Enough Said

Far from being calculated, his words spring from his spontaneity and are a mark of his great sincerity.

During the three decades since that night when Ronald Reagan sat in front of the camera in the Oval Office and memorialized the crew of the space shuttle Challenger, the center of gravity of American conservative rhetoric has shifted. As we’ve seen, the language-world that he inhabited could be muscular, wry, unexpectedly demotic, but it still aspired to a conception of measured eloquence that stretched back to the Founding Fathers and before. But it has lost ground to a very different kind of informal, studiedly “nonpolitical” form of political discourse. This has its own antecedents in previous outbursts of American populism (for instance, George Wallace’s “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”), and we can detect other rhetorical influences in it: the stylized hyperbole of reality TV, the knowing comic beats of the late-night talk shows. Yet in many ways it still feels novel in the context of mainstream US politics. It is not that it has wholly replaced the preexisting language of politics—much of the time we hear a mixture of the two—but rather that it is seriously challenging it. Recently we’ve had a chance to experience it at full industrial strength. Here is candidate Trump addressing a stadium of supporters in Dallas, September 14, 2015:

I made a beautiful speech. I thought it was wonderful. Everything was fine. About a week and a half later, they attacked me. In other words they went through … and then they lied. They made it up. And they talked about … I was talking about illegal immigration … We have to stop illegal immigration. We have to do it. [Cheers and applause] We have to do it. Have to do it. [Audience: USA! USA! USA! USA!] And when I hear some of the people that I’m running against, including the Democrats, we have to build a wall, folks. We have to build a wall. And a wall works. All you have to do is go to Israel and say how is your wall working? Walls work.

We can deconstruct this like any other public language. The super-short sentences emphasize certainty and determination, build up layer upon layer, like bricks in a wall themselves, toward a conclusion and an emotional climax. It’s a style that students of rhetoric call parataxis. This is the way generals and dictators have always spoken to distinguish themselves from the caviling civilians they mean to sweep aside. Wikipedia aptly quotes Julius Caesar’s famous summary, not of his invasion of Britain, but of his victory in the Battle of Zela—“Veni vidi vici,” “I came, I saw, I conquered”—as a classical example of parataxis. Today listeners are more likely to associate it with the successful entrepreneur or CEO.

Donald Trump’s style of parataxis is almost infinitely compressible, as his intuitive mastery of the microrhetorical world of Twitter shows: “Lightweight Marco Rubio was working hard last night. The problem is, he is a choker, and once a choker, always a chokker! Mr. Meltdown.”1 “Lightweight,” “choker,” “Mr. Meltdown”—this is personal in every sense of the word, and written personally on the spur of the moment or dictated on the fly to a harassed staffer, if that last miskeyed “chokker” is anything to go by. But it contains no fewer than three different summaries of the Trump view of Senator Rubio, each of which is immediately and eminently retweetable.

Alliteration, repetition, rhythm have been the tools of English poets from the author of Beowulf to Ted Hughes. The bricks of Trump’s imaginary wall in the Dallas speech are w’s: “… we have to build a wall, folks. We have to build a wall. And a wall works. All you have to do is go to Israel and say how is your wall working? Walls work.”

The passage represents a total rejection of the conventions of political discourse. It’s off-the-cuff, or at least intended to be heard as such—the last thing Donald Trump wants is for his audience to think he is reading from a prepared script. At this stage in the campaign, he was generally holding notes but seldom referring to them. The notes themselves were headlines, not prose, handwritten in large letters. Many political speeches sound like the work of a committee. This is undeniably, truculently first person.

And it’s fluid, the words following a still emerging train of thought. He starts an idea—“In other words they went through…”—presumably intending to say something like they went through my speech and twisted what I said and presented it out of context. But this is exactly the kind of whiny complaint that conventional politicians make, so halfway through he drops it in favor of the far punchier “and then they lied.” Isn’t lying what these political and media enemies are all about? Cut to the chase. “And when I hear some of the people that I’m running against, including the Democrats” sounds like we’re about to get a paragraph attacking other would-be Republican nominees, or the Democratic contenders, or both. But Donald Trump doesn’t want to waste time pointing out the different ways Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are defective candidates. In fact, he doesn’t sound very interested in other candidates at all. So he simply leaves it out and jumps, midsentence, to the main thing on his mind: “We have to build a wall, folks.”

The passage is punctiliously immoderate. Professional politicians have traditionally wanted to be seen as wise counselors, mastering the details and carefully weighing the options before making a policy proposal, and at least seeming to listen to serious objections made to them by opponents. Donald Trump speaks as if the truth and the right policies were blindingly obvious, and the so-called wise counselors who claim that the world is a complicated place, and that policymaking needs to take account of that complexity, are idiots or in somebody’s pocket. Saying the “unsayable” is the clearest possible way of signaling this contrary stance. But for Donald Trump, stomping on political correctness is more than effective positioning. He’s found a wanton ecstasy in it, a joyous spasm of indignation in which supporters are only too happy to lose themselves.

