The New York Sophist

The responses have been poor, to understate it. I see little action plan and a lot of reaction to something that was apparently “hard to imagine” – most of the population voting against foreigners and for America first. I’m not sure who finds that hard to imagine, but it shouldn’t be rhetoricians. But here we are – everyone upset and calling for the most extreme responses in scholarship, teaching, or what have you. Some favorites: Argumentation can’t be taught anymore and that we should only work on the scholarship of fascism.

I have some other ideas that I think are pretty good responses to the election, and none are totalizing or extreme. I think that campaign discourse really locks us into a bad frame when it comes to post-election communication: “This is the most important election of our lifetimes!” (this was said to me when I first voted in Bush vs. Clinton vs. Perot). “Your vote your voice!” and now “the country is doomed!” – we did have a civil war where states turned against the Federal government, and somehow we survived. This crazy extreme response is a bit ungrounded. Here are some things I am thinking about:

Assign more Constitutional reading and assignments

I think that the obsession we have with fact-based assignments for argumentation and/or public speaking is a death sentence for invention. Creating arguments about possibility should be what we are teaching, not “how to look up a peer-reviewed article.” For Christ’s sake, they won’t have access to them in a few years because we continue to support ridiculous paywalls from greedy bastards like Taylor and Francis, who do nothing but count money. Instead, show them how to craft reasonable claims based on past claims, arguments, and moments of controversy. I think rooting that in the Constitution and controversies about rights or governmental powers is a great way to root them in research and evidence that is not paywalled, but free to access as well as showing them how speculative arguments are based on facts/data/information and attempt to move decisions/actions/attitudes based on that. I think this will be a helpful way to intervene in what I see from the national election – an inability to imagine otherwise (both students and faculty are struggling with this). The Constitution is an imperfect document written by imperfect people that has been misunderstood in many ways over its life, then corrected with newer, better misunderstandings. And it’s a discourse that holds power over our daily lives. It’s the perfect pitch upon which to teach some rhetorical practices, particularly ones that claim understanding, truth, or historical continuity about something.

Change Tenure Standards

We have a wealth of amazing research out there, buried in a journal that isn’t accessible unless someone pays over $50 to access it. Most Americans (and even more people globally) don’t have access to our journals. Let’s change our departmental tenure standards to encourage faculty to try to aim their work at public(s). We don’t want to be in another situation where scholars face a devastating election result and all they can do is post links to a limited number of offset copies of their 2017 essay discussing how failures in communication could lead to a fascist state. We need to be in that discussion, as it’s happening, in the publications that people are linking to, sharing, quoting, and texting their family about. We need to encourage graduate students to write in public-facing ways. This intervention can help those who can’t afford or don’t need college to get access to some of our insights and lessons. Furthermore, it can have the added benefit of offering something – anything – against the rising tide of discourse that says universities are just forced liberal education camps. Let’s show them what we are up to.

Create a campus culture of debate

One of the biggest benefits for the plutocrats of election discourse is how distasteful, painful, and horrifying it is to have to talk to a liberal/MAGA person. By not engaging one another as humans capable of changing our attitudes about things, we engage one another as problems, issues, or blights. Democracy, like driving a car, is a cooperative endeavor even though it appears to be an individual act. Encouraging debates, that is the tradition of switch-side debate, where people advocate for positions that are not their own hardcore commitments, allows people to experience debate not as the performance of passionate authenticity but instead the attempt to reach audiences and have them reconsider their attitude about something. The focus on the role of language and rhetoric in shaping what we feel and think is vital to democracy. Changing position is the only real politics available if you want to live in a democracy – you have to believe people can change their minds. We’re losing this idea if we haven’t already. Encouraging such activity as a normal part of the educated life is an important change that I hope to try to push for going forward.

Dialectical Thinking instead of Critical Thinking

Too often critical thinking becomes a crutch for a preference: “That’s not critical thinking” is really “You don’t agree with me so you can’t think.” We need a better way to teach critical thinking then just getting the correct position on an issue or the best position that we can think of. We must prepare students for future problems of which we can only imagine on our darkest days. One way of doing this is teaching a dialectical approach to thought. Teaching students, or demonstrating to them, that as they think and speak about something the relationship to it changes, therefore it changes in their mind to something else as they are speaking about it would be the way to go. Not sure how to do this one. I’m reading a lot about dialectical method and trying to imagine how this would go in the classroom. I’m starting to think that good debate pedagogy and practice winds up here eventually. But we don’t see good debate pedagogy these days. The focus here is the attention to the statement of thought – David Bohm style of freezing the articulation for examination of that itself – in the midst of the discussion/debate/dialogue about the larger issue at hand. This could be done with some more practice perhaps and will really help students see the university as a different place, something really impossible to predict from their high school experiences but all the more lovely for it.

