The New York Sophist

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.

Last time I drove regularly I had three options: FM radio, AM radio and a CD player. I would move between them depending on the drive, the trip, the feeling, the attitude – to use a Burkean word. I felt like I should be able to find something good I’d want to hear in my driving days.

Driving back and forth between Rochester and Syracuse, both in upstate New York, both in pretty much a straight line on the New York State Thruway from one another, I found myself having to adapt to the trip more than I would have liked. Mostly it’s because the song was not what I wanted to hear. Or it was a song that transported me somewhere – regret, decision, or wonder. Not where I wanted to be in my drive at all. Music has that power to take us elsewhere, without consent.

Some days no song was good enough, no radio talk interesting enough. Sometimes all my CDs didn’t have the song I wanted – what song did I want? Well, not any of these. Sometimes I was just tired and kept the radio on low, tolerating or enjoying whatever the mass-market music station played. I would listen to Howard Stern complain about the FCC as he prepared to transition to satellite radio. I’d listen to FM pop or AM NPR, and very often, stations that played classical or rock. Most of the time, you have to compromise with what you are hearing – you have to make do.

I put a CD player into my first car, a 1988 Ford Bronco 2, and in my second car I used a tape player adapter which was really great for the iPod, something I acquired in graduate school which was a bad idea at the time.

The iPod felt like total freedom. Thousands of songs were on there, so I could just hit shuffle and go. I would have nobody to blame but myself for the bad songs. After all, I put them all in there. The iPod became a subject, a DJ in the passenger seat from time to time, picking particular songs and particular orders of songs that simply angered me. The iPod was deliberately doing this to me to upset me. Why would it play these songs in this order? Why would it choose to do that?

The iPod also had a sense of humor. I remember driving around with some people that I wanted to impress, that I wanted to not only like me but think I was sophisticated (more than just sophistic, which they already knew). The iPod played the most amazing set. They asked: “What song is this?” “Who is this?” and then “This is incredible!” “What great music!” They all got out of the car, and as I started to drive away, the iPod chose to play the Johnny Cage Song from the Mortal Kombat soundtrack. Not the film mind you, the CD you could get by mailing off for it to an address that would appear on the video game screen between games. I dodged a bullet with that one and laughed a lot.

Now I have a car again, and I drive occasionally to Queens from distant Long Island. It’s quite the haul, so I’m glad I only have to do it a few times a semester. But now I have a smartphone and Spotify. Now it is possible to listen to virtually any music in the world that has ever been recorded.

This changes everything. The element of surprise or shock has been bleached by a perfect playlist, soundtrack, collection of hits, collection of albums, whatever I like. Spotify even has it’s own AI DJ, that will talk to you and play songs that it knows you won’t hate. It’s almost good enough to play only songs you like (maybe in a few more months). Soon, it will play songs you don’t know that you will love. We all become those friends in my car – “Who is this? This music is amazing, what a playlist!” But who are we praising? Ourselves? Spotify? Some kind of AI subject?

The danger is real though – no longer will one be driving and be reminded of that ex, that moment in life you’d forgotten, that embarrassing time at the dance or the bar – unless you really want that memory. The radio and the burned CD, or commercial CD that you forgot was in your car player, has the advantage of pushing you around through time as you commute around in your car. You are able to remember without willing it, feel things you haven’t in a long time, and wonder about other people who are now distant in your life. In short, you are forced to adapt your attitude based on the context that comes at you, without preparation or warning.

It’s great to think through a time a song reminds you of when you aren’t doing that much on the road. It also makes you think of things you might want to do later in the day with your free time, after your errands are done. It might make you want to reach out to someone as well.

Spotify erases all possibilities, it’s too perfect. You’ll only get what you want, and you can’t even complain about the limitless selection. I think Amazon Music is equally as good. Both are terrible in the car. It’s not good mind work to be paralyzed by what good song you’d like to hear. You don’t have to adapt anything, tolerate anything – you can skip tracks until you die (or your credit card declines).

Is this the future? Are all interstitial spaces going to be bespoke, crafted moments that we can’t possibly be frustrated with? Will there be no more boredom, downtime, practice tolerating what we don’t care for? What does that do for democratic systems? More importantly, what does that do to our ability to learn and grow? As the Tibetan Buddhists say, everything you encounter is your difficult teacher. Can a teacher really and truly offer anything you want to hear? Or would they be fired? Or unethical?

I also have an XM receiver in my car and that seems like some good methadone for what I miss, or what I need. But the sheer number of stations – many of which are dedicated to just one artist- suggests that we are all in for a perfectly curated, perfectly smooth experience when in transit. AI will be sure of that. What happens when Spotify and Sirius XM get a hold of your biodata from your watch? Can your respiration or pulse indicate what should or should not be playing?

Writing studies seems so much more serious than anything going on in speech communication rhetoric to me these days. I think what’s most attractive is the focus on the idea of pedagogy. This requires the assumption that people can change if we give them opportunity to do so, and that opportunity exists in the carefully crafted use of language.

