Persuasion in Politics

Persuasion in politics Unit 1: Evaluation: what’s good and what’s bad 1.1 Politics is conducted through language How politicians use language? It’s difficult to think of any political action that doesn’t involve using language. Language is vital to the process of transforming political will into social action (Schaffner). For Fairclough politics is language: it consists in the disputes, which occur in language and over language. 1.2 Persuasion and rhetoric in a democratic society In an absolutist or totalitarian regime, those in power rule by using the twin weapons of coercion and manipulation of information. In a democracy, the objective is the persuasion in debate. The art of political persuasion was born in Ancient Greece: they developed the art of rhetoric (skill of persuasion). Rhetoric was applied for politics (agora), for law (forensic) and for speeches of public praise or blame (epideictic). Aristotle defined rhetoric as the arts of persuasive discourse: he sustained that we employ it in every activity we do and in our relations with others. It has a directive function of language seeking to affect the behaviour of the addressee. Studying rhetoric means studying the perlocutionary force of utterances. In real life, attempts to persuade others are met with suspicion and resistance. For Plato, the rhetorician is a speech-rigger. Rhetoric is manipulative and there is somehow a deficit between complex-sounding rhetorical argument and the truth. Rhetoric has also the sense of grandiloquence, the use of high-sounding, empty language. This comes from the association between the persuasive techniques and language figures that took place in the Middle Ages by Scholastic orators. Rhetoric is an outsider world and it is used to describe what others do and is often equivalent to bluster. 1.3 Spin and the spin-doctor Now rhetoric has an evil reputation: knowing how to employ the techniques of persuasion is one of the ways in which the powerful express and reinforce his power over the powerless. However, it’s not necessarily the case: rhetoric has also been subversive of authority and authority has been intolerant of orators it couldn’t control. Authority uses rhetoric in those periods where the society has freedom: coercive power doesn’t need persuasion. There is a phenomenon called spin: it is the tailoring of news released to the public in order to cast a favourable light on the institutions of authority (metaphor derived from baseball, where spin is a twist effect to curve the ball). The politician tries to curve his speeches to reach the public avoiding the critical press: according to politicians, this is necessary because press is obsessed with scandal and often distorts politicians’ message, in particular in UK and USA. In these two countries, they have press officers responsible who communicates party’s message to media: they are accused by journalists to manipulate reality or hiding the truth. Those are spin-doctors (to doctor- to interfere). 1.4 Evaluative language Evaluative language is language who expresses opinion, attitude and point of view: evaluation is the indication that something is good or bad (not only morally, but also favourable or not). It’s the basis of persuasion; it’s used to convince the audience of the goodness of certain opinions. Evaluation can be expressed overtly (it’s explicit and achieved through grammatical, textual or lexical means) or covertly (speaker provides no obvious linguistic clues, exploits audience’s ability to recognize goodness; it’s constructed around goal achievement). • Grammatical evaluation: comparatives (better/worse than); transitivity (grammatical structuring, who does what to whom and how, evaluation on responsibility). • Textual evaluation: ordering certain blocks in a certain place in a text (final paragraph editorial indicate solutions to problems proposed in the previous part. If a speaker presents two alternatives (one of those he agrees with and tries to persuade the audience for, and the other not), he’ll talk firstly of the “bad” one, deliberately weak (straw man technique) and then of the “good” one. • Lexical evaluation: lexic is word or phrases that a speaker uses. There are two types of words: grammar words (includes determiners, linkers and prepositions) and content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). 1.5 Denotation and connotation There are many ways to say things, the choice of vocabulary makes a great deal about intentions and opinions. There are two types of meanings: the denotational one, the meaning of the word, and the connotational one, the evaluation we give to a word. Many words changes connotation according to a particular culture or sub-group or even in the same culture it can change meaning overtime (ex. Politician means a plotter, intriguer now). 