The Dying Art of Political Persuasion

Nothing is harder to prove than that you can ever persuade anyone of anything. Prejudice or predisposition keeps a tenacious hold on our opinions. Yet education and a common culture (as distinct from religion) depend on the assumption that people can be persuaded. Why take a friend to a new play by an author I have read but my friend has never heard of? Because I know the friend well enough to think it worth a try.

In America, for a long time, it seemed to be like that with politics, too. People were assumed to be occasionally amenable to a change of mind, whether by argument or imaginative appeal. The naturalness of this trust, however, seems in retrospect to have been a historical accident. The last five presidential elections have been a contest for the favor of a tiny percentage of the electorate. And this is a symptom of a larger shift from argument to other kinds of stimuli that do the work faster. Persuasion has come to seem an intricate and rare undertaking.

Recently, I edited a selection of political essays in English, from the early 18th century to the mid-20th. In deciding which pieces to include, I found myself asking, What does it take to convince a reader? As the table of contents filled out, with a front line of writers that came to include Thomas Paine, William Hazlitt, W.E.B. Du Bois, George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt, I realized that there was one intellectual trait that marked the writings I valued most. In every case, the author was clearly not preaching to the converted — yet the solid finality of their convictions was never in question. It is a strange capacity, when you think about it, this readiness to be seen testing the soundness of your view — and stranger still, to do it with a clarity and energy that attract the uninitiated.

Illustration by The Chronicle

Careless journalists preach to the choir from the choir, and their reward is to be liked by the choir. In a higher realm of opinion-making — loftier for its prestige and rewards, not necessarily for the talent involved — the columnist is speaking a word to the wise, in the hope of being heard by the powerful. But the writer who really aims to convince anyone has first asked, with regard to a larger audience: “Whom do I want to be still speaking to after this effort has ended?”

A memorable essay that came from asking that question was Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 letter to James C. Conkling. Lincoln wrote this public letter to a political ally in order, through him, to reprove a body of citizens who wanted an early end to the Civil War. They were also notably hostile to the Emancipation Proclamation and the consequent recruiting of Black soldiers to fight on the Union side. Lincoln’s task was to show that these people were politically obtuse and morally bankrupt, but to do it so quietly that they would not know what hit them. To accomplish that, he was willing to deprive himself of a smashing debater’s success. He may have been writing most of all to be overheard by voters in the next election.

Lincoln’s ostensible audience, however, was composed of Northern critics of the Union cause who described themselves as “unconditional peace” men. He takes their announced political identity at face value:

You desire peace; and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it? There are but three conceivable ways. First, to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. This, I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed.

The second and third ways turn out to be surrender or compromise. Lincoln rejects surrender on patriotic grounds his opponents can hardly dispute. And compromise, he says, has been tried and proved futile. Accordingly, he follows the track of the plea for “peace” a step further in:

But to be plain, you are dissatisfied with me about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose you do not.

This might seem to end the argument decisively. But having marked the moral difference between his view and his opponents’, Lincoln declines to break off with moralistic denunciation.

Rather, he descends to the arguable practicalities of the war, once the Union has determined not to yield to the demands of the slave power:

You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union.

Now, therefore, as Lincoln goes on to say — with more soldiers in the field, the Black troops augmenting the white — the “peace” that these men seek can be brought about sooner than would have been possible without emancipation:

But negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive — even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.

Thus, in a few paragraphs, the letter has taken Lincoln’s hostile audience from undoubted agreement on the desirability of ending the war, to an exposure of their tactical blindness, to their failure to examine the cause they espouse in the light of their own mixed motives. At last he arrives at a point so basic it seems inseparable from the very idea of a political compact: a promise between citizens that cannot be breached, a contract that must not be broken. Lincoln, in short, embarrasses his opponents with a simple and parsimonious logic and the recollection of certain shared premises. The letter turned out to be, as it was meant to be, an effective instrument in his campaign for re-election in 1864.

Did Lincoln hope to convince? Perhaps not these men; some others, possibly, who held the same prejudices. Able politicians don’t necessarily talk for victory — not, anyway, victory in the moment, crashing through. The point of a speech is often to plant a doubt in minds that don’t yet belong to your side. And the best political essayists share this knowledge of persuasion as a long game. It may be enough for the moment to show yourself acting on a principle that others couldn’t possibly fail to respect. You thereby enlarge the community of listeners.

When political discourse in a society becomes thoroughly gestural — a matter of accusing, denouncing, anathematizing, naming and nicknaming, casting the obnoxious into the outer darkness — agreement comes to depend on forgetfulness rather than memory. In an essay published in 1964, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” Hannah Arendt recalled a mutation in the whole temper of civic conduct in Germany during the mid-1930s:

It was as though morality, at the very moment of its total collapse within an old and highly civilized nation, stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, of customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people.

We may suppose that this is the fate of a society endowed with only the rudiments of civility, but Arendt is speaking of a change among the educated middle class. “What disturbed us,” she adds, “was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it.” In those years, Nazis and Communists alike turned from political contestation to street brawls. Aiming to destroy each other, they agreed in their repudiation of social democracy, and called as their witness the long or short arc of history.

Follow Arendt’s clue far enough and you arrive at an unexpectedly antipolitical judgment about the nature of political persuasion. The work of changing people’s minds may succeed best when it recalls the affinity of political argument with morals and manners that have become second nature. Political change (always beset by fears and threats) may avert catastrophe by rooting itself in people’s habits of everyday conduct. Michael Oakeshott, in his essay “Political Education,” gave the same insight a more general application: “moral and political ‘principles’ are abridgements of traditional manners of behaviour.” Society does not develop by instantiating principles the way a cook follows a recipe. Nor can the social value of a reform be deduced from the total number of ultimatums and capitulations, measures asked for and measures taken. The process, or progress, occurs rather as a result of “the pursuit of intimations” — hints drawn from past practices, from memory and settled understandings, in which aids to present-day action may be found. This is not the only way political change may happen, of course; but the other ways have no special need of language to do their work.