I have written a series of posts on this, some of which can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Happy Darwin/Lincoln Day!
Today we celebrate the 211th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, who were born on February 12, 1809. Beyond the coincidence of their being born on the same day, there were many points of connection in their lives and thought.
I have written a series of posts on this, some of which can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
I have written a series of posts on this, some of which can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Thursday, February 06, 2020
Trump and Political Philosophy (4): The "Art of the Deal" and the Bible--Trump's Two Best Books
Tony Schwartz--Trump's Ghostwriter
The Introduction to Season 1 of "The Apprentice"
Donald Trump was elected president because of his rhetorical success in promoting the myth of himself as the self-made multibillionaire, and that all began in 1987 with the publication of The Art of the Deal.
There is a straight line from this book to "The Apprentice" and then to Trump's rhetoric in his presidential campaign. Prior to the book, Trump was not well-known outside of New York City. Once the book became a world-wide bestseller--over a million copies--Trump was an international celebrity known as the young brash businessman who became one of the richest people in the world because he knew how to make deals, and he did it all on his own.
When Mark Burnett, the reality-television producer, read The Art of the Deal, he got the idea for having Trump as the star for "The Apprentice." When the show premiered in 2004, it started with Trump in the back of his limousine, being driven through New York City, as Trump says, "I've mastered the art of the deal, and I've turned the name Trump into the highest-quality brand." An image of the book's cover flashes onscreen as Trump explains that as the "master," he will now seek an "apprentice," and this will be the show--to see who can succeed in helping him manage his building projects.
Then, on June 16, 2015, he gave his speech in the atrium of Trump Tower announcing his candidacy for the presidency; and in laying out his qualifications, he said: "We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal."
He repeated this in his campaign speeches--saying that American politicians have failed to lead the country, that they could learn how to lead by reading The Art of the Deal, but now the voters have the chance to elect the author of that book. He also explained that while The Art of the Deal was his second favorite book, he had to rank the Bible as the best book. Remarkably, while campaigning, he often autographed copies of both The Art of the Deal and the Bible.
When Tony Schwartz--Trump's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal--saw the broadcast of Trump's June 16th speech, Schwartz sent out a tweet: "Many thanks Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I wrote 'The Art of the Deal.'" Later, speaking to Jane Mayer for an article in The New Yorker, Schwartz said that he had noticed that Trump had somehow convinced himself that he had written the book himself. And Schwartz wondered: "If he could lie about that on Day One--when it was so easily refuted--he is likely to lie about anything."
Schwartz has confessed his sense of guilt that in writing The Art of the Deal, he started the myth of Trump as the self-made billionaire that led to Trump's presidential campaign. He has admitted that his agreeing to write the book was a selling of his soul to the devil. When Trump asked him to write the book in 1985, Schwartz was in financial trouble and worried about supporting his family. Trump's offer to him--half of the $500,000 advance from Random House and half of the royalties--was too good to turn down. In fact, the sales of the book made him a multimillionaire. But now he has tried to redeem himself by speaking publicly about what he saw of Trump's true character and the danger that poses for the country. "I put lipstick on a pig," Schwartz has said. "I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is."
Initially, Schwartz thought he could get the material for the book by interviewing Trump over a number of weeks. But he quickly discovered that Trump had such a short attention span that he could not be questioned about anything for more than a few minutes before he lost interest and refused to continue the interview. Trump was happy to talk with reporters looking for some short sound-bite comments. But he lacked any capacity for self-reflection in talking about his life. Schwartz worried that it would be impossible for him to gather enough information from talking with Trump to write the book.
Then Schwartz came up with an alternative way to work on this. He got Trump to agree to allow him to listen to all of Trump's telephone calls, which is how he conducted much of his business, while also following Trump to all of his meetings. Schwartz would then interview the people that he met through Trump and gather information and documents from them. He did this for over a year and a half. So over this time, he came to know Trump better than anyone outside his immediate family. Not only did Schwartz write the book, he also kept a journal where he wrote out his private thoughts about Trump's personality and his life. When he began speaking publicly about Trump in 2016, he used his private journal to sketch Trump's true character.
He observed that Trump is driven entirely by the need for public attention--an insatiable hunger for money, power, praise, and celebrity. He does not care about anything or anyone other than himself as an object of public acclaim. Any sign that people do not love him as much he loves himself or any sign that those working for him are not absolutely loyal to him throws him into an angry fit of rage. He will do anything to keep himself the center of attention, which often means saying or doing what he knows will be deeply offensive to people, because that forces people to pay attention to him. That's the whole point of his tweeting rants. And he must constantly boast about himself and insist that no one is as great as he is. (This is what I have written about in a previous post as Trump's grandiose narcissism.)
Trump's Advice to College Students in Wisconsin: "You'll find that when you become very successful, the people that you will like best are the people that are less successful than you, because when you go to a table, you can tell them all of these wonderful stories, and they'll sit back and listen. Does that make sense to you? OK? Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you." (I should say the rest of his remarks in this speech are not as disturbing as this one.)
Here's the first paragraph of The Art of the Deal:
"I don't do it for the money. I've got enough, much more than I'll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks" (p. 1).Schwartz says that this is a lie. Of course Trump does it for the money. That's why he becomes angry whenever business journalists write stories about how he is not as wealthy as he claims--that he is not one of the richest people in the world. That making deals is for him an intrinsically joyful art--like writing poetry--sounds nice, but it's not true. That it really is all about the money--or about his exaggerated claims about how much he has--is indicated (as I suggested in my previous post) by his ending his campaign book Great Again with a list of 70 of his properties--commercial buildings, golf resorts, mansions, airplanes, helicopters--that's why he does it, and that's what we're supposed to admire--his pile of luxurious stuff.
Trump's lying about his wealth is part of a pattern of shameless lying. "Lying is second nature to him," Schwartz has said. "More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true."
In writing The Art of the Deal, Schwartz says, he knew he would need to contrive "an artful euphemism" to make Trump's lying sound innocent. In one of the most often quoted passages in the book, he wrote:
"The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular."
"I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration--and a very effecitive form of promotion" (p. 58).We have heard a lot of "truthful hyperbole" in Trump's political speeches, including his State of the Union Tuesday night. But "truthful hyperbole" that is "innocent"? Schwartz now says that "deceit" is never "innocent." "'Truthful hyperbole' is a contradiction in terms. It's a way of saying, 'It's a lie, but who cares?'" He says that Trump loved the phrase. The White House Press Office has used the phrase to justify Trump's lies.
That "people want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest" is an important part of the popular appeal of Trump's rhetoric. In the second chapter of The Art of the Deal--"Trump Cards: The Elements of the Deal"--the first rule is "Think Big."
"I like thinking big. I always have. To me it's very simple: if you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage" (pp. 46-47).But then we have to wonder--when Trump brags about his "biggest and greatest" achievements, is this only "truthful hyperbole," or maybe not so truthful at all? So, for example, when Trump told us Tuesday night that at the beginning of 2017, America was in a deep dark decline--economically, militarily, and culturally--and now after only three years, Trump has made America great again in every way, should we believe that?
Trump's rhetorical enthymeme is that we can trust him to make America great again, because we can see the greatness he has achieved in his business life, as described in The Art of the Deal and his other books. But if one compares the story told in The Art of the Deal with the actual record of what he has done, one sees that much of that story is a lie. As I have already indicated in a previous post, a big part of that lie is Trump's claim that his father gave him very little help: "My father had done very well for himself, but he didn't believe in giving his children huge trust funds. When I graduated from college, I had a net worth of perhaps $200,000, and most of it was tied up in buildings in Brooklyn and Queens" (p. 93). Now we know that by the time that young Donald was 8 years old, he was already a millionaire, and that was only the beginning of his father's life-long payouts to his son that saved Donald from financial ruin.
And if we're judging Trump's success in "thinking big," we need to examine the history of his biggest construction project, which he expected would be his greatest achievement. In The Art of the Deal, Trump devotes one long chapter to what originated as his first major deal in Manhattan in 1974 (pp. 325-354). He secured the option to purchase the railroad yards of the Penn Central Railroad on the West Side of Manhattan--78 acres on the Hudson River between 59th Street and 72nd Street. He was forced to give up his option in the summer of 1979. But then he bought it back in January 1985.
At the end of 1985, Trump (then only 39 years old) held a news conference to unveil his plans--with drawings and models. He said this was "the greatest piece of land in urban America." He would build 8,000 apartments and condominiums for up to 20,000 people, some 3.6 million square feet of television and movie studio space, and some 2 million square feet of space for luxury stores. There would be six 76-story towers. And rising above all of this would be the world's tallest skyscraper, with Trump living at the top--"above the clouds," he told someone. At first, he named it Television City. Later, he named it Trump City. The New York Times described it as his "bid for immortality."
Trump promised that because of his unique skill for making deals, the construction for this project would start as early as 1987. This would have been his biggest deal of all, because he had to persuade hundreds if not thousands of people to allow this--politicians in charge of zoning regulations and tax rebates, citizens in the surrounding neighborhoods, architecture critics, and bankers.
