The Donald gives a 'conspiracy speech'

[Paul Rigby]

The acting demagogue

MARY BEARD

OCTOBER 10 2016

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public...-616446438

The Emperor Nero's first appearance in the senate, as the new teenager on the Roman throne, was a surprising success. He had come to power in 54 AD by the usual shady means. At least according to popular rumour, his ambitious mother had disposed of Nero's stepfather Claudius with a tasty bowl of poisoned mushrooms, in order to engineer her son's succession ahead of any possible rivals; and a spate of other convenient deaths in high places were put down to the same hard-headed dynastic planning. But Nero's debut in the senate went down well. In his fluent speech, he pledged that his reign would be free of corruption and financial scandal; that the aristocracy would keep their traditional privileges; and that he would not let his own political advisers grab too much influence.

Even the cynical historian Tacitus had to admit that, to start with, he was more or less as good as his word. But whose word had it been? Tacitus could not resist observing that one of Nero's other speeches in these first few days of his reign his magnificently insincere eulogy of Claudius had not been written by the young man himself, but had been ghosted for him by his tutor, Seneca. It led the older generation to mutter disapprovingly that Nero was the first emperor "to have needed borrowed eloquence". Or, to put the point more starkly, in speaking his lines from someone else's script Nero risked turning himself into an actor: not the most powerful man in the Roman world, but one of that vilified breed of stage performers, who ranked close to gladiators and prostitutes at the very bottom of the hierarchy of Roman social respectability and political privilege.

This went beyond some snobbish, Victorian-style slur about the stage, right to the heart of Roman public life. The politics of ancient Greece and Rome, even under one-man rule, were based on oral persuasion, and the problems of oratory were central questions for debate. The cleverest theorists in the ancient world, from Aristotle to Cicero, devoted themselves to rhetoric and the rules of public discourse as much as to ethics and metaphysics. Who should be allowed to speak? What techniques were most effective and honourable for persuading? What were the criteria for oratorical truth and falsehood or what degree of "economy with the truth" was it legitimate to get away with? Even now we are the heirs to some of these ancient debates and prejudices.

We still, for example, worry about the dangerous power of "demagogues" (or "leaders of the people"). These men first became figures of hate in democratic Athens in the fifth century BC and were never entirely banished from the ancient political arena: they were defined by their appeal to the mob, their stirring of popular prejudices and their manipulation of the "masses" in their own interests. According to one standard story, it was the decline in political and oratorical virtue, from the patriotism of the statesmanlike Pericles (mastermind of the Parthenon among other things) to the crude self-interest of his demagogue followers, which led to Athens' failure and defeat by Sparta in the great Peloponnesian War. Cheap rhetoric had misled the demos (the people) into catastrophic political and military decisions. The analogy is a seductive one. Take according to your own political persuasion Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or George Galloway, and it's easy to join in the complaints about lack of judgement, the debasement of political argument and short-sighted popular decisions based on short-term interests.

But ancient discussions of oratory tackled far trickier issues than demagoguery including, as the reaction of the older generation to Nero's inaugural address to the senate suggests, the fragile boundary between the orator and the actor. In fact, in the surviving treatises of Cicero and others on the training of the would-be public speaker, this boundary is the one they are keenest to uphold. Extravagant gestures, they insist, are to be banned from political speechmaking, as well as jokes learned up in advance, and all forms of mimicry. Cicero reserves some of his sharpest criticism for one of his predecessors in the Roman forum who at one crucial part of his "performance" pretended to be a statue. For us, this light-hearted charade is a nice hint that Roman oratory might have been less drearily pompous than we have come to imagine. For Cicero, it pointed to an ominous category mistake, confusing the theatrical stage with the rostra (the speakers' platform).

As such counter-examples themselves show, the reality must often have been different from the Ciceronian ideal. My guess is that it was a nostalgic fantasy, on the part of the grumpy old men, to imagine that Nero really was the first emperor to have had help in drafting his speeches. Certainly, across the Mediterranean, in democratic Athens where actors enjoyed a higher reputation than in Rome so-called "logographers" (word writers) regularly wrote speeches for those appearing in the criminal courts to deliver, as if the words were their own. But there remained in both ancient Greece and Rome, a strong sense that a politician was inseparable from the words he uttered. Or, as the Latin slogan put it, the ideal orator was virbonus dicendi peritus, "a good man skilled in speaking". The two goodness and eloquence went inextricably together. A person's moral and political worth was embedded in what he said. Words were the man. For the Romans, only the déclassé actor borrowed lines that had been written by someone else.

These issues still bother us, though in a rather different, and often more inconsistent and muddled, way. At some level we recognize that major politicians are now almost all "actors" in Cicero's terms. Many of their big speeches are not simply the product of consultation, advice and editing an entirely sensible process with a long history (George Washington's famous "Farewell Address" of 1796, was to all intents and purposes the work of a committee, as was Harold Macmillan's "Wind of Change" speech in 1960). Since the 1920s in the United States and 1970s in Britain, they have been written, in whole or in part, by the modern equivalent of a "logographer", as have most of the newspaper articles that go under the same political names. But we still cling to ancient ideas of oratorical ownership, turning a consistently blind eye to the real processes of composition, and regularly attributing the words to the person who delivered them rather than to the people (and it is often plural) who composed, crafted and polished them.

