Welcome!

Finally taking the plunge. For as long as I can remember, I've been a political junkie. I spend most of my free time trying to figure out how U.S. politics have gotten so broken. There's a lot of explanations: media consolidation, the politicization of religion, corporate money in politics, polarization of the public into "information silos," and the rise in power of special interest groups that threaten primary challenges against any public official who veers even the slightest bit from ideological orthodoxy, to name just a few. 

I also happen to study some of these issues academically. As a PhD student, I study rhetorical theory, which can be applied to virtually any social phenomena, so I naturally focus on political rhetoric. My dissertation, in fact, is on the rhetorical appeal of libertarianism, which I believe serves as a continual source of energy and renewal behind the conservative movement. 

Incidentally, there is a great deal of current interest in academics taking their work public. So even though I'm a bit late to whole world of blogging and tweeting, I figured this would be a good time to get started. Better late than never, right?

My hope is that this blog will serve as a kind of bridge between the separate, parallel worlds of academic and political blogging. On the one hand, I'm aware that the odds are stacked against me. Political bloggers generally don't care for academic prose, and the conservative witch hunt against progressivism in academia makes many intellectuals averse to stating their politics in a public forum. On the other hand, nothing worth accomplishing has ever been easy, has it? There's much to be gained both intellectually and politically from the engagement of rhetorical theory with current affairs, and I hope this experiment can contribute to both of these projects. 

Thanks for reading, and see you in the comments.