The Rhetoric and Implications of the 2016 US Presidential Election

I’m not exactly sure what constitutes this unit, but my guess is: Kenneth Burke, Wayne C. Booth, Kant and Nietzsche. This week seemed to me to be about learning the basics/logistics/vocabulary of  rhetoric and then seeing, to a certain extent, how these skills have been used, and why.

Introductory materials are often thought of as boring and unnecessary. In this case, I was most drawn to the text that was the most rote, Boothe’s The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. This surprised me, but it was endlessly satisfying to see these phenomenon (strategies?) classified, and to see parallels and relationships drawn out between them so incisively.

My interest in this particular author might be be explained by his book The Rhetoric of Fiction which, of all our readings, relates most directly to my area of study. “Unreliable narrator,” for example, a term he coined, is a term I have to use constantly in my discipline, and which I was already curious about.

Largely, what I felt after reading and reflecting on Boothe’s work was not that he had given me brand new information to contend with, but that he outlined a new (to me) and lucrative way of classifying and understanding information that I was already peripherally aware of, but daunted by.

Having types of rhetoric layed out for us and explored elucidates this very crucial idea that: just because something sounds correct/comforting/accurate does not mean it is. So, someone employing Win-Rhetoric may come across as a totally compassionate, thoughtful individual with your best interests at heart. In fact, I came away from these descriptions feeling like: if someone’s perspective sounds really enticing it is particularly worthy of my critical capacities.

This might account for that freaky feeling I sometimes when someone tells me something that doesn’t sound wrong but unsettles me anyways. The body’s way of alerting us to (ethical? moral?) discrepancies.

Obviously, Burke’s article is a canonical example of Bad Intentions masked by Charisma, but looking back on it it can be particularly difficult to see the severity of this discord because, positioned where we are, we already (I hope) know that Nazis are wrong, corrupt, repulsive. However, I think a really important point in this example is the emphasis on what conditions were required for these reprehensible values to not only gain traction, but flourish?

I am prone to seeing synchronicities where they may not be. One example was my two Kant lectures in on day. Another would be the multifarious ways I see these readings connecting with my readings for other classes.

Right now I am reading a lot about the human zoos (absolutely disgusting, I would caution you about how disturbing it is, but encourage you to look into it if you feel able.) Simply put: these were colonial exhibits and performances where real people were taken from their homes (Indigenous people, Indian people, Chinese people, Japanese people, to name only a few.) They were exhibited along with their possessions in the name of education. The purpose of this education was the legitimization and establishment of racial and sexual difference (among many other things.)

These exhibits were not purely entertainment or education they were a national project. The nations in which the zoos occur engineer very clear examples of what they are not (thus, what they are.) The conditions that allowed the zoos to become so terrifically popular were: white supremacy.

(It is worth noting here that I’m using the past tense because I am referring to specific instances, but I think these displays and the things that motivate them are still very much ongoing, in much larger ways than we can perhaps even understand at the moment. Consider how many communities are still in the process of trying to reclaim remains and artifacts, even at UBC. Consider the prison industrial complex.)

Another interesting way I saw rhetoric playing out in these case studies was in the way the zoos and their inhabitants were spoken about by the surrounding communities and their contingent news outlets. The cases I was reading about took place in Denmark. The exhibited peoples were prohibited from having relationships with Danish white women. But many of them did, and some pairs were even married and had lives together. This phenomenon was spun and eventually there were two many theories about what kind of Danish women would pursue relationships like these.

The first stated that it was women from the lowest classes who were engaging with foreign men: because they had such deplorable standards.

The second was that it was women from the aristocracy that were the culprits: because their indulgent, excessive lives had left them unfulfilled and in need of excitement.

Can you guess where each theory might have originated from?

