The Art of Persuasion
Rhetoric, observed Aristotle, is preeminently the art of persuasion. Conservatives, i.e., those who wish to conserve what is best and most vital about our civilization, have been notably unsuccessful at practicing this art in two large areas of social enterprise: politics, the rough and tumble of partisan struggle, and what for lack of a better term we might call “the culture wars,” which encompasses the fate of our universities, our major cultural institutions, and indeed the texture of our moral lives. Once upon a time, and not so long ago, those institutions lived up to their obligation to act act ambassadors linking the wisdom of the past with the requirements of the present in such a way that we could build responsibly for the future.
And today? You know the answer to that. The outcome of November’s election has sparked a great avalanche of conservative and Republican soul-searching. (I say “conservative and Republican” because they are not necessarily the same thing, which is part of the problem.) Has the electorate changed? Have demographic shifts in America led to a permanent shift in the habits of fiscal restraint? Must conservatives adopt the protective coloration of Leftists in order to stay “relevant,” i.e., to win elections and make a plausible showing in the media popularity sweepstakes?
These are the sorts of questions that bedevil the tranquility of conservatives these days. In his PJM column today, my friend Roger L. Simon has some pertinent things to say about this tangle of issues. “A failure to communicate,” he writes, drawing on a famous scene from the movie Cool Hand Luke, is the problem. Roger acknowledges the “the overwhelming onslaught of propaganda and dishonesty from the academy, Hollywood and the media.” But here’s the kicker: “We can complain about that all we want, but unless we start building our institutions, no genuine change will occur.”
And how do we do that? Roger is right, I believe, that in the defeat conservatives have suffered in the court of public opinion lies the promise of renewal. “The good news,” he writes, is that “the current debacle . . . provides this opportunity for radical change, perhaps even serious rebranding.”
Partly it is a matter of nomenclature, of branding. Why should the Left enjoy a virtual monopoly on all the nice words, all the emollient phrases, all the consoling sentiments? Start with the word “liberal.” Is there anything less liberal, i.e., less freedom loving, than those politicians and commentators that congregate under the rubric “liberal” these days? These people are illiberal statists who want to control every aspect of our lives and enforce a politically correct orthodoxy under the banners of “diversity,” “tolerance,” “fairness,” and the like.
“There must be somewhere out of here said the joker to the thief”.
Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
There is. I fear it is going to be “poor, nasty, brutish, and” — long.
Imagine a sixth grade class. Once a month they take a vote on whether they’ll all go to the candy store or to the dentist. One month Dick and Jane vote for the dentist, past inflamed gums and grimaces of pain. Guess where the class is going. The candy store is going to do land-office business until it either runs out of candy or more than half of the class is writhing in agony.
Want to know why the conservative brand is so out of fashion? Because even smart, literate conservatives say the silliest things, to wit, the above article:
“These people are illiberal statists who want to control every aspect of our lives …” How is it such smart people can write such ridiculous drivel? Get a clue. Rather, no, don’t, keep it up, and put it in overdrive starting one month before the 2014 Congressional election. You see, Americans really agree with your viewpoints, it’s just a question of how you try to get it across, you know, branding. So don’t re-evaluate your thinking, focus solely on rebranding. Please.
Actually it would be fairer to say that Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the art of the discovery of the available means of persuasion in a given case.” The operative terms here are: art, discover, available, means, and given case. Those in the “know” recall that one of Bill Clinton’s earliest aides (back when Bill was in Arkansas) was a Rhetoric Professor at the University of Arkansas. I won’t call him out here.
Persuasion, for Aristotle, involved mastery of the facts. It also involved credibility. Aristotle called credibility “ethos.” Absent “ethos” a speaker would never win.
The Republican problem is that the GOP lacks credibility. Republicans always cut the baby. The Republican “brand” is to do a more big business friendly version of whatever the Democrats propose.
Republicans were never the cool kids in school. Democrats were always cool. Republicans always think they have to do what the cool kids want, otherwise the cool kids won’t accept them.
If the cool kids want you to smoke dope, smoke just a little.
If the cool kids want to hang with the “minority kids,” let just a few in.
That is not what Aristotle meant by “discovery of the available means of persuasion.” And it is not what he meant by ethos.
Aristotle was pragmatic. His teacher Plato was principled. Aristotle meant that you need to learn how to share good ideas with ordinary people. The key here: good ideas!
Republicans have zero ideas.
They are just kids taking smaller hits when you pass around the dope.
