How would it affect our theorizing of radical democracy if dissent within deliberative politics was disciplined not so much through linguistic mechanisms as through a ‘habit’ of ‘selective listening’? Concerned with the constraints on radical democracy in the current global justice movement, I analyze rebellious rituals that re-interpret the hegemonic public transcript of deliberative politics in the European Social Forum (ESF). The ESF is a prefigurative arena for discursive practice in the global justice movement that includes resource-poor grassroots activists, immigrants and social movement insiders. To explore the disciplinary practices of institutional insiders towards other participants in deliberation, as well as resistance against them, I compare discursive opposition expressed within several European- and national-level ESF preparatory assemblies. I argue that the disciplining of dissent in national Social Forum settings works silently, alongside a place-specific habit of selective listening practiced by institutional elites. Rebellious rituals of resistance against exclusion emerge in transnational ESF preparatory meetings, in which grassroots activists assume the role of voluntary workers and linguistic interpreters and encourage movement elites to learn a novel habit of empathetic listening that increases the degree of inclusion.