* Daniel Webster: “True eloquence… must exist in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion.”
* Webster shows how this true eloquence results not merely in words or speeches but in action. We judge a speech, Webster teaches, by the character of the speaker as displayed in the speech, when we perceive the speaker’s “clear conception,” “high purpose,” “Wrm resolve,” and “dauntless spirit.”
* True eloquence is rare because most human things are determined in their courses by preexisting relationships rather than by communicated information; as the sociologist of science Bruno Latour writes, it is only at certain moments that “the strength of a word may sway alliances and demonstrate something, where very, very rarely everything else being equal, someone speaks and persuades.”
* To sustain our social lives we frequently refuse to assess the statements made to us. “That’s interesting,” we reply to the crank at the cocktail party… As Goethe wrote,
“We politely misunderstand others so that they shall misunderstand us in return.” Human relations are complex, mutable, subject to decay over time, and therefore fragile. Goethe’s point is that we preserve these complex relations by refusing to judge one another by the truth or significance of our statements.
* A genuinely disinterested party, one who had no interest in what use its audience made of the facts, would have to have no interest even in his or her own reputation as a reliable provider of relevant facts and so would be of no use to his or her audience. We therefore have no choice but to get our information from interested and thus biased sources, and we must endeavor to discount the interest motivating that mediation.
* facts “are made, as their name [factum] implies,” writes Richard McKeon, “and their making depends on structures of knowledge, action, and art from which they derive their being and interpretation.” Facts are made or fabricated; they are made within a structure, a network of persons and things: “An isolated person builds only dreams, claims, and feelings, not facts.”
* “Small are the advances which a single unassisted individual can make towards perfecting any of his powers.” (Hugh Blair)
* “Faith in science marks a degree of deference to authority that is unparalleled in human history.” (Steve Fuller)
* “When potential [leaders] are pushed by journalists, academic, and opponents to ‘stick to the issues,’ to be specific ‘on the issues,’ to ‘refrain from mudslinging,’ the admonition is to avoid the only ‘issue’ which a voter is competent to judge, the general character and trustworthiness displayed by candidates for office.” (Michael McGee)
* Harvey Yunis has described as the “inherent, unresolved discrepancy between the democratic insistence on amateurism in politics and the [people’s] need for competent leadership.”
* “the Everyman/Heroic conflict”: “Americans like for their candidates to be similar to themselves; yet they also want their candidates to excel in some particular area of character that they do not.”
* “the common man does, in the end, want uncommon leaders.”
* We evaluate the political speaker the same way Steve Fuller says we evaluate scientists: “Competence is judged in terms of an appropriate alteration of the tradition rather than a simple reenactment of it.”
* Insofar as the speaker claims to know what others do not, the speaker draws attention to himself or herself, takes responsibility for his or her advice, and thereby puts himself or herself at risk. The speaker is risking that he or she will be treated according to the consequences of those collective actions that are attributed to his or her advice. Without the claim to uniqueness the speaker is just saying what anyone else could say and so we would find listening to him or her pointless and dull. Politics is risky, and political careers are frequently short, because politicians are often torn apart by this tension between having something special to say and sharing the general concerns of the audience to whom one says it.
* any sensible person prefers, other things being equal, to have his or her interests represented by the educated and suave rather than the uneducated and inarticulate.
* The most straightforward way of controlling public information about oneself is to control one’s conduct so that there is nothing discreditable to be reported.
* The “more unique a politician’s language, the more likely he is to lose.”
* “Public people,” writes Meg Greenfield, “almost eagerly dehumanize themselves. They allow the markings of region, family, class, individual character, and, generally, personhood that they once possessed to be leached away. At the same time they construct a new public self that often does terrible damage to what remains of the genuine person.”
* on the campaign trail, “policies count, but mostly as vehicles through which each candidate displays and communicates a political persona.”
* Character is made visible in action: to show character, show the actions that express the potentials of the character. To show action, in turn, show the action’s traces in
the world in the alteration it effects in things.
* When the premier public relations firm of Hill & Knowlton counseled the Kuwaiti government on its propaganda efforts after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait, the fim “advised the Kuwaitis to eschew talking in public about what the US government should do, and just talk about what the Iraqis are doing in Kuwait.” It is rhetorically more effective to leave one’s demands or requests implied rather than stated…
* To sway the audience is to move them by presenting in words the things that move them…
* If you aspire to seduce, “the point is not to speak the desire but to speak that which is most likely to bring about the desire.”
* One inspires anger by presenting the things that make us angry; one inspires pity by presenting the things that are pitiable. “Sympathy,” summarizes Adam Smith, “does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it.”
* To know we must trust. Yet we trust those who refrain from asking us to trust them but instead invite us to judge for ourselves. The most persuasive argument is the one that the audience cannot help but make in response to the things the speaker has presented.
* Those who have credible reputations rely on these reputations to persuade, while those who lack reputation must have something to say… “Evidence is, in effect, a ‘substitute’ for credibility.” In American elections, challengers favor advertisements laden with policy content and factual assertions, while incumbents favor advertisements that focus on their life stories or their records of achievement.104 Parliamentary majorities vote and decide, and their backbenchers are supposed to stay quiet in the House
of Commons so that work can be done. Parliamentary minorities, by contrast, talk, and in particular, the opposition has to try to talk its way into power by being as specific and concrete as possible.
* To say something clear and unequivocal draws attention. But to draw attention, to be seen, is to take the risk of being seen to get things wrong and thus “to be wrong.”
* people are silenced by what they perceive as public disapproval of their opinions, and they tend to adjust their opinion to conform to what they perceive as the climate of opinion… The spiral-of-silence effect thus favors the vocal, the activists, or those who have the favor of the media.
* “to the extent that a group is attractive for an individual, and to the extent that he desires acceptance as a member of that group, he will be motivated—whether he is aware of it or not—to accept that group’s outlook.” It is enough to hope to join a group to feel pressured to conform to group opinions, so “an individual’s opinions will be substantially affected by the opinions of others whose company he keeps, or whose company he aspires to keep.”
