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Abstract
This essay contributes to theories of publics by offering a case study that challenges how we think about rhetorical strategies of legitimation. A focus on publics as generating norms of democratic culture shifts scholars' emphasis from identifying institutional exclusions to the inventive rhetorical work being done by those resisting public authority. Concerned that American farmers would soon become a peasant class, country lifers challenged the state on democratic grounds using dissociation and articulation to invent rhetorical practices that enabled rural citizens to live out their commitments locally.