Using debate for self-expression and empowerment instead of structured dialogue about concrete solutions to problems stymies collective action at best and reifies hierarchies at worst.

In certain ways, Schudson’s initial reluctance to dismiss public conversation echoes my own early reservations, given the ideals of egalitarianism, empowerment, and mutual respect conversational advocates champion. Still, in the spirit of the dialectic ostensibly underlying dialogic premises, this essay argues that various negative consequences can result from transporting conversational and therapeutic paradigms into public problem solving. In what follows, I extend Schudson’s critique of a conversational model for democracy in two ways: First, whereas Schudson primarily offers a theoretical analysis, I interrogate public conversation as a praxis in a variety of venues, illustrating how public “conversation” and “dialogue” have been coopted to silence rather than empower marginalized or dissenting voices. In practice, public conversation easily can emulate what feminist political scientist Jo Freeman termed “the tyranny of structurelessness” in her classic 1970 critique of consciousness-raising groups in the women’s liberation movement,15 as well as the key traits Irving L. Janis ascribes to “groupthink.”16 Thus, contrary to its promotion as a means to neutralize hierarchy and exclusion in the public sphere, public conversation can and has accomplished the reverse. When such moves are rendered transparent, public conversation and dialogue, I contend, risk increasing rather than diminishing political cynicism and alienation.

Second, whereas Schudson focuses largely on ways a conversational model for democracy may mute an individual’s voice in crafting a resolution on a given question at a given time, I draw upon insights of Dana L. Cloud and others to consider ways in which a therapeutic, conversational approach to public problems can stymie productive, collective action in two respects.17 First, because conversation has no clearly defined goal, a public conversation may engender inertia as participants become mired in repeated airings of personal experiences without a mechanism to lend such expressions direction and closure. As Freeman aptly notes, although “[u]nstructured groups may be very effective in getting [people] to talk about their lives[,] they aren’t very good for getting things done. Unless their mode of operation changes, groups flounder at the point where people tire of ‘just talking.’”18 Second, because the therapeutic bent of much public conversation locates social ills and remedies within individuals or dynamics of interpersonal relationships, public conversations and dialogues risk becoming substitutes for policy formation necessary to correct structural dimensions of social problems. In mimicking the emphasis on the individual in therapy, Cloud warns, the therapeutic rhetoric of “healing, consolation, and adaptation or adjustment” tends to “encourage citizens to perceive political issues, conflicts, and inequities as personal failures subject to personal amelioration.”19

SOCIAL CONVERSATION, THERAPY, AND PUBLIC DELIBERATION

The allure of conversation or dialogue to remedy corrosive political alienation and disaffection undoubtedly lies in social talk as a primary site for locating a sense of self, creating and performing social identity, and developing and sustaining relationships.20 On its face, conversation appears less threatening than traditional modes of public deliberation in several respects. First, conventional conceptions of expertise are significantly refigured in social conversations. In social settings, evidence often consists of lived experiences, hearsay, anecdotes, and personal feelings and opinions rather than, for example, statistics or studied conclusions from authorities. Moreover, because social conversations frequently engage with the trivial, quotidian, or entertaining, persons with social or cultural knowledge and interpersonal skills—the talent, say, to tell a joke, discuss sports, or narrate travails of childbearing and rearing—may find themselves prized in a conversational arena. Indeed, conversational “expertise” often is equated with the gift for eliciting and validating personal experiences and opinions of others, even in the face of disagreement.

Additionally, whereas informal rules of conversation are familiar and accessible to most individuals, formal processes common to public deliberation may intimidate the uninitiated in parliamentary procedure. Although conversations are not without norms, such talk unfolds spontaneously through informal, unstated conventions of politeness linked to turn-taking; topic initiation, acceptance, and refusal; leave-taking; and so forth. Participants who violate conventions by interrupting, monopolizing talk, or even voicing racism or sexism, for example, seldom face the type of reprimand often encountered in formal deliberations.

