ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Thompson has been the President and CEO of The New York Times Company since 2012. Previously, he was Director-General of the BBC from 2004 to 2012, and CEO of Channel 4 Television Corporation from 2002 to 2004. In 2012 he was a visiting professor of rhetoric and the art of public persuasion at the University of Oxford. Enough Said was longlisted for the Orwell Prize 2017.

ABOUT THE BOOK

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2017

How do we discuss serious ideas in the age of 24-hour news? What was rhetoric in the past and what should it be now? And what does Islamic State have in common with Donald Trump?

We’ve never had more information or more opportunity to debate the issues of the day. Yet the relationship between politicians, the media and the public is characterised by suspicion, mistrust and apathy. What has gone wrong?

Enough Said reveals how political, social and technological change has transformed our political landscape – and how we talk about the issues that affect us all. Political rhetoric has become stale and the mistrust of politicians has made voters flock to populists who promise authenticity, honesty and truth instead of spin, evasiveness and lies.

Featuring Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin, Tony Blair and George Osborne, Silvio Berlusconi and many more star performers, Enough Said shows how public language is losing its power, and how an ominous gap is opening between the governed and those who govern. The result of decades of first-hand experience of politics and media, this is an essential, brilliant diagnosis of what we should stop doing and what we should start doing in order to reinvigorate Western democracy.

Afterthoughts and Acknowledgements

When the wealthy Boston merchant Nicholas Boylston died in 1771, he left Harvard University £1,500 to establish a new chair in rhetoric and oratory. The university accepted the money, but then inertia set in. Eventually, after three decades had passed without any visible action on the part of the university, Boylston’s nephew Ward Nicholas Boylston filed a suit to recover the bequest. He only abandoned it after Harvard agreed to fill the chair at once – and consented to appoint his cousin John Quincy Adams, a US senator and future president, as the first professor.

Asking a non-academic with practical experience of public language and politics to lecture on the subject of rhetoric was an intriguing idea. But the potential downside must also have been obvious. When Adams eventually stood up in Harvard Hall in 1806 to deliver his inaugural oration, he began with a kind of apology:

Well, I know how he felt. In early 2012 Mark Damazer, the former Controller of BBC Radio 4, the present Master of St Peter’s College Oxford and one of my closest friends, rang me to ask if I would consider becoming a visiting professor of rhetoric and ‘the art of public persuasion’ at that university. Certainly not, I thought at once.

Nonetheless that November, having convinced myself and the organisers that I might have something to say on the subject, I gave three lectures at St Peter’s, followed by a public discussion which was moderated by Andrew Marr and included the government minister David Willetts, and the journalists Polly Toynbee and Will Hutton as well as myself. This book has grown out of the talks and some of the ideas which were raised and discussed by the panel and audience.

The publisher George Weidenfeld came up with the idea of the Oxford visiting chair as part of his Humanitas programme of visiting professorships, and this book wouldn’t exist without him. George, who once had a desk at the BBC a few yards from that other ‘George’, Eric Blair or George Orwell, was at home in most of the political and cultural worlds I reflect on in this book and glided amusedly between them. He knew many of its leading characters personally. At the time of the lectures, I was about to move from my job as director-general of the BBC to become chief executive of The New York Times. Before the first lecture, George sat me down on a sofa in the Master’s lodgings at St Peter’s and gave me the first instalment of what he called his ‘Proustian’ guide to New York. I last spoke to him at dinner on the Upper East Side three years later, a little reduced inside the pin-stripes, but still presiding puckishly. He died a few months later in early 2016 at the age of 92.

The lectures were dedicated to Philip Gould, a brilliant and kindly man who appears several times in this book as one of Tony Blair’s political advisers. I know, because I discussed it with him, how passionately Philip cared about the relationship between the politicians and the media, and about the future of the BBC in particular. I hope he would have agreed with at least some of what I have had to say. I am sorry he is not here to tell me how wrong I am about the rest. The lectures were sponsored by Philip’s last employer, Freud Communications. I am also grateful to Matthew Freud, another old friend, for his support of them.

