Facts Do Care about Your Feelings: The “Assertive Turn” in Emergent Attributes of the Contemporary U.S. Public Sphere

Introduction

In 2015, one of us attended the International History of Public Relations Conference in Bournemouth, England, where two well-established international public relations scholars presented a session titled, “All Stories are True, Some Stories Actually Happened” (McKie & Xifra, 2015). In their presentation, they discussed how effective storytelling, even if it us untrue, is key to gaining power in the public sphere. Furthermore, they asserted that those who continue to maintain that facts should be essential to a good story are like the unaware inhabitant of The Matrix—ingesting blue pills that keep them in a state of ignorance. During their question-and-answer session, an audience member questioned this assertion by pointing out that audiences, with the advent of the Internet, have more ability than ever to check the facticity of a story's claims. In response, one of the presenters said, “I submit to you that you are one of the many who take the blue pill instead of the red one that can allow you to see the fuller picture.”

In this essay we argue that these scholars were identifying an important evolution in how people and organizations are changing the ways in which they approach the normative aspects of public discourse. We introduce the idea of an assertive turn to denote this phenomenon—an important evolution in how the public sphere may be changing—and demonstrate how current theoretical conceptions of discourse are insufficient to address this dynamic. A prominent recent example demonstrates where the assertive turn plays out in real world political violence.

On January 6, 2021, rioters storming the U.S. Capitol smashed windows, smeared the walls with feces (Sommerfeldt, 2021), and several bragged on social media of their plans to abduct the Vice President and members of Congress (Graham, 2021). Images soon emerged of rioters looting artifacts both from Congressional offices and from the legislative chambers. Videos posted to social media showed violent confrontations with the Capitol police, multiple pipe bombs planted on the Capitol grounds, and rioters posing with semi-automatic rifles, zip ties, body armor, and a shirtless man in a horned raccoon hat covered in body paint waving a spear. Five people, one of them a police officer, died during the assault, and at least four more officers died by suicide in the months afterward (Healy, 2021).

In the aftermath of the “Capitol Riot,” as it is broadly known, the American public has struggled to contextualize the violence and its significance. According to polling, more than a quarter of Republicans think the violence was justified, and more than three-quarters think democracy itself is under threat due to their baseless belief that former President Donald Trump illegitimately lost the 2020 election (Bump, 2021). The assertion that the election was stolen, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, became “sticky” with partisans desperate to not lose an election. Recent studies have shown that conspiracism makes people more likely to endorse violence toward their political opponents (Vegetti & Littvay, 2021), and conspiracies about the 2020 election, growing out of the QAnon movement, have come to define the far-right movement that supports Trump (Roose, 2021). This work, however, is more concerned about how such events have led to emerging changes in the nature of the U.S public sphere.

The Capitol Riot provides useful context for understanding these changes in the U.S. public sphere. While the rioters justified their assault by claiming to defend the U.S. Constitution, many of those who condemned the riot also invoked the Constitution. It is not unusual for a democratic society to feature opposed parties that claim adherence to the same foundational legal and political ideals. A core value of a healthy, democratic public sphere is the belief that rational deliberation leads to resolutions of conflicting viewpoints and prerogatives. But this calculation, while appearing on the surface to be straightforward, is freighted with significant tension. Almost 100 years ago, Carl Schmitt observed that democracy attempts to elevate such debate to the point that it realizes “an identity of the governed and the governing” and, with such a conjunction, asserts it is elevating the “sole criterion of the people's will” (Schmitt, 1926/1985, p. 15). However, the democratic notion of public deliberation was often too individualistic, he said. This resulted in public deliberation surfacing primarily as “particles of reason” that, in turn, needed to be brought together into some kind of cohesiveness by the state, notably through the parliamentarism system (Schmitt, 1926/1985, p. 35). Moreover, the state, in congealing the people's will into the realm of the political, was the articulator of the criterion that established who was a friend and who was an enemy (Schmitt, 1932/1976). Since the state is “the decisive entity for the friend-or-enemy grouping,” said Schmitt, if the state does not or cannot perform this role then it as a “political entity is nonexistent” (1932/1976, p. 39). Not surprisingly, the rioters’ public assertions that their political opponents are existential enemies that need to be destroyed (Narvaez, 2020; Neiwert, 2009) has historically been seen in the U.S. as anathema to a well-functioning democratic public sphere. As Sorial and Mackenzie note (2011):

Forms of speech that express disagreement in violent or hostile ways may impede the open dialogue and critical engagement necessary for truth to emerge, and may have adverse consequences for the viability of the public sphere, insofar as they may undermine the normative stability of democratic values and institutions (p. 185).

Longstanding academic theories describe a democratic public sphere as a place where people of good faith gather to debate vital social issues (Dahlberg, 2005), a view incompatible with the actions of the rioters (and those who support them). This current era, considered by several scholars to be a time of postmodern skepticism about knowledge (Suiter, 2016), shows increasing signs of imperiling what Habermas has called fact-based “discourse ethics.” Discourse ethics do not rely on some external objective validator of “truth,” but instead create truth by contesting facts which can be falsified with evidence. However, his theoretical work on such discourse in relation to the public sphere assumes that the parties of a discourse accept each other's legitimacy and will try to adhere to facts when debating matters of public concern (Arnett et al., 2008). What happened on January 6th suggests that such assumptions about the importance of rationality may be growing less relevant in the U.S. as assertions about events replace even a token adherence to facts. No longer can one assume a public issue in the U.S. will be debated in good faith by people arguing sincerely and rationally. Instead, the attack of January 6th signifies a growing movement toward domination through emotive assertion and a corresponding diminution of deliberation and dialog.