In The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle, Kenneth Burke analyzes Hitler’s rhetorical form in his book Mein Kampf. Burke does this in part to uncover “what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man has concocted” (191) but also to understand his tactics better so as to anticipate the potential “concocting of a similar medicine in America” (191). While I am not directly comparing Trump to Hitler, there has no doubt been a very noticeable shift in the ways that the current president of the United States has employed epideictic rhetoric, a  rhetoric-made reality, to divide the American public while also invigorating and uniting his supporters eventually leading to his election in 2016.

One unifying tactic that I’m going to focus on is that of creating a symbol of a common enemy. “Men who can unite on nothing else can unite on the basis of a foe shared by all” (192). During a time of social and economic uncertainty, he points to a single group of people, essentializes them, and is able to use them as a scapegoat for all the problems currently being faced in the country.  We see this being employed when Trump attacks immigrants, and by extension, people of colour who are perceived to be perpetual foreigners. Here’s a quote from the announcement of his campaign:

“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably-probably-from the Middle East. But we don’t know, because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.”

It’s unclear whether Trump is specifically talking about refugees or migrants, but this sentiment has grown since becoming elected and realized in building of The Wall and the Muslim Ban. According to Trump, these people steal jobs and property from real Americans who deserve it. These people bring crime and disease over the border.  By essentializing these non-American enemies, what and who gets to be defined as “American” is also shaped. We see this in Trump’s remarks towards those in the NFL protesting police brutality as being anti-American altogether.

Burke adds, “I believe that [Hitler] has shown, to a very disturbing degree, the power of endless repetition” (217). I can’t help but think of Trump’s “make America great again” slogan, which has gone on to emblazon many a red trucker hat (even producing Canadian versions) and the acronym becoming a commonly posted phrase in internet comment sections. This slogan demands a return to a time when America was “great”, a nostalgic yearning for law and order, economic stability, and free speech without “PC backlash”.  By making efforts to contain the “enemy” (limits of immigration, preferential treatment and privileges for ‘Americans’, detaining and arresting ‘foreigners’), a prosperous America will re-emerge.

As someone who watches sci-fi, it’s hard to imagine human kind coming together and setting differences aside unless an extraterrestrial enemy force arrives on the planet to unite us all against them. Much like other myths such as multiculturalism or meritocracy, Hitler’s tactic is one that unifies and control a population that is not working towards undoing the structures of power that reinforce social and economic inequality in the first place.

Last week’s discussions focused primarily on the ideas surrounding rhetoric, and secondly political thought. This was done by a close examination of Booth and Burke’s writing. Personally, I understood the notion of rhetoric to be one of danger, and these aforementioned authors, in detailing the past uses and nuances of rhetoric have showcased how dangerous it can be.

I would like to begin with Booth, as his first text, the Rhetoric of Fiction, is interestingly close to some of the beliefs covered in the next class, where we talked about Nietzsche and Locke. Booth maintains the idea every piece of literature is the manifestation of someone’s opinion and how that bias affects the subject matter being talked about. This is a fair enough statement, as I would also argue something as personal as literature could never not be the subject of someone’s bias, save perhaps a scientific report. While this is not a breakthrough theory, I would like to think that Booth is prioritizing the awareness of such bias, in warning potential readers to acknowledge this ever-present bias and taking it into consideration when forming one’s opinion. In relating this to the political landscape of today, I think the need for understanding and recognizing bias does not need to be argued, obviously, the nature of politics is always going to mean the manipulation of bias and opinion to gain some sort of support, it just so happens to be ever more present today.

Jumping back to Booth, his three 3 types of reality are another interesting insight he brings into the discussion of rhetoric. The 3 types he mentions are: Permanent realities, Changeable realities, and contingent realities. While I am not going to summarize each one, what I found interesting, and perhaps where the skill lies in being a politician, is the ability to manipulate these boundaries. Politicians, as well as random encounters in our day to day life, will sometimes declare these ideas or opinions as fact, knowing that challenging these ideas would be to challenge a fact or accepted truth. Coupling this with the support they can have, politicians are able to hide behind ideas that they sell to the public as fact because they know they are protected from anyone challenging them, or at least any one of value challenging them.