But let me return to John Quincy Adams and the inconvenient but unavoidable facts about my own inadequacy as a guide to public language. Although I too have witnessed ‘the practice of this art in various forms’, and read a little about its ‘theory’, I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert in rhetoric. I’m familiar with a decent amount of classical literature, but that hardly makes me a classicist. This book doesn’t claim to be a work of philosophy but it does deal with the history of ideas, so I should probably confess that I am not a philosopher either, and have no training in any of the many other disciplines which the book touches on – modern history, political science, social psychology, linguistics, marketing and so on – though I have bumped into most of them, one way or another, over my career.

So I must apologise to professionals in all these disciplines for crash-landing on their fields. I hope that the critical faculties and pockets of knowledge and experience that I can bring to bear have compensated to some degree for these deficiencies and that, while my congenital intellectual overconfidence may have frequently led me astray, it may also have allowed me to bushwhack my way to a handful of insights which might be hard to make out from any one of these established academic paths.

This is the age of data, and of the quantitative analysis of language; yet, while not quite data-free, my book is firmly rooted in the qualitative – in examples, personal experiences, criticism and opinions. In this, as in other respects, it falls well short of contemporary scholarly norms. I have spent the past twenty-five years of my life trying to understand the tidal wave of digital innovation that has transformed our world. But I was brought up in the humanities.

My school, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, was originally founded by the Society of Jesus in the late sixteenth century in Northern France. The Ratio Studiorum, the early modern Jesuit system of education – itself based on the medieval Trivium which had introduced the student to the liberal arts by teaching grammar, logic and rhetoric – still influenced teaching at the school. Even in the 1970s, each year group was named after a given stage in the learning of Latin, ‘Lower Grammar’, ‘Upper Syntax’ and so on. The final year, which I entered in the autumn of 1975 to prepare for the Oxford entrance exam, was called ‘Rhetoric’.

In truth, rhetoric wasn’t much taught at Stonyhurst. It had gone into decline almost everywhere in the nineteenth century. In due course, that Boylston professorship at Harvard became a chair in literature rather than rhetoric, and today is always occupied by a leading poet. By the 1970s, and despite a modest mid-twentieth-century revival, rhetoric was a fairly obscure branch of the humanities and scarcely the stuff of sixth-form studies. But studying Latin and Greek made it unavoidable. Indeed, when I finally opened the Oxford exam paper I was confronted by a passage of English rhetoric – I think it was a gobbit of wartime Churchill – which the candidate was invited to turn into Greek in the style of his or her favourite Athenian orator.

Even back then, most educationalists would have dismissed this not just as elitist – how many candidates from state schools could compete with this kind of demented hot-housing? – but worthless from any conceivable perspective, economic, social or cultural. Many readers of this book may well agree with them. All I can say is that by this point, the Ratio had rolled up its sleeves and got down to serious business inside my 18-year-old head, and the interwovenness with which all the arts were taught – classical and modern languages, literature, history, philosophy, theology – meant that I began to feel a connectedness between all of them, and between the deep past and the present. This tendency was further encouraged by the two men who most influenced my education, Peter Hardwick at Stonyhurst, and John Jones at Merton College Oxford. Both taught me English literature, but much else besides.

Despite all of the digital talk then, I discover that I have written an old-fashioned essay. Many people have helped me in the course of its development. Professor Abigail Williams, who teaches English at Oxford, was the academic advisor on the lectures and was encouraging and inspirational throughout. Her Classics colleague, Professor Matthew Leigh, also added many insights and suggestions as well as casting an eye over my tendentious and rusty renderings of the Latin and Greek. Both Abigail and Matthew have kindly offered advice on this book as well. In addition I received helpful guidance on the lectures from Ben Page of Ipsos-MORI and Deborah Mattinson, who has played such an important part over the years in the Labour Party’s strategy for reaching out to and convincing the public. Sebastian Baird supported me during the development of the lectures with research and fact-checking.

I have also received a great deal of help in expanding the ideas in the lectures into a book. Michael Sandel, the political philosopher and Harvard professor, suggested reading to me during the course of my research. Patrick Barwise, a thoughtful and indefatigable defender of public service broadcasting, who is Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing at the London Business School, gave me valuable advice for the chapter on the role of marketing in the development of modern public language. Former Senator Bob Kerrey gave me several ideas in a series of conversations about rhetoric. Dr Frank Luntz, who features in the book and is a kind of P. T. Barnum when it comes to public language, has also talked to me about his take on the subject. Svetlana Boym, a playwright and novelist who was, until her death in 2015, Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard, helped me understand a little about the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin. My sister-in-law, Dr Rossella Bondi, added some fascinating suggestions about modern Italian political language. Rhys Jones helped with some research and fact-checking.

