Author: mikeduncan

Categories
Politics Short Essays

When Presidents Say The Quiet Part Out Loud

Over the past five years, aside my other activities, I’ve become a minor scholar on presidential rhetoric, a status thrust upon me from numerous peer review requests on manuscripts dealing with presidential rhetoric. These requests seem to stem from three of my articles that respectively touch on the rhetoric of George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump, the last three presidents prior to Biden. I did not intend such a side gig, but presidents are easy fodder for examples of public rhetoric.

So I have not written anything about Biden yet. Today, however, I think I will, given his September 1 speech at Independence Hall. Biden’s speech is not a notable piece of oratory in terms of stylistic eloquence or delivery. But in many ways, it is pivotal.

Biden’s candidacy and resulting presidency have suffered from several universal critiques that have stuck around no matter what he actually does:

He is too old. Ageism aside, this is always connected (even if implicitly) to a charge of mental deficiency. But unlike Reagan, there doesn’t seem to be anything to this charge. He was just as gaffe-prone thirty years ago, even to the extent of Bush, but far less than Trump.

He is too moderate. This flak comes mostly and most explicitly from his left via AOC and Sanders, but from the right, too, as after a certain fever pitch of extremism, anything left of Trump is, well, left; the center is obliterated (more like hidden behind a screen David Copperfield-style, but I’ll get back to that).

He is too timid. Again, placing the QAnon-level claim that he is a dictator-in-the-making aside (subverted by the Dark Brandon meme) and discounting that he has a openly off-the-rails SCOTUS and fifty Republican senators opposing anything useful he might propose, his liberal critics want more action, and his conservative critics use the same argument to blame him for his own obstruction. Why aren’t you able to resist our slander, man?

Biden’s presidency has worked best when he pushes against all of these three critiques at once, a trick he has managed rarely.

Quick, decisive, and successful action in the face of crisis, especially when done behind the scenes and well in advance of any media narrative, coupled with playing the long game legislatively, do not always lead to presidential re-election, but the nation does better long-term as a result. The vast majority of presidential decision-making and job performance is completely invisible to the public. As the saying goes, if a criminal matter goes to trial, the lawyers on one side screwed up the settlement; likewise, if you hear about a President ruminating about a decision, it’s already been mishandled. The long gestation of his student loan reduction is a good example – that should have been a Day 1 decision.

Note that I measure “success” here of a presidency independent of re-election (assuming he stands forth in 2024). Jimmy Carter’s presidency is case in point; on foreign policy, energy, and climate, it was a watershed. That’s even discounting the Egypt-Israel treaty, which I feel was far more mixed in eventual results (removing the threat of Egypt to Israel seems to have allowed the rise of Hamas and took off pressure on Israel to cut a deal with Palestine). His wrangling of votes for the Panama Canal treaty was far more impressive, as it prevented a Western Hemisphere version of Vietnam. But rampant structural inflation and a painfully slow-motion reaction to Iran’s collapse doomed Carter’s 1980 chances.

I bring up Carter because his so-called “malaise” speech is the obvious parallel to Biden’s speech yesterday. Historically, telling the American people a hard truth in a blunt fashion is a bad approach to getting elected, as Walter Mondale found out in 1984 when he announced in a debate that he was definitely going to raise taxes if elected, and the only difference between him and Reagan was that Reagan wouldn’t admit it. He was right, and lost 49 states. Carter, too, bet on a message of hardship and sacrifice, and lost as well. Being right is not enough in American politics. It never has. Often, it’s just an albatross.

Biden’s September 1 speech does tell an inconvenient truth, one that he has actively avoided for several years in the apparent belief that going “high” like the Obamas did for eight years was the right move.

So that era has officially ended. This speech is the completion of a slow, steady pivot that has accelerated in recent months.

First, containing Putin’s ongoing murder spree through Ukraine by keeping NATO unified has been a major accomplishment for Biden that counterbalances the mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan. And unlike Afghanistan, where any decision was a bad one, the Ukraine war falls into a gray proxy area where the U.S. can flex its military leverage without having troops on the ground. It’s been difficult for anyone on the right to critique this policy on Russia without sounding like a particularly dense Charles Lindbergh, the original clueless isolationist. Putin cannot be negotiated with; the last twenty years have shown he will only pause to later take more, and he can only be countered with force. Biden’s new stance toward “MAGA Republicans” should be seen through his approach to Russia. Why offer respect and dignity for irresponsible idiocy?

Second, while Biden has learned that the closet conservatives in the Democratic Senate (Manchin, Sinema) can be worn down with time and pressure, he’s out of time. There’s little legislation he can push before November, the chances of retaining Democratic control of both houses are slim even taking into consideration a large turnout after the slow-motion decapitation of Roe, and thus no tactical (or ethical) reason remains to be diplomatic about the awful state of the Republican party.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, history is running out. Biden met with a group of U.S. historians on August 4, and the topic was totalitarianism with an emphasis on the political situation in 1860 (just prior to Lincoln’s election, the usual candidate for the no-return point to civil war) and 1940, when there was a non-zero chance of a fascist America. Not many people are still alive to remember the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in ’38. However, most Americans watched Jan. 6 on their phones, and the House hearings have laid all the rot there out for anyone who cares to see.

