Abstract
A campaign to pass city council resolutions opposing an American invasion of Iraq in the Fall of 2002 and Spring of 2003 provided an opportunity to examine contrasting styles of public argument. This paper examines an extensive set of news and editorial articles as well as the actual deliberations before city councils. An argument’s style constructs a relationship between the speaker, audience, and issue through the strategic use of language. Two conflicting styles of argument were apparent in these deliberations: a protest style and a dissent style. Each style operated within a different normative frame that managed tensions between unity and division, participation and its lack, and inclusive and exclusive reasoning. While protest and dissent styles conflict, each frames important relationships for public discourse and deliberation.
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Notes
Many subtle and not so subtle differences in the perspectives of these theorists, notably Dryzek, Young, Mouffe, and Hauser, have been set aside in this gloss. However, despite significant theoretical differences, each of these theorists has identified the tensions these three norms place on the practice of democracy and argues, albeit by different means, for practices that manage division, garner participation, and apply reasoned argument to the problems and issues faced by diverse interests.
This figure was arrived at by searching the Lexis-Nexis database by U.S. region for articles containing the words Iraq, resolution, and city council between September 1, 2002 and September 1, 2003 in the Spring of 2004. All irrelevant and duplicate articles were removed from the corpus and are not included in the final number.
Each style and entailing element was apparent in the discourse through frequent appearance in both spoken and written discourse. No attempt has been made in this analysis to quantify the relative frequency or extensiveness of the styles or their elements, nor examine the rate of occurrence in different media and contexts. While future studies may examine these aspects of the styles, this study’s purpose is to explicate the styles and their features.
The protest style identified adopts a set of norms similar to those which Young (2001) identified with activists. Rather than label the protest style as “activist,” each style has been examined only in terms of rejection. Activists and deliberators do more than reject positions. It is possible that the dissent style and protest style each align with the deliberative and activist roles Young has outlined, but that should be indicated by examining styles of both rejection and acceptance.
Although the resolution speakers were advocating a position (passing a resolution is a positive act), they framed their discourse, universally, as an opposition to the Administration’s supposed, and later declared, actions. This is also why I term their campaign and resolutions “anti-war” rather than “peace;” their position was essentially oppositional.
It is important to note that resolution proponents were not the only people utilizing what I term intentional incivility. Many “pro-war” speakers utilized a similar style when arguing in favor of the administration or the war and against resolutions or their proponents. This form of action I would term “propaganda,” but will not address in this paper.
Dissoi Logoi refers to the principle of two-sided argument. In the work of Protagoras (see Sloane 2001) and the treatise “Dissoi Logoi” (see Dissoi Logoi 2001), the principle explains that any issue can be argued from two different sides. The rhetorician’s purpose is to develop each side and determine which is the stronger. The U.S. court system works on this principle. As an aspect of dissent style, it refers to the idea that those dissenting acknowledge that there are opposing arguments assenting and that the stronger of the two, whichever that happens to be, ought to prevail. This implies that a one-sided debate and decisions that do not take into account opposing viewpoints are illegitimate.
Like any governing body, the deliberation that occurs in the meeting itself may not be what has determined the positions of the various parties. Like the town hall meetings in Mansbridge’s (1980) “Selby,” the decision itself may be made outside the forum, but the forum is where the public display of deliberation—justifying and criticizing the options—takes place.
Transcribed council sessions use Jeffersonian notation common in the discourse analytic tradition (see Hutchby and Woffitt 1998). Speakers are transcribed exactly as they sounded, so that false starts, self repairs, and pronunciation is captured as the spoken words sounded. This should not reflect negatively on the speakers; lack of grammatical coherence is typical in spoken discourse. Some common notations are: pauses (numbers in parentheses used for length in seconds, period in parentheses used for less than 1 s); words in parentheses represent a best guess as to what was said; empty parentheses indicate an unidentifiable sound; colons indicate stretched sound; underlining indicates emphasis; and capitalization indicates louder volume.
In social interaction a repair is a conversational move that reforms a previous utterance. It can be self initiated, where the speaker initiates the repair or other initiated where the interlocutor either initiates a call to repair or reformulates the speaker’s statement (Hutchby and Woffitt 1998). Since public conversation works according to many of the same principles, this reprimand serves as an other-initiated repair.
It is not my intention to imply that ad hominem arguments are necessarily fallacious. Attacks on the source of a position may be relevant to discourse in many circumstances (see Brinton 1995).
van Eemeren et al. (1993) approach argument in ways that provide a theoretical basis for this connection between interaction and public reason. The principles of socialization and externalization, particularly, provide an account of the interactive aspects of argument and the way arguments construct both a standpoint and the potential for opposition to that standpoint.
For instance, in the Denver City Council meeting a resolution opponent argued that he found it “mysterious” that the resolution called for further deliberation and proceeded to recount the deliberative proceedings leading up to the current war. Similar sentiments were expressed by a Boulder councilman who opposed council action with respect to the war.
Slippery slope designates a logically fallacy whereby a claim is refuted due to what it will lead to rather than its own merits. It is important to note that, like other aspects of style, this form of argument does not reflect upon the truthfulness of the claim. This form of argument is used in cases of domestic violence, where one dominating behavior often leads to greater and greater transgressions. As an old proverb states, an avalanche begins with the falling of a single stone.
This is similar to Hariman and Lucaties (2001) analysis of the iconic Kent State photograph, where the viewer is called upon to respond to the dramatic emotion displayed in the photograph. Here however, there is still the descriptive drama, but the verbal image gains its power through the “witness” displaying the scene, rather than iconic status.
The discourse has a reciprocal relationship to the relationship among interlocutors. It constructs the relationship, based on the relational definitions available, but can also change that relational definition by representing the relationship in a different way. In this way it is both constructive and reflective of the relationship. For simplicity I use construction for both since construction must be out of something as well as of something.
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Dimock, A. Styles of Rejection in Local Public Argument on Iraq. Argumentation 24, 423–452 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-009-9175-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-009-9175-6