Those professional speechwriters remain a shadowy breed. They have their own organizations; "the UK Speechwriters' Guild [attracts] a committed group of individuals who enjoy meeting up at conferences to listen to top speechwriters talk about their work" as its founder proudly states. And a few of them come to public prominence, such as Peggy Noonan who has written about her time in the White House with Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior (she coined "Read my lips" for him), or the British journalist Philip Collins, who is regularly tagged as "Blair's Chief Speechwriter". All the same, the basic rule is that they remain in what must be an uncomfortably self-effacing form of anonymity. What Ronald Millar thought when he repeatedly heard his clever catchphrase "the lady's not for turning" credited to Margaret Thatcher is not hard to imagine. Nor, for that matter, is it hard to imagine his disappointment as she rather mangled the lines in the delivery. Thatcher was a much less skilled actor than some of the targets of Cicero's criticism, and I strongly suspect that, despite all the coaching, she had not entirely understood the parody of Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning.

The other side of the rule of anonymity is that the "logographer" escapes any public blame for any errors, as we all collude in the pretence that the words belong to the speaker, or to those who claim them in the byline. Last year I had a friendly and faintly ridiculous series of exchanges with a Tory minister about a terrible classical howler "he" had made in a worthy newspaper article about the importance of freedom of speech (he assumed that Socrates was the author of surviving writings when the whole point about Socrates is that he wrote nothing). Our debates proceeded as if he had been the real author, when I strongly suspected, and he presumably knew, that his only mistake was not to have spotted the error when he signed off the piece that had been written by one of his staff. But to blame the real writer would have been more than bad form on the part of an employer. It would have been to expose the underlying "falsehood", as the Romans would have seen it, on which our political rhetoric is based.

That is, of course, precisely what the Trump Campaign did in July, when Melania Trump's speech to the Republican National Convention was revealed to have recycled words from Michelle Obama. Although (or because) Mrs Trump had earlier claimed "I wrote it, with as little help as possible", the only way to save her was through a public apology from the speechwriter and the admission that she had not written the words at all. That seemed both shocking in its candour and at the same time hardly much of a surprise. We may like to treat the idiosyncratic personal style of Trump's own oratory as if it sprang spontaneously from the mouth of a natural, even if dangerous, orator; yet we are also more or less aware that in a presidential campaign where the political and financial stakes are so high, every utterance must have been pre-planned, every moment of apparent spontaneity carefully rehearsed, every speech crafted down to the last letter by the "word writers" on the Trump team and now possibly (accounts differ) with a little help from Nigel Farage.

It was, however, a risky strategy to be quite so open about the origin of this headline personal tribute to her husband and the logic was murky at best ("woman cleared from charge of plagiarism on grounds she never wrote the speech in the first place?"). The slightly confused public reactions served to remind us of the unresolved questions and complicated distinctions that still befuddle our ideas about the ownership of oratory. We may prefer not to face up to the "borrowed eloquence" of most modern political rhetoric, but we are even less ready to think hard about exactly when borrowing becomes stealing, and what the fundamental difference is between plagiarism and acting, and who is guilty of what.

When it comes to Trump and others, it is much easier to fall back on the relatively straightforward accusations of demagoguery, as many liberal commentators repeatedly do: "Trump's demagoguery has undermined the fabric of our national character" as one erstwhile Republican donor put it; "policy-free demagoguery", as Trump's platform has elsewhere been dubbed. There is at first sight good classical authority here, and a plausible analogy with those Athenian orators who disastrously challenged the wise policies and considered rhetoric of Pericles. But it is actually more complicated and less comforting than that.

The traditional story always used to be roughly as I told it: the demagogues the "new politicians" of fifth-century Athens, as they have also been called were a thoroughly bad lot, bringing defeat on their city by their shabby speechifying. But more recently, sparked in part by Moses Finley's famous study of Athenian demagogues, which started life as a BBC radio talk in 1961, historians have been querying the distinction between the "good" and the "bad" Athenian orators. What, they have asked, was the difference between Pericles and his unworthy demagogue successors? "Not much", is the answer. The new breed of politicians in Athens may have had less aristocratic sources of wealth than their supposedly upstanding predecessors (their hostile nicknames of "sausage seller" and "tanner" may point to that). But, scratch the surface of the complaints about them, and there is little sign that their oratorical style was significantly different from that of Pericles, who was himself well capable of winding up the demos or bribing them with perks from the state treasury. The bottom line is that "demagogue" was not a term of analysis; it was an accusation you hurled at someone who spoke powerfully, but whose policies you did not like (and we would probably find that it was hurled at Pericles himself, if only the writings of his opponents had survived).

And so it is now: an insult that is a substitute for argument, obfuscating political differences under a glow of moral superiority. Rather than throwing the demagogue card at the likes of Donald Trump, those who disagree should concentrate on saying powerfully why they are wrong. For, convenient as it might be to pretend, those we dub "demagogues" are not usually "policy-free" (if they were, they would be much less worrying). And we should perhaps devote more thought to the tougher questions that concerned Cicero and the old men at Nero's accession: not just how we are to deal with "borrowed eloquence", but more generally what we can and should expect from public, political speech.