The Trump style eschews any kind of rhetorical cleverness. There are no cunning mousetraps like the death panel. The shocking statements are not couched in witty or allusive language. His campaign slogan—Make America Great Again!—could hardly be less original or artful. Everything is intended to emphasize the break with the despised language of the men and women of the Washington machine. There is a wall between them and you, Trump seems to say to his audience, but I am on this side of the wall alongside you. They treat you as stupid, but you understand things far better than they do. The proof that I see the world as you do is the fact that I speak in your language, not theirs.

When Donald Trump repeated his ideas about how to tackle illegal immigration in a later debate in November 2015 with some of his rivals, one of them, Ohio governor John Kasich, rounded on him, saying, “Little false little things, sir, they don’t really work when it comes to the truth.” But polling suggested that many potential Republican voters thought that Kasich himself had been too aggressive in the way he had taken on Trump, and Trump’s numbers continued to rise.

Earlier in this book, we met the Greek old comedy stock character of the alazon, the braggart. Donald Trump has the aura not only of this but also of other, quintessentially American, fictional figures. Indeed, it sometimes feels as if one of David Mamet’s characters, say, had stepped off the stage and into what we must continue to convince ourselves is real life.

But, as the 2016 campaign has demonstrated repeatedly, it would be a mistake to dismiss candidate Trump’s rhetoric out of hand. If he is a braggart (and he might wear that badge with pride), he is one with an astonishing ability to listen to and respond to the mood of his audience. He has single-handedly revolutionized political messaging, issuing statements and rebuttals or simply emoting out loud around the clock. He has communicated ten times as much as his more guarded, more “professional” opponents, filling the political battleground with his noise and drowning out their more carefully rationed utterances. The sheer volume and Trump’s willingness to immediately exploit what works and ditch what doesn’t, allow his to be an experimental rhetoric. He has been in the market testing words and ideas much more aggressively than his rivals, and learning and adapting more quickly as well. The most erratic and idiosyncratic presidential candidate ever, lacking the organization, resources, and self-discipline considered essential for success, Donald Trump has nonetheless rewritten the rule book on American political language.

He may be sui generis, but the fundamentals of Trumpian rhetoric—the explicit rejection of the decorum and moderation of traditional political discourse, its replacement with anger, shock tactics, and radical policy simplification, the fetishization of tell-it-like-it-is “honesty” as the only value in public language—can be heard in the speeches and slogans of populists and antipoliticians across the developed world. In the United States, the Republican Right has been experimenting with inflammatory, extremist rhetoric at least since the birth of the Tea Party, though many of those responsible for it now claim to be aghast at where it has led. Once this new rhetoric of rage would have been political suicide. Today it resonates with tens of millions of Americans, while—to them, but not only to them—the cadences and tropes that used to hold sway at elections have come to sound evasive, stuffy, and remote.

British politics used to be more restrained but, in the run-up to the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, the Brexiters adopted some decidedly Trumpian tactics. Immigration was their ace card, and they exploited it ruthlessly, including with a poster showing a sea of refugees that was worthy of Goebbels himself. On their “battle bus,” they plastered the deeply misleading claim that the UK sends the EU “£350 million a week.” They dismissed warnings about the risks of exit from Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and other world leaders, not to mention the overwhelming majority of economists and central bankers, as hot air from hated “elites” to whom no one should pay attention. Donald Trump endorsed their campaign—and cheered their victory.

Not that the Remainers were blushing violets. War, economic disaster, the collapse of the NHS, and the ten plagues of Egypt were promised in the event of a vote to leave. With every fact debated and every source of independent expertise rubbished, the public were left to cast their vote largely on the basis of emotion and a gut judgment about which politicians they trusted more—or distrusted less. In the end, the Leave campaign was able to tap into deep wells of anger and alienation in the towns and smaller cities of the English regions and Wales, and add many blue-collar Labour voters to the ranks of the traditional, mainly Tory, Eurosceptics. That was enough.

For the UK’s elites, it was an almost unthinkable reversal and terrifying evidence of how far the country had lost faith in their worldview—and their political language. Even some of the victors looked taken aback by what they had unleashed.

In the next few chapters, I will attempt to chronicle how, across the West, politicians began to abandon the formality and restraint of traditional political rhetoric and experiment with styles that were much closer to everyday language, more direct, often more pungent, but less capable of sophisticated expression. We’ll look at two critical interactions: the increasingly fraught relationship between the politicians and a media that has itself been experiencing headlong change, and the growing divergence of the language of politics from that of policy making. But first let me set the political scene by introducing the heirs of Reagan and Thatcher.

In the last chapter, we heard Ronald Reagan declaiming in front of a very real wall in Berlin in 1987. Two years later, on November 9, 1989, that wall was breached, and within weeks Soviet rule in Eastern Europe came to an end. Soon the Soviet Union itself would break up. The Cold War was over and the West had won.

