Polarization

Rhetorical Strategies in the Tea Party Network

Alan Fortuna

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110662726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

The concept of polarization has become an important topic of interest in politics, society, and discourse around the world today. In the European Union (EU), polarizing rhetoric has driven politics into divided camps on issues ranging from immigration to economic integration. In the United States, polarization has become a universal buzzword, and significant research has been done on it as a political and sociological phenomenon. But there has been little scholarly work on polarization as a communicative phenomenon since the late 1970s.

At the same time, holes remain in contemporary rhetorical theory regarding the concept of the orator. In short, the discipline lacks a clearly defined category to deal with strategic communication by collective entities such as social and political movements.

This work fills both gaps at once. It focuses on polarization as a rhetorical strategy that seeks to create division and solidarity in audiences. In doing so, it establishes and develops new theoretical categories for contemporary rhetoric, updates and refines existing work on polarization as a communicative phenomenon, and illustrates the utility of new concepts by providing a case study involving the tea party network in the United States.

1The Core Elements of Rhetorical Theory

Before going further, it is important to outline the core elements of the contemporary theory of rhetoric and to lay the terminological foundations for the rest of this work. Such fundamental considerations are necessary because the academic study of persuasive communication spans a variety of scholarly disciplines today, each with its own set of research perspectives and terminological lexica.11 As a discipline, rhetoric has largely become a “victim of modern academic differentiation,” and modern rhetorical theory building has been limited to a few influential twentieth century thinkers.12 Such fragmentation has led to a myriad of “rhetorical” concepts, theories, and terminology in adjacent fields, and recent studies have illustrated a number of fallacies regarding the use of the word rhetoric by communications researchers across the globe.13 As a result “the English word rhetoric […] is in no way a rigorous scientific terminus; it is an informal plastic word that can be used to designate just about anything that has to do with language or communication.” Further: “if we want to drag this word out of the colloquial and establish it as a legitimate academic term, then it must refer to something specific.”14 In short, “general rhetoric must now reestablish its position within current systems of knowledge.”15

In addition to a lack of terminological clarity and theoretical focus in the academic world, there is a broad misunderstanding of rhetoric in non-academic circles as well. In general, the word rhetoric in the English language has explicitly negative connotations, often associated with manipulative communication, or as “language that is intended to influence people and that may not be honest or reasonable.”16 The misconception of rhetoric as manipulation is particularly damaging in light of the fact that some rhetorical theorists see

rhetoric as fundamentally different from manipulation. Those who manipulate, we can say, have secret goals, do not act openly, and communicate using tricks. Such communicative action must be excluded from real rhetoric, which is by definition always tied to socially acceptable means.17

While a discussion the origins of this lay conception and its perpetuation in journalistic and popular discourse are outside of the scope of this work, it is important for rhetoric as a scholarly discipline to combat such negative stereotypes and fundamental misunderstandings. Only by rehabilitating the term rhetoric as a colloquial curse word can the academic field of contemporary rhetoric be taken seriously in public and scholarly discourse.

To follow Stefanie Luppold’s suggestion, “in light of the unmanageable variety of conceptions of rhetoric and the associated definitions of rhetoric that have emerged, it seems appropriate to briefly clarify here what is meant by the term rhetoric as an academic discipline.”18 Put briefly, rhetoric is the study and art of persuasive and strategic communication in real-world contexts. This focus was established in ancient antiquity, with foundational works by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all focusing on persuasion as the core concern of rhetorical investigation and rhetorical theory.19 Although some may question the utility of integrating such sources directly into the foundation of a modern science, many elements of these ancient theories continue to be applicable to a contemporary theory of rhetoric.20 By defining rhetorical communication as explicitly strategic, contemporary rhetorical theory can confine its analytical focus to cases of intentional and planned communication. From this perspective, there is no such thing as accidental or coincidental rhetoric, and such instances in which unintentional or unplanned communication leads to accidental opinion change do not count as rhetorical.21 As such, contemporary

rhetorical theory excludes a wide array of communicative phenomena that do not meet the requirements of a rhetorical object of investigation […] Rhetoric is to be understood as a social model of interaction in which human actors act in a particular way: they are persuasive. Thus, the rhetorical case comes into existence when one person seeks to persuade another person.22

While the concept and methods of persuasion have become the focus of research in a wide variety of other academic fields, for the purposes of this work, “to persuade someone means to change either their opinion or their attitude: to cause a [voluntary] change from mental position A to a new mental position B.”23 This conception corresponds to the common understanding of persuasion as “changing someone’s mind” (as in from pro to con), but also includes the strengthening or weakening of someone’s opinions or attitudes (as in making someone more strongly or weakly pro or con).

