Demophilia: A Discursive Counter to Demophobia in the Early Republic

Engels, Jeremy

Comparing France and the United States, I propose a general model for assessing the birth of pro-democratic discourse. I first explain why founders of the modern ‘democracies’ were openly and vehemently anti-democratic. Next, I focus on two types of situation where the word ‘democracy’ is used on the political stage – when political actors want to distinguish themselves from their opponents and when political actors want to sanctify the political regime. The first case covers three specific modes of the use of the term ‘democracy’: (i) distinguishing oneself negatively by discrediting the opponent (the term ‘democracy’ is pejorative and associated with the ‘enemy’); (ii) distinguishing oneself positively by asserting one's worthiness (the term ‘democracy’ is positive and associated with ‘us’); (iii) fighting for an exclusive claim to the term in order to set oneself apart (several camps proclaim themselves ‘democrat’ and mutually accuse each other of usurping or even ‘stealing’ the title). I conclude that the use of the word ‘democracy’ generally results from a single motivation – to increase one's own political power or to diminish the power of one's opponents.

The scholarship surrounding the relationship, whether personal or intellectual, of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin is murky. Giorgio Agamben explicitly says that Schmitt’s political theology, more precisely his definition of sovereignty as the power to decide the exemption, is a direct response to Benjamin’s concept of pure or revolutionary violence espoused in the 1921 essay Critique of Violence. Jacques Derrida claims that Schmitt sent Benjamin a letter congratulating him on the publication of this essay. Horst Bredekamp details a different history, claiming the opposite, that it was Benjamin who first wrote Schmitt (scandalously) in 1930 acknowledging an intellectual debt. Such a history is rich with irony. The lives of Benjamin and Schmitt would depart on separate paths, both immersed in the same historical spectacle: one dying too young, alone, attempting to escape Nazi Europe and the other, dying an old man, with a legacy shrouded by his involvement with the rise of National Socialism. But two decades earlier, in the early 1920’s their fates were aligned in a shared battle against the Weimar Republic and the ideology of liberal democracy. It will be this equal footing, and two-headed assault on democracy, that will be the basis of this paper.

Demagoguery is a subject of much discussion around the world in light of recent international political affairs. But since demagoguery remains a contested term, the definition invites continued deliberation as rhetoricians grapple with its usefulness, persistence, and presence in world affairs, and as they consider what, if anything, to do about it. Building from Aristotle’s famously imprecise definition of demagoguery and from contemporary definitions that locate demagoguery in culture not in a specific speaker, this essay argues that demagogic rhetoric necessarily incorporates arguments, topoi, and evidence that attack and attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Specifically, demagogic rhetoric hyperextends or supercharges direct democracy by amplifying “the will of the people” to undermine the constraining functions of democratic institutions.

This article was downloaded by: [71.58.69.59] On: 30 September 2011, At: 20:32 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Quarterly Journal of Speech Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rqjs20 Demophilia: A Discursive Counter to Demophobia in the Early Republic Jeremy Engels Available online: 29 Apr 2011 To cite this article: Jeremy Engels (2011): Demophilia: A Discursive Counter to Demophobia in the Early Republic, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97:2, 131-154 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.560178 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. 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Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 97, No. 2, May 2011, pp. 131!154 Demophilia: A Discursive Counter to Demophobia in the Early Republic Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 Jeremy Engels The term ‘‘democracy’’ is ambivalent*in the history of the United States, it has played both god term and devil term, and inspired both sacrifice and trembling. Robert L. Ivie has mapped the discourse by which American policy elites have said ‘‘no’’ to democracy*the rhetoric of ‘‘demophobia.’’ This essay complements his analysis by mapping the discourse by which Americans began to say ‘‘yes’’ to democracy during President Thomas Jefferson’s administration*the rhetoric of ‘‘demophilia.’’ Understood as a discursive formation, demophilia creates space for rhetoric and deliberation that is closed by demophobia. In the process, demophilia disciplines democracy by producing deliberative subjects properly attuned to civil speech. Keywords: Demophilia; Demophobia; Democratic Deliberation; Democratic Culture; Violence ‘‘A democracy is a volcano, which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption, and carry desolation in their way.’’1 *Fisher Ames, 1788 Contrary to the misperception cultivated by politicians and pundits today, the United States was not born a democracy; quite the opposite, for democracy was portrayed as an enemy to political virtue and national stability in the years following the American Revolution.2 In the 1780s, democracy was compared to a volcano, a plague, a cancer, a storm, and a wild fire.3 ‘‘The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots,’’ Jeremy Engels is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State University. Early drafts of this paper were presented in Boston, MA, at a meeting of the Athens of America Reading Group, and at a colloquium for the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine. He would like to thank those who participated in these meetings for their time. A special thanks goes out to Greg Goodale and Nate Stormer for organizing my visits, for their hospitality, and for their general brilliance. He would also like to thank Raymie McKerrow, and the two anonymous reviewers, for guiding this essay through the review process and helping to whip it into shape. Correspondence to: Jeremy Engels, Communication Arts & Sciences, 234 Sparks, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16801, USA. Email: jdengels@gmail.com ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2011 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2011.560178 Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 132 J. Engels Massachusetts’s Elbridge Gerry commented at the Constitutional Convention.4 In Federalist 10, James Madison claimed that democracies ‘‘have, in general, been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.’’5 ‘‘If wisdom then has improved on the democracy of the ancients; faction has also refined on the means of defeating the end of those improvements,’’ the New-York Herald concluded in 1795.6 ‘‘This form of government,’’ promulgated the essayist Ali Kahn in 1803, ‘‘is extolled by those men, whose weakness and ignorance have constantly impeded their progress to the attainment of excellence and fame. This is their last resort.’’7 For these writers, democracy was a government of last resort in which the filthy rabble ruled in place of the good and noble and true. Far from being born a democracy, Robert L. Ivie notes that the United States was founded on the language of ‘‘demophobia,’’ the fear of the demos. ‘‘The United States fears itself as a democracy subject to self-destruction no less than foreign attack or domination,’’ he argues, and ‘‘it seeks security by containing democratic practices domestically and globally, by making the world safe for democracy and thus rendering itself safe from democracy’s infectious influence. This is the special burden of the American republic, the burden of a republic of fear.’’8 For Ivie, the United States is an empire because the discourse of demophobia necessitates imperialism as a solution to demotic fear. I understand ‘‘demophobia’’ as a discursive formation in Michel Foucault’s sense of a group of statements that, while dispersed, are unified by an underlying grammar and governed by rules of production.9 Demophobia is governed by rules of articulation and rhetorical norms. Moreover, demophobia marks subjects in particular ways, excluding many bodies from the realm of deliberation by framing free speech as an invitation for the enemy to strike. Demophobia is consequently the discursive formation that backs, and even necessitates, US imperialism as a cure for demotic debility. Ivie’s demophobia thesis explains much about the history of a nation that spoke of itself as an ‘‘empire’’ at the very beginning. Nevertheless, it does not explain how or why Americans in the early nineteenth century began to embrace democracy* speaking of the demos not with fear but with love. Demophobia is only half of the story. Foucault’s historical analyses demonstrate that the discourse of order is premised on the creation and rejection of disorder. By positing the language of disorder, however, the episteme creates a counter-narrative that can compete for rhetorical hegemony. The hierarchal republican order of demophobia was premised on the rejection of the democratic nightmare of all ruling all. During the early Republic, essayists defending President Thomas Jefferson took the step that brings about discursive shift in a Foucauldian understanding of history: they articulated a new discourse, ‘‘demophilia,’’ that capitalized on demophobia’s counter-discourse. These writers, in short, embraced the disorder of democracy*and then devised a discourse that would tame it. How they brought order to chaos is the focus of this essay. This story needs to be told, for demophilia would soon rival demophobia as an organizing structure for American public discourse. Demophilia, the love of the demos, is, in opposition to demophobia, premised on a stated belief in the ability of common folks to participate in politics and governance. Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 Demophilia 133 It makes sense that this discursive formation emerged during Jefferson’s presidency, for he was one of the few founders to suggest that the demos was capable of selfgovernment. John Dewey claimed that Jefferson ‘‘was the first modern to state in human terms the principles of democracy,’’ and this included a ‘‘democratic faith’’ in the ability of common folks.10 ‘‘I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom,’’ Jefferson argued.11 Demophilia is the twin, we might say, of demophobia; the self-love to the self-loathing of demophobia in our democracy’s Janus-faced existence. While demophobia says ‘‘no’’ to democracy, demophilia says ‘‘yes.’’ This essay investigates a discursive formation, demophilia, in its moment of emergence from within, and in opposition to, the discursive formation of demophobia. Foucault was deeply critical of the search for origins. For him, origin hunting was nothing more than a misguided and ill-fated search for metaphysical causality. Nevertheless, Foucault also understood that genealogical practice required scholars to discuss originary moments of discursive shift. He therefore preferred that genealogists talk not about ‘‘origins’’ but instead about ‘‘emergences,’’ which he understood in terms of irruption and interruption.12 Kendall Phillips points out that discursive formations ‘‘are riddled with incoherence and contingency.’’13 It is because of this fact*because order produces disorder, because discursive formations always contain the possibility of their own antitheses or counter-discourses*that rhetorical invention is possible from within a Foucauldian analytic framework. Following Phillips’s reading of Foucault, I argue that because the discursive formation of demophobia was not closed but instead was rife with internal contradictions and ‘‘spaces of dissention,’’ it was possible for Jeffersonians to articulate an alternative discourse that, while beginning in the cracks and at the margins of demophobia, quickly became hegemonic in US political culture. The originary moment I focus on is 1803, a particularly harsh year in the ongoing newspaper wars between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans. Federalist rags, including the Port-Folio and Boston Gazette, ran thinly veiled anti-Jefferson articles denouncing democracy for much of the year.14 Such expressions of demophobia were common in the Federalist press. What was unique about 1803 was that the Jeffersonians fired back: not simply denouncing Federalists as sore losers and closet monarchists but by defending democracy from its critics. In this moment, the discourse of demophobia, which was founded on anti-democratic discourses developed by the Greeks and refined during the Enlightenment, was successfully challenged by a discourse that did not rest on the same long and durable foundations. To get a better understanding of demophilia, I explore articles by The Examiner and Plain Truth in Boston’s profoundly influential Independent Chronicle. I do so because these authors were particularly early and astute in their articulation of demophilia. These authors understood the lengths that writers must go to in order to make democracy acceptable, and in taming democracy they assembled a discourse that was mobile. I conclude by outlining the eleven statements that are constitutive of this discourse’s grammar and then by reflecting on the implications of demophilia for democratic culture. Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 134 J. Engels Demophilia is significant for rhetorical scholars because it creates space for rhetorical practice and deliberative politics in a way that demophobia does not. That is, demophilia gives rise to rhetorical possibilities that demophobia forbids. Demophobia imagines the demos as an undisciplined mass, a murderous horde that is not only deaf to right speech but exudes its own toxic speech that spreads demotic violence. Demophilia, on the other hand, speaks of the people with love because it envisions a docile public that is appropriately attuned to civil speech. Demophilia creates space for the people to enter into public conversation, but it does this through constitutive exclusions built into the logic of the democratic grammar itself.15 We should be clear, here, that demophilia does not come from the people but speaks in the name of the people. Like demophobia, demophilia is ultimately a discourse that can be used to tame democracy*for it shapes how democracy is lived, altering what is sayable and thinkable, who can speak and in what ways. We should be on guard when political elites speak lovingly of the masses in the language of demophilia, with its emphasis on consensus, its praise of proper discourse, its insistence that wealth is sacred, and its denial of structural barriers to equality, because it is precisely in such moments that more radical democratic possibilities might be foreclosed. From Demophobia to Demophilia: A Study in Discursive Shift Before going much further, we should take a moment to map the discourse of demophobia. During the founding period, democracy was feared because it existed in a state of exception beyond law.16 Democracy was not an institutionalized, bureaucratized system of government as it is today. Instead, democracy emerged during ‘‘demotic moments’’ when the community asserted its right to nullify laws and decisions it considered unjust.17 In the thirteen colonies, mobs, riots, and other popular forms of protest were sanctioned extralegal behaviors. Democracy was ‘‘fugitive’’ action intended to right a perceived wrong; democratic violence was a way for poor and often disenfranchised citizens to make the popular slogan ‘‘government by the people, for the people’’ real.18 Understandably, citizens jealously guarded their ability to take up arms following the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, rising up in protests like Shays’s Rebellion that were intended to achieve financial remuneration for broken promises and rotten deals. Citizens had a word for such violence: they called it ‘‘Regulation.’’19 The fear of democracy as exception*as a state beyond law where actions could be justified by the assent of the democratic body even if they were technically ‘‘illegal’’* was central to demophobia. This was the meaning of Fisher Ames’s speech at the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention in 1788, where he compared democracy to a volcano*drawing out the fact that democracy was unpredictable and paid no heed to law, custom, contention, timetable, or justice. Democracy was beyond law because the will of the people trumped law. According to Ames, democracy was akin to a force of nature. Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 Demophilia 135 A democracy beyond law was especially terrifying to elites because of the old demophobic fear, first articulated by philosophers and aristocratic elites in Ancient Greece, that the people were motivated primarily by their lust for the rich man’s gold and thus that democracy was nothing more than a way for poor citizens to mobilize for theft.20 Aristotle disparaged democracy as the rule of the poor in the Politics, and even Isocrates, who repeatedly pledged his allegiance to democracy, fretted in Antidosis (through his amanuensis Timotheus) that ‘‘some men . . . have been so brutalized by envy and want and are so hostile that they wage war, not on depravity, but on prosperity.’’ For Isocrates the demos was ‘‘surly and resentful’’ of the few, the rich, the good.21 Early liberal philosophers portrayed humans as acquisitive and avaricious creatures, and it was therefore only natural that they would echo this critique. Following Thomas Hobbes, who saw in the English Civil War, and the beheading of the king, the ultimate evils of democracy, it was common in US antidemocratic discourse to compare disobedient citizens like Daniel Shays to the Levellers, a short-lived radical English religious sect in the 1640s who were widely derided as criminals for their advocacy of wealth redistribution.22 In the Levellers, the demophobes found an example to prove their argument that democracy was dangerous and that covetous citizens could not be trusted. As much as demophobia was premised on fear, it was also driven by disgust. Demophobic writers framed the Revolutionary War as a political victory but a social catastrophe because it radicalized the lower classes and cultivated the misperception that everyone was equal when they were not. In James Otis’s words, ‘‘when the pot boils, the scum will rise.’’23 Democratic demands for equality were anathema to wealthy and well-connected Americans. Thus, while demophobia was rooted in calculated fears of potential political danger, it was also buttressed by the aristocratic loathing for the common. During Fries’s Rebellion in 1799, the hotheaded Federalist editor William Cobbett (Peter Porcupine) argued that democracy ‘‘is a weed that has poisoned the soil; to crop off the stalk will only enable it to spring up again and to send out a hundred shoots instead of one. It must be torn up by the root.’’24 The arch-Federalist Boston Gazette, which had been a leading voice of revolutionary*and dare we say, democratic*sentiments during the 1770s, but which had turned deeply conservative by the 1790s, echoed Cobbett in a brief screed published in its May 2, 1803 edition.25 Placed innocuously enough on page 2, headed with no title, and wedged between announcements about a bank opening, a prominent Bostonian (Benjamin Dearborn) being elected to the American Philosophical Society, and impending state elections, this article had the feel of an announcement, not an editorial. In a sense it was, for what the article said was at the time commonplace: A Democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of national history. Its omens are always sinister, and its powers are unpropitious. With all the lights of experience, blazing before our eyes, it is impossible not to discern the futility of this form of government. It was weak and wicked in Athens. It was bad in Sparta, and worse in Rome. It has been tried in France, and terminated in despotism. It was tried in England, and rejected with the utmost learning and abhorrence. It is on its trial 136 J. Engels Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation and anarchy. No wise man but discerns its imperfections, no good man but shudders at its miseries, no honest man but proclaims its fraud, and no brave man but draws his sword against its force. Here, democracy was a synonym for ruin. It was contrary to wisdom, truth, and reason. No good man or woman would praise it; to do so was a sign of madness and dishonesty. Democracy was a corrupting force that would hasten the end of the Republic, and thus Americans were urged to draw their