Garry Wills’s Confessions of a Conservative
There is an author who was on the path to telling a political conversion narrative like those of Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz. He had been part of many of the same conservative social circles in the postwar years, was an early admirer of Witness, and had shifted his politics over time—but with some distinctive differences. That person is longtime journalist and scholar Garry Wills, whose prolific career covering political and religious issues has left an indelible mark on public affairs.
Wills’s autobiographical work Confessions of a Conservative (hereafter, CC) bypasses the seductions of a political conversion narrative. As someone who would have had good reasons to tell a story of political transformation, Wills provides a fitting example of discourse that diverged from the other authors’ tales, given its rhetorical features and functions. From the outset, Wills makes evident some of his reasons for resisting the types of moves seen in the preceding narratives:
Once one defines oneself primarily in opposition to one other thing, the essential surrender is made. . . . The obsessed person longs for some Ahab showdown with his own white whale. He grows to resemble the cruel thing he opposes, becoming its antitype or photographic negative. . . . Obsession with an enemy almost always makes one’s neighbors become the enemy.[1]
Given the attention that Wills has paid to these issues, in both content and form his book provides a perspective on the deliberative concerns that have been the focus of this book. Before moving to final conclusions about political conversion narratives, this chapter provides one alternative vantage point for discussing how to think about such stories, while raising normative expectations about what a more democratic discourse could look like in public culture.
One important qualification needs to be reiterated in this analysis. Wills’s changes have, by many accounts, involved a move from the political right to the left on many issues. To repeat a point made in the introduction, the deliberative problems of conversion narratives should not be defined in terms of allegiances to particular political movements. It might be tempting to assume that because Wills seemingly moved leftward (and most political conversion narratives in the last seventy years of U.S. history appear to be conservative), anti-deliberative qualities essentially emerge from belonging to or affiliating with a political party. As will be shown, Wills complicates the picture of a linear political journey between old and new movements in a way that defies easily assigning him to an ideology.
This volume has also argued that the construction and evaluation of an author’s deliberative vision is best ascertained through a focus on the author’s discourse, rendering movement affiliation relevant but not determining. As also mentioned in the introduction, another case study of a right-to-left political conversion, Blinded by the Right, illustrated how its author constructed a story in anti-rhetorical, absolutist terms, making political identity a foregone conclusion, much like the three previous cases in this book.[2] Such textual moves can be equally performed on the left or on the right.
A brief overview of Wills’s life and context will help draw attention to several themes showing how the author bypasses a political conversion narrative and presents an alternative, more deliberative story. I use Wills’s story in this chapter less to offer an ideal example of political transformation rhetoric than to focus on some potential ways out of the thicket of concerns raised by the preceding conversion narratives. Wills also offers a view of what better understandings of rhetoric have to offer our public discourse more generally.
Born in 1934, Garry Wills grew up immersed in Catholic culture and spent six years in a Jesuit seminary before beginning his career as a writer. Wills has been called “perhaps the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in America over the last fifty years.”[3] He has been an avid follower of figures such as Saint Augustine, G. K. Chesterton, and Cardinal John Henry Newman, and has written more than forty books covering topics such as civil rights, religious doctrine, and presidential histories. His tomes Nixon Agonistes and Inventing America, in particular, received critical acclaim for their detailed, revisionist histories of Richard Nixon and Thomas Jefferson.[4]
Wills has written for Esquire magazine and has been a college professor for many years, first at Johns Hopkins and then at Northwestern University. His countless honors include a host of fellowships, honorary degrees, and a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Lincoln at Gettysburg.[5] The author describes his career as one of “outside looking in”—as primarily an “observer” rather than a participant in public life.[6] Although Wills describes himself in such terms, he has spent periods at the forefront of various political movements.[7] After his seminary years, Wills was hired by William F. Buckley’s conservative publication National Review, where he spent a decade as a drama critic for the magazine while pursuing a doctorate in classics at Yale. Wills noted the many ex-leftists who worked at the magazine,[8] underscoring the continuity of Chambers’s and others’ experiences as political converts at the organization. Upon leaving the magazine, and despite avowals that he was still a legitimate (though reformed) conservative for a time, he was viewed by his former friends as a liberal or radical.[9]
The magazine subsequently attacked Wills in response to his critique of the police at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention, through a “National Review cover [that] superimposed Wills’s head on the body of the activist and Black Panther leader Huey Newton.”[10] As discussed by Michael Mcdonald, the magazine even had a recurring section called “Wills Watch,” which “existed to chronicle Wills’s post–National Review activities in service to American liberalism.”[11] Compared with the previous three authors, who had something to reap from their political conversions during the periods when their books were released, Wills stood to gain little from publishing his book in 1979. One National Review staffer later even told Wills that he was glad that the author had been unable to enjoy the success of the conservative movement from 1980 forward.[12]
I consider naming Wills as a liberal/radical or conservative less important than identifying how CC’s rhetorical features and functions open deliberative space for tentative political judgments. This chapter does not aim to create a definitive account of deliberative discourse about political transformation rhetoric, nor does it conceive of deliberative communication in terms of some exacting thresholds. The following instead explores how several themes and theories in Wills’s text provide at least one entry point for discussing how messages of personal political change could be fashioned in a more deliberative way.
CC bypasses many features of typical conversion rhetoric through a preference for open decision-making processes over conclusive rhetorical products.[13] In two of the book’s most telling lines, Wills states: “Approving a completed journey is not deciding on a course,”[14] articulating that citizens should remain wary of times and places where “conclusion for its own sake becomes the supreme norm” in public affairs.[15] This is not to say that conclusions and judgments are unnecessary but rather that they should remain tentative considerations among competing claims. The author forgoes a rhetoric of conclusive ends or dogmatisms whereby, as Edwin Black explains, “an audience is solicited to view its social character in terms of one prevailing and exclusionary set of perceptual values determinative of social allegiance.”[16] Where conversion rhetoric tends to frame political discourse with a sense of linear, foreordained demands, Wills’s text circumvents such moves by committing to ongoing and relatively open judgments in public matters.
