For a few years, I dedicated myself almost exclusively to political communication. Yes, we are all sinners. Today, I only do it occasionally, like a teetotaler who from time to time relapses into the vice of alcohol. One of my biggest surprises when I learned how the major political communications offices operated was discovering that truth was not something essential, but rather an obstacle in the middle of the rhetorical process. Conservatives should take very seriously the idea that political rhetoric, if it does not keep truth at its center, is pernicious and harmful, even when the end sought through manipulation is laudable. For the right, the end should never justify the means. We leave that exclusively to socialists, communists, and other animals.
In the classical world, the ideal was to find a balance between argument (logos), emotion (pathos), and honesty (ethos). Any imbalance in that triangle turns the political speaker into a charlatan, a dangerous type, and makes his message harmful to its recipients.
Plato harshly attacked the Sophists because they used beautiful words and arguments to inflame people’s emotions, making them easier to manipulate, or simply to win the applause of their listeners. The greatest sophists of the last century, without a doubt, are the environmentalists, who erect an enormous wall of empty phrases and lofty goals (who on earth would want a self-inflicted apocalypse?) to conceal their true purpose, which, of course, is the same as always: to bring down capitalism so that everything falls into the hands of socialism and communism. (RELATED: National Security Alert: California Is a CCP Experiment, and There Is an Urgent Need for a Clean-Up Across All Institutions)
“We can’t tell people the whole truth because they aren’t ready.”
The demagogue, for his part, becomes a kind of theatrical actor who seeks above all to satisfy the basest instincts of his audience, something akin to cinematic entertainment. The demagogue truncates the truth, or conceals it, so that his analysis leads directly to the great mass-mobilizing slogans. “Save the planet,” “reproductive rights,” and “no to war” are perhaps the three greatest examples of this type of manipulation so widespread on the left.
More than that, my thesis is that the left, thanks to the junk sociology embodied better than anyone by Judith Butler, has developed an entire theoretical corpus in the sociological sphere based on those slogans. Put differently, it is not that they arrived at those slogans after constructing an entire ideological pyramid with serious roots anchored in reality; rather, they artificially created the theoretical corpus beneath the apex of the pyramid in order to support the slogans they had already accepted as good and true. This, of course, destroys the scientific method; in case you were wondering about one of the reasons why left-wing intellectuals have spent at least half a century despising science, when not outright canceling it, as they have done with biology and even the climate sciences.
In the classical world, but also in medieval scholarship, rhetoric was a revered art, not because of its pragmatic possibilities for obtaining personal gain, but because it was an exercise intrinsically linked to the honest pursuit of truth and wisdom. Today, political rhetoric is almost always a necessary formality for dragging the masses toward the political options represented by the speaker.
During my experience in political communication, one of the most terrifying phrases I repeatedly heard, uttered by politicians and consultants from different parties, was: “We can’t tell people the whole truth because they aren’t ready.” I understand that total transparency is foolish. I still remember when Democrats criticized Trump for not putting the operation to capture Maduro up for debate beforehand; it would be as if Obama, before ordering Bin Laden’s death, had called a referendum detailing exactly the manner, the moment, and the place in which he was going to blow the terrorist’s balls off. It really is that stupid, but the left becomes so anxious in the face of Trump that it always ends up making a fool of itself.
That said, although it is not always possible to tell the whole truth, systematically assuming that the people are not ready to know it is the product of astonishing arrogance on the part of the ruling classes. In my experience, most of the people who argued that the people were not ready to know the truth were simply far less prepared than the people themselves to know the truth.
In politics, it is far too easy to forget that the goal is truth, not merely electoral victory. Inside and outside politics, it is time for conservatives to reorder the three priorities of rhetoric — logos, pathos, and ethos — and make a difference. It is something the left will never be able to do, if only because they do not know Latin, which is why they hate it.
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