What Does It Mean To “Speak Politically”?

Politics as the dubious craft of selling things that don’t sell themselves

What do we mean when we say, “He gave a political answer,” or “She was being political.”

Here’s an example of this familiar reference to politics. Back in 2016, Ben Carson was running for US president, and he was asked an uncomfortable question about whom he’d support if he were to drop out of the race. According to one report, ‘Carson sidestepped the latter question, stating that he has “become a little disillusioned” with his rivals.’

At another event, a pastor, Brad Sherman, asked Carson, “Who do you think best represents your values among those who are running?” According to the report, Sherman ‘said he gave a political answer. “He didn’t answer it. He skirted it just like a politician would,” said Sherman.’

We say this all the time about political speech, but what exactly are we thereby assuming about politics? In Carson’s case, the point is that he didn’t answer the questions, but he also didn’t say outright that he was going to avoid them. He only pretended to answer the questions, so that he was speaking in what existentialists call “bad faith,” meaning that he lacked integrity.

But how is that political? What is it about politics that requires such pretenses?

Selling as economic sophistry

With respect to pretenses, politics seems very similar to salesmanship. Advertisements, too, rarely if ever state the full truth about the product they’re selling. But advertisers pretend they’re telling the customer everything he or she needs to know. Thus, ads are deceptive in ways that are supposed to benefit not so much the customer but the seller. The seller benefits at the customer’s expense. That’s not to say the customer gets nothing in exchange, but it’s not exactly what she might have had in mind when the seller’s pretense attracted her to the product.

We can make plain what’s going on here by considering the perfect product. Consider, for instance, a Ferrari automobile. Notice how Ferrari spends nothing whatsoever on advertising. There aren’t any ads for Ferraris. This is because the car sells itself. The quality of the product is so high that there’s no need to sell it. More precisely, the brand proves itself in the Formula One race, which measures objectively the merits of race cars and of their manufacturers.

If Ferrari lets the facts speak for themselves, what could advertisements hope to add to them? Only lies of a hundred kinds.

Thus, the salesperson steps in only when the strengths of the product don’t speak for themselves, when the product has drawbacks that can be downplayed or obfuscated. Sales techniques operate entirely in bad faith. Telling the customer the complete, unvarnished truth about a product that doesn’t sell itself would amount to a dereliction of the salesperson’s duty.

The salesperson works for the owner who wants to sell some products that have a downside, and the salesperson’s job is to convince the customer to buy the product despite that downside. How does the salesperson succeed in doing this? With sophistry, spin, manipulative social tactics, misleading rhetoric, bogus statistics, emotional associations, lies of omission, and so on.

For instance, if sugary cereal is tasty, the ads for that cereal will highlight that upside and downplay the health costs of overloading on sugar. Technically, the TV ads might be fallacious in distracting the customer from the full truth, and they’ll do so with flashy graphics, joyful tunes and slogans, and smiling actors gulping down the tasty product.

That, then, is the essence of salesmanship. The salesperson deceives the customer in convincing her to buy a product that doesn’t sell itself because the product has a downside. Most products designed and sold in capitalist markets don’t sell themselves since they’re flawed, which means ethical standards have virtually no place in business.

We like to think it’s otherwise. In business school, for instance, students are taught that there are ethical standards even in capitalism in which selfishness is supposed to drive innovation and efficiency. But that talk of business ethics might itself be political, or more precisely, politically correct.

Indeed, in so far as corporations are interested in ethics, they surely want only to seem ethical, to co-opt the foreign discourse and to pose as do-gooders to attract moralistic customers. Morality itself is obviously at odds with most aspects of capitalism. In capitalism, for instance, money talks, whereas morality is about giving people what they deserve because they’re right even if they can’t afford to pay for much.

One of the chief myths that sells capitalism itself is that wealth and rightness go together, that a “free market” is meritocratic so that the best people rise to the top, and both the winners and the losers in the economic competition for resources get what they deserve. Assuming this is indeed a myth (since luck, for instance, plays a mighty role in economic affairs), the implication is that capitalism as an economic system, too, is flawed in that its merits don’t speak for themselves and must be supplemented with spin to hide the downside.