In some ways, Wills escapes from the rhetorical trajectory set by Witness.[17] Where Witness sought to promote a political conversion of Manichaean dualism, Wills draws from Augustinian texts to counter these ideas. CC notes that one of Augustine’s insights in leaving Manichean dualism was “Evil is not positive or self-existent. It is flawed good.”[18] From a rhetorical perspective, Augustine attempted to reconfigure the either/or nature of a conversion, which, in Wills’s analysis, can create divisions between good and evil that are too easy. At the very least, the framing of evil as a “flawed good” repositions the Christian tenet in less essential, binary terms.
In CC, dualistic problems result from group acts, not simply political “beliefs.” Wills outlines that “the more precisely we define the nature of justice and truth and reality, the more we exclude from our fellowship those who disagree,” particularly among political approaches that are firmly “dedicated to a proposition,”[19] or closed to the possibility that future messages or events could further guide one’s understanding. Just as Neil Postman once argued that “fanaticism begins with our falling in love, so to speak, with certain sentences,”[20] Wills situates fanaticism as a rhetorical phenomenon. Reflecting on the potential dangers that group discourses can demand leads the author to warn against the many ways theocracies can be generated through words.[21]
In forming conclusions, Will notes that people become part of groups through habits, commitments, styles, and formal attachments rather than beliefs.[22] Collective pressures and persuasive practices are mutually implicated in conversion narratives, which ask human beings to adhere to habitual rhetorical patterns and follow commitments among group members. Shifting from a focus on rhetorical conclusions to the processes by which they are created, Wills bypasses the type of conversion narratives examined to this point by calling into view how people even reach such commitments in the first place.
By skirting a rhetoric of totalizing group demands, at issue are the ways in which one can be too “bold and deep in [a] theory of politics,” tempting one to be “right ‘too soon.’”[23] One of the tricky features of political conversion rhetoric has been that authors often focus on the gradual nature of their experiences. Yet such incremental change is offset by how deep and determined political positioning can become, no matter how long the conversion has taken. Wills’s excursions into politics turn instead to what kind of deliberative processes are at stake in personal political changes; he notes, for example, that politicians should compromise to counteract the development of rigid opinions in a changing political environment.[24]
Some detachment from a time-based rhetoric of past, present, and future is necessary to break the conversion mold. Where the conversion pattern has enticed some of its practitioners to place an unswerving template on their personal and political experiences, in a critical passage Wills turns from a need for final discourses in public life. He says that many people see the future as an external, knowable target toward which their lives should aim, having started at some past point and developing outward in a linear trajectory; he argues that this target is illusory, however, and that what happens next holds numerous possibilities that come into being from toggling between many pasts and many potential futures.[25] This explains why so many political platforms and pledges end up overstating what they can actually know about the future. Hence, the best approach is to gain as much broad and deep knowledge about the past as possible, but to always move forward with tentative judgments, a commitment to continual inquiry, and a respect for the world’s complexity and surprises.[26]
Wills sees the past as a reservoir for future actions but bypasses predeterminations about what those possible futures will bring by countering terms that fix what can be known. Chambers saw the future as determined and parallel to his own conversion experience. Wills constructs a more limited picture of what one can claim from past experience, warning against closed orientations to the many paths that future political events may take. Practical wisdom can be informed by past experience; but in his words, history is not a revelation on par with religious scripture. [27] The future is more in flux than communicators often acknowledge.[28] Conversion can be the kind of rhetorical weapon that excludes, segregates, or falls prey to “‘isolationism’ and [the] individualism of solipsism.”[29] In this sense, conversion defines a mostly fictitious end point.
Wills’s stress upon how much a narrative should continue to frame future experiences distinguishes his book from the others in this volume. Where the other cases tended to force connections between temporality and essence, Wills implies that there are no such necessities. Black has even noted how Witness goes awry in Chambers’s “attempt to compensate by apocalyptic posturing for the discrepancy between his account of his youthful, witless commitment to Communism, and the condition of desolated heroism that his memoir coaxes the reader to assign him. Witness may work as parable, but it is unconvincing as tragedy.”[30] Overall, narratives with tragic, determined features ask readers to inhabit a world of dualistic divisions that are problematic for politics.
CC further opposes a solidified rhetoric of conversion by emphasizing humans’ creative capacities. To the author, human beings are like God when they exhibit their creativity qualities, just as God made the earth and heaven, we also must make each day anew.[31] It is worth noting the constitutive force that Wills applies to story making. He does not deny the existence of certain realities, truths, and, in this case, beginnings. But human action is seen as a continuous, selective process that makes and unmakes what we know of the past, present, and future.
This focus on processes partly follows from Wills’s implicit theory of rhetoric. Identifying Augustine as a professional rhetorician, Wills writes that for the famous theologian, people should not just look to the future or past, but rather use both in a “mutually constitutive” dialectic that demonstrates “reciprocally generative acts of man’s verbum and his self.”[32] In this approach, time, identity, and language are each positioned as subject to rhetorical intervention, as generated through and affected by human beings’ ability to create political and social worlds through speech.
CC thus remains wary of how individuals and groups can tie themselves up in linguistic knots, proposing that such complications can be equally amended through further discourse. The human self is itself “constituted” because memory is created.[33] Politics is about human creation, not the eternal reflections of traditional Greek forms.[34] These creations are not individualistic, since, in Wills’s Trinitarian terms, “God faced God” and “God creates by acting on himself.”[35] Looking to the past is as much a communal as a creative process, inviting a recognition that such processes occur prior to, and are demonstrably more important for public deliberation than any products of rhetorical actions.
The other three cases in this volume have demonstrated that conversion rhetoric often demands an adherence to internal or external essences as loci for human decision making. When political judgment is called for, Horowitz turned to attributions of the convert’s deep, internal reflexivity to make decisions, while Chambers saw the convert’s journey as reflective of dualistic universal battles that control human action from above. On the other hand, Wills prioritizes human community (and attendant communicative processes) as one of the best checks and balances for truth-seeking and policy development. CC takes issue with individuals and groups whose practices avoid debate.[36] Similarly, in working through his own Catholic faith, Wills follows others such as Cardinal Newman, who let bishops govern but located religious claims “in the Christian community at large, not in the private revelation to Popes.”[37] Relative to the conversion narrative, CC’s prioritizing of rhetorical processes over products also focuses a larger consideration about terms of redemption or convention in political affairs.
