The Black Art of Rhetoric
Joe Knippenberg points me today to what must be Michael Gerson’s most enjoyable column ever. It concerns the justification of political rhetoric and includes the phrases “folderol” and “pixie dust.” Best of all, it’s — right!
McCain can and should make an ideological case against his opponent. Why does Obama want to fight terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan but not in Iraq? How would it advance the war on terrorism to grant al-Qaeda’s fondest wish — an untimely American retreat from the Middle East? Would Obama really devote his first year in office to a series of surrender summits with the leaders of Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea? These are serious criticisms; the argument against rhetoric is not. Obama’s political weakness is that he is too liberal, not that he is too eloquent.
A presumption of any kind of democracy is that citizens are mature enough creatures to not only survive an encounter with political rhetoric but thrive. Yes, this gets you Cleon and Gorgias, but it also gets you Diodotos and Socrates. The real trouble is posed in this case by a Pericles or Alcibiades, but, as Thucydides and Plato understood, these are the sort of fantastical creatures that democracies birth, and they’re the responsibility of democracies, too. And I am not quite prepared to call Barack Obama as excellent as Pericles or as really good-looking as Alcibiades.
Which fortunately Gerson is neither. He sticks admirably to the point that rhetoric is not among the black arts. Though Bill Clinton’s dark materials make me think twice:
“A lot of people think Hillary will win in the day time and her opponent will come in the night and take back the votes she won,” he said.
Texans — don’t let Hillary’s opponent creep all up in her house, impossible to see under cover of darkness! Don’t let him carjack her victory! Remember: Hillary is a big can of mace — I mean experience. When you go to the polls, don’t let her opponent mug you of your vote. And if anyone offers you a hit off the rhetorical crack pipe, just say no!
Ah, but—as Gerson’s failings in this piece make clear, sometimes the line between ideas that fail rhetorically and ideas that fail politically are vanishingly small. Because Gerson is trapped in his own juvenile rhetoric, he fails politically. He fails politically because he can’t or won’t see a difference between a resurgent, evolving Taliban in Afghanistan, fighting against a government that is largely viewed nationally as legitimate, even if it’s leader is not; between politically pre-modern warlords in Waziristan (a region which has seen this kind of fighting off and on since before there was such a thing as modernity), threatening the sovereignty of a government on its strategically crucial border with Afghanistan, but in no way representing a popular uprising against that government; and between the two sectarian armies (both of whom we are to varying degrees arming, funding and supporting, until our fancy changes again) vying for dominance in a de facto civil war made possible by the United States and in contrast to an ineffectual political system largely deemed illegitimate by Iraq’s people. And because Gerson’s rhetoric refuses to allow him to consider conducting diplomacy as anything other than failure— because he’s so intellectually frivolous that he can thoughtless elide Cuba, an impoverished Third World island nation that poses no threat military or otherwise to the United States, with Iran, a huge, infrastructurally modern, ascendant and oil-rich future superpower— he fails. Because his rhetoric compels him to view not taking aggressive action against Venezuela as surrender— because he’s so trapped in a worldview that requires every other nation to act in ways that elicit the approval of the United States— he fails. That’s a problem of rhetoric that informs and corrupts the politics, and it’s something Michael Gerson might want to consider.
— Freddie · Feb 29, 04:38 PM · #
TRUE. In an effort not to write an article about Michael Gerson (ugh) instead of a blog post, I had to elide all that. But I did think fleetingly about the ‘surrender tour’ bit, and now have in the form of your remarks a plausible excuse to discuss it. Your decision to contrast his appreciation of domestic rhetoric with his contempt for international conversation sharpens an important point, but I’d append the following subtlety: only by talking to EVERY significant ‘rogue’ regime in the world does a conversational tour take on contours that I do think merit, at least rhetorically, epithets about ‘surrender.’ But what’d be surrendered in practice (as opposed to, say, the War on Bad Things and People) would be the principle that it is the prerogative of the United States to ignore things and people the US sees fit to ignore — a very important principle, in my book, and one that WOULD be affirmatively damaged by lining up every major freak and geek on the world stage and paying a courtesy call. Both Gerson’s approach of not talking to anyone and Obama’s approach of talking to everyone fail to apprehend that different particulars should be conceptualized and then treated differently, a point Socrates harped on as pretty fundamental to not being totally clueless and disordered. And unsurprisingly this is because both Gerson and Obama indulge in rhetoric for reasons that cause them to ‘miss the mark.’ Also unsurprisingly, the inability to recognize like and unlike, and the ability to get others to imitate the error, is the feature of rhetoric that has come in — from at least Plato through Hobbes to Habermas and beyond — for the most scorn. But the answer to that — see Bryan Garsten’s outstanding book Saving Persuasion — is not to expunge or smite rhetoric but to understand it, and then practice it, rightly.
— James · Feb 29, 04:54 PM · #
Which regimes do you think should be ignored? Are there any examples of the successful deployment of the snubbing/shunning strategy?
I don’t think there’s any evidence that Obama’s turn to diplomacy involves “an inability to recognize like and unlike.” After all, he’s not proposing to use the same diplomacy, the same combination of threats, arguments and enticements everywhere.
By the way, Socrates shunned no one. Not that that is particularly relevant.
— matt · Feb 29, 05:22 PM · #
North Korea, for instance, is a regime to be spoken with, whereas Hugo Chavez deserves none of our time. Or so I would say. The important point is that we should not ‘talk’ with any particular regime because we have so far made it a policy not to, and a fortiori we should not talk with all regimes we have by policy not talked to so far because of that fact. You are right that Obama’s policy menu, which includes diplomacy, also includes a combination of carrots and sticks that, in its seeming arbitrariness, at its worst approaches substantive folderol. It’s not because he can’t properly discriminate that Obama ‘turned’ to diplomacy, but rather that the diplomacy of his apparent choice — itself in contradiction with his highly and inconsistently discriminatory foreign policy positions — fails to discriminate the way that it does. And that way is not in the details of each diplomatic encounter, but in the preference as such for lining up so many diplomatic encounters of a particular type.
As for Socrates, I think it was to Phaedrus that he recounted realizing he had nothing to say to certain people whom he could recognize as infertile souls.
— James · Feb 29, 05:47 PM · #
I disagree that Chavez is out of bounds. Just because someone has a borderline personality disorder does not mean that you can’t hold talks with his representatives. If he insists on attending personally, then bring some brightly colored objects to distract him.
By insisting that a whole country is beneath our contempt, we are playing into the hands of those who use hatred to gain support.
Imagine if you want to discredit Hamas, for example. Can you do it by pretending they don’t exist? Instead, imagine you hold talks with them, and ask them in front of the TV cameras why they think it is OK to kill children.
Which approach do you suppose is more effective?
Now imagine you are the representative of a belligerent and arrogant country, and that YOU have the reputation for killing your enemies instead of negotiating. Does that change your answer?
— Dave · Feb 29, 07:23 PM · #