Sweden is often considered to be one of the world's most tolerant countries. This is often illustrated by questions surrounding religious expression, such as if it should be tolerated to have a veil on when working in healthcare or schools? At the same time, we can see current examples of decreasing tolerance in some parts of Europe and the world. The Hungarian Government has annulled gender studies on the basis that we are born either as women or men. Meanwhile we ask ourselves in Sweden whether parties that advocate a racial war will have right to demonstrate on our streets. In this way, tolerance seems to be linked to the contradiction that exists within democracy between the will of the people and the individual. Between those which may be included, and those which cannot be included at all - the excluded. Because democracy always needs to draw a line and this line is today redrawn in the name of tolerance.

This essay aims to investigate and problematize rhetoric’s relation to politics and democracy based on tolerance as a concept. This purpose leads to three key questions: 1. What role do the Scandinavian rhetoric researchers give the rhetoric in relation to politics and democracy? 2. How can we understand tolerance and its function for and within the democracy? 3. What could be an alternative role for rhetoric beyond tolerance?

The essay therefore contains a survey of the Scandinavian researchers in rhetoric and their views on the role of rhetoric in politics. It also contains a problematization of tolerance extracted from the work of Wendy Brown and Slavoj Žižek. The essay concludes that rhetoric research in Scandinavia is based on the intention to create more tolerance. It also comes to the conclusion that tolerance as a political discourse works depoliticizing. The essay’s contribution to rhetorical science therefore comes in the form of another perspective providing an alternative role for rhetoric in democracy. Here it is not based on morality but on what we should call the political. That is, rhetoric may act in the intersections between the dichotomies – politics / the political, democracy / dictatorship, descriptive / normative – in order to see the various symptoms and the lack that exist in society and in the system.