When we looked at Nietzsche and Locke the following session, it was interesting to see that Locke would disagree, to an extent with Booth’s claims of unavoidable bias in literature. Locke however, instead of arguing about the bias of a piece of literature, he looks at the bias when one is born. He argues for tabula rasa, meaning that when one is born, he or she is somewhat of a blank canvas, with his or her environment to act as the bias, or paint, for the blank canvas. Could we look at these two concepts and draw similarities? Could a piece of literature be somewhat of a “new born child” with a blank slate?

Lastly, one of my favorite parts about the 2^nd class was Nietzsche characterization of good and evil. Nietzsche has such a bizarre way of coming to conclusions, and it is always interesting to understand his logic and reasoning. We discussed the Genealogy of Morality and how the ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ came to be. He reasons that the Good were inherently good because of their positions in society: strong, brave, confident. The same goes for the ‘Evil’ who were evil just because they were weak, meek and of lower social classes. However, the ‘Evil’ were able to subvert the ‘Good’ and have shifted the balance of power. This is the origins of many social groups’ rhetoric for claiming that N was a anti-Semite, as he claimed the Jewish people to be the inherently ‘Evil’ people who subverted the power of Rome. They are now the ‘Good’ as they have changed the system and colloquially turned it on its head.

Reading Booth’s “How Many ‘Rhetorics’?”, I could not help but recall an earlier discussion of Rhetoric that I had in a course on Plato. While the discussion was only short, the topics stuck in my head. The Euthydemus is a dialogue concerning the dangers of rhetoric and the power of what Booth would call rhetrickery, it centers on two men who claim to have come to some deeper truth of the world and are offering their teaching for payment. These sophists–viz. paid teachers, philosophers, and rhetoricians–make a claim that they teach “Virtue…better than anyone else and more quickly” (Euthydemus 273d). As with many Platonic dialogues, the material is not, in fact, historic, but it seeks to make a point. So, Plato’s usual protagonist Socrates seeks to understand the pair.

Many of their arguments are centered on problems in the philosophy of the Greek language, and as such do not translate well into English, but I will do my best to outline some of their arguments so that you may see the forms of Rhetoric they use.

The Paradox of Learning:

The paradox of learning asks if on learning something, we know it or do not know it. If we answer the former, then we cannot learn it, as learning is acquiring knowledge that we did not already have. However, if we then answer the latter, that we acquire knowledge of that which we do not know, then how would we recognize the knowledge? Euthydemus frames this as concerning language, and how when a teacher lectures, they lecture in words and “letters” that we already know, and so they teach us what we already know (275d-277d).

While perhaps to us, this seems quite the simple dilemma to resolve, that we are being taught something more than merely the words coming from a professors mouth, or the letters of a book that we are reading, to the people of the time, this problem was a very real and very complicated matter. But, it still seems on reading that even given the problem presented, Euthydemus and his partner Dionysodorus are using a form of rhetrickery, twisting their words and the way in which we use some words in many different ways depending on the situation. By doing this, they are able to effectively mislead their opponents in argument and refute any point true or false.

The Problem with Properties:

The pair also present a problem with the way in which we present properties and identities. They ask if your father is a father, which seems like a harmless enough question, and the answer is obviously yes. However, they prepare yet another example of shifting definitions and ask whether, for example, my father is also a father, to which the answer remains yes. But, we may then ask if my father is other than a father, as it seems that he is not your father. And so it becomes clear that my father is a father, and is not a father. Which is clearly a contradiction. So either none of us has a father, or we all have the same father. (298a-c)

Again, there is a challenge in translation, but it is clear to see that without a language with the idea of relations, then this is a problem. If we do not see fatherhood as a relation between two people and merely as a property as they did at the time of Plato’s writing, then this would present a serious problem.

