I had the honor of presenting a Presidential Lecture at Shepherd University on October 28, 2024. My remarks as written are below. You can view the talk, which varies from the script in a few places and includes a short Q&A here (the video and audio are off, which is weird, but it’s all there).
Shepherd University President’s Lecture Series
October 28, 2024
What does political rhetoric owe democracy?
The title of my talk asks the question what political rhetoric owes democracy. The answer is either obviously “everything” or it’s a trick question because democracy is political rhetoric. We’ll get to that.
To start I want to talk about the elephant in the room. Also the donkey in the room and whale carcass, dead bear cub or whatever animal Kennedy is affiliated with.
There are something like half a million elected officials in the US, ranging from town councils, school boards and local municipal offices, up through state legislators, governors, and other statewide officials, to the US House, US Senate and of course the President. More than 100 people registered with the Federal Elections Commission to run for president 2024. I should be more precise, more than 100 people whose first name begins with the letter A registered with the FEC to run for president this year.
Here in West Virginia you have 55 counties, each of which has three elected commissioners – the exception is Jefferson County which has five. Each county also has a clerk, assessor, sheriff, and board of education. Each education board has five members. The state also has 232 incorporated places, most, if not all of which have their own elected governments.
Not every elected official is up at the same time of course, and not every election is contested. Nevertheless, that’s still a lot of politics.
The campaigns to which most of you are paying attention are of course, the senate race here in West Virginia, the senate race next door in Maryland, and the campaign between former president Trump and vice president Harris.
In many ways this is an election like no other, or at least almost no other.
If re-elected, Trump would be only the second US president to serve non-consecutive terms. He would be the first impeached president to get re-elected, the only convicted felon to get elected, and I believe the first Floridian to hold the office. Harris would be the first woman, the second person of color, and the first in decades nominated entirely by Democratic party officials without facing voters first.
This is a TikTok presidential election. Do with that what you will.
It is also shockingly expensive. The Harris campaign alone has raised more than one billion dollars. That’s nine zeros. The president’s salary is roughly $400,000 a year. Harris would have to be president for roughly 2,500 years to make a billion dollars. To put that in perspective, the governor of West Virginia makes about $150,000. Patrick Morrisey, the Republican candidate for governor this year and the person widely favored to be elected, has raised more than $6.5 million. To put this into further perspective the Mountaineer’s football coach Neal Brown took a slight pay cut and now makes roughly $4 million a year. If budgets are reflections of values, there’s a lot to unpack here, but that’s a different topic for a different speaker. I’m just a political guy.
In many ways however this campaign isn’t new at all.
Nativist and anti-immigrant rhetoric is as old as the republic. That some Americans hate because of what others look like, what language they speak, how they pray, or who they love isn’t new. Who they hate changes – Irish, Italians, Basques, Chinese, Catholics, Jews – you name it, someone has organized a hate campaign against them. Political violence isn’t new. There have been election riots, anarchist riots, union busters and union riots, and more. In the mid-1800s, a member of the US House from South Carolina marched onto the floor of the US Senate and beat a Senator from Massachusetts nearly to death with a cane because the Senator gave an impassioned speech against slavery. The Senator recovered and the Representative was re-elected. Outrageous political insults aren’t new. In the presidential campaign of 1800, the Hartford Courant, which was a leading newspaper at the time, wrote that if Thomas Jefferson were elected president the streets would run with blood and the president of Yale University declared that “our wives and daughters would be subjected to legal prostitution.” Even our approach to social media isn’t new. In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn argues that the real driver of the American revolution wasn’t the shooting, it was the rhetoric that came before it. Much of that rhetoric appeared in the form of pamphlets. Here Bailyn wrote:
The pamphlet [George Orwell, a modern pamphleteer has written] is a one-man show. One has the complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious, and “high brow” than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of “reportage.” All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.
American politics wasn’t puppies and rainbows until social media came along. We’ve always been something of a mess. People, often for better but sometimes for worse, behave as if they were people.
In the face of this it can be tempting to throw up our hands and say “politicians will be politicians!” and go back to watching cat videos on TikTok. That would be a mistake. Much of what I highlighted was before the Civil War. People were hurt and killed because of that rhetoric. Saying that hate happens isn’t an excuse to sit still. Our politics has never been perfect, but it’s been much better than it is today.
