Game on! With Hillary
Clinton and Jeb Bush announcing their candidacies for the presidency, the
campaign season has begun. This is not
to say either of these individuals will win the nomination of their party,
although I will personally be shocked if Clinton falters. If you teach civics, the upcoming months will
be a bit easier since the popular media will make continual references to the
process and the candidates. Usually,
heightened interest is bestowed on the campaigning when, and this is apt to
happen, one or more of the candidates makes some blunder. This eventuality will get even more attention
if the blunder offends some ethnic group or some beloved person. With more attention, civics teachers can
refer to some commonly discussed development in the campaign and shift to the
more substantive aspects of the process.
And with this focus, one important element concerns the positions and
arguments the candidates will foster.
Take for example, the Affordable Health Act: is it the worst thing that has befallen the
republic or is it saving the republic?
Just from hearing the arguments, it is hard to determine. ‘Tis the
season to analyze arguments.
A few postings ago,[1] I presented
a model for logical argument. The
creator of the model is Stephen Toulmin.
That model will serve as the standard by which to judge reasonable argumentation. I have also mentioned that the manipulation
of language in order to “win” an argument – as opposed to seeking and expressing
truth – is called rhetoric. This is not
saying that all rhetoric is false. What
it is saying is that the use of rhetoric has a different and not necessarily a
mutually exclusive aim. I would argue
that professional politicians engage in rhetoric as opposed to reasoned
argumentation. They want to win
elections and they do this by winning the argument between their proposed
agenda and that of their opponent(s).
The judges of that contest are the voters who actually go out and
vote. Given this state of affairs, then,
it is useful if civics teachers are prepared to teach students the basic
components of rhetoric and train them on the skills necessary to analyze the
argumentation a campaign produces and to dissect the rhetorical techniques the
politicians and their media experts use to “sell” the candidate.
One can do this by presenting transcriptions of speeches and
other presentations of various candidates or showing the videos of these
materials. These showings are presented
within the context of an explanation of some aspect of rhetoric and questions
that have the students zero in on the techniques the campaign is using to
convince the audience of its message.
The first question such an analysis can ask is: what is the purpose of the speech or
presentation? Is it to exhort someone to
do something; is it to dissuade someone from doing something; is it to accuse
someone of something (usually evil); is it to defend someone from something; is
it to place blame on someone for something, or is it to recognize someone for
something (usually something commendable)?
Political debate usually falls under the first two concerns – exhorting
and/or dissuading. So these sub-questions
help students contextualize political debate in terms of aims and point out
that such debates are only a partial sample of all possible forms of
argumentation.
I will continue this look at rhetoric over several postings. I feel that with the beginning of the
presidential election season – which is slightly under a year and half away
from the actual election – civics teaching will take a turn more toward viewing
this political process – a turn that can be very useful to students who will
have a lifetime to deal with arguments of every kind.
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