Michelle Obama opens the doors of perception

For the second time* in this election season, Michelle Obama riveted the country and the world with moral clarity, in a speech delivered yesterday in New Hampshire. She named Donald Trump before the world. She detailed the effects of his sexual predation -- on herself, voice shaking a little, and on a series of concentric audiences -- the one before her, the nation's children, the world. As she did at the convention, she set Trump's manifest depravity against an idealized portrait of American values as she (or her husband) strives to embody them.

The denunciation was as carefully structured as it was deeply personal. She began, by way of contrast, with a norm as she experiences it, American values that she strives to advance, as expressed in an International Day of the Girl event at the White House  (part of her Let Girls Learn program). There she "had the pleasure of spending hours talking to some of the most amazing young women you will ever meet, young girls here in the U.S. and all around the world." That opened a window on the ravages of male dominance throughout human society - and the route out:

Our failures of political rhetoric are asymmetric

The study of rhetoric can yield great insights into the way power is structured and masses of people are moved. But those who study rhetoric closely are prone to mixing up cause and effect.

So it is with an essay by New York Times CEO Mark Thompson that usefully traces The Dark History of Straight Talk -- that is, of politicians' claims to authentically channel the mystical will of the people. Simpson begins with Shakespeare's rendition of Mark Anthony's funeral oration for Caesar, in which he claims to be "no orator," but a "plain, blunt man," eschewing the rhetoric that was the chief marker of political authority in Rome. He moves on to reaction against the rationalist language of the Enlightenment, to the hookup of "anti-rhetoric" with nationalism and Heidegger's fetishization of "authentic" language, culminating in his embrace of Hitler. Finally he focuses on the anti-elitism and demonization of out-groups by the current crop of authoritarians in western democracies, culminating (for the moment) in Trump.

All good so far. But here's where I think Thompson confuses conditions that make large numbers people responsive to "authenticism" with the current condition of rhetoric itself:

What we have lost and must strive to regain is a conception of rhetoric that strikes a balance between the demands of reason, character and empathy, and that strives for genuine truthfulness rather than theatrical “authenticity.”

That makes me wonder whether Thompson has ever listened to a certain Barack Obama, who won the presidency by sheer force of rhetoric -- and whose rhetoric has arguably balanced "reason, character and empathy" as powerfully as any president's since Lincoln (whose rhetoric Obama constantly, consciously channels).

Re the qualities Thompson thirsts for: for empathy, I suggest watching Obama tear up when speaking of the Sandy Hook shooting, or listening to him sing Amazing Grace after the Charleston, or read how he delineates the emotional logic of those who perceive reverse racism in his More Perfect Union speech in March 2009*, or lays out the plights of individuals who lack health insurance in his speech to rescue the health reform bill in September 2009.**

Michelle Obama took the high road to lay Donald Trump in the dust

Michelle Obama pulled off a Houdini trick in her magnificently distilled framing of the choice in this election in her convention speech last night.

On the one hand, she articulated a humane, inclusive vision of what America is and of what's required to lead America. At the same time, she framed the choice in this election as absolutely Manichean.

She managed at once to take the high road -- "our motto is, when they go low, we go high"--  while
leveling the most devastating attack on Trump yet articulated.  It was devastating because she didn't deign to name him. She refrained not out of delicacy, but to demonstrate that she didn't have to. He was so instantly recognizable -- as were his dual alter egos, Obama and Clinton. as she had earlier portrayed them:

MIchelle brings Obama's story home

In his bid to move the political center back to the left in the wake of the Reagan revolution, Obama has always relied on an idealized abstract of American history, casting it as a story of ever-expanding commitment to shared prosperity -- prosperity shared ever more widely.  It's an oral slideshow, a series of historical tableaus delivered with incantatory parallel phrasing and refrain. In his speech on election night 2008, for example, he invoked a 106 year-old African American voter as a witness to the panorama:

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

Toward the end of her speech tonight, Michelle Obama deployed the same kind of narrative, with the same political message: