In the video below, I chat with Patricia Roberts-Miller, PhD, about her recent book Demagoguery and Democracy. Although as a scholar of rhetoric or specifically “of train wrecks in public deliberation,” Roberts-Miller has written a number of academic tomes (and in fact has a scholarly version of this one forthcoming), she wrote this as a little book specifically for a broader audience. It’s easy to read but harder to live. And it’s really excellent. Without speaking much about the past few years—her examples purposefully come from other moments in history—she clearly and compellingly helps us understand what has happened in US political discourse recently, including how complex policy discussions get railroaded by the overpowering binary of us/them. Get copies as stocking stuffers for everyone you know.
Corrigan Literary Review 