released 10/2/2024

In this interview from 2009, Elvin Lim talks about the decline of the content of presidential rhetoric. Lim is the author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford University Press, 2008). He attributes part of this decline to a rejection of constitutional authority in favor of an electoral mandate. Presidents who derive their agendas and draw their power not from the laws of the land but from popularity are concerned with polls and keeping their approval ratings high. But popularity is not necessarily related to the wisdom necessary to govern well, and the consequences of this presidential focus on popularity are made manifest in presidential rhetoric. Lim argues the speech of presidents has become increasing driven by emotional appeals to the exclusion of higher order deliberations of the intellect in order to persuade more people. Lim explains that the problem with persuasion by emotional appeal is twofold.

First, because emotional appeals bypass higher order thought which is necessary for the proper analysis of complex and important issues of the day, such appeals rest on reductive and oversimplified reasonings that are often false in significant ways. Persuasion based on such emotional appeals is necessarily shallow and often does not do justice to the issues at stake. The second problem with persuasion by emotional appeal arises when one considers that common sense intuitions are different from person to person. Lim points out that rhetoric that appeals to such common sense intuitions fails when sensibilities are not shared, and only higher order thought and rational disputation can bridge the divisions that exist between people whose gut reactions are different. Abandoning rational content in rhetoric entails the hardening of political divisions that might be bridged by rational argument, especially when such oversimplified rhetoric presents only one side of the story (well).

In this Conversation, Lim also discusses demagoguery and pandering, the history of the institutionalization of speech writing within the White House, the distinction between intellect and intelligence, and the systemic problem of the dumbing down of language.

49 minutes

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