Rhetorical Domains:

Relating these arguments, which are but two of the many in the Euthydemus, to Booth, we can see a few important factors for communication. For one thing, it seems necessary to avoid rhetrickery that we solidly define terms crucial to our discourse, and further crucial that we stick to these definitions. If we allow multiple different definitions of knowing, no matter how similar they may be, we can run into the paradox of learning, and if we allow other such confusions into our discourse, we encounter other serious problems. Compare this to the “fake news” and confusion surrounding terms such as racism in the United States, and we see that this problem of definition is still alive and well.

Similarly, we can see another challenge when communicating. To someone reading the Euthydemus from a contemporary view, these problems seem absurd and ridiculous. Particularly given the translation to English. However, we need to recognize that these problems operate in a different Rhetorical Domain than the ones which we may use today. In this sense, the very real and concerning language problems to the peers of Plato will easily be ignored or misunderstood by a contemporary reader. We can see this in current events as well, how easy it can be to talk past one another and how one issue may seem so clear to one while another has great difficulty grasping it. Discussions across Rhetorical Domains only work when not only Listening Rhetoric is used, but also that Listening Rhetoric takes into account that we may be presenting completely different issues using the same language.

A lot of this topic focused on the idea of rhetoric.  At first I thought, we focused mainly on the idea of rhetoric, but the first unit was supposed to be focused on the idea of what American society looked like before the 2016 election.  This got me thinking, how do these relate?  In working to understand American society before the election, rhetoric was key in influencing people to support a specific candidate.  I, for example, supported Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign because of his rhetoric, that he wanted to create a more fair and just society and help to fight for the working class in America.  Sanders’ plea to help the working class in this country were very similar to that expressed by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign.  However, they did use very different rhetoric.  While Sanders campaigned on a message that the reason for the economic difficulties in America is due to rising inequality in the country, and that America had to work and depend on each other to rebuild the middle class, Trump campaigned on a vastly different message, blaming immigrants and minorities for the issues in the country, and saying that he could fix all the problems in America if everyone believed in him.

In class, we worked to unpack the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf by reading the paper The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle by Kenneth Burke.  While the cliche comparison between Trump and Hitler can often undermine the seriousness of the various groups of people (Jews, Romani people, homosexuals, and those deemed “politically unfit”) who were tortured or killed in the Holocaust, it was still very interesting to observe how Hitler’s rhetoric was able to persuade Germans to be on his side, by encouraging people to unite together against a common enemy, and also by acknowledging himself as a “god-like” figure, that can solve many of society’s problems.  As much as I tried to avoid any comparisons between Trump and Hitler, I just couldn’t help but see the similarities in the rhetoric in both of these leaders in the way they worked to rile up support.  It wasn’t even between Trump and Hitler either, but also between other populist candidates that I observed.  For example, a similarity I saw between different populist candidates was their ability to blame a common enemy, whether it be a person, a group of people, or a thing.  For Trump, it was immigrants, minorities, or “Crooked Hillary”.  For Sanders, it was the big banks and Wall Street.  Perhaps this is an observation in politics that political scientists need to investigate moving forward.

Studying the idea of rhetoric, I felt the need to tie this back into my role as a climate scientist.  One of the biggest issues in fighting climate change is communication of the research that climate scientists do.  A video by Derek Muller (Veritasium on YouTube) explains this well.  This is where I feel the need to tie in Wayne Booth’s ideas on realities in his work How Many Rhetorics? and also his work Judging Rhetoric.  In the video by Muller, even though almost every scientist agrees that the climate is warming, and even though there is clear evidence to support that and it should be what Booth describes as “unchangeable truth”, because there is so much rhetoric from climate change deniers and the way they are represented in the media, many people do not know how climate change even works.  Thus, the idea that climate change is happening is more of a third reality, where realities seem to be created from rhetoric.  In this case, climate change deniers create a reality that climate change is not happening from the rhetoric that they use.  Another point that Muller makes is that people are more compelled to read an interesting story, even if it means sacrificing the truth.  This brings me to Booth’s Judging Rhetoric, where he talks about whether or not it is ethical to be able to sacrifice the truth in order to accommodate an audience.  I firmly believe that the public needs to know the truth about such an important issue such as climate change, so I personally think there needs to be a way to be able to educate the public on how climate change works in a manner that the public will understand.  The question of how to communicate climate science to the general public effectively remains one of the biggest challenges in public science education.

