Liberal rhetorical praxis and the youth rights debates

While liberalism traditionally has been conceived as a political philosophy or ideology, Michael Calvin McGee argues that it is productive to analyze it as a rhetorically mediated experience with power. Accordingly, I propose that certain norms of public advocacy are intrinsic to liberalism as a rhetoric, and that this "liberal rhetorical praxis" includes a characterization of the rhetors, auditors, critics, and judges that are valid participants in political deliberation. Further, I maintain that "youth" is a key site for the negotiation of liberal rhetorical praxis, insofar as young people are figured as the other against which the liberal advocate may be characterized. In Liberal Rhetorical Praxis and the Youth Rights Debates, I analyze twentieth-century debates that concern the right of youth to participate in political deliberation, in order to discover the norms that function to validate the public discourse of some and marginalize that of others. Four text clusters are examined: (1) Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development, (2) debates held in Congress between World War II and Vietnam over the voting age, (3) Supreme Court rulings between 1969 and 2007 over the right of public school students to freedom of speech, and (4) the current debate waged in the popular and academic press over the right of university students to "academic freedom." Through this analysis, I identify several characteristics of liberal rhetorical praxis, two of particular significance. First, liberal rhetorical praxis presumes that political contestation is negotiated by norms, procedures, and jurisdictions that are pre-political, and as such, that political exclusion is not an act but an effect. Second, liberal rhetorical praxis presumes that the assignment of moral and amoral dilemmas, and of public and private conflicts, is made apart from the resolution of those dilemmas/conflicts. Further, I identify several constraints that our contemporary public culture employs to discipline would-be advocates and auditors: that they perform a kind of prudence marked by deference to the sensus communis, utilize a style that is consistent with idealistic rather than materialistic motivational terminologies, and employ invitational or demonstrative appeals in response to issues of private or public concern, respectively.