I also received advice and support from many past and present colleagues. At the BBC, David Jordan and Jessica Cecil provided ideas and comments on the lectures and read early versions of the book. They were part of the team who routinely helped me think through difficult editorial questions and controversies at the BBC. I can’t mention everyone who influenced my development as an editor and the approach to journalism, free speech and impartiality which is set out in this book, but I am also particularly grateful for the good judgement and fast reactions of Mark Byford, Alan Yentob, Caroline Thomson, Ed Williams and Helen Boaden, as well as wise counsel from successive BBC chairmen, governors and trustees.

I’ve also received plenty of support for the project at The New York Times, including from Diane Brayton, Eileen Murphy, Joy Goldberg, Meredith Kopit Levien and Dorothea Herrey. Both Diane and Licia Hahn read the whole manuscript and provided ideas and comments. Amanda Churchill and the team in the DG’s office at Broadcasting House helped greatly with the logistics of the 2012 lectures. My executive assistant at The New York Times, Mary Ellen LaManna, has supported me and my book with astonishing 24/7 dedication. I also want to thank my literary agent, Caroline Michel; Stuart Williams, Jörg Hensgen and their colleagues at the Bodley Head in London; and George Witte, Sarah Thwaite and all of their colleagues at St Martin’s Press in New York.

I presented some of the material which now forms the postscript of this book as the John Donne Lecture at Oxford University on 17 May 2017. I want to thank my friend Will Hutton, the Principal of Hertford College, and all of his colleagues for inviting me to give the lecture. I should also thank not one, but two distinguished literature professors, Emma Smith of Oxford and James Shapiro of Columbia, for gently encouraging me to avoid an over-simplified treatment of the end of The Tempest. It is the inevitable fate of anyone who criticises the state of language that they should themselves commit every crime of which they complain. In the Donne lecture and early drafts of the postscript, I was guilty of the old journalist’s crime of bending Shakespeare’s story to my own thematic needs. I have tried to make amends in the final version.

Given that I am now in the confessional, I should also own up to a hideous mistake in the first edition of this book, namely my description of Sir Keith Joseph as ‘Svengali-like’. I had simply forgotten the anti-semitic origin and meaning of Svengali – my mistake being all the more ridiculous given that on the same page I pointed to the veiled anti-semitism directed at Sir Keith himself. I am grateful to Dominic Lawson for putting me right in a review in The Times of London.

I would also like to thank Alex Russell and all of his colleagues at Vintage for their work on this paperback edition of the book.

I want to thank everyone on this long list for their great generosity, and to absolve them from any responsibility for any error or offence which the book may contain. The case of Mark Damazer is different. It was he who got me into this business in the first place, and it seems only fair that he should take his fair share of the blame for it. But in the unlikely event of there being any credit, he should take most of that as well. He has been an unfailing enthusiast, stern critic, gracious host, sympathetic therapist and devoted friend throughout.

Lastly, my family. In Jonathan Dorfman, I am lucky enough to have a brother-in-law of astonishingly wide reading in politics, literature and culture. Many of Jonathan’s suggested quotations and astute observations have made it into the book. And I have received colossal intellectual and moral support from my wife, Jane Blumberg, who is not just my academic senior but the best literary critic I know, and from my three strong-minded children, Caleb, Emilie and Abe. Thanks to these four above all, for their backing and for their ideas.

*

There is a vast literature, ancient and modern, taken up with the themes of this book and I have no doubt only scratched the surface of it. But even a list of the works I have consulted would run for pages. Rather than a bibliography, let me mention some of the books I have found most useful – and which a reader who wants to pursue the subject further might enjoy. To this list, the reader should add the works cited in the notes.

The ancients are easy to find. You can enjoy them all for nothing on Perseus, Tufts University’s excellent classics site (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/). I’ve tended to use the Loeb and Penguin Classics editions, mainly for old times’ sake. If you are not familiar with them and can only face one ancient work, read Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War isn’t a book about rhetoric as such, but about the collision of politics, public language, deep national culture and transient public mood. Somehow it manages to be a compelling commentary, not just about the war between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies two and a half millennia ago, but about every western war that has taken place since then. The Landmark Thucydides (edited by Robert B. Strassler, Simon and Schuster, 1988) is a good edition because of its many helpful maps.

