Rhetoric, Deficit, and Where’s the Tea Party?
While many students feel that the lessons taught in Composition 101 or Speech Communications 101 are useless and a waste of time, they actually transfer fluidly to the real world: a living example is politics. This week, I am beginning a series on words and how they are used/misused to persuade people.
According to Merriam Webster’s at www.m-w.com, the word “rhetoric” has two levels of meaning. The first is: “the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion.” The second is: “skill in the effective use of speech.” There are others that include: the study of composition in the ancient world, verbal communication, and grandiloquent or insincere speech.
I want to do a series on rhetoric, because one of the more admirable qualities of politicians is their use of rhetoric. In that use, I mean the first definition above. Conversely, one of the more heinous qualities of most politicians and political pundits is their use of rhetoric. And I mean in that last batch of definitions. This, I find, can be especially true of political pundits who use grandiloquent speech that they do not even believe to persuade their viewers/listeners.
Before going into professor mode, I would like to share something of my life and reveal some of my own biases. I am a lifelong Southerner. I am a proud daughter of the sunny South and count myself blessed that I was born here. In spite of how the South is shown on Hollywood or CNN, I simply cannot see myself living anywhere else. It seems like everywhere else lacks the soul (and the seasoning) of the South. I am aware of the troubled racial background here, and I am also aware of how much we struggle openly with it. Unlike other places, where racial issues are hidden behind layers of bureaucracy, housing practices, and selective policing, we tend to know where we stand at all times and I prefer that.
As a lifelong Southerner, I have lived with the hypocrisy (and downright lying, sometimes) of a particular type of rhetoric. Whenever conservative politicians run for office here, the word “deficit” is tossed about like confetti. Phrases like, “exploding deficits,” and “big government spending” become as ubiquitous as cell phones. Ronald Reagan is their apostle Paul and Democrats are the anti-Christ (I literally heard a preacher say this from the pulpit once).
This type of rhetoric fuels their supporters. It fuels their supporters to the point where I started believing that they were dog-whistle words for speaking about Black people. I have literally been in a room with a bunch of Southern, white women teachers and they classified those on the food stamp program as lazy minorities who are taking money from them. They failed to speak when I pointed out that most people on welfare are single white women. They also had nothing to say about the people (and this includes Bret Favre) who actually defrauded the welfare system in Mississippi for years. But that’s another post…I promise. Soon.
This rhetoric is so effective, that the Tea Party was formed around it. Remember them? The Tea Party that formed during the Obama presidency in order to watch the purse strings of the government? Anybody? Anyone?
To be fair to the Tea Party, they didn’t just target Democrats. No, they also targeted Republicans/Conservatives who they felt were not conservative enough fiscally. I feel that they went after Republicans even more aggressively than Democrats, actually. John Boehner and Eric Cantor, both Republican/Conservatives, went down flaming one way or the other at the hands of the Tea Party. John McCain, career-long Republican/Conservative, was also targeted by this group.
Oh, this group was angry. Their rage, even from the television set, was almost palpable. The Democrats were spending all of the money, socializing America, taxing citizens to death, and the Republicans allowed it — according to the Tea Party. There were too many donkeys and elephants in the proverbial swamp and that swamp needed to be drained! The Democrats simply had no sense of fiscal responsibility and the Republicans had betrayed them. Oh, holy Lord, where was Ronald Reagan when people needed him???
I sat and watched this from the safety of my home in downright disbelief. I honestly could not believe that this group of people actually believed what they were screaming. I honestly could not believe that other people believed what these people were screaming. I honestly could not believe that the Republican Party caved to this faction and second-guessed its own leader, Michael Steele (but then again, he is Black, so I quickly got over my disbelief). I honestly could not believe that Boehner retired and Cantor was primaried. I honestly could not believe that McCain may have been their next victim. I honestly could not believe that no one was actually checking the deficit record from reputable sources. How come nobody, even shrewd political pundits on either side, countered this rhetoric with simple fact checks? How come nobody engaged the more rational leader with a history lesson? How come none of the Tea Party members never visited even wikipedia.org and searched Ronald Reagan and the deficit? It would have been a simple solution to silence seething rage; yet, no one employed it.
