is thus the same process as the extension of the franchise. To lament the consequence without recognising the cause is a form of historical snobbery.
Less florid rhetoric is not necessarily worse rhetoric. There is a tendency, even today, for poor writers to come on like a pastiche of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society because they think of that style as somehow properly rhetorical. But purple prose does not sound black and white when it is spoken. When he was criticised by William Faulkner for his limited vocabulary, Ernest Hemingway gave a reply that was not intended as advice for speechwriters but works as such anyway: ‘Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words and those are the ones I use.’
Soon after the audience started to grow, the world started to shrink. Radio, television and the internet have vastly extended the reach of a political speech. Before mass media connected leaders to their public, rhetoric was an elite game. The political class talked about the people but largely to each other. The real setting of the great speech is no longer the Temple of Concord, Freedom Hall or the steps of the Capitol, even though the words may be spoken there. The speech exists in the lines cut into soundbites on social media, edited to seven seconds on the evening news or published in next day’s newspaper. Even that had ceased until I revived the format in The Times, which now carries analyses of all the major political speeches. The format devised there appears in this book, for the select band of speeches that have endured among the mass that have been given.
The test of time proves too much for most rhetoric, plenty of which falls victim to the sheer pace of modern politics. There are two types of modern politician, the quick and the dead. No one can afford to be silent for long, and the outcome is that politicians today speak far too often. Gladstone and Disraeli would deliver polished speeches three times a year. Their speeches would be deeply researched and considered rather than knocked out in the heat of a passing crisis. Most political speeches today are unnecessary: press releases stretched far beyond their natural span. They also have to stretch further than they did. Government has grown broader in scope, and more complex. Speeches get made about such unpromising subjects as environmental directives and the gradient of welfare benefit tapers.
The great causes, at least in the rich, fortunate democracies, have gone. If there are fewer uplifting speeches today than there once were, then the chief cause is a heartening one. Momentous speeches are always given in answer to a signal injustice or crisis – think of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. The success of the developed democracies means injustice is less acute than it once was. The great questions – the entitlement to vote, material and gender equality, freedom of association and speech, war and peace – are not entirely resolved, but the first decades of the twenty-first century show progress that would have been unimaginable two centuries before.
The line towards freedom is crooked, as we shall see. Nevertheless, the issues are smaller, the injustices largely less raw. The conflict between capitalism and communism pitted two sets of utopian aspirations against each other, with liberals and socialists everywhere painting the war of ideas in vivid colours. The victory of capitalism over socialist planning changed politics even in countries that had never been run by the communists. It meant that the left-of-centre parties largely accepted the writ of the market. The argument continued about where the lines of regulation should be drawn, but the dispute was now in the details, not the principles. At much the same time, the political Left won a cultural victory over the respect that was due to people of all creeds and colours. Each side, by and large, accepted the lesson it had been taught by the other, and the upshot was the creation of a new, benign, largely liberal consensus.
This means that public speech that truly sings is harder to pull off. Rhetoric, like all drama, needs a dispute. Agreement writes white, as Montherlant said about happiness. Politics, though, has to go on and this explains the rather exaggerated, overwrought nature of rhetoric today. No politician ever gets into office by volubly agreeing with his opponents. The political dispute therefore carries on regardless, as if there were no consensus. Public speech is easily reduced to an exercise in caricature, confected and boring, with the volume set too high. Amid this vast ado about nothing, it is little wonder that a decline in the standard of rhetoric is declared. But it is an illusion, and if public speech is boring the proper response is to be thankful. There are plenty of examples of shining speech in this book given during times when politics was far from boring and some of it was terrifying.
There is, though, still a reasonable complaint here. Language in the public square today does not always rise to the occasion. Too little of what is said in politics is memorable. It needs to be. Politics is the best idea about government that anybody ever had, or ever will have. Words need to inspire because disenchantment with politics fosters the illusion that there is an alternative. It is certainly still possible to write well rather than badly. The Obamas, Barack and Michelle, have shown that it is still possible to go high when everyone else is going low. It is still possible, as Mark Twain put it, to apply ‘a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense’. The aim of good public speaking is to borrow the rhythms of everyday speech but at the same time to heighten its effects. The objective is to write high-octane ordinary speech, as if an eloquent person were speaking naturally at their best, fluent and uninterrupted, with all the connecting threads edited away.
The greatest speeches are essays in simple language, easily comprehensible to a democratic audience, but works of beauty and profundity all the same. As a collection, the finest public speeches tell the story of the unfolding of human accomplishment through politics. This book is not a story of human progress in the manner of the old Whig theory, in which history moves serenely from darkness towards the light. There have been too many desperate times. But to the extent that there has been progress in the material conditions of life, as unquestionably there has, that progress is owed to political argument that began with the Funeral Oration of Pericles and continues to this day.
That is the spirit, and the thesis, of this book, which defines five political virtues and applauds the greatest words that have been spoken in their defence. The first political virtue is that through politics the voice of the people is heard. The second is that politics commits us to persuasion rather than force. The third virtue is that through politics the demand for recognition can be heard. Fourth, the equal consideration of all citizens in free societies is the means by which the material condition of the population is improved. Then, fifth, perhaps the most profound point of all: it is only when politics prevails that the worst of human instincts can be tamed. All of these virtues require poetic political speech.
The Quarrel with Ourselves
William Butler Yeats once said that poetry was made out of a quarrel with ourselves whereas rhetoric derived from the quarrel with others. It can, alas, be more than a quarrel. We now face new threats to the liberal democratic order, from both without and within. In the wealthy democracies today an insidious lack of confidence has set in. Conspiracy theories have flourished and people are tempted towards fringe candidates. This lack of confidence in democracy is misplaced and dangerous. Cynicism with politics is everywhere and it is everywhere nihilistic.
The history of fine speech is proof against cynicism of this kind. Public speech can be elevated and it can still be uplifting. It needs to be because it is in the spoken word that the defence of politics has to be conducted. The final speech in this book tells the most heartbreaking story of the modern age. ‘Not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald’, says Elie Wiesel, the worst of instincts was let loose. Politics is the human achievement that prevents a repetition of terrors such as this. The title of Elie Wiesel’s great speech is a reminder to us all of the perils of indifference. We can compose a funeral oration for politics if we choose. Or we can fight back.
This book exhibits the examples that we can choose to follow. By explaining what the great speakers meant and how they said it, I hope to elucidate the principles through