You Talkin’ To Me? by Sam Leith (Profile Books, 2011) is an excellent general introduction to rhetoric ancient, modern and contemporary. I also enjoyed Brian Vickers’s more academic but still eminently readable In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford University Press, 1998). Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment by Bryan Garsten (Harvard University Press, 2006) is a masterly and original analysis of the main lines of argument for and against rhetoric and perhaps the most persuasive defence of persuasion that I read. I also found Adam Adatto Sandel’s The Place of Prejudice (Harvard University Press, 2014) interesting and valuable. Kenneth Burke was one of the mid-twentieth-century’s most influential writers on rhetoric. I read A Rhetoric of Motives (Prentice-Hall, 1950) and sections of other works but – though this is no doubt more of a reflection on me than on Burke – rather struggled with his approach. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader (The Guilford Press, 1999) was one of several collections of essays I examined to get a sense of academic thinking about rhetoric at century’s end. Though it is only indirectly a book about rhetoric, I found Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (edited by Barbara Cassin, Princeton University Press, 2014; originally published as Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, Éditions de Seuil, 2004) alarmingly moreish.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s Eloquence in an Electronic Age (Oxford University Press, 1988) is an important and engaging study of how mass media influenced political speechmaking. I also benefitted from Stephen Fox’s classic The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising & Its Creators (Morrow, 1984 – though I read the 1997 Illini Books edition).

On George Orwell, in addition to the great man himself, I looked at Christopher Hitchens (especially Orwell’s Victory, Allen Lane, 2002), and Orwell and the Politics of Despair by Alok Rai (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Riverhead, 2012) is a white-knuckle introduction to the man and the system he has created.

There is a groaning bookshelf of tomes analysing the various ills which afflict our politics, media and public language, and new works arrive by the week. I’ve only read a tiny fraction of them and, in any event, have relied more on transient digital sources for evidence and contemporary commentary. But, in addition to the several titles mentioned in the body of this book, I read Blur by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (Bloomsbury USA, 2010) and unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Random House, 2007), both of which deal with information overload, facts and spin. Unspeak by Steven Poole (Little, Brown, 2006) is an angry, compelling complaint about the way politicians and others twist apparently straightforward words – nature, community, abuse and so on – to mean whatever they want them to mean and, as a result, deliver highly partisan messages through seemingly neutral language.

I quote John Lloyd’s What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics (Constable, 2004) in this book. In fact, I have found his muscular take on the media during his years at the Financial Times unfailingly interesting – and often convincing. I could say the same for David Carr, who was a media columnist at The New York Times when I arrived in 2012 and who became an informal mentor to me, as he did to many others, somehow combining the need for strict journalistic impartiality with a passionate enthusiasm for what the Times could be at its best. David died suddenly at the Times in 2015. Writing on media by Lloyd and Carr, as well as by Emily Bell, Margaret Sullivan, Jim Rutenberg, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Hewlett, is well worth seeking out on the Web.

‘Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,’ John Keats claims at the start of ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. I’ve returned from my own journeys in the realms of the Internet to confirm what you already know: it is not all 24-carat. Yet, more than anywhere else, it is where our public discourse is happening, and where it must be studied. The reader must and will find their own way. But let me finish with a word of praise for Wikipedia, that inevitably imperfect but – especially for a project like this – invaluable resource, a neural network for the world and the start of so many cultural and intellectual departures. This is people power (demokratia) at work in aid not just of opinion but of true understanding, another modest cause for hope in a troubled time.

penguin.co.uk/vintage

1 Lost for Words

Public language matters. Words are free, and every politician and journalist and citizen can draw on an unlimited supply of them. But there are days when the right words are all that counts, and the speaker who can find them determines what happens next. Over time, leaders and commentators and activists with empathy and eloquence can use words not just to exploit the public mood, but to shape it. And the result? Peace, prosperity, progress, inequality, prejudice, persecution, war. Public language matters.

This is hardly a new discovery. It’s why public language and public speaking have been studied and taught and fought over for thousands of years. But never before has public language been as widely and readily distributed as it is today. Words hurtle through virtual space with infinitesimal delay. A politician can plant an idea in 10 million other minds before she leaves the podium. An image with an author and a deliberately composed meaning – a plane hitting a skyscraper, say – can reach the eyes of viewers around the world with an instantaneity no longer constrained by distance or mechanical limit. Once, and not long ago in human history, we would have heard a rumour, or read a report of it, days or even weeks later. Today we are all witnesses, all members of a crowd that is watching and listening in real time.

