In his opening remarks on Discourse and Democracy, rabble-rouser Todd Gitlin maintains that democracy is a wager that reason when publicly exercised will succeed in eclipsing unreason.

He goes on to exclaim that the degradation of politics [with its emphasis on demagoguery as a means of galvanizing one's base], the degradation of the media [which functions as an instrument of distraction and for which public discourse is a side-show relegated to dead-air time] and the mystification of society have all led to a cheapening of public discourse.

This condition is compounded, Gitlin says, by the domination of America by a single political party for the last 30 years and by a sitting president whose trademark is absence of deliberation. In the debates, Gitlin says, Bush revealed more of his character than is ordinarily seen. Brute repetition is a revelation to the inner Bush, not a carefully calculated political strategy.

Quoting from Ron Suskind who writes in the New York Times Magazine (October 17, 2004) about Bush's faith in his own positions, Gitlin declares George W. Bush to be anti-rational. Here is what Suskind wrote:

"[Bush's] aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmered something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

In later discussion, Gitlin acknowledges that one of the functions of speech in modernity is to make people feel good. In addition to persuasion and rationality, speech is used to create mood. "We had entertainment before we had news," Gitlin said. "News has a narrative arc… There are irrationalities entangled with the use of speech" to which earlier speaker Karlyn Kohrs Campbell responds, "You can also entertain while being deliberative."

However, with regard to public discourse, both Gitlin and Campbell appear to believe we can do better.

George Loper, October 21, 2004

Note: The Third Annual LaBrosse-Levinson Lectures on Religion, Culture and Social Theory are co-sponosred by the Center on Religion and Democracy and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Papers for the event will be published in the Fall 2004 issue of The Hedgehog Review.

Todd Gitlin is Professor of Journalism and Sociology at Columbia University and is author of ten books, among them Letters to a Young Activist, 2003; Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Image and Sound Overshelms Our Lives, 2002; The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars, 1995; and Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago, 1970. In 1963-64, he was president of Students for a Democratic Society and helped organize the first national protest against the Vietnam War.