This work explores some of the key normative conceptions of the public sphere and how some of these concepts need to be re-thought in an era of emotivism and growing extremism channeled through social media, especially on the far right. It will focus on where existing research has failed to capture how, in the U.S., societal tendencies and concomitant developments have overtaken established theories regarding the public sphere—specifically, we argue that deliberation is giving way to raw assertions that may be powered by malignant narratives. The assertive turn—a will to power in the public sphere—is in ascendance, at times overwhelming appeals to rationality. In this work, we are not necessarily judging whether a given worldview in the public sphere is true or false, but whether that worldview is amenable to challenge through the introduction of new facts. When it is, we say that worldview is rational. However, when facts—say, multiple independent analyzes of the 2020 election outcome—are not accepted, we say that worldview is not rational. Ultimately, we come to some initial observations regarding what are the new emerging attributes of the postmodern public sphere.

The Public Sphere

Most theories of the public sphere can be traced to work by John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas, whose public-sphere-related works explore how tensions between private and public behavior are resolved. Dewey famously argues that interactions among people within a community give life to the social context of democracy (Dewey, 1927). These actions are private when they only affect the people involved—for example, a conversation between two family members. But when these actions have “indirect consequences” that affect other people who are not directly involved, the action is public (p. 12).

Dewey further argues that the experience of this public discourse helps form communities: the act of conversation within a group of people is how social connections are formed and norms established and, as more communities like this form, they begin to establish rules to govern behavior between and among each other. He writes that these ongoing negotiations between people and communities, and the resulting tension between what is public and what is private, creates a social “current” of ongoing deliberation. These conversational acts constitute a body of discourse that creates the foundation of democratic forms of government. In other words: discourse leads to democracy (Dewey, 1927, p. 146).

Decades later, Jürgen Habermas built on many of Dewey's ideas when analyzing the politics of democracies in Western Europe. He formalizes Dewey's concept of what constitutes private and public behaviors so as to envision a public sphere as a physical space, exemplified by the salons and coffeehouses of 18th century Europe, where deliberation takes place (Habermas, 2015). His normative description of a public sphere explores how it “can well facilitate deliberative legitimation processes by ‘laundering’ flows of political communication through a division of labor with other parts of the system” (Habermas, 2006, p. 415). Thus, says Habermas, a public sphere should be inclusive and devoted to good faith argumentation as its members debate social values, community needs, and political ideas, free of interference from the state and the influence of money-making interests from outside the community. While that vision has yet to be realized, Habermas's theorizing nevertheless extended on Dewey's work by further articulating the tension between public and private to include how individuals spoke on (and specifically back to) the public power of the state in a true public sphere.

As Habermas’ conceptualization of the public sphere evolved, and technology became an increasing factor in public sphere discussion, he incorporated the role of mediation and mediatization in shaping public deliberation (Habermas, 2006). Most relevant for this work, he expresses concern that mediated political communication has come to drive deliberation, noting that this process only works if media remains self-regulating, independent from social pressures, and amenable to feedback. In other words, he sees the formation of public opinion through the media as an indispensable (if not inevitable) way for the public sphere to amplify community deliberation so that it can constrain the state and for-profit power centers. Such deliberation, he says, is

supposed to generate legitimacy through a procedure of opinion and will formation that grants (a) publicity and transparency for the deliberative process, (b) inclusion and equal opportunity for participation, and (c) a justified presumption for reasonable outcomes (mainly in view of the impact of arguments on rational changes in preference) (Habermas, 2006, p. 413, emphasis added).

These normative descriptions of how a public sphere should work require certain assumptions about “reasonable outcomes.” These outcomes, Habermas says, are the result of daily routines where people seek and grant reasons for decisions and behavior, the cumulative total of which defines what they will accept as “reasonable.” Deliberation being reasonable is foundational for Habermas’ ideal of democracy, which is an expectation of “the political public sphere to ensure the formation of a plurality of considered public opinions” where actors respect differences (Habermas, 2006, p. 416). However, this understanding of what constitutes “reasonableness” is unsatisfying given the contemporary reality of political discourse in the U.S.; how can deliberation take place if one group is making unreasonable demands? This is perhaps why he worried that the public sphere is also increasingly dominated by “the kind of mediated communication that lacks the defining features of deliberation” (Habermas, 2006, p. 414), such as the decline of face-to-face communication during decision making and the lack of reciprocity between speakers and audiences that at least attempts to simulate, or stimulate, equitable discourse.

Because Habermas’ normative theorizing does not account for the ways in which varied groups may view reasonableness differently, especially in ways that are not amenable to deliberation, this formulation is not sufficient for understanding contemporary discourse in the U.S. public sphere. The assumption that deliberation will be, at its core, reasonable, and therefore grounded in a set of shared assumptions about the legitimacy of difference, is a critical flaw in thinking about today's U.S. public sphere, which is increasingly dominated by forceful assertion rather than deliberation based on facts and reason. For example, Nancy Fraser observes that Habermas’ model of a public sphere is too bourgeois—many ostensibly democratic societies restrict access to the public sphere only to those deemed sufficiently wealthy, influential, and masculine. In these exclusionary settings, the self-talk about the value of public spheres “became hegemonic, sometimes imposed on, sometimes embraced by, broader segments of society” (Fraser, 1990, p. 131). She focuses her critique on the place of women in the public sphere, who were often systematically excluded from the deliberative process, denied the right to vote, to run for office, and to hold positions of power. Thus, the actual public sphere “requires bracketing inequalities of status,” where participants pretend that everyone has an equal stake in certain discussions even though they clearly do not (Fraser, 1990, p. 133). This pretending not only inhibits equal participation by creating structural barriers for subaltern groups, but it also creates additional structural advantages to hegemonic groups. In her view, “unbracketing” inequalities to allow an open acknowledgment that different groups have different stakes in deliberation allows subaltern groups into the public eye so that they can also be a part of the deliberative process—ideally, with an intent to remove those barriers.

This criticism, while important for advancing the theory of the public sphere to better account for the reality of modern democracies, nevertheless assumes a degree of rational deliberation that can allow subaltern groups to cohere and debate hegemonic groups. Ironically, many of the Capitol rioters believed themselves to be marginalized groups in American society—an example of how raw assertion does not require factual basis. For example, the leader of the Oathkeepers, a fascist anti-government militia, told reporters that the rioters were “pissed-off patriots that are not going to accept their form of government being stolen from them,” and referred to a series of baseless accusations about 2020 election integrity (Hennessy-Fiske, 2021). The so-called “QAnon Shaman,” who was in the group that forced its way into the U.S. Senate chambers, left a note on then-Vice President Mike Pence's desk that said, “It's only a matter of time—justice is coming” (Mathias, 2021). The rioters used their presumed marginalization to justify their use of violence in challenging the “hegemony” of a democratic election (McSwiney, 2021)—a form of self-delusion that is not clearly accounted for in most normative public sphere theorization. Their forceful assertion that they were powerless in society belied their privileged socio-economic status: the Chicago Project on Security and Threats analyzed the records of 200 rioters arrested by the FBI and found they were “CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants” (Pape & Ruby, 2021). The disconnect between the aggrieved statements of the rioters and their privileged positions in society suggests something worrying about how public discourse is evolving away from rational discourse. The assertive turn reveals many on the far-right claiming one's victimhood, regardless of status, as sufficient justification for anti-democratic behavior and even violence. Put differently, assertion is overwhelming deliberation. As we argue below, this assertive turn highlights a gap in public sphere theory when it comes to more fully theorizing how contentious speech (and acts) operates in the current U.S. public sphere.

Re-thinking “Domesticating Hostility”

In a seminal work, Mouffe (1999) argues that removing barriers to inclusion, as Fraser suggested, might not be sufficient for creating an idealized free speech environment. Drawing on Wittgenstein (2001), she observes that impediments to free speech are like sand scattered on ice—the friction makes walking possible. That is, as Martin (2013) puts it, the human condition walks on “rough ground,” which means we are not entitled to “free and unconstrained public deliberation on all matters of common concern” because there is no presumption of a “rational consensus” within the public (p. 174). Thus, Mouffe argues, the “ideal speech situation,” where all voices are heard equally, is impossible in practice: “the obstacles to the realization of the ideal speech situation are ontological,” rather than practical, she says (Mouffe, 1999, p. 274). This is an inversion of the normative claims made by Habermas. By nature, Mouffe says, we are simply too disposed to contentious discourse; she proposes that conflict is central to the public sphere, a concept she calls “agonistic pluralism” (Mouffe, 1999). She notes that, in deliberative models, power is commonly conceived as “an external relation taking place between two pre-constituted identities,” but, when conflict is at the center of a public sphere, power morphs into the identities of the parties themselves (Mouffe, 1999, p. 275). Her inclusion of identities is important. That is, informed by her analysis, we see the assertive turn is more about who gets to be in the public sphere than any normative rules that customarily govern the public sphere.

By theorizing conflict as the beating heart of a healthy public sphere, Mouffe separates “the political” (disagreement between two social groups) from “politics” (the institutions and rules that shape how debates occur and decisions are made). Moreover, as Wenman puts it, such antagonisms between parties are “constitutive of social relations,” and allow for “pluralistic social formations” (Wenman, 2003a, pp. 166–167). Seen this way, politics is better conceived as the process of “domesticating hostility” (Mouffe, 1999, p. 276) about the political issues that underlie human social relations. That is, effectively managing conflicts through discourse ultimately can lead to the coalescing of separate group identities into the overarching identity of “citizen” (Mouffe, 1993; Wenman, 2003a). Her domesticating hostility theorizing provides a useful framework for better understanding (and potentially lowering) the stakes of political conflict, which Mouffe portrays as, ideally, shifting from antagonism (destroying an enemy) to agonism (struggling against an adversary whose right to exist is unquestioned). “An adversary is a legitimate enemy,” she says, but this realization does not suggest this means all conflicts are resolvable (Mouffe, 1999, p. 276, emphasis added). Rather, in her view, the success of democracy lies not in eliminating conflict, but in normalizing and institutionalizing conflict between different parties in the public sphere.

One of the essential attributes for agonism to be constructive is that individuals involved in the struggle share a symbolic space with their adversaries; if there is no “symbolic unity” among the parties (e.g., “a language of civil intercourse” that informs a “common bond” that, in turn, influences conflict performances) then the public sphere degenerates into “uncompromising conflict” between groups who identify friends versus foes (Mouffe, 1993, p. 82, 2005). Wenman (2003b, p. 181) notes that, for agonism to be constructive, “Agonistic citizens must accept the rules of the democratic game,” which, as articulated by Mouffe, means the adversary never completely disappears but, instead, is excluded on the basis that their presence must be constantly renegotiated through deliberation (Mouffe, 1993). As Howarth (2008) points out, Mouffe thinks contemporary analysis of politics in the public sphere focuses too much on either the Habermasian notion of “communicative rationality between free and equal citizens seeking to achieve rational consensus by means of free discussion” (Howarth, 2008, p. 177) or a fixation on political parties seeking to accrete power.