The electoral victories of the left illustrates the advantage of pretending to beat Santa Claus at his own game, but without even asking whether you’ve been a good kid or not, because that would be unduly discriminative. They might has well have the law of gravity on their side, which by the way might explain how successfully they seem to be pulling things down. The appeal of the left is not much different from an appeal to our worst instincts, under the pretense of proclaiming the most elevated pursuits.
This is leading with honey instead of leading with principle. When JFK was saying “Ask what you can do for your country…” he was challenging us to exercise the best of our selves, in other words he was selling the “conservative” values, or at the minimum pretending to, which our current president is quite adept at. Better PR, not necessarily better authenticity!
If we do not cultivate critical thinking in the mind of children, will they ever know the difference?
So, how can we sell individual freedom, individual responsibility and personal ambition, which even children can aspire to if appropriately addressed, instead of getting stuck on the defensive, ever trying to explain why we are not really the irredeemable devils we are accused of having been since birth? Good teachers should be qualified to address this question. Good teachers are also those people particularly well versed in the art of asking the right questions at the right time. Perhaps we should get busy with asking the questions that have been systematically suppressed under the pervasive fog of the “progressives”.
For instance, asking “What are you going to make of yourself?” can excite a young person better than “What is your most trampled right?”. And “If you have rights already, where did they come from?”. Creativity, initiative, example. The conservative values are not dead. They are only hidden. Emit the light! Merry Christmas!
I have a severely pessimistic view of a lot of the left. Even if they could be convinced to the right’s views, it would be fleeting and mishmashed in with all of their other [dis]integrations.
Conservative principles will be in decline so long as the left dominates government, education, and media. The government will implement the hard left ideology taught by our schools, and the media will cheer them on while suppressing conservatives voices. Conservatives must fight back or face political extinction. The only option is for the governors and legislators in Red States to make it illegal for government and educational institutions in their states to discriminates against conservatives. Conservatives must be allowed to sue state institutions that actively discriminate against conservatives in hiring and promotion, which includes most, if not all, state universities. It is outrageous that hard left institutions like state universities use taxpayer money to advance the liberal agenda while discriminating against conservatives. We need to fight back now!
The beginning of the end for United States occurred in 1971 when President Nixon created the Petro Dollar system. This created unlimited credit ( as long as Petroleum can be pumped out of the ground) and created a Fiat U.S. Dollar. The U.S. Government went hog wild with this new found source of credit, The Petro dollar system became a cookie jar that never ran out of cookies.
The result ; In the last 40 years the U.S. Dollar has lost 90% of its value due to massive over borrowing and foolish spending, because the cookie jar kept on giving.
An unintended consequence were massive liquid accounts for Saudi Arabia to push Sharia Law and funding terrorism, which it has been actively involved in for hundreds of years. The Petro dollar system provided massive amounts of cash to continue their self righteous movement to overthrow Democracy and Liberty.
The problems we face today do not exist in a vacuum, there are clear and fundamental causes for them, we just choose to ignore them. It is much easier to blame Liberals, or institutions, the MSM, radicals, socialism, anything but the truth.
It is understandable since once we face the truth, we would be forced to fix the problem. Fixing the problem would smash the cookie jar and nobody wants that.
I think Aristotle believed that rhetoric was (or at least could be used as) a tool to reveal, or discover, truth. Logos, Ethos, and Pathos all needed to be present in an argument for a true proposition. Lose any one of those, and you have a false proposition. My own opinion is that most of what passes for intellectual discourse in the past hundred years or so, has been dedicated to discrediting Ethos in an effort to empower people who believe that truth (insofar as they can admit that truth exists) consists in what they can get someone to believe. Truth will nevertheless, plant a size 14 up your butt whether you believe in it or not.
Growing up as a Democrat, realizing over the years that my Liberal brethren had become illiberal before my eyes, I remain a Democrat despite the rampant shallowness and stupidity of my compatriots in the hopes of being a granule of change that might someday restore my party to its roots. For this in the meantime I am considered an apostate and I get the same murderous look from my Democrat pals that that a Pakistani taxi driver gave me one day –a few years before 9-11– when he realized that my queries about Islam were merely sympathetic curiosity and not a sign of conversion. I am worse than a conservative or a Republican to my Liberal friends, I’m a Democrat who wants to change and rectify an errent political party and culture.
My main instrument for curing the ills of the Left is also good for what ills the right: seeking a synthesis of what is good in both sides. Schizophrenic splits and projection indicate the cure for what ills: to bridge what alienates in the other and to own in oneself what one finds culpable in others. So for the Democrats, the market is our friend and we need it to fund all the virtue we want to exercise… and we are not the masters of irony that our pride leads us to be, that irony twists in our hands and we have become the hypocrites that we compulsively see in others.