And one thing that has changed is the speed and reach of garbage. Social media and bots make everything bad that much louder, that much faster, that much more far reaching, and that much more dangerous.
This election is both unprecedented and more of the same, only more so. Whether we get better or worse, where we go from here both before the polls close and when the next president is hopefully peacefully sworn in, is important. And it’s up to us.
Which brings me to the question I asked at the beginning: What does political rhetoric owe democracy?
To explain why the answer is either obvious or the question is a tautology I want to start with some definitions.
The first big word in my question is rhetoric. A lot of people complain that too much of our politics is “just rhetoric.” Speeches are just rhetoric, campaigns are just rhetoric, candidates just spout rhetoric. This view echoes the complaints of philosophers dating back to at least Socrates. In his dialogues, which were more or less dramatic enactments of conversations between Socrates and the foil of the day, Plato repeatedly berated teachers of rhetoric. Socrates, via Plato, compared rhetoric to “mere cookery.” It was meant to “excite the soul by use of language.” In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates ask the sophist Phaedrus, “if a speech is to be classified as excellent, does that not presuppose knowledge of the truth about the subject of the speech in the mind of the speaker?” Phaedrus replies, “But I have been told, my dear Socrates, that what a budding orator needs to know is not what is really right, but what is likely to seem right in the eyes of the mass of people who are going to pass judgment: not what is really good or fine but what will seem so; and that it is this rather than truth that produces conviction.”
For Plato, teaching people to “become man of real power in the city, both as a speaker and a man of action,” which is to say “the art of politics,” as Protagoras claimed to do, risked poisoning the soul. Plato wasn’t trying to use a clever metaphor here, that wasn’t his style. He meant that “knowledge is food of the soul” and that unless the speaker really knew The Truth – that’s with capital Ts, you can’t see it but it’s written that way in my notes – he could ruin people. In one dialogue he warned that a doctor who was a bad speaker would be ignored, while a good speaker who didn’t know what he was talking about would be believed. That has a very 2020 vibe.
The anti-rhetoric strain has been going strong ever since. The Roman orator Quintillian derided “hack advocates” – his words. And on through the millenia.
Our founders were equally skeptical and cautious. Before he became a song and dance man, Alexander Hamilton had a career in politics. In the first Federalist Paper, broadsides promoting the new and outrageous sounding US Constitutions, Hamilton wrote:
And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.
Closer to our time, in his essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell took his turn beating this dead horse, in part by complaining about overused metaphors, like the one I just used. He also complained about words that have become meaningless with over use, words like democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic and justice – his examples, not mine. In the same essay he complained that “In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing,” that “political speech is largely in defense of the indefensible,” and it is meant to “give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” This was all in 1946, back when things were going reasonably well.
Not long after Orwell, the American rhetorical scholar and conservative public intellectual Richard Weaver defined rhetoric as “truth, plus its artful presentation.” Here he was following not only Plato in appealing to a deeper Good, but also echoing Cato, who was then quoted by Quintillian, who wrote that rhetoric was “good men, speaking well.” Good does a lot of work here. True eloquence requires, for Cato, Quintillian, Weaver, and others, an understanding of The Good. That understanding was necessary to be a good orator. In 1963, Weaver lamented the demise of real or good rhetoric, writing that “Beginners, part-time teachers, graduate students, faculty wives, and various fringe people, are now the instructional staff of an art which was once supposed to require outstanding gifts and mature experience.”
The late Washington Post columnist Meg Greenfield summed it up well in a column in 1984: “Rhetoric, in short, is widely considered a sin.” I should note this was in an essay titled “In defense of rhetoric.”
And on it goes.
The problem with Plato and his progeny is the assumption of Truth, or Good. These folks aren’t fans of democracy. They think only the people who Know Things, who have access to what is really right or really true, should be allowed to speak or teach others to speak. Speaking well, for them, wasn’t just the tricks. It was knowing the nature of the good. Which, coincidentally, they knew. It’s amazing how people who insist that only the righteous should lead define themselves as righteous. The rest of us are just misguided, muddled, the victims of faculty wives and other fringe people.
