Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!
—SARAH L. PALIN
Public language matters. Words are free, and every politician and journalist and citizen can draw on an unlimited supply of them. But there are days when the right words are all that count, and it is the speaker who can find them who determines what happens next. Over time, leaders and commentators and activists with empathy and eloquence can use words not just to exploit the public mood but to shape it. And the result? Peace, prosperity, progress, inequality, prejudice, persecution, war. Public language matters.
This is hardly a new discovery. It’s why public language and public speaking have been studied and taught and fought over for thousands of years. But never before has public language been as widely and readily distributed as it is today. Words hurtle through virtual space with infinitesimal delay. A politician can plant an idea in ten million other minds before she leaves the podium. An image with an author and a deliberately composed meaning—a plane hitting a skyscraper, say—can reach the eyes of viewers around the world with an instantaneity unconstrained by distance or mechanical limit. Once, and not long ago in human history, we would have heard a rumor, or read a report of it, days or even weeks later. Today we are all witnesses, all members of a crowd that is watching and listening in real time.
Now. It’s happening now. He’s saying that now. You’re posting this now. I’m replying now. Listen to me. Look at me. Now.
We think of ours as the age of digital information, and so it is. But we sometimes forget how much of that information is conveyed in human language that is doing what it has always done in human societies: alerting, frightening, explaining, deceiving, infuriating, inspiring, above all persuading.
So this is also the age of public language. More than that, we are living through an unparalleled, still unfolding and uncertain transformation of public language. But when we consider and debate the state of modern politics and media—how policies and values get discussed and decisions get made—we tend to think of it only in passing, as if it is of interest only insofar as it can help us understand something else, something more foundational. It is the argument of this book that public language—the language we use when we discuss politics and policy, or make our case in court, or try to persuade anyone of anything in a public context—is itself worthy of close attention. Rhetoric, the study of the theory and practice of public language, was once considered the queen of the humanities. Now she lives out her days in genteel obscurity. I’m going to make the case for putting her back on the throne.
We enjoy one advantage over earlier generations of students of rhetoric. Thanks to the searchability and indelibility of modern media, it has never been easier to trace the evolution of the specific words and statements of which a particular oratory is constituted. Like epidemiologists on the trail of a new virus, we can reverse time and track an influential piece of public language from its pandemic phase, when it was on every lip and every screen, back through its late and then its early development, until we arrive at last at the singularity: the precise time and place it first entered the world.
* * *
On July 16, 2009, Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York, appeared on Fred Thompson’s radio show to add her two cents to the hottest political topic of that summer—President Barack Obama’s controversial plans to reform America’s health-care system and extend coverage to tens of millions of uninsured citizens.
Fred Thompson was a colorful conservative whose furrowed and jowly gravitas had taken him from a successful law career to the US Senate, not to mention several successful stints as a Hollywood character actor. After the Senate, he embraced talk radio, and in 2009 his show was one of countless conservative outlets on which Obamacare was dissected and condemned.
There wasn’t a better person than Betsy McCaughey to do that. A historian with a PhD from Columbia (thus entitling her to that medical-sounding “Dr.”), McCaughey had risen through sheer brainpower from humble origins in Pittsburgh to become a significant public figure on the American Right. And she was considered a specialist in health-care policy. She had been a forensic as well as ferocious critic of Clintoncare, the Democrats’ failed attempt to reform the system in the 1990s. Obamacare, of course, was a rather different proposition—indeed, some of its founding principles had been developed by Republicans, or even implemented by them. The policy bore a particularly inconvenient resemblance to Mitt Romney’s health-care reforms while he was governor of Massachusetts. Mr. Romney was already being touted as a possible challenger to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.
But Betsy McCaughey was too forthright and ideologically committed to be discomforted by the intellectual genealogy of Obamacare. Nor was she likely to face a particularly testing cross-examination from her lawyer-turned-radio-host. American politics was polarizing even before Barack Obama arrived in the White House, and the media discussion of that politics had polarized along with it. The paradoxical result was that the more bitter the divisions became, the more likely it was that everyone in any given studio or on any political Web site would agree with one another. The people with whom they all disagreed were absent—indeed were probably all gathered in a different studio, making the opposite case in an equally cozy ideological cocoon where they faced the same low risk of contradiction.
