Twelve or so years ago I heard that well-known political scientist Jackie Mason on the subject of the political rhetoric of the day, specifically on that of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. In his characteristic Yiddo-staccato accent, Mason, as memory serves, said:
Pericles, Cicero, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and a few other well-known political orators might beg to differ, yet there does seem a fairly high truth quotient to Mason’s analysis, at least when applied to contemporary politicians. Who really fully believes the utterances of our politicians? So much of what they say, after all, doesn’t even originate with them, but are the words of speechwriters and staffers. Did John F. Kennedy ever say anything that Ted Sorsenson or Richard Goodwin or Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., didn’t write out for him? The most memorable political utterances of the past 30 years have come in the form of lies, evasions, and disinformation. One thinks of George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips” or Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” or Colin Powell—a serious and dignified man —destroying his stellar reputation by unknowingly lying before the United Nations about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In 2004 the young Barack Obama gave a stirring speech before the Democratic National Convention about the essential unity of America and then, as he began his presidency four years later, set out in so many ways to disunite the country. The recent record of political oratory in American politics, let us agree, has not been dazzling.
The grand oratorical tradition begins mainly with the Romans. Largely eschewing an interest in science—the Romans lifted their science from the Greeks—and not greatly productive in the realm of original art, popular Roman education, as French historian Jérôme Carcopino notes in Daily Life in Ancient Rome (1941),
This education was training in public argument and utterance: deliberative, forensic, and epeidictic.
Along with military success, oratory was the main route to distinction in Rome. Tacitus, in his Dialogue on Oratory, writes: “For the more powerful a man was as a speaker, the more easily did he obtain office, the more decisively superior was he to his colleagues in office, the more influence did he acquire with the leaders of the state, the more weight in the senate, the more notoriety and fame with the people.” Tell that to the verbally costive Mitch McConnell or to the lubricious Chuck Schumer. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle observes: “it helps a speaker to convince us if we are to believe he has certain qualities himself, namely, goodness, or goodwill to us, or both.” Tell that to the entire U.S. Congress and the last four presidential administrations.
The low quality of political oratory in our day doubtless has a lot to do with the electorate’s combined impatience with complexity and taste for blatancy. The phenomenon is not restricted to the United States. From England a friend of mine writes that “the country seems to be going mad, with a clear chance of having as our next P.M. a superannuated Trot aged 68 [Jeremy Corbyn] who makes Bernie Sanders look like Mrs. Thatcher.” Here in the United States, of course, we have Donald J. Trump, whose election to the presidency appears to have had less to do with him, a far from attractive human being, than with disgust with business as usual in Washington (the “swamp” and all that). So heterodox has been Trump’s speaking method that he has successfully defied the good sense of Aristotle, who writes that “political oratory affords few chances for those leisurely digressions in which you may attack your adversary, talk about yourself, or work on your hearers’ emotions; fewer chances, indeed, than any other [oratory] affords, unless your set purpose is to divert your hearers’ attention.”
Read the full article at the Claremont Review of Books.
