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By Robin Phillips|Published Date: June 20, 2011 
“O simple ones, learn prudence; O fools, learn sense.”
--Proverbs 8:5
It’s election year again. Every time the political debates come round, I am reminded of the section in Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death where he described what political discourse looked like a hundred and fifty years ago.
Postman cites the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates as an example of how much things have changed. In 1858 a day’s debate could last seven hours and was packed with richly developed intellectual argumentation. By contrast, today’s politicians typically offer us a succession of quick, disconnected points which attempt to convey a general impression of competence and trustworthiness while lacking in the rigors of analytical depth and philosophical sophistication.
Someone who has chronicled the gradual dumbing-down of American political discourse is Elvin T. Lim, political scientist from Wesleyan University. His 2008 publication The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, looks specifically at presidential speeches, yet his observations have relevance across the spectrum of our nation’s political discussions.
Professor Lim points out that the speeches given by presidents are increasingly filled with vacuous statements that do not invite rational disputation. Speeches are designed to maximize applause lines, stroke the emotions and appeal to our intuitions, while being lean on substantive content. As such, presidential rhetoric completely bypasses the type of higher order thought necessary for proper analysis.
Lim has amassed an impressive array of evidence to chronicle the steady dumbing-down of Presidential rhetoric. He calls this dumbing-down process “anti-intellectualism”, and with good reason. He contrasts it with the classical understanding of rhetoric. For the ancients, good rhetoric included logos (the weighing and judging of reasons for a particular course of action), ethos (the credibility of the speaker) and pathos (emotional appeal). “Presidential rhetoric today” Lim writes, “is short on logos, disingenuous on ethos, and long on pathos.”
Lim also criticizes Presidential rhetoric for its simplicity. He quotes the famous Presidential speech writer Peggy Noonan who once said, “It is simplicity that gives the speech its power... And we pick the signal up because we have gained a sense in our lives that true things are usually said straight and plain and direct.”
What’s wrong with Noonan’s approach? When Lim was being interviewed by Ken Myers, he suggested that “simplicity does not guarantee the truth, only the semblance of sincerity….It is true that most of the time when we are being truthful we say things simply and we don’t hide behind the obscuration of words – that’s exactly true. But that has no relation to the truth content of what’s being said at all. A highly rhetorically adept person can well articulate things simply and yet conceal them precisely via the simplicity of his words.”
What does any of this have to do with the primary debates? Well, consider: if the American public no longer expects their presidents to give speeches conforming to the canons of rational argumentation, then it should come as no surprise to find a similar “anti-intellectualism” among those running for president. Like the presidents they hope to become, candidates will typically seek to inspire hearers through the strategic use of evocative imagery, but will rarely develop a structured argument with a conclusion that follows logically from premises.
In marketing platitudes instead of defending ideas, presidential hopefuls are simply practicing what it will take to become President of the United States.
For more insight into this topic, buy The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, or purchase Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death from our online store.
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