On the face of it, then, nothing about this encounter—the political circumstance, the characters, the likely flavor and flow of the argument—was out of the ordinary. But on July 16, Betsy McCaughey had something new to say. Deep within one of the drafts of the Obamacare legislation that was then making its way through Congress, she had stumbled on an unnoticed but alarming proposal:
One of the most shocking things I found in this bill, and there were many, is on page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory … that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go into hospice care … These are such sacred issues of life and death. Government should have nothing to do with this.1
There are two things to note about this claim. The first is simply that it’s untrue. The section of the bill that McCaughey was referring to—Section 1233—did not in fact call for compulsory “end-of-life” counseling sessions. Such sessions would have remained at the patient’s discretion. The intent of the draft section was to make these voluntary sessions eligible for coverage under Medicare, the federal program that pays many of older Americans’ medical costs.
But the fact that it was untrue—and indeed was promptly and definitively refuted by defenders of the bill—did nothing to stop it from rapidly gaining currency. This is the second, and more intriguing, point to note. Provision of end-of-life counseling had previously enjoyed tentative bipartisan support, but in the days following McCaughey’s appearance, many of America’s most influential conservative commentators and a number of prominent Republican politicians, including the House minority leader, John Boehner, took up her charges. And the claim began to be rounded out. The radio host Laura Ingraham cited her eighty-three-year-old father, proclaiming, “I do not want any government bureaucrat telling him what kind of treatment he should consider to be a good citizen. That’s frightening.”2 While a few commentators associated with the Right ridiculed the “myth” or “hoax” of Section 1233—on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough joked about the “Grim Reaper” clause3—most of the discussion on the conservative side of the political divide was predicated on the assumption that McCaughey’s claim about the bill was a straightforward statement of fact.
Then, on August 7, Sarah Palin entered the fray with a posting on Facebook that included the following passage:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.4
What followed is well known. Within a few days the freshly baked term death panel was everywhere—radio, TV, the newspapers, the Web, Twitter—spread not only by its author and her supporters but, unintentionally yet also unavoidably, by those who were frantically trying to debunk it. By the middle of August, an opinion poll by the Pew Research Center suggested that 86 percent of Americans had heard the term (that is twice as many as those able to name the vice president). Of these, 30 percent believed it was a real proposal—the proportion among Republicans was 47 percent—while another 20 percent said they weren’t sure whether it was true or false.5
Despite all denials, a belief that Obamacare meant compulsory death panels remained stubbornly widespread, and a few months later the Democrats dropped the underlying proposal. When in 2012 the Obama administration again raised the possibility of covering end-of-life counseling under Medicare, the tagline threatened to take flight once more and the proposal was quickly dropped. In the summer of 2015, after extensive further research and consultation, Medicare announced that it did indeed intend to pay for end-of-life counseling. Predictably, Betsy McCaughey immediately took to the New York Post to announce: “Death panels are back.”6
A term that exaggerated and distorted a claim that was itself false, and that in any event had virtually nothing to do with the central thrust of Obamacare, had changed the course of politics. In fact, it is probably the only thing that many Americans can recall about the whole health-care debate. As the veteran conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan remarked about Sarah Palin: “The lady knows how to frame an issue.”7
* * *
Let’s set aside whatever views we have about the protagonists in this political drama, or indeed about health care and politics as a whole, and consider the phrase death panel purely as a piece of rhetoric. What makes it tick? Why was it so successful in shaping the debate? And what, if anything, does it tell us about what is happening to our public language?
Part of its strength is obviously its compression. A powerful political point that can be expressed in two words is perfect for the world of Twitter—and not just Twitter. Say that at some point in the summer of 2009, you’d been walking through an American airport past a TV monitor. The words death panel fit neatly onto the news tickers that all the cable news networks put across the bottom of the screen. You don’t even know whether the person on the screen is arguing in favor or against Obamacare. What you see—and what you remember—is the two words.
We can break the compression down farther. The term has the effect of a synecdoche, that type of metonym in which the part stands for the whole. We know when we hear the words death panel that they don’t stand merely for Section 1233; they stand for the whole of Obamacare. Actually, they stand for everything to do with Barack Obama, his administration, his vision for America.
And the words are proleptic: they take an imagined future scenario and present it as current reality. Whereas Betsy McCaughey simply misrepresents the draft bill, Sarah Palin offers a political prediction that goes like this: the legislation the Democrats are proposing gives the federal government control over your and your family’s health—control over life and death—and, knowing them, it won’t be long before they create a bureaucracy to decide who gets what. On the face of it, then, this is a slippery slope argument—let them pass this law, and in the end the government will decide who lives and who dies. But of course it isn’t a complete argument at all. It’s a piece of rhetorical panache that leaps straight to the dystopic end state and brings it to life with vivid imagery. The power of prolepsis is such that we may not even notice that the intermediate steps in the argument are missing.
