Reason over Rhetoric

America goes nuts so the rest of us don't have to

If Plato is to be believed, politics has always been susceptible to self-serving, populist, deceptive, insincere, and often just plain mendacious messaging. In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato describes a dinner in which Socrates and a bunch of rhetoricians explore the question of what rhetoric means, how it operates, and whether it is, overall, a good thing. At one point, the rhetorician Gorgias is goaded by Socrates into stating outright that rhetoric is the greatest good in a society since it represents

the ability through speeches to persuade judges in a court, Senators in the Council chamber, Assemblymen in the Assembly, or in political gatherings of any other kind whatever. Indeed by virtue of this power [of rhetoric] you will have the doctor as your slave, and the trainer too, and this businessman of yours will make his next appearance earning money not for himself but someone – for you – because of your ability to speak and persuade the multitude. (452e)

Socrates, in his counterargument, notes that rhetoric is not interested in what is true, but only in how best to persuade. He asks of Gorgias whether “the rhetorician need not know the truth about things, but has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who [genuinely] know?” Gorgias affirms that this is indeed the case, at which point Socrates launches into a lengthy argument aimed both to discredit rhetoric and to promote the need for philosophy (i.e. actual knowledge and truth) as the basis for a true politics.

Nice idea, but naïve you are probably thinking. Because fast forward two and a half millennia, and we’re still resolutely mired in a sorry state of rhetorically-induced false reality based on a swindling of the ignorant. As a good example, it seems that many Americans remain genuinely convinced that the cost of tariffs imposed on most of America’s trading partners will be borne by foreign producers, and not domestic consumers. Repeatedly during his campaign, Trump made the case that tariffs were the cure-all for America’s economic ills, noting it was “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” In September of last year, for example he called his opponent Kamala Harris “a liar” who “makes up crap,” and then proceeded himself to make up crap, noting “I am going to put tariffs on other countries coming into our country, and that has nothing to do with taxes to us. That is a tax on another country.” When faced with higher prices and empty shelves, it is possible that some Trump supporters may gain an inkling that something is not quite right with the math. But I wouldn’t count on it, because for many, the math is whatever Trump tells them it is, reality be damned.

Now, you might not think of that kind of thing (i.e. lying) as “rhetoric.” Indeed, a typical Trump speech is more about mangled words, quagmires of sense, and testing the limits of grammar. But as Socrates insightfully pointed out, rhetoric is not really about using lofty, finely-crafted expression. Instead, it is about “persuading the ignorant” that the speaker has “more knowledge than those who [genuinely] know.” That substitution of knowledge with sloganeering, little matter how mangled it be, is the true measure of rhetoric. And by that standard, Trump is an outstanding rhetorician.

However, there’s one quite significant benefit to this display of rhetorically-induced, reality-denying madness that’s currently engulfing the U.S.: for the rest of the world the political value of acknowledging reality has been creeping upwards. I am not saying that there has been a sudden clear-headedness that has swept over the political landscape everywhere that is not the U.S. But there has been a marked increase in the political value of establishing clear distance from the madness taking hold in America. Since that madness is linked to rhetoric over reality, the counterbalance for the rest of us is a notable rise in reality over rhetoric.

Two countries that in many ways resemble the United States are: Canada and Australia. And both, coincidentally, have just had elections. In both cases the results were decidedly, even vigorously, anti-Trump, by which I mean the electorate opted for the clearest non-Trumpy political party that could win, namely the Liberal Party in Canada (LPC) and the Labour Party in Australia (ALP), as a strategic demonstration of reality-based political choice.

The political landscape in both countries is quite distinct, and it is likely that the ALP would have fared well, even without the Trump effect. But in Canada, the Liberals’ victory is 100% attributable to the flaming shitshow that Trump has been unleashing over the last months. Faced with electoral oblivion as late as this January, the Liberals’ fortunes, even before their new leader Mark Carney took over, have been soaring from the moment Trump took office. Why? His imposition of punitive tariffs on Canadian exports and his moronic threats to annex the country produced a severe backlash that manifested itself as a sudden, indeed unprecedented, return of support for the LPC as the clearest anti-Trump political alternative.