1.6 “Insider” words (good), “outsider” words (bad) 1 Related to the question of good or bad evaluative connotation is the question of the difference between the labels a group decides to use for describing itself and those used by the outsiders of that group (ex. All governments call themselves democratic, even if they are not). The use of a word says a lot about the speaker. Unit 2: Ways of persuading Authors have distinguished two types of persuasion: one is by appeal to reason; the other is by appeal to the emotions. Another distinction is between ideational or conceptual persuasion (the author tries to persuade the audience of the veracity, logic or usefulness of his ideas) and interpersonal persuasion (the author attempts to convince the audience that he’s honest or that they lack a quality he can provide). There are four models of persuasion: 1 authority; 2 comparison; 3 problem-solution; 4 association. 2.1 Authority The persuader, the responsible for the persuasive message, appeals to some high authority to strengthen his message (ex. religion, it appeals to God, but also academic and scientific writing). 2.2 Comparison or analogy In persuasion by comparison, the speaker invites the audience to compare and contrast an argument with others, assuming that one is better than the others. It is frequent in election time with slogans. There are two types of election campaigning, one positive (a party declares his virtues, criticized for being too general) and one negative (party attacks the failings of his adversary, criticized for being unfair). Generally, parties opt for the positive campaign to stress their virtues and minimize attention on the opposition (that will use negative campaigning). In a two party system like USA, persuasion by comparison is very common. 2.3 Problem-solution In this method of persuasion, the speaker proposes and outlines a problem and suggests that he has the solution. The scheme is: evaluation, solution, problem (it’s not racist/ to impose limits/ on immigration). Other schemes: problem and solutions; problem, solution 1, negative evaluation on solution 1, solution 2, positive evaluation on solution 2, conclusion. 2.4 Association Persuasion by association is conducted through other resources than the language: music, images... create an association about a person. Critics say that the use of this kind of persuasion has been increased in political propaganda (“image politics”, association between image of politicians and ideas), but also in the past it was very important (political logos, colours, songs, gestures…). Unit 3: cave emptor! Arguments good and bad, true and false, logical and non-logical There are some irrational methods of argument, like the straw man technique or weasel wording (euphemism used for evil action): they are effective but sometimes illogical or immoral. 3.1 Ad hominem/ad personam It’s one of the classical non-rational arguments: it consists in attacking a person rather than her arguments (opponent speaker or authority called in support of an argument we oppose, or even a group the person belongs to with the use of negative association). 3.2 Tu quoque (also known as: you are just as bad or two wrongs make it all right) Subcategory of the ad hominem technique in which the person making an argument is accused of having acted in a way inconsistent with their argument (A proposes not to do something, B replies pointing out that A did that thing or vice versa). 3.3 The slippery slope It’s used to assume that something is wrong because it could slide towards something wrong: there is no logical reason to consider the two separate phenomena as equivalent, but taken as a perception about people’s psychology, it may appear having a validity. By making exceptions to a rule, this might be weakened. In political arguments, it’s frequently used about censorship and freedom of speech. 3.4 (False) binary opposition (false dichotomy, the excluded middle) It’s based on antonyms, and there are three different types: gradable antonyms (words that make two extremes on a cline, like hot and cold); complementary antonyms (there are real opposites because there are mutually exclusive and not gradable, like dead and alive); converse antonyms (describes different perspectives on a relation, like lend and borrow, the existence of the first implies the other). Complementary antonyms are the most difficult to find: many alternatives are presented as exclusives when they are not. The binary opposition excludes the alternatives of being against or in favour of both. 2 Binary opposition is strengthened by the creation of the opposition between us (positive) and them (negative): it’s often a cultural creation. 