The warning we had about authoritarian rhetoric
As the United States turns to the 2024 presidential election, all democracy-loving Americans should be alarmed about the rise of authoritarian rhetoric — a growing amount of it now employed by American political representatives.
In 1939, the cultural critic Kenneth Burke issued similar warnings. In “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” published in the Southern Review, Burke admonished against democracy-loving Americans uncritically accepting what he derisively called the rhetorical “remedies” offered by authoritarians such as Adolf Hitler and against diminishing the damage such rhetoric unleashes. Burke’s article implored Americans to reject authoritarian tendencies in American political discourse wherever and whenever they appeared.
Burke’s central argument was that political parties vying for complete political power need a unifying voice to be successful. Hitler, who claimed to represent the entire German nation, was that unifying voice for Germany during a tumultuous period following the country’s defeat in WWI.
Burke revealed how authoritarian leaders seductively picture themselves embodying a nation’s true and pure values and adopt (but ultimately debase) powerful religious imagery by claiming to be saviors who can restore a nation’s lost pride. According to Burke, in Germany during the 1930s, these rhetorical appeals formed the basis of Hitler’s authoritarianism as a governing ideal, leading to the creation of the Nazi dictatorial state.
Burke suggested that such messianic rhetoric endures because it successfully exacerbates problems through hyperbole and offers simplistic solutions by blaming problems on others. Indeed, according to Burke, authoritarians need to promote “victimage” by scapegoating innocent others for a nation’s complex problems. Authoritarians devise mythical dramas in which they heroically struggle against treacherous enemies. Hitler demonized Jews and his political opponents (e.g., communists), falsely asserting they were determined to destroy everything noble and good about Germany and were the cause of the nation’s ills.
Burke explained that, in authoritarian rhetoric, scapegoats symbolize the evils against which a nation’s people must unite. Authoritarians claim that only after scapegoats are purged can a nation be remade in the image of its strong leader, even as the nation, in purging those enemies, degenerates into despotism and lawlessness.
In addition to the above, Burke showed how authoritarians achieve control by taking over propaganda outlets that spread and authorize their crude ideas. The ideas then infiltrate public consciousness and rationalize all actions authoritarians undertake, however corrupt and cataclysmic, once they turn their rhetoric into reality.
By promising absolute certainty and order that only they can provide, authoritarians rhetorically create the conditions to harm opponents, destroy existing political institutions, and, in the case of some authoritarians, wage devastating wars. As the communication researchers Johannesen, Valde, and Whedbee argue, the Nazis’ constant scapegoating of Jews “as parasites” and “a cancerous disease” to be excised from the national body made the Final Solution seem justifiable to Germans.
Burke would have been appalled that authoritarian rhetoric thrives today. In Europe, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian appeals excuse his murderous autocratic ways and his quashing of all opposition.
But Burke also would have warned about prominent American political officials who praise Putin and accuse the US of causing Putin’s unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine. He would have urged Americans to repudiate home-grown authoritarians, who use rhetoric deceptively to liken the (e.g., legal and political) challenges they face (and have brought on themselves) to Putin’s ruthless persecution of Russian dissidents. This is simply another form of destructive victimage rhetoric — projecting onto others the anti-democratic sins of authoritarians.
Burke remained acutely aware that it is sometimes frustrating for democratic nations to solve problems through political dialogue and compromise. Democracies require rhetoric to induce peaceful cooperation between citizens who disagree. But they also require citizens who critically assess manipulative authoritarian appeals.
The lasting importance of Burke’s essay is how it reveals the alluring but dangerous rhetorical “‘medicine’” authoritarian leaders offer frustrated audiences who are distrustful of democratic institutions or openly hostile to them. Burke hoped democracy-loving Americans, then and now, would “know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”