This week, I was introduced to the discipline of rhetoric, which in simpler terms, involves the art of persuasion, speaking well, and expressing clearly (Booth 6). As a student of sociology, I have often discussed the role of public address in socio-political movements, but it was interesting to examine how persistent social constructs are found in both everyday (micro) and public (macro) speech patterns and delivery themselves. In the context of power structures, I want to attempt to understand how the social inspires rhetoric, and how rhetoric reproduces the social. And so, in this reflection I attempt to connect social constructs to thematic tools found in Hitler’s rhetoric, with particular reference to The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle by Kenneth Burke.

After reading the articles this week, I found that I was most attracted to the concept of manipulating social phenomena to assert power and establish domination. In The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle, Burke discusses the rhetoric used by Hitler when addressing himself, Jews, the German people, and the idea of the German nation. Hitler actively used socio-religious values to shape his rhetoric in a way that directed the German population in a favourable direction, so it is important to investigate the two most prominent ways that this was done: inborn dignity, which relates to race, and gendered power structures, which relates to gender. Interestingly enough, both of these social constructs have been heavily shaped by religion.

For centuries, religion and scripture have been used to define, or at least implement, social norms surrounding race. In the centuries leading up to the racialized Atlantic Slave Trade, Christian perceptions and representations of race depicted Jesus and other religious figures as being noble white men, whereas devilish creatures and sin were associated with the colour black and darkness. These ideas justified the eventual oppression and enslavement of millions of African people, as the slave owners were only “obeying God’s word” and doing what was “inborn” and “destined” for their race and better for the world at large. Relating this back to Hitler’s rhetoric, he mimics this approach to inborn dignity by asserting that the Aryan Germans have a religious duty to conquer the “racial inferiors” and restore peace to the country (Burke 202). He refers to his personal ambitions to do this as obedience to God’s will, thus furthering the idea that his plans stem from religious purity rather than political gain, and enabling him to scapegoat the Jewish people of Europe for more reasons than one.

The second tool that Hitler’s rhetoric employs is the gendering of power structures (Burke 195). Although gender norms have consistently existed since the beginning of time, they became particularly defined with the emergence of Christian rulership, as ideas of Virgin Mary and Eve created dichotomies that dictated women’s behaviour. Furthermore, they established power dynamics between men and women that placed men in positions of social domination and women in positions of subordination. Men were often bestowed with the duties of guiding the women in their lives and making difficult decisions for the family, whereas women were expected to comply and maintain their family honour by upholding socio-religious values. According to Burke, Hitler was inspired by this power imbalance when he referred to the masses as feminine, and asserted that they desired to be led by a strong male. And because they were feminine and unable to make decisions as men would, they had to be careful because they could either be “wooed” by good men (i.e. Hitler) or “seduced” by evil ones (i.e. Jews). By choosing to gender the German people as feminine, he emphasized their need for a strong, dominating leader that could make the tough decisions, and enabled himself to ascend to this position.

Without directly likening Hitler’s rhetoric to that of present-day leaders, I find that the use of inborn dignity and gendered power structures is particularly important to my understanding of modern-day socio-political phenomena, especially with reference to slogans and publicly available comments made by presidential candidates leading up to the 2016 US presidential elections. For instance, “Make America Great Again” fascinates me, as it heavily implies ideas of white inborn dignity and ownership over the US. The way that the red “MAGA” hats and merchandise are widely distributed and nationally understood to represent a certain set of values is extremely interesting. I find that the connection between the Republican party and conservative, often pro-Christian, values allows Republican candidates to draw upon religious scripture and/or ideals to persuade the people into re-establishing the “pure”, “good” America, and links back to both Hitler and other leaders’ provocation of religious responsibility during propaganda and public speaking.

