When They Go Low, We Go High Read online

  This charge is also perennial. Every change brings an accusation of decline; every age is written off as a dying fall. Abraham Lincoln revolutionised rhetoric on the field at Gettysburg and attracted criticism for the plainness of his novel style. Robert Peel, whose maiden speech in Parliament in 1810 was judged to be one of the finest ever given, was mocked when he replaced the ornate Thucydides-inspired curlicues of Chatham, Burke and Fox with a flatter, demotic vocabulary. Roosevelt and Churchill adapted their rhetorical style to the new technology of the wireless, which demanded a quieter, more intimate tone than a podium calls for. They too incurred the claim that rhetoric was in decline. This is more than a lament about language. As rhetoric and democracy run together, any allegation about the decline of rhetoric is always a coded way of claiming the concomitant decline of politics itself. We need to be clear that both claims are nonsense. Rhetoric is thriving and so is democracy. They have simply changed together.

  The extension of the franchise meant that oratory had to become more demotic. The electorate of the late eighteenth century in England would have been classically educated, and all to the same extent. The Great Reform Act 1832 added the merchant class to the electorate, and further extensions to the franchise in 1867, 1884, 1918 and 1928 brought the whole adult nation into the conversation. The pivotal change was not that politicians became more stupid or less literary but that the audience grew. Classical and biblical references and quotations from Shakespeare and Dickens were once commonplace because a speaker could be sure that the audience would share them. With a larger audience, the common denominator is lower and political language becomes less courtly, more colloquial. The decline of the grand oratorical style is thus the same process as the extension of the franchise. To lament the consequence without recognising the cause is a form of historical snobbery.

  Less florid rhetoric is not necessarily worse rhetoric. There is a tendency, even today, for poor writers to come on like a pastiche of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society because they think of that style as somehow properly rhetorical. But purple prose does not sound black and white when it is spoken. When he was criticised by William Faulkner for his limited vocabulary, Ernest Hemingway gave a reply that was not intended as advice for speechwriters but works as such anyway: ‘Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words and those are the ones I use.’

  Soon after the audience started to grow, the world started to shrink. Radio, television and the internet have vastly extended the reach of a political speech. Before mass media connected leaders to their public, rhetoric was an elite game. The political class talked about the people but largely to each other. The real setting of the great speech is no longer the Temple of Concord, Freedom Hall or the steps of the Capitol, even though the words may be spoken there. The speech exists in the lines cut into soundbites on social media, edited to seven seconds on the evening news or published in next day’s newspaper. Even that had ceased until I revived the format in The Times, which now carries analyses of all the major political speeches. The format devised there appears in this book, for the select band of speeches that have endured among the mass that have been given.

  The test of time proves too much for most rhetoric, plenty of which falls victim to the sheer pace of modern politics. There are two types of modern politician, the quick and the dead. No one can afford to be silent for long, and the outcome is that politicians today speak far too often. Gladstone and Disraeli would deliver polished speeches three times a year. Their speeches would be deeply researched and considered rather than knocked out in the heat of a passing crisis. Most political speeches today are unnecessary: press releases stretched far beyond their natural span. They also have to stretch further than they did. Government has grown broader in scope, and more complex. Speeches get made about such unpromising subjects as environmental directives and the gradient of welfare benefit tapers.

  The great causes, at least in the rich, fortunate democracies, have gone. If there are fewer uplifting speeches today than there once were, then the chief cause is a heartening one. Momentous speeches are always given in answer to a signal injustice or crisis – think of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. The success of the developed democracies means injustice is less acute than it once was. The great questions – the entitlement to vote, material and gender equality, freedom of association and speech, war and peace – are not entirely resolved, but the first decades of the twenty-first century show progress that would have been unimaginable two centuries before.

  The line towards freedom is crooked, as we shall see. Nevertheless, the issues are smaller, the injustices largely less raw. The conflict between capitalism and communism pitted two sets of utopian aspirations against each other, with liberals and socialists everywhere painting the war of ideas in vivid colours. The victory of capitalism over socialist planning changed politics even in countries that had never been run by the communists. It meant that the left-of-centre parties largely accepted the writ of the market. The argument continued about where the lines of regulation should be drawn, but the dispute was now in the details, not the principles. At much the same time, the political Left won a cultural victory over the respect that was due to people of all creeds and colours. Each side, by and large, accepted the lesson it had been taught by the other, and the upshot was the creation of a new, benign, largely liberal consensus.

  This means that public speech that truly sings is harder to pull off. Rhetoric, like all drama, needs a dispute. Agreement writes white, as Montherlant said about happiness. Politics, though, has to go on and this explains the rather exaggerated, overwrought nature of rhetoric today. No politician ever gets into office by volubly agreeing with his opponents. The political dispute therefore carries on regardless, as if there were no consensus. Public speech is easily reduced to an exercise in caricature, confected and boring, with the volume set too high. Amid this vast ado about nothing, it is little wonder that a decline in the standard of rhetoric is declared. But it is an illusion, and if public speech is boring the proper response is to be thankful. There are plenty of examples of shining speech in this book given during times when politics was far from boring and some of it was terrifying.

