A Rhetorician’s View

A quick editorial note:

I am planning on moving away from Substack for a number of reasons: Their unabashed support of anti-trans, pro-Nazi, pro-fascist discourse is one, another is their questionable use of writer and reader data, and a third is the high fees they charge writers when you choose to subscribe.

The newsletter will move to its new home on News of the Day, a small, public-interest company that publishes a newsletter with low overhead and no Substack issues like listed above. They are a much more amenable site politically and much cheaper for you if you choose to subscribe. Here is the link. If you sign up you get a $3 dollar credit you can use to subscribe to any newsletter on the site. I will cross-post here until the subscriptions on the site expire, then I will shut this down.

I finally got around to watching Joe Biden’s State of the Union for 2024. My comments are divided. At first, I made a number of observations about the rhetorical function of the State of the Union, then slowly moved into more specifics about President Biden’s performance. I feel that the older I get and the more of these speeches I watch, the more I believe it’s vital to consider what role we want for these speeches in American life.

The first consideration is how this speech impacts our view of discourses in general. Conflating opposition with the normal political is “debate for debate’s sake,” one of the worst positions one could have on defending debate.

It has much better ends than that, but such ends are not upheld well when we believe our biggest national rhetorical moments are moments of “national debate.” I think there were a lot of things in the State of the Union (SOTU) that Biden delivered that encouraged this viewpoint of opposition. The rhetoric and style of his address is good for him, good for his support in his base, but perhaps bad for national understanding and appreciation of the power and necessity of debate. It also raises the question of what the function of the SOTU is and should be.

Watching the SOTU this year and knowing the Swedish Prime Minister was there, I couldn’t help but think how weird this speech must have been from his point of view. Something like this in the Swedish Parliament would most likely be confusing – beyond just crossing the line, most of the members of Parliament wouldn’t even think of such a speech being delivered. It’s simply not the “politics” of the chamber. Outside of that space, campaign discourse is different and more familiar to Americans interested in politics. As we all know (or at least regular readers of me know), rhetoric is always aimed for and evaluated by the audience.

This means the State of the Union, as Biden and his staff put it together, met the appropriate requirements for audience expectation while also addressing the “universal audience” (Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric), trying their best not to appeal to the specific audience but instead meet the standard of situational encounter: If someone from that place and time (2024 America) encountered these arguments and reasons, they would find them difficult to deny. What this means for me is that the discourse triggers the traditional Burden of Rejoinder as opposed to the laugh, the discount, or the “what the hell is he talking about?” The universal audience is a very important but very simple bar to reach.

Here’s where the intervention can come in: What do Americans want, what should they want from the State of the Union? Do they want a political showdown, a stump speech, a call to arms for a political campaign? Or do they want something basic, something more along the lines of the bare-bones Constitutional requirement?

Here’s the U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 3:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient

Without any consideration for the time and place and history of where we are now, what this seems to me as a rhetorician (someone who teaches people how to speak and argue well with their voice, at least, that’s what I think the field is about) is that the speaker would be well advised to split the address into an analysis, based on the best information from the secretaries, the GAO, and other intelligence and information services what the conditions are – a lay of the land of the U.S. and where we are this year as compared to other years. The second half of the speech then would be the President’s view of what priorities and issues should be that will be taken up.

Over time this has become altered, and we can’t avoid it: Now it’s a description of the country and the State of the Union and how my administration made it so great. If there are issues, it’s because of the parties’ opposites and their mistaken actions in the past. The ideas for the future are reduced to Vote for me or my party to ensure that we won’t go down that road again.

Some of this seems to be informative in the way that we might (incorrectly) teach it in our Public Speaking courses at the university or at the high school level. But Biden (as well as the last few Presidents giving these) make them showpieces of two-party politics rather than something that could be a bit better for the people instead of the people-as-split-into-two-parties.