Some refutatio: No, it doesn’t mean this is the only way to change people. No, not everyone is always willing or able to change. But it does require some civic faith to live in a democratic order – part of that faith is not dismissing the assumption before you’ve had a go.

These things apply to speech comm rhetoric as well, but public speaking has been set aside as something irrelevant to the work of the verbal rhetoricians. The important thing is criticism not creation: The work that is to be valued doesn’t happen with students, it happens in monographs. Teaching is something that isn’t valued as a site of academic work by speech communication rhetoricians.

This isn’t everyone; there are speech comm rhetoricians who care about teaching, but their teaching is ironic in relation to what counts as good research in the field. You see people teaching modality as the heart of rhetoric, teaching peer-reviewed sources as the only form of evidence while writing and publishing about the speech that gets lost in between civic forms of power and testimony that is rejected as evidence by power because of race. If this appears in the public speaking curriculum, it would be a very rare thing indeed!

But in writing studies it seems that modality has been replaced by this idea of improvement through practice and reflection. This is what public speaking should be. I try to make it more like this, but I think I need more instruction from writing studies. There’s a depth there I can’t really seem to get into. So I’m trying to assemble a reading list for myself from the syllabi I can find online from writing studies graduate seminars.

In speech communication, there’s no premium on teaching whatsoever. Maybe it’s changed? I hope so. It’s assumed that if you have a tournament debate background you can teach argumentation. It’s assumed you can teach public speaking if you have been accepted to a graduate program. What training you get, or what supervision you get is really random. I know of a couple of programs where that supervision is from a lawyer – someone without an academic degree.

This is too much separation between graduate studies and teaching to be productive, and I hope maybe in writing studies I can find something to help me unlearn a few things.

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.

Rhetoric historians – I know you are reading. Please let me know what the analogue is to this issue? I beg you, I need to read some of the historical material.

Rhetoric has been ruined by the Institutional Rhetoricians. By this I mean rhetoricians who think NCA is more important than rhetoric; that NCA represents rhetoric; that NCA can provide a good accounting or defense of rhetoric; that think NCA doesn’t exist as a function of rhetoric.

J.M. O’Neill founded the discipline using rhetoric to craft a professional role of speech teachers at the University level. He did this not because he was an NCA officer, went to legislative assembly, or any of that bullshit. He was able to do it because he was an artist, his medium being debate.

We cannot lose rhetoric to the institutional jockeys. Many of the people are interested in power, status, authority – but above all that they are interested in having a substantive role. The mark of the institutional rhetorician is the person who has intense anxiety about what Kenneth Burke labeled “the paradox of substance.” They cannot ever feel comfortable with the label “rhetor” or “rhetorician” because they don’t like having to defend it and explain it – something rhetoricians and rhetors delight in. Instead they invent and lie. They call themselves “political scholars,” “legal scholars,” “scholars of race and gender,” or whatever the title de jour might be.

Instead, why not say you are a scholar of rhetoric and you study race? Or gender? Or trans-politics? Or anything! Why not that? Because they are lazy and they do not want to have the discussion about rhetoric one more time.

The field is in that conversation and that articulation every time. Every time we articulate what rhetoric is to someone, someone who might not have been lucky enough to encounter it before running into us, we breathe new life into the field. We renew it and we welcome more into it. The power of it is that we can articulate, without constraint the importance of examining whatever issue it is that we wish to study and discuss. No other field has that latitude. None.

But that’s not all. Rhetoric has the capacity to instruct others how to talk about what matters in ways that bend other people, that transform matter, that alter what matters to them. It’s a teaching art, and many institutional rhetoricians resent having to teach that. Instead they want to be admired; they want to be the smartest person in the classroom saying the smartest thing about race, politics, the first amendment, whatever they love. Instead of opening the tent wide and inviting others to become advocates – effective advocates for issues – they would like to keep the group small and keep the spotlight on the few people who they think “have it right.”

Grasping to hold onto a slippery rock like NCA for your identity is kind of sad – reminds me of Ralph Ellison’s essay The Little Man at Chehaw Station where he talks about how we hang onto the rocks of tribal identity when we fear the phoenix that results from the combination of various identities. This is a great way to think about “the paradox of substance,” and one that Ellison would approve of, after all he and Burke were friends.

Why do rhetoricians scramble for the stable when the unstable and the shady are their home? I’ll end with a quote:

“The Sophist runs away into the darkness of that which is not, which he has had practice dealing with, and he is hard to see because the place is so dark.” ~ Plato, Sophist (254a) trans. Christopher Tindale (I think).

The Sophist might not be your identity as a rhetorician, but one thing is certain about them – you can call them whatever you wish but they were people who were interested in teaching others how to speak, relate, and create meaning within their community. That’s admirable. They didn’t flee to the institutions of Athens; they used them to riff off of to create the words that would create the meanings that were valuable to their students and their audiences.