He failed. By 1991 and 1992, he had filed for corporate bankruptcy four times; and he was headed to personal bankruptcy. In 1994, he had to sell 70% of the ownership of the rail yards land to a consortium of Hong Kong businessmen. In 1990, he had already agreed to capitulate to the opponents of his project, and he accepted the plans for development of the land proposed by an Upper West Side community group. Their plans called for smaller, shorter buildings, and certainly not the world's tallest building. It would be called not Trump City but Riverside South.
Pushed into a corner, Trump was forced to reverse his big plans and accept something small, because that was the only way he could survive. And in so far as he did survive, he had turned defeat into a kind of victory, although it was a victory that depended on his father's help in bailing him out.
Michael Kruse, writing an article on Trump's failure to build Trump City, draws an insightful conclusion from this as showing Trump to be "the most successful failer of all time":
"On the Upper West Side, Trump was overbearing, tactless, and tone-deaf. His proposals were extreme, offensive and ill-conceived. Many of the people who fought him thought they beat him. The prevented him from doing what he actually wanted to do. But those buildings were built. That money was money he made. It's the Trump Paradox: He's the most successful failer of all time. Because what really happened with what become Trump Place was that he created such a disturbance for so long that his opponents literally did his work, designing his development for him, which saved him, which enabled him to maintain a veneer of credibility, which allowed the 'Apprentice' to present him as it did, which let him run for president. The election was an apt capstone. He lost (the popular vote), but he won (the Electoral College). And so, his transactional, bluff-and-bluster, react-to-me life became a candidacy, and now a presidency, that is driving change on a far larger canvas than just the New York skyline."If this is true, there are lessons here both for Trump's opponents and his supporters. For the opponents, the lesson is that defeating him requires backing him into a corner where he cannot survive without capitulating in a way that he can present as a success. For the supporters, the lesson is that while Trump is likely to fail to deliver on his biggest promises, his grandiose bluster might shake things up in such a way as to bring some small but momentous changes to American politics.
Trump Acquitted--Why the Rush to Impeachment?
Trump Acquitted!
Well, of course, there's no reason anyone should have been surprised by that headline. Surely, everyone--including the House Democrats who voted for impeachment--knew that this was the inevitable outcome if they did not take enough time to build a case that could persuade at least 20 Republican Senators to vote for conviction.
I have reread my post from December 6th--"Why the Rush to Impeachment? Jonathan Turley's Prudent Warning to the House Judiciary Committee." And the acquittal of Trump in the Senate certainly seems to confirm the wisdom of Turley's warning. The House's impeachment of Trump now looks more like the failed impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 than the threat of impeachment that succeeded in forcing Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974. That is to say, this attempted impeachment looks like a purely partisan political attack on the president that failed to win bipartisan support.
It's hard to understand what the House Democrats thought they were going to accomplish. It's also hard to understand why the three law professors who argued for a quick impeachment--Noah Feldman, Pamela Karlan, and Michael Gerhardt--did not respond to Turley's warning.
Now there's talk about the possibility that the House Democrats might continue their investigations by seeking the testimony of John Bolton and others. Why didn't they do that months ago as part of a prolonged investigation to build up the case for impeachment?
Well, of course, there's no reason anyone should have been surprised by that headline. Surely, everyone--including the House Democrats who voted for impeachment--knew that this was the inevitable outcome if they did not take enough time to build a case that could persuade at least 20 Republican Senators to vote for conviction.
I have reread my post from December 6th--"Why the Rush to Impeachment? Jonathan Turley's Prudent Warning to the House Judiciary Committee." And the acquittal of Trump in the Senate certainly seems to confirm the wisdom of Turley's warning. The House's impeachment of Trump now looks more like the failed impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 than the threat of impeachment that succeeded in forcing Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974. That is to say, this attempted impeachment looks like a purely partisan political attack on the president that failed to win bipartisan support.
It's hard to understand what the House Democrats thought they were going to accomplish. It's also hard to understand why the three law professors who argued for a quick impeachment--Noah Feldman, Pamela Karlan, and Michael Gerhardt--did not respond to Turley's warning.
Now there's talk about the possibility that the House Democrats might continue their investigations by seeking the testimony of John Bolton and others. Why didn't they do that months ago as part of a prolonged investigation to build up the case for impeachment?
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Trump and Political Philosophy (3): The Rhetorical Myth of Trump the Self-Made Billionaire
Trump's Business Bankruptcies
The Story Behind Donald Trump's Wealth
New York Times Reporters Breaking the Story of Fred Trump's Financial Bailouts of His Son
President Obama Roasts Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011
Applying Aristotle's Rhetoric to Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric makes clear that Trump's primary rhetorical technique for his election campaign was the argument from the character of the speaker that stressed the prudence or practical judgment of Trump as a wildly successful businessman, which would allow him as president to Make America Great Again.
This argument can be put into the form of an enthymeme:
Major premise: Because of stupid politicians, America no longer wins; and America will not win again until a successful businessman who knows how to win is elected president.
Minor premise: Donald Trump is unique in his business success and his prudence in knowing how to win, because he is a self-made multi-billionaire.
Conclusion: Therefore, Americans need to elect Trump president.Both of the premises are open to dispute. Here I will challenge the minor premise by pointing to the evidence that Trump's business career shows many failures from his imprudent decisions, that he was saved from ruin by his father's life-long transfer of money to him, and so he is not the self-made billionaire that he claims to be. I will also suggest that Trump's financial imprudence as a businessman has been continued in his financial imprudence as a president who has promoted reckless increases in the federal budget deficits and the national debt, which contradicts his promise in his campaign rhetoric that he would show his fiscal prudence as president.
One can see Trump's campaign enthymeme by reading Trump's campaign book Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America (New York: Threshold Editions, 2016), which brought together all of the recurrent language and themes of his campaign speeches.
From the very beginning of the book, Trump identifies his political opponents as all being incompetent. They are "politicians who talk a great game in campaigns--and play like total losers when they try to actually govern because they can't govern, they don't know how to govern" (xi). And "as for the presidency and the executive branch, the incompetence is beyond belief" (xii).
Instead of the failed leadership of these incompetent losers, America needs the leadership of a successful businessman who has shown he knows how to win.
". . . It needs someone with common sense and business acumen, someone who can truly lead America back to what has made us great in the past."
"We need someone with a proven track record in business who understands greatness, someone who can rally us to the standard of excellence we once epitomized and explain what needs to be done" (xiii).
"America needs to start winning again" (1).So here's the major premise in Trump's argument from character: all of America's political leaders in recent decades have lacked the political judgment necessary to lead America into greatness--"they don't know how to govern"--and the only good alternative is to turn to a successful businessman who has shown the "common sense and business acumen" that he can use to lead America back to greatness.
To support this major premise, he offered arguments from examples--examples of failed leadership (from the Carter years to the Obama years) in both domestic policy and foreign policy.
For the minor premise in his argument from character, Trump had to argue that his unique success as a businessman identified him as the prudent leader who knows how to govern so that America can win again.
"I'm not bragging when I say I'm a winner. I have experience in winning. That's what we call leadership. That means that people will follow me and be inspired by what I do. How do I know? I've been a leader my whole life. Thousands of my employees know that I'll deliver and help them deliver" (9).To support this minor premise, Trump offers arguments from examples of his success in business. His book ends with an "About the Author" section that gives a story of his business career in 16 pages, which begins: "Donald J. Trump is the very definition of the American success story, continually setting the standards of excellence while expanding his interests in real estate, sports, and entertainment. He is the archetypal businessman--a deal-maker without peer." So as the "archetypal businessman," no other businessman is equal to Donald J. Trump.
This story in the book concludes with a long list of 70 "properties" said to be "owned and/or developed and managed or licensed by Donald J. Trump," which includes everything from Trump Tower and The Estates at Trump International Gold Club (Dubai) to his Boeing 757 and 3 Sikorsky 76 Helicopters.
Look, Reader, at this stunning list of Donald Trump's luxurious properties! Don't these examples of his pile of wealth prove that he's the only person who can lead you and Make America Great Again?
As Trump relentlessly repeated this rhetorical argument from character--insulting all professional politicians as losers and bragging about himself as the rich business genius who always wins--his opponents in the Republican primaries and in the general election were thrown into stunned confusion without finding any effective response to Trump's rhetoric. If they had read Aristotle's Rhetoric, they could have understood Trump's rhetorical technique, and they could have found the best rhetorical counterattack that could have defeated him. (If Trump had been running against Obama, then Obama might have employed his rhetorical skills in mocking Trump as he did at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011.)
To understand the rhetorical argument from character, Aristotle explained, one must understand those circumstances that shape character in ways that are pertinent to rhetoric. This includes understanding how character is formed by the experiences of good or bad fortune. In particular, the characters of fortunate people can be distinguished into at least three groups--the nobly born, the rich, and the politically powerful (1391a20-1391b3).
Aristotle is bluntly critical of all three character types. People favored by fortune, he says, are generally inclined to be arrogant and thoughtless. Yet he also ranks these characters as better or worse, with a progression from the nobly born, who are the worst, to the rich, who are better, and then to the politically powerful, who are the best of these three types. Political rule is elevating in a way that noble birth and wealth are not.
Aristotle says that wealthy people tend to be insolent, arrogant, and impulsive. They think they possess everything that is good since they believe they can buy everything, and so they think they possess what all human beings seek. They think that displaying their wealth proves their superiority.