The impact of the term is accentuated in the original posting by two inspired pieces of passing off. Sarah Palin puts “death panel” in quotation marks, which implies that she’s quoting from the draft bill; she also puts quotation marks around “level of productivity in society,” as if that too were Barack Obama’s phrase rather than her own concocted one. This evocation of a dehumanized Socialist/bureaucratic state seems to have been prompted by conservative congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s lopsided interpretation of the views of the bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, a fervent advocate of universal heath care. It is of a piece, though, with attacks on US government attempts to reform health care stretching back more than half a century; in the mid-1940s, the American Medical Association denounced President Truman’s plans for national health insurance as Soviet-style “socialized medicine.” But death panel triggers even darker allusions: twentieth-century eugenics and euthanasia programs, and the selections in the death camps, with Barack Obama and Medicare officials taking the place of Nazi doctors.
If we listen really carefully, though, we can hear something else. The mention of Trig, her son with Down syndrome, signals how far Palin has generalized and radicalized an argument that began with what now seems the relatively modest claim that the elderly were going to be badgered into refusing further treatment. Now it’s about murdering the young.
And there’s a broader implication. An American voter might reasonably conclude that there are two kinds of public policy question: those that go to the heart of religious, cultural, and ethical differences—the debates about abortion and same-sex marriage are obvious examples—and those which are essentially managerial. How can we prevent another shock like Lehman Brothers? How can we best protect the United States from the Zika virus? You might further conclude that the question of health-care reform fell squarely into the second category.
Not according to Sarah Palin. Her previous public mentions of Trig had been in connection to her opposition to abortion, and for her Obamacare raises similar issues—this is a battle between the forces of good and evil. In referring to him, she’s attempting to pivot the visceral, Manichaean quality of the abortion debate into the battle over health-care reform. When it comes to abortion, the two sides believe there can be no compromise. The same is true of health care, she says. You can’t compromise with people who mean to slaughter your children.
And that’s the final point to make about the term death panel. It’s maximal: in all respects it states its case in the strongest possible terms. What Sarah Palin claims to be uncovering is nothing less than a conspiracy to murder. There is no presumption of good faith on the part of your opponent—this is a fight to the political death, a fight in which every linguistic weapon is fair game. It is a rhetoric that seeks not to dispel distrust of politicians but to foment it. And it worked.
Perhaps the term death panel leaves you cold. Perhaps you find the rhetorical conceit grotesque or comical, and you are amazed that anyone could be taken in by something so crude and exaggerated. But all rhetoric is designed for a particular time and place and above all for a particular audience—it is a supremely tactical, contextual art—and the phrase probably wasn’t intended for you. Given the context and the people likely to hear it, however, it was devastatingly effective, like a precision-guided munition punching its way through to its target.
Yet in one respect it is an utter failure. It is so tendentious, so abstracted from the real—and difficult—decisions and trade-offs that must be faced in any debate about health care, so purely partisan in intent and meaning, that it makes the real policy choices associated with Obamacare not easier but harder to understand. Whether willfully or not, explanatory power has been wholly sacrificed in the interest of rhetorical impact.
There Is Great Anger
Across the political spectrum, there is a growing acknowledgment that something has gone awry with politics and the way political questions are debated and decided in America, Britain, and other Western countries. Democracy is a rough business and disquiet about it is hardly new—read Plato or Hobbes. But there is substantial evidence to support the current anxiety.
“There is great anger. Believe me, there is great anger,” Donald Trump told his followers on March 15, 2016, in a speech celebrating his victory in Republican primaries in four more states. Whatever else you make of Mr. Trump, it’s hard to argue with this observation. The Edelman Trust Barometer measures trust in government, business, media, and NGOs in twenty-eight countries around the world. Its 2016 survey showed a fractional improvement in trust in government after the lows of the financial crisis, but it also suggested that the gap in the level of trust expressed by elites (or the “informed public”) in political and other institutions, and that expressed by the general population, had widened, and indeed was now the widest that Edelman had ever seen. The three countries where the gap had grown the most over the past four years were France, the UK, and the US.8
In both America and Europe, near-term disillusion with mainstream politicians—caused by their failure to do anything about income inequality or to punish anyone after the financial crash, by rising anxiety about globalization and immigration, and by the bitter residue of the war in Iraq—have exacerbated and accelerated adverse trends in our political systems that were already causing concern. In the United States and other Western countries, politics has become vituperative, the gap between Left and Right has widened among not only politicians but also the public, and the number of policy areas on which the mainstream parties are willing or capable of reaching an accommodation with their opponents has shrunk, in the case of the US close to zero. As a result, decision making in many national and supranational political institutions has become sclerotic.