3.5 Short terms vs long term It’s a particular case of the false binary, the excluded middle: it implies a choice between two alternatives while they can be made at the same time. 3.6 False parallels (odd couples) It’s a technique that implies that two different phenomena are very similar: this means that’s possible to transfer the negative associations of something very bad onto something else that may not strike everyone as bad. 3.7 Causation or correlation? (post hoc ergo propter hoc: after this, therefore because of this) Cause and effect seem to be simple, but just the co-existence of two events does not imply the causality. Two phenomena can be linked by a third factor: many seemingly causal relations are simply linked by a third outside factor; two phenomena might simply be coincidence (sometimes it may be difficult to acknowledge if it’s causality or casualty. Epilogue: The climate change debate and its politics The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, caused by humanity’s use of fossil fuels, causes the atmosphere to capture more of the Sun's heat than normal (greenhouse effect) and these causes global warming that could have catastrophic consequences. Some scientist say that Earth goes under natural periods of warming and cooling even without human intervention and that this increase is only correlation, coincidence, and that temperatures may stabilise or fall again. Others argue that even the correlation is not so close (cooling down in the period in which coal was the most used fuel). From these arguments, it comes a disagreement among politicians about what policies to adopt, like beginning with nuclear energy or renewable energy sources or both. Unit 4: The rhetoric of liberty, freedom, emancipation 4.1 Rhetoric in the soundbite age The way politicians relate to the public and the language they use is changed with the use of television and media (it shows highlights and not the complete speech, so speeches begin to be tailored with short phrases, called soundbites). Hecklers, people who interrupt with disagreement the speech, are not anymore invited, but the audience is of the faithful party. From the point of view of politicians, the creation of soundbites by the press could be a threat, so they do it themselves. There are many critics of this development and they claim that modern political speeches tend to be a collection of soundbites and politics don’t develop their rhetorical skills because of the lack of hecklers. 4.2 Binomials and bicolons Binomials are semi-fixed phrases, which are very common in the language (like salt and pepper): there are two or more words or phrases belonging to the same grammatical category having some semantical relationship or some syntactic device (and or), parallelism or rhyme. Bicolons are expressions containing two parallel phrases and they tend to be more extended than binomials (ex. Bible or political rhetoric). 4.3 The three-part list (tricolon) The tricolon employs parallelism: the simplest is the repetition of three words (ex out out out). It’s used for evaluation and persuasion: this is not so obvious when the link is natural. 4.4 Beyond three Sometimes there are longer parallel structures, usually more elegant variation of the tricolon. 4.5 Contrasting pairs The contrasting pairs (or antithesis) is a structure containing two parts (so is a subcategory of bicolon) which are parallel in the structure but opposed in the meaning (ex solid for fluidity) and it is often used in bipartisan democracy. 4.6 Oxymoron In the oxymoron there are two apparently contradictory elements combined in a single word, phrase or epigram (ex. bittersweet). Often the contradiction is evaluative. The word oxymoron itself means “to make an argument by negatively evaluating some entity by suggesting that the two components are incompatible. 4.7 Rhetorical figures in times gone by: liberty, freedom and emancipation Declaration of Independence, The Gettysburg Address and I have a dream (M. L. King): they have in common the pursuit of liberty but they have different emphasis. 4.8 The declaration of independence 3 It was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of USA, and revised by a drafting committee set up by the Congress and ratified by it in 1776. It contains traces of the Bill of Rights composed in England in 1689. The true declaration is in the last paragraph, before there are justification of the rebellion. About their independence, the British government says that the rebels were disloyal, opportunistic and ungrateful since the British had fought a long war against France to defend the colonists. The authors resent the lack of consultation and outside interference with their affairs. The war was partly a liberation, partly a civil war: that’s why the tone is defensive, even if it will be seen as a sign of USA supremacy on Europe. 4.9 The Gettysburg address It was a speech delivered in November 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln to inaugurate the National Cemetery on the site of one of the battles of the American Civil War, in which Northern Army repulsed the Southern one. It has been described as a masterpiece of prose-poetry. Unit 5: Metaphors and company: the subtle persuaders Many persuasive discourses contain figures of speech because they are arguments by comparison or analogy or supposed resemblance. Argument by analogy are pseudo-rational. 