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This article examines the nature of public discourse within a democracy. The author argues that healthy democratic debate must exist but not degenerate in antagonism and estrangement within the body politic. When politics results in dehumanizing those who dissent, transforming fellow citizens into internal enemies, democracy ceases to exists. The author contends that the majority must maintain this civility, particularly when engaging in dissent. Although dissent is vital to a functioning democracy, the author argues that it must resist the temptation to resort demonizing the subject of its dissent.

This essay examines the Bush administration's rhetoric of evil in the war on terror and invasion of Iraq by reframing the question of national security into one of a chosen people's recurring quest for redemption. As such, ritualized perceptions of peril are an engine of unreflective policy making. Yet the ritual of redemptive violence suggests a remedy from within war culture, which begins with reconsidering the function of the scapegoat vis-à-vis the articulation of categorical guilt. From there, the essay explores the notion of transforming the scapegoat mechanism through rehumanizing rituals into a peace-building, as opposed to enemy-making, salvation device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay advances the notion that democratic deliberation at its best in the here and now is primarily rhetorical A "rowdy" rhetorical conception of deliberation, in the reconstructive spirit of the mythical figure of Old Man Coyote, is well adapted to meeting the present conditions of what Chantai Mouffe calls agonistic pluralism. The democratic deficit created in the absence of such a conception is illustrated with reference to the so-called "war" on terrorism following the attack of September 11, 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]