swords against it as they would foreign invaders. Federalists hammered away at democracy in 1803 because to impugn democracy was to besmirch President Jefferson. Defender of Shays’s Rebellion, critic of the Constitution, staunch foe of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, Francophile supporter of the French Revolution, champion of the people, Jefferson’s public image was tied to democracy*especially when he was juxtaposed with the stodgy Adams.26 When responding to Federalist attacks, Republicans had many rhetorical options. They could have employed the language of balance, central to the civic republican tradition. They could have denounced Federalists as closet despots, invoking what had become stock issues in Republican discourse, the Alien & Sedition Acts, as evidence. They could have defended republicanism, popular government, and the vox populi, the wisdom of the people. Yet this time, Republicans came to democracy’s defense in a series of articles by The Examiner and Plain Truth in Boston’s staunch Republican Independent Chronicle, one of the most influential newspapers in the early Republic.27 This is an originary moment in a discursive shift from demophobia, the fear of democracy, to demophilia, the love of the people, the love of democracy. Why did these articles appear in 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase but otherwise a forgotten year in American history? They emerged because Republicans felt that they needed to defend democracy in order to defend their president. This was why demophilia was necessary; but we also have to reflect on why it was possible. There was space for a new discourse of demophilia for two reasons: first, because the rhetorics of demophobia became overbearing and oppressive, to the point that the fear of democracy came to seem to many like a love of monarchy; and second, because it was primarily Federalists who espoused demophobia, making the fear of democracy seem like the losing party’s creed. There were, in short, cracks in the discursive formation that provided space for rhetorical invention. According to The Examiner, Federalists ‘‘do not hesitate to declare in favor of a Monarchy, reserving to themselves the right of chusing their Monarch, and having the order and privileges of Nobility exclusively bestowed on themselves and family.’’28 The haters of democracy seemed to be lovers of monarchy: and monarchophilia after the American Revolution was reprehensible. Republicans used the Federalists’ purported monarchal inclinations, and their supposed love of all things British, to defame their opponents during the elections of 1800. The demophiles therefore had a major advantage: they were not Federalists. By attributing demophobia to the machinations of the ‘‘Essex Junto’’ and the ‘‘Tory Faction,’’ Republicans were able, through the logic of perspective by incongruity, to create space for demophilia.29 Demophilia 137 In 1803, demophobia was framed as the property of Federalists, and thus the irruption of demophilia in the nineteenth century was politically charged*loving democracy became a useful stance in partisan battle. Demophilia was designed, in short, to put the nail in the Federalist coffin. Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 The Examiner On May 30, 1803, Boston’s Independent Chronicle advertised The Examiner’s essays as a rebuttal of the Boston Gazette’s claim that ‘‘No brave man but would draw his sword against the force of Democracy,’’ and, sure enough, the first three essays published under this title began by reprinting the offending passage and responding directly to it. The Examiner’s first essay, published on June 6, began: ‘‘After reading the above paragraph, can any man hesitate to declare, that there is a party in this country opposed to our present system of government? That there are men who stand ready to draw their swords, to overthrow the Constitution?’’30 These two interlocking questions encapsulated The Examiner’s argumentative strategy: he or she argued that the United States was a democracy, that the Constitution was a democratic document, and that the Federalists who talked of drawing a sword against democracy were calling for a war against the Constitution and the Federal Government. The Examiner’s argument that the US and its Constitution were democratic was based on a rhetorical collapse of the two terms, republicanism and democracy, that Publius went to such great lengths to distinguish in Federalist 10. ‘‘When such writers reprobate Democracy, it is Republicanism they mean to deprecate; for there is no other species of Democracy, either in the Federal or State Governments,’’ the Examiner asserted. Democracy came in no other form than republican democracy* and democracy, this essayist disclosed, meant nothing more, and nothing less, ‘‘than the right of suffrage.’’31 In this sense, the United States was a democracy because large portions of the population could vote.32 The Constitution, in turn, was a democratic document because it was presented to the people who then voted (through their delegates to ratification conventions) in its favor. There was no need for Americans to tremble before democracy. Federalists succeeded in making it scary by employing a basic rhetorical trick: they refused to define the meaning of the word, calling forth all manner of terrifying association.33 Given that democracy was nothing to be scared of, The Examiner was particularly angry with William Sullivan, a young Boston lawyer who delivered the demophobic Fourth of July oration in Faneuil Hall in 1803. In this speech, Sullivan dismissed concerns that the United States had anything to fear from monarchy or aristocracy, as Republicans often claimed. ‘‘It is not from Monarchy, it is not from aristocracy, that dangers threaten, but do they not threaten from democracy?’’ he asked, answering with an emphatic and alarmed ‘‘yes.’’ Democracy was the gravest danger facing the United States, and ‘‘the informed and the opulent, ask only that their country may be saved from the horrors of democracy.’’34 The Examiner dismissed such claims with a historical argument, suggesting that the spirit of resistance to Britain during the Revolutionary War was inspired by democratic sentiments. This meant that Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 138 J. Engels Americans in 1803 were reliving the drama of the 1770s, and Federalists like Sullivan were the equivalent of ‘‘the Old Tories’’ who ‘‘were accustomed to say: ‘the informed and opulent ask only that their country may be saved from the horrors of Democracy.’’’35 Sullivan’s demophobia stood against the legacy of the Revolutionary War; it was Toryism, in new garb. Sullivan and the other demophobes lied about history and got the facts of the case wrong. They distorted America’s democratic past to dupe the people. The Examiner was emphatic: Americans had nothing to fear from democracy. Though in the past democracy was tied to Regulation, mob violence, and revolution, in the present democracy was not a dangerous idea. By 1803, the Examiner proclaimed, Americans had succeeded in domesticating democracy, which no longer stood against authority but stood behind it. Who, then, was threatened by democracy? ‘‘With what authority then can a young man presume to suggest, that there is a controversy between the opulent and poor, or the learned and unlearned?’’ the Examiner asked, concluding that a youngster such as Sullivan had no such authority. ‘‘How dare you allege, that the opulent and learned, ask only to be saved from the horrors of democracy?’’ The Examiner practically shouted, issuing the following challenge to Sullivan: ‘‘Produce sir your evidence, and let the public know the cause of your apprehensions, and whether you as a learned and opulent man have reason to denounce the poor and ignorant.’’36 According to The Examiner, the demophobes drew imaginary lines between rich and poor to perpetuate demotic fear*yet these lines did not scar the American landscape as they did Europe’s, with its history of feudalism. While the distinction between the few and the many was the ideological grounding of classical Greek democracy, and while American politicians including John Adams believed that the conflict between rich and poor was inescapable, The Examiner attempted to shift the foundations of democracy as it would be practiced in the United States.37 He or she did this by claiming that the distinction between rich and poor, a distinction absolutely vital to the democratic imagination in prior centuries, was an awful fiction conjured up by Federalists to score political points. By denying the distinction between rich and poor, The Examiner made democracy safe for the rich. This was not the Levellers’ democracy or classical Grecian democracy with its liturgies, its eisphora, and its punitive fines against the rich leveled by popular courts. According to The Examiner, American democracy treats wealth with kid gloves. Just as demophobia is a fractured and contradictory discourse, so too is demophilia*and this is one of its aporias. In the early Republic, class distinctions were real, whether the demophiles denied them or not. By denying democratic citizens one of their most basic demands*for financial justice*demophilia opened itself up to challenge and, potentially, reversal. Having denied the distinction between the few and the many, The Examiner intimated that the real danger to Americans was not democracy. The real danger was the anti-democratic rhetoric of democracy’s increasingly hysterical opponents. In the third installment, published on June 16, The Examiner claimed that if the Boston Gazette had its way, ‘‘the sword is to become the arbiter of our national rights; the Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 Demophilia 139 citizens are to assemble in hostile array; instead of the pen to describe the legitimate limits of our civil policy, the sword is to make the indelible marks where our privileges begin and where our rights end.’’38 For the demophiles, the pen, not the sword, deliberation, not violence, was the instrument of democratic politics. By affirming conversation in place of Regulation as the means by which democracy was enacted, The Examiner brought democracy out of the realm of exception and made it subject to the laws of polite society. Moreover, affirming democracy’s reliance on deliberation provided a convenient means of contrasting demophilia with demophobia. While Federalists argued that democracy led inevitably to despotism, this