For Mouffe, notes Howarth, both approaches tend to “negate the role of politics because of their strong individualistic and rationalistic assumptions about politics, society and subjectivity” (Howarth, 2008, p. 177). These formulations mean that “politics is reduced to economic competition or rational deliberation,” Howarth says, while Mouffe, instead, sees politics as centered on the “ineradicable conflict between opposed collective identities and agencies” (Howarth, 2008, p. 177). Mouffe writes of this dynamic when she specifies that antagonism is a “we/they relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any ground,” while agonism is a “we/they relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognize the legitimacy of their opponents” (Mouffe, 2005, p. 20, emphasis added). Mouffe maintains that this is an important dynamic of the public sphere because it avoids a false and hegemonic rush to consensus (Budarick, 2020; Mouffe, 1993).

Mouffe's arguments describe some of the contentiousness of today's U.S. public sphere, but her conceptualizations fall short of capturing the depth of the antagonism that seems to drive contemporary political discourse. Much like Dewey, Habermas, and Fraser, Mouffe thought the public sphere reveals itself through goodwill deliberation among discordant parties within a community—a normative claim that is appealing but often not realized in the U.S. public sphere. Rather than “domesticated hostility” providing shape to deliberation, contemporary U.S. political discourse seems driven by undomesticated hostility. This “wild” discourse emphasizes denying the legitimacy of political opponents and using any means necessary to exclude them from the public sphere. The events that led up to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrated that right-wing publics formed not around points of deliberation, but rather all-encompassing, non-factual, and hostile assertions that, to these audiences, were not only sensible but also justification for violence.

Out of the four scholars discussed above, Mouffe's observations about hostility are closest to capturing the evolving reality of the public sphere in the U.S. and in East European countries like Hungary and Poland (Kreuder-Sonnen, 2018; Minakov, 2020). A comparative analysis, however, is beyond the scope of this work; the theorizing offered here focuses primarily on Mouffe's argument for agonistic pluralism and its relevance for the changing nature of the U.S. public sphere. We posit that her arguments for agonism appear quaint, particularly in the aftermath of extensive violence at the Capitol and how those actions reflect a growing disdain for the existence of individuals with contrary views. Her claims about hostility potentially serving as a constructive end regarding the public sphere need further review and updating.

Undomesticated Hostility as an Emerging Attribute

It is clear from the January 6th riots that some strains of hostility in American politics are not domesticated. Rather than a site of rational deliberation between legitimate opponents, the public sphere is being reconstituted as a forum for assertions (often unsubstantiated) that refuse to acknowledge the validity of counterclaims. It is an inversion of Habermas’ discourse ethics, where the facts behind assertions can be challenged. Our concern about the gap between the theories we explored above and the reality of the assertive turn in the U.S. public sphere is based on the inviolability of these assertions—the lie about the 2020 U.S election being “stolen” persists despite mountains of contravening evidence. Facts are simply not relevant to those who believe in the lie.

Fraser would recognize one reason for this: in recent years, the exclusivity of the American public sphere (commonly seen as white, Christian, male, and heterosexual) has been systematically challenged by subaltern groups through social justice activism. And, as the makeup of the U.S. changes to be less white, less Christian, and less heterosexual (Knight, 2019), far-right figures such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson have worried that these dynamics will “change the racial mix of this country,” which is, for him, a bad thing (Murdock, 2021). These concerns are rooted in the assumption that marginalized groups do not “deserve” the same access to the public sphere that white, heterosexual, Christian people do—a dynamic that is known to breed backlash against ascendant groups (Kidder et al., 2004). Indeed, an examination of the beliefs of Trump voters in 2016 found they were driven by a sense of threat to their dominant social status (Mutz, 2018). These same attitudes are prevalent in the groups that stormed the U.S. Capitol as well. They are not inclined to engage in deliberation to arrive at a pluralistic consensus, nor do they recognize the legitimacy of their political opponents (DeBonis & Barr, 2021). This rejection of deliberation suggests there is resistance in the U.S. to making the public sphere more egalitarian and inclusive, and that some topics, like racial reconciliation or full gender and sexual equality, are simply unacceptable for some members of the public (e.g. white, male, and heterosexual).

This has proven to be a major shortcoming of 20th century scholarship about the public sphere: theorizing on the public sphere has not adequately accounted for ascendant irrationalism, an increasing disdain for deliberation, and an embrace of mere assertions. While Fraser focused her criticism on the exclusion of women, we are now witnessing a broader spectrum blowback to racial and sexual minorities who seek equitable access to the public sphere. The ongoing Black Lives Matter protests exist because of the systematic exclusion of Black people and voices from the public; similarly, the debate over equality for trans people often suffers from a dearth of trans voices. Habermas’ model of deliberation does not clearly account for such marginalized groups, nor does it account for the impact such subaltern groups may have when they challenge the bourgeois hegemony of the public sphere. Dominant groups’ displacement of deliberation by assertion leaves little room to negotiate access for subaltern groups. Exclusion, not deliberation, is re-shaping the nature and aesthetics of public discourse.

