Divisive Discourse: The Extreme Rhetoric of Contemporary American Politics.

• Author: Miller, Eric C.

Divisive Discourse: The Extreme Rhetoric of Contemporary American Politics by Joseph Zompetti. San Diego: Cognella Academic Publishing, 2015. 258 pp. $74.95 Hardcover.

Years from now, when historians chronicle the Obama era, they will situate events within an especially anxious discursive environment. Presidential history tends to survey the major exigencies of a given term in office, and the current administration has these in surplus. Since 2008, the nation has been embroiled in a diversity of passionate debates, including but not limited to those concerning gun control, religious freedom, healthcare, gay rights, and immigration. Place these between the nation's first black president and a largely white backlash movement, at the tail end of a "Great Recession," and amid the lingering threat s of global terrorism, and you have a plausible setting for extremist rhetoric. If argumentation scholars have a public role to play in times like these, it must in volve clarifying the chaos.

This is the daunting project of Joseph Zompetti's Divisive Discourse: The Extreme Rhetoric of Contemporary American Politics, an interesting and timely read that may prove useful as a textbook for courses on argumentation. A classically trained debater, Zompetti approaches controversy with an eye for premises, contentions, evidences, and fallacies. He documents these in clear and logical fashion, always directing the reader to observe the architecture of the argument. "By focusing on the tactics and techniques of discourse rather than the content," he writes, "my hope is that the conversations generated by this book will be about how political issues are discussed instead of what is being discussed" (p. xix). The book's seven chapters include an introduction to theoretical foundations, a conclusion, and five analytical chapters spanning the controversies enumerated above. Admitting to but suppressing personal opinions, Zompetti attempts to dissect these debates from a position of relative impartiality.

Chapter 1 covers a great deal of conceptual ground in a concise thirteen pages, providing definitions for key terms, explaining the Toulmin model, and listing some of the most common types of fallacy. Here Zompetti equips readers with the tools for performing the work that follows. Specifically, this means recognizing the characteristics of extremist speech and analyzing them against the context and available evidence.

Chapters 2 through 6 put these tools to good...