Aristotle concedes that, insofar as many people do need the wealthy, there is some truth to their claims. Even the wise, Simonides observed, are seen to wait at the doors of the rich. Even so, the essential character of a wealthy man, Aristotle concludes, is that of a "fortunate fool."
Aristotle does add the qualification that those of long-established wealth are better than the newly wealthy. But his point is not that the former are free of the vices of the latter, but only that they have these vices to a somewhat lesser degree.
The wealthy think that their wealth makes them worthy to rule. But Aristotle makes it clear that the politically powerful are generally better than the wealthy. The exercise of political rule requires that powerful men be "more manly," "more serious," and "more dignified" than wealthy men. "They are more dignified rather than more pompous, for their reputation makes them more visible, so that they observe a mean; and the dignity is a mild and becoming pomposity" (1397a27-28).
Public responsibilities call forth exertions of human capacities and impose standards of conduct that are unequalled by the activities of wealthy men. This is not to deny, however, that politically powerful men promote greater mischief than do wealthy men. In fact, as Aristotle notes, precisely because powerful men are never satisfied with petty things, their injustices are never small, but always great.
One can see here suggestions as to how Trump's opponents should have answered his rhetorical argument from character--that his success in becoming wealthy proves that he is more qualified to govern than are all those professional politicians who are really stupid. His opponents should have exposed the false and silly pretensions of this argument coming from Trump as the "fortunate fool," which would have required refuting his claims to business success that made him a self-made multi-billionaire.
In his book, Trump writes:
"There's nobody like me. Nobody."
"I ask people to look at what I've done throughout my whole career. Look at how successful I've been doing things my way. So they have a choice. They can pretend some impossible solution is actually going to happen, or they can listen to the person who has proved he can solve problems."
"I started in a relatively small real estate company based in Brooklyn and made more than $10 billion. I now live on what is considered the best block of real estate anywhere in the world--Fifth Avenue between 56th Street and 57th Street , right next to Tiffany's in the heart of New York City."
. . .
"Nobody understands business better than I do" (74-75).
. . .
"During the recession of 1990 many of my friends went bankrupt, and never recovered. I never went bankrupt."
. . .
"The money I've earned was the result of my own work--projects I created, deals I made, companies I bought and turned around" (80-81).
"I work hard, I've been honest and I'm very successful. The billions I have? I earned every penny. When I was beginning my career, my father never gave me much money, but he gave me a great work ethic. I always know a hater when they say my father gave me $200 million when I was starting out. I only wish!" (98)"I never went bankrupt" is a lie. In one of Trump's tweets (on June 19, 2015), he wrote: "Stop saying I went bankrupt. I never went bankrupt but like many great business people have used the laws to corporate advantage--smart!"
What he means by "using the laws to corporate advantage" is that he was forced to put 6 of his properties into bankruptcy. Trump's Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City filed for bankruptcy in 1991. The next year, two other properties in Atlantic City and his Plaza Hotel in New York City went into bankruptcy. In 2004, Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts filed for bankruptcy. In 2009, Trump Entertainment Resorts went into bankruptcy. Trump has said that the first three bankruptcies count as only one, so that the total is not six but four. And when he says "I never went bankrupt," this is his evasive way of saying that only his companies went bankrupt! None of these bankruptcies are mentioned anywhere in his book.
And when he says "my father never gave me much money," he is lying about his dependence on the huge amounts of money his father gave him--beginning when Trump was 3 years old and continuing throughout his life whenever Trump needed to be bailed out from his failures. The best evidence for this comes in an investigative report published in The New York Times on October 2, 2018.
The investigators for the Times studied over 100,000 pages of confidential tax records and financial records of Fred Trump and his children. Some of these documents are attached to the article. They found that Fred Trump transferred over $1 billion in wealth to his children without paying the tax rates for gifts and inheritances. This included the equivalent of $413 million in today's dollars going to Donald Trump, much of this through secret transfers. So the original source of Donald Trump's wealth was from his father.
President Trump refused requests to comment on the article. One of his lawyers sent a letter to the Times denying much of what the article reported and threatening a suit for defamation, which has never been filed.
By age 3, the young Donald Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today's dollars as an employee of his father. By age 8, Donald was a millionaire.
Over Donald's lifetime, there were over 295 streams of revenue to him from his father. Whenever Donald started new building projects, his father increased the flow of money to his son, sometimes in the form of loans that were never repaid.
Whenever Donald's businesses began to fail, his father would give him more money. In one of the most famous examples of this, Fred Trump once bought $3.5 million in casino chips to help his son make a bond payment on an Atlantic City casino.
The most dramatic discovery by the Times that has never previously been reported is how Trump family formed two companies--All County Building Supply and Maintenance in 1992 and Apartment Management Associates Inc. in 1994--through which Fred Trump transferred his wealth to his children without paying gift or estate taxes.
Throughout all of this, Fred carefully promoted the myth of Donald as the Self-Made Billionaire by telling reporters that Donald had done it all on his own. This myth then became the basis for Trump's presidential campaign rhetoric--arguing from his character as the "archetypal businessman" who would use his genius for moneymaking to Make America Great Again.
The falsity of this rhetorical myth explains why Trump as president has failed to show the astute practical judgment for solving America's problems that he promised in his campaign speeches. For example, in the campaign, he warned about the economic danger from federal budget deficits and the national debt:
"Right now this country is in serious financial trouble. Our national debt is more than $19 trillion, and we're on our way to $20 trillion. Even the most liberal economists warn that as we head past the $20+ trillion debt levels, we'll be in big, big trouble. That's when our financial system really starts to falter and diminish our borrowing capacity as well as drive up the interest costs on our debt" (82).In his campaign, Trump promised that he would be using his genius for financial management to balance the federal budget and pay off the national debt. But today, the national debt is over $23 trillion and climbing, and the yearly federal budget deficit has risen to over $1 trillion. Trump has even stopped talking about the national debt as being a problem.
Now President Trump can't rely on his father to bail him out of debt.
Sunday, January 26, 2020
Trump and Political Philosophy (2): Aristotle on Trump's Campaign Rhetoric
Despite the broad coverage of political philosophy as applied to Trump in Trump and Political Philosophy, there is something missing--there is no thought about how Aristotle's Rhetoric could illuminate Trump's rhetoric. There are some references to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics--and Carson Holloway's paper on Book Five of the Politics is excellent--but there is almost complete silence about Aristotle's classic study of rhetorical theory. (Leslie Rubin's paper does have one paragraph on Aristotle's Rhetoric in an endnote [vol. 1, p. 69].) That's too bad, because it's impossible to understand Trump's electoral success without understanding his distinctive rhetoric, and there has never been a better book on rhetoric than Aristotle's. (I have written a series of posts on the Nicomachean Ethics that begin here, here, and here.)
It has always seemed odd to me that political scientists and scholars of political philosophy ignore Aristotle's Rhetoric, although politics is all about rhetorical persuasion, and Aristotle wrote the best study of the subject. Moreover, much of Aristotle's book can be understood as political moral psychology, comparable to some of the recent evolutionary political psychology developed by people like Jonathan Haidt (as I indicated in a post here.)
After looking back at my book Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the "Rhetoric" (first published in 1981), I thought I would briefly sketch Aristotle's framework for rhetorical analysis and then apply it to one of the prominent examples of Trump's campaign rhetoric: his speech announcing his presidential run in June of 2015.
ARISTOTLE'S RHETORICAL ANALYSIS
For the sake of brevity, I will have to be schematic without filling in the details. (Hey, go buy my book, and buy extra copies for your family and friends.)
Rhetoric is reasoning from the common opinions of one's audience, so that the persuasive speaker starts with the common opinions (doxa) and then moves the audience to the conclusions that he favors.
Aristotle distinguishes the means of rhetorical persuasion into three broad categories: the intellectual content (dianoia) of a speech, the style (lexis) of a speech, and the arrangement (taxis) of a speech.
The intellectual content has three elements: the arguments of the speech (logos), the character of the speaker (ethos), and the emotions of the audience (pathos). A successful speaker must offer persuasive arguments in his speech. He must show his own character to be persuasive. And he must persuasively handle the emotions of his audience to move them to action or decision.
Persuasive arguments have formal and substantive elements. The two formal elements are logical (deductive) reasoning through enthymemes and factual (inductive) reasoning through examples. Enthymemes are syllogisms (reasoning from premises to conclusions), but often some of the steps in the syllogism are left unstated. Examples can be either historical cases or fictional stories.
There are three substantive kinds of persuasive arguments corresponding to the three subject areas of rhetoric. Political rhetoric consists of deliberative arguments about policies for the future that can be advantageous or disadvantageous for the political community. Legal rhetoric consists of forensic arguments about past actions accusing or defending people in judging the justice or injustice of their actions. Epideictic rhetoric consists of ceremonial arguments for praising people for their noble deeds or blaming them for their ignoble deeds.
We see political rhetoric when people are debating matters of public policy or constitutional issues concerning the institutional structure of a regime. We see legal rhetoric when lawyers or judges are debating the application of law to particular cases. We see epideictic rhetoric when in ceremonial occasions (such as funerals and the dedication of cemeteries), the past deeds of people are praised as honorable or blamed as dishonorable.