The low level of trust in established politicians has led many citizens to turn away from them in search of alternatives. These include old-fashioned left-wing radicals like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US; anti-immigration and extreme right parties like France’s National Front, which has polled strongly in recent elections and whose leader, Marine Le Pen, looks to be a serious contender in the 2017 presidential election, and Austria’s Freedom Party, whose candidate Norbert Hofer came within an inch of becoming president of that country in May 2016; new populist-radical groupings like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain; parties centered on single issues, like Britain’s UKIP and Scotland’s SNP; and pure antipoliticians like the Italian comedian Beppe Grillo and the American celebrity property developer Donald Trump. The success of these nonmainstream parties and individuals has tempted some politicians within the mainstream to ape their style and tactics. In their different ways, Ted Cruz and Boris Johnson are examples of this last phenomenon. As a result, established parties and political institutions are experiencing disruptive forces both from without and within.
Public apathy and lack of engagement with politics is at least as serious an issue as the fragmentation and the rise of the populists. In many democracies, voter turnout is falling. The young are a particular concern; in the 2014 midterms, only one in five Americans eighteen to twenty-nine years old voted. Both the supply and the consumption of serious news have been falling—and public trust in mainstream media, which is facing its own centrifugal forces as well as an existential economic crisis brought on by digital, is in scarcely better shape than that in mainstream politics.
The obvious question is: Why? Or to sharpen the point, recognizing that (for reasons we will also explore) conspiracies have come to sound more credible than accidents to many of us: Who is to blame? The good news is that a large team of detectives is at work on the case, and that they already have a number of suspects. The rather less good news is that the suspects are so numerous, and the detectives’ theories so contradictory and difficult to confirm, that so far it has proved impossible to charge anyone.
One group of sleuths wants to pin it on the politicians. That sounds straightforward enough, but even here there’s a disagreement. Some want to blame individuals. Tony Blair’s name comes up frequently, as does George W. Bush’s, though some of the older detectives are still obsessed with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Their continental colleagues mention Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as any number of Central and Eastern European leaders. The detectives make their cases with passion, but we can’t help noticing that the only politicians they mention are those whom they personally dislike and with whose politics they obviously disagree; Left-leaning detectives blame only politicians of the Right, and vice versa. We can’t, of course, rule out the possibility that all of the ills of democracy in one country stem from the nefarious actions of one individual or party or ideological orientation, but it’s hard not to conclude that these detectives are so emotionally involved in the case that they have lost objectivity.
Other investigators discern shifts in attitude and behavior that go beyond individual politicians. In their cheerily titled It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, the distinguished political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein examine a series of recent policy clashes to demonstrate the particular difficulties that the American political system—as compared to a European parliamentary democracy—has in coping with periods of strong ideological antagonism between its main parties. But their thrust is resolutely one-sided. The “new politics of extremism” are entirely the fault of the Republican Party, and one of the book’s suggestions of how to put things right is to “punish a party for ideological extremism by voting against it. (Today, that means the GOP.) It is a surefire way to bring the party back into the political mainstream.”9
Vote Democratic, in other words. But blaming an adverse trend in political culture entirely on one party and then inviting your readers to vote for the other one is scarcely a recipe for reducing political division. Nor does it really address the issue of radicalization and fragmentation within a party—fragmentation which, in the case of the Republicans, means that there is essentially no one at the controls, and no means of achieving consensus about any future direction for the party, whether toward the center or away from it.
Perhaps we’ll have better luck with Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s The Spirit of Compromise. It tackles the same problem—ideological difference leading to legislative and governmental stalemate—in a more even-handed way, looking for systemic causes rather than blaming any one party for it. As Gutmann and Thompson see it, political campaigning has become continuous rather than limited to set periods before elections, and the behaviors that go with campaigning—in particular the need to sharply distinguish yourself from your political opponents—are inimical to successful government, and in particular to the eponymous “spirit of compromise” on which they claim much practical political progress depends.
This is potentially a more compelling diagnosis, though exactly where it takes us remains unclear. The book ends with some practical suggestions for the reform of America’s political institutions, but the central call is for something altogether more abstract, a new equilibrium between the dutiful and reasonable Dr. Jekyll mind-set of good governance and the riotous Mr. Hyde of the campaign trail:
The uncompromising mindset should not be eliminated even if it could be. Campaigning requires it. Campaigning and the uncompromising mindset are in the DNA of the democratic process. The democratically defensible aim therefore is to find a better balance between the mindsets. That balance is currently eluding American democracy, and it is increasingly at risk in other democracies.10
Here too—notwithstanding Gutmann and Thompson’s specific recommendations for improved civic education and campaign finance reform—we are offered a prescription for a way forward that sounds suspiciously like a restatement of the problem. The whole point about poor Dr. Jekyll is that he is destined never to find a happy medium, or even a modus vivendi, between the two halves of his character.
