rhetoric society of america Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

[RSA talk] “Obscured Ends and Amoral Means: The Flickering Moralism of Machiavellian Approaches to Rhetoric”

chart showing four RVN governments between November of 1963 and September of 1964

This paper came out of my being puzzled by a paradox I kept running across in the various deliberative train wrecks I study—the intermittent moralism of Machiavellian approaches to public policy disagreements. “Machiavellianism,” only orthogonally related to what Machiavelli actually said, claims to treat means as morally neutral, often in service of some version of power politics or neo-Social Darwinism. But this amoralizing of means is both rhetorical and flickering—American intervention in Vietnam, for instance, was advocated on the grounds of moral necessity and amoral power politics, sometimes in the same document.

What I’ll pursue in this paper are some of the somewhat paradoxical rhetorical consequences of this disingenuous framing of means as amoral.

I’ll focus on US decision-making regarding Vietnam in August of 1964. August of 1964 is one of several moments of escalation, with attention generally on LBJ’s decision to lie in order to get the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed on August 7. But I’m more interested in the chaotic debacle that was General Nguyễn Khánh’s not-quite month as Chief of State. I’ll start by discussing the objectives (ends) at the time, the necessary conditions for success, the actual conditions (as described by US decision-makers), the means they chose, and finish with how Machiavellianism played into it.

Ends In an August 10 “situation report,” Maxwell Taylor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and recently appointed US Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam said that the “Communist strategy” was not
“To attempt to defeat the superior Republic of Vietnam military forces in the field or to seize and conquer territory by military means. Instead, it is their announced intention to harass, erode and terrorize the population into a state of such demoralization that a political settlement favorable to the Communists will ensue.” (#306, 657).
Robert McNamara would later identify policies in 1964 as oriented toward “the objective of destroying Hanoi’s will to fight and its ability to continue to supply the Vietcong” (In Retrospect 152). In an important –strategy setting—document in August of 1964, McGeorge Bundy said we must “make it clear both to the Communists and to South Vietnam that military pressure will continue until we have achieved our objectives [….] leaving no doubts in South Vietnam of our resolve” (#313, 675). By persuading “the Communists” that the US would not give up Vietnam, it was hoped that “the Communists” could be persuaded that a divided Vietnam—much like Korea—was the best deal they could get, and therefore take it.

Necessary Conditions To achieve those ends—a Hanoi willing to agree to a divided Vietnam—certain conditions had to exist. RVN had to be an effective and largely victorious force, capable of exterminating the insurgency without alienating the populace. The “pacification” program was crucial for achieving several of the conditions—denying communist support for the Viet Cong, maintaining the morale of the populace, achieving military victories—and it depended on “clearing” certain areas of Viet Cong agents and supporters. South Vietnam had to have a competent, trusted, and stable government. The South Vietnamese people needed to support that government, and support the war (which could only happen were the first condition met). The US had to signal willingness to throw limitless resources at the conflict. These various conditions tended to be characterized as issues of “morale” (or its opposite—“defeatism”) in official documents, documents that admitted none of those conditions were present.

Actual Conditions In that August 10 “situation report,” Taylor acknowledged that the South Vietnamese military was weak, while trying to put a positive spin on it: “In the view of US advisors, more than 90 percent of the battalions of the army are at least marginally effective.” (#306; 661). The pacification program was “proving to be a most difficult one primarily because of the inefficiency of the ministries, their ineptitude in planning and their general lack of spirit of team play” (Taylor 659). In a memo ten days later, Taylor said, “that the present in-country pacification plan is not enough in itself to maintain national morale or to offer reasonable hope of eventual success.” But the worst was the government. The US had endorsed the November 1963 coup on the grounds that Diem was corrupt, incompetent, and tremendously unpopular. He had collaborated with the Japanese (unlike Ho Chi Minh, who fought them), was brutally persecuting Buddhists, and may have been considering a peace treaty with Ho. The hope was that replacing Diem would increase Vietnamese commitment to the war by putting in place a more popular, competent, and bellicose government. It didn’t work (as can be seen in the chart at the top.

Taylor said
The most important and most intractable internal problem of South Vietnam in meeting the Viet Cong threat is the political structure at the national level. The best thing that can be said about the present Khanh government is that it has lasted six months and has about a 50-50 chance of lasting out the year [….] It is an ineffective government beset by inexperienced ministers who are also jealous and suspicious of each other [….] However, there is no one in sight who could do better than Khanh in the face of the many difficulties which would face any head of government [….] The attitude of the people toward the Khanh government, mostly confused and apathetic since its inception, is only slightly more favorable than a few months ago. Despite considerable efforts, Khanh has not succeeded in building any substantial body of popular support. (657-658).