When Mouffe, writing in 1999, notes that the rise of the far right indicated “a growing disaffection with democratic institutions” (Mouffe, 1999, p. 271), she observed an early warning sign of a deeper rejection of the very idea of democracy. A decade after she wrote her essay, the far right had used the internet to construct their own atomized public spheres that challenged what they claimed was a liberal hegemony in public discourse (Cammaerts, 2009). This “anti-public” sphere is defined by its oppositional nature: rather than a deliberative type of agonistic pluralism, there are instead antagonistic assertions. Since political opponents lack legitimacy, even humanity, many of these dominant groups fantasize about oppressing subaltern groups through laws, violence, and even murder. A realistic analysis of the public sphere in the 21st century must account for how the far right uses the immediacy, interactivity, and cloistered aspects of social media platforms to organize against deliberative pluralism—something not conceivable (at least in scope) in the 1990s, as there was not a good material analog to social media in the history of the idea of the public sphere (Batorski & Grzywińska, 2018). The analysis below incorporates the virtual nature of the contemporary public sphere as it has evolved online and suggests a new framework for understanding how it has changed from earlier analyzes.

The Post-Modern, Anti-Rationalist Public Sphere

Scholarly work on the U.S. public sphere needs to come to terms with the stipulation that today's mediated communication does not necessarily contribute to thriving communities that engage in rational discourse to resolve disputes and find common ground. But forming a new theory of the public sphere that incorporates these challenges is difficult. While a comprehensive picture of what a postmodern public sphere looks like is beyond the scope of this essay, we posit that there are three trend lines that are readily visible and interconnect with each other: (1) challenges to rationality, (2) the power of stories, and (3) malignant narratives.

To better understand how significant portions of the American public exhibit an aversion to rationality, one must first acknowledge how free market neoliberalism in the U.S. has, over the last 40 years, contributed to this dynamic. The marketization of political and social life has a homogenizing influence on the public, since “differences of race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and more presumably play no role in the behavior of market actors and their successes and failures” (Asen, 2017, p. 331). At first, it may seem that such homogenization would minimize conflict. However, the opposite effect has become apparent. As Asen writes, this homogeneity “obfuscates the means for redressing inequality and mobilizing diversity by weakening relations among people and devaluing coordinated action,” (2017, p. 331), which leaves people feeling powerless against faceless market forces. The rhetoric of neoliberalism presents this community destruction as a rational good, the inevitable-yet-moral result of impersonal market forces. These market forces appear to have an inevitability about them because they are propelled across class structures. While working and middle classes manage themselves for optimal benefits from the market (e.g., increased wages, enhanced lifestyles, and upward mobility), elites also serve as guiding hands for strivers (Foucault, 2010; St. John, 2015). Moreover, the individualist logic of neoliberalism atomizes communities into single persons who are not encouraged to pursue communal action (especially when it lacks a clear connection to the marketplace). Phelan argues that “the political rationality of neoliberalism is generative of a politics of disidentification” (Phelan, 2019, p. 468) that encourages and celebrates a language of alienation from facts, evidence, and the perspectives of one's opponents.

This is evident with the January 6 rioters, who actively opposed rationality within the online spaces where they organized: for example, long before the violence at the Capitol, members of several far-right groups already trafficked in violent rhetoric and conspiracies (Goldwasser, 2021). What we are witnessing now is the rise of an anti-rationalism in what Mark Davis calls an anti-public sphere that “radically flout[s] the ethical and rational norms of democratic discourse” (Davis, 2020, p. 1). Within this anti-public sphere, he argues, publics show little interest in ethical discourse norms and set themselves “in pointed counter-hegemonic opposition to democratic processes and institutions … and actively seek to disrupt democratic processes for [their] own purposes” (p. 3). However, while Davis’ observations are useful, he limits his characterizations of an anti-public sphere to isolated discussions of hate speech, e-Bile, and science skepticism. This approach leads to bracketing anti-rational discourse; what we posit, however, is that such anti-rational speech is constituting an emerging postmodern public sphere, one based on assertion and power rather than deliberation. As such, the idea of an anti-public sphere appears to be too pat. For example, adherents to the myth that Donald Trump had the election stolen from him engage in a public sphere that circles around, and generates momentum through, asserting power. They exhibit behavior that is not “anti” to a public sphere, but, instead, has reconfigured what they see as vital in human communication: accepting and sharing among themselves an asserted populist reality in the face of overwhelming, contravening evidence offered by experts. In essence, they are re-constituting the public sphere to be a frame of reference that is not contingent on rational claims based on facts or good faith debate.

Contrary to the assumptions of Habermas, Fraser, and Mouffe, anti-rationalists do not want to join a bourgeois (and increasingly neoliberal) public sphere; they want to resist it (and, if possible, destroy it) and establish new norms. Yet, this is not a counter-hegemonic movement; by any measure, these anti-rationalists are the hegemonic group in American society despite their forceful assertions to the contrary. This is a contradiction unresolvable through deliberation. The intense emotionality of anti-rational assertion is something of an “epistemological blind spot” (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019, p. 2) that works as a driver of participation for these types of aggrieved publics. One could assume that many people can fall into ignoring rationality or materiality as they argue passionately for causes, even causes that work against their material self-interests. Experimental research has shown for decades that material self-interest is generally overestimated as a driver of behavior (Miller & Ratner, 1998). Yet, it would be a mistake to say an emotionally-driven argument is necessarily anti-rational (especially to the publics that are activated by them), or that emotions inherently stand in opposition to facts. Emotional arguments can be used for constructive purposes just as easily as they can be used for tearing down others. Rather, it is the combination of anti-rationality and emotivism that creates the conditions in online spaces for explosions of violence. It seems clear that powerful myths were behind the January 6 riots—stories so overwhelming and believable to willing listeners that they convinced hundreds of people to engage in violence. It is important, therefore, to next examine how narrative can combine with anti-rationality to bring forward this emerging, irrational postmodern public sphere.

