Right-wing populism has been widely implicated in the destabilization of democracy in traumatic events such as the presidency of Donald Trump. Chapter 4 examines the cultural, economic, and communicative aspects of populism and its origins, addressing arguments for including populist parties and leaders more effectively in conventional party politics, before moving on to a deliberative response. It may be possible to engage citizens attracted to populism (though not leaders) in deliberative terms. Populist leaders can be demagogues uninterested in abiding by democratic norms of any sort, least of all deliberative ones, though it might be possible to induce somewhat better democratic behavior on their part. Populist citizens are more promising in deliberative and democratic terms because some of their concerns and insecurities have a reasonable core: society really is dominated by an elite, just not the one that populist leaders stress. This core could be reached by deliberation, however much its concerns have been more effectively exploited by demagogues to date. Discursive psychology can be deployed in thinking about deliberative bridges to populist citizens. Populist citizens may be attracted to democratic innovations such as deliberative mini-publics. Contestatory deliberation involving democratic activism can counter populist leaders.

This section consists of excerpts from Aristotles Rhetoric in which he discusses his division of rhetoric into deliberative, epideictic, and judicial or forensic rhetoric and a selection of speeches that illustrate each of these modes of rhetoric. There are two examples of deliberative rhetoric, eight of epideictic rhetoric, and seven of judicial rhetoric. The speeches range from the fifth century BC to the late twentieth century of our era.