When commenting on the emerging forms of linguistic analysis many years ago, Bertrand Russell opined that they constituted a “philosophy without tears,” a fated attempt to make rational that which was often irrational and to make scientific that which was inevitably perspectival. In donning the white coats of empiricism, Russell contended, linguistic philosophers were avoiding the very heart of philosophy—the ethical dilemmas, the shifting First Premises, the uncertain ontologies, the rivalrous epistemologies and subjectivities.
In a different vein and in a different discipline, Nathaniel Klemp risks abandoning that which he seeks to understand—that damnable thing called politics and the even more damnable thing called rhetoric. On almost every page in The Morality of Spin, one senses an author who is tortured by that which he seeks to understand but who has mustered up the courage to trod on nonetheless.
Above all, though, this is an honest book. It genuinely wrestles with its subject matter, desperately trying to find something noble about political discourse. Its author is an idealist who is looking for a space, any space, where rhetoric might honorably reside. He never really finds it, however. When examining the “moral status” (p. 7) of politics and when distinguishing among its ideal, decent, and problematic manifestations, Klemp never escapes the trap he sets for himself. His criteria for a decent rhetoric—a discourse that is open to revision, that preserves individual autonomy, that respects others’ choices, that provides all relevant information, and that avoids exploiting asymmetric relationships of power—are admirably posited, admirably discussed. But when it comes to everyday applications, such principles tend to waft away in this book. They do so because politics itself is rooted in immediacy and because rhetoric is provisional to its core. Political rhetoric frustrates idealists like Klemp because it is messy on its best days.
The book is brief—five chapters long—with the first two chapters providing a useful overview of relevant theorists of the public sphere, including John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Sissela Bok, John Dryzek, Amy Guttman, and Dennis Thompson. Drawing on this assemblage, Klemp lays out his goal for the remainder of the book: to distinguish among 1) deliberative, 2) strategic, and 3) manipulative speech. In Chapter 3, he applies his model to the rhetoric of the Christian Right based on his own textual analysis and on a series of in-depth interviews he conducted with members (and opponents) of Focus on the Family. When doing so, the author toggles back and forth between the descriptive and the normative.
Chapter 4 takes up model building based on what he found when talking to the activists in Colorado Springs. From them, Klemp adduces three markers of ideal public deliberation: 1) the Principle of Fair Competition—both sides in an argument get to talk; 2) the Principle of Rhetorical Diversity—underrepresented perspectives are given special consideration; and 3) the Principle of Independent Public Scrutiny—objective outsiders, referees if you will, get to weigh in as well.
The final chapter returns to Focus on the Family and mostly finds its rhetoric wanting. The group’s “enclosed infrastructure,” says Klemp (p. 149), bottles up the free flow of conversation upon which a democracy depends. Too, its “two-tiered rhetoric” (p. 79)—one for outsiders, one for insiders—often makes the group sound disingenuous. So, for example, Klemp notes that the Christian Right’s “stealth candidates” (p. 89) sometimes appropriate the language of Civil Rights rather than depending on their own, overtly religious, language when shopping their message about prayer in the schools. He ultimately concludes that his case study reveals a “democratic trade-off” (p. 164) between full-throated political discussion and a discourse that dangerously inflames people.
When reading Plato’s Phaedrus, I often had the sense that Plato secretly enjoyed rhetoric even while savaging it. So too with Klemp, who is sensitive to the moral dilemmas of rhetoric and yet fascinated by its effectualities. But The Morality of Spin is ultimately haunted by its author’s unwillingness to consider why politics is the way it is and why rhetoric is so deeply unsettling. Because he is conflicted in these ways, a certain dualism attends his claims: concealment versus openness; intentional versus unintentional strategies; rational versus irrational appeals; hidden motives versus actual behavior. There is also a considerable amount of reifying in the book as, for example, when Klemp distinguishes phenomena that naturally resist the same (e.g., overt vs. covert manipulation). In addition, his claims are too often unaccompanied by evidence. He argues, for example, that there is more “rhetorical corruption” (p. 141) at the local than at the national level, a finding that will surprise many. He also distinguishes “purely contestatory” politics from its “partial” (p. 136) counterpart but never really distinguishes them empirically. At yet another point in the book, he argues that media consolidation has resulted in less and less scrutiny of problematic politics, a claim that would surprise Bill Clinton, Chris Christie, the National Security Agency, and all remaining advocates of Obamacare.
Ultimately, though, this is a brave book because its author really cares about the matters he discusses. But he also champions a politics without tears, looking for “discursive consistency” (p. 83) in a field that abhors all such consistencies. Klemp asks politicians to reveal their motives even though they could not possibly accommodate his request for reasons both political and psychological. He also expects the nation’s leaders to base their arguments on premises that all citizens can accept; given the complex sociology of the United States, this is surely a dream that will die aborning. He judges everyday politics too untidy, too antagonistic, too impolite, too unintellectual, too emotional, too indeterminate. In trying to eliminate such things, he seeks out an unpolitics.
Klemp also seeks out a silent politics. By rejecting so much of the rhetoric he hears, by attacking the “information-blasting” that “undermines fair competition” (p. 161), he turns the public sphere into a public vacuum. By lambasting rhetors who use emotion to get their work done, he rejects political orators from William Jennings Bryan to Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan to Ted Cruz. He upbraids leaders who use fear appeals to distance citizens from their “capacity to choose” (p. 49), but where would politics be without fear? without hope? without passion? without worry? without anticipation? Inevitably, idealized models of argument like Klemp’s fail to connect to the rush of emotion needed for mass mobilization. The only sort of politics a democratic electorate can countenance, I submit, is a politics with tears, Nathaniel Klemp’s thoughtful analysis notwithstanding.
