The one rhetoric to rule them all

When people think about rhetorical effectiveness, we imagine ourselves as the audience, and so we tend to universalize from our experience. If it appeals to us, we call it “effective,” as though our judgment is the only one that matters. And we condemn anyone who uses a strategy that doesn’t appeal to us as engaging in “ineffective” rhetoric.

But we really disagree.

Liberals (people who want progressive change, but gradually, and from within existing political, ideological, and media systems) get really uncomfortable with conflict, violations of civility, negative campaigns, what they perceive as “personal attacks.” They turn away from that; they advocate “positive” rhetorical strategies, that find common ground, humanize the opposition, and avoid calling anyone racism.

Some leftists (call them social democrats) think in terms of policies, and so they think that we need to keep the message on policy issues. In my experience, they tend to be more tolerant of conflict than liberals, as long as it’s conflict about policies. (I put myself in this category.) Some leftists (call them heirs to the Enlightenment) believe that they are advocating the right policies, and so we need to slam the opposition (which is anyone who has an even mildly different from them) and hold out for the right policies, refusing any kind of compromise. They advocate finding a political figure who refuses to compromise and promoting that figure.

I could go on. There are lots of other positions conventionally categorized as “leftist” that I’m not talking about. My point isn’t to create an exhaustive taxonomy of “the left,” but to show that people who have a very similar end in terms of policy agenda have very different standards about “effective” rhetoric.

I also think every one of these positions (and a bunch of the ones I’m not listing) is valid. There are times when finding common ground, kindness, and listening is a wonderful approach. Projects like Hands Across the Hills and Divided We Fall are tremendously valuable. But even they show that this deeper and more charitable understanding of people who disagree with us doesn’t generally lead to changing positions on policy issues.

What’s a little misleading about the three examples above is that I’ve only used positions for which there is a match between the rhetorical and political preferences, and that isn’t always the case. (There are people who are deeply committed to the kind of policy agenda often called “far left” and the civility model of rhetoric, for instance.). Sticking with examples where the rhetoric and politics match just makes the topic easier to discuss.

Speaking of which, as I keep saying, I think the whole tendency to reduce our complicated policy and ideological options to left v. right (whether a binary or continuum) is gerfucked. But, because it is the way we talk about politics in the US, that false binary is hard to avoid (much like trying to talk about racism in the US without talking about white v. black).

The media is committed to the left/right binary because it enables the horse race frame, which people mistake as “neutral.” It’s also simply easier. Reporting that relies on analyses of policy agenda is slower, takes more expertise, and requires a deeper understanding of history and politics than journalism majors provide. The left/right binary makes marketing more straightforward, and it’s more profitable. It’s easier to get a loyal audience for a network or outlet (and advertisers like loyal audiences) by appealing to us v. them (right v. left), and generating outrage about Them. Outrage is good for the bottom line.

Paradoxically, living within an informational enclave enables people who are in fact highly factional in our beliefs and behavior to imagine ourselves to be independent thinkers. A person who watches Fox all the time might take pride in their not always agreeing with what they see; sometimes they side with Wall Street Journal (or they brag that they never watch Fox, and get all their information from The Blaze). Or, we might say that Rachel Maddow is too extreme (or not extreme enough), and we’re independent thinkers because we don’t agree with everything in The Nation.

If we accept the false binary (or continuum) then we’re likely to essentialize the opposition (attributing the same beliefs and motives to everyone who disagrees). And that brings us back to the point of this post (you thought I’d lost it): we shouldn’t assume that all audiences are the same. In addition to the fact that we might have wildly different goals in a disagreement (discussed elsewhere), even if we’re talking about trying to persuade someone to agree on a specific policy, the kind of strategy we most prefer might not be the one most effective with them.

Right now, I’m seeing a lot of critics of Trump who are arguing with each other about the best way to try to persuade his supporters to stop supporting him, or at least hold him accountable. There are people who argue we should let the little stuff (his tendency to drink water with two hands) go, and focus on his corruption of democratic institutions (such as reframing SCOTUS decisions in terms of support for him personally, his demands for loyalty), or on his policies. I don’t think we have to choose one.

Some of his supporters are Followers, and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, rational discourse is not the way to persuade them to change their support. Their support doesn’t have a rational basis. Some of his supporters are strategic—they loathe him personally, and are very worried about his policies, but they believe that Joe Biden wants to turn the US into the USSR (except with more homosexuality), and so they sincerely believe they have no choice. I think that’s a position that’s open to persuasion, but it involves persuading them first that they need to get a broader range of sources of information, and that means trying to do something about inoculation. There are people who argue that there is no difference between Biden and Trump, so there’s no point in voting (a stance that benefits Trump more than it does Biden). A fair number of those people are trolls, but not all. I haven’t found that they’re open to rational argumentation, but maybe I haven’t found the right strategies.

People have different reasons for supporting Trump, and are different in terms of what rhetorical strategies will be effective for them. The search for the one rhetoric to rule them all is fruitless.