The last decade has seen the political establishment – whether the neoliberal left or the Reaganite right – in a state of total bewilderment. Since the ascendency of the populist right in the form of Donald Trump and the populist left, epitomized by Bernie Sanders and his supporters, center-left and right politicians cannot get a handle on what they are missing. After all, they have such good policies – policies carefully crafted in think tanks and universities to help the voters live better lives. With such empirically well-founded ideas, how could voters not reward them with a huge landslide?
The hard truth that the establishment seems incapable of realizing is that voters are motivated by more than economic self-interest and technocratic policy positions – they are moved by emotion and identity. By anger stemming from perceived injustice. By joy springing from triumph. By desperation flowing from wishes left unfulfilled. The careful calibration of these emotions is the bread and butter of the true political rhetorician. If we wish to restore balance, order, and vigorous debate to our contemporary moment, the art of political rhetoric must be revived.
There was a time when rhetoric was the lifeblood of American democracy. In the nineteenth century, citizens would travel hundreds of miles to hear the great orators of the day speak. It was the event of the season when a truly masterful orator such as William Henry Seward or Daniel Webster passed through town. In the midst of major events, people would seek out the local rhetorician to hear his thoughts. In the chambers of Congress, such oratorical displays were so commonplace that tourists would journey from all over the nation in hopes of hearing the great men of their day debate some important issue. In short, voters craved the verbal flourishes, word play, and emotional appeals that articulated, shaped, and defended the public policies of the nineteenth century.
It is not hard to see why rhetoric has faded in prominence over the last half century – it has been replaced by mass produced news, social media, and other high tech forms of communication. When in need of an emotional fuel to give politics meaning, voters turn time and again to these sources of political information instead of rhetoricians. Winston Churchill identified this rising phenomenon before the outbreak of World War II: “Public opinion is formed and expressed by machinery. The newspapers do an immense amount of the thinking for the average man and woman.”
At this point, a person could reasonably say: “It is all very well and good to fear the extent to which digital media controls the emotions of voters, but how exactly is getting views from sensationalist news and social media worse than from sensationalist politicians?”
The answer is in the diversity of viewpoints expressed by the American political class. Though politicians must constantly cater to mass produced opinions that obscure reality, the truth is that most aspirants to high office have fairly divergent views on solving the problems that confront our nation. When such differences are brought to light, it helps to cultivate more authentic political discourse apart from the latest buzzwords. Beyond that, the embrace of in-person displays of political rhetoric helps keep politicians grounded in their local communities. Though they sometimes may lose touch with their constituents, the average office-bearer is nonetheless accountable to a block of voters whose views they are expected to represent. Having to engage in town hall meetings and other in-person venues keeps politicians from being lost to the rootless world of news media.
If understanding why political rhetoric has declined is easy, reviving rhetoric is a much trickier endeavor. After all, the forces of 24-hour news cycles and social media that have destroyed rhetoric are unlikely to go away any time soon. As such, partisans of the rhetorical art must be creative. We must find ways to insert serious rhetoric into social media and the news. Nor does it seem that all voters are completely satisfied with the shallow world of social media we have entered upon. Donald Trump – whatever else his faults may be as a speaker – draws massive crowds excited merely to hear him speak. Few other politicians have gained this level of rhetorical devotion or seem to have bothered analyzing what emotional speeches like his could do for their careers.
Having said this, rhetorical education can be restored in fairly traditional methods. Too often our school system teaches history as a series of facts, parading one after another in great boring columns. However, history classes used to be taught using rhetoric. For example, to help students understand debates about states’ rights in the nineteenth century, teachers once assigned Daniel Webster and Robert Haynes’ famous exchange about the topic on the Senate floor. Likewise, we today could educate our students in the basics of politics and history through rhetoric, thus giving students some understanding of how rhetorical devices work.
More broadly, the role of the educator must be to teach students how to have an appropriate emotional response to political rhetoric. Many criticize emotional appeals in politics. However, emotion is an important part of being human. More than this, it is a vital aspect of that which makes us good. The chief theological virtues – faith, hope, and love – are all sentiments rather than purely rational objects. That we have forgotten this fact is to blame for the overwrought politics of our time; when the young are not taught harness the passions in a healthy way – usually as a result of centrist technocrats having no use for emotion – then they will instead have their hearts filled with dark emotions concocted by demagogues and self-interested media sensationalists.
To say that the art of public speaking is dead would be simply untrue. There are plenty of speeches given across the nation each and every day. However, the art of political rhetoric – carefully orienting the passions of man to some lofty goal – has sadly been lost. There are no longer Ciceros, Lincolns, and Churchills to inspire posterity with their eloquence and the halls of the Senate are filled not with glorious declamations but with the dry coughs of dull procedure. Yet, if we work at it, rhetoric need not stay dead. Rhetoric can and must be revived for the greatest of political callings to make a triumphant return.