Germany got down to the task of the reintegration of its formerly Communist Eastern lands with trademark focus. Elsewhere on the Continent, victory in the struggle against the USSR did not bring a new unity, but rather an acceleration of the centrifugal political forces that had already made themselves felt in the last years of the Cold War. In Italy, the investigation known as Mani pulite (clean hands) precipitated the final collapse of the venal and discredited political structures of the postwar era. The arrival of the Second Republic in 1994 did not bring stability, however, but further fragmentation of Left and Right and a window of opportunity for one of the first of the new populists, Silvio Berlusconi. In France, the fiercely anticommunist Socialist François Mitterrand remained president until 1995. His reputation was to suffer in subsequent years as the extent of his instrumentality and cynicism as a political operator came to light, not to mention questions about his activity in Vichy France and his government’s collusion in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In office, Mitterrand quickly abandoned his socialist agenda for the country in the face of economic headwinds. Long years of gradualism followed, including two spells of cohabitation, when he was forced to govern with a parliament controlled by the Right. Mitterrand was succeeded by a conservative centrist, Jacques Chirac, who campaigned on a platform of reducing government spending and lowering taxes, but as president soon found himself cohabiting as well. He achieved few of the reforms he had promised. The next president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had been a controversial and outspoken interior minister, cordially disliked by the Left. He too promised significant economic and social reform, but—especially after the global financial crisis erupted in 2008—backed down and governed much as his predecessors.

Unlike America, but in common with most European countries, Britain began the ’90s still feeling the sharp effects of recession. The political execution of Margaret Thatcher and the selection of a far less forbidding successor in the form of John Major enabled the Tories to hang on for most of the decade, but the bitterness and hatred of the Thatcher years remained, especially in the Midlands, the North of England, and Scotland and Wales. She entered folk memory as a horror movie bogeyman, while the Conservatives found that for much of the UK they had become “the nasty party.” Politics and the coverage of politics became nasty too, and remained nasty even after the long economic boom began with the UK’s ejection from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (a precursor to the euro) in 1992. Like one of Shakespeare’s unhappy English monarchs, John Major struggled with one political rebellion after another, and off-the-record disloyalty—Tories claiming that honesty or their conscience required them to stab their own colleagues in the back rather than attack the opposition—became the norm.

That opposition was becoming much more professional. Tony Blair was elected Labour leader in 1994. The party had already been out of power for fifteen years and was desperate to get back into government. Their new leader capitalized on the progress made by two predecessors, Neil Kinnock and John Smith, and convinced Labour to move to the ideological center. Old differences were put aside for the time being. Tony Blair tried to give this new positioning the mark of permanence with one of the simplest rhetorical expedients of all: he renamed his party. From now on, it would be New Labour, the word “new” suggesting youth, freshness, open-mindedness, modernity (all words the public might well associate with the young Mr. Blair himself). Implicitly, however, the new brand also condemned old Labour, whose failed policies and dated class-based messages had cost it the previous three general elections.

New Labour was an exercise in what, around this time, Bill Clinton’s sometime adviser Dick Morris started to describe as triangulation. He explains it in an interview on PBS’s Frontline in 2000:

Take the best from each party’s agenda, and come to a solution somewhere above the positions of each party. So from the Left, take the idea that we need day care and food supplements for people on welfare. From the Right, take the idea that they have to work for a living, and that there are time limits. But discard the nonsense of the Left, which is that there shouldn’t be work requirements; and the nonsense of the Right, which is you should punish single mothers. Get rid of the garbage of each position, that the people didn’t believe in; take the best from each position; and move up to a third way. And that became a triangle, which was triangulation.2

“Move up to a third way” is significant. The triangulator sees himself at an Olympian point above the two old positions. This was exactly what Tony Blair had in mind: to combine Margaret Thatcher’s faith in markets and in the reforming power of deregulation with a leftist’s concern for social justice and inclusion. Conservative disregard for the less well-off and old Labour pipe dreams about compulsory egalitarianism could both be consigned to the recycling bin.

In the mid-1990s, the electoral advantages of this “third way” were overwhelming in both Britain and America. But triangulation has a weakness. For all their faults, the two old positions—in Britain, free-market conservatism and traditional socialism—are ideologically settled. Each has its literature, its dyed-in-the-wool supporters, its own robust internal logic. The triangulator’s eyrie high above them has none of these. From it, he seeks to command politics by driving a wedge through the ideological middle, but he is vulnerable from both Left and Right. And like any exercise in splitting the difference, the policy choices can feel arbitrary—Why strike the balance here rather than there? In the mid-’90s, against the backdrop of economic success and a manageable international scene, triangulation looked like the politics of the future. A decade later, many voters would ask themselves if it had ever added up to anything more than tactical opportunism.