It’s tempting to agree with Plato, Orwell, Weaver, and everyone else who accuses others of being “hack advocates.” I think that a lot. As a teacher and practitioner of the “art of politics” I’m not the problem – the problem is all the knuckleheads who don’t agree with all of my obviously right answers and compelling arguments. Students should also do the readings and everyone else should have already done them in someone else’s class.
But the problem with this approach is pretty clear, if somewhat humbling. I might be wrong. You might be wrong as well.
Democracy is premised on each of us being wrong sometimes, and none of us having all the right answers all the time. Enter another view of rhetoric.
If you think about it, politics can’t be anything other than rhetoric – of course speeches, campaigns, and politics are rhetoric. What else would they be? Odds are good that any answer you come up with matches someone’s definition of rhetoric.
Aristotle, whose book The Art of Rhetoric is basically all you need to understand how to make a compelling case, defined rhetoric as “the art of discovering all of the available means of persuasion in a given situation.” He further delineated three kinds of speeches: forensic, which are truth-seeking, like forensic medicine; epideictic, which are speeches in praise or blame, like wedding toasts which are often both; and deliberative, which is the point of politics.
For the purposes of this talk, I want to talk about deliberative rhetoric.
Deliberative rhetoric is toward something. It’s an argument meant to get people to agree to a course of action. Rhetoric isn’t a threat or an order, it’s about persuasion. You use rhetoric to persuade your friends to go for burgers rather than pizza. That takes creativity, maybe making a deal to get pizza next time or extolling the virtues of Blue Moon over Tomeez. No judgment here, just an example, props to Tomeez for organizing hurricane relief. The point is, when you’re making the case for something you’re using rhetoric. To say that political speeches shouldn’t be so full of rhetoric is like saying burgers shouldn’t be so full of, well, burger.
We all try to persuade each other all the time – as Aristotle wrote, “all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit.” I’m trying to persuade you all here tonight that how we talk about politics matters. Your professors try to persuade you to do the readings and challenge yourselves intellectually. Your partners try to persuade you to spend less time watching soccer and paint the front porch already, and you try to persuade them that watching soccer is important downtime and that soccer has important life lessons to teach and the porch can wait besides you’ll get to it and it’s too cold for the paint to really set anyway. And she tries to persuade you that if the couch is so comfortable that maybe you should sleep on it, and you try to persuade her that that’s just fine thank you very much.
I may be drifting off topic here a bit. The point is rhetoric is what we do to figure out the best way to approach an unknown and unknowable future. We do not, and cannot, know the one true best course of action. The world is complicated and confusing. There are far too many variables and unknown to account for, not the least of which are people and people are weird. The best we can do is try to reason together, to talk and persuade, marshall evidence and appeal to emotion, speak as and to the whole person, to find the best course of action.
In this view, being together is to have a conversation. We’re constantly negotiating and speculating, urging and conceding, listening and learning. That last bit is important, so I’ll repeat it in case you weren’t listening – listening and learning are important.
In his 2006 book, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment, Yale University professor Bryan Garstan wrote, “[A] politics of persuasion in which people try to change one another’s minds by appealing not only to reason but also to passions and sometimes even prejudices is a mode of politics worth defending. Persuasion is worthwhile because it requires us to pay attention to our fellow citizens and to display a certain respect for their points of view and their judgments.” Several years later, in the Annual Review of Political Science, Garsten wrote about a “rhetoric revival in political theory.” The revival, for Garsten, was driven in part by the failure of deliberative democratic theorists and advocates like Jurgen Habermas who often claimed that rhetoric was the enemy of reason. In the piece Garsten quotes John Dewey, one of America’s most important philosophers and one of the most important philosophers of America, as writing “The essential need [in mass democracies]…is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion.” Dewey wrote those lines in 1927.
In the view of writers and scholars stretching at least from Protagoras, who told Socrates that he taught the art of politics, through Garsten who gives exams about Aristotle at Yale today, rhetoric is central to the democratic process.
I would go a step further and argue that in constructing our politics, rhetoric also constructs our polity.