5.1 Metaphors A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a name or quality is attributed to something t which is not literally applicable (ex. nerves of steel). Often we talk of making an argument like a journey, or of ideas or theories as buildings. How metaphors work: A certain quality (basis or grounds of the resemblance), supposed to belong to an entity (the source) is re-applied or transferred to another entity (the target). Metaphors always express an evaluation the target in terms of good or bad, which is why they are so useful in persuasive argument. Usually the target is a different type from the source. The power of the metaphor is that the grounds are implicit and not stated openly. This has two consequences 1: different people can interpret the same metaphor in different ways. 2: it makes the supposed resemblance more difficult to challenge or deny. With a metaphor, it’s more difficult to deny its meaning. The metaphor is often used against the interlocutor who used it firstly. Sport and war: Sport and war metaphors are used for politics, while when we talk about war we usually use euphemisms. 5.2 Similes A simile is a statement, which makes a comparison between two entities, which are deliberately very unlike: they contain expressions like “like, as, similar to…” Similes are often used to allow the author to extend the analogy and develop grounds, explaining why X is like Y. The distance between source and target is intentionally dissonant and the author takes some times to connect those two. Making the “right noises” Their evaluative potential means that they have two evident functions in the language of politics, because they are part of the language of persuasion. Sometimes, like during electoral campaigning, they can be employed to communicate to an audience shared values: this is called right noises political metaphors. 5.3 Metonymies Metaphor and simile bring together two dissimilar entities: in a metonym, some entity is alluded to by mention of something else connected with it (ex. the Crown- the monarchy). Sometimes this something else is some part of the entity (ex. head- person). Many of these combine metonym and metaphor (ex. standing shoulder-to-shoulder- collaborating). On other occasions, the “something else” is simply related to an entity, like topological metonymies (ex. Washington- the US government, Brussels (personification) - the EU institutions). At other times, individuals can be made to stand for institutions (personificational metonymies): those are powerful in expressing points of view. National or ethnic stereotypes can be partly explained as metonymies, but unfortunately, we use the label to the whole people when it should be actually referred to a part of it. We use also the national metonym to refer to their government. 5.4 Beware of arguments by comparison-analogy-resemblance that employ metaphor, simile or metonymy 1) They are generally unsupported by rational evidence: they give no evidence to prove their assertion, but using colourful language, the audience is invited to accept and agree with the speaker’s evaluative judgement (metaphor is not a description, but an evaluative judgement). 2) They can have hidden meaning for particular audiences (ex. crusade: positive for Americans but negative for Muslims). 4 3) Omnis comparatio claudicat: some parts of the analogies apply, some others no (ex. love like a red rose: beauty implied, not short-lived). Unit 6: Questions and responses 6.1 Institutional discourse Political language is one form of institutional discourse; most types of spoken language take the form of questions and responses (whatever follows the question; only a response that fully satisfies the questioner can be called an answer). 6.2 From deference to hostility Years ago, journalists tried to avoid all forms of political controversy, but now, after the advent of commercial television companies, the relationship has changed. 6.3 Difficult questions, difficult answers: assertions and presuppositions Some questions are more difficult or dangerous to answer to. In order to analyse the hidden dangers in questions, we need to appreciate the notions of assertion and presupposition. The assertion is a fact, an opinion, an exhortation that is stated openly and overtly. Presupposition is a fact or opinion, which is to some degree implicit that is either implied as or taken for granted as existing or being true. In political questioning criticism is often hidden in the question’s presuppositions. Although interviewers may ask such tough questions to try evasive politicians, these questions may oblige the politician to be evasive ("do you still beat your wife?", where either a yes or a no would damage the speaker). 