Glenn Tinder writes that political systems tend to pursue either a politics of redemption or of convenience.[38] In a politics of redemption, governments attempt to redeem their populations in the same way religions have historically enforced protocols among their members. In a politics of convenience, it is merely the job of government to maintain order in society so that many different interests and perspectives can flourish. A defining feature of CC concerns its comparable use of what Wills says is the purpose of politics: “to hold people together in peace, not to enunciate ‘raw justice,’” so that “the nation should be a human convention.”[39] For the sake of analysis, I use the terms “convenience” and “convention” interchangeably to describe a limited, socially created politics that seeks to work with every citizen’s needs and expressions despite imperfections in practice. Wills clarifies that society would not be possible if every political argument were grounded in ultimate, virtuous claims; in fact, civil war would be a constant.[40] I find that such “convenientist” (Wills’s term) discourse calls for more epistemological humility and accountability for one’s rhetorical choices than those made by this book’s other political converts, who tend to introduce inviolable, undebatable experiences into public affairs.
By dichotomizing experience between old and new lives at each turn, conversion rhetoric tends to polarize politics with more “redemptive” than “convenient” weighting. As mentioned earlier, it is the difference between a political outlook that largely sees others as evil rather than merely mistaken.[41] Outlining his political theory, Wills underscores that politics is not about destroying others, but giving the losing player or side a “rematch”; while parties may campaign in grandiose terms, at the end of the day they agree to “Apocalypse No.”[42] In battles between the two Cold War superpowers, the author admonishes that cosmic demands have little place in politics, since the idea of convenience calls for compromises that brook militaristic forms of rhetoric seeking to eliminate other political systems.[43] Instead, drawing from Augustine’s City of God,[44] he calls for a politics based on a far less eternal “transitory unity.”[45] More than one’s political beliefs, the degree of space admitted for political tussling and differing judgments is at issue—not simply a priori commitments that automatically exclude others from a civic community.
Analyzing Augustinian ideas, CC counters the redemptive directionality that conversion accounts can manifest. Wills partly outlines that an ends-focused, determined politics runs opposite to his Catholic faith, but it is additionally Augustine’s unknowingness about other men’s souls within this religious tradition that leads the author to skepticism over righteousness and certainty.[46] When this convenience rhetoric edges close to drawing divides between old and new lives, however, the author is quick to note how much he supports traditions and how his proclivity for conservatism remains, along with his general respect for the political system’s continuities and coherence, which “surely are conservative values.”[47]
In this vision, conservatism should be comfortable with what Cardinal Newman called “a certain assemblage of beliefs, convictions, rules, usages, traditions, proverbs, and principles” that can be drawn from in pursuing practical political wisdom.[48] Wills positions politics as a matter of variable human measures over divine dictate or inner sanction, yet he leaves room for human agency and passionate advocacy in stating that voices of moral courage and change are heroic, and that we must foster such light at every opportunity.[49] In this spirit, there is a wry liminality to the book’s title, Confessions of a Conservative, which appears to draw from both Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and Augustine’s Confessions, demonstrating the very “assemblage” of beliefs that Wills finds useful for politics.
Communication scholar Dan Hahn notes that citizens use rhetorical forms to react to uncertain political circumstances, providing themselves with stable language structures that can unfortunately overclaim what is knowable in a situation.[50] Similarly, the conversion form may be used as a structure to direct life stories and policy positions, but Wills’s convenience rhetoric leaves open more space for uncertainty and future change than the conversion form has tended to admit (at least in this volume’s previous cases). Wills asserts continuity and change less to use one’s life experiences as a political weapon than to preserve the limits of one’s knowledge and continual need to work with information from past and present others.
CC opens deliberative space by configuring politics as about horizontal rather than vertical or top-down rule. The best political relations are seen as a kind of “brotherhood without a father.”[51] In both domestic and international affairs, politics should “settle for less” than implementing absolute justice, instead aiming “for the modest goal of protecting our shared good things.”[52] A rhetoric of convention would, by implication, proceed from reflections over one’s whole political community first, considering the breadth of human experiences capable of being incorporated into political deliberation and decision making.
Where typical conversion narratives start from and end with one’s own experience or commitment to an ideology as a basis for political knowledge, approaching the public arena with redemptive, vertical posturing, a convenience rhetoric underscores how one’s claims need be considered as part of a wider circle of relationships. Such rhetoric leaves more room for the unexpected paradoxes, chance encounters, and turns and returns than one-way, redemptive political visions. As Wills writes, the foundation for reasoning and reasonability in a complex social world are complexities themselves and an acknowledgment of the messiness of even having freedoms to begin with.[53]
The redemption or convention distinction is not an argument for a strict separation between religion and politics; nor is it to say that the state should not create or enforce norms of justice. Reinforcing the process-based politics explored in the previous section, convenience rhetoric simply calls for a more limited, communal approach to constructing public judgments than the features of conversion narratives tend to promote.
Some critics called into question CC’s apparent contradictions between saying that there should be affirmative action for blacks and arguments that it is not the state’s role to preserve justice—i.e., so that the criterion of a convenient state is put aside for Wills’s own causes.[54] M. J. Sobran says that distinguishing between “mere” and “final” justice would have helped in this regard, with the former meaning better “civic relations” rather than “ultimate” rewards.[55] The division between “mere” and “final” is useful, but I would add that a communicative understanding of these distinctions can also incorporate agency and communal accountability to processes of judgment, instead of the deductive, self-evident, or idiosyncratic claims to knowing found in much political conversion rhetoric.
In the U.S. context, Wills ironically finds that disestablishment between church and state has helped religious groups and practices proliferate.[56] In other words, politics should always admit room for religion; but for their very own interests, religious communicators should be wary of becoming too dominant in the public square. An open, convenient deliberative environment is far more conducive to the promotion of faith viewpoints than applying redemptive discourses to political matters. In this way, politics should involve accommodation rather than revelation.[57]
In practice, redemptive political discourses run into additional quandaries. Reinhold Niebuhr once argued in Moral Man and Immoral Society that the more political power human beings attain, the less “moral” their choices tend to become. By virtue of the kinds of decisions that political leaders have to make—for example, going to war in a foreign country or leaving an afflicted population without help, power and morality necessarily share an inverse relationship.[58] Anything more than a circumspect approach to political decision making hence runs the risk of overreaching in its ethical claims. Avoiding the revelatory demands of the other political conversion narratives, Wills’s rendering of how justified accommodations to the political environment could best take place provides one approach to the problem of moral overstatement in public affairs.
