This essay argues that scholars who focus on demagogues rather than demagoguery are mistakenly making charismatic leadership a necessary quality of demagoguery. Instead of focusing on demagogues, we should focus on the conditions that nurture demagoguery. This essay makes the case that charismatic leadership is not necessary for demagoguery but an almost inevitable method of gaining compliance in a culture that promotes outcomes-based ethics.

This paper argues that, for many people and in many circumstances, public deliberation is about group identity rather than argumentation. Research on ingroup and outgroup thinking in social psychology helps to explain why thinking in terms of group identity is so powerful. The power comes from the promise that the world is a stable and easily known place, made up of discrete and transparent groups.

Many scholars have argued that rhetorical theory and pedagogy should return to the neo‐classical and agonistic theory and pedagogy of the antebellum era. The ability of proslavery ideology to dominate political and rhetorical practice, however, troubles any easy equation between that pedagogy and practice. This article argues that agonism was hindered by the rhetoric of the improbable cause, a tragic metanarrative of novels like Nick of the Woods, which served as a defense of slavery and slaveocracy, without even mentioning the word, through reinforcing a foundation for that system. This view served to rationalize a system that had a dreamy, noble, and tragic ethos that was actually protected and supported by a brutal practicality; left out is something in the middle, the practical but principled argument about long‐term politics.

Abstract John Quincy Adams's speech on behalf of the kidnapped Africans aboard the slave ship Amistad points to a troubling dilemma in rhetoric: that the power of rhetoric is limited by the audience's perception of what is plausible, and that can, as in the case of the Amistad argument, mean that outrageously unjust but intransigent and powerful interests set the limits of discourse. If rhetorical theory promotes decorum, what is the place of principled dissent and sincere outrage?