Nor do Gutmann and Thompson have an entirely satisfactory answer to the problem of political opposition. While governments govern, it is the nature of opposition parties to oppose (in the US system, parties are often governing and opposing at the same time in different branches of government or different houses of Congress), and opposition is inevitably a form of permanent campaign. The normal rules of campaigning therefore apply: opposition leaders are encouraged to attack as much of their rivals’ political program as they decently can and to fight for even symbolic victories. Not to do so, not to kick against measures that you argued vehemently against to get yourself elected, but rather to help the other side achieve more in government than the barest minimum that the disposition of votes would allow, can appear hypocritical and a betrayal of one’s own supporters.
Gutmann and Thompson’s call for a return to the spirit of compromise thus runs up against a fundamental asymmetry, which is that compromise is generally more attractive and necessary for governments than for oppositions. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Athenians dealt with this problem by instituting ostracism, political exile, to prevent defeated would-be leaders from disrupting the orderly conduct of government. That is hardly an option for us.
And—although the authors never state this—their conclusions could be taken to imply that the best policies are generally to be found in the center ground between the ideological poles. Yet many successful policy ideas began their life on the radical Left or Right rather than in the zone of moderate pragmatism between them. We should also beware of assuming that the best politics is consensual in intent and docile in flavor. Often obstinacy and a noisy determination to be heard is the only way of getting bold new policy ideas accepted. High passion and loud argument can be the sign of a healthy as well as a sickly democracy.
I have chosen two books about American politics. If I had selected similar books about the state of contemporary European politics, they too would have focused on political paralysis—though probably the rather different stasis that can emerge from coalition politics in a parliamentary system, or from a deadlock of vested interests in an unreformed political culture. But many of the underlying themes would have been the same.
Behind these topical diagnoses are any number of academic theories about why our democracies are suffering their present tribulations. In Political Order and Political Decay, for instance, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama charted the rise and decline of institutions in Western and other civilizations over centuries. The historian Niall Ferguson also focused on the role of institutions in The Rule of Law and Its Enemies, his Reith Lectures for the BBC in 2012. But institutions—meaning our constitutional arrangements and political practices, our systems of law and order, and the structures and conventions under which economic, social, and cultural activities take place in our societies—are only one place to start when a political scientist uses history to explain our current difficulties. Without even attempting to do justice to the different schools of thought on the subject, we might just note that we can usually place even these scholarly investigators on a political spectrum: those on the Left warning that the contradictions of capitalist liberal democracy—essentially meaning inequalities of power and wealth—are finally coming home to roost; those on the Right seeing once strong political and social cultures being undermined by the leveling forces of progressivism and political correctness.
But some of our detectives are on the trail of a quite different set of villains: the media. Here too they are divided between those who blame specific malign forces—Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, The New York Times, the BBC, and The Daily Mail are names that might appear near the top of sample American and British lists—and those who cite structural changes, by which they mean the technological and commercial forces that have fragmented audiences, disrupted traditional media, introduced a 24/7 news cycle and, at least according to some, generally dumbed down and poisoned public discourse.
In fact, claims that our media is letting democracy down—specifically that it is failing properly to explain political choices to the citizenry—long predate continuous TV news, let alone Gawker and BuzzFeed. Four decades ago, John Birt, a future director-general of the BBC who was then a TV current affairs producer of notable seriousness, wrote in The Times of London with his colleague Peter Jay that “there is a bias in television journalism. It is not against any particular party or point of view—it is a bias against understanding.”11 Their thesis was that TV journalism’s love affair with story, emotion, and moments of eye-catching but ultimately insignificant impact prevented the serious choices of which real government and policy formulation consist from being aired at all, or they were so simplified or shortened as to be useless if the object of the exercise was to inform, rather than just entertain, the public.
That claim, and others like it, have been repeated with increasing urgency as technology has changed the grammar of journalism and the way it is consumed. In 2007, Tony Blair described the media as a “feral beast,” arguing that the resulting competition among media outlets had led to a savage hunt for what he called (following Birt) “impact journalism,” in which responsible reporting was replaced by sensationalism and character assassination. As a result, an honest and straightforward dialogue between political leaders and the public was becoming increasingly difficult.12 John Lloyd’s 2004 book What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics painted a picture of a modern British media (very much to include the BBC) that was so arrogant, so obsessed with competitive success, and so self-deceiving, that it risked losing any sense of civic responsibility.13
Again, I have chosen examples from one Western country. Had I instead picked critiques of the media in the United States or continental Europe, the case studies and the institutions would have differed but the charge sheet would have been much the same.
