many miseries of life. We sleep more soundly in our beds if we know that our politics will keep us safe. Liberal democracies rely on fine articulations of the principle of hope, and we must rediscover our confidence in and our patience with the idea that politics will gradually improve the condition of the people. The short cut signalled by the populist is an illusion.
Liberal democracy is a series of failures, each one slightly better than the last. It can be hard to make that sound as dramatic as the populist’s utopian insistence that we can make it to a perfect island in the ocean in a single leap. If the passion appears to be spent, if the extraordinary hopes that were once embodied in democratic politics now seem to be fraying, this is the moment to recall that liberal democracy was born as an insurgent idea. It was the utopia of its day, and the case in its favour, expressed in some of the finest words ever spoken, embodied the hope that tomorrow would exceed today.
We need to make the case again that Cicero inaugurates, for liberty and justice in the republic as a superior state to the rule of the demagogue. We need the uplifting words of Thomas Jefferson to maintain that the beauty of politics is its capacity to restrain men from injuring one another and that this is the only way to protect the rights of minorities. We need the retort to the populist that Abraham Lincoln supplies. There is no pithier expression of a fine idea in the archive of speech than Lincoln’s imperishable formula of government of the people, for the people and by the people. We need to take heed of John F. Kennedy’s warning that good government is done with the people rather than to the people. And we have Barack Obama’s reminder, from not so long ago, that when hope connects to power it is still possible to be hopeful about America, and, by extension, about democracies the world over. Cicero, Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy, Obama – all, in their way, speak on behalf of representing the popular will through democratic institutions. They describe a utopia that is the best possible in the circumstances and they do so in words that yield to none in clarity, lucidity or beauty.
The utopia of the people that is described in democratic rhetoric is not a state of final perfection. It is an endless process rather than a truth out of Pandora’s box. It is, as Richard Rorty writes in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, ‘the hope that life will eventually be freer, less cruel, more leisured, richer in goods and experiences, not just for our descendants but for everyone’s descendants’. The conversation will never end, as the solution to one problem begets another. The purpose of democratic government is forever to adjudicate between rival expressions of reasonable desire. The calls for unity made by Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are far more than political platitudes. They are the deepest wisdom of political thought.
These speeches communicate a spirit too. They are not dry political theories. They are words written to cajole, persuade and inspire, words that articulate the principle of hope which was described by Ernst Bloch in the book of that name as follows: ‘Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness.’ Populism, which trades on – relies upon – fear, is locked into nothingness. Camus’s brilliant observation bears repeating. The democrat is the one who knows he does not know everything. Only the populist utopian thinks he has all the answers. He promises an odyssey to utopia but he is going nowhere.
Being set on the idea
Of getting to Atlantis,
You have discovered of course
Only the Ship of Fools is
Making the voyage this year.
Auden is right. We must not embark on the ship of fools.
2
War: Through Politics Peace Will Prevail
So Little Masonry
In its final version it is one of the imperishable rhetorical classics, made all the more memorable for its echo of Shakespeare’s line from Henry V: ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’. But it has a less distinguished history. In a by-election campaign in Oldham in 1899 the 24-year-old Liberal candidate, who was fighting the first political campaign of his career, had said, in all gravity: ‘Never before were there so many people in England, and never before have they had so much to eat.’ Nine years later the colonial under-secretary gave a speech on a projected irrigation scheme in Africa in which he said: ‘Nowhere else in the world could so enormous a mass of water be held up by so little masonry.’
The name of the writer and speaker of these words in Oldham and in Africa was Winston Churchill, and neither of these were his finest hour. But then, suddenly, in August 1940, in a panegyric to the Battle of Britain fighter pilots who truly had stood between the nation and the barbarians, Churchill declared: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed, by so many, to so few.’ In its ultimate, eternal permutation it has a classic simplicity and an effortless flow that seem inevitable. Even at this distance in time it is still moving to say it out loud. For Churchill, the moment finally ascended to the height of the words and the effect is mesmeric.
Rhetoric cannot work when the phrases are too lavish for their topic. But there is no more important subject for the democratic politician than the coming or the conduct of war. The preservation of order is the first responsibility of the state, and so to launch a nation into war is the gravest thing a leader will ever do. There is no greater burden of office and, correspondingly, in the elevated words of Pericles, David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan we hear some of the finest rhetoric in the canon. When the threat is as grave as war, the words must measure up to the task.
This is where the tradition of rhetoric began – with a eulogy to the lost sons of Athens. In the Funeral Oration, Pericles tried to console the bereaved with the argument that voluntary sacrifice in battle is the highest form of civic duty. We have seen that Lincoln used the same argument at Gettysburg in 1863 in his eulogy to those slain in the American Civil War: ‘from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion’.
We will see too that in a democracy war needs a purpose beyond the cessation of hostility. The speeches in this chapter are also about the purpose to which peace must be turned. Pericles offers a eulogy to democracy as much as to the departed. Lloyd George defines the land fit for heroes. Wilson imagines a global alliance of democratic nations. Churchill offers blood, sweat, toil and tears to see off the tyrant and Reagan stands to speak on the right side of the Berlin Wall which marks off the free world. In all instances, the war is being fought for a noble purpose, not merely to keep the enemy at bay, but to deepen the commitment to a free nation.
The original casus belli – that the nation was in peril – is never enough. The war has to be fought for better politics. The social legislation of the Labour Attlee government between 1945 and 1951 acquired its moral force from the aftermath of war. The conflict itself and its immediately succeeding years should be seen as a single event. The rhetorical work for what comes later begins during the war itself. War has always been, strangely enough, one of the ways in which democracies wield the resources to progress. Rhetoric that defends the idea of the people is the way that democracies heal their internal rifts. Rhetoric that commends the idea of the people against predators is the democratic response to threat. At a moment of peril the speech, the means by which the leader inspires the nation to withstand assault and live to fight another day, is vital. There is no other time when so much rests on so few words.
PERICLES
Funeral Oration
Athens
Winter,
