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Eloquence and Its Conditions Eloquence and Its Conditions Rob Goodman Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Robert Marx Goodman All rights reserved ABSTRACT Eloquence and Its Conditions Rob Goodman Political rhetoric generally assumes an asymmetric relationship between speaker and audience, but the rhetorical tradition has also developed resources to render this relationship more equitable. One such resource is the conception of the rhetorical situation as one of mutual vulnerability to risk on the part of both speaker and audience. However, this conception is increasingly threatened by “algorithmic” practices of political rhetoric that shield elite speakers from exposure to risk, as well as by the overcorrecting reaction to this development seen in the demagogic rhetoric of “unfiltered” and spontaneous “straight talk.” Turning to the classical tradition of eloquence can help us recover an alternative to both of these troubling tendencies, which we might call “spontaneous decorum.” This notion of eloquence combines qualities associated with spontaneity, because it welcomes risk and uncertainty as part of public deliberation, with qualities associated with decorum, because it is conceived as set apart from ordinary speech, embracing verbal artifice and rejecting the value of sincerity. Part 1 of the dissertation considers the development of this model of eloquence in classical Greek and Roman rhetoric. Chapter 1 uses the oratory of Demosthenes, and its reception in antiquity, to critique the notion of sincerity as a warrant of rhetorical truthfulness. Chapter 2 addresses the resistance to the systematization of rhetoric in Cicero and Quintilian. Part 2 of the dissertation considers the continuing relevance of ancient notions of eloquence, investigating ways in which more recent writers have worked to translate them into modern institutional settings. Chapter 3 focuses on Edmund Burke’s role in the 18th-century reception of classical eloquence; it reconsiders his provocative claim that disruptive speech can act as a spur to sound political judgment, even under rule-bound, constitutional government. Chapter 4 explores the means by which Thomas Babington Macaulay attempted to revive the ancient conviction that history is a branch of rhetoric, arguing that the oratorical coloring of his work can best be understood as a response to the contemporary emergence of mass politics; it also contrasts his historical method with the resolutely anti-rhetorical method of Alexis de Tocqueville. Finally, Chapter 5 considers how Carl Schmitt constructed the contemporary “crisis of parliamentary democracy” as a rhetorical crisis, and how his proposed solution to the crisis—taking seriously the ritual as well as the strictly deliberative aspects of rhetoric—informed the illiberal turn in his thought; I conclude by arguing that a more nuanced conception of ritual action can better account for the value of stylized speech, is consistent with the classical tradition, and is more potentially compatible with democratic deliberation. While the first part of the dissertation reconstructs a model of eloquence open to both spontaneity and stylization, the second part shows that this model is far from a relic, and that it remains a valuable resource for critiquing the current state of political speech. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Part 1: Eloquence and the Ancients Chapter 1: Say Everything: Frank Speech and the Characters of Style in Demosthenes 21 Chapter 2: “I Tremble with My Whole Heart”: Cicero and Quintilian on the Anxieties of Eloquence 53 Part 2: Eloquence and the Moderns Chapter 3: Edmund Burke and the Deliberative Sublime 110 Chapter 4: Debatable Land: Macaulay, Tocqueville, and the Art of Contingency 163 i Chapter 5: Rhetoric and Ritual in the Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy 224 Postscript: Rhetoric and Deliberation 265 Works Cited 272 ii Acknowledgments With promises of more fulsome expressions gratitude to come in a future edition of this work, I want to thank all of the friends, colleagues, and mentors whose helpful comments and support were essential to the completion of this project. They include: Ashraf Ahmed, Jed Atkins, Andreas Avgousti, Christopher Berry, Elizabeth Blackmar, Philip Bobbitt, Richard Bourke, Joy Connolly, John DiIulio, Kathy Eden, Kevin Elliott, Jon Elster, Alan Finlayson, George Gopen, Jane Gordon, Ayten Gundogdu, Philip Hamburger, Mike Hawley, Joseph Howley, Turkuler Isiksel, Kate Jackson, David Johnston, Jessica Kimpell, Carl Knight, Jennifer London, Matthew Maguire, Alison McQueen, Jeff Miller, Ben Mueser, Ben Mylius, Christian Rostbøll, Melissa Schwartzberg, Catherine Steel, Nadia Urbinati, Henriette van der Blom, and Jim Zetzel. Finally, I owe the deepest gratitude to my wife, Ellen Goodman, and our daughter, Abigail, for their steadfast support and love. iii Introduction Politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. -David Foster Wallace In December of 