essayist pointed out that in fact it was democracy’s critics who called for military despotism in order to prosecute their war against democracy. It was not the democrats who called for violence and revolution; it was democracy’s opponents who urged citizens to take up their swords, transforming popular government into ‘‘drawn sword democracy’’*and, The Examiner asked, ‘‘what species of Democracy can be worse than a drawn sword Democracy, neighbour against neighbour, state against state, each man armed with a destructive weapon to assassinate his opponent, and civil society converted to civil war?’’39 Democracy was not the problem. Instead, it was the fanatical opposition to democracy that put the US on the path to bedlam. In the fifth installment, published on July 30, The Examiner cemented the case for democracy by invoking a distinction common to the Enlightenment: all governments were monarchies, aristocracies, or democracies. The framers of the US Constitution, of course, accepted this distinction as popularized by Montesquieu in Book 2 of The Spirit of the Laws (1748), but they hoped to blend aspects of these forms of governments to provide a manner of balance.40 The Examiner made the case for democracy by disentangling the political forms and forcing citizens to choose. ‘‘Judge then, fellow citizens, between the two parties. Are you in favor of a Monarchy, an Aristocracy, or a Democracy? If you disown the latter, you must embrace one or the other of the former,’’ this essayist announced, equating Jeffersonians with democracy and Federalists with monarchy and/or aristocracy. To be against democracy was to be for monarchy or aristocracy, and to raise the sword against democracy was to call for a new Constitution founded on monarchal or aristocratic values. If Federalists had their way, the Examiner concluded, the bright light of liberty would be extinguished and everything would go dark. Plain Truth From July to September 1803, another essayist writing under the pseudonym ‘‘Plain Truth’’ took up democracy’s defense in nine essays titled ‘‘On Democracy.’’ Plain Truth explained the project in the following terms: ‘‘I shall endeavor, in an easy and simple manner, to explain the Democracy of our Governments, and shall leave the People to judge for themselves, whether there can be any real formation for the clamour of the Federal party, as they stile themselves, against it.’’41 In attempting to clear up confusion over the word ‘‘democracy,’’ Plain Truth reiterated many of The Examiner’s arguments. The United States was a democracy, the Constitution a democratic document, and 140 J. Engels Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 American history the history of a democratic people struggling against the bonds of monarchy and aristocracy. To prove this point, Plain Truth undertook a remarkable reconstruction of public memory*adopting a pseudonym, ‘‘Plain Truth,’’ that had been the title of the most devastating attack on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and his advocacy for democracy in 1776, and enlisting notable historical figures from the Revolutionary-era*even Jefferson’s avowed political enemies*as character witnesses in democracy’s defense: The balance of character was certainly in favour of Democracy. Washington, Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and a train of great and worthy characters, many of whom are in the shades of death, guided your councils, fought your battles, and formed the Constitutions of the several States, as well as that of the Federal Government. These men, though differing in their opinion on some incidental points, all united in placing us under the fortunate protection of Democratic Governments. Our young men may be poisoned by the suggestions of the enemies of Democracy; but the old men, who saw seventy-five, and were sincerely engaged in the conflict, and then acted from proper principles, will never be ashamed of, or forsake them. Neither fear nor flattery will change them. BunkerHill can never be removed from its base, nor the soil of Lexington and Concord be washed from the stain of innocent blood.42 In early American public address, orators often declared that the spilled blood of revolutionary martyrs made demands on future generations of Americans*in particular, to defend the nation and the Constitution from its enemies.43 Plain Truth relied on this commonplace but infused it with a democratic history, arguing that Americans fought against monarchy but also for democracy during the Revolutionary War. By arguing that Americans had fought and died for democracy when they fought and died for their nation during the war, Plain Truth enlisted democracy in the service of national glory. In fact, by empowering citizens and ensuring that they had a stake in national discourse, Plain Truth claimed that democratic government would cultivate in citizens ‘‘a supreme love to their country, to her national existence, her freedom, and her glory.’’44 At bottom, Plain Truth indicated, all governments were democracies. While Montesquieu divided the forms of government into monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, ‘‘this ought nevertheless to be noticed, that strictly speaking, all power, Monarchical or Aristocratical, must be derived from, and maintained by the Democracy. Let the Government be as despotic as you can imagine, in the hands of one man or of many men, yet if the People are united in an opposition, the Government must be changed.’’45 Democracy, here, meant something more extreme than democracy as suffrage in The Examiner’s essays: democracy was the power of consent and dissent. As such, democracy was the ultimate power, the power to withhold consent, the power to assent to alternative covenants, the power of the people to suspend law and change governments, the power of revolution as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. While democracy was an awesome power, Plain Truth counseled Americans that it need not be feared. ‘‘But this is a solemn truth’’ that citizens never suspended the laws Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 Demophilia 141 and turned to revolution ‘‘until their oppressions from their Sovereign have become insupportable, until all hope of redress was gone, nor until their prayers, petitions & calamities had become the sport of the Tyrant and his favorites.’’ Continuing, Plain Truth conceded one point to the Federalists: that democratic government could be abused. Nevertheless, ‘‘it is as true that the power has never been exercised, but when the oppressions of the Tyrant had become insufferable, and there was no other means left to save the People from permanent intolerable slavery.’’46 The democratic potential to overturn governments was never exercised lightly, and, just because democratic government had been abused in the past did not mean that it should be abandoned. ‘‘The People are weak,’’ opponents said, for ‘‘they killed Louis because he was a tyrant, and have established Bonaparte in tyranny. Suppose this charge to be founded in truth, what does it prove? Does it prove any thing more, than that a Democratic Government is liable to abused, corrupted, and badly exercised? And where is the principle, or form of Government that is secured against this?’’47 By Federalist reasoning, any government subject to abuse should be abandoned. By Federalist reasoning, government itself should be abandoned because all forms of government were subject to abuse. By Federalist reasoning, Americans would be plunged into anarchy. The demophobes claimed that democracy was guilty of destroying nations and of theft. Having disarmed fears of revolution, Plain Truth turned to the topic of wealth. Though the demophobes invoked the legacy of the English Levellers to prove that democracy inevitably led to theft and redistribution, Plain Truth argued the opposite: namely, that American democracy cultivated a respect of wealth by leveling the field of social opportunity and making it possible for anyone to become wealthy. There are some men in all communities, who hold principles incompatible with all kinds of Government; but in America, the lives, liberty and property of the People depend entirely upon a regular, well administered Government. There are no slaves (excepting the blacks in the southern states), there are no different classes or ranks of men, all are under the same civil and political advantages for the acquirement of honors and estates; property has no charms to attach the People to a man who has the possession of it, without wisdom and virtue. We know that riches are not always to men of understanding, and yet we know that where a man of understanding is in the possession of wealth, he will do good with it. The People of this country never neglect such men in their suffrages, nor do they vote for a weak or wicked man because he has wealth.48 Federalist hysteria about leveling was not based in reality because the special reality of the United States made leveling unnecessary. ‘‘Here we are in a country where all power is confessed to be derived from the People; where no one can obtain wealth without toil and industry; where each one has an equal chance for riches and honors; where the taxes are very light on the people; where there are no tythes for priests, no finances for favorites, no stipends for the idle,’’ and thus no need for financial revolution.49 In this essay, Plain Truth went even further than The Examiner in denying class distinction in order to justify democratic government: he or she denied that there were slaves in the United States, excluding, of course, those slaves that were Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 142 J. Engels placed outside the constitutive boundaries of the demos. Denials like this were foundational to the discursive formation of demophilia. For Plain Truth, Federalists invoked the Levellers because they desired a government based on wealth and distinction. Federalists derided democracy because it opened the doors of government to common citizens, thereby diluting the power and influence of the rich. This was democracy’s great benefit: by providing everyone with an equal opportunity to achieve wealth, democracy cultivated a respect of wealth because it was only through hard work and individual initiative that such glories could be won. Here, Plain Truth evinced demophilia’s dependence on what Max Weber has called the Protestant Ethic, an ideology deeply engrained in the American experience.50 Plain Truth’s demophilia drew on the Protestant Ethic and argued that the United States was a land of opportunity, where the poor could become wealthy if only they worked hard enough. Covetousness, which Federalists feared, and which even Plain Truth admitted was a deadly sin for democracy, was banished from the American psyche and replaced with an ideology of hard work. By democratizing opportunity, and tying wealth and achievement to industry, demophilia made wealth sacred. Having established that the United States was a democracy, and having argued that democracy posed no threat to wealth but instead was essential to national defense and glory, Plain Truth concluded that demophobia was delusion. Having denied that there were class tensions in the United States, Plain Truth and The Examiner explained demophobia as a product of class bias. For Federalists, Plain Truth concluded, ‘‘democracy is an abominable thing, because, by it they are excluded from offices, places, and emoluments.’’51 Demophobia was partisan and classed; demophilia, however, was common to all Americans. Demophilia constituted ‘‘Americans’’ by uniting them in a common national pursuit: the achievement of democracy. Demophilia was, in short, the means to national consensus. Mapping Demophilia Some discourses are effective at achieving their aims, and others are not. It is a rare discourse, however, that provokes an epistemic shift in how a culture thinks. The discourse of demophilia was one such discourse. To study demophilia as a discursive formation requires mapping its architecture*specifically the propositions that comprise the discourse and the rules of articulation for how the discourse should be spoken. Using the writings of The Examiner and Plain Truth as a guide, I think we can identify eleven such propositions. In its earliest articulation, demophilia said that: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. democracy and republicanism are equivalent; the Constitution is a democratic document; the history of the United States is a history of democracy; the founders sacrificed their blood for democracy; governments are either democracies, monarchies, or aristocracies; consensus is the goal of democracy; Demophilia Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 143 wealth is sacred; the United States is a land of opportunity; there is no slavery in the United States; democracy is not dangerous; deliberation, not violence, is the medium of democracy. Here, we can see that demophilia has a coherent internal rhetorical logic determined, in large part, by the fact that it emerged from within, and as a rejection of, demophobia. Demophobia was too entrenched in the United States for Republican essayists to articulate a truly radical form of democracy committed to revolutionary principles like the leveling of wealth. So, the demophiles disciplined the democracy they espoused, making it more palatable. In short, the demophiles disarmed the demophobes by making their concerns seem absurd. To do this, the demophiles defined democracy in opposition to aristocracy and monarchy, downplayed its revolutionary potential, praised consensus and unity, assured Americans that their wealth was safe, and denied that there were deep structural inequalities that might lead to social conflict. The demophiles also stated the centrality of deliberation to the new political order, because deliberation was a way to tame democracy*taking it out of the state of exception and making it more acceptable. Enlightenment philosophers including Montesquieu argued that all states were democracies, monarchies, or aristocracies. By creating a republic, and drawing on the civic republican vocabulary during the Revolutionary Era, Americans created an entity that was distinct and different from any of the states in Montesquieu’s schema. By collapsing democracy and republicanism, the demophiles were able to integrate the United States’ political history into Enlightenment categories, the categories of an emerging liberalism. The demophiles were particularly interested in establishing that the United States was a democracy, that the Constitution was a democratic document, that the founders died for democracy, and that America’s past was a democratic past, because if they were able to reconstruct public memory in this way then they would force Federalists into a difficult choice: either support democracy, or be against the Constitution and American history and its giants*Washington, Adams (both Sam and John), Hancock, Franklin, Jefferson. The demophiles shored up their position by employing a rhetoric of stark choices. Many Americans in the early nineteenth century now argued that the mixed Constitution of the United States rendered old Enlightenment fictions that all governments were democracies, monarchies, or aristocracies invalid.52 Nevertheless, the demophiles*having collapsed democracy and republicanism*invoked these old distinctions to abuse their adversaries. By denying the reality of a mixed Constitution, and arguing that the United States was, at bottom, a democracy, the demophilies were able to claim that if Federalists did not want a democracy then they must want a monarchy or an aristocracy. In this way, Federalists became traitors to the democratic*and now national*cause. The demophobes expressed fear that democracy would make political conflict uncontrollable. To disarm these fears, the demophiles denied the dangerousness of Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 144 J. Engels democracy. The Examiner did this by narrowing democracy’s definition: it meant popular suffrage, nothing more, nothing less. As such, he or she brought democracy out of the realm of exception and subjected it to law. Plain Truth granted that at times democracy led to revolution, but only when the people were abused and had no other avenue to reform but to take up arms. Democracy could be dangerous, but only when government acted undemocratically. To ensure that democracy was seen as safe, demophilia denied that the people coveted the treasures of the rich. The demophiles framed democracy as a system of government that would cultivate commercial respect by leveling the playing field and giving everyone the opportunity to succeed. The demophiles then denied the structural conditions that might lead to revolution. Perhaps one of the most telling rhetorical moments in Plain Truth’s essays was when the writer argued that in the United States, ‘‘there are no slaves (excepting the blacks in the southern states).’’53 The argument that ‘‘there are no slaves’’ collapsed all class distinctions into the dialectic of master and slave and then displaced this dialectic outside the demos where it was no danger to stability. This argument was intended to prove that the United States was free from the class distinctions of Europe. It was intended to demonstrate that because all Americans were equal, and because no one was a master or a slave*except, of course, for the real masters and the real slaves* then there was no need for demotic moments. Democratic politics could proceed through normal political channels. Federalists attacked democracy because they were frightened by the fact that democracy*and its basic semantic unit, the democratic demand*existed beyond the law.54 They were frightened of the mob taking the law into its own hands. In response, the demophiles attempted to discipline democracy so that it was no longer a radical, revolutionary force but instead was socially acceptable and subject to legal regulation. To achieve this goal, the demophiles forwarded the assumption that everyone was equal and that there were no barriers to social advancement. In doing so, demophilia willfully made citizens blind to systemic evils, because to call attention to such evils was to set the mimetic chain of democratic demands in motion, leading to social conflict and perhaps even revolution. Demophilia rewrote the meaning and purpose of democracy. Democracy in classical Greece was rooted in what was believed to be an eternal, inevitable, and ultimately unsolvable conflict between mass and elite; in fact, democracy was invested primarily in keeping the balance in check. Demosthenes captured the ethos of democratic Athens in the following terms: ‘‘compassion for the weak, a prohibition against strong and powerful individuals acting violent toward other citizens, and a refusal to countenance either brutal treatment by the powerful of the mass of citizens or subservience by the masses to the powerful.’’55 Greek democracy was designed to protect the poor from the influence of the rich: democracy, in short, was a means to achieving balance and justice. The demophiles attempted to distance their vision of democracy from Demosthenes.’ In the United States, the goal of democratic politics was not economic justice. The goal of American democracy was harmony and consensus. Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 Demophilia 145 Consensus was an important goal because if political decisions were consensual then the outcome was democratically legitimate. Moreover, talk of consensus was a way for the demophiles to disarm the types of raging, out of control controversy that the demophobes feared. If, as Jefferson argued in his First Inaugural Address, ‘‘every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,’’ then there need be no controversy, no violence, no revolution.56 By elevating conversation to a higher philosophic plane where there was no difference of opinion, the demophiles attempted to end controversy*not just about democracy, but about all political issues. At the heart of demophilia, then, was the valorization of consensus through the deflection of controversy. Finally, demophilia affirmed the importance of civic deliberation*a possibility that had been closed by demophobia’s fear of demagoguery and the rabble’s violent tongue. Demophobia closed the door to popular deliberation because the founders feared that citizens were stupid. This made Americans easy prey for demagogues who would encourage the demos to do what it did best: run amok. The demophiles, in contrast, claimed that demophobia, and not demophilia, was the discourse of violence. Recalling the demophobic charge for Americans to raise their swords against democracy, The Examiner argued that if Federalists had their way, ‘‘the brawny arm, instead of the correct head, savage barbarity instead of cool deliberation, would soon become the edicts by which the life, liberty, and property of the citizens would be decided.’’57 Through a