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Carson Holloway has an important word here on the dangerous vacuity of our public discourse, using President Obama’s recent West Point commencement address as an example, and applying Aristotle’s two-fold categorization of epideictic rhetoric (basically ceremonial) and deliberative rhetoric (a call to action).

Here is Professor Holloway’s conclusion:

We too often associate the word “argument” with confusion, weakness, and division. On that contrary, if our public policy is to be effective, if our commitment to self-government is genuinely to be lived out, and if our sense of community is to be preserved, we need not to avoid but to insist on public argument, properly understood as the pursuit of deliberative rhetoric in its proper sphere.

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