The Rhythms of Political Speech

I tell people that I’m a recovering academic, and one of the consequences of that is that my writing has a disturbing tendency to be dense and long, which is acceptable for academic theses but somewhat less so for blogs, social media, political speeches, or other media messages. When communicating with general audiences, shorter and clearer message are both more easily transmitted and comprehended.  Consequently successful politicians tend to adopt similar speaking styles because they are effective. There are a range of written works that inform this topic, but I’m trying to reign in my dense, academic thesis-esque instincts, so I’ll recommend one book, Our Master’s Voices: The language and body language of politics by Max Atkinson (1984). Atkinson articulates the rhythms of political language and inside tricks that makes some politicians different from or better than others.

The first of Atkinson’s rules that stuck in my mind concerns presenting arguments in terms of lists of three. This is am argumentation technique that is common throughout history from the sacred Christian Trinity to the more secular Hegelian dialectic and negative feedback relationship, but presenting information in lists of threes is a natural technique that corresponds to how people naturally think. A list of three is compelling because it makes the list seem sufficiently long that it could be easily elongated if necessary. A list of two, in contrast, seems insufficient like you may have done insufficient research or the point you’re making is insufficiently supported. So persistent are lists of three that people will often add a third item to a list of two to fill it out in the form of the word, “etcetera.” I didn’t pick this up until Atkinson pointed it out, but then I started noticing it occurring frequently.

A second effective argument pattern concerns contrastive pairs that take the form, “either this or that.” The technique implies a decision point, a choice, or a cognitive verge. Contrastive pairs can be superimposed on a policy issue to structure its confusing complexity. This superimposition can be done both for good and for ill.  When done for the former, it can help make complex issues more understandable. When for ill, contrastive pairs can oversimplify the natural complexity associated with a complex policy issue. More pernicious still, contrastive pairs can makes imply a false dichotomy that increases issue stridency by dividing populations into “them” and “us.”

The third point concerns the reasons why these argument framing techniques should be pursued: so that political communications can be more effective and more memorable. Effective communications should leave your audience whistling a tune. Talks should be memorable. So what do you want that tune to be? What should the listener take away? Note that this perspective puts the focus on the listener rather than what the speaker wants to say. It forces the speaker to consider what the listener can hear.  Experts in a field may have a deep understanding of an issue, but distilling and presenting that information in a way that is effective remains an art. This is especially true for conservatives as their worldview centers on what works over the long-term, which is inherently complex. Liberals, progressives, and Democrats in contrast, subscribe to a worldview that centers on the “advertising ethic” – that is, the truth is that which sells in the short-term, regardless of what works or “reality.”

In order to have a larger impact in the political arena, conservatives need to improve their communications strategies, and some suggestions have been made here. Additional potential suggestions include keeping arguments short and clear and being sufficiently informed and prepared to “drill down” and provide more detailed and supported explanations when required. It also helps if politicians are attractive. For example, before becoming Prime Minister, Margret Thatcher had her teeth fixed. Check out the before and after pictures as they’re quite surprising. I offer these communication tips because, in an attempt to be clear, understandable, and influential, I intend to focus on lists of threes that help the reader understand something memorable about a complex topic. We’ll have to see about becoming more attractive.   

MIT as Political Microcosm

For me, it all starts with MIT, which I treat as a condensed microcosm that reveals a larger set of wider-ranging issues. I went there to study policy and political science – what they call Course 17 – and as MIT is an engineering school, I thought that the department’s take on policy would be from an engineering perspective or at least accommodate an engineering perspective. After all, the mascot of MIT is “the Engineers,” so there are reasons to believe this is the case. However, that has not been my experience. My experience has been that MIT is surprisingly politically correct. Of course, it remains to be defined just what “political correctness” means, and there are several possible definitions. But the way it was implemented at MIT was quietly, pervasively, and powerfully. That is, if you held views that ran counter to accepted wisdom, then that was a problem.

Now you might ask, “What’s an example of accepted wisdom, and what’s wrong with it?” Well, I had a problem with the way democracy was treated as an unquestioned good, which is a view held by Noam Chomsky, which for me is a bright red light indicating “problem.” From an engineer’s perspective generally and an electrical engineer’s specifically, that view is highly problematic because we did not decide whether an answer to a hard electrical engineering problem was correct or not through voting. So how did we tell? Well, there was the matter of mathematical expertise, but even that was somewhat flawed, because how can you tell the transformation from the physical to the mathematical representation is correct? That answer is, “by experiment.” That is, the ultimate arbiter of correctness is a theory’s ability to predict the future as confirmed by experiment. Richard Feynman (MIT ’39) said at Cornell (1964) that there are three parts to science: (1) you guess it – i.e., theory; (2) you compute the consequences of the guess – i.e., experiment; and (3) if the guess doesn’t square with the consequences, then you’re wrong. It is that relationship between theory and experiment that provides the core of science.

Now there is a saying in academia that fields that are truly scientific don’t need to include the term “science” in their names. For example, computer science often amounts more to hacking than science, but computer science provides ample opportunities to determine if the code works starting with compiling and moving on to more sophisticated testing. Political science however is in my experience deeply problematic because too often policies are judged by their intentions and implicit flattery rather than logic, plausibility, or likely results. This is a problem because I expect that the policies that determine and guide our life should be crafted with the same care that engineers create Porsches or iPhones, but this simply is not the case. Moreover, even believing that this should be the case is controversial because it threatens those who have based their careers in making arguments that rest on a more… emotional and self-interested foundation, which has led to many of today’s political problems. Instead, a more cognitive and commons-oriented perspective is required, but because such change is fundamental it will threaten the status quo and prove controversial. Be that as it may, this is the challenge of the 21^st century politics. What we see now under President Obama, the European Union, and other institutions such as NATO, the IMF, the WTO, the UN, and the Federal Reserve are the dying embers of 20^th century social bargains coming under increasing pressure and eventual failure. The studies found here recognize this reality and choose to understand why this is the case in order to postulate policies that will lead to more stable and sustainable results.