August 4 must have been an extraordinary conversation, and the speech reflects it and his desire not to be the next James Buchanan. Biden positions himself much like Bush did after 9/11 – faced with an existential threat, he draws a line. The difference here is that Bush’s us/terrorists dichotomy, full of useful ambiguity about exactly who the terrorists were and who “us” was, left American citizens out of the bad group; Biden leaves no doubt. MAGA Republicans to him are an existential threat, and left to their own devices in the interests of expediency, they could destroy American democracy. He speaks of them in the same terms that a far milder personality might comfortably speak of the KKK.

This kind of rhetoric from a President is not new. Trump openly demonized his political opponents as threats to the nation before he was even elected (along with anyone he didn’t like), consistently during his presidency, and as recently as yesterday. And if you think this election year is nasty, study any presidential election after Washington’s two terms.

What’s new is Biden is doing it now. Joe Biden. The regular Joe of the Senate, the guy who made riding Amtrak to Delaware a political statement, who left Anita Hill out to dry to appease his colleagues, who staked his reputation on being cautious, diplomatic, and reasonable, the avuncular guy that the Onion mocked by having him wash his Trans Am on the White House, or cooling his heels in Mexico for awhile until the heat in D.C died down. The dramatic shift in the last year to Biden taking up the ethos of a lone warrior standing before the gates of democracy, ready to slug Hitler with a left cross, is remarkable.

And it is perhaps all the more interesting in that he doesn’t have much choice in the matter. He can’t sell the inevitable solution to inflation, which is time and patience, any more than Carter could.

What he can sell, however, is avoiding a total collapse of the American experiment, because he controls the only lever to do so. The three conservative alternatives are Trump as dictator for life, as by his own definition he cannot lose an election; a Cheney-style neoconservative unitary executive, perhaps Liz Cheney herself, a viewpoint as dead in the water as a return of the Shah to Iran; or a tepid version of the Republic of Gilead, with a capital in Texas or Florida and led by some Mini-Me version of Trump obsessed with transphobia.

The leader for any counter-effort does not need to be Biden, necessarily. I think he would be wise to allow more Democratic leaders to emerge in the next few years. Harris has not had any opportunity to shine, and this is perhaps because she is ill-placed as a VP to an active President; as a former successful prosecutor, she is a better fit for Attorney General. She might have been less cautious than Garland.

History didn’t thrust this savior role on Biden, much like it did Bush in 2001. That lead to a massive and completely unnecessary expansion of presidential power via Cheney & company and a massive and completely unnecessary war in Iraq. Even with Biden’s original offer of being the mild anti-Trump having morphed after Jan. 6 and Roe into something more forceful, I don’t see such an expansion behind Biden’s speech, or any appetite among the Democrats for doing much beyond their usual health care and wage initiatives. Everyone is still reeling from the open wound of the Roe decision. The message now, unlike 2001, is to hold the line, not re-orientate the federal government or start building democracies in countries that have never seen democracy. It’s not even to endorse/power some “woke” social revolution with the sole heinous purpose of persecuting heterosexual white Christian males… until sending them to prison after storming the U.S. Capitol amounts to persecution.

Biden as a sane alternative to Trump produced a clear shift in the 2020 suburbs. The Texas one that I live in moved ten points. But Sept. 1’s speech is a different kind of message, something far more serious in tone, and the cold fact of the seemingly immortal 6-3 split on the SCOTUS lurks behind its reasoning. The first congressional election after Jan. 6 looms, and while the speech will win no prizes for style, it does set an unusually combative tone for the Democratic Party in a midterm. Does the situation match it? The historians in the White House in August probably think so, and Biden seems to have listened to them.

Categories
Book Reviews Short Essays Writings

Book In Hand

My personal copies of Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem came in the mail today.

Overall, it’s a handsome edition. I like that they used a relatively small font. The two big tables in Chapter 6 are not formatted as they were initially and after the galley stage, but what’s here is legible, at least. Anything to do with Greek or tables or tricky formatting is the first thing to get screwed up in academic publication, alas.

Categories
Argumentation Short Essays Writings

A Brief Note on History and Citation

I found this brief essay today while sorting through old papers. I don’t remember writing it save in the vaguest possible way, but it announces its context well enough. The dates suggest I wrote it early on at UHD in 2009 or 2010.

I definitely reference that Asimov essay a lot; I wish I didn’t have to.

There’s an interesting exchange in the latest issue of RSQ (Rhetoric Society Quarterly) between LuMing Mao and Scott Stroud on how to conduct the enterprise of comparative rhetoric. I don’t think either one articulates the problem – which is historiographical in nature – well enough, so I’ll take a stab at it while it’s fresh in my mind.

