Invitation to the Bores (Hitler’s “Table Talk”–RSA talk)

To the extent that scholars in rhetoric are interested in Hitler (and that isn’t much) the attention is paid to his big rallies and major speeches, but, for purposes of thinking about our current problems with political deliberation, his smaller rhetorical situations are more instructive, specifically, his deliberations with his immediate circle.

The very effective Nazi propaganda machine promoted the “Hitler Myth:” that he (and he alone) had the sincerity, will, stamina, and judgment to lead Germany to the greatness it once had and was entitled to have again (Kershaw, Hitler Myth). His superior judgment enabled him to have brilliant insights—better than supposed “experts”—on topics ranging from interior design to economics. He was particularly prone to showing off this “universal genius” at meals, during which he delivered monologues for the benefit of his inner circle, his most devoted followers—the people most deeply committed to him, and most committed to promoting the myth of him as a universal genius. The paradox I want to pursue in this talk is that those were the people who, because of so much exposure to his opinions and processes of judgment, must have known that he wasn’t a universal genius at all. Yet, they seem to have believed and not believed in his perfect judgment.

Albert Speer, who maintained in his mendacious post-war writings that he avoided the mealtime monologues, describes an illustrative moment, when Hitler lied to his dining companions about having chosen all the marble personally for various buildings. Speer comments:”Hadn’t he noticed that I was sitting at an adjoining table? What so took me aback was and is the fact that he was still clutching at glory in such ridiculously trivial questions” (Spandau 118).

Speer says, “How intense and uncontrollable this man’s desire to show off must have been!” (Spandau 119). It wasn’t just Speer who must have noticed that quality. He mentions that “Hitler quite often presented as the fruit of his own reflections” information that Speer knew had been given him by other experts, and that all of the inner circle knew that Hitler lied when he claimed to read all of a treatise, since he also bragged about only reading the ends of books.

Speer, describing an evening that devolved into Hitler’s “lengthy expatiations on the role of the individual in history” (Spandau 58), says that Hitler’s “relationship to history was sheer romanticism and centered around the concept of the hero. He might well mention Napoleon or Old Shatterhand in one sentence” (Spandau 59). ‘Old Shatterhand’ was the hero of the German author Karl May’s Western novels, which Hitler loved, and which informed Hitler’s understanding of American history and culture (although May hadn’t been to the US prior to writing most of the Shatterhand series). Speer says that “Hitler would rely on Karl May as proof for everything imaginable” including what constitutes the ideal company commander (in the form of May’s fictional Winnetou, Spandau 347; see also Kershaw, Hitler 7, Hubris 15, ). Someone whose assessment of a major foe is grounded in popular novels is hardly a genius, let alone a universal one.

Many of Hitler’s lunch and dinner monologues were later published as a book called Hitler’s Table Talk (an obvious reference to The Table Talk of Martin Luther), or, more accurately, some version of those monologues was. The history of their publication is fraught, and there are reasons to doubt many of the passages (especially regarding religion). There is also reason to think that the published version is more coherent than what listening to them was actually like. Speer says of the published version that it “more or less filtered [Hitler’s] torrent of speech and subsequently smoothed and styled it” (Spandau 345). The book, Speer says, reduced Hitler’s repetition, “the slow, painful process of gestation which could be felt in the way phrases were formed [….] Vivid monologues have been produced out of agonizing long-windedness” (Spandau 346). It’s hard to imagine that the actual talk would have been even more long-winded and incoherent, since reading Hitler’s Table Talk is like reading the transcript of what a narcissistic sophomore in college who thinks he has smoked good weed would say to a room of people who have passed out long ago or are already getting at it on the bunk bed above. It’s hard to read them and not come to the conclusion that Hitler is a bloviating, self-deluded, thin-skinned blowhard.

It’s equally hard to believe that the people at the tables with him didn’t come to that conclusion as well.

There are similar problems with the transcripts of Hitler’s meetings with his generals (Hitler and His Generals). While the post-war narrative promoted by many of Hitler’s generals (that he continually got in their way, that they could have won the war if left to make their own decisions, that they didn’t know about the serial genocides, and that they continually resisted him, and so on) was simply untrue, the deliberations do show a leader not very good at deliberating. Like the meal-time monologues, they have passages of Hitler browbeating, rambling, and being more concerned with being right than with finding the right course of action. As his generals are pressuring him to make a decision, he might suddenly veer off into a windy digression about medals, the racial characteristics of troops, how right he was in some previous disagreement with generals, why his experience as a private means he understands strategy better than any general.

