Two Questions About Politics

1. What are they saying?

The public face of politics is its rhetorical message, and this message must be understood to understand politics. Political rhetoric is a sophisticated and asymmetrical genre. Like fiction, writing politic rhetoric involves highly specialized skills, while the reading of politics must be generalized as widely as possible. Sloganeering is not just a matter of “empty” rhetoric, it is a matter of basic literacy. So while political writers gear their message to engage the widest audience possible, they will only reach as far as is expedient. If you can’t understand a slogan, you will be written off as a conscious political subject.

But in America, Tocqueville’s land of lawyers, you have to understand whole speeches.
Four-score and seven years ago. . . is part of the basic literacy of American politics. The first question about politics, then, is the same as the first question about poetry: What are the words on the page?

2. Why are they saying what they are saying?

No self-respecting politician or poet would stop with the words on the page, of course. Politicians and other sophisticated readers of politics are not offended by slogans. Sloganeering is a sin only to politically naïve intellectuals. Naïve intellectuals are good at figuring out what politicians are saying, the rhetorical message, but, stopping there, they can only take offense at being treated like the naïve readers of the hoi polloi. The hoi polloi, for their part, get what they need from a slogan: A sense of what their vote is worth this year. A politician also does not mind a slogan, because she will read a slogan the way she reads the whole world. Politicians read the world for clues that betray ulterior motives, and no clue can be so thoroughly written so as to speak only for itself. The most honest, carefully-conceived political speech helps comprise the same field of data as alliterative lies shouted through a bullhorn.

Sophisticated readers of poetry may pick up poems like jewels, cut and finished objects. Readers of politics observe objects in motion, infer tactics and teleology from distance over time, hearing what is said in what is done, and what is done when it is said. Politicians read a protean intertext of objects and actions, and this is the ultimate source of our distrust for them. To read politics in this way is to admit that nothing is finished, nothing is true for everyone, and there is a struggle that has not yet been won. And yet political rhetoric, idiotic slogans and inaugurals alike, always has all the answers. A speech tries to drop like a diamond, a piece of partisan poetry, but even the naïve sense that the sophisticated do not believe in giving away diamonds. No, it’s still bread and circuses. We may be entertained or we may be offended, but we know that politicians don’t spend all of their time tossing pumpernickel through a burning hoop.

If we don’t ask why political rhetoric says what it is saying, we are audience members wondering at the skills of an acrobat. When we begin to read words as moves and moves as purposes, we can no longer be audience to the show. When we read words as moves, we must change to an entirely different metaphor. We must leave the circus tent for the battlefield, a place of terrain and tactics and a place where you can still lose the war. It turns out that one of the jobs of politicians is to establish solid ground for their constituents, a place for them to live as though the battle has been won and to believe that certain things are certain enough to count on.

Political literacy leads to political discontent, now as ever. It is not encouraged in schools, because it rarely transcends the carefully amassed discourse of either rightwing or leftwing politics. Politically sophisticated reading is not ideological, because ideology is what we extract when we ask our first question, What are they saying? When we ask the second question—Why are they saying it?—we find that they are not speaking for this moment alone. We find that the jewels they drop before us have no substance, but are instead movements in a long and deadly game. Discontent follows when political rhetoric no longer answers all of the questions we ask it.

And yet knowledge is power, and it is better to know you ride a plank in the flood than to think you live on dry land. The politically sophisticated reader must give up the consolation of the gods in order to read the intentions of the king. Such is the power and risk of democracy: To know that the king is human and not the voice of god, and to feel the weight of the world that you have allowed the king to carry.