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The decline of democracy in the US entails the surge of authoritarianism, ascendency of demagoguery, dispersal of the democratic majority, and weakening of public reason. Dissent, envisioned as a rhetorical practice of democratic deliberation, resists authoritarianism by advancing democratic values. Accordingly, this paper examines democracy as a minority voice, explores the deliberative capacity of dissent, and identifies the rhetorical properties of deliberation. The paper argues that dissent, in its fugitive aspect, is dispersed across an array of modest sites, guided by a deliberative ideal partially realised, and framed by democratic values. Dissent functions in this capacity as an itinerant, recurring source of democratic renewal on occasions of political crisis. It is an adaptation to structural constraints that provides a nurturing aspiration to prompt political agency, establish realistic expectations, and sustain vigilance. While the immediacy of the authoritarian threat and corresponding questions about the role of democratic communication are addressed in terms of the 2024 general election in the US, the democratic challenge in the US is indicative of the abiding immediacy of the authoritarian threat to other democracies and suggestive of deliberative adaptations for restoring the vitality of democratic communication and culture. Complacency in democratic theory and practice is counter-indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces a twentieth anniversary forum reviewing the state of scholarship on communication as a critical/cultural study. It features democratic discourse as a main line of inquiry for pursuing a more just public culture, references relevant critical/cultural scholarship, and notes that forum contributors focus on matters of identity addressed in queer scholarship, including a current shift in the culture wars, and on constructions of race, articulations of whiteness, and issues of racism. Values of inclusion, rights, equality, and political agency engaged by these forum contributors are critical to the challenge of renewing democracy in a time of cultural turbulence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the simplest terms, academic freedom means unfettered scholarly inquiry, a scholar's fundamental right of research, publication, and instruction free of institutional constraint. This indispensable principle of scholarship is the precious gift of independent intellectual judgment--an endowment of open inquiry, free investigation, speculation, imagination, reflexivity, interpretation, assessment, and informed opinion protected against inevitable accusations of political and religious heresy. It is the legitimizing concept of academic life and a right that exists within academic communities for the larger benefit of a free and open society consistent with the ethos of a progressive polity. Academic freedom exists only so long as the professoriat acts on its responsibilities as citizen-scholars consistent with democratic ideals. Such action may entail challenging conventional histories and developing alternative narratives for the enrichment of public memory, constructing situated languages of critique and envisioning new possibilities, critically intervening in public life, creating think-tanks, producing alternative media, and developing curricula to engage pressing social issues, but not at the expense, as Giroux and Giroux emphasize, of the scholar's artistic acuity, intellectual rigor, or theoretical skills, even while addressing a variety of audiences within and outside of academia. To proscribe such forms of engaged scholarship by declaring them inappropriately political or subversive is to misrepresent the purpose of academic freedom. To succumb to such misrepresentations is to abandon the sine qua non of the nation's democratic aspirations. In this most important and pragmatic sense, academic freedom is more than a privilege and nothing less than a responsibility of citizenship. (Contains 69 notes.)

Rhetorical inducements to escalate the war in Ukraine are examined as a function of Kenneth Burke’s conception of symbolic action. Entelechy, a term borrowed from Aristotle, expresses Burke’s view that language possesses a telos, or direction within itself that aims for completion. The image of Russian President Putin, embedded in a trope of brutality, is a case in point of language escalating toward a deadly point of no return. Rhetorical creep inhibits and obscures the possibility of finding a diplomatic way to war’s end. Clearing a path to a viable peace requires identifying and reassessing tropes that oversimplify a complex situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There prevails a type of tension in American political culture between democracy and rhetoric that motivates a country of fear and war instead of peace and order. Several books discuss this issue at length and argue that the national identity as a democracy is made problematic by distrust of rhetoric as an instrument of public deliberation. These books include Thomas Farrell's 'Norms of Rhetorical Culture,' Dennis Thompson's 'Democracy and Disagreement' and Joseph Bessett's 'The Mild Voice of Reason.'