August 13, 1964, McGeorge Bundy presented a plan called “Next Steps in Southeast Asia, “a highly important document” (Logevall 217). McNamara would later say that “the memo and its derivatives became the focus of our attention and acrimonious debate for the next five months” (In Retrospect 151). The first sentence of the section, “Essential Elements in the Situation” is “South Vietnam is not going well” (#313, 674).

Taylor responded to Bundy’s “Next Courses of Action” (which he endorsed that one assumption behind Bundy’s proposal (which he believed to be correct) is:
The first and most important objective is to gain time for the Khanh Government to develop a certain stability and to give some firm evidence of viability [….] A second objective in this period is the maintenance of morale in South Viet Nam, particularly within the Khanh Government [….] he must stabilize his government and make some progress in cleaning up his own operational backyard. (690)

The Course of Action that Bundy’s memo advocates, and Taylor endorses, “relies heavily upon the durability of the Khanh Government. It assumes that there is little danger of its collapse without notice or of its replacement by a weaker or more unreliable successor” (692). Ten days later, worried about a coup, Khanh himself would resign and skedaddle to Dalat. He had to be coerced to come back and form a triumvirate. There were no illusions about the instability and unpopularity of the government, and yet the US was pursuing a plan that, as was repeatedly insisted, depended upon a stable and popular government, which US officials knew they didn’t have. They did, however, have one that wouldn’t negotiate with Hanoi.

The Means
One of the “means” necessary for success was preventing peace talks: “We must continue to oppose any Vietnam conference” (#313). After listing the various means the US should take, Bundy says,
These actions are not in themselves a truly coherent program of strong enough pressure either to bring Hanoi around or to sustain a pressure posture into some kind of discussion. Hence, we should continue absolutely opposed to any conference. (#313; 678).

That this was the means was not publicly admitted. But the conservative and “realist” political scientist Hans Morgenthau had figured that out, snarkily noting in an article in New Leader in June of 1964:
Our main immediate problem is apparently not to win the war against the Viet Cong but to prevent the ascendancy of an anti-war government in Saigon. What we are saying and doing must, then, have as its main purpose to prevent the collapse of the morale of General Nguyen Khanh’s government and of its military forces (44).
Thus, American Vietnam policy in 1964 was to prevent negotiations with Hanoi until the morale, bellicosity, and military effectiveness of the South Vietnamese was such that Hanoi (and China) would believe that a divided nation was the best they could possibly get: “We need to apply “a combination of military pressure and some form of communication under which Hanoi (and Peiping) eventually accept the idea of getting out” (#313). The “Next Course” also advocated dropping leaflets, increased training of RVN forces, mining of the Haiphong harbor, “tit-for-tat” actions, only acknowledging successful military actions. Taylor said, “The US Mission has recognized in its information and psychological programs the need to present the Khanh government in its most favorable light at home and abroad, particularly in the United States” (# 306 660).

What I hope is striking to you is that the means were profoundly rhetorical; they were about persuasion—persuading the North Vietnamese they couldn’t win, and the South Vietnamese that they could. South Vietnamese needed to be persuaded to support the war, and both the South Vietnamese and Americans needed to be persuaded to have faith in the Khanh government—its stability, competence, and resolve. But even the American officials themselves weren’t persuaded of any of those things. So, the Machiavellianism came to be the approach to public deliberations—critics of American policy in Vietnam had to be smeared, discredited, and deflected. Preventing reasonable discussion of Vietnam policy itself became a means necessary for the ends.

Machiavellianism
I mentioned earlier that McNamara said the US objective was destroying Hanoi’s will to fight and ability to support the Vietcong. He said, “Neither then nor later did the chiefs fully assess the probability of achieving these objectives, how long it might take, or what it would cost in lives lost, resources expended, and risks incurred” (152).

The amoralizing of means didn’t mean they were actually neutral—there is nothing morally neutral about napalm—it just meant that people could deflect or even demonize public discourse that criticized the ends or means. The ends (and therefore the morality of the means) are themselves outside the realm of argument—they’re simultaneously obscured and circular (since the postulated morality of the ends or intentions justifies being dishonest about what the ends or intentions actually are). We can’t argue reasonably about the ends—because they’re postulated as moral—and we can’t argue at all about the morality of the means. Thus, amoralizing policies (the means) necessarily results in the demoralizing and depoliticizing of public discourse. The point I’m makingis that US officials (like many others) were Machiavellian not just in terms of their use of napalm, but their approach to public discourse. And my crank theory is that one necessarily leads to the other.