We talked the United States into existence. Our democracy was cobbled together with ideas borrowed from the English, the Swiss, the Basques, and the Iroquois. Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and the rest cut deals, cajoled opponents, reassured supporters, and talked our nation into being. The Aztecs declared what is now Mexico City their capital because a prophecy said to settle where they saw an eagle eating a snake on top of a cactus. Washington DC is the US capital as the result of a deal to get southern states to agree that the new nation should pay Revolutionary War debts. Our nation isn’t the new geography of an old church, there are no Roman walls. We’re the result of pirates, thieves, visionaries, religious outcasts, slave traders, lost sailors, utopians, and desperate dreamers from around the world.
Our nation is the result of bold ideas and rhetorical flourishes. As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1815:
What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. The records of thirteen legislatures, the pamphlets, newspapers in all the colonies, ought to be consulted during that period to ascertain the steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the authority of Parliament over the colonies. (quoted by Bailyn)
America was invented by deeply flawed, very smart, and rhetorically skilled visionaries and political entrepreneurs. As the AP’s Ted Anthony wrote after this year’s Democratic and Republican conventions, “Americans live in one of the only societies that was built not upon hundreds of years of common culture but upon stories themselves… In some ways, the United States…willed itself into existence and significance by iterating and reiterating its story as it went.”
The identity of a nation, like our own personal identity, is a matter of assembling parts that seem to make sense, fit, and provide an understanding of history to explain the present and predict the future.
President Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes wrote, “Every nation is a story. It’s almost never a simple one, and the story’s meaning is usually contested. National identity itself depends upon how we tell the story—about our past, our present moment, and our future.” In the words of Jodi Wallwork and John Dixon in the British Journal of Social Psychology in 2004, nations are “…imagined as entities possessing a geographic and historical ‘reality’ that somehow exceeds their human membership.” This reality is constructed through language; as rhetorical scholar M Lane Bruner put it, “…national identity is incessantly produced through rhetoric.”
In his 1975 article, In Search of the People: A rhetorical alternative Michael McGee argued, “One begins with the understanding that political myths are purely rhetorical phenomena, ontological appeals constructed from artistic proofs and intended to redefine an uncomfortable and oppressive reality. Such myths are endemic in the human condition. Though technically they represent nothing but a “false consciousness,” they nonetheless function as a means of providing social unity and collective identity. Indeed, “the people” are the social and political myths they accept.”
The United States is, at its core, rhetorical. Which leads to my explanation of democracy.
At its most basic, democracy is a form of government that relies on the consent of the governed. There are direct democracies, parliamentary democracies, constitutional democracies, and so on. These definitions are variations on the theme of how decisions get made, who gets to make decisions, how those decision makers are chosen.
The US is, of course, not a pure or direct democracy. We are more democratic today than at any point in our history, give or take some attempts to restrict voting in some places, but we aren’t all voting and not all votes count the same.
A brief and incomplete history lesson may help here. In 1776 New Jersey gave women the right to vote. In 1807 they took it away. In 1789 only white, male landowners over the age of 21 could vote. Catholics, Jews and Quakers were barred from voting in some states. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, gave citizenship to formerly enslaved people, but that didn’t mean they were allowed to vote, whites in power found all sorts of ways to prevent African Americans from exercising political power, especially after the reconstruction era ended and we saw the rise of Jim Crow laws. In 1876 the US Supreme Court ruled that Native Americans weren’t citizens, and thus couldn’t vote. Until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, US Senators were elected by state legislators rather than the people. Women were given the vote in 1920, barely more than 100 years ago. Residents of Washington, DC weren’t allowed to vote for president until 1961. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned practices that prevented or discouraged African Americans from voting. 18 year olds were given the right to vote in 1971. (American University Washington College of Law)
Even as the US is getting more democratic, there are still undemocratic elements baked into the system. Every state gets two Senators, regardless of how many people live in that state. Regardless of what one thinks of the logic that led to that rule, it skews the system to favor Republicans. Odds are good Republicans will retake the majority in the Senate next week – and those 51 or so Senators will represent a minority of American voters. Democrats in the US Senate will likely represent tens of millions of more people than Republicans will, but will have less say in our laws than Republicans.
