Deliberating War

This book argues that treating politics as war derails essential democratic processes, including deliberation and policy argumentation, in complicated ways. ＂Politics is war＂ is not always just a figure of speech, but often a sincere expression of how people see disagreement--they mean it literally--and they use it to evade the responsibilities of rhetoric. This book takes the metaphor seriously. Using a series of case studies ranging from the 432 BCE ＂Debate at Sparta＂ to Bill O’Reilly’s recent invention of a ＂War on Christmas,＂ Deliberating War illustrates pathologies of deliberation that arise when a community understands itself to be at political war. This book identifies recurrent rhetorical strategies that constrain or even effectively prohibit deliberation, such as deflecting, reframing, threat inflation, appealing to paired terms, claiming moral license, radicalizing a base. In short, what seems to be an effective solution to an immediate rhetorical problem--using hyperbole and demagoguery to persuade people to adopt a specific leader or policy--is a trap that prevents democratic practices of compromise, deliberation, fairness, reciprocity. Unhappily, threat inflation--even when well-intentioned--At some point, hyperbolic rhetoric becomes threat inflation, and then that inflated threat becomes the premise of policies, both foreign and domestic. And then agreeing as to the obvious existential threat posed by the Other and uniting behind the obvious policy solution is a necessary sign of being on the side of Good. Once communities become persuaded that they are in an apocalyptic battle between Good and Evil, politics as war can quickly become real war--often with far-reaching and catastrophic consequences.

Patricia Roberts-Miller, formerly Director of the University Writing Center and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, is a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation--that is, times that communities made decisions they later regretted, although they had all the information they needed to make better ones. She is the author of Speaking of Race: Constructive Conversations About an Explosive Topic (The Experiment, January 2021), Rhetoric and Demagoguery, (Southern Illinois UP, 2019; finalist Rhetoric Society of America book of the year), Demagoguery and Democracy (The Experiment, 2017), Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (University of Alabama Press, 2009), Deliberate Conflict: Composition Classes and Political Spaces (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), Voices in the Wilderness: The Paradox of the Puritan Public Sphere (University of Alabama Press, 1999), and various book chapters and articles.