The audience is not the Congress, the Justices, and the guests; it’s quite clearly the American people around the world. It’s also the people around the world who are interested in US policy and US vision/direction for the future. Any statement by the President about the “state” of the union, what conditions exist now, and what narrative of conditions exist. That viewpoint cannot be anything other than an argument aimed at an audience, for a purpose – that purpose being to be the reason (Data) to support the policy to come, the actions (Claim) that the President believes to be the expedient and necessary steps that the Government should pursue. The speech will serve as a number of moments of reason (Warrant) that will hopefully pop out to the audience.

The best example of this is when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted Biden to shout out the name of Laken Riely – Biden responded by holding up a pin and expressing sympathy as someone who lost children himself. This places him in a position of understanding. Then he tried to articulate an argument that was along the lines of the problem not being immigration but the current border policy. He tried to explain that it’s not that tempting to pay a human trafficker $8,000 if your asylum hearing will only be a six-week affair. Something snappier here would have been a better expression of warrant since warrants are ironically best expressed when they are not exposed but apprehended: Laken Riely was killed by an illegal, someone who was here because traffickers operate in and around our poor border laws. Cut the time for a hearing, you cut the traffickers and you cut the opportunity for illegals to enter our country. Desperate people will support desperate measures; cut the desperation by reducing the hearing time to six weeks. This is how we support Americans and those who want to become Americans.

My wording here is just a rough suggestion, but the point is that more explanation in a SOTU is not necessarily a good thing – less might be better as listeners fill in the gaps as warrants do the work for us. The strategy here can be really good – those warrants, when apprehended and added by the listener – can help constitute the audience as American instead of supporters of one party or another. The SOTU can be used to discover these – an interesting project would be to pursue what Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca suggest, which is to analyze within the context and place and time of the argument what the universal audience of that time period must have been – then you can collect temporally relevant moments of audience construction and see how the appeal to “Americans” has changed a bit over time. This could be a very important part of the SOTU for those who are interested in the question: what do Americans want or need?

Biden gave too much information sometimes. He’s at his best when sparring with the audience instead of the more poetic metaphors he had in the speech. I would suggest that a comparison of less specific financial data and more “plain speech” would be better. Phrases like “when the knife was held to the neck of democracy” (referring to January 6th) don’t hit as well as phrases like the “American comeback story.” I think that it should be altered to serve Biden’s perspective rather than some high-level view of how to talk about America.

The trouble with speechwriters is that they can’t help themselves. These are the words of the President, so they should be Presidential words. The people who study this stuff in terms of working in speechwriting want to connect (or be the creator of) a great turn of phrase for the history books. What they don’t realize is that the phrases that stick and hang out in our minds long after a presidential address are composed not for posterity but from the figure of the president as he is and the time and place of the address. The best lasting rhetoric is that aimed at the audience, which can only be the audience as they are. An ethical speaker can invoke the universal audience to show that specific audience how good they could be, how the best reasoning is, and how the best narrative could be told. Through this, the SOTU could become more than another campaign stump speech. It could be instead a moment of the constitution of American identity, not in a whiggish way but a universal audience way, one where listeners could see a model of rhetoric that encourages them not just what facts to believe about the country but what to believe about the identity of being American. This might be the best way to answer the question of what Americans want and need.

The peroration was traditional: “I see a future” – not much to remark on here other than the traditional recognition of the close of a formal speech. Moving through a number of visions to the central thing that is composed of those moments but is higher than them is something that’s difficult for any speechwriter to avoid.

The exordium was great. Referencing FDR coming to Congress to address them at an unprecedented time was a great start but wasn’t well supported through repetition and return. Like the peroration, the exordium needs a building moment of what factors exist that call this comparison to mind. From there, the comparison can be a frame for how we, as Americans, should see ourselves – like the Americans that FDR addressed during the Depression and the start of World War 2.

If you have other thoughts about the SOTU, please leave a comment. I am happy to discuss this or other SOTUs throughout history.