Tag Archives: political campaigns

Dusting Off an Old Problem for a New Age

Joseph_McCarthy Wikipedia.org
Joseph McCarthy                        Wikipedia.org

All politicians engage in degrees of hyperbole.  Even so, we expect that political candidates will not become completely untethered from the facts as we know them: that they will not seek the favor of the least-informed by making statements that ignore the truth.

Those of us who follow such things thought years ago that we could put to rest the once-popular communications idea of the demagogue. The term was widely used when I was an undergraduate way back in the days before indoor plumbing. The idea is that a person could rise to power in civil society by pushing lies and falsehoods on a susceptible public.

I remember putting a dusty 1954 volume of Reinhard Luthin’s red-covered American Demagogues  back on a library shelf in the early 1970s with the firm belief that our democracy had moved on. I assumed that Luthin’s work was not where the future of American political communication would go. There would be no more jingoistic fabulists in American politics to match the discredited figures of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, Louisiana’s Huey Long, Boston Mayor James Curley, and others.  Surely our era of detailed backstories and proliferating media would prevent chronic liars and nativists from rising to become political heavyweights. As a nation we had become wiser if not happier.

But here we are well into the 21st Century, encountering the same kinds of willful prejudice-baiting, scapegoating and misstatements that made the rhetoric of figures like McCarthy so damaging. The Senator was not beyond holding up an empty sheet of paper and declaring that it contained the names of “known communists” who were presumably prepared to sell America out to the Soviets.  Never mind that these alleged traitors were often artists, writers and even musicians.  Who knew that the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was a threat to the “the American way of life?”

To be sure, all politicians engage in degrees of hyperbole. Overstatement is part of the campaign process.  And some claims are not readily testable on empirical grounds. Even so, we expect that political candidates will not become completely untethered from the facts as we know them: that they will not seek the favor of a mob by making indictments they know to be false.

Trump’s strategic use of false assertions uttered to please a crowd has begun to fill a catalogue of certifiably incorrect claims.

If Luthin were alive today to revise his study, Donald Trump would have to be added to his examples.  Trump’s strategic use of false assertions uttered to please a crowd has begun to fill a catalogue of certifiably incorrect claims.  Many of his statements are breathtakingly dishonest. Most of us have heard them in familiar iterations:

-That President Obama is not an American citizen,

-That Obama is a “founder” of ISIS,

-That the President “invaded” Afghanistan,

-That Hillary Clinton was plausibly behind the death of family friend Vince Foster,

-That Ted Cruz’s father played an active role in the assassination of President  Kennedy

-That voter fraud is a significant problem in American elections.

The list goes on to many more bogus claims. As of last week, the Pulitzer Prize winning organization Politifact found that 70 percent of the claims made by Trump in this campaign were mostly to completely false.  In the same categories the percentage for Hillary Clinton was 28 percent.

The irony here is, of course, that in an age of proliferating information and easy access to it, there could still be so many of us who are not put off by Trump’s false claims.  The conventional explanation is that we all exercise a “confirmation bias,” sometimes also known at the “theory of motivated reasoning.” The theory is simply the conventional idea that we look for evidence to confirm what we already believe, ignoring the rest.  But at some point even a diehard believer probably can’t prevent the cognitive dissonance created by finally confronting the disconnect between support for a favored figure and the ransacking of settled truths. It’s one thing to find this pattern in a friend or relative with mental illness or clear cognitive deficits.  It’s another to accept it from a person who wants to represent the United States to the rest of the world.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

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Debased Debates

The Kennedy-Nixon Debates, 1960 Source: Wikipedia.org
The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon Debates                          Wikipedia.org

There is a wide perception that it is the moderator’s job is to comment on lies, half truths or false claims.  But that’s the job of the other debater. In a good debate the participants aren’t answering reporter’s questions, but fact-checking each other.  

The political season always brings out a cycle of “debates” finally agreed to by cautious candidates, news organizations, and good government groups. Though everyone involved has different motives, the one most commonly expressed is that debates offer the public the chance to compare candidates side by side. In the unfettered give-and-take of a debate we are supposed to learn about issues that divide and sometimes unify those running for the same office.

And yet most of these joint appearances are a sham. As usually formatted, they can’t achieve the lofty goals they allege.

A public debate done correctly should deliver what philosophers call “dialectic:” a purposeful clash of views where claims and evidence are tested against a series of counter-arguments.  Among others, Aristotle was certain that acts of public advocacy had a cleansing effect on the body politic. He believed we are wiser for subjecting our ideas to the scrutiny of others. This may sound lofty and abstract, but most of us do a form of this when we talk through a pending and important decision. We often want friends to help us see potential problems to our proposed course of action.

In open societies such as ours we expect to hear the contrasting opinions. It’s a wonderful process when it can be properly formatted. Otherwise—and as devised by most political operatives—a political debate is usually is little more than a joint press conference.

The problem is that candidates usually fear these exchanges. They and their staffs believe that a serious gaff can sink an entire campaign. So they hedge their bets. They agree to “debates” if they are moderated by a panel or at least a single journalist. This is when the process begins to go south. It’s further doomed when each side is given only a minute or two to respond the statements of opposing candidates. These errors are then compounded with a final counter-response that is barely the length of a sneeze. As it now exists, it’s little more than a lukewarm form of political theater.

I especially regret that the national Commission on Presidential Debates that includes some of my professional colleagues hasn’t significantly altered this ersatz format. A true debate will have no more than a moderator or time-keeper to equalize participation and keep things civil. In true debates there are no outside questioners. The advocates directly address the claims and arguments of their opposites on what is usually a single broad but important subject area. Their opening remarks must be permitted to be longer than a television commercial. They listen, refute, question, and challenge each other. When one issue seems to have been exhausted, the moderator may steer the pair to a related issue and then get out of the way.

Lincoln and Douglas debated for hours by themselves without the assistance of others. Indeed, a prime form of Saturday night entertainment in the 19th Century was a formal debate in a town’s biggest venue. The whole process of seeing two leaders explain their ideas under the scrutiny of an interested audience could be invigorating. By contrast, the short question-based formats commonly in American political debates generally ruin the chance to see how much a candidate truly knows beyond the memorized sound bites that they repeat at every stop. Just when follow-up rebuttals might begin to test a candidate’s knowledge of an issue, the questioners usually interrupt and move on to a new topic.

Last year Americans could catch a series of BBC debates in the United Kingdom between Alistair Darling and Alex Salmond on Scotland’s referendum to go it alone as an independent state. These weren’t perfect by any means. But these televised clashes had the advantage of allowing both sides sufficient time to make essential arguments and extended refutations. As can be seen during weekly Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons (available on C-SPAN’s website), the British expect that their leaders should be able to stand up under sometimes withering criticism from their ideological opponents.

Our system conspires to do the reverse by giving unnecessary screen time to outside questioners, thereby protecting candidates by allowing them to stay in a comfort zone of stump-speech clichés and bumper sticker retorts.  Debates should expose the relevant facts and hard truths behind a decision to support or oppose an action.  We never let the candidates go on long enough to see if they have confronted those truths.

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