As a post-Civil Rights, non-Baby Boomer, Ronald Reagan survivor, and lifelong Southerner, I have NEVER seen any conservative politicians, statewide or nationwide, actually balance the budget. I saw the Democratic governor of Mississippi, Ronnie Musgrove, attempt to do it. I saw the Democratic president, Bill Clinton, balance the budget with a surplus left.
But, in all of my memory, I never saw a Republican president do it, so I had to check some sources. And there are plenty of reputable sources that keep up with the federal deficit.
But the Tea Party earnestly believed what they were yelling. They believed it, because this is the rhetoric that they listen to day in and day out…for decades. For decades, the Republican Party/Conservatives have all but preached limited spending and small government. And let me tell you something, reader, there IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS MESSAGE.
However, when the practice is the direct opposite of the message….well, what do we call that? While the Tea Party was yelling into the cameras, I checked for the last Republican president to balance the budget. It was not the halcyon Reagan era. The last Republican president to actually balance the budget was Dwight Eisenhower.
Elected in 1953, Eisenhower, the WWII hero, balanced the budget and built the interstate system. He was lukewarm on Civil Rights, but conservative fiscally. Eisenhower, not Reagan, gave the Republican its balanced budget and fiscal conservatism. Yet, I never hear him mentioned in political conversations. Reagan pretty much exploded the deficits, with the Republican trickle down formula, to levels no one has ever seen. Yet, that’s not mentioned in connection with him.
Before the Covid-19 outbreak, our deficit was once again exploded by a trickle down tax policy. Where was the Tea Party when these bills were being formulated? Many of them are still in office, yet they remained silent. If the rhetoric was for small government with limited spending, why does not that apply to trickle down economic policy?
One of the first lessons of Composition 101 or even Speech 101 is that of word choice and usage. Without becoming too professorial, we teach students about a voice. When we write/speak formally, we have a writer’s/speaking voice that differs radically from the way most of us speak and communicate on a daily basis. A speech that we give before colleagues reads radically different from a casual text that we send to friends. In academia, some of my African American colleagues call this code switching. While I understand where they come from historically, I vehemently disagree with them concerning Common American English. Most of us walk around with at least three different Englishes in our heads every day, and learning to read/write in a formal setting is just another English.
In the real world, this translates into how we choose words at work. The most visible example that I can give my students are the words of politicians. I ask them all of the time, “What does ‘family values’ even mean?” On the Democratic/liberal side, I ask them why no one talks about homelessness? Why is that replaced by the word, “middle class families”? It is also true that people in the real world simply lean toward the rhetoric that confirms their stereotypes. And as a person who loves language, who uses it in order to make a living, I could hear what the Tea Partiers would not speak: “I am tired of the government taxing me so that lazy, undeserving minorities can eat. Obama is THEIR president and he is helping them laze around and live off my money.” I do not suspect that many of these people could actually define Socialism, Communism, or Fascism adequately, I doubt seriously that they understood what “wealth redistribution” means historically and I highly doubt that they paid attention in government class. Yet, these are the words that they threw about quite casually. And it was heartbreaking to see some seasoned politicians taking advantage of the anger and using it enzymatically to help their own agendas.
Now, we can say that rhetoric is harmless. But how many times did the federal government shut down during the Obama presidency? How many families suffered, because the government was shut down? What went undone and untended to as we lurched from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis? How much credibility did the United States lose with the rest of the world, because we lurched from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis? And did we discard our mantra, “politics stops at the water’s edge,” because a group of people felt betrayed racially and economically and encouraged their political leaders to disgrace the first Black president by forcing the country from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis in order to “prove” him inept to the world?
We can say that I am just being a jerk. Okay, maybe. Or reader, you may say that I am just being histrionic as women are wont to be. Definitely not. I say to you and my students, when word choices/rhetoric and even silence and th actions based upon them have actual consequences that hurt people, I would not be so quick to dismiss the words coming out of the general instructor’s/professor’s mouth.
As always, if you like this clapback (press the hands). Or, I will see you in class…maybe? Online? I don’t know. This comes from my English 101/Composition 101 class, by the way.
