Charles Homans recently published an excellent New York Times Magazine article on campaign rhetoric. I’m thinking of sharing it with my History of Global Rhetorics seminar in the fall, to connect with the Dialogus de Oratoribus from Tacitus and the questions it raises about writing under imperial power. This passage is what caught my eye:
How do you think about a politician who openly veers into fascist tropes but, in four years in office, did not generally govern like one? On one level, the answer hinged on how the people — his people — heard what he said. His long pattern of self-contradiction and denial, of jokes that might or might not be jokes, meant that “he can talk in different layers to different people,” [New School Professor of History and author of The Wannabe Fascists Federico] Finchelstein said. “There are people who take what he says literally. There are people who don’t take it literally. And people who ignore it as rhetoric. He’s talking to all these people.” The question was what they heard.
Those “different layers” are what University of Chicago Helen A. Regenstein Professor Shadi Bartsch characterizes as Roman imperial “doublespeak” and also the competing “esoteric” and “exoteric” readings that far-right philosopher Leo Strauss ascribed to the rhetoric of Plato and Maimonides. With the alarming turns that American public political rhetoric has recently taken, I want to look again at one of the philosophers idolized by the neoconservatives who paved (razed?) the foundation for our contemporary political situation.
So reading the other team’s playbook means assigning excerpts from On Tyranny and Persecution and the Art of Writing. I was lucky to talk some with Nicholas Xenos when I was a graduate student at UMass in the early 2000s, and his argument that “Strauss was somebody who wanted to go back to a previous, pre-liberal, pre-bourgeois era of blood and guts, of imperial domination, of authoritarian rule, of pure fascism” in that political moment — one much milder than today’s — hit hard.
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