These are my initial responses to the election. I will have more as I think more. Let’s try to avoid the reactions. Leave that to the journalists. Scholars should be better. Professors should profess something other than doom.

Why is Bernie, or any other left-leaning person still using X or Twitter? This makes little sense to me. I guess this is just another example of people not realizing how their daily actions impact their politics. We need actual dialectical analytical folks out there with the political commentary, not just professional politicians with a brand, like Bernie.

Anyway, he X-ed something today in response to the Democratic party loss in the election:

I’m not sure why it won’t embed the way other things do on this site but it’s probably “user error” – which is what a friend of mine calls it every time I complain about my new iPhone. I hope to figure out how to embed tweets better in the future (or X’s).

Bernie misses the point here. He won’t want to talk to working class people, because working class people all share a very similar view – it is the foreigners that are taking away jobs, harming the economy, and increasing taxes. Most working-class people believe there’s a zero-sum game here with public money, and that the more we let in foreigners, legal or not, the less they will be able to take home in their check and the less good jobs will be available.

Politicians like Bernie would rather use the rhetoric of “change” – which isn’t a good word at all, it’s a “change” to move from a democracy, to a republic, to a plutocracy, to a dictatorship (the path we seem to be on now just like the Romans were). Change is so vague that anyone from any political position could use it. This is how we know Bernie isn’t serious; he’s a professional politician with a brand.

Addressing the zero-sum game means that Democrats or any politician who wants to engage working-class people will need to speak about racism and essentialism – two things that most politicians will not touch or discuss. They will vaguely gesture toward it, and then not respond when the racist and essentialist side says, “I support black people better than their own leaders do!” Which, of course, is another essentialist/racist view. What is required is a deep, deep, deep dive into the idea that we somehow have no public money and why that might be, the preconception that there’s a table with limited seats for those who want to work and be a part of a community, and that immigrants do not come here to commit crimes but find themselves in desperate situations due to the slow and poor policies we have for those people.

Bernie’s call to address the American working-class seems really beautiful and easy – it’s almost like a Trump campaign argument! But doing this is something so difficult, messy, and time-consuming no professional politician will do it.

If this interests you, it has to be done by you with the people you interact with in your daily life. This requires strategy, consideration, planning, and having difficult conversations with people who are your friends and who you care about. This is the province of rhetoric.

Unfortunately our universities are filled with RINOS – Rhetoricians in Name Only – who hate public speaking and teach it like they are teaching someone how to assemble a utility shelf for their garage. Most university rhetoricians who teach public speaking resent students, resent the course, feel like it’s beneath them, and just prostrate their entire curriculum to weird and vague assumptions about business norms (without having worked or studied business communication at all).

High School teachers are better positioned because students feel more open there to express ideas and teachers feel the pressure of the school board and community. They are performing more rhetorical dance moves in their class political discussions about class and race than the RINOs are.

A good solution is, unlike some rhetoricians and RINOs on Facebook are saying – only study fascism from now on or your work isn’t relevant (A wild claim from a discipline that encourages dilettantism, just attend an NCA convention to see it for yourself) to refigure the curriculum of the basic course and public speaking to reflect an investigation to how American government is 100% dependent on rhetoric. I’m going to be working on this and I will share my thoughts here on the blog.

But Sanders, or any professional politician, won’t do it. They understand the difficulty and danger of rhetorical engagement. They’d rather call for change for a vague “working-class.” These terms need not only more narrow definition, but serious inquiry behind them. I bet you won’t find many people who describe themselves as working-class – most people in America are middle-class, don’t you know? The problem is with those working-class people who are too stupid to vote correctly, etc. (This is RINO discourse)

I wonder if we really could support a true dialectical thinker in public office. What if they ran on a campaign that yes, government issues are complex and difficult and yes sometimes it feels like politicians ignore you. But I hope to get your support by showing you how deeply interconnected our policies with taxation and public services are with our treatment of people who come into this country, no matter how they get here.

