Gorgias visits Yale, Polus is alive and well and hacking at K2

My Democratic Rhetoric class read Plato's Gorgias (his dialogue attacking rhetoric from both a moral and a pragmatic angle) the week before Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain gave a lecture at Yale.

My professor was amazed by the similarity between the scenes, the charismatic orator in front of a crowd of eager, ambitious young people, promising that, if they followed his teachings, they would have

the word which persuades the judges in the courts, or the senators in the council, or the citizens in the assembly, or at any other political meeting?--if you have the power of uttering this word, you will have the physician your slave, and the trainer your slave, and the money-maker of whom you talk will be found to gather treasures, not for himself, but for you who are able to speak and to persuade the multitude.

Westen's thought-provoking book argues that Democrats could actually win elections if they used research on emotional intelligences and networks of associations to better target their messages. The book is worth reading for the close readings of major political ad campaigns alone, and Westen certainly covers the issues that plague the Dems (abortion, health care) with more coherence and less controversy in the frames and talking points he proposes.

But, as in Gorgias, the effectiveness of Westen's methods is called into question less by his description of his methods and more by blind spots where his method is, apparently useless. Gorgias is undermined by his consistent need to defend the morality of teaching rhetoric. He lives in fear of the inhabitants of the various towns who might banish him or worse, but if rhetoric truly gave him the near absolute powers he claimed, he should never fear an angry mob.

The weakness of Westen's method came out in the informal Q&A that followed his lecture. I had read the book and had noticed that many of Westen's proposed talking points included references to Scripture or the speaker's faith, Did he think, I asked, that irreligious candidates could still use his methods or be elected at all? Should the Democrats be imposing a religious litmus test on candidates for their own good?

Westen replied that he believed that atheists couldn't win. Further, he had been asked to run for Congress in his native Georgia and had turned down the Party Elders in large part because he felt his (fairly disaffected) Judaism would be a sticking point that even his rhetorical skills couldn't help him escape.

If Westen is right, I think this is a big problem for American democracy (not to mention any of my hopes for holding office). Westen's approach, ultimately, isn't built on manipulating others by using deceptive practices like priming, but, rather, to reassure voters that your positions are grounded in values that are similar to theirs. It's a shame if we can't trust anyone who doesn't worship our god to share the principles that we care about, particularly as faith in god has not, of late, been a particularly good guarantor of respecting any of his creatures.