ABSTRACT
Scholars of political rhetoric and concerned citizens in a democratic community must attend to two tendencies that threaten the very foundation of a democratic political culture: the tendency to substitute confrontational, exclusionary, and reactionary public argument for civil public discussion, and the seemingly contradictory tendency to reject the notion of “character” as a substantive issue worthy of public judgment. We might begin to improve this confused condition by attending to the mutually defining element linking the concepts of “character” and “civil discourse”: the constitution of political agency. All political rhetors inherently offer, for public acceptance, a sense of how the political world works, what sorts of action are best within that world, and how political agents should conduct themselves and engage their fellow citizens.