Now, I haven’t thought too much about the other side of the coin, but here’s my first try. For Republicans: freedom has consequences and what endangers what we wish to conserve in “what is best and most vital about our civilization”, is the fact that what is best and most vital about our civilization is that freedom has the license to be mercurial, naughty, unruly. If we pour a mix of concrete into the pillars of Western Civilization that is too hard, it will also be too brittle to absorb the shock of the new that freedom periodically ushers into history.
I totally agree. Conservative and Libertarian writers, speakers, radio hosts have to stop insulting people who disagree with them and start converting them. They have to stop pandering to the ignorant extremists on their own side which they do for profit and popularity. It’s an up hill battle because the main stream media will not let them break out of their stereotype and has too many of the conservatives afraid to speak openly about their own principles.
Heh. Everyone’s still blaming the other guy…even the author.
Here’s a thought…mebbe it’s time to not only change the message…but to change the messenger, as well?
Re-examine your premises, folks. Check your assumptions, preconceptions and biases at the door. (You can’t do that, though. It’s called change blindness or cognitive blindness. w/ a whiff of narcissism and hubris.)
If you can’t find a political philosophy with a map, compass and a flashlight (which you can’t), go back to what the Founders said – and no cherry picking. Read everything they wrote…and start over from the beginning. The political philosophy you’ve been using must be broken, ’cause you don’t really have one.
Constitutional construction, which is what the Founders recommended for understanding what they wrote. i.e. they meant what they said and said what they meant. Freedom and liberty. You folks don’t know what those two words mean, nor what the Founders meant when they used the words.
That would only be a start.
Of course, you won’t do that, because you already think you know it all. You think you know what’s best for everyone in the nation. …if only you were in cahrge…you could make things better for everyone else, whether they liked it or not.
So…you’ll keep doing what you’re doing…and you’ll keep losing the big elections and the big policy decisions and the ‘culture wars’ and…blaming your losses on moochers and the media and the sheepople and the lack of ideological purity in your membership and among your politicians, and blaming the NEA and the unions and the colleges and universities and the mechanic and the messaging and…anything and everything…but yourselves.
All we need to do is Clone Bill Whittle,Problem Solved.Merry Xmas All.
Not surprising that media people see media message as the problem and the solution. The real problem is that the Democrats have real power to reward and punish and the system only rewards the few at the expense of the many but they use the media (the part of the market that sells to the shallowest part of society) to find the suckers to support it.
Until conservatives have formed the ability to take care of their interests on the ground and resist the Democrats where it counts we will lose. We will also need to finally discard the patrician class conservatives who get their power from their status within Universities, media, etc. As long as they feel they are credentialed to the system they will give way to the system. A system that can make a Barack Obama a president is a failed one. People should stop looking at their credentials and start looking to real improvements.
“Roger acknowledges the “the overwhelming onslaught of propaganda and dishonesty from the academy, Hollywood and the media.” But here’s the kicker: “We can complain about that all we want, but unless we start building our institutions, no genuine change will occur.””
completely agree.
“The good news,” he writes, is that “the current debacle . . . provides this opportunity for radical change, perhaps even serious rebranding.”
Here is where you lose me. I have read or seen nothing to indicate that “serious rebranding” wouldn’t damage the conservative coalition as currently configured. It would be instructive if those calling for said rebranding were to comprehensively state what that would entail.
I don’t think it is as much a problem with the ideas, and the people who are placed up in politics by the party machine to represent the ideas. They are politicians, both left and right. They seek to first and formost look after their own interests, which usually translates to the interests of their biggest financial supporters.
The problem is that none of these financial supporters is interested in the best results for the country’s citizens as a whole. They are all self-interested in what best serves their agenda. The message problem the “Republican” Party has is that they are currently perceived as being entrenched in this self interested political behavior, while the “Democratic” Party makes fiscally insolvent gestures to placate the masses to seem like they are helping the people.
When people finally realize that professional politicians on all sides of the political spectrum funded by special interests are the problem, then we may have a chance to fix this problem. My proposed solution, if the politicians will not voluntarilly submit to term limits, then the people must keep voting them out of office until a batch is put in which actually fixes this special interest funding issue. Term limits by ballot box instead of entrenched politicians pork barreling from both sides of the political spectrum.
Until this happens it won’t matter if the Blue or Red team is “in control” because they have all rigged the game to not be in the interest of all the people of the country.