A speaker's persuasiveness depends not just on his presentation of persuasive arguments (logos), which Aristotle takes up in Book One of the Rhetoric, but also on his presentation of his moral and intellectual character through his speech (ethos), and on his moving his audience in their emotions (pathos), which he takes up in Book Two.
The character of a speaker is most persuasive when he displays prudence (phronesis), virtue (arete), and good will (eunoia). A speaker shows his prudence when he shows his practical competence in judging the subject of his speech. A speaker shows his virtue when he shows that he is trustworthy. And he shows his good will when he shows that he cares for his audience. A speaker who appears to be imprudent, untrustworthy, and uncaring is not persuasive.
A successful speaker must also be emotionally persuasive in understanding the emotions of his audience, so that he can stir those emotions that favor his position and calm those emotions that deny his position. To achieve this, Aristotle lays out the social psychology of seven pairs of emotions that counter one another: anger and calmness, friendly feeling and enmity, fear and confidence, shame and shamelessness, kindliness and unkindliness, pity and indignation, and envy and emulation.
It might seem strange that Aristotle presents this account of the emotions as part of the intellectual side of rhetoric (or what Aristotle calls dianoia), because we often assume that reason and emotion are in oppositin. But actually Aristotle suggests that the emotions are rational, in the sense that they arise from beliefs about the world that can be either true or false. Consequently, a speaker can talk an audience into or out of an emotion by persuading them that their emotion is either reasonable or unreasonable as a response to their circumstances. A rhetorician changes the emotions of his listeners by changing their minds.
So, for example, Aristotle defines anger as "a painful desire for a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight of oneself or one's own, the slight being undeserved" (1378a32-33). (Similarly, evolutionary psychologists like Debra Lieberman, who have developed a cognitive theory of the passions, will define anger as a painful response to perceptions of social undervaluation.) Aristotle infers from this definition the various elements of anger--how angry people are disposed, with whom they are customarily angry, and in what circumstances they are inclined to anger. With this knowledge of anger, he then shows how a speaker can arouse anger in his audience by persuading them that they have been slighted by someone undeservedly, and therefore they should seek revenge; or he can calm the anger in his audience by persuading them that their anger is not warranted by the circumstances.
Notice that the slight that arouses anger must be undeserved. Human beings become angry when they think they are not being treated in accordance with their worth. Anger, then, is a response to injustice in its fundamental sense of not receiving one's due. Anger manifests a natural sense of justice. Some of the prime causes of anger--such as ingratitude, refusal to reciprocate good for good, and failure to help one's friends--are the sort of things that Aristotle identifies as unjust by nature. The human emotion of anger is the ultimate source of the legal concept of natural law.
By the end of the second book of the Rhetoric, Aristotle has explained all of the rhetorical "proofs" (pisteis) for handling the arguments of a speech, the character of the speaker, and the emotions of the audience. It might seem then that he is finished.
But in the third and final book of the Rhetoric, Aristotle takes up the elements of oratorical performance that he has previously neglected--the style and arrangement of speeches. He has denounced sophistical speakers for being so preoccupied with verbally charming and diverting their listeners that they ignore the primacy of "proof" and the "body of proof"--the enthymeme. Now, in the third book, he seems to be introducing the same devices of verbal ornamentation that are favored by the sophists.
To devote so much attention to matters of style is necessary, Aristotle admits, only as a concession to corrupt listeners. But still he accentuates the rational character of the subject. Style can be proper if it is an integral part of the substantive proofs of a speech--if it's a style that is appropriate to the subject, that manifests the speaker's character, and that expresses the right emotion.
Style concerns not what one says but how one says it. And so style has little influence with good listeners, because they are more interested in the substantive proofs of a speech than in its manner of presentation. And "rightly considered," concentrating on style "is thought vulgar" (1403b37-1404a2). But the "corruption of regimes" and the concomitant "corruption of the listener" make it necessary for the rhetorician to be careful about style. Since it is important for speaking clearly and with the proper dignity, the rhetorician needs to consider it somewhat in any type of instruction. It assumes great importance, however, only for the sake of diverting the listener with amusing imagery--"wherefore no one teaches geometry this way."
Through the clever use of an emotional style, Aristotle explains, a speaker can make his audience believe in what he asserts to be facts, even when his assertions are false:
This is what happens when a regime becomes utterly corrupt, resulting in the corruption of opinion, and then even the noblest rhetorician must turn his attention to style to hold the interest of his listeners. Thus the character of a regime determines the character of rhetoric. And Aristotle wishes his rhetorician to know not only what would be possible in the best regime and what is commonly possible in most regimes, but also what is demanded in the worst regimes.
Like style, Aristotle prefers not to give too much importance to the arrangement of a speech. In its simplest form, it's enough to arrange a speech into two parts--state the case and then prove it. But many speeches might require at least four parts: a proem that catches the attention of the audience, a statement of the speaker's position, the proof for that position, which is usually the longest part of the speech, and then an epilogue that summarizes what has been said.
Aristotle's Rhetoric provides the entire toolkit for rhetoric. Every possible technique for persuasion is included. But different kinds of rhetoricians will tend to rely on different kinds of techniques.
Trump's rhetoric is certainly distinctive. In his formal logic, he tends to rely more on reasoning from examples or factual claims than on reasoning by logical inference. But like any persuasive speaker, there is always, at least implicitly, an underlying enthymematic deductive argument. Trump's general enthymeme in his presidential campaign was clear: It would be good for America to be made great again. I will make America great again. Therefore, it would be good for America to elect me President.
In his substantive arguments, he engages mostly in political or deliberative rhetoric rather than legal or epideictic rhetoric.
In his rhetorical appeal to his good character, he emphasizes his practical judgment as a successful businessman, his trustworthiness as a leader, and his good will towards his supporters as he fights for them against their enemies.
In his emotional rhetoric, he stirs up the resentful anger of his audience as people who have been unfairly slighted by the elite ruling class, and he promises that he will take vengeance against those enemies of the people. He also arouses his audience's fear of those who would attack and exploit them, such as foreign countries and illegal immigrants who take their jobs and threaten their lives and families, and he promises that he will defend them against those enemies.
The most distinctive feature of Trump's rhetoric is his style. Aristotle thought that an excessive emphasis on style was vulgar. And, indeed, Trump's rhetorical style makes him the center of attention because of its vulgarity.
This was made clear when some people complained that Trump's rhetoric was not "presidential," because it did not show the style of formal dignity and propriety that people expect to hear from a president, and Trump responded by saying that if he adopted a "presidential" style of speaking, this would be "too boring" for his audience, who need to be entertained.
At a Wisconsin Rally: Being Presidential "Would Be Boring"
There is, however, as I have indicated, a Teleprompter Trump who is more presidential and less vulgar in his style than the Turbulent Trump. The Teleprompter Trump is displayed in speeches like his address in Warsaw in 2017, and these are the speeches favored by the intellectuals who support Trump--like the Claremont Straussians.
TRUMP'S SPEECH ANNOUNCING HIS PRESIDENTIAL BID
At Trump Tower in June 16, 2015, Trump announced his candidacy. This is a full video of the speech. A full transcript of the speech along with annotations can be found here at the Washington Post.
In this speech, Trump's primary mode of rhetorical persuasion is his appeal to his character as a successful real estate businessman who has shown his astute practical judgment for making deals that has made him very rich, which shows that as president he can make deals for America, so that America can become a winner again, after too many years of being a loser.
American politicians today don't have this competence because they are too stupid to make good deals for America: "politicians are all talk, no action." After describing how China, Japan, and Mexico take American jobs and money, he asks: "How stupid are our leaders? How stupid are these politicians to allow this to happen? How stupid are they?"
"Our country is in serious trouble. We don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time"
Not only are the politicians too stupid to make good deals, they are also controlled by special interests, by political donors, and by lobbyists. So the voters cannot trust them to care about what's good for America. By contrast, Trump says, you can trust me to work for you because I am so rich that I don't need money from the special interests. "I'm using my own money. I'm not using the lobbyists. I'm not using the donors. I don't care. I'm really rich."
It's important, therefore, to impress his audience with how wealthy he is. "I'm proud of my net worth. I've done an amazing job." He presents a written financial statement of his wealth that says that he has assets of $9 billion and 240 million dollars.
Remarkably, however, his financial statement gives no supporting evidence for this number. And since he is famous for piling up huge debt that has forced him into multiple bankruptcies, many people are skeptical about his claims about his wealth.
Trump's political rhetoric about public policy in this speech depends mostly on reasoning from examples. So to show the need for restrictions on international trade, he describes examples of trade that are bad for the United States.
"When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn't exist, folks. They beat us all the time. When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically."
It is easy for the "fact-checkers" of Trump's speech to point out that although Chevrolet is not a popular car in Japan, there are Chevrolets in Tokyo.
"But I said, 'Don't hit Iraq,' because you're going to totally destabilize the Middle East. Iran is going to take over the Middle East, Iran and somebody else will get the oil, and it turned out that Iran is now taking over Iraq. Think of it. Iran is taking over Iraq, and they're taking it over big league."