What a rhetorical challenge! It does make me wonder, and oddly, it makes me somewhat hopeful as this difficult dive is quickly becoming our last political option versus a fascist dictatorship.

Take 1:

The difficult rhetorical lesson – if there is any perception that one’s economic situation is not as good as it once was, that belief cannot be engaged with any claims about human rights, rights to live how one wishes, civil rights protections or any such claim.

This perception can be very minimal. For example, if people perceive that the price of eggs is “too high” this will be a reason to dismiss a candidate, even an incumbent, who has a very strong foreign policy record or even economic record. The perception of the economic situation is connected directly to the President.

This means that people will shop at their preferred store, buying their preferred brands or even things that are unnecessary (lampooned in many great memes where an Xbox or PS5 is in with the groceries) and calling it the President’s fault that they can’t afford things.

This is also imaginary – the “better off” might have never taken place. Or it could be an imagined price from prior years. Or it could be a fantasy of what things “should cost.” Such communist fantasies like price fixing are very persuasive to right-wing voters: “A cheeseburger shouldn’t cost $20!” But they will also believe in the power of the free market, or assume the market is a natural force, like the wind and we have to adjust to it.

This is very dire for the rhetorician – any suggestion of a declined economic power, even a fantastical one, will beat out concerns for national security, domestic terrorism, corruption, selling secrets to the highest bidders, colluding with foreign governments to benefit oneself (kleptocracy) – all things that we have seen in Trump’s previous administration but are ok with because we could be really rich one day or rich people should be protected because they are what the country is all about. The idea that one has a very small chance of becoming a millionaire will always outweigh human rights for other citizens, particularly ones you have no connection to at all. The strategy must be one of identification first not division first – and certainly not the Harris ads that I enjoyed but did not help accomplish anything where supporters of Harris were cast as liars, hiding their true vote from friends and family knowing in their heart the right thing to do. It just doesn’t work, because identification/division doesn’t work this way. People love belonging and being a part of something; they don’t want to be shown that it’s an act.

The solution is hard to come up with out of context, but an economic focus is the name of the game. Once that perception is there the stain cannot be removed with “caring for other people.” We don’t have a society that works that way. People are very happy to watch others suffer (emphasis on others) so they can get a nicer car. Thinking about how to run a campaign in that environment is tough, but appealing to the loss of rights or exclusion of the needy isn’t going to do much except make the people who would already vote against the economic fantasy feel good.

Take 2:

“economics” is a catch-all that allows people to articulate deep-seeded racism and misogyny. For example, one can easily vote for the extreme right-wing candidate saying that economics are the bottom line, that they will be better off under such a regime, and conceal a more ruthless and horrific claim, that they don’t trust women, minorities, or foreigners. Even children of immigrants are suspect here. There is a genetic purity to nationalism which makes it well and truly fascist. Belief that American-ness (or any nationality) is genetic or only fully realized by a particular sex is the perfection of the fascist rationality. The conclusion becomes: Your life is meaningless unless the state can use you up. The dialectical rhetorical form is seamless. When people say “I’m voting for economic reasons” they are not voting for their own economic well being, that much is clear. They are voting for a general “economic” sensation that women, minorities, and foreigners (legal or not) are not in their correct places. They need to get back in their boxes and have children, servile minimum wage jobs, and leave. The variant of this is “they’re taking our jobs!” and the newest variant is “They’re eating the pets!”

Take 3:

The media handed the election to the right-wing by mistaking their role in society to give everyone a turn at the microphone instead of being critical about how people put their thoughts together. A well meaning, mass-media journalist can consider it ethical to “report on how people are voting” and then leave the statements out there to flap in the wind. They assume the viewers will be critical themselves and see the flawed reasons people share about why they are supporting this or that candidate. The media’s function – which we haven’t seen since 2020 during the “voter fraud” work of Trump – is to point out the lack of evidence, incorrect connection and assumption, etc. This work is only being done by the comedian-news, something we’d be better off without, where comedians sit with all the trappings of the mediated journalist and dispense the ridiculousness of politics. This has no effect on anything except to make us feel good about our preconceptions. The media, instead of sharing preconceptions and conclusions, should be engaging those by bringing in the experts to respond to the statements of the person on the street.