[RSA talk] “Ambiguous Hyperbole as a Rhetorical Strategy.”

On December 3, 2020, the Missouri Gateway Pundit promoted the conspiracy theory that originated with Trump’s legal team: that there was had video showing two Georgia election workers “secretly inject tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots into the vote count and process the fraudulent ballots for counting multiple times without detection, despite several machine hand recounts” (“First Amended” 51). Later that same day, Gateway Pundit named one of the workers, Ruby Freeman, and would later also name and give identifying information about her mother, Wandrea Moss. Despite the immediate debunking of the conspiracy, Gateway Pundit continued to promote the lie (and they’ve never retracted it). In December of 2021, Freeman and Moss sued the owners of the site—two brothers named James and Joseph Hoft, and in January of 2022 the Hofts replied. The goal of that response was to avoid accountability for what they did and are still doing, and what I want to explore in this talk is the role that the “it’s just rhetoric” strategy plays in that evasion.

The Hofts made six major “affirmative” arguments:
• The statements they made are true. “Defendants aver that all statements allegedly made by Defendants complained of by Plaintiffs are true […] Any complained-of statements allegedly made by Defendants that may happen to lack 100% factual veracity are substantially true, and thus treated as true as a matter of law. (“Defendants Answer” 18)
• The gist of the statements is true. “Any statements made by Defendants complained of by Plaintiffs that are not literally true are substantially true, in that the “gist” or “sting” of the statements is true” (18)
• The statements aren’t literally true, but are opinion or rhetorical hyperbole (i.e., “just rhetoric”). “The statements at issue in the First Amended Complaint are either statements of opinion based on disclosed facts or statements of rhetorical hyperbole that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.” (19)
• Moss and Freeman are public figures, so it doesn’t matter if the statements are true. “Due to the media scrutiny they received in connection with the 2020 presidential election, Plaintiffs are limited purpose public figures.” (19)
• Truth doesn’t matter because they were just repeating what reliable sources said. “Defendants’ statements were published in reliance on statements published by credible sources, including President Donald J. Trump and his campaign.” (19)
• Everybody was saying it. (“Incremental Harm”) “Defendants are far from the only persons to publish statements regarding Plaintiffs.” (20)

What’s striking about this set of arguments is the degree to which they contradict one another. Put simply, the Hofts are claiming that what they said is and is not true, and they did and did not believe it to be true, they did and did not want or expect their readers to take the statements literally. If what they said was literally true, and they believed it to be such, and they expected their audience to understand it as true, then it wasn’t hyperbole. The Hofts’ are using what I’m arguing should be called “strategically ambiguous hyperbole.”

Affirmative defenses are often contradictory because it’s legally acceptable to engage in “arguing in the alternative”—more or less a series of arguendo claims. Also known as throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. To claim that all of their statements were hyperbole is to say that they not only didn’t believe them, but didn’t think their audience would. Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones each tried this defense, and bungled it, Tucker Carlson tried it and succeeded. I want to talk briefly about the Carlson case, because it’s significant.
Carlson and his guest Alan Dershowitz had agreed that a woman who got hush money from Trump had committed “textbook extortion”—that is, a crime. She sued for defamation. Fox argued that the “extortion” accusation was hyperbole, and a judge agreed, saying that the “general tenor” (Memorandum 11, 17) and “context surrounding the statement” (14) would make it clear to any “reasonable” viewer that Carlson was not reporting facts, but engaged in opinion. Carlson’s “accusations of extortion are a familiar rhetorical device” of hyperbole (13). The judge said “that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes” (12), and “Carlson’s ‘dialogue was taking place on an animated, non-literal plane’” (16). The judge said that it didn’t matter whether some viewers took the statement as literally true; what matters is what a “reasonable” person would do, and that’s a common standard in law.

Common definitions of hyperbole emphasize that it is an “obvious and intentional exaggeration” (dictionary.com), “a rhetorical trope by means of which statements are made that are obviously exaggerated and thus untrue or unwarranted” (Snoeck Henkemans 269) That is, a hyperbolic statement is obviously not true, and not meant to be taken as true. But that isn’t true, as one can see in the Hofts’ brief—it isn’t obvious at all whether they believe their claims to be literally true. They are ambiguous on that point.