Triangulation was a more radical challenge to the divisiveness of purist Left-Right democratic politics than Butskellism. If that had been pragmatic and transient—an echo of the government of national unity that had won World War II—this was an attempt to supplant the politics of ideological division and push it permanently to the edges of national life. The Blairite “third way” had a genuine policy agenda, but we can also think of it as an attempt to replace one rhetoric, the acrimonious and futile wrangling of the Thatcher years, with another. Instead of insults hurled across an unbridgeable ideological gulf, the triangulator’s synthesis would be made real for the public by a new way of talking about policy. There is no better example than that early rhetorical coup de main by Tony Blair that a future Labour government would be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”

This sophisticated new note was hard to strike consistently, however, and for traditionalists it could sound suspiciously like dalliance with the enemy. Tony Blair and his team had observed the disastrous result of mixed messages both for their own party and for the Major government, and had witnessed the glee with which the British media seized on anything that could be interpreted as a sign of party disunity. They also knew that—notwithstanding triangulation—in office they would face an overwhelmingly hostile conservative press.

So they decided to take a new, far more tough-minded approach to communications. From now on, there would be a comms strategy and a grid—a chart plotting everyone’s speaking calendars so that they could be compared and coordinated. Every political message, whether offensive or defensive, would be conceived and refined to further the government’s overall strategy. It would then be dropped into the optimal spot in the grid, so that the words came from the right lips in the right place at just the right moment. The room for maneuver in communications that individual politicians and government departments had historically enjoyed would be curtailed. And there would be sanctions: anyone who spoke out of turn would not only lose the political backing of No. 10, but would also find himself or herself being actively briefed against and, if necessary, dispatched to the outer darkness of the back benches. To enforce the new regime, Tony Blair appointed Alastair Campbell, a former tabloid political editor, as his head of communications and strategy. He would do the job with brilliance and an air of savage righteousness.

In opposition and in the early years of government, the Blair-Campbell approach was astonishingly successful. Tony Blair and his political partner Gordon Brown ran circles around John Major’s battle-weary troops. In 1997, Tony Blair arrived at Downing Street amid great public optimism and, in his first few months in power, displayed a preternaturally confident touch with the media. He negotiated the tricky aftermath of the death of Princess Diana (“the people’s princess,” he called her on the morning of her death) with delicacy and grip. Then he and his advisers decided to stake his personal political prestige on direct involvement in peace talks in Northern Ireland, previously an elephants’ graveyard of British political reputations. The graciousness and generosity with which he negotiated and promoted the Good Friday Agreement positioned him perfectly as a statesman who could soar above the political fray and reconcile the irreconcilable. He had another memorable (if unintentionally hilarious) one-liner ready when the agreement was finally reached: “A day like today is not a day for sound bites really, but I feel the hand of history on our shoulders.”3

Yet over time, the way he and Alastair Campbell sought to choreograph the story of the government became the story. This was not the first regime to endlessly rerelease good news, kowtow to newspaper proprietors, or ruthlessly sacrifice its own ministers when a damaging story ran for too many news cycles. But the weird combination of professionalism and paranoia with which the Blair government sought to guard its narrative felt new and decidedly alien, a break with a—now misremembered and romanticized—tradition of impromptu heartfelt eloquence, dazzling wit, and endearing British fallibility.

Blair’s people believed, and said quite freely if one challenged them, that the new tactics were the only credible response to an unremittingly hostile media environment. That claim was hard to dismiss. Unfortunately, the effect was to make not only the conservative newspapers but more or less the whole of the media doubt every word they said. The new government’s response to that mounting skepticism was to redouble its efforts to control the message.

An incident in 2001 crystallized the feeling that official news management had taken on a disturbing life of its own. On September 11, Jo Moore, an adviser to one of Tony Blair’s ministers and a former chief press officer of the Labour Party, sent an email to the press team in the ministry responsible for transport, local government, and the regions, saying, “It is now a very good day to get anything out we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?” Given the thousands of innocents who were losing their lives at that moment in the World Trade Center, it was a grotesque suggestion, one that seemed to speak of a loss of moral bearings, not just by a single political operative but by an entire government.

Spin was the word used to describe this. It originally referred to one particular form of media manipulation—proactive off-the-record briefings by so-called spin doctors to encourage journalists to adopt the preferred interpretation of a given political statement or event—but it came to be associated with the whole bag of tricks. Many of the techniques were as old as the hills. Political discourse has always been manifold, the official speechifying accompanied by a quiet word in the right ear, the planting of the right rumor or joke. But the obsessive and hostile coverage of Blair-era spin meant that many members of the public became fully aware of it for the first time.

The new approach to communications irritated the media and troubled the public, but not enough to blight New Labour’s upward path. Tony Blair was reelected easily in 2001 and moved confidently into a second term. At this point, observers could have been forgiven for asking themselves why such a successful government felt it needed to spin quite so hard.