My point is that the people exposed to this blathering and bullshitting would have known Hitler was not a stable genius with universally valid insight. Yet they were the ones who most enabled him and enabled the Hitler myth. Why support him, why support the lie that Germans should trust him? What persuaded them to support him publicly? And the answer is: the way that the power relations inherent to charismatic leadership can inhibit not only deliberation, but doubt of any kind.

Charismatic authority is most famously described by Max Weber, who described it as one of three ways that a ruler can be perceived as legitimate. Charismatic authority comes from the beliefs of the followers, “how followers see things” (Economy and Society page 374). In the relationship of charismatic authority, “supernatural, superhuman, or at least exceptional powers or properties are attributed to the individual” (374). Ian Kershaw summarizes how charismatic authority relies on continually good outcomes for the followers: the power of the charismatic leader is “sustained by great deeds, resounding successes, and notable achievements, which provide the repeated ‘proof’ of the leader’s ‘calling’” (Hitler Myth 9). The charismatic leader must continually surprise his followers with his “universal genius”—that’s why Hitler would grasp at petty successes (like claiming to have picked the marble personally), and refuse to admit errors.

The question is why those obvious moves would work.

And they would work partially because they had to work. The power of the charismatic leader comes from self-confidence, which is necessary for the risk-taking. Thus, the dynamic of charismatic—the need for fawning followers, the need to impress those followers, the need for self-confidence—mean that the charismatic leader him (or her) self has to be the first and most fooled about their own supernatural abilities. And, it’s hard to maintain that level of self-delusion if the people immediately surrounding the leader are even dubious, let alone critical, of the leader. Thus, dissent is treated as disloyalty, and the consequence is that the leader has to be surrounded by people who are, or who believe themselves to be, not as insightful and charismatic.

Oddly enough, it was Speer (who was not and never had been as good at his job as his post-war autohagiographies would claim) who identified the problem with Hitler’s regime: that it put and kept in place people who were weak, corrupt, and just not very good (“inferior” is the term Speer used). Hitler’s “joy” at hearing “news which suited his course of action” and “anger at news which crossed him” (Overy Interrogations 226) meant that people didn’t give him the information, insights, and suggestions that would have led to better decisions (an important theme in Kershaw’s Fateful Choices). Hitler’s emphasis on loyalty, his need to be a universal genius, his faith in himself—all those characteristics meant that he didn’t want people around him who were smarter than he, better informed, or threatening to his ego in any way. As Speer said, Hitler’s “methods of necessity led to weak collaborators for his arbitrary method of choice brought no men with proper qualifications to the right positions” and the “inferiority” of his subordinates ensured that their subordinates would also be “inferior” (Overy 226). Speer draws the conclusion that “A system which makes the selection of the leading personalities dependent solely on the judgment, arbitrary discretion, and whims of the dictators inevitably leads to such results” (Overy 226). And that is the kind of system encouraged by the model of charismatic leadership.

Charismatic leadership, despite serious problems, remains the dominant model of leadership, especially in the popular culture of self-help books and management seminars. Americans’ persistent fascination with charismatic leadership is important for scholars of rhetoric because charismatic leadership is a theory of rhetoric and deliberation. Or, more accurately, it’s a theory of rhetoric that is anti-deliberation. The fantasy of charismatic leadership is that there are people whose ability to lead (that is, both make decisions and motivate others to go along with those decisions [deliberate and persuade]) is not discipline- or field-specific. It’s universal. People with field- or discipline-specific expertise inform these leaders who are then able to discern the correct course of action because they have a kind of judgment—extraordinary insight, vision, they’re great judges of people—that makes their assessment better than anyone else’s. This is an incipiently authoritarian model of power, in that power comes from the supposedly superior judgment of the leader. For a leader to admit error, uncertainty, or ignorance, then, is to reduce their power. Dissent, disagreement, and deliberation have problematic places in systems reliant on charismatic leadership, especially the more that the leader believes in their own charismatic leadership—they come to believe the myths about themselves (see especially Kershaw Hitler Myth 264)

Scholars in leadership have tried to manage the problem of leaders who lead organizations, corporations, and countries right off a cliff (sometimes called “the Hitler Problem,” Tourish and Pinnington 149). by distinguishing between good and bad charismatic leadership on the grounds of outcome and/or the leader’s intention. Both criteria lead one into the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy and survivorship bias.