This has been one of Trump's most often repeated examples of his good judgment in foreign policy--that unlike most Republican and Democrat leaders, he warned against the American invasion of Iraq that began on March 19, 2003. He used this both against his Republican opponents in the primaries and against Hillary Clinton.
But there is no evidence that Trump ever warned against invading Iraq before the invasion started, although he expressed concerns about the costs of the war after it started, and by 2004 he was publicly criticizing the war.
Newspapers like the Washington Post and organizations like FactCheck.org have regularly pointed out that many of Trump's examples in his speeches are either completely false or distortions of the truth. Remarkably, Trump's response to this has been to repeat the same examples without ever admitting their falsity.
In some cases, the falsity of his examples is so obvious as to be preposterous.
"Last quarter, it was just announced our gross domestic product--a sign of strength, right? But not for us. It was below zero. Whoever heard of this? It's never below zero."
It's impossible for GDP to be "below zero"! Apparently, he's referring to a quarterly report not about GDP but about the growth in GDP, which is often "below zero" in some quarters.
Here's another preposterous example: "A lot of people up there can't get jobs. They can't get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs, and Mexico has our jobs. They all have jobs."
There are no jobs? Actually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of job openings at the end of April of 2015 was 5.4 million, which was the highest since December of 2000. In recent years, there has been no shortage of jobs in America. Instead, there has been a shortage of labor to fill the many job openings.
This is a critical point for explaining why people voted for Trump. Did they vote for him because they were unemployed or otherwise economically disadvantaged, and they thought Trump would create good jobs for them? Some surveys of his voters have indicated that most of them had incomes placing them in the top 50% of incomes. If this is so, then it's not clear that voting for Trump was an expression of economic grievances.
The true motivation for Trump's voters might have been not so much economic as cultural--a response to Trump's emotional rhetoric of fear--the fear of dangerous foreign invaders. Near the beginning of his speech, Trump provided the most memorable passage of his speech:
"When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically."
"The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems."
(APPLAUSE)
"Thank you. It's true, and these are the best and the finest. [He points to the crowd of people on the balcony above him applauding.] When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not send you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
"But I speak to border guards, and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people."
So while "some" of the Mexican immigrants to the United States are "good people," most of them are drug-dealers, criminals, and rapists?
Amazingly, Trump and his supporters have never denied or apologized for this remark. Instead, they have said that it really is "common sense" and an honest challenge to "political correctness."
In fact, immigrants to the U.S. generally show crime rates that are lower than for native-born Americans. But still Trump can point to examples of immigrants who have committed crimes in the U.S.--like the infamous MS13 gangs and those who attacked the American families who were represented in the audience for Trump's first State of the Union Address, where he identified them as typical Americans who have faced violence from Mexican immigrants.
Trump is skillful in employing what Aristotle identified as the fallacy of emotional style. Trump speaks in a style of anger in response to perceived slights from Mexico: "they're laughing at us, at our stupidity." And he speaks in a style of fear in response to perceived attacks from Mexican immigrants: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." And if his audience sympathizes with his emotions of anger and fear, then they believe his false facts justifying these emotions must be true. Nothing said by the "fact-checkers" can negate the emotional power of this rhetorical fallacy over the minds of Trump's supporters.
I will have more to say in future posts about the rhetoric of Trump's speeches.
It has always seemed odd to me that political scientists and scholars of political philosophy ignore Aristotle's Rhetoric, although politics is all about rhetorical persuasion, and Aristotle wrote the best study of the subject. Moreover, much of Aristotle's book can be understood as political moral psychology, comparable to some of the recent evolutionary political psychology developed by people like Jonathan Haidt (as I indicated in a post here.)
After looking back at my book Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the "Rhetoric" (first published in 1981), I thought I would briefly sketch Aristotle's framework for rhetorical analysis and then apply it to one of the prominent examples of Trump's campaign rhetoric: his speech announcing his presidential run in June of 2015.
ARISTOTLE'S RHETORICAL ANALYSIS
For the sake of brevity, I will have to be schematic without filling in the details. (Hey, go buy my book, and buy extra copies for your family and friends.)
Rhetoric is reasoning from the common opinions of one's audience, so that the persuasive speaker starts with the common opinions (doxa) and then moves the audience to the conclusions that he favors.
Aristotle distinguishes the means of rhetorical persuasion into three broad categories: the intellectual content (dianoia) of a speech, the style (lexis) of a speech, and the arrangement (taxis) of a speech.
The intellectual content has three elements: the arguments of the speech (logos), the character of the speaker (ethos), and the emotions of the audience (pathos). A successful speaker must offer persuasive arguments in his speech. He must show his own character to be persuasive. And he must persuasively handle the emotions of his audience to move them to action or decision.
Persuasive arguments have formal and substantive elements. The two formal elements are logical (deductive) reasoning through enthymemes and factual (inductive) reasoning through examples. Enthymemes are syllogisms (reasoning from premises to conclusions), but often some of the steps in the syllogism are left unstated. Examples can be either historical cases or fictional stories.
There are three substantive kinds of persuasive arguments corresponding to the three subject areas of rhetoric. Political rhetoric consists of deliberative arguments about policies for the future that can be advantageous or disadvantageous for the political community. Legal rhetoric consists of forensic arguments about past actions accusing or defending people in judging the justice or injustice of their actions. Epideictic rhetoric consists of ceremonial arguments for praising people for their noble deeds or blaming them for their ignoble deeds.
We see political rhetoric when people are debating matters of public policy or constitutional issues concerning the institutional structure of a regime. We see legal rhetoric when lawyers or judges are debating the application of law to particular cases. We see epideictic rhetoric when in ceremonial occasions (such as funerals and the dedication of cemeteries), the past deeds of people are praised as honorable or blamed as dishonorable.
A speaker's persuasiveness depends not just on his presentation of persuasive arguments (logos), which Aristotle takes up in Book One of the Rhetoric, but also on his presentation of his moral and intellectual character through his speech (ethos), and on his moving his audience in their emotions (pathos), which he takes up in Book Two.
The character of a speaker is most persuasive when he displays prudence (phronesis), virtue (arete), and good will (eunoia). A speaker shows his prudence when he shows his practical competence in judging the subject of his speech. A speaker shows his virtue when he shows that he is trustworthy. And he shows his good will when he shows that he cares for his audience. A speaker who appears to be imprudent, untrustworthy, and uncaring is not persuasive.
A successful speaker must also be emotionally persuasive in understanding the emotions of his audience, so that he can stir those emotions that favor his position and calm those emotions that deny his position. To achieve this, Aristotle lays out the social psychology of seven pairs of emotions that counter one another: anger and calmness, friendly feeling and enmity, fear and confidence, shame and shamelessness, kindliness and unkindliness, pity and indignation, and envy and emulation.
It might seem strange that Aristotle presents this account of the emotions as part of the intellectual side of rhetoric (or what Aristotle calls dianoia), because we often assume that reason and emotion are in oppositin. But actually Aristotle suggests that the emotions are rational, in the sense that they arise from beliefs about the world that can be either true or false. Consequently, a speaker can talk an audience into or out of an emotion by persuading them that their emotion is either reasonable or unreasonable as a response to their circumstances. A rhetorician changes the emotions of his listeners by changing their minds.
So, for example, Aristotle defines anger as "a painful desire for a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight of oneself or one's own, the slight being undeserved" (1378a32-33). (Similarly, evolutionary psychologists like Debra Lieberman, who have developed a cognitive theory of the passions, will define anger as a painful response to perceptions of social undervaluation.) Aristotle infers from this definition the various elements of anger--how angry people are disposed, with whom they are customarily angry, and in what circumstances they are inclined to anger. With this knowledge of anger, he then shows how a speaker can arouse anger in his audience by persuading them that they have been slighted by someone undeservedly, and therefore they should seek revenge; or he can calm the anger in his audience by persuading them that their anger is not warranted by the circumstances.
Notice that the slight that arouses anger must be undeserved. Human beings become angry when they think they are not being treated in accordance with their worth. Anger, then, is a response to injustice in its fundamental sense of not receiving one's due. Anger manifests a natural sense of justice. Some of the prime causes of anger--such as ingratitude, refusal to reciprocate good for good, and failure to help one's friends--are the sort of things that Aristotle identifies as unjust by nature. The human emotion of anger is the ultimate source of the legal concept of natural law.
By the end of the second book of the Rhetoric, Aristotle has explained all of the rhetorical "proofs" (pisteis) for handling the arguments of a speech, the character of the speaker, and the emotions of the audience. It might seem then that he is finished.
But in the third and final book of the Rhetoric, Aristotle takes up the elements of oratorical performance that he has previously neglected--the style and arrangement of speeches. He has denounced sophistical speakers for being so preoccupied with verbally charming and diverting their listeners that they ignore the primacy of "proof" and the "body of proof"--the enthymeme. Now, in the third book, he seems to be introducing the same devices of verbal ornamentation that are favored by the sophists.
To devote so much attention to matters of style is necessary, Aristotle admits, only as a concession to corrupt listeners. But still he accentuates the rational character of the subject. Style can be proper if it is an integral part of the substantive proofs of a speech--if it's a style that is appropriate to the subject, that manifests the speaker's character, and that expresses the right emotion.