The Power of Narrative

Walter Fisher's narrative paradigm, which he first explicated in 1984, presents an important challenge to many of the established public sphere arguments that rational approaches underlie argumentation and public discourse (Fisher, 1984). Rather than assuming that people are mostly rational and driven by a concern for the facts surrounding an issue, Fisher argues that people are driven by stories as much as they are by facts. Seen this way, facts really do care about your feelings—they have emotional salience—as those feelings provide context, meaning, and priority for how facts are understood when presented as part of a story.

Fisher presents the narrative world as a contrast to the rational world. He says the rational world assumes: (1) humans make decisions and communicate them through formal rational argument, (2) different situations call for different argument strategies, (3) rationality is a function of knowledge and rules of argumentation, and (4) the world can be understood through rational (i.e. scientific) means (Fisher, 1984). This formalization of rational argument implies the need for training to be an effective rational rhetor, which, in turn, creates a class of elites who can argue properly and a class of non-elites who cannot. The hierarchical quasi-scientism that results requires a certain type of public sphere that features a system of education to create rational rhetors trained in evidence and argumentation. The rational-world paradigm has at its core a belief that arguments based on facts are the essential elements of persuasion.

While Fisher does not ignore the power of rational argument, he offers the narrative paradigm as an attempt to synergize the power of the factual with the impact of a story well told. For Fisher, the narrative world rejects any claimed superiority of the rational-world framework. That is, no one needs a credential to participate, and the “winners” are not the ones who can marshal the most facts to their case, since an argument, according to the narrative paradigm, does not limit itself to facts and reason. Rather, an argument within this paradigm substantiates itself through “historical as well as situational … stories competing with other stories constituted by good reasons” (Fisher, 1984, p. 2). The “good reasons” of these stories, Fisher argues, function similarly to Habermas's idea of “reasonableness” and thus are received as rational “when they satisfy the demands of narrative probability and narrative fidelity, and as inevitably moral inducements” (Fisher, 1984, p. 2).

From this perspective, the dialectic synthesis between facts and the need for narrative plausibility is built into the narrative world. An ideal effective argument will combine two competing aspects—the evidence-based argument, and the aesthetics of story construction—to assemble facts within a convincing narrative. In contrast, Fisher maintains, a purely rational approach prefers a single argumentative process of comparing one set of facts against another that is less persuasive (although Fisher has oversimplified the nature of rational world arguments—they also include appeals to reason, interpretation, and values; straight facts are never enough). In the narrative world, Fisher argues that, from a normative perspective, facts are important for effective argumentation, but facts alone do not make an effective argument: an effective argument requires a believable and relatable story linking the facts together in order to persuade.

Because it rejects the need for experts in rational argument, Fisher argues that the narrative paradigm is “inimical to elitist politics” (Fisher, 1984, p. 9). If someone is focused on telling a powerful story to mobilize people into action, there is no need for formal, rational argumentation. Moreover, he maintains that there is no need for a normative evaluation of the structure of arguments because narrative storytelling is a widespread skill that everyone can do. Unspoken in his essay is how that leaves open the door to populists and demagogues who can muster a good narrative to support their cause and rally supporters. Furthermore, even highly decentralized and anti-elitist narratives can be evaluated by members of a public sphere. QAnon adherents, for example, evaluate each other's narratives by challenging each other about details of alleged Democratic Party conspiracies, urging fellow storytellers to constantly “do their research” by consuming more conspiracy texts. These non-rational evaluations and contestations reveal that even Fisher's narrative paradigm, while helping to explain the diminution of established normative understandings of the public sphere, does not necessarily hold up when a narrative is both internally consistent and moralistic, but false. This creates a space Fisher does not explore, which is the ascendancy of “bad” stories that hinge on anti-rational assertions yet are bolstered by claims that “research” substantiates them. In other words, malignant narratives can ascend within the narrative paradigm, presenting the veneer of substantiation through asserted “facts.”

Malignant Narratives as a Shaping Force

Fisher's conceptualization of a narrative paradigm informing discussions in the public sphere weakens in the 21st-century media environment for three reasons: (1) the distinction between rationality and narrativity has collapsed in many places, (2) facts no longer appear to drive narrative arguments, and (3) internal narrative fidelity is no longer essential for effective storytelling.

On the first point, while Fisher is correct to note that well-constructed stories are as persuasive as rationalism's reliance on facts, he draws too sharp of a distinction between the two, which is highlighted by his observation that some stories are better than others based on whether they are internally consistent (the “narrative probability”) and whether they ring true (the “narrative fidelity”) to an audience's lived experience. Yet, this formulation assumes such stories are true, despite the increasing emergence of narratives that ring true for audiences but are substantially false and can lead to violent outcomes.