Finally, there is the public. Some politicians and other members of our elites wonder—always privately, of course—whether the real culprits for the breakdown in trust, engagement, and comprehension between voters and politicians are the populace themselves. Perhaps they’ve changed. Perhaps some combination of affluence and hedonism and the technologies that allow them to fill their heads with entertainment morning, noon, and night have led them to become more shallow and selfish, less civic minded, less able to concentrate.
There are dispassionate experts on tap here too, notably in the field of social psychology, which has developed and broadened in recent years to include the strongly trending field of behavioral economics, which applies psychological, social, and economic data and insights to understand how human beings make choices about what to buy or which services to use—and, by extension, what public policies to support, or even whom to vote for. In fact, the conclusions of thought leaders in behavioral economics like Cass R. Sunstein (the coauthor, with Richard H. Thaler, of the influential 2009 book Nudge) tend to support traditional wisdom about human beings: that many of us prefer to avoid views we disagree with and, if confronted with them, may well become more, not less, fixed in our existing opinions; that we are far more likely to believe a rumor or a conspiracy theory like the death panel if it fits our worldview than if it doesn’t.
The politicians, the media, the public. You will have your own views about each of these explanations. I am skeptical of any theory which is predicated on the wickedness or insanity of any one political party or media organization. I believe that social psychologists and others are making interesting and potentially significant empirical advances in our understanding of individual and collective human behavior. None of their work suggests that the public should be singled out for blame for the palpable deterioration in our political cultures. Indeed, the instinct to jump at once to blame, to turn individuals or parties or particular companies or institutions into pantomime villains or maniacs, to descry a plot behind every political or cultural development that runs counter to one’s own preferences—this instinct seems itself in need of further exploration and explanation.
Nor do such theories explain why the same or similar trends are apparent in different countries with different political and media landscapes. I believe that the structural and behavioral changes we’re seeing in media are relevant, but unlike Tony Blair, I believe they’re only one part of the story and probably not the most important one. The same goes for the possible culpability of individual politicians and political parties.
We Have Lost the True Names of Things
Watching the global financial and economic crisis unfold from the vantage points of the BBC and latterly The New York Times, I have been struck by how hard politicians, journalists, and academics have found it to explain what is happening and why to those who have been most affected by the shock. Remedies were proposed that politicians duly promoted or disparaged. Monthly economic data was released. Across the media, there was a superabundance of news, comment, and debate. But the disconnect between all of this and the public was palpable. It was not just that ordinary citizens found the crisis difficult to fathom—that was true of most members of the political and media elites as well. It was that many had given up even trying to understand what was happening. The jargon-filled arguments within the elites passed over their heads, and even if they hadn’t, a growing number of people had come to doubt every word that came out of the mouths of the politicians, business leaders, and so-called experts.
The distress signals were manifold: in many democracies, the dismissal of incumbent leaders and parties, regardless of policies or political orientation. In some, the rise of populism, xenophobia, and racism. In Southern Europe and elsewhere, national strikes and civil disturbances. And almost everywhere, and so pervasive that it has become the background music to any discussion about the state of our politics, a growing, darkening cynicism.
Public incomprehension and distrust are measurable. One BBC survey found that in the UK, only 16 percent of those questioned felt confident about explaining what inflation is.14 For GDP, the number was 10 percent; liquidity, 7 percent; credit default swaps, CDOs, QE, TARP, the EFSF—not asked but presumably too few to measure. For most laypeople, much of the theoretically “public” discourse about the economic crisis might as well have been in Sanskrit. The research company Ipsos MORI identified what it calls a “presumption of complexity” among a significant portion of the public, a default sense that certain public policy terms and issues are too arcane to even attempt to understand.15
And even for those nonexperts who felt it worth the effort, there was deep skepticism about whether what they heard could actually be trusted. Even before the crisis, an earlier MORI report suggested that 68 percent of the British public believed that official data were changed to support whatever argument the government of the day wanted to make; 59 percent that the government used figures dishonestly. In the UK and many other Western countries, trust in many of the media organizations that relay and interpret this official information was similarly low.
