Crowley, Liberal Rhet. Theory, and Jesus Camp

Ok, I'll admit up front that the following is the early part of the paper I'm handing in tomorrow night in conjunction with my CMAP. I thought I'd go ahead and post it as it touches on some of what Faith, Maggie, and others have blogged about so far. . .

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In Toward a Civil Discourse (2006), Sharon Crowley attempts, with many qualifications, to describe a rhetoric that can work past the “current ideological impasse” between liberalism and apocalyptism in American political discourse (23). Early chapters are dedicated to recovering rhetorical possibilities long obscured by pejorative, cynical connotations of rhetoric in general. Among Crowley’s contentions is that “rhetoric cannot thrive in politics where open disagreement is discouraged” (21). To this end, she describes a discourse in which liberals must forego insistence on reason being paramount to values (John Locke), emotional connections (Lynn Worsham and Alison Jagger), or “evaluation and commitment” (George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776)). Likewise, Crowley does not believe that an a priori insistence on consensus—as an outcome of multi-party democracies, public policies, or, really, any rhetorical situation—is a productive “argumentative goal”: “just relations between and among opponents,” she writes, “are . . . difficult to establish . . . when everyone begins with the knowledge that all positions taken by some or all must be eroded or even forgotten if deliberation is to succeed” (21-22).
Crowley builds much of her argument on a foundation provided by Chantel Mouffe, who also decries consensus-building in efforts to rescue democracy from “the failings of liberalism” and Derridean “violent hierarchies,” and who helps recover the “predominant role of passions as moving forces of human conduct” (18-20). Crowley does expand on Mouffe’s assessment of liberal rhetorical theory by articulating how it banks on the willingness of members of a democracy to argue in a rational fashion, even as it becomes clear that legitimacy was never grounded on rational argument (vs. hegemonic discourse), and that liberal rhetorical theory also demotes values (and agency) to the realm of the individual subject (the way Hugh Blair “advised his students to lay aside their commonplaces” and base arguments on their “native genius”), which poststructuralists have already troubled (35-38). To me, this dismantling of liberal rhetorical theory aids in Crowley’s own self-reflexive rhetoric. Crowley is not an apocalyptist but promises to be charitable in order to model the aidos and dike she is promoting in the sophistic tradition of Protagoras and Gorgias; however, she often admits the near impossibility of this while describing the apocalyptist “camp” vs. the liberalism that informs her own politics. Her attempts at self-reflexivity also provide a necessary basis for returning doxa from opinions formed and held by individuals to a more “postmodern theory of rhetorical invention” in which “doxa designates current and local beliefs that circulate communally” (47).
Crowley’s narrative becomes more engaging when she traces a sort of Foucauldian archeology of how hegemonic discourse positioned Americans as a briefly united “we” in the wake of 9/11 and how liberal democracy privatized values and emotions to the realm of the individual while elevating reason to that of public discourse. Her argument is also well-served by repeatedly defining Aristotelian rhetoric as a search for all available means of persuasion. Crowley does run the risk of constructing a straw man out of the tent show end of fundamentalism, but I found that her continual positioning of liberal thought as equally if oppositely hegemonic—an emanation of our habitus that is difficult to “not think” in terms of—did temper the easy one-sidedness to which her book might have succumbed. I also found myself generating more connections to the ways in which liberal thought lacks aidos as it constructs the Other, especially in recent documentaries like Ewing and Grady’s Jesus Camp (2006) and Friends of God (2007), which was directed by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra. Both films have drawn criticism for over-representing the extreme: for focusing on kids praying at camp with a cardboard George W. Bush, or, in the case of Pelosi’s film (described by HBO as “a look at the many millions of evangelical Christians who have become a formidable force in our culture and our democracy”), for lingering on the Christian Wrestling Federation.

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