This ambiguity has consequences for our ability to make policy decisions. If someone uses a textbook example of hyperbole—“my suitcase weighs a ton”—and a listener refutes it by weighing the suitcase and showing that it only weighs forty pounds, the critic just looks like a humorless jerk. There’s no point in refuting a textbook case of hyperbole. The Hofts’ claims were ambiguously hyperbolic—they were absurd, and they were false, and they were and are obviously false to any reasonable person, but they were and are not obviously false to someone who lives in a world of hyperbolic claims about the villainy of Democrats. Large numbers of people (presumably including Gateway Pundit readers) didn’t understand those claims to be hyperbolic—they thought they were factually accurate–which is why the women got death threats. Those supporters may not be reasonable people, but that’s a legal and not rhetorical standard.

Thus, the exaggerated and fabricated claims of voting fraud enable Trump supporters to persuade their base that violence, negating election results, and various other authoritarian and extreme responses are justified self-defense, while evading accountability for the consequences of their persuasion. The absurdity of the claims also enables potential Trump voters who might “dislike Trump’s rhetoric,” but like his policies to deflect criticism for what they are supporting. They see his inciting violence and calling for authoritarian policies as “just rhetoric.” The same claims are hyperbole when strategically useful to call them that, and true or substantially true when that’s the useful strategy. And that’s what I mean by strategically ambiguous hyperbole.

I mentioned earlier that hyperbole isn’t always oriented toward rousing an audience. Sometimes it’s a strategy of deflection, by shifting the stasis. When Trump characterizes immigration as an “invasion,” that strategically ambiguous hyperbole means we’re now arguing about just how dangerous or criminal immigrants are. We are arguing about whether Moss and Freeman introduced tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots—that is, just how big the fraud was. That immigrants are dangerous, and that the election was stolen, are part of the frame, not part of the argument. And so we don’t talk about whether Trump tried to incite a riot that would steal the election—even if he did, it seems justified by the fraud that never happened.

Strategically ambiguous hyperbole also aids in the deflection of responsibility on the part of voters who intend to support Trump even if they don’t “like his rhetoric.” A common way of deflecting reasonable discussion of Trump’s corruption, fraud, and lying is to respond with, “All politicians lie”—a hyperbolic statement not intended to rouse but deflect. “All politicians lie” is simultaneously true and false. All politicians do lie—all humans lie—but that statement is used, implicitly, to dismiss the degree and kind of lies that Trump tells. It’s hyperbolic in its implications.

In addition to evading accountability, this flipping in and out of defending their rhetoric as hyperbole enables them to forestall refutation. To be effective at rousing an audience (and hyperbole can have other functions), a hyperbolic statement has to resonate as “true” in at least two ways: plausibility of the overall thrust of the argument, and sincerity of the rhetor.

In the case of Moss and Freeman, the base believed/s that Democrats can only win elections by cheating; even if Democrats didn’t cheat exactly as much as the Hofts said, or in the specific ways they said. Claudia Claridge calls this kind of hyperbole “emotional truth” versus “factual truth” (18), but I don’t think invoking the rational/irrational split is either accurate or useful here. The people who find this kind of hyperbole powerful think they’re relying on factually and literally true assertions about reality. They consider it a fact that the election was stolen; the details don’t matter. The data presented as proof (analysis of the video, claims about a fake flooding) don’t have a particularly important relationship to the conclusion, so it doesn’t matter if they turn out to be false (Jenny Rice’s book on conspiracy thinking describes this process elegantly). I want to emphasize this point—that there is no expectation of a logical relationship between major claims and supposedly supporting evidence means that the argument cannot be refuted. If it can’t be refuted, it can’t be deliberated.

The Hofts, like Alex Jones, Giuliani, and Trump, openly violate the norms, even of a legal case, as it is going on, and as they claim they are honoring them. Alex Jones continued promoting on his radio show the very conspiracy theories and false claims he was in the midst of a lawsuit about, during which he testified under oath that he had stopped making those claims, and for which he had apologized enough already. He has testified in court to facts about his wealth, mental health, and intentions that he promptly and deliberately contradicted on his radio show; Giuliani signed and contradicted an admission of lying. The Hofts, in a legal document, said their claims were true and untrue. The incoherence is the point.