2007, visitors to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign website were met by a “splash page” comprised of two elements: the “media,” an image of the candidate, and the “button,” which enabled a one-click subscription to the campaign’s email list. Or, to speak more accurately, visitors were met by one of 24 permutations of these elements, randomly assembled from one of six media variations (three photos and three videos) and one of four buttons (“SIGN UP,” “SIGN UP NOW,” “LEARN MORE,” AND “JOIN US NOW”). Over the course of the experiment, some 13,000 visitors were exposed to each combination. “Combination 11”—a black-and-white image of Obama and his family above the “LEARN MORE” button—outperformed its competitors by generating a sign-up rate of 11.6%. By contrast, the campaign’s initial choice—a color image of Obama above the “SIGN UP” button—had generated a sign-up rate of 8.26%. In other words, the optimized splash page, which remained in place for the rest of the campaign, translated into a 40.6% improvement. Extrapolating the difference over the course of the election, Dan Siroker, the campaign’s Director of Analytics, estimates that the experiment harvested an additional 2,880,000 email addresses. In turn, he writes, “each email address that was submitted through our splash page ended up donating an average of $21 during the length of the campaign. The additional 2,880,000 email addresses on our email list translated into an additional $60 million in donations.”1 1 Dan Siroker, “How Obama Raised $60 Million by Running a Simple Experiment,” Optimizely, November 29, 2010, blog.optimizely.com/2010/11/29/how-obama-raised-60-million-by-running-a-simple-experiment. 1 When I mention that I’m writing on the topic of political eloquence, I’m often asked for my opinion on President Obama. My opinion is the wholly conventional one that he is the best orator of his generation. But I am also convinced that his campaigns’ advances in analytics, as exemplified by Siroker’s story, are a far more pivotal contribution to the modern history of political persuasion than any of Obama’s own words. By 2012, those analytic techniques had grown even more sophisticated. By mining sources including web browsing histories, social networks, and credit reports, both the Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns “collected an average of 1,000 data points on each voter.”2 Those data points were marshalled in order to predict “which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals,” enabling the campaigns to reach voters with “individually tailored messages”—with much of Obama’s success ultimately attributed to his campaign’s considerably higher investment in data analytics and microtargeting.3 Of course, there is no partisan monopoly on these tools of persuasion. In the 2016 Republican presidential primary, for instance, the Ted Cruz campaign used data mining to construct personality profiles of likely voters. The campaign’s communications staff explained how those profiles would shape advertising directed at members of the National Rifle Association: 2 Christina Lamb, “Is Obama Stalking You?” The Spectator, October 27, 2012, www.spectator.co.uk/2012/10/is- obama-stalking-you. 3 Michael Scherer, “Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win,” Time, November 7, 2012; Joshua Green, “Corporations Want Obama’s Winning Formula,” Bloomberg Businessweek, November 28- December 2, 2012. See also Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns (New York: Broadway Books, 2013); and John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, Dollarocracy (New York: Nation Books, 2013). 2 Personalities that have received high scores for “neuroticism” are believed to be generally fearful, so a pro-gun pitch to them would emphasize the use of firearms for personal safety and might include a picture of a burglar breaking in to a home. But those who score high for “openness” or traditional values are more likely to receive a message that promotes hunting as a family activity, perhaps accompanied by an image of a father taking his son duck hunting.4 When Sheldon Wolin decried the “technologization of politics” in 2006, none of these developments were yet in evidence; in the subsequent decade, that “technologization” accelerated by any measure.5 More recently, Mark Thompson, former director-general of the BBC and now chief executive of the New York Times, observed that “the art of persuasion, once the grandest of the humanities and accessible at its highest level only to those of genius—a Demosthenes or a Cicero, a Lincoln or a Churchill—is acquiring many of the attributes of a computational science.” This is “rhetoric not as art but as algorithm.”6 4 Tom Hamburger, “Cruz Campaign Credits Psychological Data and Analytics for Its Rising Success,” Washington Post, December 13, 2015. 5 Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 565. 6 Mark Thompson, Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics (New York: St.
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