Palgrave Filibustering Tyranny by Suffering Vicariously: From Ancient Rome to America’s Founding, to Today

This book focuses on the symbolic power of a talking filibuster. Since a true filibuster requires hours of standing and talking, it is physically grueling. While some talking filibusters obstruct the passage of undesirable bills and nominees, other aims may include publicizing an ignored issue, revising a bill, or forcing consideration of an otherwise dead bill. Moreover, filibustering can give voice to an unheard group that can coalesce and create a political movement, such as the libertarian posse that formed during Rand Paul’s 2013 filibuster against drone killings or the feminist army that formed during Wendy Davis’s filibuster against a Texas abortion bill that same year. It’s this suffering of the legislator on behalf of constituents that captures the cultural imagination and leads to filibuster depictions in film (“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”), on television (The Simpsons, The West Wing, Parks and Recreation, Scandal), and helps filibusters to go viral on social media. Charting the history of the filibuster from Ancient Rome until today, this book argues that the filibuster's evolution can be traced through eras of anti-tyranny, deliberation, drama, and emancipation. Chapter by chapter, this evolution is described with Jean Baudrillard’s conception of the real, simulation, simulacra, and the hyperreal, and with Jacques Rancière’s theories of dissensus and emancipation. In a timely and insightful volume, Evan Johnson has produced a detailed and cogent rhetorical history of the filibuster. Filibustering Tyranny provides a well-written, thoughtful, and useful analysis of the purposes and uses of the filibuster from ancient times to our present moment. This work will be of significant interest to students and scholars of communication, political science, history, and democracy writ large. Mary E. Stuckey, Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, Penn State University