But then 9/11 happened, Britain joined the American-led war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and by the middle of 2002, it was clear that Tony Blair’s government was also contemplating joining the United States in a second war to unseat the dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The government justified the war on the basis of “evidence” about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, which famously turned out to be false.

Insensitive emails are one thing. Invading a country on the basis of unjustified claims about nonexistent security threats is another. Once the gulf between the government’s claims about Saddam and the reality became apparent, Tony Blair and his colleagues suffered a loss of credibility from which they would never recover. It was characteristic of this astonishingly focused and energetic team, however, that they would never stop trying to do just that. One of the countermeasures that Alastair Campbell and the prime minister’s audience insight guru, Philip Gould, now deployed in earnest was an unconventional approach to TV appearances by the prime minister that they had first experimented with in the noisy run-up to the Iraq war: the masochism strategy.

This was a response to the realization that the bond of trust between leader and audience (the bond of ethos and pathos) was at breaking point, specifically because the audience had come to believe that the leader was so set on his course that he was no longer listening to them and was incapable of course correction. The conviction that this process had passed the point of no return had prompted the Conservatives to replace Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1990. The masochism strategy aimed to forestall such a disaster by offering the leader up for a confrontation with critical citizens on live TV, where he would have no choice but to listen and to be seen to listen. If the masochists had been around in the early 1980s, they would have regarded Mrs. Thatcher’s Belgrano confrontation on Nationwide not as a PR mistake but as a heaven-sent opportunity. By Tony Blair’s final election campaign in 2007, masochism had become a central communications doctrine. Here’s Blair’s biographer, Anthony Seldon:

A key campaign strategy was to expose Blair to as much media publicity as possible and show him confronting his critics. The party’s “war” book, the bible on how the election should be fought, said that “TB must connect with the electorate, particularly with the hard-working majority, and make it clear he is not abandoning them.” … Opportunities were positively sought for him to appear on television and admit “we’ve made mistakes, we can do better and I’m aware of that.” Campbell and Gould thought it important for him to be seen to be “taking some hits.”4

During the campaign, Tony Blair repeatedly found himself under fire on live TV from members of the public on topics ranging from Iraq to the NHS to income inequality. He patiently defended the detail of government policy, but the purpose of the exercise was at least as much about ethos as it was about logos. Here is a leader, his presence seemed to say, with the courage to stand up to his critics and the humility to listen as they read out the charge sheet. He took great care throughout to look people in the eye, to let them speak without excessive interruption, to respond without belittling them or suggesting superior intelligence. He never forgot anyone’s name.

The pop psychology may be straightforward, but this is sophisticated political messaging that adds a layer of soft subliminal rhetoric—the gutsy but empathetic leader willing to take the heat in his effort to understand and convince the public—to the traditional layer of policy advocacy. “Winning” is no longer only, maybe not even mainly, about winning the argument as such but about reestablishing a mood of sufficient mutual trust that the argument can at least begin to be heard: ethos, pathos, logos, in that order.

You can debate which you prefer: the angular, patronizing, but unselfconsciously authentic voice of Margaret Thatcher talking to Diana Gould on Nationwide in 1983, or the carefully composed humility of the listening Tony Blair twenty-four years later. But you cannot deny that the second represented, for good or ill, an innovation in the marketing of political leaders or, to use a term coined by Vladimir Putin’s sometime media adviser, Gleb Pavlovsky, an advance in political technology. Today it features as a defensive tactic in communications playbooks across the Western world. When President Obama decided in January 2016 to use his executive powers to introduce new gun controls without congressional support, it was inevitable that a few days later he would make himself available to be grilled on live TV by gun supporters—indeed, he criticized the National Rifle Association for refusing to take the opportunity to face him down in front of the cameras.

But counterspin, which is what the masochism strategy adds up to, is really just a variant of spin, based on the same research techniques and the same marketing insights, devised by the same experts. It speaks to the absence of manipulation—look, no hands—but is of course itself exquisitely spun. For that reason, it can succeed in dispelling press and public skepticism about government messaging only in specific political circumstances, and only momentarily.

The masochism strategy was predicated on another bleak conclusion by the comms experts—that conventional media had become so hostile that they should take every opportunity to circumvent it entirely. Better to be confronted by a group of angry but still biddable members of the public than by one of the broadcast media’s professional hit men. In the UK, this instinct to circumvent the media whenever possible would survive the Blair and Brown governments. Before he became prime minister, David Cameron said to me that he could no longer see why any public figure agreed to be interviewed by the BBC Newsnight anchor, Jeremy Paxman; it had become a “snuff movie for politicians.”

But the attempt to reestablish trust by establishing a direct dialogue with the public went much wider. Town hall formats, more or less choreographed, became increasingly popular in election campaigns. Even between elections, governments and opposition parties would attempt to draw the public into discussions about policy choices, in exercises like Tony Blair’s Big Conversation, a road trip during which he and other ministers were supposed to listen to citizen perspectives on public policy. Petitions—now e-petitions—which for centuries had been an informal part of political life became officially sanctioned with the guarantee that, if a certain threshold of names was reached, a parliamentary debate would follow.