In a related vein, then, the priority placed on forging and maintaining relationships in social conversations privileges avoiding conflict, even when conversational partners violate norms or make outlandish claims. Because the presumption of trust governs, Ronald Wardbaugh notes, “good behavior in conversations is cooperative behavior” and confrontation becomes anathema: challenging or “correcting others . . . directly questions an underlying assumption of conversation—that everybody is telling the truth.”21 If friction threatens or erupts, parties skirt conflict through capitulation or compromise, silence, shifting topics, or polite physical escape.22 Even some argumentation scholars agree that eluding discord trumps effective decision making when talk is “conversational.” Thomas A. Hollihan and Kevin T. Baaske, for example, counsel conversationalists to consider, “How might [a dispute] affect our relationship?” and “What good is securing a victory in an argument, if the person [I] have argued with ...refuses to be a friend, or comes to . . . dislike [me]?”23 Therapeutic dialogue is likewise highly personal, although such talk directly engages with some conflict or struggle: addiction, familial strife, grief, eating disorders, low self-esteem, or other personal or relational issues.

Therapeutic discourse—be it in encounter groups, 12-step programs, or individual counseling—travels a course of self-discovery aimed ultimately at personal, not social, reform. In therapeutic talk, the self monopolizes; the individual is central subject, provider of evidence, and solution, even if the “problem” entails external structures such as work-related stress or navigating racism, sexism, or homophobia.24 Ironically, although the postmodern turn in therapy challenges the concept of an isolated self by emphasizing identity and knowledge as products of relational dialogue,25 some postmodern dialogic therapists nonetheless regard external data that might contradict a client’s self reports as not germane. Sheila McNamee, for example, terms as “monologic” rather than her preferred “dialogic” the “modernist belief that we can objectively assess a person, a situation, or a relationship based on the notion that there are (or could be) some clear standards for evaluation. . . . .The discourse of reason is so commonplace” that “[w]e simply expect others to be able to provide rational and objective evidence supporting their claims.”26

To be sure, certain conventional boundaries between public and private forms of communication and problem solving are artificial; deliberation over facts, values, and courses of action inhere in essentially all human decision making, whether it be over foreign policy or navigating daily life. So, too, some rhetorical scholars, myself included, have noted that some rhetors may mobilize oppressed or politically disaffected constituencies by transferring certain communication skills acquired in the private sphere into the public domain, especially if the rhetor’s aims entail transforming disempowered audiences into confident and skilled political actors.27 In fact, Campbell’s treatment of the “rhetoric of conversation” in the talk of three historical female figures greatly mirrors the consciousness-raising that she earlier analyzed in the women’s liberation movement.28

Still, in important respects, received conceptions of democracy and public deliberation stand in sharp relief to social conversations and therapeutic dialogues. First, unlike the scrupulous avoidance of conflict in social conversations, democratic argument, as Kenneth Burke contends, is necessarily an admixture of “competition” and “cooperation.” As he argues, “Only if all reports were in and if there were no vital questions still unanswered, could a social body dispense with the assistance of a vocal opposition in the maturing of our chart as to what is going on, which social functions are helpful and which are harmful.”29 Thus, contrary to the relational harmony privileged in social conversations, true civic deliberation fully recognizes, in Schudson’s words, that “Democracy is deeply uncomfortable.”30 Public arguments are catalyzed by predicament or dispute, placing them at odds with the social convention prescribing divisive issues such as politics and religion as off-limits in “polite conversation.”

Rather than developing relationships of equality, the conversational privileging of affective criteria over reasonable problem solving in public deliberations can invite, as I have said, what Janis terms “groupthink.” Among the primary contributors to groupthink, explains Janis, is the goal of group cohesiveness. To maintain the god-term of “community,” self-appointed group mind-guards paint dissenters as disloyal or uncooperative, limit future membership to like-minded individuals, and frame out-group opposition as too evil, ignorant, or unintelligent to warrant consideration. Similar to social conversations, in groupthink, parties concerned about appearing unduly quarrelsome avoid conflict by denying or diluting their reservations about a proposed action, shifting or tabling discussion of thorny topics, or resorting to silence or physical absence. Such self-censorship, coupled with the faulty assumption that silence equals consent, results in the illusion of unanimity.31 Although name-calling and ostracism can and do occur in traditional democratic processes, the prioritizing of group harmony and cohesiveness in conversational models grants freer license to scapegoat.

