"A plain public road": evaluating arguments for democracy in a post-metaphysical world.

• Author: Hartnett, Stephen

But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooks you round the waist, My right hand points out to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far . . . it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know, Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds, and I will mine, and let us hence forth; Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

- Walt Whitman, the 1855 Leaves of Grass, p. 52-

When Whitman writes "Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,/You must travel it for yourself," he alludes to the crucial problem of how democracy balances the experiences, needs, and aspirations of the individual against the extra-individual forms of order and authority that structure society. At times, it seems that Whitman privileges the individual over larger forms of social gatherings, as his poetry is driven by a swaggering belief in the power of the individual to determine tight and wrong. Thus, while speaking with his own miraculously American vernacular, Whitman reinvents the Enlightenment decree: "Dare to use your own reason" (Kant, 1784/1988, p. 462). However, as the often brutal reception of Whitman's early poetry (see Woodress, 1983) and the struggles of the past one-hundred and forty odd years of American history since the initial publication of Leaves of Grass both demonstrate again and again, the poetic impulse to celebrate the individual's "own reason" and the over-riding political and cultural realities involved in the construction of "Wonderful cities and free nations" have historically found themselves at odds over the question of what counts as persuasive evidence for deciding why we should privilege one "road" over the other. Consequently, one of the central questions in American democracy is to what, if any, extra-individual authority we might appeal for grounding our individual experiences within the extra-individual democratic journey?

Proceeding from the general premise that post-metaphysical thinking strives to deconstruct modernist systems for verifying truth claims, we suggest that engaged cultural critics, advocates, and philosophers need to recognize that all we have left-in terms of how both to construct and analyze possible answers to the question raised above - is a renewed civic sensibility that is deeply attune to the obligations and responsibilities of argument evaluation (among others, see Farrell, 1993; Harnett, 1998; Hauser, 1995; Mailloux 1985, 1991; Ramsey, 1998a; Rorty, 1989; Schrag, 1985). This position therefore recognizes the efficacy of Schiappa's (1995) claim regarding the fundamentally public and political nature of argument evaluation, which states that

all evaluation expresses values; all language use is sermonic and advocates a partial point of view; and, if the argument under assessment is of public interest, the values and point of view cannot help but have a public dimension (pp. xvi-xvii).

Given that we begin this argument evaluation with these pragmatic, post-metaphysical, and rhetorical rather than epistemological commitments, we believe it is important to clarify what this position obliges us to demonstrate with respect to what might be called historical evidence. On the one hand, we recognize the rhetorical and thus malleable and shifting grounds of arguments concerning first or ultimate principles, let alone regarding debates about and within democracy (see Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Trend, 1996; West, 1989). We accordingly begin with the premise that there are no definitive, metaphysically pure, unassailable arguments that can once-and-for-all ground democratic practices in ultimate and final principles, and that any attempt to do so is but a historically-situated act of persuasion. On the other hand, this commitment to post-metaphysical and pragmatic criticism does not open the door to a naive and thorough-going relativism that is unable to cite certain forms of evidence as a part of the argument in favor of one form of democracy over another. We accordingly begin with the premise that even while the notion of evidence or data is in itself rhetorically constructed (see Berkhofer, 1995), the public give-and-take of democratic dialogue nonetheless obliges citizens to attempt to support their political claims with sound arguments grounded at least in part on lessons learned from a sincere appraisal of the available evidence regarding a given topic of debate. Hence, throughout this essay, we supplement our pragmatic argument evaluation with references to the works of historians, philosophers, and political scientists, as they offer both complementary and contradictory perspectives on the specific acts of persuasion under consideration.