In some cases, persuasion takes place at the moment of performance, as when one person convinces another to agree to a project with an effective presentation. And for the most part, rhetorical theory has focused on producing persuasive communication for individual situations and contexts. Both research and experience have shown, however, that changing a person’s behavior (and above all sustaining such behavior) often takes time and repeated acts of persuasive communication. In this sense, rhetorical communication sets processes of persuasion in motion, or seeks to augment or curtail processes that are already in motion in a given audience.24 This “processuality” of persuasion “surpasses the perspective of the mere situatively limited act of persuasion.” Instead it requires “a persuasive process calculus” that moves away from “the classical, punctually conceived act of one-time persuasion.”25 Whether in advertising campaigns or in politics, a significant portion of strategic communication in public discourse today is the result of a coordinated effort that unfolds over time. As political communications scholar Jarol Manheim has described it:

Given that change is a longitudinal phenomenon […] campaigns must comprise progressions of messages, message effects, and observed changes of the target. They are, then, inherently sequential. It is the case that, on rare occasions, singular events can alter the psychological states or behaviors […] But it does not follow that singular, purposeful bursts of information per se […] can have the same effect.26

As a result, persuasive campaigns

are more or less long-running aggregations of messages […] It is both unduly limiting and counter-productive to think exclusively in terms of more or less singular messages that are delivered under more or less isolated circumstances […] Rather the strategist should think of the campaign as a long-, or at least longer-, running series of opportunities to […] generate the desired movement.27

This longitudinal perspective is critical for the contemporary theory of rhetoric to be able to deal with complex cases in the real-world of political and social discourse. In such cases, the rhetorical strategies planned and translated into texts by communicators lead to longitudinal persuasive (and thus rhetorical) processes that are set in motion both by single events and as the result of coordinated campaigns over time. More explicitly, successful rhetorical strategies trigger rhetorical processes in target audiences. These two theoretical categories are directly connected to one another through the category of text, and all three are important elements of the contemporary theory of rhetoric. In the chapters to come, each of these categories will be used to describe specific aspects of the phenomenon of polarization from a rhetorical perspective. Polarizing strategies refer to the conception, planning, and execution of (both punctual and longitudinal) communication designed to polarize, polarizing texts incorporate specific elements and structures associated with the strategy of polarization, and polarizing processes refer to the effects of such texts on audiences, both in the moment and over time.

To briefly summarize, “in practice, rhetoric is the mastery of success-oriented, strategic processes of communication.”28 In order to successfully use communication to reach their real-world goals, a speaker must determine what they want to persuade their audience of and must then formulate an appropriate text that delivers their persuasive message to their audience.29 Accordingly, both ancient and modern rhetorical theories have focused on three core theoretical categories: the orator (a strategically acting communicator), the text (as the communicative product of the orator), and the context (divided into the situation within which communication takes place and the audience as the target of persuasion). Each of these categories represents an important object of investigation for contemporary rhetorical analysis and an important point of consideration for any would-be persuasively acting individual. For this reason, and to better lay the foundation for the work to come, the following section will briefly discuss each of these three core elements from the perspective of contemporary rhetorical theory.

1.1Orator

In comparison to other scholarly fields that deal with human communication, rhetoric places the strategically active speaker (orator) at the center of its theoretical and analytical focus. Ancient rhetorical theorists ranging from Aristotle to Quintilian and Cicero focused their works on the artifex as an “expert” or “specialist” in the rhetorical arts: how such a person should be defined and how they can act most effectively and morally.30 More recently—and using Shannon and Weaver’s linear model of communication as a starting point—Joachim Knape has asserted that rhetoric

has only one main concern from which everything else is derived: how can the “sender,” which we name the “orator,” strategically and effectively communicate to meet life world goals? This fixed perspective gives all other theoretical considerations a focused direction. We see communication sub specie oratoris, that is to say: completely from the perspective of the orator.31

As briefly mentioned above, in order to act rhetorically (that is, to assume the role of an orator), a speaker must plan and undertake a number of actions. One of the most important is to clearly analyze their real-world goals and explicitly identify how persuasive communication can help them reach their aims. Whether a person wants to sell a product, get elected to public office, or receive a promotion in their workplace, they need others to act in a certain way that is beneficial to their cause. Once a speaker has clearly identified what they want to achieve, they can then begin making mental calculations about what persuasive communication and arguments might most effectively move their audience to do what they need. Should the salesperson highlight the quality of their product, or its low cost? Should the politician make campaign promises to a target constituency, or attack their opponent’s positions? Should the employee undertake direct negotiations with their superior, attempt to secure a letter of reference from a respected coworker, or write a list of successful projects they have completed for the organization?

These questions highlight the central concept of oratorical calculation in rhetorical theory. People acting rhetorically do not seek to persuade others just for fun or for mere exercise; they seek to use their persuasive communication to effect real changes in the real world. As described by E.E. White: “When we see that a situation exists that can or should be modified by communication […] we may respond to it by using symbols in hope of inducing changes in readers/listeners and thereby altering […] the provoking circumstances.”32 In order to meet their real-world goals, rhetorical actors must induce others to act in a specific way. Not only must an orator clearly identify their own goals, they must al...