It’s a similar story with the White House and the electoral college. The last Republican president to receive a majority of the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004. Before that it was his father, George H. W. Bush in 1988. Presidents Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 lost the popular vote but won the electoral college. There is about an even chance that will happen again next week.
Gerrymandering skews the system even further, in many ways elected officials choose their voters rather than the reverse.
There are countless local elections, ballot initiatives, referendums, and more that are closer to “one-person one-vote.” Democracy, defined as majority rule, is alive and thriving, just not everywhere, for everyone, or at every level.
However defined, structured or imperfect, democracy should more or less give people the ability to throw the bums out, complain about whatever they want without getting thrown in jail or beaten up, and allow for its own continued existence. At some point people have to stop arguing and vote. Once the vote is held, the country, or county, or whatever the vote is for, has to do what the majority said and move onto the next argument. This time next year, either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will be your president, whether you voted for them or not. Your bumper sticker that will say “such and so is not my president” is wrong.
This definition of democracy is important, and the undemocratic parts of our past and present matter. But the explanation is incomplete.
The traditional motto of the US is e pluribus unum – out of many, one. Political philosopher and one-time Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts Danielle Allen has written, “I seek not ‘one people’ or ‘one America,’ but a ‘whole’ people…the metaphor of wholeness can guide us into conversation about how to develop habits of citizenship that can help a democracy bring trustful coherence out of division without erasing or suppressing difference.”
She further wrote:
Democracy is based on the proposition that all human beings are amenable to persuasion and capable of decision-making achieved through persuasive language. The institutions of democracy imply this proposition, regardless of whether all a democracy’s citizens agree with it. If democratic citizens are to live up to the proposition implied by their institutions, they cannot give up using conversation to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes in any case whatsoever…We describe our current political situation as one in which force is not merely necessary but also the only available instrument. This contradicts core principles that ought to be the basis of our habits.
Democracy is a conversation about what to do next – sometimes a loud conversation but a conversation nonetheless. It is a means of structuring conflict without the use of force. You don’t “win” democracy, any more than competing swimmers “win” water. We can lose democracy if we shut down debate, delegitimize our opponents, and baselessly attack the process. The moment someone says “we don’t need to vote because we’re pretty sure we know what people would do or who they would vote for,” democracy fails. The moment we say one person alone has the answers and the disagreement is illegitimate and those who disagree should be punished, democracy fails. The moment we excuse violence, we weaken democracy and the moment we resort to violence we threaten democracy’s existence. The moment we stop talking, arguing, cajoling, and persuading, democracy is over.
Rather than e pluribus unum, a better motto might be: out of many, a conversation. I would say that in Latin, but that would seem pretentious. And I have no idea how. The point is that we don’t need to be one, we simply have to agree to keep talking.
Democracy doesn’t exist outside of our own agreement that it should exist, even when it’s really frustrating and doesn’t go our way.
Another way to put it is that the point of democracy is democracy. And democracy is an ongoing discussion about what to do next – it is citizens discovering all of the available means of persuasion in a given situation. Which is to say, political rhetoric is democracy. Democracy is how we try to get each other to do things without resorting to violence, threats or intimidation.
Democracy doesn’t exist beyond our collective agreement that it exists and our shared commitment to its continued existence. If all this is right, or at least plausible, we need to consider what kind of rhetoric is good for democracy. What kind of rhetoric helps democracy work well, and what undermines it?
At a bare minimum, we need rhetoric that is logically sound and emotionally compelling. We need a rhetoric that unites rather than divides, that reinforces common identity and articulates shared goals even as it argues for one approach over another. As advocates for our positions or our candidates, we need to also be advocates for democratic rhetoric and therefore democracy itself.
Democratic political rhetoric, as a version of Aristotle’s deliberative rhetoric, is always about what’s next. Democracy never fully is, it is always becoming.
So let’s talk about what good democratic rhetoric looks like.
A few minutes ago I argued that the US is a rhetorical construction, it’s a story about itself. Yes, there are borders and borders matter. A shared currency, a road that doesn’t change as I drive here from DC and back, free trade across state lines, and so forth matter. But a country is more than a map, and even the map is contested. In 2017, the border between North and South Carolina changed. In 2002, Arizona and California changed their borders. The US and Canada are in an ongoing dispute about border issues. All of that stuff matters.