Just as CC prioritizes open decision-making processes above conclusive rhetorical products, the text operates with an implicit theory of argumentation about how such processes might occur. Deflecting the unidirectional features of conversion narratives, the text approaches difference as a matter for responsive deliberation rather than redemptive battle. W. Barnett Pearce writes that scholars should evaluate different forms of communication as positive or negative, depending on how they deal with difference.[59] In this spirit, Wills puts forward a theory of decision making accounting for the need to work with others, however messy: “The constant adjustings and compromisings, pushings and shovings, takings and givings, settlements and half measures that are ridiculed in our politics are the signs of life reacting as a whole; making society responsive to a number of needs, so we can move and change together.”[60] Where the imperfections of human debate might be cause for trying to perfect oneself toward what is more right, true, and permanent—along the lines of many conversion narratives—Wills’s deliberative vision remains content with the partial, tentative goods that endless argumentation can provide.[61] In public culture, concepts dealing with dialectical forms of communication such as “controversy” often carry negative connotations.[62] Countering these trends, Wills situates the tentative workings of political give-and-take as positive forces worth pursuing.
Drawing again from Augustine’s discussion of the earthly, sinful City of Man and the heavenly City of God, which Wills distinguishes from a third city—the political sphere—the author remarks that “the other two cities have both process and finality. Their members are pilgrims before they reach final citizenship. The third city has no final citizens. It has only process, not finality.”[63] Wholly uncompromising positions that fail to recognize and deal with difference have to do their best to avoid the ongoing changes of the political world.
Amid these changes, the public realm requires judgments (even judgments that have life or death impacts), but such judgments should be recognized for their partial human characteristics.[64] Wills spotlights that the body politic requires some temporary unities; after all, even demons and devils have a minimum threshold of getting along to constitute a group, such that peaceful foundations tellingly apply to both the just and unjust.[65]
Terms like “best” and “evil” miss the point of a deliberative politics[66] where, as a result of necessary processes of adjustment and compromise, solipsistic or idiosyncratic candidates are generally weeded out. In effect, if politicians could not compromise the only thing they would represent would be themselves.[67] This language of “compromise built on compromises” and even trying to accommodate those who won’t reciprocate bypasses typical conversion terminology, promoting forms of power built on “holding out, deliberating, [and] bargaining,” as Wills says.[68] Against the conversion form’s tendency to have one pick and stick with a “side,” Wills says that it’s no accident that most politicians are lawyers, since lawyers engage in mediation, negotiation, and other skills involving working for one side one day and another the next; “the neutral agent is not a friend of one side, and therefore no enemy to the other side.”[69]
Decision making that attends to difference leads to election results that are an expression by many people not to impose themselves on others, in a way that almost always guarantees that those who win can’t destroy their opponents.[70] This line of reasoning does not mean that citizens should approach politics with minimalist expectations. Wills instead invites awareness of how problematic insular forms of communication that brook no opposition, or that have their politics worked out for good, are for societies.
Wills makes a case for endless argument evident through other models. He remarks that conservative political philosopher Willmoore Kendall was always debating with himself, looking for assumptions, questions missed, and inquiring about his own conclusions with integrity.[71] This is a different approach to reflexivity from the one set forth by Horowitz, which had stopping points for rhetoric and argument. Affirming Kendall’s civic identity, Wills says that finding time for reflection, study, and creating are integral to original thought.[72] According to Wills, this is a mode of thinking and communicating that got Kendall ousted from Yale’s political science department and, eventually, National Review, where he had been a staple figure. Wills attributes Kendall’s departure to editor William F. Buckley’s squelching of debate and creation of a “theocratic” atmosphere at the magazine.[73] CC’s awareness of the tensions that difference brings to the public square supports an implicit theory of deliberation where testing and criticism remain forever incomplete, yet necessary.
Along with rhetorical forms such as the conversion narrative, a host of other forces in society make an endlessly argumentative approach to politics difficult. Wills covers how geographical single-party pressures bear on freethinking individuals—for example, if a longstanding Republican moves to a place that’s largely Democratic, the chances are high that that person will become a Democrat or at least stop voting Republican, which will in turn affect her or his children.[74] Peer pressures, professional values, and ideological allegiance can play a larger role in one’s orientation to politics than rational arguments about policies.[75]
Because of these pressures, Wills sees politics as mostly about continuity, perhaps giving more praise to the status quo and what the electoral systems preserve than may be warranted. At a minimum, CC asks readers to think about how geography, identity, and one’s social groups affect argumentative processes, broadening a theory of deliberation to account for limiting interpretive prejudices while offering the possibility of reflection and revision from such embeddedness.
In Wills’s eyes, when politicians gather their supporters and repeat the same clichéd messages and simply give them what they want to hear, they foster a mediocre politics.[76] Civil society can thus provide one of the most promising venues for public debate. By taking his lobbying directly into the streets and public places, Martin Luther King, Jr. ultimately opened up debate where the electoral process had shut it down.[77] In other words, endless argumentation in the face of difference offers a more informed approach to advocacy than the dictates of structures such as the conversion form tend to offer. A final characteristic of CC focuses a critical question about conversion narratives: What might more deliberative forms of identity rhetoric look like?