Style concerns not what one says but how one says it. And so style has little influence with good listeners, because they are more interested in the substantive proofs of a speech than in its manner of presentation. And "rightly considered," concentrating on style "is thought vulgar" (1403b37-1404a2). But the "corruption of regimes" and the concomitant "corruption of the listener" make it necessary for the rhetorician to be careful about style. Since it is important for speaking clearly and with the proper dignity, the rhetorician needs to consider it somewhat in any type of instruction. It assumes great importance, however, only for the sake of diverting the listener with amusing imagery--"wherefore no one teaches geometry this way."
Through the clever use of an emotional style, Aristotle explains, a speaker can make his audience believe in what he asserts to be facts, even when his assertions are false:
"Style expresses emotion when a man speaks with anger of an insolent insult. . . . The appropriate style makes the fact appear credible: the mind of the listener makes a logical error in believing the truth of what the speaker says, because they in the audience feel the same emotions, so that they think the facts to be so, even if they are not as the speaker represents them; and the hearer always sympathizes with the emotional speaker, even though he says nothing. As a result, many overwhelm their listeners by making noise" (1408a23-25).If a speaker expresses an emotional style of anger as he asserts that he and his audience should be justifiably angry, because they have been slighted or injured by their enemies, and if the audience shares this emotion of anger with the speaker, the audience will believe the factual assertions of the speaker, even when these are false. This is the fallacy of an emotional style of speaking: if the speaker speaks in the style of an emotion like anger, and if the audience sympathizes with that emotion, then the facts asserted by the speaker as justifying that emotion will appear to be true, even though they are false. Because of this emotional style, "the mind of the listener makes a logical error."
This is what happens when a regime becomes utterly corrupt, resulting in the corruption of opinion, and then even the noblest rhetorician must turn his attention to style to hold the interest of his listeners. Thus the character of a regime determines the character of rhetoric. And Aristotle wishes his rhetorician to know not only what would be possible in the best regime and what is commonly possible in most regimes, but also what is demanded in the worst regimes.
Like style, Aristotle prefers not to give too much importance to the arrangement of a speech. In its simplest form, it's enough to arrange a speech into two parts--state the case and then prove it. But many speeches might require at least four parts: a proem that catches the attention of the audience, a statement of the speaker's position, the proof for that position, which is usually the longest part of the speech, and then an epilogue that summarizes what has been said.
Aristotle's Rhetoric provides the entire toolkit for rhetoric. Every possible technique for persuasion is included. But different kinds of rhetoricians will tend to rely on different kinds of techniques.
Trump's rhetoric is certainly distinctive. In his formal logic, he tends to rely more on reasoning from examples or factual claims than on reasoning by logical inference. But like any persuasive speaker, there is always, at least implicitly, an underlying enthymematic deductive argument. Trump's general enthymeme in his presidential campaign was clear: It would be good for America to be made great again. I will make America great again. Therefore, it would be good for America to elect me President.
In his substantive arguments, he engages mostly in political or deliberative rhetoric rather than legal or epideictic rhetoric.
In his rhetorical appeal to his good character, he emphasizes his practical judgment as a successful businessman, his trustworthiness as a leader, and his good will towards his supporters as he fights for them against their enemies.
In his emotional rhetoric, he stirs up the resentful anger of his audience as people who have been unfairly slighted by the elite ruling class, and he promises that he will take vengeance against those enemies of the people. He also arouses his audience's fear of those who would attack and exploit them, such as foreign countries and illegal immigrants who take their jobs and threaten their lives and families, and he promises that he will defend them against those enemies.
The most distinctive feature of Trump's rhetoric is his style. Aristotle thought that an excessive emphasis on style was vulgar. And, indeed, Trump's rhetorical style makes him the center of attention because of its vulgarity.
This was made clear when some people complained that Trump's rhetoric was not "presidential," because it did not show the style of formal dignity and propriety that people expect to hear from a president, and Trump responded by saying that if he adopted a "presidential" style of speaking, this would be "too boring" for his audience, who need to be entertained.
At a Wisconsin Rally: Being Presidential "Would Be Boring"
There is, however, as I have indicated, a Teleprompter Trump who is more presidential and less vulgar in his style than the Turbulent Trump. The Teleprompter Trump is displayed in speeches like his address in Warsaw in 2017, and these are the speeches favored by the intellectuals who support Trump--like the Claremont Straussians.
TRUMP'S SPEECH ANNOUNCING HIS PRESIDENTIAL BID
At Trump Tower in June 16, 2015, Trump announced his candidacy. This is a full video of the speech. A full transcript of the speech along with annotations can be found here at the Washington Post.
In this speech, Trump's primary mode of rhetorical persuasion is his appeal to his character as a successful real estate businessman who has shown his astute practical judgment for making deals that has made him very rich, which shows that as president he can make deals for America, so that America can become a winner again, after too many years of being a loser.
American politicians today don't have this competence because they are too stupid to make good deals for America: "politicians are all talk, no action." After describing how China, Japan, and Mexico take American jobs and money, he asks: "How stupid are our leaders? How stupid are these politicians to allow this to happen? How stupid are they?"
"Our country is in serious trouble. We don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time"
Not only are the politicians too stupid to make good deals, they are also controlled by special interests, by political donors, and by lobbyists. So the voters cannot trust them to care about what's good for America. By contrast, Trump says, you can trust me to work for you because I am so rich that I don't need money from the special interests. "I'm using my own money. I'm not using the lobbyists. I'm not using the donors. I don't care. I'm really rich."
It's important, therefore, to impress his audience with how wealthy he is. "I'm proud of my net worth. I've done an amazing job." He presents a written financial statement of his wealth that says that he has assets of $9 billion and 240 million dollars.
Remarkably, however, his financial statement gives no supporting evidence for this number. And since he is famous for piling up huge debt that has forced him into multiple bankruptcies, many people are skeptical about his claims about his wealth.
Trump's political rhetoric about public policy in this speech depends mostly on reasoning from examples. So to show the need for restrictions on international trade, he describes examples of trade that are bad for the United States.
"When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn't exist, folks. They beat us all the time. When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically."
It is easy for the "fact-checkers" of Trump's speech to point out that although Chevrolet is not a popular car in Japan, there are Chevrolets in Tokyo.
"But I said, 'Don't hit Iraq,' because you're going to totally destabilize the Middle East. Iran is going to take over the Middle East, Iran and somebody else will get the oil, and it turned out that Iran is now taking over Iraq. Think of it. Iran is taking over Iraq, and they're taking it over big league."
This has been one of Trump's most often repeated examples of his good judgment in foreign policy--that unlike most Republican and Democrat leaders, he warned against the American invasion of Iraq that began on March 19, 2003. He used this both against his Republican opponents in the primaries and against Hillary Clinton.
But there is no evidence that Trump ever warned against invading Iraq before the invasion started, although he expressed concerns about the costs of the war after it started, and by 2004 he was publicly criticizing the war.
Newspapers like the Washington Post and organizations like FactCheck.org have regularly pointed out that many of Trump's examples in his speeches are either completely false or distortions of the truth. Remarkably, Trump's response to this has been to repeat the same examples without ever admitting their falsity.
In some cases, the falsity of his examples is so obvious as to be preposterous.
"Last quarter, it was just announced our gross domestic product--a sign of strength, right? But not for us. It was below zero. Whoever heard of this? It's never below zero."
It's impossible for GDP to be "below zero"! Apparently, he's referring to a quarterly report not about GDP but about the growth in GDP, which is often "below zero" in some quarters.
Here's another preposterous example: "A lot of people up there can't get jobs. They can't get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs, and Mexico has our jobs. They all have jobs."
There are no jobs? Actually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of job openings at the end of April of 2015 was 5.4 million, which was the highest since December of 2000. In recent years, there has been no shortage of jobs in America. Instead, there has been a shortage of labor to fill the many job openings.
This is a critical point for explaining why people voted for Trump. Did they vote for him because they were unemployed or otherwise economically disadvantaged, and they thought Trump would create good jobs for them? Some surveys of his voters have indicated that most of them had incomes placing them in the top 50% of incomes. If this is so, then it's not clear that voting for Trump was an expression of economic grievances.
The true motivation for Trump's voters might have been not so much economic as cultural--a response to Trump's emotional rhetoric of fear--the fear of dangerous foreign invaders. Near the beginning of his speech, Trump provided the most memorable passage of his speech:
"When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically."
"The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems."
(APPLAUSE)
"Thank you. It's true, and these are the best and the finest. [He points to the crowd of people on the balcony above him applauding.] When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not send you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
"But I speak to border guards, and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people."
So while "some" of the Mexican immigrants to the United States are "good people," most of them are drug-dealers, criminals, and rapists?
Amazingly, Trump and his supporters have never denied or apologized for this remark. Instead, they have said that it really is "common sense" and an honest challenge to "political correctness."
In fact, immigrants to the U.S. generally show crime rates that are lower than for native-born Americans. But still Trump can point to examples of immigrants who have committed crimes in the U.S.--like the infamous MS13 gangs and those who attacked the American families who were represented in the audience for Trump's first State of the Union Address, where he identified them as typical Americans who have faced violence from Mexican immigrants.