  There is, though, still a reasonable complaint here. Language in the public square today does not always rise to the occasion. Too little of what is said in politics is memorable. It needs to be. Politics is the best idea about government that anybody ever had, or ever will have. Words need to inspire because disenchantment with politics fosters the illusion that there is an alternative. It is certainly still possible to write well rather than badly. The Obamas, Barack and Michelle, have shown that it is still possible to go high when everyone else is going low. It is still possible, as Mark Twain put it, to apply ‘a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense’. The aim of good public speaking is to borrow the rhythms of everyday speech but at the same time to heighten its effects. The objective is to write high-octane ordinary speech, as if an eloquent person were speaking naturally at their best, fluent and uninterrupted, with all the connecting threads edited away.

  The greatest speeches are essays in simple language, easily comprehensible to a democratic audience, but works of beauty and profundity all the same. As a collection, the finest public speeches tell the story of the unfolding of human accomplishment through politics. This book is not a story of human progress in the manner of the old Whig theory, in which history moves serenely from darkness towards the light. There have been too many desperate times. But to the extent that there has been progress in the material conditions of life, as unquestionably there has, that progress is owed to political argument that began with the Funeral Oration of Pericles and continues to this day.

  That is the spirit, and the thesis, of this book, which defines five political virtues and applauds the greatest words that have been spoken in their defence.
The first political virtue is that through politics the voice of the people is heard. The second is that politics commits us to persuasion rather than force. The third virtue is that through politics the demand for recognition can be heard. Fourth, the equal consideration of all citizens in free societies is the means by which the material condition of the population is improved. Then, fifth, perhaps the most profound point of all: it is only when politics prevails that the worst of human instincts can be tamed. All of these virtues require poetic political speech.

  The Quarrel with Ourselves

  William Butler Yeats once said that poetry was made out of a quarrel with ourselves whereas rhetoric derived from the quarrel with others. It can, alas, be more than a quarrel. We now face new threats to the liberal democratic order, from both without and within. In the wealthy democracies today an insidious lack of confidence has set in. Conspiracy theories have flourished and people are tempted towards fringe candidates. This lack of confidence in democracy is misplaced and dangerous. Cynicism with politics is everywhere and it is everywhere nihilistic.

  The history of fine speech is proof against cynicism of this kind. Public speech can be elevated and it can still be uplifting. It needs to be because it is in the spoken word that the defence of politics has to be conducted. The final speech in this book tells the most heartbreaking story of the modern age. ‘Not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald’, says Elie Wiesel, the worst of instincts was let loose. Politics is the human achievement that prevents a repetition of terrors such as this. The title of Elie Wiesel’s great speech is a reminder to us all of the perils of indifference. We can compose a funeral oration for politics if we choose. Or we can fight back.

  This book exhibits the examples that we can choose to follow. By explaining what the great speakers meant and how they said it, I hope to elucidate the principles through which good politics can be conducted. All we have at our disposal are beautiful words, but what a weapon to hold. Stirring words in a skilled arrangement are all the power we need. The question for us now, when confidence in politics and democratic process is low, is not whether good things are still being said. Good things are still being said. The question is whether we are still listening.

  1

  DEMOCRACY:

  THROUGH POLITICS THE PEOPLE ARE HEARD

  The Best State of the Commonwealth

  Good politics is founded on extraordinary hope. Political imagination is the fancy that the world can get better and that the actions of men and women can together make it so. That act of utopian imagination is a description of democratic politics at its best. It is heard to great effect in the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. This is where we hear the idea of popular power expressed in language lifted to move the people. It is politics enchanted once again.

  One of the flaws of liberal democracies is that, when they succeed, they start to sound boring. Over time, power has a tendency to corrupt language, though not because politicians are venal. It is because success turns a politician from a campaigner into a technocrat. Their speeches – and I plead guilty to writing some of them – become one half braggadocio about achievements to date and one half technical exposition on policy detail. The enchantment goes missing and so does utopian hope.

  Half a millennium ago, in 1516, Thomas More published a strange and remarkable volume called Utopia. Oddly, for a man with a deserved reputation for severity, a lifelong wearer of a hair shirt, More was fond of jokes, and the title of his most famous book is a tease. Does he mean eutopia, the good place, or does he mean outopia, no place at all? He adds to the sense of play by giving his narrator the name of Raphael Hythloday, which translates from Greek as ‘speaker of nonsense’. More’s text causes us to ponder whether Utopia is his version of the perfect society or a kind of Tudor cabaret act.