Second, democratic processes and public problem solving necessarily diverge from social conversations by articulating objectives at the outset; adhering to formal rules for participating in, managing, and achieving problem resolution; and documenting outcomes. Through the scrupulous recording of motions, discussions, amendments, and votes, the dynamics of such joint action are rendered visible, accessible, and retrievable, even to persons not party to the immediate deliberative process. “Democracies,” Schudson writes, “put great store in the power of writing to secure, verify, and make public. Democracies require public memories.”32 Thus, contrary to the framing of conversation and dialogue as egalitarian public problem-solving models, they, in truth, can reify pecking orders by licensing group members with social authority to set agendas, steer and dominate discussion, and—absent the polling and recording of votes—interpret the “will” of the group. Moreover, such informal processes can reward those who speak the loudest, the longest, are the most articulate, or even the most recalcitrant. Freeman’s analysis of consciousness-raising groups is instructive:

At any small group meeting anyone with a sharp eye and an acute ear can tell who is influencing whom. The members of the friendship group will relate more to each other than to other people. They listen more attentively, and interrupt less; they repeat each other’s points and tend to give in amiably; they tend to ignore or grapple with the “outs” whose approval is not necessary for making a decision . . . They are nuances of interaction, not prewritten scripts. But they are discernible, and they do have their effect. Once one knows ...whose approval is the stamp of acceptance, one knows who is running things.33

As a result, Freeman argues that purportedly “structureless” organizations are a “deceptive . . . smokescreen,” given that “‘structurelessness’ does not prevent the formation of informal structures, but only formal ones . . . For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved . . . and to participate . . . the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can only happen if they are formalized.”34 Schudson likewise argues that the inherently “threatening” nature of political deliberation demands procedures guaranteeing “equal access to the floor, equal participation in setting the ground rules for discussion, and a set of ground rules designed to encourage pertinent speaking, attentive listening, appropriate simplifications, and widely apportioned speaking rights.”35

Third, whereas in social and therapeutic talk, personal experience, opinion, and individual well-being reign supreme, the force of “opinion” in a democracy demands allegiance both to reasonableness and to the larger collective good. Unlike certain postmodern dialogic therapists, responsible public deliberators view neither facts as inescapably elusive nor appeals to the rational uniformly suspect. Rather, democratic arguers apply rigorous standards for evidence and, above all, writes Schudson, subscribe to “norms of reasonableness.”36 A key groupthink feature—uncritical, self-righteous faith in the group’s inherent morality and traditions—is nourished by privileging lived experiences and personal opinions, the primary content of social and therapeutic talk. As Donal Carbaugh points out, because the “self” becomes the “locus of conversational life,” conversationalists may “disprefer consensual truths, or standards of and for public judgment,” which they view to “unduly constrain ‘self.’”37 Such an egocentric focus can enable members of deliberative bodies to discount crucial, formal types of external evidence that counters existing personal and group assumptions, resulting in what Lisa M. GringPemble characterizes as forming public policies such as welfare reform “by anecdote.”38

Fourth, a communicative model that views public issues through a relational, personal, or therapeutic lens nourishes hegemony by inviting political inaction. Whereas the objective of conventional public argument is achieving an instrumental goal such as a verdict or legislation, the aim of social conversation generally stops with self-expression. As Schudson puts it, “Conversation has no end outside itself.”39 Similarly, modeling therapeutic paradigms that trumpet “talking cures” can discourage a search for political solutions to public problems by casting cathartic talk as sufficient remedy. As Campbell’s analysis of consciousness-raising groups in the women’s liberation movement points out, “[S]olutions must be structural, not merely personal, and analysis must move beyond personal experience and feeling . . . Unless such transcendence occurs, there is no persuasive campaign . . . [but] only the very limited realm of therapeutic, small group interaction.”40

Finally, and related, a therapeutic framing of social problems threatens to locate the source and solution to such ills solely within the individual, the “self-help” on which much therapy rests. A postmodern therapeutic framing of conflicts as relational misunderstandings occasioned by a lack of dialogue not only assumes that familiarity inevitably breeds caring (rather than, say, irritation or contempt) but, more importantly, provides cover for ignoring the structural dimensions of social problems such as disproportionate black poverty. If objective reality is unavoidably a fiction, as Sheila McNamee claims, all suffering can be dismissed as psychological rather than based in real, material circumstance, enabling defenders of the status quo to admonish citizens to “heal” themselves.