Political rhetoric matters. Political leaders can use rhetoric that speaks to “the better angels of our nature” to draw us together, as President Lincoln urged in his first inaugural address. Or they can use rhetoric to sow fear and distrust, and push us apart. Political leaders in the United States have an obligation to the former.
The United States, more than many nations, is a rhetorical space as much as it is a physical one.
Phrases like “All men are created equal,” “Land of the free, home of the brave,” and “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” are as much a part of our landscape as the Lincoln Memorial and Mount Rushmore (themselves symbols of ideas and ideals). Borders of course matter – taxes and health care change as you cross from the US into Canada – but the character of the country inside those borders is a function of political rhetoric.
Pamphleteers made the case for rebellion against the British before the shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. As Bernard Bailyn wrote in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the pamphleteers established the premises and “defined the assumptions” of the American Revolution. Bailyn opens his book quoting a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson in which Adams writes, “What do we mean by the revolution? The war? That was not part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected…before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.”
Political leaders, and would-be political leaders, have rhetorically constructed our American identity ever since. They have told us that the United States is a “shining city upon a hill,” as Rev. John Winthrop wrote in 1630 on the voyage to what would become the colonies, and as President Reagan reminded us several hundred years later. They calmed us by insisting that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” as FDR did in his first inaugural address. And they reminded us that the American promise is still unfulfilled for too many, as Dr. Martin Luther King did on the National Mall in the summer of 1963.
Our nation is a story itself. Our story constructs a coherent past that explains our present, and points to our future.
This story is incomplete – it is a myth more than a report. As the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country, “Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity.” Our story glosses over slavery, treatment of Native Americans, religious and ethnic discrimination of every flavor, and much more. But the story still matters because in showing us at our most idealistic, it shows us what we can become.
The best political rhetoric acknowledges our nation’s flaws and mistakes. It is honest and humble.
The best political rhetoric brings us together to face and account for our flaws and to move forward together. It uses language to help us create a “more perfect union,” while acknowledging that we will inevitably stumble along the way. It recognizes, to borrow from Langston Hughes’ 1935 poem Let America be America Again, that America never was but that it will be.
We always need such rhetoric. We always need to be reminded that we play an important part in our national experiment. Sometimes the need for a rhetoric that hopes that we are on the side of the Lord more than it insists the Lord is on our side is especially acute (to again lean on Lincoln). This is such a moment. We need our political leaders at every level to remind us that ours is a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” as Lincoln did at Gettysburg.
We need political rhetoric brave enough to say that we are far from perfect and that together we must commit to being better.
Our democratic experiment may never fully succeed. The point of democracy is after all the process of democracy. No bell will ring if we “win” democracy and no one will get a prize at the end. But our experiment can fail. We can surrender and say that since our union can never be perfect it must be torn apart, that our individual differences matter more than our shared dreams. We can give up and settle for a United States that’s a map and not an idea. Or we can raise the quality of our discourse and demand that our leaders do the same.
Now is the time to be brave, together.