Operating with multiple political selves, Wills’s identity rhetoric provides an alternative deliberative vision to the other cases. This is not to downplay the importance of identity choices, or the impact of factors leading to what Pierre Bourdieu has called a “habitus”[78] —or situated habits and predispositions. CC shows, rather, how individuals should remain attentive to communicative forms inviting fixed ideological positionalities. CC invites readers to consider a dialectical, active understanding of identity, using terms such as “flexible,” “polymorphous,” and “easy [to] access” to describe civic selves that are both open to the deliberative environment and capable of understanding the complications that rhetorics about political identity can create for oneself and others.[79]
Individuals cannot avoid processes of identity change. Wills outlines that knowledge is dynamic and always in progress, changing our sense of selves from day to day: “we are different people by the time we end a sentence from the ones who began it. To move to a conclusion is to change in the very act of concluding.”[80] In this formulation, human identity is recursive rather than fixed or determined, at once always drawing from the past but also innovating upon it with each utterance about the self. Wills’s identity rhetoric is primarily verb driven, avoiding the solidifying nouns or adjectives of conversion language, leading one reviewer to note that the author “is not, after all, seeking followers but drawing up his own intellectual inventory.”[81] Ultimately, a more positive form of civic identity than that offered by conversion narratives is marked by movement, restiveness, and a tendency to want to let one’s thinking journey in different directions.[82]
As a Catholic and a political writer, Wills affirms various roles in the text, yet brackets these identity claims as subject to continued communicative inquiry. In a section of the text where he may have easily slipped into a conversion narrative propagating a grand chasm between old and new lives, Wills instead relates that:
But people do keep asking what one is; and while I do not want to fight for a term . . . I could make up a third name, a new one; but that hardly solves the problem. If I were to call myself a “convenientist,” that would involve more explanation than conservatism itself. If I called myself “Augustinian,” I must recognize that Augustine’s thought labors under centuries of misapplication and misunderstanding. . . . There is a sense in which I could still call myself a distributist, as I did in 1957, but I would have to distinguish between my form of distributism and all others—there is no using a term simply in the complex world of our politics.[83]
In this passage, Wills does not make political identity a blank canvas on which any fleeting self might be painted. He plays with how messages about potential selves could create different futures in which there is little room for further talk of what identities might mean. One process-based term that defies political conversion in this regard is “explore.” Wills says that he finds himself still exploring pieces of one philosophy on economics, another on political realism, and another on moderation.[84]
Yet identity terms still have to be negotiated effectively in an environment pressing for such labels. Wills cites one constant pressure, in particular: a demand that he confess to an identity as a conservative, an attribution that he says he often failed to live up to.[85] But he quickly turns to a larger consideration—that the idea of confession itself has many meanings in Augustinian thought.[86] As Wills underscores in another section, Augustine himself held multiple roles and had multiple conversions, and was a critic of both pagan and Christian superstitions.[87] In this spirit, CC highlights an ongoing tension between every human being’s need to make rhetorical choices while not becoming a slave to them. Since people live in a world of tangled up language, they have to be especially wary of substituting slogans and explanations from leaders for dialectic, challenging thought; but they also need to use the terms that are available to open up the possibility of renewing or redefining words.[88] A recursive self is evident in both the defining processes and the defined products of human rhetoric.[89] More important, these conceptions make problematic identity claims to “authenticity.” Discourse can be authentic only to the extent that it represents a useful term for the moment, not some immutable substance that positions identity as incapable of amendment or redefinition. Compared with conversion rhetoric, CC brackets and complicates attributions as important choices but always as among many others that could have been made.
Juxtaposed against Horowitz’s reflexivity rhetoric, for instance, a more deliberative, democratic identity rhetoric would not commit to stopping points. Ironically, the growth espoused by conversion narratives withers at a point where political-identity decisions have reached a dead end. Wills underscores that “to have an identity is not to be fixed at one stage of learning; it is, rather, to have a capacity to integrate new experience within a self-correcting continuum. One is never more oneself than in the extension of the self. To cease extending is to begin decomposing, losing identity as a living unit.”[90] In a media environment enamored with political typecasting, Wills bucks such trends by focusing on the kinds of rhetorical identity choices that can create an inflexible sense of selves. In this regard, conversion’s reifying tendencies are sidestepped through commitments to continue self-creating.[91] No matter how embedded in a context one might be, generating alternative identity choices is made critical to the advancement of democratic societies.[92]
One productive way to foster more expansive identity rhetorics is to play with the ambiguities, contradictions, oppositions, and paradoxes that consistent identity claims tend to manifest. For example, according to Wills, everyone is a living contradiction in being both an elitist and not an elitist, with conservatives, for example, despising many elite professors but loving CEOs of companies and military leaders, and vice versa for liberals.[93] Additionally, everyone has both liberal and conservative tendencies, remembering the past with awe while looking toward the future with anticipation—just as innovation without tradition can be dangerous.[94] CC recognizes how commitments to some political-identity terms, although necessary, fold on more minute examination. Seeing how a claim to any one identity term such as “liberal” prevents one from perceiving all the ways that one is likely also not liberal bypasses conversion’s emphasis on the unbridgeable differences between old and new lives.
R. Z. Sheppard finds that Wills “insists on rigorous and adventurous exploration of paradox and contradiction.”[95] Another critic characterizes the author as “too much his own man with his own mind to fit into any pigeonhole. Just as it is not easy to classify his beloved Chesterton, so it is difficult to label Wills.”[96] Others describe how CC affected their understandings of the author: “If the world is divided between those who think Alger Hiss despicably guilty and those who are certain he is admirably innocent, Wills can be counted on to come along and explain him as simultaneously guilty and admirable.”[97] Another reviewer noted, as well, “whereas liberals are secularists, [Wills] is a Catholic. Similarly, he is viewed as a journalist in the academy and as an academic by journalists.”[98] Overall, Wills’s multiple identities and general approaches to rhetoric evidence an exceptional case when compared with other political conversion narratives.
Wayne Booth once remarked that “whatever imposes belief without personal engagement becomes inferior to whatever makes mutual exploration more likely. . . . The process of inquiry through discourse thus become more important than any possible conclusions, and whatever stultifies such fulfillment becomes demonstrably wrong.”[99] By prioritizing rhetorical processes over products, conceptualizing a politics of human convention over redemption, creating grounds for endless argumentation, and promoting conditions for expansive identity rhetorics, CC bypasses the totalizing features of the other political conversion narratives, engaging a process discourse in both content and form.
One of the most important tasks for public policy has been to refine standards for public discourse and deliberation,[100] so this chapter has offered an alternative illustrating what more democratic forms of rhetoric could look like compared with stories using the conversion form. Connections between CC’s ideas and current debates covering reason and religion, public deliberation, and the possibilities for democratic discourses bring into view what Wills’s text contributes to some larger issues at stake in political conversion narratives.
