(Director’s note: Cynthia Haynes is Director of Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design Ph.D program and Professor of English. Her research interests are rhetoric, composition, multimodal pedagogy, virtual worlds, critical theory, computer games studies, and the rhetoric of war and terrorism. Her recent book, The Homesick Phone Book: Addressing Rhetoric in the Age of Perpetual Conflict won the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America annual book prize. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Unalienable Rites: The Architecture of Mass Rhetoric. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
The upcoming Presidential Election of 2020 will be perhaps the most complex rhetorical skirmish in this country’s history. I use the term rhetorical skirmish to set a tone, to call to mind a set of tactics. In military history, a skirmish involves vanguard troops that would engage in disruptive activities to delay, demoralize, mislead, and otherwise serve as the annoying “gadfly” in a heavily armored wartime conflict. Our presidential election is in grave danger, again. If the 2016 election was fraught, consider the recent worrisome rhetoric (and actions) that will once again put our democratic processes to the test.
The ongoing efforts to disrupt presidential campaigns in the form of social media disinformation is ramping up. Not going away. Record numbers of tweets, Facebook posts/ads, and headlines will trample our collective ability to parse the rhetorical skirmishes word by loaded word, sentence by arguable sentence. And this is why rhetoric is needed more than ever to take up the challenges of 21st century democratic elections: unpacking the language and disarming the weaponization of political discourse. Who knew that rhetorician-at-large would be a career option? Who knew that rhetoricians would be hired in droves as ‘fact-checkers’ in post-2016? Who knew that words matter? Parmenides knew. Plato knew. Nietzsche knew. W. E. B. Dubois knew. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew. Angela Davis knows. Gloria Steinem knows. Toni Morrison knows. And now you know.
“They” will tell you that mail-in ballots are rigged. Don’t believe it. Look at who is saying what to whom and who has most to gain by this lie. “They” will tell you that polling places are equipped to handle long lines of “socially distanced” voters. Don’t believe it. Look at Georgia’s primary election just this past week. Chaos. “They” will tell you that there are Democratic candidates under investigation, and they might even tell you that due to the pandemic, the election has to be postponed. Don’t believe it. Read the rhetorical tea-leaves, and count the rhetorical lies. You see, rhetoric can be used for good and bad purposes. It’s the main reason rhetoric has gotten such a bad rap in the last few thousand years. Rhetoric is a way to use language and a way to analyze language. That’s the good news. It’s both/and. Not either/or.
In 2016 bots organized by nefarious groups (some say nations) were highly successful in hardening anti-Hillary sentiment among the voting population. “Fake news” became the latest rhetorical tug-of-war phrase as both Republicans and Democrats hurled it at each other. It’s no wonder that everyone has difficulty parsing the language of millions of tweets, Facebook posts, and mainstream media publications and television news programs. I distinctly remember that on the morning of the 2016 election, my mother forwarded a post on Facebook about a friend of a friend’s aunt in Texas who swore that when she voted that morning, a straight Republican ticket, the voting machine changed her vote for Trump to Clinton. And if she hadn’t checked before leaving the voting booth….etc. etc. Trump claimed he got many calls about such “vote-flipping,” which turned out not to be true (according to Snopes).
Fact checking is a lot of work. Reading is a lot of work. Yet we seem to be reading more and more in the 21st century. What counts as “reading” is the most urgent rhetorical question we face. I had to look up what “tl;dr” meant when I first started seeing it preface some of my Facebook friends’ posts. As an educator, and a rhetorician, I can tell you it made me frustrated. It means “too long; didn’t read” and would usually link to someone else’s long post/rant or to some long article in the news. Words matter. Words add up. Words change attitudes. Words change election results. That is why teaching my students to understand, rhetorically, how language works, to use rhetoric to understand how motives underpin language, and to split the rhetorical hairs all ways if necessary to get to the truth…these are the reasons I am a rhetorician-at-large in the 21st century. Please read as much as you can, and then please vote this coming November…no matter what “they” say or how hard “they” try to dissuade you with disinformation.
For further reading:
Bizzell, Patricia, Bruce Herzberg, and Robin Reames. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 3rd ed. Macmillan Publishing, 2020.
“How Donald Trump Answers a Question” video by Evan Puschak. December 30, 2015.
Neely, Brett. “NPR Poll: Majority of Americans Believe Trump Encourages Election Interference” NPR.org. January 21, 2020.
Rowland, Darrel. “What you need to know about the language of disinformation ahead of the 2020 election cycle” USA Today. Feb 24, 2020.
Savoy, Jacques. “Analysis of the style and the rhetoric of the 2016 US presidential primaries” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 33, Issue 1, April 2018, Pages 143–159.