Now. It’s happening now. He’s saying that now. You’re posting this now. I’m replying now. Listen to me. Look at me. Now.

We think of ours as the age of digital information, and so it is. But we sometimes forget how much of that information is conveyed in human language which is doing what it has always done in human societies: alerting, frightening, explaining, deceiving, infuriating, inspiring, above all persuading.

So this is also the age of public language. More than that, we are living through an unparalleled, still unfolding and uncertain transformation of public language. Yet when we consider and debate the state of modern politics and media – how policies and values get discussed and decisions are made – we tend to think of it only in passing, as if it is of interest only insofar as it can help us understand something else, something more foundational. It is the argument of this book that public language – the language we use when we discuss politics and policy, or make our case in court, or try to persuade anyone of anything else in a public context – is itself worthy of close attention. Rhetoric, the study of the theory and practice of public language, was once considered the queen of the humanities. Now she lives out her days in genteel obscurity. I’m going to make the case for putting her back on the throne.

We enjoy one advantage over earlier generations of students of rhetoric. The searchability and indelibility of modern media mean that it has never been easier to trace the evolution of the specific words and statements of which a particular oratory is constituted. Like epidemiologists on the trail of a new virus, we can reverse time and track an influential piece of public language from its pandemic phase, when it was on every lip and every screen, back through its late and then its early development, until we arrive at last at the singularity: the precise time and place it first entered the world.

*

On 16 July 2009, Dr Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York, appeared on Fred Thompson’s radio show to give her two cents on the hottest political topic of that summer: President Barack Obama’s controversial plans to reform America’s healthcare system and extend coverage to tens of millions of previously uninsured citizens.

Fred Thompson, who died in the autumn of 2015, was a colourful conservative whose furrowed and jowly gravitas had taken him from a successful law career to the US Senate, not to mention several successful stints as a Hollywood character actor. After the Senate, he embraced talk radio, and in 2009 his show was one of countless conservative outlets on which Obamacare was being dissected and condemned.

There wasn’t a better person than Betsy McCaughey to do just that. A historian with a PhD from Columbia University (thus entitling her to that medical-sounding ‘Dr’), McCaughey had risen through sheer brain power from humble origins in Pittsburgh to become a significant public figure on the American right. And she was considered a specialist in healthcare policy. She had been a forensic as well as ferocious critic of Clintoncare, the Democrats’ failed attempt to reform the system in the 1990s. Obamacare, of course, was a rather different proposition – indeed, some of its founding principles had either been developed by Republicans, or even implemented by them. The policy bore a particularly inconvenient resemblance to Mitt Romney’s health reforms while he was governor of Massachusetts. At the time of McCaughey’s radio interview, Romney was already being touted as a possible candidate to take on Barack Obama in 2012.

But Betsy McCaughey was too forthright and ideologically committed to be discomforted by the intellectual genealogy of Obamacare. Nor was she likely to face a particularly testing cross-examination from her lawyer-turned-radio-host. American politics was polarising even before Barack Obama arrived in the White House, and the media discussion of that politics had polarised along with it. The paradoxical result was that, the more bitter the divisions became, the more likely it was that everyone in any given studio or political website would agree with one another. The people with whom they all disagreed were absent – indeed were probably all gathered in a different studio, making the opposite case in an equally cosy ideological cocoon where they faced the same low risk of contradiction.

On the face of it, then, nothing about this encounter – the political circumstance, the characters, the likely flavour and flow of the argument – was out of the ordinary. But on 16 July, Betsy McCaughey had something new to say. Deep within one of the drafts of the Obamacare legislation which was then making its way through Congress, she had stumbled on an unnoticed but alarming proposal:

There are two things to note about this claim. The first is simply that it’s untrue. The part of the bill which McCaughey was referring to – Section 1233 – did not in fact call for compulsory ‘end of life’ counselling sessions. Such sessions would have remained at the patient’s discretion. The intent of the draft section was to make these voluntary sessions eligible for coverage under Medicare, the federal programme which pays the medical costs of many older Americans.