Trump is skillful in employing what Aristotle identified as the fallacy of emotional style. Trump speaks in a style of anger in response to perceived slights from Mexico: "they're laughing at us, at our stupidity." And he speaks in a style of fear in response to perceived attacks from Mexican immigrants: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." And if his audience sympathizes with his emotions of anger and fear, then they believe his false facts justifying these emotions must be true. Nothing said by the "fact-checkers" can negate the emotional power of this rhetorical fallacy over the minds of Trump's supporters.
I will have more to say in future posts about the rhetoric of Trump's speeches.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Trump and Political Philosophy: Is Trump's Rhetoric Lincolnian? The Teleprompter Trump Versus the Turbulent Trump
Trump's Teleprompter Speech in Warsaw, Poland, July 6, 2017
Trump Tosses Out His "Boring" Speech Notes
I have been thinking about how political philosophy might help us understand Donald Trump. I have been prompted to do that by my reading of Trump and Political Philosophy, a two-volume collection of papers edited by Angel Jaramillo Torres and Marc Benjamin Sable (published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018). This will be the first of a series of posts on the questions raised by those papers.
One of those questions is whether Trump's rhetoric can be rightly understood as following in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln. This question is posed sharply by the contrast between John Burt's paper ("The Lesson of Lincoln in the Age of Trump") and Kenneth Masugi's paper ("The Great Emancipators Oppose the 'Slave Power': The Lincolnian--and Aristotelian--Dimensions of Trump's Rhetoric").
Burt argues that Trump rejects Lincoln's view of the Declaration of Independence as affirming a Kantian politics of human equality and liberty, and instead Trump promotes a rhetoric of resentment and grievance based on a Schmittian conception of politics as a battle between friends and enemies. On the contrary, Masugi argues, Trump's rhetoric affirms Lincoln's vision of the Declaration of Independence in declaring that "making America great again" will renew America's devotion to the principles of Lincoln and the Declaration.
The reason for this disagreement is that they are looking at two different versions of Trump's rhetoric. Masugi is looking at the rhetoric of the Teleprompter Trump, who reads off a teleprompter an eloquent and thoughtful speech written for him by others--like his speech in Warsaw, Poland, on July 6, 2017. Burt is looking at the rhetoric of the Turbulent Trump, who tosses out the speech notes prepared for him because he finds them "too boring," and then launches into a rambling rant full of resentment, boasting, and lying as he attacks those he identifies as his enemies.
Once one sees this, then the question is which of these two Trumps is the true Trump? Or must Trump's populist rhetoric always be a confusing mixture of both? Or can Trump's two rhetorical styles be understood as different ways of expressing the same ideas?
THE SCHMITTIAN POLITICS OF THE TURBULENT TRUMP
Burt is the author of Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism (Harvard University Press, 2013), which interprets Lincoln's political thought in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates as founded on Kantian liberal principles. This connection between Lincoln and Kant runs through his paper in Trump and Political Philosophy.
Burt sees Lincoln's interpretation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as based on the Kantian principle that all human beings are equal in their moral dignity as persons, and therefore that the legitimacy of government arises from the consent among equals who respect one another's worth as moral agents. Against this is the contrasting view assumed by Stephen Douglas and elaborated in the writings of Carl Schmitt that politics is ultimately about the contest between friends and enemies. Until recently, Burt believes, America has been on the side of Lincoln and Kant; but now Trump and his populist movement are pushing America to the side of Douglas and Schmitt.
Burt sees Trump as denying two ideas that have been core values for America until recently:
"1. That America sees itself as destined to be an equal multicultural society that will root its sense of being a nation in a common political culture rather than in common blood; that in attempting to become a multicultural democracy America will blaze a path for democracy worldwide."
"2. That America is committed to a world order founded upon multilateral agreements (as opposed to two-sided bargains of a temporary and transactional kind), to international institutions of collective security ruled by open covenants openly arrived at, in short to an order which extends to the world the political culture of liberal democracy" (215).These two ideas are presented in Kant's writings--particularly, in his essay "Perpetual Peace." The first idea comes from Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's interpretation of the Declaration as affirming the equal liberty of all human beings and of their right to establish governments to secure their rights by their consent acting as one people. The second idea is the application of the first idea to international politics, which was expressed in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and elaborated by later presidents, as part of the post World War Two understanding of the liberal international order, in which equally sovereign nations would cooperate through international agreements to secure peaceful security, free trade, and human rights for the mutual benefit of all nations.
According to Burt, Trump's Schmittian populist rejects both of these ideas, because Trump sees both national politics and international politics as violent contests between friends and enemies. As Trump sees it, American politics is a battle between the Elites and the People, and some Americans are not part of the American People because they are actually "Enemies of the People." For example, Muslim Americans are not real Americans because they are in sympathy with foreign terrorists, as illustrated by the thousands of Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey, whom Trump knows cheered the attack on the Twin Towers. And Mexican Americans are not real Americans because most of them are rapists, drug dealers, and murderous gang members, although "some, I assume, are good people." Consequently, American judges who are Muslims or Mexicans are "haters" of Trump who cannot be trusted to be fair judges.
For Trump, international politics is also a battle between friends and enemies, because in the competition between nations, there must be winners and losers. Under the false appearance of an international order of globalist cooperation, the United States has been losing in its competition with other nations; and only now, with Trump's policy of America First, America is finally winning again.
THE LINCOLNIAN POLITICS OF THE TELEPROMPTER TRUMP
While Burt supports his view of Trump's ugly rhetoric by citing Trump's inflammatory remarks at his campaign rallies, in his Twitter messages, and in some informal remarks, Masugi supports his view of Trump's noble rhetoric by reading three of Trump's formal speeches in 2017, in his first six months in office--his Inaugural Address (January 20), his first State of the Union Address (February 28), and his Speech to the People of Poland in Warsaw (July 6). For each of these three speeches, Trump was careful in reading his prepared speech off a teleprompter. Notably, Burt never mentions any of these speeches.
In his Inaugural Address, Trump began by acknowledging the presence on the platform of four former presidents--Carter, Clinton, Bush, and Obama--by thanking President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid, and by noticing that "every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power."
But then he asserted that his inaugural ceremony was different from previous presidential inaugurations in a way that set the theme for his entire speech.
"Today's ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another--but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People."
"For too long, a small group in our nation's Capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have borne the cost."
"Washington flourished--but the people did not share in its wealth."
"Politicians prospered--but the jobs left, and the factories closed."
"The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country."
"Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation's Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land."
"That all changes--starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you."
"It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America."
"This is your day. This is your celebration."
"And this, the United States of America, is your country."
"What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people."
"January 20th 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again."
"The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer."
"Everyone is listening to you now."
"You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before."
"At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction that a nation exists to serve its citizens."Here Masugi sees Trump condemning all previous administrations--both Republican and Democrat--as promoting what Aristotle and the American Founders called a "faction"--promoting the narrow interests of "the establishment" rather than the common good of the People. But now as "the people became the rulers of this nation again," Trump reaffirmed the teaching of the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address that just government must be of, by, and for the People.
The most often quoted passage of Trump's speech was his description of "American carnage":
"But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential."
"This American carnage stops right here and stops right now."In the middle of the speech, Trump uttered the one and only sentence in which he shifted from "we" to "I."
"From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land."
"From this moment on, it's going to be America First."
"Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families."
"We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength."
"I will fight for you with every breath in my body--and I will never, ever let you down."
"American will start winning again, winning like never before."So here Trump clearly identified himself as the one Leader of the People against the Elites who have exploited the People.
In some parts of this speech, Masugi sees Trump affirming what Aristotle called "political friendship"--the communal feeling or allegiance of all citizens to one another that creates a patriotic solidarity.
"At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other."
"When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice."
"The Bible tells us, 'how good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity.'"
"We must speak our minds openly, debate our disagreements honestly, but always pursue solidarity."So here, it seems, there need be no Schmittian division of the American people into friends and enemies as long as they live together in patriotic solidarity.
But notice how Trump did point to some divisions within the American People. First, he set "the establishment" against the People, as what Masugi calls a "faction" that exploits the People. And then when Trump identified the "tens of millions" who became part of "this movement," he was apparently referring to those voters who elected him, as opposed to those who voted for Hillary Clinton in opposition to "this movement."
Here we see the fundamental problem for all populist rhetoric that claims to speak for the People as opposed to the Elites. Who are the People? All of the citizens? Or only some of the citizens--only those who support the populist leader against the Elites? Is the contest not only between the People and the Elites but also within the People divided into opposing groups?
In his review of Trump and Political Philosophy in the Claremont Review of Books, Michael Anton said that Aristotle's distinction between "the many" and "the few" does not clearly apply to the United States, where there is no clear-cut "many" comparable to the demos of the ancient Greek cities. Anton observed: "We instead have two popular classes: unmarried and mostly poor blue-state urbanites, and red-state, rustbelt, heartland blue-collar workers, middle managers, and homemakers." Yet like the ancient city, "we have only one ruling class" that has chosen to take the side of "the urban mob." So now we have three groups--the ruling class, the "urban mob" that supports the ruling class, and the rural or small town working class and middle class that supports Trump.
If Trump speaks for the American People, does that mean that those in the "urban mob" who oppose him are not real Americans?
