Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric.

Political scientists, whether of a materialist or idealist bent, have usually treated rhetoric as epiphenomenal. More recently, constructivists have brought new attention to rhetoric as shaping political outcomes through the mechanism of persuasion. This paper suggests a new way of understanding the role of rhetoric in accounts of politics, as a form of coercion, and thus lays the groundwork for what we call ‘coercive constructivism’ in contrast to the Habermasian versions so popular today. We subsequently illustrate our model’s relevance through two ‘hard’ cases: (1) the efforts of Druse Arabs in Israel to garner full citizenship rights by framing them as the just desserts of their battlefield sacrifice, and (2) the campaign to forge an American commitment to the reconstruction of Europe after World War II by framing it as essential to the defense of ‘Western civilization.’ We maintain that these outcomes are not entirely explicable without close attention to the competing rhetorics put forward by the opposed parties and that our model of rhetorical coercion helps make sense of these puzzling and important cases. We contend that thinking about rhetoric in such terms avoids the naïveté of the Habermasian perspective, the crudeness of vulgar materialism, and the reductionism of ideational approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]