series of juxtapositions*arms and heads; barbarity and deliberation; pens and swords*The Examiner upheld a deliberative politics purged of violence and transformed democracy into a deliberative politics purged of violence. Here, democracy was not anarchy but instead the government of correct heads and cool deliberation. With its valorization of deliberation in place of violence, demophilia taps into our public memory of the founding period. It is easy today to be taken in by the reassuring historical image of reasoned and rational individuals deliberating the important matters of the day in quaint, friendly town halls during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This image is an illusion.58 In the early Republic democracy was not a system of cordial discussion; it was a politics of the street. Democracy was performed through the closing of courts, the tarring and feathering of hated officials, the raising of liberty polls, and the burning of effigies, not through reasoned argument or soaring eloquence or syllogistic proofs or enthymematic reasoning. Perhaps reflecting democracy’s rowdy nature, or perhaps reinforcing it, the founders hoped to bar the demos from the rostrum. The founders prized cool deliberation as the means to making good decisions, but only amongst elites gathered in congressional bodies.59 By upbraiding Federalists as violent despots, demophilia created space for public deliberation, validating the right of everyday citizens to participate in conversations about public affairs*so long as they did so coolly and with correct heads. This expansion of the deliberative public sphere was signified in rhetorical theory by the fact that the tripartite division of rhetoric championed by George Campbell Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 146 J. Engels and Hugh Blair*the eloquence of the pulpit, the bar, and the popular assembly* was quickly altered in the United States to include a fourth division of rhetoric: the eloquence of public debate, or popular eloquence.60 By tracking the evolution of rhetorical theory during the nineteenth century, we can see demophilia’s influence. By reading the essays of The Examiner and Plain Truth, we can recover demophilia’s now de-politicized political agenda. By encouraging citizens to buy into the doctrine that deliberation was the appropriate means of resolving conflicts and voicing the democratic will, the demophiles were able to bring democracy out of the state of exception and into the realm of talk, where it was subject to discipline and regulation. The demophiles juxtaposed democracy’s reliance on deliberation with the demophobes’ politics of violence, framing discussion as the antidote to the Federalists’ goal of waging war on democracy. In place of this violence, the demophiles called on Americans to settle their disputes with ‘‘cool deliberation,’’ hence democratizing the Enlightenment’s elite doctrine of public reason and extending the capacity for rational discourse to the masses. In doing so, the demophiles disarmed the demophobes’ fears about Regulation and mob violence. Demophilia had no place for tarring and feathering or the closing of courts. Demophilia placed what had been accepted, quasilegal or extra-legal actions in colonial times clearly outside of the law. Demophilia charged Americans to choose words over blows. The demophiles hence transformed deliberation into a disciplinary force for taming democracy’s exceptional nature and making it subject to rules, norms of decorum, rubrics of civility, and, in some cases of free speech, to the law itself. Deliberation as Discipline This essay offers a narrative framing of a discursive formation in its emergence. The next step in an analysis would be to build a genealogy of demophilia, which would not be a history of ideas but instead a history of articulations. This genealogy would focus on how demophilia shapes how democracy is sayable and thinkable*how demophilia determines who can speak, what they can say, and how they say it*in particular historical moments. It would investigate how demophilia conditions the will to truth and the types of knowledge that are valued in democratic public culture. Finally, it would show how demophilia has been resisted. Like demophobia, demophilia as discursive formation is riddled with cracks, fractures, contradictions and aporias that make invention, and resistance, possible. A genealogy of demophilia will also be a genealogy of democratic deliberation: first, because, as we have seen, demophilia creates a space for deliberation that demophobia had closed; and second, because demophilia needs deliberation to keep democracy from getting out of hand, which would prove that demophilia was a lie and that demophobia was the true discourse all along. Many scholars writing about deliberation today approach it as a trans-historical good rooted in human nature and a transcendental condition for the very possibility of democratic culture.61 This tendency to frame deliberation as a trans-historical good is likely rooted in the Greek myth of Prometheus as recounted in Plato’s Protagoras and Isocrates’s Nicocles, and Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 Demophilia 147 also in narratives, such as Cicero’s De Inventione and De Oratore, which suggest that it was speech and the capacity for deliberation that raised humans out of the state of nature and prepared them for society. While it is easy to approach democratic deliberation as a trans-historical good rooted in human nature and democratic sociality, the history of demophilia suggests instead that deliberation is historically conditioned by the rhetorical conditions under which it emerged. The deliberative public sphere in the United States was, from the very beginning, circumscribed by the need to answer demophobic critics. As such, insofar as democratic deliberation is the outgrowth of the discursive formation of demophilia, it brackets the most difficult questions about democracy, questions of inequality, faction, violence, and revolution, in order to better defend democracy from its critics. Rather than understanding deliberation as a trans-historical necessity, Foucault would call on us to study deliberation as discipline, in both senses of the word*as a discipline that developed with its own discourses, hierarchies, categories, and rules, and as a form of discipline that could tame unruly subjects and fit them for society. These two forms of discipline are related. Having investigated the early history of demophilia, we can think differently about the development of rhetoric as a discipline that teaches citizens how to deliberate. Rhetoric and deliberation are, of course, not equivalent. In the tradition of John Rawls, deliberation is generally defined as reasongiving discourse, while not all rhetoric assumes this deliberative form.62 This does not mean, however, that rhetoric and deliberation are opposed, that rhetoric is contrary to deliberation, or that rhetoric is merely a pre-deliberative mode of engagement. Instead, following rhetorical scholars including J. Michael Hogan, Robert Asen, and William Keith, we can think of deliberation as constituting a specific type of rhetorical practice.63 In this model, rhetorical training becomes integral to civic engagement and deliberative practice. Rhetorical training has not always had a straightforward relationship to citizenship. During much of the eighteenth century, rhetorical training was yoked to bourgeois commercial interests and students like those at Columbia in the 1780s and 1790s ‘‘learned that the public sphere was a place where citizens testified their allegiance to the hegemonic order.’’64 In turn, as the nineteenth century progressed, rhetoric was seen less as a medium for imparting civic virtue and more as the means to teaching good writers who could conduct themselves appropriately in what Asen and Daniel Brouwer have called the bourgeois public sphere.65 There was a moment, however, in the early Republic when rhetorical training was interested in teaching citizens*a limited number of elite citizens, at least*to be civically virtuous. In imparting this lesson, rhetorical pedagogues including the First and Third Boylston Professors of Rhetoric at Harvard, John Quincy Adams and Edward Tyrell Channing, taught their students that democracy was a form of life founded on certain deliberative habits and practices. For them, democracy was not something that existed in a state of exception that exploded in moments when the community needed to demonstrate its power. Instead, democracy’s power was the power of better arguments winning out in the public sphere. For much of the nineteenth century, rhetorical training was interested in transforming students into deliberative subjects Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 148 J. Engels who were deliberate in action and careful to express their demands and dissatisfactions verbally, rather than with guns and blows. Rhetorical training attempted to make democracy habitual, not exceptional, and therefore subject to regulation. This was perhaps why Hugh Blair’s work was so influential on American rhetorical theory during the nineteenth century. Blair was interested in developing the ‘‘taste’’ of his Scottish students so that they could present themselves in British polite society without embarrassment. Similarly, American rhetorical theory became increasingly obsessed with proper usage and tasteful expression because proper citizens trained in deliberation would be less rebellious. ‘‘Raise the moral character of a state as high as you please; give all classes a proper regard for the institutions, habits, and opinions that alone can establish their happiness,’’ Channing argued in 1819, ‘‘and you will find, indeed, that society is tempered and softened, but not tame and lethargic. The earthquake and whirlwind are stilled, but an active and abundant growth is going on everywhere.’’66 Training in democratic deliberation, Channing taught his students, ensured that Americans ‘‘are less capable of sudden, violent and transient excitement’’ and that they ‘‘live less in a habit of passion.’’ ‘‘It is probable that a single popular allusion, nay, a single word might have produced a more tumultuous sensation in a Roman or Athenian crowd,’’ he concluded, ‘‘than the most awful appeal to men’s hearts from Burke, or Chatham, or Ames, or Patrick Henry could produce now.’’67 Channing’s words seem implausible given that his term at Harvard, from 1819 to 1850, encompassed the ‘‘golden age’’ of American oratory with its ideal of the orator hero, the good man speaking well, leading the masses to a virtuous future.68 But here, Channing did not represent reality but instead the cultural, demophilic ideal of the deliberative subject: tempered, softened, attuned to civic speech, moved only by good reasons, unmoved by demagoguery, disinclined toward violence. The fact that the demophiles called for cool, rational debate as the antidote to violence was to be expected given the fallout from Enlightenment critiques of rhetoric. Rational speech*‘‘cool’’ deliberation*quickly became a cultural ideal in nineteenthcentury US public culture. What was novel about this articulation of the deliberative ideal was the discursive formation in which it was couched. The demophiles went to great lengths to construct a scenario in which democracy could be tamed and in which deliberation could replace violence as the means by which the democratic will was expressed. Demophilia denied structural problems that might transcend deliberative solutions, made wealth sacrosanct, and removed the ultimate option, revolution, a symbolic right enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, from the table. Only on the basis of these propositions did deliberation become the centerpiece in a discourse that said yes to democracy. Only by making these moves did deliberation become the antidote to democratic violence. Thus, we see that there is a dangerous tendency implicit in demophilia*the tendency to deny conditions that might compromise deliberation precisely because demophilia needs deliberation to be the antidote to demotic violence in its case for democracy. This is the circular logic of demophilic deliberation. Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 Demophilia 149 A genealogical study of demophilia suggests that deliberation has deep conservative undertones as a cultural ideal. Demophilia set the agenda for disciplining citizens through rhetorical training. By employing the classical distinction between peitho and bia, pedagogues like Channing distinguished between rhetoric and violence and taught their students to work toward a politics purged of violence. Nevertheless, to the extent that deliberation is an outgrowth of the discursive formation of demophilia, deliberative subjects are disciplined to bracket certain questions* revolution, slavery, inequality, capitalism*in order to achieve demophilia’s goal of purging democracy of violence and rendering it safe. The problem is not deliberation per se, then, but deliberation that arises from within the discursive formation of demophilia, for this deliberation denies inequality, denies the distinction between rich and poor, and even denies slavery*thereby neutralizing radical democratic speech aimed at achieving equality through calls for the redistribution of wealth. Demophilia promotes a radically sanitized vision of democracy that strips citizens of many of their most potent rhetorical resources for ensuring that they are not exploited by the rich and for achieving political and material equality. Demophilia transforms deliberation into an alternative to violence largely by ignoring the structural conditions of ‘‘objective violence’’ that had made democratic violence acceptable in the Revolutionary-era.69 Yet in the end, demophilia never quite corresponds to what it claims to be, for violence is just as foundational to the demophilic position as it is to the demophobic. Ivie argues that demophobia produces violence by validating war as the means to making the world safe for democracy. Having eliminated foreign dangers, governing elites needn’t fear democracy so much. Demophilia, on the other hand, acts an engine for naming internal enemies*enemies like the Federalists who opposed democracy. While demophobia targets democracy as the enemy, demophilia attacks the enemies of democracy who must be either subsumed under democracy’s umbrella*they must be converted to the democratic faith*or if they refuse to conform, eliminated. We see this logic of internal enemy-formation in how Republicans treated their opponents, for demophilia was, from the beginning, a fighting faith and a partisan tool for winning a political argument. The demophiles were animated by a deep anxiety about the power of minorities, an anxiety, we should note, not unlike Madison’s fear in Federalist 10 that a small and unrepresentative faction (like the socalled ‘‘Shaysites’’ in Massachusetts) could hijack the government. While Publius’s fear of factions turned him against democracy, the Republicans hoped to use democracy as a weapon against factions by emphasizing the duties minorities owed to majorities. Once an issue had been debated and the people had rendered their decision, the demophiles stressed that the minority had a duty to submit to the decisions of the majority as inscribed in law. For citizens of a democratic society, Plain Truth averred, ‘‘their greatest honor, as well as their highest interest, is found in yielding a willing obedience to its force. All opposition to it, either directly, or indirectly, is licentiousness, and not liberty. The compact is, that the minority shall submit to the constitutional voice of the majority, in all elections; and therefore, all Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 150 J. Engels factions, caballing, and uneasiness on the subject is essentially treason.’’70 The demophiles were not particularly concerned about free speech or minority rights; they hoped to protect their electoral gains and keep a hold on power. Federalist dissent was licentiousness; it was treason, and it had to be suppressed. Here, we see the dual forms of violence inherent to demophilia: the violence of a join democracy or die proposition, and the violence of what Alexis de Tocqueville would call ‘‘the tyranny of the majority,’’ or the violence found in the minority’s duty to conform to the dictates of rhetorical consensus. Demophilia proscribes violence and prescribes deliberation instead. The demophiles claimed that conflicts must be argued and not fought out, thereby denying citizens any non-deliberative means for making demands or resolving arguments. Demophilia would not recognize direct action or non-violent protest like Thoreau’s night in jail as legitimate forms of democratic politics. While replacing violence with deliberation is a noble goal, there is a problem associated with this project that transcends the early Republic and continues to be an issue for many theorists of democratic deliberation today insofar as their visions of deliberation follow from the discursive formation of demophilia. The valorization of deliberation in demophilia is premised on a distinction between rhetoric and violence that then is assumed to be the case. Demophilia transforms deliberation into the antithesis to, and even the antidote for, violence only by removing the causes for violence from the conversation. If everyone is equal, if wealth is sacred and won only through hard work, if there are no slaves, then there need be no violence. If these conditions are in place, then deliberation can easily prosper. Citizens are then taught to deliberate as though these problems do not exist. In this way, demophilia makes democracy easy. But democracy is not easy. Democracy is difficult. It is never on stable footing. Moreover, the line between rhetoric and violence in democratic culture is never as clear as theorists would like it to be. In the end, demophilia is an engine of enemy-production on par with demophobia. Simply contrasting deliberation with violence in order to defend democracy from its critics is not enough. Tempting as it might be, demophilia is not the solution to enduring social problems. How could it be when it is premised on so many denials? Notes [1] [2] Fisher Ames, Speech at the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, January 15, 1788, in The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification, ed. Bernard Bailyn, Library of America Series (New York: Literary Classics of the US, 1993), 1:894. On democracy as a central problem in post-Revolutionary America, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776!1787 (1969; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 471!518; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (1979; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1!65; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 211!47; Gary Nash, Demophilia [3] [4] Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] 151 The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005), 366!422; Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: ‘‘The People,’’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007). These claims often preceded through a metonymic chain that linked Shays’s Rebellion and other such uprisings with democracy*see Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 103. Gerry quoted in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 1:48; 2:57. James Madison, ‘‘Federalist 10,’’ in The Federalist, intro. and notes by Robert A. Ferguson (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2006), 56. ‘‘From the (New-York) Herald,’’ Catskill Packet & Western Mail, May 23, 1795, 1. Ali Kahn, ‘‘The Observer*No. III,’’ Boston Gazette, March 24, 1803, 2. Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 12. Drawing out the Greek roots of the concept, Jennifer R. Mercieca uses the term ‘‘misodemia’’ rather than ‘‘demophobia’’ in Founding Fictions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 18. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1971; New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 38. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (1939), in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925!1953, vol. 13, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 173. Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson, Library of America Series (New York: Literary Classics of the US, 1984), 1400. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 140, 148!50. He speaks of ‘‘surfaces of their emergences’’ in The Archeology of Knowledge, 41. Kendall R. Phillips, ‘‘Spaces of Invention: Dissension, Thought, and Freedom in Foucault,’’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002), 333. From January to May, an essayist writing under the pseudonym Aurelius composed six essays titled ‘‘Progress of Democracy’’ for Boston’s Port-Folio, and beginning in February, the Boston Gazette ran a series of editorials from essayist Ali Kahn under the heading ‘‘The Observer.’’ Aurelius’s essays appeared in Boston’s Port-Folio on January 15, January 22, January 29, March 5, March 26, and May 14, 1803. Ali Kahn’s essays under the title ‘‘The Observer’’ began in February 1803 and were a fixture in the Boston Gazette into 1804, ranging over topics domestic and foreign, but always with a strong anti-democratic bent. The notion of constitutive exclusion is developed in Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After Identity Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 78!84. The idea of a ‘‘constitutive outside,’’ a more general concept, is developed in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985; London: Verso, 2001). For a helpful reading of the ‘‘state of exception,’’ see Georgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). On ‘‘demotic moments,’’ see Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 238!54. On ‘‘fugitive democracy,’’ see Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘‘Fugitive Democracy,’’ in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 31!45. 152 J. Engels [19] [20] [21] [22] Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] On the rhetoric of Regulation, see Jeremy Engels, ‘‘Reading the Riot Act: Rhetoric, Psychology, and Counter-Revolutionary Discourse in Shays’s Rebellion, 1786!1787,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 63!88. On the anti-democratic rhetorics of Ancient Greece, see Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1996), and Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Isocrates, Antidosis, in Isocrates Volume II, Loeb Classical Library Edition, trans. George Nolin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 265, 271. On the Levellers, see Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 104!42; on Hobbes’s critique of democracy, see Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 25!54. Otis quoted in Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 476. Porcupine’s Gazette, March 30, 1799. On the radicalism of the Boston Gazette during the Revolutionary-era, see Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). On Jefferson’s democratic image, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (Charlottesville: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation and the University Press of Virginia, 1998). According to Sean Wilentz, ‘‘Thomas Jefferson, more than any other figure in the early Republic, established (and was seen to have established) the terms of American democratic politics.’’ Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005), xx. On the influential partisanship of the Independent Chronicle, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, ‘‘The Tyranny of Printers’’: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 107!8, 141, 223. ‘‘The Examiner*No. 1,’’ Independent Chronicle, June 6, 1803, 1. ‘‘The Examiner*No. 2,’’ Independent Chronicle, June 9, 1803, 2. ‘‘The Examiner*No. 1.’’ ‘‘The Examiner*No. 1.’’ On voting in the early 1800s, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 26!76. ‘‘The Examiner*No. 2.’’ William Sullivan, An Oration, Pronounced July 4th, 1803, At the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, In Commemoration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Boston: Gilbert and Dean, 1803), 13, 12, 5!6. ‘‘The Examiner*No. 6,’’ Independent Chronicle, July 11, 1803, 1. ‘‘The Examiner*No. 6.’’ On the centrality of the distinction between the few and the many in Athenian democracy, see Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). The founders of the United States, themselves astute students of Ancient Greece and Rome, hoped they had solved the problem by creating a Constitution that would balance the needs and desires of the few and the many. Nevertheless, some Americans continued to see the conflict between mass and elite as an organizing structural conflict. For example, take William Manning’s 1799 A Key of Libberty. For Manning, the Constitution was a product born out of this conflict between the few and the many. He explained that after Shays’s Rebellion, ‘‘the Few were all alive for the support of the government, and all those who would not be continually crying, ‘Government, Government,’ or who dared to say a word against their measures, were called Shaysites and rebels and threatened with prosecutions, etc.’’ John Adams, too, thought society was inevitably divided into mass and elite, democracy and aristocracy. For him, there was no way Demophilia Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] [60] [61] 153 to mitigate this social tension; a strong executive (like himself) could only attempt to keep the pendulum from swinging too far in either direction. Adams was critical of the aristocracy, which he believed to be avaricious. But his deepest fear, Gordon Wood argues, was that ‘‘unchecked, the people would not only turn on the aristocracy, robbing them and ruing them without hesitation, but they would also despoil and plunder among themselves.’’ William Manning, The Key of Libberty (1799), in The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, ‘‘A Laborer,’’ 1747!1814, ed. Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 165!6; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 578. ‘‘The Examiner*No. 3,’’ Independent Chronicle, June 16, 1803, 2. ‘‘The Examiner*No. 3.’’ On the understanding of mixed government that animated American constitution making, see Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 197!255. Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 1, Independent Chronicle, July 18, 1803, 2. Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 4, Independent Chronicle, August 1, 1803, 1. See Engels, Enemyship, 157!205. Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 9, Independent Chronicle, September 8, 1803, 1. Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 1. Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 1. Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 2, Independent Chronicle, July 21, 1803, 2. Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 2. Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 2. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1904!5; Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 1998). Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 2. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 588!92, 602!15. Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 2. The foundational nature of the democratic demand is stressed in Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, 4. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, in Writings, ed. Peterson, 493. The strategy of appealing to timeless, unobjectionable principles is what Stephen Howard Browne calls ‘‘the Jeffersonian style’’ in Jefferson’s Call for Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 90. ‘‘The Examiner*No. 3.’’ See Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free Press, 1998). Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror, 19!20, 32. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran (1783; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 264!65, 288!89; George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer (1776; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 98!99. Deeply influenced by Campbell and Blair, the earliest rhetorical theorists in the United States, including John Witherspoon, John Quincy Adams, and Samuel Knox, had little to say about the forms of eloquence beyond the pulpit, bar, and legislature. However, demophilia soon proved this division untenable, and as the United States became more democratic in the 1820s and 1830s, rhetoric finally broke free from its eighteenth-century shackles. Here, Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture is an exemplar. Farrell argues that ‘‘the public sense of rhetoric is not some recent ideographic invention of Jeffersonian Democrats’’ but instead ‘‘is always present to us in principle, because the autonomous individual, pressed far enough along his journey, is finally perishable. In other words, 154 J. Engels [62] Downloaded by [71.58.69.59] at 20:32 30 September 2011 [63] [64] [65] [66] [67] [68] [69] [70] rhetoric viewed aesthetically is an intrinsic feature of the human condition.’’ While Farrell is rightfully critical of the ‘‘disturbing excesses of transcendental hermeneutics,’’ of the decontextualized, de-historicized analyses of rhetoric offered by Gadamer and Habermas, I think he evinces similar excess by denying that deliberation as ideal and practice could be the invention of political actors. Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 132, 102. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993; New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), and ‘‘The Idea of Public Reason,’’ in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 93!141. For other works that stress the importance of reason-giving to deliberation, see also Amy Guttmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 52!127; James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 23!70; and Joshua Cohen, ‘‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,’’ in Deliberative Democracy, 67!91. J. Michael Hogan, ‘‘Rhetorical Pedagogy and Democratic Citizenship: Reviving the Traditions of Civic Engagement and Public Deliberation,’’ in Rhetoric and Democracy: Pedagogical and Political Practices, ed. Todd F. McDorman and David M. Timmerman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), 75!97; Robert Asen, ‘‘A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 189!211; William Keith, Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). Mark Garrett Longaker, Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 167. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 4. The story of rhetoric’s devolution from a civic practice is told in Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990). Edward Tyrrell Channing, Lectures Read to the Seniors in Harvard College, ed. Dorothy I. Anderson and Waldo W. Braden (1856; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 20. Channing, Lectures Read to the Seniors in Harvard College, 79. On the orator hero ideal, see James Perrin Warren, Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). I take the idea of ‘‘objective violence’’ from Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 2. Plain Truth, ‘‘On Democracy,’’ No. 6, Independent Chronicle, August 15, 1803, 1.

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