This has been billed, too, as a collapse in support for the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), which is led by a rather insipid politico named Pierre Poilievre. That would seem to make sense, since, over the last several years, Poilievre has been aping Trump political tactics, decrying DEI, vilifying Davos-attending globalist-elites (his words), showing up on Jordan Peterson’s podcast for a long self-indulgent wallow in right-wing hyperbolic muck, and somehow managing to make eating an apple a political fuck you to the woke hive mind (long story: ask a Canadian friend).

But that story of collapse is untrue. Instead, Trump’s election galvanised Canada’s non-conservative voting electorate to coalesce around a single alternative to stymie conservative fortunes. Thus, in both countries, there was a consolidation of voting from the middle/left of the political spectrum towards the main political party. This cost the more progressive political parties their representation. But it also meant that the conservative alternative could not benefit from a divided electorate on the left and slip through the middle.

So this is not a story of a resurgent left, but rather a consolidation of what I might term political reason over political rhetoric. That explains the rise of strategic (i.e. rational) voting choices in both Canadian and Australian elections, leading to the reelection of both the LPC and ALP.

But I suggest it might go further than that. This creeping forward of reason into the political discourse is also affecting an erstwhile Trump-adjacent political discourse in Canada and Australia, and, perhaps in many other countries as well. This perhaps explains why the level of support for the conservative opposition in Australia remained largely stable, and in the case of Canada rose to heights not seen since the late 1980s, despite certain shared affinities with Trumpism. As an example, at a campaign rally in April, an Australian senator from the conservative opposition (the “coalition”) vowed to “make Australia great again.” But no sooner were the words out of her mouth than she was backpedaling furiously, insisting that only a “Trump-obsessed” media could possibly think she had any parallels with the U.S. right in mind. In Canada, too, the Conservative party was backtracking, albeit clumsily, from its Trumpy rhetorical formulations.

This was not just optics. While there is a certain (and one assumes self-loathing) quotient of Canadians and Australians who are very keen on Trump, it is under 10%; the vast majority view Trump somewhere on the scale between dental surgery and genital warts. Look, here's a graph. Consider that oversized column of “very unfavourable” as the statistical equivalent of the middle finger.

Canadians view of Trump

As I see it, Trump’s victory has shifted what’s known as the Overton Window (which describes the bounds of acceptable political discourse) in the rest of the world – and maybe even in the U.S. itself. His political brand has become so toxic, his political representation so scabrous outside of the U.S. (except maybe Russia?), that conservatives like Poilievre and Peter Dutton (former head of Australia’s Coalition) now have to reassure voters over and over again they’re not in any way aligned with Trump. “Trump doesn’t even like me,” mewled Poilievre during the Canadian campaign. And when they still lost anyway it was clear to many (although not all), that Trump’s toxicity to their overall conservative brand was primarily to blame.

So when Timothy Garton Ash declares a “global liberal fightback,” I am inclined to disagree: it’s a global reality fightback.

There’s nothing wrong with holding conservative views. But there is something wrong when those views are distorted by politicians who indulge in cheap rhetoric and peddle in a shallow populism appealing to ignorance because it seemed to work in America. In Canada, for instance, Conservative gains prior to the Trump moment were largely a result of incumbency exhaustion, high housing prices, and post-Covid inflation. Nothing to do with global elitists gathering at Davos to push a woke agenda down your throat and confuse your children about their gender identity. Nothing. So where’d all that toxic shit come from? The weird turn that happened in the US and somehow intoxicated conservatism in other places. But now that the truth of what the U.S. is doing to itself is becoming clear, the move back to a somewhat more reasonable political discourse everywhere else is underway.

Put another way, Canada and Australia today enjoy better governments than they would have had Trump not been reelected. And that’s not just because of the political parties that won. Even had the opposition prevailed, this would still be true. Yes, America’s politics are breathtakingly awful. But on the upside, it’s helping other countries bring more sanity and stability to their political discourse by nudging, albeit very slightly, back into the political arena the idea that acknowledging reality and embracing knowledge-based policy is actually a good thing.

Socrates, I think, would be pleased.