When David Cameron came to power in 2010, his director of strategy Steve Hilton arrived at No. 10 with a fresh set of ideas about how to draw government and people closer together. Instead of traditional policy levers and paternalistic public information campaigns, ministers would use insights from social psychology and behavioral economics to help drive meaningful progress on such intractable issues as poverty and unhealthy eating: a Behavioural Insights Team—immediately and inevitably dubbed the “Nudge Unit”—was quickly set up in Downing Street. The government would also release vast quantities of data and make it freely available to the public on the Web. This new transparency would not only drive efficiency and innovation in public sector organizations but also promote citizen engagement and personal, social, and corporate responsibility. Hilton’s “postbureaucratic” plans to replace big (and distrusted) government with reform to be led and carried out by the people themselves called for the mobilization of social entrepreneurs, hundreds of thousands of community activists, and an army of citizen-leaders.

The army never materialized. Indeed, little of this came to pass, and none of it—nor the incessant tweeting and posting, the Web sites and the YouTube videos—seemed to have the slightest effect on public trust or engagement. A somewhat frustrated Steve Hilton left No. 10 in early 2012. The Cameron government soon settled into a middle-of-the-road approach to communications, experimenting in the digital space but placing much store by its inevitably more cordial relations with the conservative press. As for spin, while avoiding some of the wilder excesses of the Blair years, Whitehall and David Cameron’s No. 10 quietly incorporated most of the techniques pioneered by Alastair Campbell and Co. into their own playbooks. Toned down and domesticated, so familiar now that people seldom remark on it, spin became routine.

In several respects, the story of spin in Britain is unique. It arrived abruptly—or at least that was how it appeared. It became a significant focus of political attention itself. It felt more of a breach with tradition there than it did, for instance, in the United States, where political communications had been professionalized much earlier. As a result, many members of the public took it personally.

But in truth, spin—the aggressive and systematic attempt to control the political message—became standard operating procedure among mainstream parties virtually everywhere in the Western world. Most continental European countries avoided significant involvement in the Iraq War and did not feel betrayed over the casus belli as many in Britain did. But the global financial crisis that unfolded from 2008, and the painful recession and public sector cutbacks that followed it, seemed to cast just as much doubt on what their elites had been telling them. Cynicism about politics is hardly new, but by the end of the decade, attitudes were hardening and anger was rising across the Continent and the English-speaking world. Citizens who a few years earlier might have been prepared to put their skepticism on hold and give at least some of the politicians the benefit of the doubt, now distrusted all of them. Even before that, however, in some countries challengers had emerged who sought to distinguish themselves by the way they spoke and to reject the carefully constructed and focus-grouped language of the incumbent parties in favor of something more earthy and immediate.

Let’s return to Italy. In the last chapter, we heard Pier Paolo Pasolini calling for a new unifying technocratic public language for the country. In his book Language and Society in a Changing Italy, Arturo Tosi charts what actually happened to political rhetoric in Italy in the last years of the consensus and in its chaotic aftermath.5 Traditional orotundity and abstraction increasingly gave way not to a dispassionate language of plain facts and rational policies but to the vivid and the demotic. Political statements became more direct and less coded. Slogans, typically pugnacious and memorable, often took center stage: Roma ladrona, la Lega non perdona! (Thieving Rome, the League will not forgive you!).6 Bloodcurdling, if faintly camp, military metaphors began to abound, especially on the Right—Stiamo già oliando i kalashnikov (We’re oiling the Kalashnikovs) was one contribution from Umberto Bossi of the Northern League,7 while an argot based on Italy’s national sporting obsession became popular with politicians of every political stripe:

I don’t believe that our position is offside.

—Fausto Bertinotti, Rifondazione comunista

They’ve put me on the bench and on the bench is where I’m staying.

—Guilio Andreotti, Christian Democrat, former prime minister 8

This is a public language aimed at the common man and woman, though scarcely as Pasolini imagined it: it is the language of the TV blaring in the corner of the living room or behind the bar; the language of supposed popular authenticity; and, at least in the mouths of male politicians, of clicheic Italian virility.

More than any other modern Italian political figure, Silvio Berlusconi typified the new rhetoric. Admirers sometimes compared him to Reagan and Thatcher, the courageous free marketer with the courage to take on and sweep aside a corrupt generation of trimmers. But in truth he lacked their commitment to reform, their zeal, their strategic consistency. Silvio Berlusconi appeared on the scene as a quintessential parapolitician, a Trump before the fact: populist, changeable, instrumental—and with a rhetoric to match. From his first appearance on the political stage, he was a predictable and assiduous fan of football and military metaphors, both of which fitted comfortably with his central presentation of himself as the masterly but plainspoken businessman sent to Italy by God.