As I have indicated in some previous posts (here and here), this analysis creates serious problems for those Claremont Straussians like Anton and Masugi who want to defend Trump.
According to Anton, the election of 2016 was a life-or-death war, with Trump fighting for the true Americans, the working class and middle class Americans, who are not Third World immigrants or urban poor minorities or cosmopolitan elites, and these Trump voters supported constitutional republicanism. On the other side of the war, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats represented "half the country and all our elites," who wished to overturn the constitutional republic and replace it with one-party rule with absolute power to rule over the country.
Actually, "half the country" was a majority of the voters, because as Anton indicated, the Republicans have lost the popular vote for the presidency in every election since 1988 except for 2004; and in 2004, Bush won with only 50.7 percent. And, of course, Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton in 2016; and he lost again in the mid-term congressional elections in 2018, which Trump turned into a referendum on his presidency.
Anton and Masugi employ a populist rhetoric that presents a Manichaean war between good and evil--the Virtuous People versus the Evil Elites. This becomes complicated, however, as soon as one notices that some of the People are evil, because they vote for the Evil Elites, and some of the Elites (like Trump, Anton, and Masugi) are virtuous because they lead the Virtuous People against the Evil Elites. Doesn't this sound like Schmitt's Friends Versus Enemies? Where's the "political friendship"?
That the Virtuous People who support Trump are a minority was suggested at Trump's Inaugural Address, because the crowd of people on the Washington Mall for the speech was smaller than the crowd for Obama's Inaugural Address. Trump was so resentful about this that he had to lie by insisting that his crowd was the largest inaugural crowd in American history.
The Crowd for Trump (Left) Was Smaller than the Crowd for Obama (Right)
The next day Press Secretary Sean Spicer declared: "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration--period." A photographer for the National Park Service was asked by the White House to crop out the empty space in the photographs of Trump's crowd to make the crowd appear larger than it was.
Five weeks later, in his first State of the Union Address, Trump continued to claim that he spoke for the People; and Masugi sees in this speech more evidence that Trump appeals to the principles of the Declaration of Independence as interpreted by Lincoln. Masugi rightly points out that Trump placed his speech in the flow of American history from its founding in 1776 to its future 250th anniversary in 2026.
Trump began the speech by saying:
"In nine years, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding--250 years since the day we declared our independence. It will be one of the great milestones in the history of the world. But what will America look like as we reach our 250th year? What kind of country will we leave our children?"He then indicated that "in 2016, the Earth shifted beneath our feet," and "the chorus became an earthquake, and the people turned out by the tens of millions, and they were all united by one very simple, but crucial demand: that America must put its own citizens first. Because only then can we truly make America great again."
Most of his speech was a summary of his policy proposals, which included a quotation from Abraham Lincoln as a congressman speaking for a protectionist trade policy. It's certainly true that trade protectionism was part of Lincoln's Whig ideology.
In speaking about the need to build a great wall on the southern border to restrict immigration, Trump appealed to what Masugi identifies as "natural law":
". . . we will soon begin the construction of a great, great wall along our southern border. As we speak tonight, we are removing gang members, drug dealers, and criminals that threaten our communities and prey on our very innocent citizens. Bad ones are going out as I speak, and as I promised throughout the campaign."
"To any in Congress who do not believe we should enforce our laws, I would ask you this one question: What would you say to the American family that loses their jobs, their income, or their loved one because America refused to uphold its laws and defend its borders?"Masugi says that this is a "natural law" stated in the Declaration of Independence in that it is natural for the people to establish government to secure their "safety and happiness." But is it a matter of "natural law" that we must agree with Trump's claim that undocumented Mexican immigrants are mostly "gang members, drug dealers, and criminals" who want to steal from and murder innocent Americans? Or is it possible that the proportion of criminals among immigrants is actually lower than among native-born Americans?
At the end of his speech, Trump declared:
"When we have all of this, we will have made America greater than ever before--for all Americans. This is our vision. This is our mission. But we can only get there together. We are one people, with one destiny. We all bleed the same blood. We all salute the same great American flag. And we all are made by the same God."
"When we fulfill this vision, when we celebrate our 250 years of glorious freedom, we will look back on tonight as when this new chapter of American Greatness began."As Masugi indicates, Trump is suggesting here that in 2026, a year and a half after an eight-year Trump presidency, we will see how his "Make American Great Again" policies renewed the greatness of the American founding with the Declaration of Independence. And while Trump does not explicitly affirm the Declaration's principle of human equality, there is perhaps an echo of "created equal" in Trump's "we all are made by the same God."
While Masugi respects Trump's rhetorical achievements in his Inaugural Address and his first State of the Union, he thinks "Trump's most profound speech of his presidency" (247) is the speech in Warsaw on July 6th, 2017.
In this speech for Trump's first presidential trip to Europe, the central theme was the survival of the Western world. In the history of Poland in the 20th century, Trump saw the threats to the West coming from German Nazism and Russian communism and the noble triumph of the Polish people in prevailing against those threats. But then he saw new threats both internal and external that will require the West to courageously and resolutely reaffirm its distinctively Western cultural identity.
". . as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?"
"We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive. If anyone forgets the critical importance of these things, let them come to one country that never has. Let them come to Poland. And let them come here, to Warsaw, and learn the story of the Warsaw Uprising."One of the new external threats to the West, Trump declared, is "radical Islamic terrorism." And he said that he had called on more than 50 Muslim nations to join in defeating these shared enemies.
Other external threats include "new forms of aggression, including propaganda, financial crimes, and cyberwarfare."
He also mentioned the new threat from Russia:
"We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes--including Syria and Iran--and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself."The new internal threat to the West is "the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people. The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies."
To meet these new threats, the survival of the West, Trump claimed, would depend on a revival of the core values of the West. He mentioned at least five values. The first was "individual freedom and sovereignty." The second was human rights: "above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization."
The third value was the agreement of "this great community of nations" in affirming that "it is the people, not the powerful, who have always formed the foundation of freedom and the cornerstone of our defense." This "community of nations" was manifest in the NATO alliance of "free, sovereign and independent nations" for the defense of our freedoms and our interests. In support of NATO, Trump declared the continuing commitment of the United States to Article 5 of the NATO treaty--the mutual defense commitment.
He also repeated his often expressed desire that the NATO powers should do more in spending their fair share of money on defense, and he praised Poland for being one of the NATO members that has made the target of military spending that is 2% of its GDP.
The fourth crucial value of the West that Trump mentioned was what Masugi calls "the divine and transcendent": Trump told the story of Pope John Paul II's visit to Warsaw on June 2nd, 1979, when one million Poles gathered for a mass with the Pope.
". . . every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down. They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II's sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer. A million Polish people did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words: 'We Want God.'"
. . .
"As I stand here today before this incredible crowd, this faithful nation, we can still hear those voices that echo through history. There message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out 'We want God.'"Masugi sees this appeal to the divine as comparable to Lincoln's appeal to the Biblical God in his Second Inaugural Address.
Finally, Masugi also sees Trump invoking another distinctive value of the West--the Socratic philosophic longing for knowledge, including self-knowledge (251, n. 12). "We debate everything," Trump observed. "We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves."
If these values of the West are defended, then, Trump declared at the end of his speech, "the West will never, ever be broken."
Although he did not exactly so it, Trump implied that he was putting forth a new slogan--"Make the West Great Again."
This is a remarkable speech for Trump because it truly does--as Masugi argues--strike the chords and themes of a Lincolnian rhetoric. And against Burt, it even suggests the principles of Kantian liberalism--equality of human rights promoted by a community of nations.
But then we must wonder--how do we resolve the apparent contradiction between the Teleprompter Trump of this elegantly written and thoughtfully composed speech and the Turbulent Trump who goes on incoherent rants full of lies, insults, grievances, and narcissistic boasting about himself as the "very stable genius"?
I have no good answer to that question.
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Roger Scruton, 1944-2020: The Romantic Conservatism of Atheistic Religiosity
Roger Scruton died on Sunday at his home in England at the age of 75. This picture was taken in 2016 when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. The Washington Post has a good obituary.
Scruton was the preeminent conservative philosopher of his time. During Margaret Thatcher's years as Prime Minister, he was often identified as her "court philosopher." But he denied that he had much influence over her because her conservatism was more of the Hayekian free-market variety that was very different from his Kirkian traditionalist conservatism.
As is often true of the traditionalist conservative thinkers today, his thought was shaped by the Kantian Romantic tradition of the Nineteenth Century that saw a religious attitude as essential for a healthy moral order, so that traditional religious experience needed to be defended against a Darwinian science that claims to explain the place of human beings in the natural world without any reference to a transcendent realm beyond nature. And yet--again like many traditionalist conservatives--Scruton did not believe in the literal truth of Christianity or any other religion. He wanted to have a sense of the sacred that comes from religious emotions as expressed in great art, but without the need to believe any religious doctrines. We know that God is dead, he suggested, but we also know that human beings need to satisfy their religious longings for transcendence and redemption. In that way, he followed the lead of Friedrich Nietzsche in his early and late writings (as opposed to the Darwinian liberalism of his middle writings).
In various posts (here, here, and here), I have criticized the atheistic religiosity of Scruton's conservatism as incoherent self-deception.
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