Rhetorical Leadership: Recent Episodes
David Erland Isaksen
Join Dr. David Isaksen and his guest from academia, communications consulting, and politics in discussions about what it means to lead people by persuasion rather than by force/rank/bargaining.
Dr. Ivana Stradner, who grew up in Serbia, discusses the rise of Serbian nationalism, Putin's strategy of increasing ethnic tensions in the region, and why we may be close to a new war in the Balkans.
During the Second World War, Chaim Perelman, a leader in the Jewish Belgian Resistance was writing a philosophical treatise on justice. Frustrated, he discovered that his training in analytic philosophy renedered him unable to make any arguments about why his cause was more just than that of the Nazis, because he had been trained to disregard arguments about values, preferences, or the probable. So Perelman began identifying everyday arguments humans use in newspapers and politics to discover how they work and what foundations they build upon, leading to his and Lucie Albrechts-Tyteca's masterpiece The New Rhetoric. Dr. Richard Enos joins us to discuss Perelman's theory of argumentation and how it provides a basis for making rational arguments and decisions about values.
00:00 Defining demagoguery
04:00 Why Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt were not demagogues
10:30 Case Study: Earl Warren's demagogic argument about Japanese Internment
12:20 Threat perception and demagoguery/ "The Flight 93 Election"
14:40 Signs and evidence of threats
15:45 Demagoguery in the gay marriage debate
17:30 Demagoguery as "algae in a pond" allegory
18:30 How Trump out-competed other demagogues
21:20 Trump as a large Salomon Asch experiment on the nation
23:30 How dishonest media give demagogues the cover to flip
24:45 Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio as a case study in demagogue/demagogic culture
29:30 How media revolutions coincide with the rise of demagogues
30:45 The solution: we have to stop buying demagoguery
31:50 What inspired this book
33:00 Lesser and greater demagogues
34:10 In-group policing as a parry against demagogues (McCarthyism/Birchers)
36:10 The extremism of the current GOP base and the "ends justify any means" argument
37:20 The need for leadership and a reckoning to defeat demagoguery
39:30 Why "suspending democratic norms" is a one-way street
40:35 Rejecting "our" demagogues
42:15 Institutional remedies for demagoguery
43:20 Two-party systems and us/them rhetoric
44:45 How demagogues create us/them in multi-party systems
45:15 Gerrymandering, safe seats, and partisan extremism
46:05 What can WE do?
46:15 1. Make demagoguery less profitable/successful
46:52 2. Not argue with those who repeat demagoguery, but engage with them
49:18 3. Argue with those who repeat demagoguery, but stick to the issue at hand
50:25 4. Actively support democratic deliberation
51:00 Don't take your democratic freedoms for granted
52:19 Never-Trump Republicans and cross-party coalitions for democratic norms
56:00 Democracy is fragile and needs our commitment
56:45 Remembering the lessons of WWII and demagoguery
1:00:00 "Purifying" our public sphere is not a solution
1:00:50 Creating a culture "parry" for the thrust of demagoguery
1:01:48 How important should politics be in our lives?
1:03:20 Paul Woodruff's democratic values of "harmony" and "reverence"
1:04:30 Learning to get along
Dr. Patricia Roberts-Miller, author of "Demagoguery and Democracy," talks about how demagogues arise out of a demagogic culture, the forms of argument we can recognize as demagoguery, their appeal, and why a culture of demagoguery is corrosive to democratic deliberation.
Although from humble origins, Quintilian rose to prominence in Rome as a teacher of rhetoric and became the first imperial endowed chair in rhetoric in Rome. He was a skilled and compassionate educator who tried to help his students become the "vir bonus" or "good man speaking well." Towards the end of his life, he summarized his educational methods and philosophy in the "Institutes of Oratory" and laid the foundation for classical education that would last for centuries.
Cicero gave his life defending the Roman republic from the emerging tyrants and saw rhetoric as tool to build, uphold, and defend a free and just society. In his writings on rhetoric and politics, he describes the virtues and skills needed by someone who would unite wisdom and eloquence to become the ideal orator. Dr. Enos joins us to discuss his life, writings, and legacy.
Aristotle wrote a work on rhetoric that would define a discipline. He rejected Plato's denunciation of rhetoric and showed why it is an art, a discipline, or a science and gathered the gems of all the manuals of rhetoric up to his day in a work that has endured for over 2000 years. Richard Enos and David Isaksen discuss some of its main contributions to rhetorical studies and what you can learn from it to give a good speech and lead ethically by persuasion.
UK award-winning public speaker, Simon Day, shares his journey from being terrified of public speaking to mastering the art, as well as some of the secrets to his success including adopting and adapting the rhetorical style of Barack Obama, learning the Memory Palace technique, storytelling, and perfecting his delivery with lessons from music. Find more from Simon at https://simonspeaks.co.uk/
Cicero called Isocrates "the father of eloquence" and said that from his school proceeded giants who had an enormous influence on Athenian society and Greek culture, but he is often overlooked in histories of rhetoric and philosophy. In this episode, Richard Enos and David Isaksen discuss his contributions to the philosophy and teaching of rhetoric. Positioning himself between the philosophers and the sophists, Isocrates developed a school of wisdom joined with eloquence for the benefit of a democratic society.
Dr. Richard L. Enos, expert on classical rhetoric, shares some of his insights on the historical moment in antiquity where rhetoric was conceived as a discipline. The innovation of the alphabet gave a larger portion of society easy access to tools for abstract thought, leading to fundamental changes in society. Dr. Enos traces how the ancient traditions of oral histories and memorization techniques laid the foundations for modern poetry, literature, and rhetoric.
Author and master trainer Vidar Top and Dr. Isaksen discuss how you can create a powerful connection with individuals and audiences so they can change for the better. (more from Vidar Top at www.linkedin.com/in/evtop and http://vidartop.com).
The topos of the tyrant was a rhetorical weapon to defend democracy. The current "authoritarian moment" calls for a renaissance of this rhetorical exercise. A speaker can use "the topos of a tyrant" by recounting and elaborating on "the six vices of a tyrant": suspicion, cruelty, savagery, arrogance, immorality, and avarice. As Cicero stated, "when it comes to preserving the people's freedom, no one is just a private citizen." It is the duty of every citizen to guard against tyranny and from becoming tyrants ourselves.
Debate champion and communication consultant Daniël Schut joins Dr. Isaksen to discuss how he coaches his clients for debates and speeches, the ethical issues in communication consulting, how some scientific research and theories on persuasion may be destroying the basis for democracy, and how that can be countered. (more from Schut at https://adrem-debatstrategie.nl)
Dr. Isaksen explains how to anticipate counterarguments in your speeches, using Barack Obama's "We the people" speech as an example of what to do, and Brutus' speech in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" as an example of what not to do.
Dr. Isaksen uses examples from Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, and Christopher Titus to explain the high, medium, and low rhetorical styles, and how and when these are best used."