6.4 question structure The grammatical structure of the question may be manipulated by those asking questions, in order to make them more coercive or controlling. Closed yes/no questions are more limiting than wh questions, and they make appear the interviewee as uncooperative and/or evasive. The use of yes/no questions may be strengthened by the use of tag questions (they don't, do they?). Another restricting question type is the negative interrogative, which is also coercive because it leads the answerer towards a preferred answer. In addition, agreement statements are used to invite the interviewee to agree with the speaker: when asked by a hostile questioner, they allow to display information and force the interviewee to disagree. Another tactic is repetition: by repeating the same question, the questioner can highlight evasion and make the respondent seem evasive. Similarly, interruption is used to challenge the interviewee and by interrupting the interviewer asserts control and negatively evaluates the interviewee's response as uninformative or unimportant. Another form is other turn completion, aka finishing the other person's answer before them. 6.5 Taking responsibility (or not): attribution and neutralism in questions Where the criticism in a question is particularly acute, the ideas and opinions in the question are often ascribed to another source, especially other authorities: this is called attribution. It enables the interviewer to appear to maintain a neutral stance with respect to the interviewee and his own questions. Clayman employs the term neutralism to describe this artifice: it's normal for interviewees to acknowledge and acquiesce to the adversarial stance of their interlocutor. There is a default assumption on the part of the interviewees that interviewer’s opinions are not an issue and that interviewee decline interviewer’s responsibility for what is said, even if possibly damaging. There are some exceptions: here, the interviewee risks appearing unreasonable and irascible. 6.6 Primary and secondary sources The secondary source is a source that quotes another one (the primary source) using attributing expressions. Sometimes the secondary source is not specified. There are numerous different types of sources for facts and opinions, among which there are press agencies, prestigious newspaper reports, tabloid newspaper reports, politicians on the same side as the interviewee, politicians on the opposing side, government agencies and officials and unnamed sources. Unit 7 Humour, irony and satire in politics 7.1 Politics and humour Humour has a subversive power because it allows the powerless to gain some revenge at the expense of the powerful. For this reason, humour at the expenses of the regime in totalitarian states is forbidden. The humour arises from a reversal of evaluation: bad things become good. Even in environments where free speech is tolerated, political humour thrives: often they target individual politicians (described as unpopular or over-ambitious or stupid) instead of the political system. 7.2 Irony and sarcasm 5 Irony occurs when there is a radical difference between the evaluation expressed in what is actually written or said (the dictum) and the evaluation that is really intended (the implicatum). Often the dictum is positive and the implicatum is negative: this is because the function of irony is to criticize. Sarcasm is a straightforward kind of verbal irony with a clear victim. Others define sarcasm (hurtful) as the manner in which the victim sees what the speaker calls irony (elegant). Rhetorical questions are often vehicles of sarcasm. 7.3 Definition of satire Satire is a work in which wickedness or folly are censured, it’s a literary form in which human or individual vices are being made fun of. Satire is also a means of persuasion: a person, behaviour or state of affairs is criticised in hope to persuade the audience that something has to change. Only individuals who have power, influence and authority can be satirised, otherwise it wouldn’t be satire. It makes an indirect attack on his object and often uses humour as a vehicle and has a moral aspect (it uses criticism to bring change). Satire is set in a fictional world, parallel to the real one: the reader has to recognise the aspects of the real world and the point of the satire, so he has to be well informed. Satire was born with Horace and Juvenal, and it was darker and angrier: when authority prohibits direct criticism, the use of irony, humour and parody is more efficient (honourable mention: “Animal Farm” by Orwell (parody for the URSS). 7.5 Modern satires Satire often uses exaggeration and its most useful tool, irony, in particular dramatic irony, where the audience knows things actors don’t and it may happen an exchange of evaluations. Unit 8: Blame and praise One of the classical functions of rhetoric was epideictic (praise and blame, positive and negative evaluation): it is commonly found in comments and opinion sections in newspapers. Conclusion In a modern democratic society, politics is persuasion and so it’s the use of language. Evaluative language is the linguistic method persuading us of what is good or bad and it tells us about the beliefs and opinions of the speaker. 6