But mediated journalism will not do this as they are a multibillion dollar business. Instead, they will run with whatever people are saying, unaware (hopefully) that repetition on a national stage isn’t persuasive but informative. The June debate between Trump and Biden is a great example of this where the media decided, without evidence, to repeat over and over again that Biden had a “disastrous debate performance” and give no examples. They were focused on our focus on his elderly mannerisms, not the policies he cited and the accomplishments he touted. Trump’s comments were far more insane claiming Biden should be in jail, calling him a weak Palestinian, and other such statements.

screenshot of CNBC “Squawk on the Street” graphic that aired November 5, 2024

This graphic is a good example of what I mean. Here they present this data in a way that encourages engagement from and with the “journalists” who are hosting the program. These talking heads discuss the meaning of this data and simultaneously convey through the power of national media that there is a relationship here, not between perceptions of investors, not due to outside forces – even some coming from overseas, and not because of the policies of the Congress and President a term or two before them. This implies a spurious and direct relationship between the election of a President and market changes. It’s worse than a mistake, it’s encouraging reasoning that is damaging to any form of democratic order.

Another example is the repetition of the Reagan line “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” This metric is a begged question at best, and harmful, unethical equivocation at worst. For a journalist to ask an average person at a rally or a poll this question is unethical journalism without specifics. It just creates content that can be sliced and diced and served to keep us watching.

More on “Are you better off now than you were four years ago”

The media has helped craft the stage for fascism to steal the show and they won’t care – they are little more than “content creators” now, happy to get views and recycle clips of interviews time and time again until they are no longer getting attention. The role of the journalist is to craft the narrative, share the story of what’s happening, not hand the microphone around for everyone to speak on a national stage. Oddly, organizations like Braver Angels and the like think this is the solution – no criticism whatsoever – so we can continue to have family dinners while the country turns its hegemonic blade to its own throat.

We absolutely do not need Intergroup Dialogue to understand one another nor do we need Braver Angels so we can all go to brunch together or have dinner as a family and enjoy our company. We need a media and a rhetorical culture that celebrates inquiry, asking after the equivocation and begged question, and finding out more about your own stance. It’s not a good thing to know what’s good for the country or be right. It is a good thing to share that view in hopes someone will push back against it with critical faculty.

There’s no reason to listen to debate coaches when they are interviewed by the media on Presidential debates or any election debates.

The reason is obvious: Collegiate or High-School debate has no connection to political debating. Debate coaches love attention and love being in the media. The reason they are trusted on these matters is because of one of the most basic and oldest fallacies in the world – equivocation.

Aristotle identified equivocation as one of his “Sophistic Refutations” – a work that was read by philosophers and others as a way of discounting the techniques of the Sophists, but it’s not clear that he meant to do that. Equivocation as a fallacy is when you use a word when you know that the audience will think of it with a different definition than you have.

Debate coaches, when they are asked by the media about these election debates use the term “debate” meaning that what we are about to see in the political debate is the same as what the college and high school debate coaches do. The debate coaches never correct them.

They never attempt to complicate the relationship between what they do and what we see in election debates. They also never attempt to really disambiguate what they do from political debate in a way that would benefit them in terms of why they should be heard; why their opinion on the debate matters. They just pretend that what they are familiar with is exactly what we see in the national political debates.

This is a huge missed opportunity. Debate coaches could use this moment to promote what they do, an attempt to improve national debate quality. They could also speak to how terrible the debates are for anyone looking to make a decision using them as a guide. They could also use the gap between what they do and what we see as evidence that debate education is necessary, powerful, and valuable to improve the quality of discourse in the United States.

An easy way in, that you’ll never hear a debate coach say in the media would be to talk about how both participants in the debate would have record low scores in a competition with high school or university students. They wouldn’t even move the needle. The discourse we get from the political sphere is abysmal compared to what the nation’s young people expect as a minimal buy in for being a decent debate speech.

You won’t hear that. You’ll hear self-serving discourse from these coaches, pretending that they are experts on these terrible political debates. They will only use the opportunity to make themselves look like experts, and they will only share their own personal political opinions. This doesn’t help Americans or other viewers understand the debate, but definitely fits in with a number of other journalists or commentators who share their views. What’s missed is the opportunity to educate people on the understanding of debate. There are different ways to structure and set up debates, and not all debates are equal. A higher standard of debate is what is on the line, and these selfish people can’t be bothered to tell the journalists that the model is bad and there could be a better one.