Section One of this essay accordingly engages in a critique of Patrick Buchanan's recent campaign speeches, publications, and Internet postings from the perspective of argument evaluation. Our analysis proceeds by interweaving traditional rhetorical terms (catachresis, cataplexis, and categorical propositions) with more politically charged terms (specious nomenclature, escalation, and maximalism), hence enabling us to offer some provisional interdisciplinary observations regarding the dialectical relationships among rhetorical tropes, argumentative structures, and political ideologies. In order to provide a strong historical grounding for our discussion of Buchanan, Section Two then examines James Morone's Democratic Wish and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Rites of Assent, both of which consider the role of rhetoric in arguments for American democracy circa 1776-1860. based on the rhetorical, historical, and political issues raised in these first two sections, we conclude the essay by posing a series of questions that we believe carry heuristic value for future research in argument evaluation, even if they do not decide the questions at hand in any definitive manner. These questions address some of the paradoxical possibilities of illusion and imagination within arguments concerning American democracy.

This essay is therefore grounded within a long tradition in which scholars of communication studies and argument evaluation have recognized the correlations among a text's organizing rhetoric, its mode of argument, and its larger political claims (see L. Bennett, 1992; Bertelsen, 1992; Condit, 1987; Deethardt, 1983; Jamieson, 1992; Kneupper, 1986;; Parry-Giles, 1993; Schiappa, 1995; Wetler & Pearce, 1992). Using the terms of such rhetorical/political critique as our starting point, we hope to contribute to the broad project exploring the relationship between argumentation and democracy by supplementing traditional communication studies and argument evaluation concerns with the interdisciplinary moves outlined above. In doing so, we hope to provide an at least partial response to Robert Hariman's (1994) claim - which we believe applies to scholars of argument evaluation as well - that "rhetorical theory needs to be oriented more toward contributing to a general academic culture of inquiry, and to specific projects in other disciplines" (p. 332). We accept this challenge with the understanding that such interdisciplinary scholarship re-validates and re-energizes the study of argument as well.

EVALUATING PAT BUCHANAN'S ARGUMENTS REGARDING OUR CRUMBLING DEMOCRACY

Our discussion of Buchanan and the politics of his arguments regarding our crumbling democracy begins with the recognition that nearly all political discourse shares the common ground of striving to give voice or name both to psychological unease and the desire for a better world (see Marcuse, 1966; Ramsey, 1996; Reich 1970). However, in keeping with the general premises of pragmatic, post-metaphysical thinking noted above, we assume that the process of re-thinking the relationship between this psychological grounding and its attendant political discourse is fundamentally nonverifiable in any strict philosophical, scientific, psychoanalytic, or historical sense. To state this thesis in traditional rhetorical language, the fundamentally synecdochical and therefore integrative qualities of democratic culture are based on a part/whole symbiosis of people/government, yet this relationship - which is based on the entirely ambiguous yet all-important notion of the legitimacy of political representation - is not verifiable in any concrete, "objective" manner. What separates the myriad camps producing political arguments, then, is not the verifiability of their claims (which in almost all cases expresses the wish for something better), but rather, the question of what historical narratives, cultural assumptions, and language games do they employ to express themselves? Indeed, following the lead of Richard Rorty (1989), we are compelled not to ask the epistemological question "How do you know?", but rather, to ask the rhetorical question "Why do you talk that way?" (p. 51). We are concerned then, with the question of how Buchanan's arguments rely upon a series of culturally, historically, and linguistically-situated conventions regarding forms of argumentation. Following Rorty, we explicate in a detailed manner how these conventions structure Buchanan's politics, yet we do so while eschewing the modernist vocabulary of "truth" and morality in favor of a pragmatic search for "the form of historical narration" (p. 60) that underlies Buchanan's discourse.

We have chosen to analyze Patrick Buchanan's campaign speeches, publications, and Internet postings because a) they have received no sustained academic attention, and b) the widespread media commentary they have elicited (even after his withdrawal from the 1996 presidential campaign) has been consistently both confused and confusing (among others, see J. Bennett, 1995; Daley, 1995; Davis, 1995; Holmes, 1995; Ingwerson, 1995; Kuhn, 1996...