The dark history of straight talk
An argument has been raging in the Trump camp this summer. It’s not an argument about policy or the electoral ground war, but about rhetorical technique. Isn’t it finally time to abandon the improv and the wild one-liners, and restrict the candidate to the button-down rigor of the teleprompter?
To his new team it may be a no-brainer, but for Donald J. Trump it’s an existential question. Last week, in an interview with Times reporters, he talked about staying on message: “Now we’re getting to Labor Day, and things will be different.” And yet he expressed worry, as he has in the past, that scripted performances would bore crowds at his rallies. “I want to do this my way,” he said.
It echoed a comment Trump made in July on Fox News, during a similar conversation: “I want to be myself. You know, it got me here.”
His natural shtick may fly in the face of all conventional wisdom about political speechifying, but it’s taken him far further than any of the purveyors of that wisdom ever thought it would. More important, he’s used his erratic and self-evidently impromptu speaking style to support the central thrust of his campaign, which is an attack, not just on the substantive track record of the establishment, but on its discredited way of speaking — the instrumentality and the focus-grouping, the suppression of honesty and real emotion in favor of boilerplate, slipperiness and downright lies.
It may feel like a new phenomenon in contemporary American politics, but the “I just want to tell it like it is” maneuver is a familiar one in the annals of rhetoric. It’s what Mark Antony is up to when he says to the Roman crowd in “Julius Caesar,” “I am no orator, as Brutus is; / But, as you know me all, a plain, blunt man,” in the midst of his “Friends, Romans and countrymen” speech, one of the most cunning displays of technical rhetoric, not only in Shakespeare, but in the English language.
Rhetoric is the language Rome’s elite used to debate; by denying that he knows the first thing about it, Mark Antony is in effect tearing up his gold membership card and reassuring his plebeian audience that, though he may look rich and powerful, he is really one of them.
Nearly four centuries after Shakespeare wrote those words, Silvio Berlusconi successfully struck the same pose in modern Italy. “If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s rhetoric,” he told the Italian public. “All I’m interested in is what needs to get done.”
But for all its protests, anti-rhetoric is just another form of rhetoric and, whether Trump is conscious of it or not, it has its own rhetorical markers. Short sentences (“We have to build a wall, folks!”) that pummel the listener in a series of sharp jabs. This is the traditional style of the general (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) or the chief executive, a million miles from the complex and conditional — and thus intrinsically suspect — talk of the lawyer/ politician. Students of rhetoric call it parataxis and it’s perfect, not just for the sound bite and the headline, but for the micro-oratorical world of Twitter.
Anti-rhetoric also uses “I” and “you” constantly, because its central goal is not to lay out an argument but to assert a relationship, and a story about “us” and our struggle against “them.” It says the things society has deemed unsayable, at least in part to demonstrate contempt for the rhetorical conventions imposed by the elite — and if that elite then cries out in horror, so much the better.
The quality to which every anti-rhetorician aspires is authenticity. But there is a big difference between proclaiming your authenticity and actually being true to yourself and the facts. So let me use a different term: authenticism, for the philosophical and rhetorical strategy of emphasizing the “authentic” above all.
Modern authenticism began as a reaction to the Enlightenment program to recast language to conform to the notion of Reason. Immanuel Kant’s friend Johann Georg Hamann was one of the first to make the case that, if you take ideas and words out of their behavioral and cultural context, they lose meaning and relevance. A purely rationalist language would no longer be able to express community or faith. Hamann’s contemporary, the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, made the critical link between language, culture and nationhood, and soon authenticity of language became associated with another product of Enlightenment thought: nationalism.
These ideas entered European thought through a chain of influence that stretched from Hegel to Kierkegaard to Nietzsche. By the early 20th century, Martin Heidegger was distinguishing not just between authentic and inauthentic modes of being, but between authentic and inauthentic language.
“Once you heard the voice of a man, and that voice knocked at your hearts, it wakened you, and you followed that voice.” That was Adolf Hitler, the man whom Heidegger would praise for helping the German people rediscover their authentic essence, addressing government and Nazi party leaders in September 1936. According to Hitler, the miraculous appearance of the “voice” — by which he meant the profound bond between himself and his audience that let him express their deepest feelings — allowed ordinary men and women, who were “wavering, discouraged, fearful,” to unite as a Volk, or national community. It was at once a political and a personal “voice” that, thanks to the invention of radio, could reach out not just to audiences at political rallies, but into any living room.
Authenticism was banished to the fringes of politics after World War II and the defeat of European fascism. Technocratic policy-making delivered relative prosperity and security for the majority, and many voters found the rationalist rhetoric of mainstream politicians credible. Authenticism does not even rate a mention in George Orwell’s landmark 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” But the uncertainty and division that have followed the global crash, mass migration and the West’s unhappy wars in the Middle East have given it a new opportunity. TODAY’S AUTHENTICISTS come in many different guises, from pure anti-politicians like Trump and Italy’s Beppe Grillo to mainstream mavericks as diverse as Britain’s Boris Johnson and Ted Cruz. None of them are Hitlerian in intent, but nationalism typically looms large (“Make America Great Again!”), as does the explicit or implicit contrast between the chosen community and a dangerous or unacceptable “other,” which in 2016 almost always means elites and foreign immigrants.
They also like to contrast their own down-to-earth way of speaking with the complex and, to many ordinary voters, bewildering language of technocracy. As Michael Gove, one of the leading campaigners for Brexit in the recent British referendum, succinctly put it: “People in this country have had enough of experts.”
A majority of British voters did indeed ignore the advice of those “experts” and their dire warnings of what would happen if the country voted to leave. It remains to be seen how many millions of American voters will reach the same verdict on the rhetoric of that technocrat’s technocrat, Hillary Clinton.
In many ways, her problem at the mike is the opposite
of Trump’s — cerebral, calculated, stripped of all spontaneity and risk, her style epitomizes what fans of “tell it like it is” bluntness think of as untrustworthy.
What we have lost and must strive to regain is a conception of rhetoric that strikes a balance between the demands of reason, character and empathy, and that strives for genuine truthfulness rather than theatrical “authenticity.”
Until that balance is restored, authenticism will persist. It need not lead to political catastrophe; it has flared up and sputtered out repeatedly in the past. Trump may well be roundly defeated, teleprompter or no. But across the West the conventional language of politics really is undergoing a crisis of credibility. Authenticism scored a victory in Britain’s vote on European Union membership, and authenticist anti-politicians and ultra right-wing parties are polling strongly in many European countries. It would be wrong to assume that any one election will see it off this time.
Ronald Reagan once said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” But we live in different times. Who could possibly object to a politician saying “I want to be myself”? And yet, knowing what we know, those five innocuous words are enough to send a shudder down the spine.
Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The New York Times, is the author of the forthcoming “Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?” from which this essay is adapted.