Finally, while I am aware of policies and discourse that impact gender minorities, I would be interested in investigating how gendered power structures play a role in the rhetoric surrounding day-to-day political power. How is America described by political candidates? Is America weak and subordinate, or strong and persistent? “Make America Great Again” implies that the nation was once a dominating presence (almost empire) in the world, and needs to be restored to its former glory through a bold and relentless leader (sounds familiar!). How did Hillary Clinton draw on gendered power structures, and how was it perceived? I would imagine that due to implicit biases that prevent women from being seen as equally powerful to their male counterparts in influential positions, her rallying speeches may not have had the same momentous effect. How does Trump use gender in his rhetoric to assert the “strongman personality” in speeches and public addresses? I’ve noticed that he uses a lot colloquial language to express the idea that he is strong, smart, wealthy and a great leader, which is interesting because it makes his comments even more accessible to the general reader.

All in all, further exploration of these questions can lead to a better understanding of the American people and the rhetoric that was required to win them over, enabling us to better parallel the relationship between social issues and rhetoric of modern-day politics with that of the 20th century.

This week in class we talked about Boothe’s views on Contemporary Rhetoric. This was of great interest to me as I had not read these texts in another class (unlike the Nietzche and Kant) and also had not really looked into rhetoric as a form of study. Thus, I delved deeper into this study I didn’t know much about, to see how it related to politics, and more importantly, how it related to my personal life.

The main topics I’m going to talk about in my reflection on Boothe’s rhetoric are:

1. Defining rhetoric and understanding what it is.
2. The 3 types of reality.
3. How does rhetoric relate to whats going on in the U.S.

In class, we grappled with defining rhetoric but I don’t think we came to a hard enough conclusion. So after class, I decided I would attempt to define it myself and in doing so came up with my own definition: “All of the arts and tools used in understanding, misunderstanding, communicating and convincing.” I got this from a combination of Boothe’s contemporary definition, Oscar Wilde’s epigraph, and Aristotle’s classic definition.

After understanding what Rhetoric was, and setting up parameters for where it could be, I then went back to tackle Boothe’s concept of there being three reality’s.

• Reality 1: Permanent and unchangeable reality
• Reality 2: Realities changeable, but not created by rhetoric.
• Reality 3: Contingent realities about our lives.

I found this to be a really interesting point as my belief system starkly contradicts Reality 1. I didn’t really believe that things could be intrinsically evil or good, right or wrong. Upon rereading Boothe’s three reality’s, I realized that that’s not what he was saying exactly. Reality 1 is not the idea that things are intrinsically good or bad, but rather that certain things intrinsically exist regardless of how you perceive them. For example, it’s not that dropping ceramic is intrinsically bad or good, but rather that it drops because gravity intrinsically exists. This was a major flaw in my first reading, and upon rereading, I quickly realized where I went wrong. Reality 2 was quite easy for me to grasp as well as reality 3, and the examples of the mountain being smaller after a year as a form of reality 2 and Hitlers’ rhetoric as an example of reality 3 were both very understandable and sufficient for me.

This relates to what’s going on in the US as we see a president whose rhetoric may be toxic to society. As a leader, Trump possibly more so than other politicians implements Rhetrickery (dishonest forms of communicative arts). This is an issue as the power he has allows him to change reality through his use of rhetoric (direct application of reality 3) coming from thought that is already intentionally deceptive. This is an issue because such misinformation and dangerous rhetoric at a high level can start fueds with other leaders in society, possibly leading to worse off economic conditions as well as trade issues in the long run.