But lines on maps, banking regulations and pavement don’t make the US what it is any more than a roof and kitchen make a house a home. What matters is the story. The rhetoric of our nation is what differentiates the US from a complicated set of financial transactions. I haven’t devoted a career to politics because I love receptions with lobbyists and working in places where I take turns getting yelled at by constituents and yelled at by my boss. I have spent most of my life volunteering on campaigns and working in politics because I believe in the idea of an American ideal. The same is true for most of the people I have met over the decades. Some are venal, selfish and couldn’t care less about anyone other than themselves. But most people, most of the time, work in politics because we believe in the promise of the United States of America.
OK, so now to the rhetoric, to the story we tell when we advocate for candidates or positions.
First, the United States has never lived up to its promise. The man who wrote “all men are created equal” owned slaves. The land on which most of us live was stolen from the Native Americans who were here before the Europeans. During World War II we rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in camps. Today there are people who say that some of their fellow citizens are unworthy of the promise of America. All of that and more is true. Yet the promise matters, and we have been more or less lurching toward it for 250 years. Our political rhetoric needs to keep moving us toward that promise.
In July 2020, in the middle of the last overheated presidential campaign, I wrote a piece for The Fulcrum arguing for a rhetoric of a humble civil religion. I opened the essay writing:
In 1976, Barbara Jordan told delegates to the Democratic National Convention that Americans are “a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community.” Jordan, then a House member from Houston and the first African American as well as the first woman to give the convention keynote address, went on to say that “We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present … but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America.” Her words still ring true.
Our political rhetoric should help foster that community and realize that promise. It should speak to the ideal that all men – all people – are created equal. Our union will never be perfect. People are not perfect, and perfection is the end of democracy. Our union can, however, be more perfect. We can, and should, strive for a stronger American community. The American community I was raised to believe in, the one I learned about at St. Thomas’ Day School in New Haven, Connecticut and that was fostered in my home, is a humble community. It is a community that, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, prays not that God is on our side but that we are on His. It is a community that fosters freedom, and responsibility, that encourages debate that is rooted in respect. That never says anyone is less than because of what they look like, who they pray to, who they love, or how long their family has lived in our map.
Nearly 25 years after Jordan’s speech, the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote that we should “face up to unpleasant truths about ourselves, but we should not take those truths to be the last word about our chances for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making.” Later in the same work, a book called Achieving our Country, Rorty wrote, “You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one in which you wake up every morning.”
All good and soaring and abstract and whatnot. Everyone agrees everyone else ought to behave better, because of course we’re all good people behaving well and if we’re behaving badly it’s because those other people made us. So let’s talk about what better political rhetoric looks like in practice.
Talk the politics into being that you want to participate in. Each of us makes our politics every time we speak. Speak and make the politics you want.
The politics I want is one that moves us toward a more perfect, that makes us whole if not one. It is a politics that knows that most people, most of the time, are doing the best they can for what they think are good reasons. I want a politics that gives me the benefit of the doubt, and that lets me learn.
As a practical matter that means encouraging people to vote, not making it harder to vote. It means accepting election outcomes and working with the person you beat or lost to to advance shared values. It means not calling your political opponents evil. It means not saying entire groups of people should be wiped out because of their political beliefs. It means supporting the free press, even when it makes you angry. It means not attacking your opponents for their race or gender, if they have a disability or if they weren’t born in the US. It means putting policy ahead of politics. It means telling the truth. It means condemning election violence, whether it is assassination attempts, threats to poll workers, or setting fire to ballot boxes. It means increasing trust in, rather than baselessly attacking, democratic institutions. It means listening – really listening – to understand.
A passionate, partisan politics means finding all of the available means of persuasion in a given situation. That means finding and telling compelling stories, framing issues in ways that highlight your strengths, it means connecting your issues to voter values. It means respecting voters and taking seriously their fears, anger and hopes.
It is up to us, through our rhetoric which is to say through our politics and our democracy, to make and remake our democracy every day. Political rhetoric owes democracy everything, because our democracy is our political rhetoric. It is up to us to live up to it.