Mark Thompson, chief executive of the New York Times, has written a highly padded opinion piece that boils down to one important thing he wants to get across to you rubes: Trump = Hitler. Oh yeah, he includes one very slight caveat so you don't think of him as your usual leftwing loon. The rest of his piece is mostly yawn inducing padding which serves as filler for his basic premise.
So let us get to Thompson's unintentional humor as he stresses that Trump is like Hitler because, get this, they both spoke off the cuff. I kid you not.
“Once you heard the voice of a man, and that voice knocked at your hearts, it wakened you, and you followed that voice.” That was Adolf Hitler, the man whom Heidegger would praise for helping the German people rediscover their authentic essence, addressing government and Nazi party leaders in September 1936. According to Hitler, the miraculous appearance of the “voice” — by which he meant the profound bond between himself and his audience that let him express their deepest feelings — allowed ordinary men and women, who were “wavering, discouraged, fearful,” to unite as a Volk, or national community. It was at once a political and a personal “voice” that, thanks to the invention of radio, could reach out not just to audiences at political rallies, but into any living room.
Authenticism was banished to the fringes of politics after World War II and the defeat of European fascism. Technocratic policy-making delivered relative prosperity and security for the majority, and many voters found the rationalist rhetoric of mainstream politicians credible. Authenticism does not even rate a mention in George Orwell’s landmark 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” But the uncertainty and division that have followed the global crash, mass migration and the West’s unhappy wars in the Middle East have given it a new opportunity.
Today’s authenticists come in many different guises, from pure anti-politicians like Mr. Trump and Italy’s Beppe Grillo to mainstream mavericks as diverse as Britain’s Boris Johnson and Ted Cruz. None of them are Hitlerian in intent, but nationalism typically looms large (“Make America Great Again!”), as does the explicit or implicit contrast between the chosen community and a dangerous or unacceptable “other,” which in 2016 almost always means elites and foreign immigrants.
Wow! What original thinking there, Mark! Trump and Hitler were both "authenticists" (fancy way of saying "speaking off the cuff") so that makes him like Hitler even though you are careful to ameliorate it by saying Trump didn't intend to sound Hitlerian. Gosh! That's big of you.
The rest of Thompson's piece can best be classified as filler bloat surrounding his Trump/Hitler premise:
It may feel like a new phenomenon in contemporary American politics, but the “I just want to tell it like it is” maneuver is a familiar one in the annals of rhetoric. It’s what Mark Antony is up to when he says to the Roman crowd in “Julius Caesar,” “I am no orator, as Brutus is; / But, as you know me all, a plain, blunt man,” in the midst of his “Friends, Romans and countrymen” speech, one of the most cunning displays of technical rhetoric, not only in Shakespeare, but in the English language.
Rhetoric is the language Rome’s elite used to debate; by denying that he knows the first thing about it, Mark Antony is in effect tearing up his gold membership card and reassuring his plebeian audience that, though he may look rich and powerful, he is really one of them.
Nearly four centuries after Shakespeare wrote those words, Silvio Berlusconi successfully struck the same pose in modern Italy. “If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s rhetoric,” he told the Italian public. “All I’m interested in is what needs to get done.”
Um, didn't Shakespeare also write that "brevity is the soul of wit?" Okay, Thompson has found a fun big word, besides "authenticism," to play with and he just won't let go:
But for all its protests, anti-rhetoric is just another form of rhetoric and, whether Mr. Trump is conscious of it or not, it has its own rhetorical markers. Short sentences (“We have to build a wall, folks!”) that pummel the listener in a series of sharp jabs. This is the traditional style of the general (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) or the chief executive, a million miles from the complex and conditional — and thus intrinsically suspect — talk of the lawyer/politician. Students of rhetoric call it parataxis and it’s perfect, not just for the sound bite and the headline, but for the micro-oratorical world of Twitter.
Anti-rhetoric also uses “I” and “you” constantly, because its central goal is not to lay out an argument but to assert a relationship, and a story about “us” and our struggle against “them.” It says the things society has deemed unsayable, at least in part to demonstrate contempt for the rhetorical conventions imposed by the elite — and if that elite then cries out in horror, so much the better.
The quality to which every anti-rhetorician aspires is authenticity. But there is a big difference between proclaiming your authenticity and actually being true to yourself and the facts. So let me use a different term: authenticism, for the philosophical and rhetorical strategy of emphasizing the “authentic” above all.
Finally, Thompson displays his complete lack of reality awareness when he mocks the yahoos for not listening to the "experts."
They also like to contrast their own down-to-earth way of speaking with the complex and, to many ordinary voters, bewildering language of technocracy. As Michael Gove, one of the leading campaigners for Brexit in the recent British referendum, succinctly put it: “People in this country have had enough of experts.”
A majority of British voters did indeed ignore the advice of those “experts” and their dire warnings of what would happen if the country voted to leave. It remains to be seen how many millions of American voters will reach the same verdict on the rhetoric of that technocrat’s technocrat, Hillary Clinton.
Why oh why can't the great unwashed listen to the experts? Well, it could be because their track record, such as on Brexit which Thompson cites, has yet to come true, as revealed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal report:
It’s early, but data so far suggest the British decision to leave the European Union could be another example of a recurring phenomenon: expert predictions of dire consequences to political decisions that end up proving overheated.
...It’s worth revisiting the level of concern prior to the vote. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said a vote for Brexit would cause a “DIY recession.” In the immediate aftermath of the vote, many market economists forecast recession would begin almost immediately.
In the days after the vote, global stock markets indeed fell sharply. Perhaps if it had been just a little bit worse, a broader panic would have sent things into a spiral. Instead, markets have rebounded. The FTSE 100 climbed to near-record levels by the middle of August.
Nor has the wider economy shown many signs of a coming downturn.
Oops! So the experts were wrong with their dire predictions about a Brexit collapse. Could someone please send the news to Mark Thompson? And while sending him this news perhaps you could also send him a link to an online course on writing to teach him to avoid such basic errors as padding his stories with annoyingly repetitive words as well as citing hilariously untrue "facts."
p.s. Trump and Hitler also both teetotalers. Hmmm...
