Before the general election in Denmark in 2022, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation hosted an event called “Democracy’s Evening”. Broadcast live with all party leaders lined up to debate the nation’s pressing issues, the debate was suddenly interrupted by a group of climate activists shouting slogans and showing signs. Within one minute the protesters had been escorted off stage. In a newspaper opinion piece one of the protesters later reflected back on the event, expressing her doubts if this kind of civil disobedience was the right way to promote the climate cause. She explains that her participation was based in frustration over not feeling heard, but also discusses her concerns about how to communicate about climate topics. Acknowledging that when climate activists speak many people feel ignored or directly attacked, she predicts further alienation.

In a time where polarization of public debate has become a widespread political phenomenon, a key challenge for the field of rhetoric is to explore ways to prevent that public debate atrophies (because people withdraw in disgust) but can remain, or reinvent itself, as a forum for critical exchange of viewpoints. I am interested in what rhetoric might contribute to a public discussion of norm transgressing debate behavior both in terms of analysis and useful criteria for evaluation.

With a theoretical basis in ideas about deliberative democracy, I draw how recent rhetorical theory approaches the question of appropriateness and civility in public debate. Using the episode in the Danish election program and the ensuing discussion about it, I focus on the notions of ‘civility’ as and on the idea of ‘listening rhetoric’. I discuss how notions of civility can be combined with Bob Ivie’s thoughts on dissent and the trickster figure as crucial to dissensual democracy on the one hand and my own and Christian Kock’s notion of ‘rhetorical citizenship’ on the other – all with the ambition to initiate formulation of discursive norms useful to inform debate practice and evaluate public debate.

Literature:
Ivie, R. L. (2015). Enabling Democratic Dissent. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 101(1), 46-59.
Keith, W. & Danisch, R. (2020). Beyond Civility. The Competing Obligations of Citizenship. Penn State University Press.
Kock, C. & L. Villadsen (2017). Rhetorical Citizenship: A Lens for Studying the Discursive Framing and Performance of Citizenship. Citizenship Studies 21 (5): 570-586.
Ratcliffe, Krista. (1999). Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a “Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct." College Composition and Communication 51 (2): 195-224.