Mao’s essay is in response to Stroud’s “Pragmatism and the Methodology of Comparative Rhetoric” in the Fall 2009 RSQ. As far as I can tell, he charges Stroud with creating a false dichotomy between “descriptive” or “historical” comparative rhetoric, where the main goal is to accurately describe and contextualize texts, and an “appropriative” or “reconstructive” approach where the texts are used primarily as fodder for contemporary theorizing. Mao opines these two approaches blend together dialogically; you can’t objectively do descriptive work without contemporary bias, and the text itself tends to restrict the limits of reconstruction. My apologies to Mao if this is oversimplified.

Stroud replies to Mao first by restating his arguments: 1) CR assumes a descriptive approach is best; 2) CR should allow both descriptive and reconstruction; 3) “there is no sense of accuracy above and beyond the general criterion of ‘usefulness’ relative to some contingent purpose.” He then charges Mao with further failing to define what “accuracy” or “responsibility” means in the textual criticism of CR, and notes that Mao’s objections themselves have a consistent descriptive bias. Over this apparent confusion, he prefers a “pragmatist” approach that eschews fealty to the text and champions using it for contemporary problems as well as increased attention to important texts. He repeatedly uses Pound’s Tang dynasty translations as an example of a pragmatist approach. He is less concerned with his research being “right” than being “useful: “I think this sort of pragmatic pluralism is much more flexible and non-exclusionary than relying heavily on vague notions of ‘responsibility’ and a ‘proper’ purpose animating work in CR” (74). Apologies, again, if this is oversimplified, particularly in the cultural sensitivity area.

Reading these two pieces reminds me of a problem that I heard Mike Leff once call “chasing the ur-text” – namely, a desire to determine more accurate versions of an ancient text can overshadow the usefulness of the text as received for provoking thought and addressing contemporary concerns. The particular text in question was Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but the problem also exists with any text for which we lack a great deal of original context or a solid philological footing.

My response to these ideas is twofold.

First, the problem here is not description vs. reconstruction. That’s a pointless debate. Mao is right about that. The problem as I see it, though, is a matter of ethical citation. If you are to cite a text as an authority in some fashion, there is an ethical charge to do so in a matter that is as less wrong as possible.

By “less wrong,” I refer to Isaac Asimov’s famous essay, “The Relativity of Wrong,” where he notes that the purpose of scientific inquiry is not to determine truth or to prove anything, but to, quite simply, be less wrong than previous solutions to a given problem. His central example is the curvature of the earth, once thought to be 0 (flat); early estimates of a spherical earth rendered a value of .000126 (the flat-earthers were “right” to three decimal places!); later accounts narrowed the value even further, and Asimov predicted that future measurements would get even closer to the “correct” value without ever quite getting to it. Perhaps, even, the very concept of curvature would have to be revised.

That said, Stroud’s unconcern with “accuracy” to the text is somewhat ironic, as he charges Lao with misrepresenting his article’s argument, particularly his lit review of CR. It seems to me if he is really committed to pragmatism, he shouldn’t care, and should even applaud Lao for using his article for his own “useful” purposes. The problem with that, though, is that Stroud never really defines what “useful” is. Useful how? Useful to whom? How is “usefulness” measured? I suspect this term is no less slippery than Lao’s “accuracy.”

However, Stroud is on to something when he says Lao’s real concern is “moral” (71); he then charges Mao with failing to define what “responsibility” to the text is. I think Stroud is right, but his deconstruction of Mao’s position is somewhat unfair as it skips past a central debate/special topic of historiography: namely, the ethics inherent in writing history. Generally speaking, as Mao notes, separating “historical” from “reconstruction” ignores what history is; the telling of stories by humans. Implicit within that definition is the question of citation. History is myth without citation; it is only when we can attach texts to other texts and archeological evidence that they become history, which is itself a inherently biased account of other biased accounts. Citation is the only glue that keeps this mess together, and it is often not a particularly strong bond if applied poorly.

The pragmatist, then, without a sense of citation, is a teller of myths, not a scholar; they may indeed solve contemporary problems, but their solutions can’t be ethically cited and are thus ungrounded historically. The objection, then, becomes a question of false ethos; a pragmatist gets to put on a historian’s ethical cloak because he or she works with ancient texts, but they reject the very framework of that ethics. One can’t claim, ethically, to be an expert on, say, Erasmus, without being intimately familiar with his historical context, language, source critical issues, etc. If one simply “uses” Erasmus, then you are not an expert on Erasmus – you’re an expert on using Erasmus.

There is “something” to a text that remains after we subtract our situational bias. It is not a reflection of Plato’s forms, but it is something. Respect of this nebulous something is the cornerstone of interpretation. That “something,” in fact, is the only thing what allows us to judge either or not an interpretation is “less wrong” than another. The text allows multiple interpretations and uses, but it also constrains us. Apologies to Umberto Eco, who I am paraphrasing badly from memory – and yet, there is something there.