  The clue to the riddle is also the link between Cicero and the rhetoric of the American republic, and it is found in More’s subtitle Optimus status republicae: ‘The Best State of the Commonwealth’. Or to put it in a current idiom, the perfect state of the union. More sends his narrator Hythloday on a journey to Utopia where he discovers, ready-made in the ocean, a society that dramatises Cicero’s argument for the Roman republic. That argument, which More revives and which Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama all articulate, is how the people are to be heard. More’s answer to that question is politics. The noble life, he argues, is one that is dedicated to public service in the name of the people. This marks a change from the Greek tradition in which it was thought that a citizen had to be of noble birth. Cicero’s argument is that virtue, rather than inherited wealth, should have its reward. It is in the finest speeches about popular power that this idea is expressed.

  But it is not just the beauty of the idea that makes these speeches fine. The beauty of the diction counts too. Fixing problems is the purpose of democratic politics but saying so is never enough. As La Rochefoucauld said, ‘the passions are the only orators that convince’. Democratic politics still needs the elevation of Cicero’s case for the Roman republic, Thomas Jefferson’s praise of the blessing of equal liberty for all, Abraham Lincoln’s ability to summarise the promise of democracy in a single phrase, John F. Kennedy’s call for an active citizen body and Barack Obama’s extraordinary, audacious hope. All these speakers express in unforgettable cadences the political virtue of granting power to the people.

  But, in our time, an alternative utopia to liberal democratic politics has risen again in the form of populism. If politics is to turn away from this phoney appeal to the people, it can only do so in words that once again resound to the times. If politics has become dry then it needs to be reinvigorated by the precious democratic gift represented by the principle of hope.

  Popular politics cannot work without utopian spirit. We need to draw from More’s Utopia its sense of possibility, because the spirit of utopia is a desire for progress. It is a way of thinking that reminds us that the world might be different. This hope needs to be expressed in words that take wing. Rhetoric is the art of public persuasion, and if the ideas of liberal democracy are to retain their hold over the imagination of the people, they need to be argued with clarity and elevation. In the speeches that follow, they are.

  MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

  First Philippic against Mark Antony

  The Senate, the Temple of Concord, Rome

  2 September 44 BC

  Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was the first man to claim that rhetoric can save the state. Cicero was a philosopher, politician, lawyer and writer. He was the first among equals of the rhetoricians, both as a speaker himself and as the man who made the subject a systematic field of study. Cicero’s De oratore is still the best rhetorical instruction manual. He is headmaster of the school of oratory.

  Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric still work; they will always work. Invention, he says, is the drafting of good arguments; disposition is the arrangement of those arguments for best effect; style is giving the argument shape in language; memory is recall in an age before autocue; pronunciation is delivery on the day. Cicero also identified three styles. The plain style should be used to teach, the ornate middle style to please, and the grand style to arouse the emotions. But De oratore was more than a book of instructions on how to talk. It was a book of statecraft as well: the subjects were for Cicero indivisible. If rhetoric and democracy were born together with Pericles, then rhetoric and statecraft were united by Cicero.

  After a spell as a slum landlord, Cicero devoted his life to the theory and practice of oratory. He learned his trade in Rome under the tutelage of Crassus, the leading orator of his day. Cicero was debarred from a career in politics due to his ignoble plebeian ancestry. He grew up in the provincial town of Arpinum, the son of a fuller, a cloth-maker who soaked wool in urine for cleansing purposes. Cicero instead built a reputation as a lawyer of great integrity and gained public recognition when he
acted in the impeachment of the corrupt governor Gaius Verres in 70 BC. Low birth notwithstanding, he did then make it into politics. In 63 BC he exposed a plot by Lucius Sergius Catiline to launch a coup against the Roman republic. The Orations against Catiline are the most ferocious tirades against a rival in the history of speech. The story is told, fictionalised to dramatic effect, in Robert Harris’s trilogy of historical novels about Cicero.

  When Cicero said of Catiline in the Temple of Jupiter: ‘Among us you can dwell no longer’, he ended Catiline’s career. But he also damaged himself. Cicero was granted the title of Pater Patriae, Father of the Fatherland, but he was exiled from the republic for having, in the aftermath of triumph, executed a Roman citizen without trial. The law of the republic made no exceptions, even for its saviour.

  It is to the curatorial brilliance of Cicero’s devoted secretary Tiro that we owe the fifty-eight Cicero speeches, of the eighty-eight we know he gave, that we have today. We also know Cicero from his letters to Atticus, which were discovered by Petrarch in 1345 and which are the source of the influence that Cicero was to have on the European Renaissance. In the decade of his retreat after fleeing Rome in 55 BC, Cicero composed a series of works that have among their debtors the significant names of Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Burke, Adam Smith and Rousseau.