Mercieca is a professor of communication at Texas A&M University. Shaffer is an associate professor at Kansas State University.
When the governing body of the Republican Party called the events of Jan. 6, 2021, “legitimate public discourse,” it renewed a sometimes-furious debate about what are, and aren’t, acceptable forms of discussion and debate in a democratic society.
This question has emerged frequently in recent years, with complaints about inappropriate methods of protest, efforts to take particular viewpoints off social media, and accusations that various people are disseminating misleading information. But the issue took on new urgency on Feb. 4, 2022, when the Republican National Committee censured U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.
They are the only Republicans serving on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The governing body of the Republican Party said this meant they were “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
As researchers who study the relationship between communication and democracy, we believe our insights can help citizens draw the line between “legitimate political discourse” and illegitimate political violence.
There are legal standards defining protected speech, but something that meets the legal definitions may not necessarily help build and maintain democracy. Scholarly definitions of the types of speech that are beneficial for democracy help make the issues clearer.
Persuasion, not coercion
Put most simply, speech that is designed to teach people about other viewpoints and persuade them to change their minds – rather than pressuring them to take different actions – is good for democracy.
The key, as pointed out by communication scholar Daniel O'Keefe, is that the audience has “ some measure of freedom ” about receiving the message and choosing how to act upon it.
Persuasion, even in its most vigorous and aggressive form, is an invitation. When a person seeks to persuade someone else to agree with their viewpoint or values, or to recall or ignore history in a particular way, the recipient may choose to go along, or not.
Coercion, on the other hand, is a kind of force – a command, not an invitation. Coercion denies others the freedom to choose for themselves whether to agree or disagree. Coercion and violence are anti-democratic because they deny others their ability to consent. Violence and coercion are the very opposite of legitimate political discourse.
Politics is not war, and legitimate political discourse is not violence.
‘Be a citizen, not a partisan,’ says Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of political discourse.
What about protest?
Protests can take many forms. In their most democratic form, political scientist Mary Scudder notes that protests “ can improve the deliberativeness of a political system by putting important problems on the agenda or introducing new arguments into the public sphere.” Protest helps people to be aware of the views held by others, even if different groups disagree vehemently.
In the name of democracy, scholars of communication, free speech and deliberation have said protesters deserve to be heard and given as much latitude as possible to communicate with the public. In part, that is because protesters may represent underprivileged or mistreated people whose messages may be hard for powerful interests to hear.
But impassioned protest can sometimes seem like an attempt at coercion, especially for people who feel targeted by the protesters’ messages.
Persuasion and coercion on Jan. 6
The Republican National Committee would like Americans to focus on the peaceful protesters who gathered on Jan. 6, 2021, to hear President Donald Trump’s speech at the Ellipse – and ignore the violence at the Capitol.
If we look at the Ellipse, we see a vibrant, and legitimate, political protest with signs, chants and speeches. If we look at the Capitol, by contrast, we see illegitimate political violence, including people using bear spray, erecting a hangman’s noose and assaulting others.
The link between them was Trump’s speech. He used a particular combination of rhetorical strategies, calling for a plague to be removed so that the nation could be pure again; threatening force; and claiming that his group was good, strong, pure and sure of victory. He also made claims of victimhood, of having had something stolen from him and his supporters. This specific combination of rhetorical strategies has traditionally been used to motivate a nation for war.
That type of communication from a president can be legitimate political discourse when used to motivate a nation to war against another nation, though there have certainly been circumstances in American history in which that
power has been abused. But when the president uses that rhetoric against the democratic process in his own government in order to retain power, it is not legitimate political discourse. Rather, as scholars of authoritarianism have explained, using war rhetoric against your own nation amounts to an “autogolpe,” or “self-coup.”
When Trump urged the Ellipse crowd to march to the Capitol and “ fight like hell,” his words transformed an occasion of legitimate political discourse into an anti-democratic violent insurrection.
The result was real physical violence, characterized by Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, a 42-year-old veteran of the war in Iraq, as a “ medieval battle.” Several people died and many were injured.
American democracy was damaged as well. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican U.S. senator from Alaska, called the Republican National Committee’s characterization “false” and “wrong,” saying on Feb. 5, 2022, that the events at the Capitol were “ an effort to overturn a lawful election.”
Democracy isn’t a game. To respond with appropriate seriousness, Americans can’t frame moments such as Jan. 6 simply as a “ competition between left versus right, Democrat versus Republican; a battle of individuals and political factions,” writes communications scholar Dannagal Young. Those violent, coercive events are challenges to the real heart of democracy: peaceful persuasion and the rule of law.
Looking at the entirety of what occurred on Jan. 6, 2021, it’s clear that there was both legitimate protest and illegitimate political violence. When political violence replaces political discourse, and when political leaders refuse to play by the democratic rules of the game, democracies weaken, and may even die.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Click here to read the original article.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.