By examining four interrelated cases for their deliberative outlooks, this volume has focused on what I claim to be more or less propagandistic public discourse. Nicholas O’Shaughnessy finds that some classic elements of propaganda include Manichaean dualism, a quest to create enemies at every turn, and “the eliding of a complex world into a condensed and coherent and tightly defined framework.”[101] For many of the aforementioned reasons, Wills’s text could have easily slipped into such a structure. As some religious controversies have illustrated, a tendency to embellish conversion narratives with a “particular bent toward narrative one-upmanship” has presented problems for congregations[102]—and the temptation to heighten and dramatize one’s “before” and “after” experiences to fit the conversion form’s pressures presents an ongoing problem for public discourse.
Relative to this concern, a central debate in current scholarship regards the role of religion in political movements. In a dialogue with Pope Benedict XVI, Jürgen Habermas has been a proponent of the idea that religion provides both a powerful “motivation” and commitment to the “common good” among citizens in a way that legal rules cannot.[103] He finds that religious traditions can still thrive without “dogmatism,” or “the coercion of people’s consciences” in modern societies,[104] building on his earlier work proposing that “neither science nor art can inherit the mantle of religion; only a morality, set communicatively aflow and developed into a discourse ethics, can replace the authority of the sacred.”[105] Michael Sandel has similarly commented that “a politics that brackets morality and religion too completely soon generates its own disenchantment. Where political discourse lacks moral resonance, the yearning for a public life of larger meaning finds undesirable expression.”[106] In this vein, Wills’s text resembles Habermas’s twin concerns for involving religion in the public square while heeding dogmatisms, using religion as a motivator for both producing and critiquing politics.
As Wills’s book illustrates, at stake is a theory of reflexivity prioritizing communicative processes and endless argumentation. Habermas finds that “as long as participants inhabit the same discursive universe, there is no hermeneutic impulse to reflect on otherwise self-evident, unarticulated background motivations.”[107] I find that the question of whether discourse becomes dogmatic has less to do with assigning religiosity to messages than with the types of rhetorical forms that can lock individuals and groups into the “same discursive universe[s],” deflecting a rhetoric of inquiry. Although some indicators highlight that, for example, presidential candidates are becoming “more partisan, sectarian, and liturgical” in their public messages combining faith and politics,[108] the fact that faith is involved is less important than how religious discourse operates in the political realm.
Some Christian traditions manifest the tensions evident in political conversion rhetoric. In another book, Wills conducted an exhaustive survey of U.S. religious history, finding that continual strains between head and heart—or reason and emotion—have gone on for quite some time between Enlightenment-conditioned rational religion and experiential and mission-oriented Evangelicalism.[109] Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz show that political conversion accounts have also been reflective of these tensions, working under various rational or experiential guises. Along these lines, Robert Glenn Howard finds that Martin Luther created a reformation that made both fundamentalism and pluralism possible, since Luther configured faith “beliefs” as “authorized by an individual experience of the divine,” but with the effect that any actor or the state could now be challenged, opening space for all kinds of conflicting religious interpretations.[110] Compared with figures such as Erasmus, for whom God’s words were to be studied and debated, Luther prioritized individual access to transcendent authority—effacing public deliberation from theological and political matters.[111]
In different ways, Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz are more in Luther’s camp while Wills’s book can be positioned with Erasmus’s. A rhetorical study of these four authors shows how a close reading of discursive features can provide entry points to deliberative theories.[112] Kristy Maddux finds that terms such as “evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and modernism can be defined as rhetorical styles rather than institutions, groups of people, or individual leaders.”[113] In other words, communication criticism can unearth the rhetorical habits of particular texts, providing vantage points on how the tonal or structural choices of deliberators tend to fix positions. G. Thomas Goodnight also underscores how “at stake in any particular style, trend, or performance (that is in the rhetoric) of public engagement may be . . . the communicative practices invoked to articulate and enact a public sphere.”[114] In creating the conditions for a politics in which all can participate, not all discourse forms are created equal. Empirical research has shown that narratives tend to reduce the ability of individuals to offer critiques and counterarguments.[115] So one implication is that deliberative theorists need to engage discourse forms aiming to silence rhetoric, especially redemptive speech with little concern for ongoing, innovative, and robust speech.
Through an extensive analysis of the ways in which figures such as Thomas Hobbes have undermined deliberative discourse in their political theories, Bryan Garsten asks scholars to examine “speech that aims to persuade [and] can engage our capacity for practical judgment,” as distinguished from “efforts to avoid rhetorical controversy” that “tend to produce new and potentially more dogmatic forms of rhetoric.”[116] He advises a deeper engagement with many of the tricky methods by which advocates can manifest “anti-rhetorical rhetoric[s],” such as calls to public reason that homogenize diverse expressions in the name of an overly demagogic joint perspective.[117] From this, Garsten crafts a definition of deliberation that “stimulates reflection or judgment by disrupting ordinary habits of response,” as opposed to “universally acceptable procedures of argumentation.”[118]
Wills’s deliberative vision avoids the overly homogenizing emphases of rhetorical forms like conversion, making tentative identity claims without folding political processes into redemptive, singular, and powerful voices that have little interest in drawing out reflection and further judgments. A primary danger facing public deliberation is “the atavistic belief that identities can be maintained and secured only by eliminating difference and otherness.”[119] As political conversion narratives highlight, rhetoric seeking to excise differences go far beyond religious spheres. Some studies even show that redemption and rebirth messages continue to permeate the U.S. government’s missions.[120]
Deliberation scholar Seyla Benhabib asks, “[S]ince all identities . . . are riven by multiple, complex, and heterogeneous allegiances, does not the ‘politics of presence’ run the risk of reinforcing a form of identity-essentialism, a defunct metaphysics of group presences?”[121] It is toward this question that Wills’s discourse is perhaps most distinguished from the other narratives. Conversion stories merge identities with movement claims, running the risk of introducing partially or fully metaphysical assertions (for reasons that can be either religious or self-induced) into a political arena that necessarily manifests more groups, allegiances, and, ultimately, proliferating rhetorics than essentialized discourses can contain. Wills affirms various identities as a contribution to the public sphere but positions identity as a matter for continual upkeep, subject to further education.
