Crowley's Rhetoric

What I thought when reading Crowley was that she's using Berlin's tactic of foregrounding ideology, and giving a strident political focus to her discussion of rhetoric. In this, she seems to be using the approach that she criticizes the fundamentalist rhetoricians for, and I'm not sure whether that was deliberate, and think maybe it wasn't. Her idea that the liberal and fundamentalist rhetoricians are coming from fundamentally incompatible viewpoints seems like a starting point for a discussion of how their rhetorics operate. In her discussion of their operation, she carefully notes where liberals have been more willing to engage the other side than conservatives. So the editorializing intertwines with the scholarship, which, again, fits with the idea that putting ideology out front is the most honest thing to do, so that any political goals can be seen by the students and accepted, or not.

The question that Crowley's use of this tactic brings up is one that the article we read last week got me thinking about: how much does revealing ideology, and political goals, help to promote an honest discourse, and how much does it inhibit the audience, and subvert any potential openness. Crowley comes at us with revolution in her eye, then intersperses discussion of the nature of rhetoric, and I, as a reader, end up skimming toward anything that doesn't seem like mudslinging.

Do you guys think this is deliberate? Does she have a goal on the level of rhetorical pedagogy? I don't really know.