Is such deep public distrust justified? If you are a member of Edelman’s “informed public,” your answer may well be no. Perhaps you blame our education system, or the zeitgeist, or the populists who congratulate their audiences on their lack of trust. Of course, it is one of the features of the current breakdown in trust that everyone thinks that someone else is responsible for it.
In this book I am going to argue that more than the frailties of any one set of actors, what lies at the heart of the problem is language itself. I will not claim that rhetoric is some kind of prime mover of political and cultural change. As we shall see, rhetoric is itself constantly acted upon by other forces, many of which have been correctly identified by those diligent detectives. But rather than treat it as a by-product of other deeper factors, I want to place it in the heart of the causal nexus. As much as anything, our shared civic structures, our institutions and organizations, are living bodies of public language, and when it changes, so do they. The crisis in our politics is a crisis of political language.
* * *
I began this chapter with Sarah Palin’s death panel because it seems to me to encapsulate some of the most troubling trends in contemporary political discourse. It achieves its impact by denying any complexity, conditionality, or uncertainty. It exaggerates wildly to make its point. It is built on a presumption of irredeemable bad faith on the part of its political target. It accepts no responsibility to explain anything to anybody, but instead treats the facts as if they were a matter of opinion. It rejects even the possibility of a rational debate between the parties. With language like this, no wonder so many citizens turn away from politics in disgust.
The death panel may be an extreme case, but we shouldn’t pretend that its faults are rare. On the contrary, as we shall see in the following pages, they regularly feature in the language not just of those, like Sarah Palin, on the edges of politics but also in the mouths of mainstream leaders, moderates as well as radicals, even august scientific bodies.
To take a single example, in May 2016, the Treasury Select Committee of the House of Commons16 accused both sides in the bitter referendum campaign on the UK’s continued membership of the European Union of misleading the public with irresponsible and exaggerated claims that they were presenting as “facts” but that in many cases relied on hidden and highly questionable assumptions. “What we really need is an end to the arms race of ever more lurid claims and counterclaims made by both sides on this,” Andrew Tyrie, the committee chairman, told the BBC. “I think it’s confusing the public, it’s impoverishing political debate.”17 In this case, the two “sides” included the entire political establishment of the country from the prime minister down.
A few weeks later the UK voted to leave the EU. It was a stunning reversal, not just for David Cameron (who announced his resignation next day), but for Britain’s elites. Emotive language about immigration and dubious promises about “taking back control” had won out over often wild warnings about the economic consequences of exit. The poor, the angry, and the old had outvoted the prosperous, the better educated, and the young. England and Wales had outvoted Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the UK’s capital, London.
Nor are these trends restricted to words. As well as maximalized written and spoken language, the visual rhetoric of news and politics has become compressed into lapidary images, resonant, artful, tendentious. One way of thinking about 9/11 is as mass murder conducted to create a single piece of rhetoric, in this case a few seconds of news video showing airplanes flying into skyscrapers and the skyscrapers subsequently collapsing. The twin towers stand for Western might and Western values, their collapse for the possibility that this might and these values can be laid low. The flames, the sheering, falling walls, the billowing black smoke and dust bring that hoped-for future destruction into the present. Metonymy, prolepsis, maximality.
But there is more to the crisis than the problems of compression and exaggeration. Once upon a time science was afforded a privileged status in public discourse and its findings were considered fact. Today science is routinely treated as one more opinion. Fury and incomprehension have eroded even the barest standards of courtesy and mutual respect in debate, especially in cyberspace. We are increasingly reluctant even to try to find a common language with which to engage with peoples and cultures whose values differ substantially from our own. There is a growing intolerance for free speech, and a growing appetite to curb it, not just in controlled societies but even in Western countries that claim to venerate it. We will chart all of these developments in the pages that follow.
It is the argument of this book that these negative trends spring from a set of interlocking political, cultural, and technological forces—forces that go beyond any one ideology, or interest group, or national political situation. A healthy public language knits public and political leaders together and, precisely because it succeeds in drawing ordinary citizens into the debate, ultimately leads to better and more widely supported policy decisions. But when public language loses its power to explain and engage, it threatens the broader bond between people and politicians. I believe this very process is taking place in our democracies today.
This is why the crisis in public language is so significant. For some, the instrumentality, the leaching away of substance, the coarsening of expression are essentially cultural disappointments—evidence of some wider dumbing down and failure of seriousness. For me, the critical risk is not in the realm of culture but that of politics, and in particular, democracy—its legitimacy, the competitive advantage it has historically conferred over other systems of government, and ultimately its sustainability.