He had a brand marketer’s touch when it came to naming the many parties and coalitions he assembled over the years: Forza Italia (Come on Italy!), Polo del Buon Governo (Pole of Good Government), La Casa Delle Libertà (The House of Freedoms), and so on. But in other ways his political discourse was more novel. Tosi identified several curious tics, including Berlusconi’s habit of dropping courtly and consciously old-fashioned phrases into his speeches (mi consenta—“if you’ll allow me”) and his unnerving use of the honorific when referring to himself in the third person (il Signor Silvio Berlusconi). Then there are the jokes. “I am the Jesus Christ of politics.” “Ah, Barack Obama. You won’t believe it, but the two of them sunbathe together, because the wife is also suntanned.” “When asked if they would like to have sex with me, 30 percent of women said yes, while the other 70 percent replied, ‘What, again?’”9

Whether the man himself would ever have admitted to a “Berlusconi rhetoric” is another matter. For Silvio Berlusconi, the words rhetoric and rhetorical were always an insult—associated with the old political culture he was trying to sweep aside. When he sued La Repubblica in 2009 over the ten hard-hitting questions about his conduct the newspaper had repeatedly printed, he claimed that the questions were not just defamatory but “rhetorical,” when in fact that was the one thing they were not.10

So what is going on here? For many Italians, especially on the Left, Berlusconi’s erratic rhetoric was nothing more than idiocy. Many foreign observers were tempted to agree, especially as tabloid headlines and legal entanglements came to define both the man and an era in Italian politics. The term bunga bunga, used by the media to refer to the orgies in which il Cavaliere was alleged to delight, grew into a kind of maximal enthymeme itself, a world of pantomime hypocrisy and color-saturated excess.

But one could make the case that what Berlusconi was in fact doing—with some craft—was deploying a heterogeneous tool kit of words and rhetorical gestures with the specific aim of forging and then maintaining a grand tactical alliance of the Italian Right: at one moment echoing a lost politeness that might still speak to some older conservatives, switching to the suave and modern managerialism of the billionaire entrepreneur, then to the voice of the strongman with its dog-whistle hint (always deniable) of the age of Mussolini, and finally to the language of the terraces of AC Milan—the old, the young, white collar, blue collar, big business, small business, the hard-liner, the semi-detached.

Even the jokes have a knowing, postmodern quality to them. Berlusconi resembles a stand-up comedian of the old school who has discovered that he can use his well-worn shtick successfully with a new, younger crowd that interprets his material as an entertaining and teasing attack on the boundaries of political correctness, the more risqué the better, while his original audience can still laugh along at the same blue jokes without being aware of the wink and the quotation marks.

And despite the incomprehension and disgust of political opponents and the wider world, this linguistic concoction worked well enough for Italians to give Silvio Berlusconi two spells as prime minister. But it is a purely political public language, optimized for the briefest of sound bites and the bluntest of posters, and capable of delivering only the broadest of messages. As a means of helping voters to understand the choices facing the country, like the language of the death panel, it too turns out to be an antilingua, not an aid but a stumbling block in the path of understanding.

Silvio Berlusconi is often dismissed as an isolated aberration, but as anxiety about immigration and Islamist extremism grew across Europe, other conservative leaders started reaching for similarly crude rhetoric. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch anti-immigration Party for Freedom, should have described the Prophet Muhammad as a pedophile and a murderer. But by the 2012 presidential election cycle, even Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, was stating bluntly that there were too many foreigners in his country. The Left had been attacking the crudeness of Sarkozy’s language on immigration and other issues for some time. In 2010, one of his ministers, Luc Chatel, had defended the president’s rhetoric by saying that in these complicated and difficult times, the president was right “to speak straight and true,” and to refuse the kind of “convoluted style and syntax” that loses both listener and citizen.11 The irony of suggesting that the right response to greater political complexity is less sophisticated language seems to have been lost on both Luc Chatel and his boss.

Russia’s brief flirtation with something approaching open democracy ended in what one British foreign secretary called the “drunken shambles” of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, which ran from 1991 to the end of the century. From the start, his successor, the young and politically inexperienced former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin, was determined to show what a different animal he was. Here he is in a 1999 press conference three months before he became president, laying out his strategy to eliminate the threat from Chechen terrorists: “We will track down terrorists everywhere. If they are in an airport, then it would be in an airport. I beg your pardon, but we WILL hunt them down and blow them away even if we find them in the shitter. End of story.”12

The pungency of the key phrase my ikh i v sortire zamochim, which means “we’ll ‘wet’ them even in the shit-house,” made this one of the new president’s most noted early remarks. As Rémi Camus, an expert in Russian grammar and linguistics, explains, the family of words denoting wetting and wetness, including the verb (za)mochit—“to wet”—have been used by criminals and police since tsarist times to signal the spilling of blood. Mokroye delo, “wet business” or “wet job,” originally meant a violent robbery or murder. In the golden age of the KGB, it was slang for a clandestine operation involving an assassination.13 Svetlana Boym, who until her death was professor of Slavic and comparative languages at Harvard, told me that she thought there might be something else behind Putin’s words, a reference to a specific kind of hazing in the army and the prison system, in which Muslim recruits and prisoners are forced to defile themselves by being made to clean filthy toilets.