But the fact that it was untrue – and indeed was promptly and definitively refuted by defenders of the bill – did nothing to stop it from rapidly gaining currency. This is the second, and more intriguing, point to note. Provision of end-of-life counselling had previously enjoyed tentative bipartisan support, but in the days following McCaughey’s appearance, many of America’s most influential conservative commentators and a number of prominent Republican politicians, including the then House minority leader, John Boehner, took up her charges. And the claim began to be rounded out. The conservative radio host Laura Ingraham cited her 83-year-old father, proclaiming: ‘I do not want any government bureaucrat telling him what kind of treatment he should consider to be a good citizen. That’s frightening.’³ While a few commentators associated with the right ridiculed the ‘myth’ or ‘hoax’ of Section 1233 – on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough joked about the ‘Grim Reaper’ clause⁴ – most of the discussion on the conservative side of the political divide was predicated on the assumption that McCaughey’s claim about the bill was not a myth, but a straightforward statement of fact.

Then, on 7 August, Sarah Palin entered the fray with a posting on Facebook which included the following passage:

What followed is well known. Within a few days the freshly baked term ‘death panel’ was everywhere – on radio, TV, the newspapers, the Web, Twitter – spread not just by its author and her supporters but, unintentionally yet also unavoidably, by those who were frantically trying to debunk it. By the middle of August, an opinion poll by Pew suggested that no fewer than 86% of Americans had heard the term. Of those, 30% believed it was a real proposal – the proportion among Republicans was 47% – while another 20% said they weren’t sure whether it was true or false.⁶

Despite all denials, a belief that Obamacare meant compulsory death panels remained stubbornly widespread, and a few months later the Democrats dropped the underlying proposal. When in 2012 the Obama administration again raised the possibility of covering end-of-life counselling under Medicare, the tag line threatened to take flight once more and the proposal was quickly dropped. In the summer of 2015, after extensive further research and consultation, Medicare announced that it did indeed intend to pay for end-of-life counselling. Predictably, Betsy McCaughey immediately took to the New York Post to announce: ‘Death panels are back.’⁷

A phrase which exaggerated and distorted a claim that was itself false, and which in any event had virtually nothing to do with the central thrust of Obamacare, had changed the course of politics. In fact, it is probably the only thing that many Americans can recall about the whole healthcare debate. As the veteran conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan remarked about Sarah Palin: ‘The lady knows how to frame an issue.’⁸

*

Let’s set aside whatever views we may have about the protagonists in this political drama, or indeed about healthcare and politics as a whole, and consider the phrase ‘death panel’ purely as a piece of rhetoric. What makes it tick? Why was it so successful in shaping the debate? And what, if anything, does it tell us about what is happening to our public language?

Part of its strength is obviously its compression. A powerful political point that can be expressed in two words is perfect for the world of Twitter – and not just Twitter. Say that at some point in the summer of 2009, you’d been walking through an American airport past a TV monitor. The words ‘death panel’ fit neatly onto the straps which all the cable news networks put across the bottom of the screen. You don’t even know whether the person on the screen is arguing in favour or against Obamacare. What you see – and what you remember – is the two words.

We can break the compression down further. The phrase has the effect of a synecdoche, that type of metonym in which the part stands for the whole. We know when we hear them that the words ‘death panel’ don’t just stand for Section 1233, they stand for the whole of Obamacare. Actually, they stand for everything to do with Barack Obama, his administration, his vision for America.

And the words are proleptic: they take an imagined future scenario and present it as current reality. Whereas Betsy McCaughey simply misrepresents the draft bill, Sarah Palin offers a political prediction which goes like this: the legislation the Democrats are proposing will give the federal government control over your and your family’s health – control over life and death – and sooner or later they’ll create a bureaucracy to decide who gets what. On the face of it, then, this is a slippery-slope argument – let them pass this law, and in the end the government will decide who lives and who dies. But of course it isn’t a complete argument at all. It’s a piece of rhetorical panache which leaps straight away to the dystopic end-state and brings it to life with vivid imagery. The power of the prolepsis is such that you may not even notice that the intermediate steps in the argument are missing.