To the critic who argues that none of this is new, I would reply yes and no. Some of the characteristics I discern in our rhetoric—like highly synoptic language or telling, memorable slogans and phrases—are as old as the hills. Let them eat cake. No surrender. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Nor is this the first time that someone has stood up to claim that slogans, rhetorical tricks, savage ad hominem attacks, and outright lies are replacing rational debate, or that extreme partisanship is rendering orderly government impossible. From Plato to George Orwell, the story of the West is littered with claims that the political language of the day is failing, and bringing the politics itself down with it. Indeed I will argue that we can learn a lot about the challenge we face with our own public language by studying these earlier critics and the crises they lived through.
There never was a golden age of public language, no Garden of Eden in which leaders and people once lived in perfect harmony, and politicians were unfailingly reasonable and courteous to one another. I will, nonetheless, make the case that there are specific accelerants that make our circumstance exceptional, in particular the way that the revolution in media and communications has interacted with our political cultures.
As I suggested at the start of this chapter, our first instinct today, if we sense a weakness in the way our politicians or our media communicate, is to work back to the causes—the economic or political interests, or the ideological forces—that we presume must lie beneath. We are children of the Enlightenment who have been taught always to dig below the surface to get at the truth, and that nothing is more of the surface than rhetoric, that slap of paint which politicians use to cover goodness knows what. So for us, causality always runs from underlying politics to language. But there have been periods, in the ancient world but also in modern history, when some observers have come to believe that the causality can flow the other way: that it’s when public language fails and collective deliberation is no longer possible, that the wider culture goes south and the institutions of politics and the state begin to spiral down.
In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides adduces a change in language as a major factor in Athens’s descent from dysfunctional democracy through demagoguery into tyranny and anarchy: people began to define things in any way they pleased, he says, and the “normally accepted meaning of words” broke down. In his account of the Catiline crisis in republican Rome, Sallust has Cato the Younger identify the misuse of language—specifically the scission of word and meaning—as the underlying cause of the threat to the state. Society, Cato says, has lost the “vera vocabula rerum,” literally, the “true names of things.”18 In seventeenth-century England, Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war he believed had been caused in significant measure by a war of words about religion—spread through the pervasive pamphleteering that printing had made possible—that had fatally weakened the linguistic common ground on which an ordered state depends.
Collapse of democracy, anarchy, civil war—these things seem vanishingly remote to most of us in the West. Yet there is already an ugly and divisive mood in many countries, particularly about immigration, race, and national sovereignty, and some of the TV news pictures we have seen in recent years from Ukraine and Greece and elsewhere have reminded us how insecure civil order and the structures and conventions of a modern democracy can be. In Northern and Western Europe and the English-speaking world, we are still far from this kind of instability. Few would deny that our own divisions are growing, however, or that recent events—in particular the ongoing financial crisis and the inequalities it has underlined, Brexit, and our unhappy adventures in the Middle East—have revealed a gulf of incomprehensibility and distrust between decision makers and the rest of us.
Perhaps, in the event of an acute national threat, a language could once again be found, as it was in World War II, to galvanize and unify our nations. But consider instead a slow-onset emergency: an unstoppable tide of immigrants, say, or a looming crisis of social cohesion driven by growing income inequality, or a rate of global warming that turns out to be at the upper end of the climatologists’ models. Do we have a rhetoric capable of supporting the process of debate and decision that would be required in that eventuality?
And there’s another threat. Ever since Plato, critics of rhetoric have worried about instrumentality—the risk that eloquent but unscrupulous speakers will seek to convince not through the merit of their argument but by pressing the audience’s buttons, in other words by using ideas, phrases, and professional tricks that they’ve learned and perfected over time to elicit a desired reaction from the people they’re addressing now. We live in a world where these tricks are being rapidly mechanized. How do we decide which of two ways of expressing a marketing message—or a political thought—is more persuasive? An A/B test, where the two are tested side by side with two segments of a given audience, will give you a definitive answer. Such testing is ubiquitous and significantly automated. Most of us are not aware that much of the public language to which we are exposed is continually being algorithmically assessed and optimized. If human persuasiveness fails, it will be replaced not by a vacuum but by the persuasiveness of the machines. They knew in ancient Athens how power gravitated to the most persuasive orator. The risk in the future is that power comes to lie in the hands of whoever has the biggest machine.
At the end of this book, I will turn to the question of solutions to the current crisis. If I am right and the causes lie deep in our culture and history, the answers won’t come quickly or easily. But we better start doing something. In the world of politics and public policy, words are actions and they have consequences. Our public language is in danger of failing right now—and history tells us that when this happens, bad things soon follow. The Lord of Misrule invites you to a dance.