[Various folks have asked about the book I’m currently trying to write, so I decided I’d post the part of the latest draft of the introduction that is the draft of the summary of the chapters I’ve drafted. You might sense a theme here. As it stands, the intro begins by talking about the Corinthian speech at the “Debate at Sparta” and then moves into these summaries.]
It’s conventional to think of rhetoric as changing the minds of an audience—gaining their compliance to one’s main claim or set of claims. Thus, to look at the rhetoric of the “Debate at Sparta” is to look at what strategies rhetors used to gain (or try to gain) compliance to their argument about whether to go to war with Athens. While those present eventually voted for a resolution that was implicitly a decision for war with Athens, it isn’t clear that they did so because the speech for war (the Corinthian’s) changed their minds. This chapter uses the Debate at Sparta and Alexander the Great’s speech at the Beas River in order to make two major points: first, what matters about rhetoric surrounding a decision to go to war is not whether it persuades listeners to go to war, but how the way the war is defined in the course of the discussion: what kind of war it is (e.g., preventive, pre-emptive, limited, total), and, closely connected, what the goals of the war are (in other words, at what point can we say that the war was successful, and can therefore be ended). Second, the strategies that are the most attractive to a rhetor who is simply looking for short-term gains in persuasion are ones that constrain policy deliberation and, therefore, threaten the long-term best interests of the community as a whole. Among the most effective—in the short-term—strategies is to deflect away from pragmatic disagreements about policy options by describing the situation as an existential battle between two entities, a description that can trap a culture into either a war of extermination or endless war.
The second chapter considers Charles Cambreleng’s speech in Congress in February of 1835 and several articles about the 1873 controversy concerning the ship Virginius. Both situations enable thinking about the relationship of factionalism, hyperbole, threat inflation, and bargaining. While presenting a situation as a zero-sum conflict of such intensity that we don’t have time to deliberate is rhetorically powerful (threat inflation), it isn’t always oriented toward starting a war. There are considerable benefits under various situations, including one of hyperfactionalism, in looking as though one is panting for war, even (or especially) when war is unnecessary and unwise. The problem is that appealing to the triumph of faction as a good in and of itself encourages communities to make “Vladimir’s Choice.” While the agonism of factionalism can function to ensure that there is disagreement, and that therefore policy proposals are disputed (“interrogated” is the term often used), it can paradoxically mean that irrational loyalty is admired and emulated. Thus, factionalism can either function to improve or prohibit policy disagreement, and even deliberation. The final point in the chapter is that our tendency to think in terms of binary paired terms (that is, assuming that all issues can be mapped as terms that are consistently opposed to some and associated with others) means we assume that our rich and varied spectrum of political commitments can not only be reduced to two opposing ones, but that they are opposed in every way and at every point. The more factional a community, the greater the pressure to present policy commitments as grounded in principle, and the less likely it is that they are—appeals to principle become sticks with which to whack the opposition, and not legs on which beliefs stand.
This book is an exploration of how communities do and don’t engage in effective public deliberation about war. But, I won’t rely on any very precise use of the term “war”—this book includes discussions of conflicts that never happened (such as the US going to war with France or Spain), conflicts in which war was never formally declared (Vietnam, the Falklands/Malvinas), failed attempts to prevent a war (appeasing Hitler, the Falklands/Malvinas), and times that people claim something is metaphorically war (factional politics as war). The third chapter focusses on the April 3, 1982 debate in Parliament, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in the unenviable position of having to announce that Argentine troops had occupied the long-disputed islands of Malvinas/Falklands. Although the islands were not of strategic or economic importance to either Argentina or Britain, diplomatic negotiations over the future of the approximately one thousand people on the islands had sputtered without noticeable progress for almost twenty years. Oddly enough, neither Argentina nor Britain wanted a military conflict over the territory, and both governments thought they could avoid such a conflict almost until the moment that British troops arrived. Since the area was primarily of symbolic importance, and neither side wanted military conflict, it’s interesting to wonder how they ended up in a war neither wanted. In this chapter, I’ll argue that the situation exemplifies some of the ways that factionalism can create untouchable third rails in politics, and then we have the train wreck of a war no one wanted. Or, to mix my metaphors, the short-term gains of refusing to negotiate Falklands’ sovereignty coupled with the high costs of rational deliberation about the long-term policy options meant that pundits and politicians who hoped to keep their jobs were willing to take the gains and avoid the costs.
