Restoring Quality Civic Discourse to the Body Politic: Liberty Leads the Way

Every Sunday as a teen I watched William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, a weekly television show in which Buckley crossed rhetorical swords with the intellectuals and politicians of the day.

Buckley was urbane, witty, and erudite. Watching Buckley whetted my appetite for vigorous debate. More importantly, it taught me good people should fearlessly open themselves to debate, trusting, as Thomas Jefferson said, that “reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error ... Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves?” (Jefferson Query XVII, “Religion”).

This faith that truth will eventually emerge from vigorous, reasoned discourse is a cornerstone of our republican form of government. In a natural-rights Republic, we recognize we are endowed by our Creator with equal, inalienable natural rights. This leads to the corollary of consent, which says no one naturally has a right to rule another without consent. The purpose of rhetoric is to obtain consent through deliberation and to assist in the formation of public opinion. This should happen through what professor Colleen Sheehan calls a vibrant “marketplace of ideas”. This marketplace should be characterized by high ethical standards, sound reasoning, and orient us towards the highest good. If this occurs, citizens and their representatives will make laws in accordance with consent, consistent with liberty and natural rights, thereby securing a just and legitimate government. We would call this citizenry self-governing.

In a corrupt regime, or even outright tyranny, all of this gets turned on its head. Rights, the rulers claim, are given to us by the state. Rulers seek merely the appearance of consent. Rhetoric is seen as a tool of manipulation by leaders and corrupt citizens, and rhetoric is sophistic, marked by specious argument, unethical appeals, and emotionalism. The marketplace of ideas becomes controlled; speech is regulated; dissent is limited by censorship or coercion. The people are bribed and distracted by “bread and circuses” which keep them pacified and preoccupied. Law is corrupt, bureaucratic, arbitrary, and written by rulers to favor rulers. The citizenry becomes apathetic and disengaged from politics.  

While this corrupt regime may seem far-fetched, looking at our current state of politics, one cannot help but think this deterioration has already begun. Just weeks ago, the nation was a painful witness to the shallow proceedings disingenuously called a “presidential debate." In fact, this “debate” was a paltry shadow compared to the debates of yore, and failed to meet any minimal standard of true debate. There are many examples in U.S. history we can look to. Although not a presidential debate, in 1858, U.S. Senate Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln chased down his opponent Douglas until he agreed to seven very long debates. The format was simple: the first speaker had one hour, followed by a 90-minute response by his opponent, and then the first speaker returned again for 30-minute rejoinder – no moderators, no questions from the media or audience, and no interruptions. Such a thing is almost inconceivable to us today.  Years before that, John Quincy Adams defied the U.S. House’s gag order on slavery and bravely spoke of its evils. He also dared to defend the rebellious slaves of the ship Amistad before the U.S. Supreme Court and won them their freedom. The moment of our birth as a nation is perhaps our greatest achievement in civic discourse. The Constitution was heatedly, but doggedly debated line-by-line, followed by similar ratification debates in each of the states. Ordinary citizens engaged in this vigorous debate. Historian Pauline Maier writes the, “Debate over the Constitution raged in newspapers, taverns, coffeehouses, and over dinner tables as well as in the Confederation Congress, state legislatures, and state ratifying conventions. People who never left their home towns and were little known except to their neighbors studied the document, knew it well, and on some memorable occasions made their views known. What the people and the convention delegates they chose decided had everything to do with making the United States into what George Washington called a “respectable nation” (Maier, pg. IX, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788, 2010).

How can we inculcate in Liberty students and future citizens this appetite for substantive debate? How can we convince them to reject the platitudes and sloganeering that is served up by politicians and the media, and demand a more robust civic discourse? It is up to the next generation of Americans to rediscover what we previously knew—what constitutes debate and civic discourse and how constitutional republics should go about doing it.

At Liberty, we teach students to be accountable for their words. They must own what they write and speak. We expect students to assert their opinions with graciousness and respect, knowing that unanimity of thought is impossible in any free republic. They learn that their ideas and those of others must stand the test of logic; that their claims must be supported by evidence, and most importantly, that all arguments must be limited to those that meet high ethical standards. They learn to be builders of sound arguments, and not just “de-bunkers” (to use C.S. Lewis’ term) who tear down the arguments of others. In other words, our students learn the art of true rhetoric. In the end, discussion in our classrooms should model what we desire to see in the larger society, for we expect our students to not only be self-governing citizens, but leaders of their communities. It will be up to them to lift our country to a higher standard of debate and civic discourse so that we may once again be, in the words of George Washington, “a respectable nation.”

Mrs. Renstrom teaches Western Literature and AP Language and Composition at Liberty. She holds a master’s degree in Rhetoric and Communication Studies from the University of Virginia.