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Within the rhetoric and composition literature, liberal and liberalism often denote unsophisticated theory and insufficiently progressive practice. I argue that such a view distorts the liberal tradition. Liberalism is, in fact, a potent reform project deeply connected to university writing instruction. During our field's social turn of the 1980s, liberalism's progressive potential was obscured. This was to the field's detriment; liberal goals, values, and ontological ideas can add meaning to our work and inform classroom practice. To illustrate my claim, I examine liberalism's relationship to the rising anti-racism movement. A commitment to liberal ideals, I argue, can help ensure the effective application of anti-racist principles.1
With rising extremism and political division, democracy is under threat both in the United States and abroad (see "Democracy Index 2023"). Not coincidentally, the relationship between writing pedagogy and social reform is of increasing interest within rhetoric and composition. Comp, we might say, is once again (very) political. As such, it's a good time to reexamine the political connects and disconnects that define our field. Political accountings, mappings of our various ideological commitments and the tenants thereof can help writing teachers know where we stand in relation to each other and larger social forces. They are thus essential.
The following both engages in political mapping and argues that certain terrain has been inaccurately described by previous cartographers. My base premise is that when we talk politics and writing pedagogy, we encounter two broad lines of force, two ways of connecting work in the writing classroom to larger issues of social improvement. The first and more visible is informed by far-left political and social theory; Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci are present, if not cited. While specific manifestations vary, to think in this line is generally to equate politically progressive writing pedagogy with resistance to a hegemonic other, typically conceived as a structural force maintained by certain ways of writing and speaking. On my political map, I label this the leftist position. John Trimbur aptly summarizes its mandate when he writes that composition's left, to which he belongs, is "oppositional," its primary task "to resist [the] normalizing pressures of the status quo" ("Composition's Left" 39). The second line of force, or way of connecting work and world, has...