Patricia A.Sullivan,“Signification and African-American Rhetoric:A Case Study ofJesse Jackson’s ‘Common Ground and Common Sense’Speech,” Communication Quarterly 41 (1993):1–15;quotation,1.

7.Sullivan,“Signification and African-American Rhetoric,”4.

8.Sullivan,“Signification and African-American Rhetoric,”4.

9.Sullivan,“Signification and African-American Rhetoric,”6.

10.Sullivan,“Signification and African-American Rhetoric,”10.

11.Sullivan,“Signification and African-American Rhetoric,”11.

12.Sullivan,“Signification and African-American Rhetoric,”12.

13.Mark Lawrence McPhail,“Passionate Intensity:Louis Farrakhan and the Fallacies ofRacial Reasoning,” Quarterly Journal ofSpeech 84 (1998):416–29.

14.Goldzwig,“A Social Movement Perspective on Demagoguery.”

15.McPhail,“Passionate Intensity,”426,footnote 4.

16.McPhail,“Passionate Intensity,”417.

17.McPhail,“Passionate Intensity,”418.

18.McPhail,“Passionate Intensity,”421.

19.McPhail,“Passionate Intensity,”418.

20.John Arthos Jr.,“The Shaman-Trickster’s Art ofMisdirection:The Rhetoric ofFarrakhan and the Million Men,” Quarterly Journal ofSpeech 87 (2001):41–60.

21.Arthos Jr.,“The Shaman-Trickster’s Art ofMisdirection,”56.

22.In addition to the discussion that follows,two excellent treatments ofvernacular discourse can be found in Kent Ono and John A.Sloop,“The Critique ofVernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62(1995):19–46;and Gerard A.Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric ofPublics and Public Spheres (Columbia:University ofSouth Carolina Press, 1999).Moreover,reconsiderations ofvernacular discourse and the public sphere are expanding our notions ofthe nature and function ofdemocratic dissent.See,for example,

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Kendall R.Phillips,“The Spaces ofPublic Dissension:Reconsidering the Public Sphere,” Communication Monographs 63 (1996):231–48.

23.Samuel McCormick,“Earning One’s Inheritance:Rhetorical Criticism,Everyday Talk,and the Analysis ofPublic Discourse,” Quarterly Journal ofSpeech 89 (2003):109–31;quotation, 109.

24.McCormick,“Earning One’s Inheritance,”abstract,109.

25.Steven R.Goldzwig,“Multiculturalism,Rhetoric,and the Twenty-first Century,” Southern Communication Journal 63 (1998):273–91.

26.Steven R.Goldzwig and Patricia A.Sullivan,“Narrative and Counternarrative in PrintMediated Coverage ofMilwaukee Alderman Michael McGee,” Quarterly Journal ofSpeech 86 (2000):215–31.

27.J.Michael Hogan and Glen Williams,“The Rusticity and Religiosity ofHuey P.Long,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7(2004):149–72;quotation,151.

28.Hogan and Williams,“The Rusticity and Religiosity ofHuey P.Long,”166.

29.James Darsey,“A Vision ofthe Apocalypse:Joe McCarthy’s Rhetoric ofthe Fantastic,”in The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York:New York University Press, 1997),128–50;quotation,129.

30.James Darsey,“A Vision ofthe Apocalypse,”139.

31.James Darsey,“A Vision ofthe Apocalypse,”135.

32.Karen E.Whedbee,“Reclaiming Rhetorical Democracy:George Grote’s Defense ofCleon and the Athenian Demagogues,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34(2004):71–95.

33.Whedbee,“Reclaiming Rhetorical Democracy,”71–72.

34.Whedbee,“Reclaiming Rhetorical Democracy,”72.

35.Whedbee,“Reclaiming Rhetorical Democracy,”83.