The impact of the phrase is accentuated in the original posting by two inspired pieces of passing-off. Sarah Palin puts the phrase ‘death panel’ in quotation marks as if she’s quoting from the draft bill; she also puts quotation marks around ‘level of productivity in society’, as if that too was Barack Obama’s term rather than her own concocted phrase. This evocation of a dehumanised socialist/bureaucratic state seems to have been prompted by fellow conservative Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s lopsided interpretation of the views of the bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the most fervent advocates of universal health care. It is of a piece, though, with attacks on US government attempts to reform health care stretching back over half a century and more; in the mid-1940s, the American Medical Association described President Truman’s plans for national health insurance as Soviet-style ‘socialised medicine’. But the words ‘death panel’ trigger even darker allusions: twentieth-century eugenics and euthanasia programmes, and the selections in the death camps, with Barack Obama and Medicare officials taking the place of Nazi doctors.

If we listen really carefully, though, we can hear something else. The mention of Trig, her Down’s syndrome child, signals how far Palin has generalised and radicalised an argument that began with what now seems the relatively modest claim that the elderly were going to be badgered into refusing further treatment. Now it’s about murdering the young.

And there’s a broader implication. An American voter might reasonably conclude that there are two kinds of public policy question: those that go to the heart of religious, cultural and ethical differences – the debates about abortion and same-sex marriage are obvious examples – and those that are essentially managerial. How can we prevent another shock like Lehman Brothers? How can we best protect the United States from the Zika virus? You might further conclude that the question of healthcare reform fell squarely into the second category.

Not according to Sarah Palin. Her previous public mentions of Trig had been in connection to her opposition to abortion, and for her Obamacare raises similar issues – this is a battle between the forces of good and evil. In referring to her Down’s syndrome child, she’s attempting to pivot the visceral, Manichean quality of the abortion debate into the battle over healthcare reform. When it comes to abortion, the two sides believe there can be no compromise. The same is true of health care, she says. You can’t compromise with people who mean to slaughter your children.

And that’s the final point to make about the phrase ‘death panel’. It’s maximal: in all respects it states its case in the strongest possible terms. What Sarah Palin claims to be uncovering is nothing less than a conspiracy to murder. There is no presumption of good faith on the part of your opponent – this is a fight to the political death, a fight in which every linguistic weapon is fair game. It is a rhetoric which doesn’t seek to dispel distrust of politicians, but to foment it. And it worked.

Perhaps the term ‘death panel’ leaves you cold. Perhaps you find the rhetorical conceit grotesque or comical, and you are amazed that anyone could be taken in by something so crude and exaggerated. But all rhetoric is designed for a particular time and place, and above all for a particular audience – it is a supremely tactical, contextual art – and the phrase probably wasn’t intended for you. Given the context and the people likely to hear it, however, it was devastatingly effective, like a precision-guided munition punching its way through to its target.

And yet in one respect it is an utter failure. It is so tendentious, so abstracted from the real – and difficult – decisions and trade-offs which must be faced in any debate about health care, so purely partisan in intent and meaning, that it makes the real policy choices associated with Obamacare not easier to understand, but harder. Whether wilfully or not, explanatory power has been wholly sacrificed in the interest of rhetorical impact.

There is Great Anger

Across the political spectrum, there is a growing acknowledgement that something has gone awry with our politics and the way in which political questions are debated and decided in America, Britain and other western countries. Democracy is a rough business and disquiet about it is hardly new – read Plato or Thomas Hobbes. But there is substantial evidence to support the current anxiety.

‘There is great anger. Believe me, there is great anger,’ the American celebrity property developer Donald Trump told his followers on 15 March 2016, in a speech following his victory in Republican primaries in four more states. Whatever else you make of Trump, it’s hard to argue with this observation. The Edelman Trust Barometer measures trust in government, business, media and NGOs in twenty-eight countries around the world. Its 2016 survey showed a fractional improvement in trust in government after the lows of the financial crisis, but it also suggested that the gap in the level of trust in political and other institutions expressed by elites (or the ‘informed public’fn1), and that expressed by the population at large, had widened year after year, and indeed was the widest that Edelman has ever seen.⁹ The three countries where the gap has grown the most over the past four years are France, the UK and the US.

In both America and Europe, near-term disillusion with mainstream politicians – caused by their failure to do anything about income inequality or to punish anyone after the financial crash, by rising anxiety about globalisation and immigration, and by the bitter residue of the war in Iraq – have exacerbated and accelerated adverse trends in our political systems which were already causing concern. In the US and other western countries, politics has become vituperative, the gap between left and right has widened not just among politicians but among the public, and the number of policy areas on which the mainstream parties are willing or capable of reaching an accommodation with their opponents has shrunk, in case of the United States close to zero. As a result, decision-making in many national and supranational political institutions has become sclerotic.