If good charismatic leaders are ones that get good outcomes, then Hitler was a good leader until, at the earliest December of 1941; some Germans began to lose faith in November of 1943, with the encirclement at Stalingrad; and US intelligence reports said that 25% of Germans still believed in Hitler in 1945, as Allied troops were crashing into Germany (Kershaw The End, Gellately Backing Hitler, Evans The Third Reich at War). There is the same problem with assessing leaders of corporations in terms of outcomes–what if they are getting good outcomes through processes that guarantee eventual disaster? Ken Lay of Enron, Eckhard Pfeiffer of Compaq, Adam Neumann of WeWork, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, Travis Kalanick of Uber—they were all celebrated as excellent examples of transformational leaders until the moment they weren’t. Until news broke about fraud, dodgy accounting, misleading claims, cultures of bullying and harassment, they were, after all, getting good outcomes–being lauded in the press, successful at finding backers, and effectively silencing dissenters (through intimidation, NDA, nuisance suits). Their methods of leading didn’t change; the outcomes did because the methods became public.

In effect, then, “good” charismatic leadership isn’t really a different management style from “bad” charismatic leadership as long as we measure by outcomes. It’s just leadership with accurate press.

There’s a similar problem with trying to distinguish good from bad charismatic leadership on the grounds of intent—if there is one thing about which people who met Hitler agreed, it was that he sincerely believed that what he was doing was right. Intending to do good, and doing good aren’t the same thing, and believing that one is on the side of good can contribute to exploitative and dishonest practices. The problem with much scholarship on charismatic leadership is that there is a “no true Scotsman” quality about it (leaders who are exposed as exploitative were never really charismatic leaders) as well as survivorship bias (only looking at leaders who seem to be getting good outcomes).

So, why am I talking to scholars of rhetoric about a leadership model backed by scholarship that is largely “no true Scotsman” and survivorship bias? Because, the rhetoric and ideology of charismatic leadership is probably second only to the just world model (in its most powerful form—prosperity gospel) in terms of frames from within which Americans imagine the possibilities, responsibilities, and stases of political discourse. Scholars who care about rhetoric as a critical project, as something that could help people deliberate better, need to understand the extent to which the rhetoric about charismatic leadership pathologizes (and sometimes feminizes) what scholars of deliberation promote as useful and effective deliberation.

Hitler’s rhetoric worked because the people in his inner circle made sure it worked, because he had a wickedly effective propaganda machine that continually presented him as someone who, as Rush Limbaugh said about Trump, “has excellent instincts,” despite all the evidence to the contrary. A large number of Americans think deliberation is unnecessary because the correct course of action (which just happens to benefit them or fulfill their political agenda) is obvious, and anyone who disagrees with them is villainous or the dupe of villainous entities (a way of thinking about politics not restricted to one position). A concerningly large number of Americans believe that the right course of action is to put in positions of power decisive people who get the real people, will refuse to compromise, and are willing to violate any norms of discourse, fairness, process, accountability, precedence, even legality in order to enact the policy every reasonable person knows is right. We are in a world in which “disruptive” is an end in and of itself.

In other words, a large number of people, all over the political spectrum, don’t want a democracy because they don’t want inclusive deliberation, compromise, negotiation, and accountability. They want their way, and they want violence if they can’t get it. Rhetoric is, at its best, the discipline of democratizing deliberation, the alternative to violence. The rhetoric of charismatic leadership is anti-deliberation; its cultural dominance explains a lot, I’m arguing, about our current culture of demagoguery. American worshipping (and I use that word deliberately) of charismatic leadership explains many otherwise odd things about our current political situation.

Speer’s insight was that charismatic leadership is always at least a little at odds with an administration of hiring the best people. The more that we value charismatic leadership as the best kind of leadership, the more that we sideline inclusive deliberation and accountability as political goods.