At the same time, CC is not a perfect text. In continuing efforts to work toward more deliberative theories of democracy, perfection should not be expected, in any case. The book could be faulted for being too undecided, too inaccessible to non-Catholics or others not sharing Wills’s environ, or simply too distanced from many of the concrete political events happening during the time it was written. John Lee writes that Wills’s book may even be seen as a call to political passivity, given the author’s many affirmations of the electoral and political system.[122] As a well-to-do writer working at the top of his craft, Wills could also be seen as elitist. Critic Jack Beatty takes issue with Wills’s implication that virtue should be equated with knowledge, pointing out that educated elites send populations into wars like Vietnam even when citizens are often against it.[123] Still, in circumstances that could well have prompted a political conversion narrative, Wills said no.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 59.
Waisanen, “Political Conversion as Intrapersonal Argument.” As a former conservative journalist turned liberal media activist, David Brock uses the conversion form to document his political transformation. Similar to Horowitz, Brock attended the University of California at Berkeley, was inspired to become a conservative by the writings of Norman Podhoretz, and went on to become a writer for various conservative publications. Brock, Blinded by the Right, 5. Brock cites former leftists Irving Kristol and Ronald Reagan (two figures influenced by Chambers) as also having influenced his turn to conservatism. Conversely, in his journey out of conservatism, Brock admits that he searched for inspiration from others who had traversed the opposite path and found that Lee Atwater, the “Republican pitbull strategist,” had “made telephone calls from his deathbed apologizing to those he had slandered.” See David Brock, “Unliving a Lie,” Fast Company, September 2004, 75. Appalled by the conservative smear campaigns that he was a part of in the 1990s, Brock turned from his former ways and created Media Matters for America, a watchdog organization for conservative media practices. Brock’s political conversion narrative highlights that the author does not appear to be invested in revelatory, transcendent “truth” as a standard for his conversion, instead focusing on fixed “recovery” of self terms. That is, there is an equally foundational framing of inner validity in Brock’s narrative that bears significant similarities to the first three cases in this volume. Brock presents readers with notions of a “real” self and “authenticity” in the public sphere—or a way to justify a “true” experience of recovery that, given the weight of evidence, forgoes public reasoning and reasonability. Waisanen, “Political Conversion as Intrapersonal Argument.”
John L. Allen, “‘Poped Out’ Wills Seeks Broader Horizons,” National Catholic Reporter, November 21, 2008, http://ncronline.org/news/people/poped-out-wills-seeks-broader
-horizons, par. 2.
“Garry Wills,” Contemporary Authors Online (Detroit: Gale Biography in Context, 2012).
Jack J. Cardoso, “Garry Wills,” in The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives Thematic Series, ed. Arnold Markoe and Kenneth T. Jackson (New York: Gale Biography in Context, 2003), par. 12–13.
Garry Wills, Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer (New York: Viking, 2010).
As one critic notes, this started early, since “at a 1972 antiwar demonstration in Washington, Wills decide[d] to make a rare lurch from outsiderdom to activism, undergoing arrest.” John Leo, “Wills’s Testament,” Commonweal 138 (2011): 22.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 29. Wills editorializes further that the people who hated the New Deal and government regulation ended up loving the much grander form of the “warfare state.” Ibid., 30.
Frank Gerrity, Review of Confessions of a Conservative, Best Sellers, 1979, 224.
Cardoso, “Garry Wills,” par. 6.
Michael McDonald, “Wills Watching,” New Criterion, June 2011, 74.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 79.
For more on this distinction in public argumentation, see Daniel J. O’Keefe, “Two Concepts of Argument,” Journal of the American Forensic Association 13 (1977): 121–28.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 85.
Ibid., 112.
E. Black, Rhetorical Questions, 39.
When Wills worked for National Review, he was once assigned to review Chambers’s Cold Friday. Wills relates that he had to go back and reread Witness again to corroborate the witty and delightful Chambers he knew in person from the pretentiousness he observed across Chambers’s writings. Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 50.
Ibid., 193.
Ibid., 201.
Postman, Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk, 107.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 54.
Ibid., 112. Elsewhere, Wills helpfully explains that genre has to do with a text’s external relationships, while form is about its internal mechanics. Ibid., 98.
Ibid., 180.
Ibid.
Ibid., 217.
Ibid.
Ibid., 197.
Ibid., 226–27.
Ibid., 59.
E. Black, Rhetorical Questions, 44–45.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 231.
Ibid., 229. At the same time, Wills appears to be unsettling the type of “sacred canopies” described by others, such as Peter Berger. See Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967).
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 223–24; emphasis in original.
Ibid., 221.
Ibid; emphasis in original.
Ibid., 158.
Ibid., 68.
Glenn Tinder, Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 198–204.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 58.
Ibid., 184, 187.
See Burke, Attitudes toward History.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 116.
Ibid., 58.
Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009).
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 197. Some readers might find Wills’s interpretation of Augustine as a “convenientist” surprising, since the historical figure is often assumed to be a Neoplatonist. In his reading, Wills clarifies that Augustine rebelled against both Plato and Aristotle and is not a Neoplatonist, particularly by looking at certain passages from the City of God. Ibid., 54.
Ibid., 210.
Ibid.
Ibid, 214.
Ibid.
Hahn writes that “politics, by its very nature, seldom deals in certainties; rather, it deals with actions today that will produce reactions tomorrow. It deals with hypotheses, speculations, and arguments about which actions among those possible for today will produce which reactions, desirable and undesirable, that are possible for tomorrow. Thus politics, inherently, is involved with rhetoric about the unknowable. How, then, do people come to believe so fervently that they do know? How do they become so positive that the newest flux of illegal immigrants will hurt the economy or that failure to build a certain weapon system will doom us to another war?” Dan Hahn, Political Communication: Rhetoric, Government, and Citizens (State College, PA: Strata, 2002), 74.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 66. Wills says that his view is drawn from how Catholics tend to begin from the social structure of the family over individuals. This understanding of the family is not about patriarchy, however—mutual admiration and neighborly respect are the relations most worth pursuing. Ibid., 56–57.