The low level of trust in established politicians has led many citizens to turn away from them in search of alternatives. These include old-fashioned left-wing radicals, like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US; anti-immigration and extreme right parties like the French Front National, which has polled strongly in recent elections and whose leader, Marine Le Pen, looks like being a serious contender in the 2017 presidential election, and Austria’s FPÖ, or Freedom Party of Austria, whose candidate Norbert Hofer came within an inch of becoming president of that country in May 2016; new populist-radical groupings like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain; parties centred on single issues, like Britain’s UKIP and Scotland’s SNP; and pure anti-politicians, like the Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, or Donald Trump. The success of these non-mainstream parties and individuals has tempted some politicians within the mainstream to ape their style and tactics. In their different ways, Ted Cruz and Boris Johnson are examples of this last phenomenon. As a result, established parties and political institutions are experiencing disruptive forces both from without and within.

But public apathy and lack of engagement with politics is at least as serious an issue as those of fragmentation and the rise of the populists. In many democracies, voter turnout is falling. The young are a particular concern: in the 2014 midterm elections only one in five American 18- to 29-year-olds voted. Both the supply and the consumption of serious news has been falling – and public trust in mainstream media, which is facing its own centrifugal forces as well as an existential economic crisis brought on by digital, is in scarcely better shape than that in mainstream politics.

The obvious question, of course, is why. Or to sharpen the point, recognising that (for reasons we will also explore) conspiracies have come to sound more credible to us than accidents nowadays, who is to blame? The good news is that a large team of detectives is at work on the case, and that they already have a number of suspects. The rather less good news is that the suspects are so numerous, and the detectives’ theories so contradictory and difficult to confirm, that as yet it has proved impossible to charge anyone.

One group of sleuths wants to pin it on the politicians. That sounds straightforward enough, but even here there’s a disagreement. Some want to blame individuals. Tony Blair’s name comes up frequently, as does George Bush’s, though some of the older detectives are still obsessed with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Their continental colleagues mention Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as any number of Central and Eastern European leaders. Each detective makes their case with passion, but we can’t help noticing that they only ever mention politicians whom they personally dislike and with whose politics they obviously disagree; left-leaning detectives only blame politicians of the right, and vice versa. We can’t of course rule out the possibility that all of the ills of democracy in one country stem from the nefarious actions of one individual or party or ideological orientation, but it’s hard not to conclude that these detectives are so emotionally involved in the case that they have lost objectivity.

Other investigators discern shifts in attitude and behaviour which go beyond individual politicians. In their cheerily titled 2012 book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, the distinguished political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein examine a series of recent policy clashes to demonstrate the particular difficulties which the US political system – as compared to a European parliamentary democracy – has in coping with periods of strong ideological antagonism between its main parties. But its thrust is resolutely one-sided. The ‘new politics of extremism’ are entirely the fault of the Republican Party and one of the book’s suggestions of how to put things right is as follows:

Vote Democrat, in other words. But blaming an adverse trend in political culture entirely on one party and then inviting your readers to vote for the other one is scarcely a recipe for reducing political division. Nor does it really address the issue of radicalisation and fragmentation within a party – fragmentation which, in the case of the Republicans, means that there is essentially no one at the controls, and no means of achieving consensus about any future direction for the party, whether towards the centre or away from it.

Perhaps we’ll have better luck with Amy Gutmann’s and Dennis Thompson’s The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It. The book tackles the same problem – ideological difference leading to legislative and governmental stalemate – in a more even-handed way, looking for systemic causes rather than blaming any one party for it. For Gutmann and Thompson, the root cause is that political campaigning has become continuous rather than limited to set periods before elections, and that the behaviours that go with campaigning – in particular the need to distinguish yourself sharply from your political opponents – are inimical to successful government, and in particular to the eponymous ‘spirit of compromise’ on which they claim much practical political progress depends.

This is potentially a more compelling diagnosis, though exactly where it takes us remains unclear. The book ends with some practical suggestions for the reform of America’s political institutions, but the central call is for something altogether more abstract, a new equilibrium between the dutiful and reasonable Dr Jekyll mindset of good governance and the riotous Mr Hyde of the campaign trail:

modus vivendi