On the second point, among many myths that persuade people, yet whose premises are false, are QAnon's child rape/cannibalism conspiracy theory, many of whose adherents stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The idea of a secret cabal of Satanists who steal children from playgrounds sounds farfetched, and rightfully so. But when seen as “an open-ended collective narrative based on paranoid attitudes toward political institutions and establishments” (Cosentino, 2020, p. 60), the appeal of a moral-but-false narrative that makes a case for ending child abuse has its own kind of logic and consistency. While Fisher acknowledges this challenge to the narrative paradigm, he nevertheless argues that the logic of good reasons (which requires an “inspection of facts, values, self, and society”) will keep such malignant narratives in check (1984, p. 16). He asserts that the “most helpful” stories are moral ones that will help minimize the proliferation of destructive narratives. But QAnon is a moral story, and it claims to use facts to support a conclusion for which there is no evidence, while offering a “helpful” account that supposedly betters society.

Regarding point three, Fisher assumes that moral stories are fact-based, logically sound, and pro-social. He maintains that the narratives that are most compelling and powerful are the ones that appear to be true (or, in his terms, exhibit fidelity). He limits his argument, however, to stories based in reality and interpreted through a common set of facts that ultimately respect humanity. But, as the narrative surrounding the storming of the Capitol has shown, a strong, seemingly moral narrative can have nothing to do with reality and, in fact, can be driven by an attempt to deny the rights of others with a different viewpoint to exist.

The narrative paradigm does not account for malignant narratives, in part, because it does not account for the very recent role that online mediatization plays. Such mediatization exposes people to a type of compelling story that relies on the simulacrum of rationality while operating at odds with a fact-based narrative. Mediatization is a process-oriented concept, generally focused on “the degree to which the media constitute the most important or dominant source of information on politics and society” (Strömbäck, 2008, p. 234). It makes the quality of the media of extreme importance to Fisher's argument—misleading or malicious media can result in bad stories being presented as good ones, which can lead to people being persuaded by them, as happened with the January 6th riots.

Fisher's paradigmatic framework, by downplaying how individuals can use logic in malignant ways, fails to account for the postmodern reality of internet-mediated public discourse. Logic is deployed routinely by malicious actors to present facts in an often elliptical, misleading, but compelling way—something Fisher does not account for. Consider the “Big Lie” underneath the January 6th riots, which claims the November 2020 presidential election was stolen. There is no evidence that there was election fraud, and dozens of court cases, many overseen by Republican judges, found that claims of voter fraud were meritless. However, most Republicans nevertheless think the election was, in some way, stolen (Oliphant & Kahn, 2021). Rationally, no one should believe in this lie, but a combination of “good reasons” offered by vested interests (e.g., Republican Party officials and operatives), an emotional reaction to losing the election, and a powerful story decoupled from facts, has convinced millions of people that the lie is true.

We lack satisfying theoretical language regarding the public sphere to explain why such false stories are so “sticky” to their audiences. While Fisher's narrative world paradigm offers much in the way of explanatory power, especially by expanding the possibilities of effective public discourse beyond the narrow confines of purely rational deliberation, it nevertheless fails to describe and account for the modern world as it is, and how people encounter, embrace, and activate stories that are malignant.

Conclusion: Emerging Attributes of the Post-Modern U.S. Public Sphere

It seems clear that traditional theories of the public sphere are in crisis. That is, as McKie & Xifra (2015) pointed out, overemphasizing the significance of facticity misses the importance of the power of a meaningful story; in this case, we point to the rise of anti-rationalist assertions within the U.S. public sphere. The rationalist assumptions of the 20th century versions of the theory do not describe how public spheres function in the 21st century, and more recent theorizing has failed to capture the role of fact-less assertion in shaping norms and expectations. As regards Mouffe, in particular, we see that domesticating hostility only plays a limited part in a genuine public sphere in the U.S. Insufficient attention has been paid “to the economic, material and institutional obstacles that block its realization, as well as the precise composition and configuration of such impediments” (Howarth, 2008, p. 139). We elaborate on this observation by pointing out how these obstacles have led to some within hegemonic groups (e.g., white, and Christian) asserting that seemingly opposing groups (e.g., non-white, and non-Christian) should be destroyed. Additionally, as Tormey and Townshend (2006) point out, in delinking the political from the imperatives of neoliberalism, Mouffe has denied “foundational arguments which appeal to a common human essence … making it difficult to see whether [she offers] the intellectual resources to enable ‘the political’ to become domesticated” (2006, p. 109). We go further and maintain that there are compelling signs that the concept of domesticating hostility is in eclipse in the face of the assertion of malignant narratives.

Moreover, the larger question of vitriol within the public sphere needs more careful consideration. For example, Sorial & Mackenzie (2011) maintain that vitriol and speech that advocate violence is not constitutive of the public sphere because “it cannot reasonably be claimed to contribute to public debate” nor helps achieve “social goods” (p. 176). In this respect, their observations about the nature of the public sphere actually hew closer to Fisher's: they see malignant narratives as not playing a substantive role in the public sphere. But what if those promoting such vitriol see it as essential to speaking about their concerns within the public sphere? What if such vitriol is, in fact, how a community builds and maintains ties with its constituent members (such as white supremacists, who share a common interest in denying the humanity of non-white people)? These are not speculative questions—they are Socratic in that they are prompted by an increasing avoidance in the U.S. public sphere of deliberation based on shared, and ostensibly constructive, “rules of the game.”

