Anger and Eloquence

Republicans are angry people. Very angry people.

Like many people I was more than a little disturbed by the tenor of the speeches at the Republican party convention. This year Republicans managed to outdo themselves in the level of vindictive, mean-spirited, frothing-at-the-mouth fury that transcended the usual irrationality of political rhetoric and approached the lofty heights of the incoherent.

Now I’m no stranger to convention speeches, and I’ve seen quite a few from both parties. They are almost always terrible, hamfisted affairs. The roaring that accompanies most convention speeches is not the crowd, it’s the combined effect of generations of our political forebears who were well-schooled adepts in the art of political oratory spinning furiously in their graves. The modern politician is incapable of constructing a speech. What he or she offers instead is a collection of phrases, an assemblage that aspires to nothing more lofty than generating a soundbite for the next day’s news. The concept of an eloquence that will not just move people but sustain them (think about what Lincoln was actually trying to achieve beyond the moment of the speech with his second inaugural, or MLK, Jr. with his “I have a dream” speech) is completely foreign to the modern politician. This creature thinks only in collections of keywords. The audience for these speeches is not primarily the people, but the news media; the media loves keyword-driven speeches, because these fit nicely into the simplifying frameworks they use to report the news. On the rare occasion where the goal of a speech is to invite a reaction from the people it is designed to be only a temporary reaction, one that will get them motivated to do something that will enhance the reporting of the story (making people really angry, or fearful, or righteous, believing there is a crisis, etc.).

This is the primary reason Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democrat nominating convention was such a standout: the man can actually construct an eloquent speech. But to be honest, it wouldn’t have taken much to set himself apart. Remember Kerry’s syntactic sledge-hammer that passed for an acceptance speech? (I’m betting you don’t, which is part of my point.) Why was it that so many Democrats that I spoke to after that convention were saying privately “Oh crap, we nominated the wrong guy. . .again?” Why is it that you can find numerous examples of Obama’s 2004 speech on YouTube, but Kerry’s speech exists on the web for the most part only in transcript form?

An analysis of Kerry’s speech by William Saletan for Slate provides the answer. When you look at the way Saletan lays out portions of the speech the intent is obvious: it’s a speech full of stubby fingers to push large buttons. Its only purpose is to generate applause lines, so that the applause will provide an index to the strength of the keyword that produced it, and that soundbite will be more likely to be reported by a credulous media. Such a speech is as far removed from eloquence as you can get; therefore, predictably, Kerry’s speech, like most speeches of the modern politician has quickly been forgotten. Once it served its purpose–to get the media gossiping about the latest move in the political horse race–it could be safely consigned to the trash compactor of history. Significantly, Saletan feels no need to comment on this aspect of the speech: it is taken for granted as the standard form and allows him to blather on about the political horse race implications of the speech.

You could argue that the bar has been set pretty low by the current inhabitant of the Oval office, a native speaker of English who nevertheless approaches speaking as if English were a third language picked up abroad during a drunken weekend holiday excursion. But it is unfair to blame Dubya for this. He is merely the apotheosis of what an entire political and media culture wants from the modern politician. Having any real ability with words is not highly valued on the part of the people (operatives and voters) who put him there. In part this is due to the strong anti-intellectualism that runs throughout the Republican party. It is, however, an anti-intellectualism that is reflective of a pretty widespread cultural mindset in the US. The US is a country that is in love with being smart, in a spelling bee, SAT, Jeopardy kind of way. It doesn’t like being intellectual in the sense of thoughtful, reflective, analytical, unorthodox, and non-formulaic.

In this environment it is hardly surprising that we should find the Republicans launching a concerted effort to criticize Obama on the grounds that he is too eloquent. Partly this is because Republicans just don’t get Obama’s political speech-making style. A Republican speech is poking people with a sharp stick, either your own “base” or the other guys; what Obama does, by contrast, appears to them like garble from outer space. But the attempt to slam Obama is also because Republicans do get it. They are desperate to paint eloquence as empty and insubstantial: it can only inspire people, only motivate them, only raise expectations (always a bad thing if you are a Republican). Republicans get the idea that words are power, and that they can effect change (think of the way Kennedy’s “Ask not. . .” still resonates). But they don’t want us to get that. For Republicans, the only role of language is to lay down the law and describe the way things are. Our role is to hear and obey. What they want to avoid at all costs is the idea that politics might provide a vocabulary that ordinary people could use to think for themselves, to dream a different dream from that already laid out for them by their political overlords.

It is an interesting thought experiment to wonder how Abraham Lincoln would have fared if he had been running for national office in today’s climate. You can get a sense of the yawning cultural gulf that separates our time from that of Lincoln if you check out Smithsonian Magazine’s excellent article reconstructing the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. Reading the article you’ll probably be moved to laughter when you compare that series of debates with our current Presidential and vice-Presidential “debate” formats. I’m betting that the laughter will, however, quite quickly turn to tears of rage and frustration. Because you are left with the unmistakable impression that Lincoln would not have made it very far in today’s political culture. In the nineteenth century, your political opponents would have attacked your ideas, your record, pointed out credibility gaps, manipulated your words for their own benefit. . .all tactics we recognize today. But they would never have disputed the importance of eloquence, even if they often fought over what eloquence meant. Rhetorical sophistication was seen as a civic virtue and an important leadership characteristic. It’s ironic, but also deeply revealing, therefore, to see the Party of Lincoln attacking the very thing for which Lincoln remains so well-known.

Which brings me back to the Republican convention slaughterfest. I know how political conventions work. I know that they are filled with what are so charmingly called “red meat” speeches that are meant to whip people up for the cameras. But there is a world of difference between Obama attacking McCain by saying that “John McCain doesn’t get it” and Rudy Giuliani’s–the former mayor, remember, of the most cosmopolitan of US cities–waving the flag of xenophobia by making nasty insinuations about those dangerous ideas that Obama might have brought back when he dared to go outside the US and tangle with “furreners.” And then there was Romney furiously bouncing up on down on his “elite liberal east-coasters” pogo schtick. Not to mention the argument in all the speeches that what really motivates Democrats is lying awake at night thinking up new ways that they can make America as unsafe as possible and turn the entire country over to the forces of Islamic fundamentalism as soon as our backs are turned.

Now it is obviously very sad that many Republicans don’t see these things as merely political theater but that they actually believe that these kinds of assertions have some basis in reality. And you would like to think that this convention would have given any Republican-disposed independent voter pause: if this is supposed to be a party that believes (suddenly) in change, why is it that all this rhetoric is vintage Republican? Why is it that the people who hold all the power in the party sound as if they could have stepped straight out of the 1980s?

Furthermore, it isn’t as if the Republicans are the only ones tossing out red meat in their convention; the Democrats certainly had their rabble rousers also. But the kind of spectacle offered by the two conventions was radically different. At the Democrat convention, the meat didn’t look all that fresh, to tell you the truth, but what made it all work was that the dogs were starving: it’s been a long time between feedings for the Democrat pack.

The Republicans, by contrast, are kept well fed. Their palates have become somewhat jaded. The “red meat” that was on display at the Republican convention had more to do with an audience of well-heeled aristocrats in evening dress watching a young woman bound, gagged, and flayed alive while chamber music plays softly in the background.

All of this however only raises another question: why is it that Republicans are such angry people?