Citizen Empowerment in an Age of Spectatorship

This paper is about the prospects for citizen empowerment in an age when the average citizen experience politics as a spectacle. When politics is a spectacle, the opportunities for, and risks of, manipulation of the electorate increase. The greater those risks, the greater the disempowerment of citizens. Electoral politics in mature liberal democracies institutionally tend to reinforce this citizen disempowerment. One response has been widespread appeal to versions of deliberative democracy. I argue that such arguments have not sufficiently theorized citizenship as a lived experience in contemporary politics and, thus, have neglected an important dimension of power and citizen disempowerment. My paper addresses the problem of rhetorical power in deliberative contexts. The question addressed is whether there are democratic means of governing this power. Theorists (e.g. Young, Dryzek) who have turned their attention to deliberative communication have argued for including rhetoric as a permissible mode of expression in deliberations. While arguments for the inclusion of rhetoric aim to ensure that deliberations do not favour the already privileged, they do not take account of rhetorical power. Taking rhetoric to mean the art of persuasion (usually in terms of persuasive speech), rhetorical power is a superior ability to practice that art. This constitutes an increased opportunity to influence political outcomes and, therefore, rhetorical power threatens democratic equality. This is especially a problem for deliberative democracy because of the emphasis on discursive interaction. Thus, I argue: rhetorical ability constitutes a form of power in deliberative contexts; and, the exercise of that ability can subvert democratic equality. The failure to recognise the problem of rhetorical power, which is connected to the common characterisation of rhetoric as merely stylised speech, leaves in place a form of domination that arises from deliberation itself. I argue that the power of superior rhetorical ability is inescapable, but that it can be democratically governed. In developing this argument, I rule out two possible approaches: (a) bringing all to the same level of rhetorical ability through formal instruction; (b) containing rhetorical power either through practical restrictions or through the articulation of deliberative norms. Regarding (a), I argue that inequalities in ability are unavoidable. Regarding (b), I claim that containing rhetorical power risks undemocratic restrictions on speech, while articulating discursive norms fails to acknowledge the inherent rhetoricality of discourse. Thus, I argue for a kind civic education that can govern rhetorical ability by empowering those who would be subject to it. This ‘demotic empowerment’ is based on self-reflection about one’s personal susceptibilities to certain modes of speech, emotional appeals, and patterns of argument. This kind of self-knowledge becomes a form of self-defence. It is also an account that is true to structural realities in contemporary politics, where observers vastly outnumber direct participants and rhetorical strategies are deployed with purpose and skill to swing the opinions of those not routinely and directly involved in political action.