In addition, for some people, wild exaggeration adds credibility to an argument because it shows the passionate and sincere commitment of the rhetor to the in-group. It is a kind of performative appeal to authority—you should trust me because my commitment to the in-group is unconstrained, as shown by my being rhetorically unconstrained–and that appeal to authority works in several ways. It shows passionate commitment to the in-group (“the power of the irrational rhetor”), as well as an authoritarian understanding of truth (the argument made by Robert Paxton). The “truth” of the statement might be the sincerity of the rhetor. It can be an instance of what Ryan Skinnell calls “deceiving sincerely,” a characteristic Skinnell (and others, like Paxton) have argued is present in fascism (Rhetoric of Fascism). The truth of the statement is that the speaker is truly committed to dominating, exterminating, or expelling the out-groups. And that makes everything they say, even if false, true because the “gist” (Democrats stole the election) is true.

Brad Serber has argued that Trump and his supporters don’t engage in “dog whistles,” but “howling.” Serber says, “Dog Whistling carefully avoids the direct use of epithets, calls for violence, and other more overt kinds of hate speech, [but] Howling drops all pretense of civility and political correctness” (194). The rhetor is willing to violate rhetorical norms, and so will be willing to violate other norms as well to get the policies the in-group wants. What Trump models and offers to his followers is the opportunity to participate, via agency by proxy, in grandiose violation of legal, moral, and rhetorical norms without accountability.

Finally, it isn’t just rhetoric. The strategically ambiguous hyperbole is in service of policies that cannot be deliberated because the affirmative case is made up of claims that cannot be refuted. Both the rhetors and the policies they advocate are rhetorically, ethically, and politically unmoored. As Mary Stuckey has shown, hyperbole tends to correlate to times of increased incivility—that is, violations of discursive norms, “a certain vagueness regarding means and ends” (that is, what I’ve called a depoliticized public sphere), “and a reliance on hope and nostalgia” (676). If being irrational and extreme becomes the criterion for having credibility, then deliberation, nuance, complexity, uncertainty, reciprocity, inclusion, are all deflected if not demonized. The point of strategically ambiguous hyperbole is to evade the responsibilities of rhetoric, and the requirements of democratic deliberation. When Trump says that, on his first day in office, “we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” it is tempting for people who like certain policies of Trump’s (overheating the economy, reducing environmental protection, ending gay marriage) to dismiss the anti-democratic and authoritarian policy agenda as hyperbole. That’s a mistake. It isn’t just rhetoric.

Works Cited

Claridge, Claudia. Hyperbole in English: A corpus-based study of exaggeration. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
“Defendants’ Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Petition and Counterclaims.”
“First Amended Complaint.” Case: 4:21-cv-01424-HEA Doc. #: 33 Filed:
Gerstein, Josh and Kyle Cheney.

“‘He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob’” Politico 12/14/2023 01:03 PM EST Updated: 12/14/2023 05:06 PM EST
(Giuliani) Nolo Contendre [sic] Stipulation. Case No. 1:21-cv-03354 (BAH).
Henkemans, A. Francisca Snoeck. “Strategic manoeuvring with hyperbole in political debate.” Contextualizing pragma-dialectics 12 (2017): 269-280.
Kreider, A. J. “Argumentative Hyperbole as Fallacy.” Informal Logic 42.2 (2022): 417-437.
Levine, Sam. “Jury in Rudy Giuliani Defamation Trial Urged to Send Message: ‘Don’t Do It’” Thu 14 Dec 2023 15.05 EST
Memorandum in Support of Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss. McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC, No. 1:2019cv11161 – Document 39 (S.D.N.Y. 2020).
McFadden, K. “Hyperbole.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, 4th ed., Princeton UP, 2012, p. 648.
Paxton, Robert O. The anatomy of fascism. Vintage, 2005.
Rice, Jenny. Awful archives: Conspiracy theory, rhetoric, and acts of evidence. The Ohio State University Press, 2020.
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Fanatical schemes: Proslavery rhetoric and the tragedy of consensus. University of Alabama Press, 2010.
Skinnell, Ryan. “Deceiving Sincerely: The Embrace of Sincerity-as-Truth in Fascist Rhetoric.” Rhetoric of Fascism. Ed. Nathan Crick. 2022.Stuckey, Mary E. “American elections and the rhetoric of political change: Hyperbole, anger, and hope in US politics.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs. (2017): 667-694.Trump, Donald. Trump, Donald J. “We Will Begin.” Right Side Broadcasting Network