Paradoxically, that we believe that the correct course of action is obvious to us, and would have been obvious to us had we be in the charge at various moments in the past, keeps us from learning from the past. It enables us to tell a story about gullible, oblivious, benighted, and possibly corrupt fools who ignored the obviously right policy. There are several errors in that narrative—the notion that there is a correct course of action, that it’s obvious to good people, that we are the exactly the good sort of people who see it, and that anyone who disagrees with us (or who took a different course of action in the past) did so because they are failed and flawed. The third chapter, about the Falklands War, and the fourth, about appeasing Hitler, are both about instances in which there was not an obviously correct course of action that all people of good sense and goodwill recognized immediately for what it was; more important, that there were people believed in a right answer, obvious to them, and obvious to everyone, and that disagreement about what should be done was unnecessary at best and villainy of some sort at worst, is precisely what led to decisions communities later regretted.
There’s a saying attributed to Santayana, “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” The problem with that saying is that there is an awful lot of history to know, and we don’t know which past incident we should take as our model. As will be discussed in the fourth chapter, we think that appeasing Hitler was an obviously stupid policy—not just given what we now know, but given what was obvious at the time. And so the supposedly obvious mistake about Hitler is frequently, even compulsively, applied as the obvious parallel that should make it clear that we should respond with maximum aggression to this provocation. But it is also obvious to many people (and was obvious to many people in the 1920s and 30s) that the Great War had been caused by responding with excessive aggression, thereby provoking Germany and Austria. It is (and was) obvious to many people that appeasing Austria would have been the wise choice. Thus, history does not tell us that appeasement is always an obvious mistake. In fact, it isn’t even clear that the example of Hitler is a case of political leaders making a choice which was to them obviously wrong. I think they made the wrong choice, but not an obviously wrong one, and it may have even been that they made the choice they did because so many people believed that the correct political option is always the obvious one. That is, the tragedy might have come about at least partially because people thought not only that they were right, but so obviously right that they could dismiss out of hand any disconfirming information or arguments.
Throughout the book, I argue that rhetors are tempted to avoid policy argumentation because it’s hard, not particularly popular with audiences, even less popular with most media, and often obligates them to talk about their policy or party in ways that will expose flaws. As mentioned above, one of the flaws might be that the case is rhetorically difficult and the audience is unlikely to see the situation as meriting much concern. In 1947, Harry S Truman wanted Congressional approval for providing support for an anti-communist (and problematic) government in Greece, and for Turkey. Worried that the “ill” of his case would seem remote, and the aid risky (since it might lead to another European war), Truman and his speechwriters chose the same strategy as had the un-named Corinthian: make the conflict not a limited dispute but an existential and inevitable battle between two identities. This move put the specifics of Truman’s policies above the realm of pragmatic rational policy argumentation—if we’re facing extermination, it’s frivolous to count pennies or dispute data. If the situation is urgent, then asking for democratic deliberation helps the enemy. The fifth chapter looks at the rhetorical problem presented by this framing of American foreign policy arguing that it wasn’t possible for this remain a frame only for foreign policy. It must, inevitably, become the way that domestic deliberation about foreign policy would be handled, and it was.
If we are in an apocalyptic battle between Good and Evil, then there is no such place for the everyday politics of compromise, deliberation, fairness, reciprocity. The conclusion argues that what initially seems to be an effective solution (hyperbole and demagoguery) to an immediate rhetorical problem—how do I persuade people to adopt a policy (or support me) without relying on policy argumentation, since that probably wouldn’t work?—is a trap. At some point, hyperbolic rhetoric becomes threat inflation, and then that inflated threat becomes the premise of policies, both foreign and domestic. And then agreeing as to the obvious existential threat posed by the Other and uniting behind the obvious policy solution is a necessary sign of being on the side of Good. Thus, the rhetoric of existential war inevitably has as one its major casualties democratic discourse itself. And democracy without democratic discourse isn’t democracy.