In particular, the rise of emotivism, and an assertive anti-rationalism that rejects external narrative validity and norms against abusive speech, has resulted in an emerging U.S. public sphere that no longer needs rationality, deliberation, or good faith argumentation. This emerging public sphere also eschews a belief in the legitimacy of one's political opponents, what Tormey and Townshend (2006) call “a climate of toleration” that could head off “the socially and physically destructive implications” of agonistic conflict (p. 103). Instead, the U.S public sphere is being shaped by “extreme forms of individualism … which threaten the very social fabric,” and have arisen from structures and power centers that have discouraged citizens to be active in rationalist deliberation (Martin, 2013, p. 200).

The emerging attributes of the public sphere are informed by a hostility that Mouffe thought could be domesticated. This study, however, finds that this claim about the nature of conflict informing the public sphere appears to be quaint. The January 6th rioters were not motivated by out-arguing their opponents—they sought to destroy their foes, a belief system encouraged by powerful elite actors who could have urged restraint but instead urged violence. Yet, we lack clear theorizing that attempts to evolve the concept of the public sphere to account for how it is increasingly characterized by vitriolic assertion and malignant narratives through internet-mediated speech, leaving open the question of what comes next.

In order to address the problems presented by the assertive turn in the public sphere, we must first be able to identify some of its key attributes, something we have described in this work. Existing theories of the public sphere are proving inadequate to account for developments in 21st century America due to a reliance on normative assumptions that do not match the current reality and thus contribute to a struggle to develop the theoretical language to describe the ways in which publics are fracturing through internet-mediated speech. This is a phenomenon that is not limited to the right wing—the anti-vaccine movement, for example, began on the left and serves as a bridge between the far left and far right (Higgins, 2021).

While, over a decade ago, some legal and philosophy scholars have noted this diminution of the public sphere, they tend to point to the need for revivifying “the discovery of truth and rational decision-making” as necessary for a well-functioning public sphere (Sorial & Mackenzie, 2011, p. 186). More recent work by Korstenbroek (2021) about the public sphere in Europe observes shortcomings in Habermas’ and Mouffe's theories of the public sphere. While his observations parallel some of the concerns in this work, he suggests an “empathetic public sphere” where “right-wing populist sentiments are listened to, yet simultaneously confronted regularly with the—often personal—stories and narratives of those (non-native) others they oppose” (p. 16). While this is thought-provoking, his analysis suffers from: (1) a focus on the performative (acting like one is listening to an opponent and then sharing a compelling personal narrative) rather than the ascendant power of assertion in the public sphere, and (2) a lack of analysis of how the power of malignant narratives can completely undermine the reciprocity needed for such empathy to provide a constructive outcome. That is, one can display empathy to an adversary, but it means little if the worldview of the adversary is to deny the importance of the empathetic person's point of view. In sum, our work finds that academic normative theorizing appears to sidestep the problem of today's postmodern public sphere: a lack of cross-current deliberation that can help multiple publics come to a consensus on what is “truth” through an agreed-upon “rational decision-making” process.

This is where understanding the ways in which power flows through the public sphere could illuminate the challenge. Habermas noted that people's daily routines help them establish a range of reasonable behaviors and speech; such reasonableness should, ideally, form the basis of a deliberative, good faith public sphere. But what happens when those daily routines include hours of discussion in a community dedicated to attacking and eliminating political opponents? What happens when the constituent groups of a public sphere do not have compatible views of reasonableness and behavioral norms? Again, these questions are not speculative; they are Socratic in that they point to the need to re-think how power is working through, and within, the U.S. public sphere.

Mouffe's model of domesticated hostility implies that elites play a role in how hostility is mediated in the public sphere—but in the 21st century, right-wing elites in America are, instead, urging undomesticated hostility. Digital communication and changing demographics in the U.S. have reshaped who gets to have the most impactful presence in the public sphere. The anti-rationalist U.S. public sphere tends to amplify fabulism (e.g., “white replacement” conspiracies) allowing hegemonic groups to envision “their” society and its boundaries. It appears incumbent that scholars explore how different media forms (e.g., social media, far-right television networks, and talk radio hosts) appear to be driving this fracture by stoking vitriolic assertions as a substitute for fact-based deliberation. For example, Budarick (2020) maintains that agonistic pluralism should be researched regarding “its practical application to media texts” and how it “can be institutionalized in sustained political form” (p. 10). We further postulate that expanding the scope of analysis would mean including the discourse of anti-rational public spheres and also how people are potentially “deprogrammed” out of them.

Our essay highlights how the contemporary public sphere is different from older conceptualizations: rationality is no longer king, stories are no longer supported by evidence, and narratives are being crafted malignantly by powerful elites who do not wish to share with opposing views access to public discourse. Displacing the deliberative public sphere with a public sphere of mere assertions challenges many earlier normative theories of how public discourse should function.

As we were finishing this essay, we noted the passing of David Finn, one of the founders of the Ruder-Finn public relations firm and a thought leader in the public relations profession since the mid-20th century. His obituary in the New York Times quoted him as saying in 1995, “being public relations counsel to a client carries with it the responsibility to believe that what one's client says is in fact true” (Rifkin, 2021, emphasis added). But, 25 years after that comment, McKie and Xifra made clear at that public relations history conference that there were different understandings of truth arising—that the story is everything and facts, at best, are secondary and, ultimately, may be superfluous. Without taking seriously how this disturbing dynamic has arisen, scholars will be left racing to catch up with how public discourse, and the U.S. postmodern public sphere, is displaying potentially destructive trends. Absent focused research, we risk getting further overtaken by anti-rationalism and, moreover, by more stories that may sound relatable to many, but have no basis in reality.