Ibid., 207.
Ibid., 132, 130.
David Gordon, “Confusions of a Conservative,” LewRockwell.com, November 18, 2005, www.lewrockwell.com/gordon/gordon14.html (no longer available).
M. J. Sobran, “Up to Liberalism,” National Review, May 25, 1979, 686.
Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American Christianities (New York: Penguin, 2007).
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 199.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960).
W. Barnett Pearce, Making Social Worlds: A Communication Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 214.
My reference to “endless argumentation” is akin to Burke’s metaphor of “unending conversation.” Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 110–11.
G. Thomas Goodnight, “Controversy,” in Argument in Controversy, ed. Donn W. Parson (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1991), 1–13.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 198.
Ibid., 119.
Ibid., 194.
Ibid., 114.
Ibid., 172.
Ibid., 173, 204, 174.
Ibid., 175.
Ibid., 113; emphasis in original.
Ibid., 23.
Ibid., 181.
Ibid., 24–25. Wills further refers to the many occasions where differences within the conservative coalition assembled at National Review were bypassed. Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 103.
Ibid., 104. In another part of the book, Wills castigates rational models of debate that fail to take into account how visceral political commitments can become, among other factors. Ibid., 163. Edwin Black has made similar comments: “The acquisition of a social identity, then, is not only the relatively simple matter of embracing a term or a set of terms. It is, also, the infinitely more complex act of assimilating whole networks of affiliation, value, and vocabulary.” E. Black, Rhetorical Questions, 49–50.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 183.
Ibid., 161.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste , trans. Richard Nice, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 176. In a different context, for an analysis of how deliberation and multiple political identities relate, see Waisanen, “Toward Robust Public Engagement.”
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 222; emphasis in original.
Joseph Lelyveld, “Intellectual’s Inventory,” New York Times, July 15, 1979, www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/01/reviews/wills-confessions.html; emphasis added. Wills clarifies that “man begets himself in his act of knowledge,” using Gerard Manley Hopkins’s verb “to self” to describe such constitutive identity rhetoric. Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 224.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 230; emphasis added.
Ibid., 211–12.
Ibid., 215.
Ibid., 3.
Ibid. More often than not, Wills wrestles with terms that others have used to characterize him, apparently through attempts to make him into a political convert. After his book on Nixon came out he was surprised to learn that many did not consider him a conservative anymore, while he was also not a liberal given his critical approaches to electoral politics on the left. Despite these criticisms, Wills was called a liberal by National Review and a radical by William F. Buckley, but he clarifies that this was misleading (as most political attributions are), since he did not support the anti-elitist sentiments shared by radicals. Ibid., 121–22. One CC reviewer writes that Wills will always be claimed by others, regardless of what he either does or does not espouse about his political identity. Walter Karp, “The Constructs of a Conservative,” Harper’s, November 1979, 96.
Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, 190–91.
Ibid., 213.
Ibid., 230.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 230.
Ibid., 147–48.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 216; emphasis in original.
R. Z. Sheppard, “The Heart and Head of the Matter,” Time, April 23, 1979, 86–87.
Paul K. Cuneo, review of Confessions of a Conservative, America, June 30, 1979, 540.
Werner J. Dannhauser, “Against the Center,” Commentary, July 1979, 68.
Michael McDonald, “Wills Watching,” New Criterion, June 2011, 76–77.
Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, 137.
Giandomenico Majone, Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, “The Death and Life of Propaganda,” Journal of Public Affairs 9 (2010): 9–10.
“Bearing True Witness: Why We Are Tempted to Embellish Conversion Stories,” Christianity Today, July 2010, 45.
Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 22–23, 30. In other works, Habermas notes that “the ambition of philosophy’s ‘translation program’ is, if you like, to rescue the profane significance of interpersonal and existential experiences that have so far only been adequately articulated in religious language.” Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 164.
Habermas and Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization, 43. Even Joseph Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI) writes that “there exist pathologies in religion that are extremely dangerous and that make it necessary to see the divine light of reason as a ‘controlling organ.’. . . However, we have also seen in the course of our reflections that there are also pathologies of reason. . . . [I]t suffices here to think of the atomic bomb or of man as a ‘product.’” In this understanding, religion and reason can correct each other’s limitations. Ibid., 77–78; emphasis in original.
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 92.
Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 322.
Habermas, Religion and Rationality, 155.
Brian Kaylor, “No Jack Kennedy: Mitt Romney’s ‘Faith in America’ Speech and the Changing Religious-Political Environment,” Communication Studies 62 (2011): 504.
Wills, Head and Heart.
This was far before The Fundamentals of the U.S. fundamentalist movement was written in 1910. Robert Glenn Howard, “The Double-Bind of the Protestant Reformation: The Birth of Fundamentalism and the Necessity of Pluralism,” Journal of Church and State 47 (2005): 92.
Examining past or shared resources thus became irrelevant to working out one’s theological interpretations; given this theory of public engagement, Luther unsurprisingly refused to meet Erasmus to discuss these issues. Ibid., 97, 101.
See Edward Schiappa, Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003).
Kristy Maddux, “The Foursquare Gospel of Aimee Semple McPherson,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14 (2011): 291.
G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres: A Note on 21st Century Critical Communication Inquiry,” Argumentation and Advocacy 48 (2012): 261.
Jeff Niederdeppe, Michael A. Shapiro, and Norman Porticelli, “Attributions of Responsibility for Obesity: Narrative Communication Reduces Reactive Counterarguing among Liberals,” Human Communication Research 37 (2011): 295.
Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 174–75.
Ibid., 181–82.
Ibid., 190, 196.
Seyla Benhabib, “Introduction: The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. idem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4.
Jason A. Edwards, Joseph M. Valenzano, III, and Karla Stevenson, “The Peacekeeping Mission: Bringing Stability to a Chaotic Scene,” Communication Quarterly 59 (2011): 351.
Benhabib, “Introduction,” 10.
John Lee, review of Confessions of a Conservative, Commonweal, September 28, 1979, 536.
Jack Beatty, review of Confessions of a Conservative, New Republic, May 19, 1979, 38.