All things considered, it hasn’t gone well for Prime Minister Theresa May, her party, the Labour Party and the other smaller factions in the Mother of Parliaments. The stunner is how well the Speaker has managed the chaos.
Anyone spending time listening to the President and others in the current American stalemate might wonder what has happened to fluent advocacy. The President’s impoverished lexicon leaves him ill-prepared to make coherent arguments for policies. He clings to one comfortable idea that he understands: a wall. It has the virtue of being a thing rather than an idea. In his one-note campaign he seems to have missed the irony of arguing in favor of one of the crudest tools in any government’s arsenal: a symbol of political failure that even Ronald Reagan understood when he challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to get rid of Berlin’s concrete barrier. A wall was perhaps a more appropriate military weapon in the 14th Century than it is now.
Eloquent and forceful advocacy is not dead. But Washington D.C. is no longer one of its natural homes.
Because I teach advocacy, my courses these days come with a caution to my students to aim higher than the rhetoric coming from the White House and other corners of Washington. Eloquent and forceful advocacy is not dead. But Washington D.C. is no longer one of its natural homes. When “bye bye” is the President’s way of ending negotiations with other political leaders, we hear yet again a rhetoric of petulance that is more appropriate to a child than a leader of a great nation.
A far better model is on view almost daily in the form of the current Speaker of Britain’s House of Commons. I’ve been on a busman’s holiday recently following the often dismal Brexit debate unfolding in London. The tense standoff involving elected members to the Mother of Parliaments has been managed by John Bercow, whose job it is to bring order to a body that is always rowdy. The 55-year old former Conservative, the grandson of Romanian-Jewish immigrants, has been a formidable and sometimes controversial Speaker, lecturing members on their behavior and keeping the House more or less on schedule. He is also a marvel of fluency.
In the current climate of U.K. politics there are even more daily eruptions than usual in the compact chamber, mostly motivated by opposition to the Prime Minister’s plans for carrying out a divorce from the European Union. All things considered, it hasn’t gone well for Prime Minister Theresa May, her party, the Labour Party and other smaller factions in the body. Yet, the stunner is how well Bercow has managed the chaos.
Bercow has created some additional fury from the Tories in power, who claim that he is playing favorites in the ways he has adjudicated various amendments and procedures. Even so, if I were asked to give a student an immersion experience in hearing eloquent advocacy, I’d give them at least several hours of material showing Bercow presiding over debates in the Commons. He listens with precision and grace. And his answers and explanations to doubting members show a number of attributes of effective advocacy. He’s responsive, courteous, patient, forceful, and rarely at a loss in finding exactly the right words. He also seems to know the names and biographies of most of the body’s 650 members.
Here’s a sample of Bercow in the thick of it.
Recently he declined a member’s “point of order” asking the Leader of the Opposition to apologize for allegedly muttering the phrase “stupid woman” made after comments from Theresa May. The rules of most deliberative bodies do not allow personal attacks on members. But Bercow said that neither he nor his deputies heard the comment. His unpopular decision left him with the difficult task of making a case for not ruling on a possible verbal slight against May, even in the midst of the #MeToo era. If this is not Bercow’s finest hour, his efforts still illustrate how a master advocate articulates a position in the face of fierce resistance.
For our times we can update Samuel Johnson’s famous remark about patriotism: fear is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
If historians were looking for a label to characterize the dominant theme in our public discourse these days they could do no better than call it “The Age of Fear.” It may be true that crime rates in most parts of the country have generally fallen, and that the chances of being the victim of terrorist attack are less likely than getting struck by lightning. Nonetheless, we live in an age where too many voices in our political and news-gathering systems depend on fear as their most reliable theme. Acts of terrorism like the recent attack in Manchester England are sufficient for cable news networks, among others, to go into narrow and repetitive coverage. Jerky cell phone videos add all of the video they need to endlessly mull the imagined ghosts in the room, with the added effect of overstated conclusions that we are not safe and terrorism is rampant.
The same thread is endlessly recycled by the President, who uses much of his public rhetoric to focus on threats allegedly coming from undocumented immigrants, Syrian refugees, Muslim extremists, Mexican drug smugglers, Chinese banks, Australia, Germany, to mention just a few from his long list. We learned that we were in for a three-alarm Presidency when Donald Trump broke tradition in his inaugural address to rehash warnings that were endlessly recycled to his followers on the campaign trail. He talked of the “American carnage” of too few jobs, insecure borders, abuse at the hands of our allies and more. The speech was significantly out of the norm: less a ritual celebration of the transfer of presidential power than a victim’s list of grievances against others. And it surely resonated then as it does now with too many Americans with who have little patience to deal with the complexities of modern life. They do not know that the world is generally more understandable and actually less threatening if understood in 2000-word clarifications rather than 20-word rants.
Because we are hardwired first for survival, we look for threats before opportunities; self-preservation before self-actualization.
We can update Samuel Johnson’s famous remark about patriotism and reset it in our times: fear is the last refuge of a scoundrel. It’s easy if not responsible for a demagogue to conjure malevolent ghosts in our midst. This is the rhetorical thread that connects figures from the margins of our civil life as diverse as “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace and any number of public figures who built a political base by motivating concerns about “Them.” Using this thread usually provides an unearned advantage. Those nameless others inside and beyond our borders are almost always portrayed as immoral, unclean or dangerously powerful. The irony is that most Americans have no right to claim a nativist ideology. Our ancestors came from somewhere else. Even so, it thrives.
Fear appeals gain a natural advantage from the human impulse to fantasize about what we do not fully know or understand. Fear always builds from the predicate of potential harm we can imagine. Because we are creatures hardwired first for survival, we look for threats before opportunities; self-preservation before self-actualization. As any lover of film-noir knows, another person’s shadow is all we need to envision the worst. It follows that verbalizing threats against survival is easily rewarded. The beneficiaries may be political scoundrels, cable news companies, and various agents who have seemingly simple solutions to sell: everything from home security alarms to firearms to grotesque projects like a massive border wall.