This is hardly parliamentary language, but that of course is the point—the new power in the land assuring his fellow citizens that he has the state security expertise and unlimited capacity for violence to get the job done. The fear of causing offense (“I beg your pardon,” like Berlusconi’s “if you’ll allow me”) is for show only; I know this world and I know what works is the real message. No one had ever talked like this before. It cut through the conventional political rhetoric of 1990s Russia like a knife. In future, the Chekist brutality would be more veiled. The air of menace would remain.

It tells us just how debased our attitude to public language in the West has become that Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric should have often been favorably compared to that of our own leaders. Why can’t Barack Obama speak with such clarity and muscularity? some conservative politicians and commentators have wondered aloud. Perhaps they base this suggestion on the altogether more guarded language President Putin uses when he is talking to external audiences, remarks that are blandly translated and lack the ambiguity and dark allusiveness of the Russian he uses for domestic consumption. His critics in Russia believe one of his greatest skills is his ability to deliver quite different messages to audiences at home and abroad without the latter even being aware of it.

Back in 1999, Vladimir Putin’s rhetorical register was altogether narrower. The president of a country must be able to strike a wide range of notes, however, and so the circle around him, including that self-proclaimed political technologist Gleb Pavlovsky, got down to business. They were watching developments in political communications in the West with interest, in particular the experiments we discussed a few pages ago in what Putin’s team started to call direct democracy. How much better if, instead of the tainted, unruly wrangling that characterized debate in the Duma, the Russian people could enter into an unmediated dialogue with their leader! Accordingly and to this day, President Putin regularly makes himself available for multihour live TV programs during which Russian citizens can ask him questions on a host of topics.

It’s unprecedented—a Russian leader so confident, so open that he is prepared to expose himself to anything the public can throw at him and for far longer than Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, or any American president, ever attempted. Nor, unlike those Western politicians, does he ever duck and dive. He listens attentively to the question and then just comes right out with a thoughtful answer. Really the only difference between A Conversation with Vladimir Putin and Mrs. Thatcher on Nationwide is that President Putin controls the questions as well as the answers. He controls the TV channels and radio stations that broadcast the program too. The “conversation” is better described as a dramatized monologue, the leader deep in dialogue with himself and finding much he can agree upon.

This is the form of accountability without the substance, the masochism strategy without the pain. When we contemplate the dysfunctional relationship between politicians and the media in our own countries, it’s always worth remembering what the alternative looks like. You can watch it right now on YouTube.

Vladimir Putin tapped into distinct features of the Russian political scene—understandable terror of anarchy after the chaos of the immediate post-Soviet years, suppressed national anger at the country’s defeat in the Cold War and subsequent marginalization. But in other countries, all sorts of would-be political insurgents were taking a demotic axe to the discredited rhetoric of the mainstream: nationalists and single-issue agitators like Nigel Farage of UKIP; hard-line anti-immigration/racist parties of the Right like the French Front National and the Greek Golden Dawn; new popular groupings of the radical Left in Spain and Greece; protest movements like the Stop the War Coalition. All would tell their supporters that they had been lied to for years by the political establishment. All would claim to be speaking with a new plainness and candor.

But by now the public was hearing a similar message—about the need to replace deceitful spin with words of simple truth—from many mainstream politicians. Over the two decades between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the global financial crisis, the public presumption of good faith between opposing parties and factions evaporated in many Western countries. Established politicians got into the habit of calling each other liars and phonies with almost as much vehemence as the insurgents. They didn’t seem to realize that as far as the public was concerned, they weren’t just excoriating their immediate opponents; they were damning an entire profession—one of which they themselves were members. The fringe politicians and the extremists took up the cry from outside the tent. The media faithfully reported it all. No wonder that more and more voters came to believe it.

The near-universal trashing of the regular language of politics creates perfect conditions for the true demagogue, by which I mean the politician for whom populism is not a means to an end but an end in itself. In the shape of Donald Trump, it has become a central fact in the 2016 US presidential election.

Demagoguery has erupted many times before and has often sputtered quickly out. But don’t count on that happening again. The public fury that is driving the present surge of populism may be disparate and incoherent, but it is real—and growing. Political elites hope that the anger is transient and that the normal service will be resumed soon. Yet the language they would once have used to calm us down is the very thing that has failed—and that now sets the public’s teeth on edge. They’ve pressed the emergency button several times already, and nothing has happened.

Can the media ride to the rescue by exposing the difference between responsible rhetoric and the wild distortions and contradictions of the extremists? The fourth estate might like to think so, but for those who have already turned their back on the rest of the establishment, it presents not as an honest broker or a credible witness but as another part of the problem.