Politics as Machiavellian salesmanship

In any case, again, politics seems comparable to salesmanship. The politician may need to step in only when there’s a societal downside that must be minimized, an unpleasant fact that must be glossed over to achieve some presumed greater good.

In sales, the downside might be the product’s planned obsolescence which limits the product’s usefulness, an environmental cost in using the product, or a physiological harm the product does to the user.

In politics, the downside is that in civilization, many diverse groups are stuck with each other, and without political compromises, the alternative to settling the inevitable disputes is war, organized crime, or some other barbarism. More fundamentally, the downside is that people are inherently flawed and self-conflicted so that civilization has typically resorted to exploitation in its enslavement of whole populations, in its subordinating of women to men, and in growing by military conquest, the theft of land, and the despoliation of the biosphere.

Modern societies are supposed to be more enlightened, but maybe that’s just a political answer, that is, an act of salesmanship or as late-modern thinkers put it, a “metanarrative,” which is another word for “myth.”

Notice the difference between dictatorships and free societies. In a dictatorship, there’s plenty of propaganda but not exactly salesmanship or politics. In North Korea or Nazi Germany, for instance, the leader is presented as superhuman, which is of course deceptive. But there’s no attempt to convince the public that the myth is true because dictators rely on force, not on persuasion.

If a salesperson reaches into your pocket and steals your money, the act of selling ends when that crime begins — unless the salesperson proceeds to lying about whether the theft occurred. Likewise, the dictator’s propaganda is meant more to feed the leader’s ego and to inform the public what the society will be like, regardless of whether the populace approves.

In a freer society, by contrast, the use of force in that sense is illegal, which opens the door to sophistry as a means of controlling the social narrative when the unvarnished truth couldn’t possibly work because the truth is untoward and not what most people want to hear.

To return to Ben Carson’s skirting of the pastor’s question about the sharing of Republican values, the unpleasant truths which Carson meant to hide are plain: the Republican Party is perfectly amoral, and Americanized Christianity is a grotesque betrayal of Jesus’s countercultural ideals. Thus, even if the pastor’s insinuation that Republican politicians ought to have Christian values weren’t an indicator of the pastor’s cluelessness, the “conservative values” on offer would be gross mockeries.

Obviously, a politician can’t say any of that without insulting the voters, which is to say that those dark facts hardly sell themselves. On the contrary, we’d run screaming from anyone in authority who spoke in such Machiavellian terms. But those facts remain as matters of history and of institutional constraints.

Thus, because in a free society Carson couldn’t force voters to vote for him, and he couldn’t fall on his sword like an autistic philosopher and tell the full truth that hardly anyone wants to hear, all that was left to him was rank sophistry, or Machiavellian manipulation. He dodged the question and saved face with some verbal trickery. He gave a political answer.

And note the many modes of deception that are available to trained cynics with sociopathic tendencies: beguilement, betrayal, bullshitting, cheating, circumvention, demagoguery, demonization, delusion, disappointment, duping, entrapment, fakery, falsification, foolishness, fraud, lies of omission, misdirection, outwitting, pandering, swindling, trickery, victimization.

Political handlers, public relations consultants, or spin doctors are just expert manipulators in those respects. Using staged events, political speeches, and other crass maneuvers, these sophists are salespeople in the political sphere: they sell the politician or some agenda as their product to voters who act in the asymmetric role of the duped customers.

Sometimes the sales job doesn’t work, though, and the audience sees through it, in which case we identify the speech as too “political,” meaning obviously deceptive, evasive, or otherwise manipulative.

Morality, the opposite of salesmanship and politics

It’s easy to say, at this point, that we should be looking for solutions. “How can we make politics better?” you might be wondering. “How can we hold politicians accountable?” Democracies do so structurally, by eventually kicking the bums out. But that doesn’t stop new “bums” (that is, subcriminal sociopaths) from entering the political arena with each election cycle.

Democracies prevent the rise of dictators or kings, but they don’t solve the problem of human nature. They don’t make us magically wise. Thanks to science and to free education, modern societies are better informed than previous ones, and as children we’re taught basic liberal values of citizenship, to be kind to others, to cooperate, work hard, respect the law, and so forth.

And with the meme of “wokeness,” the elite classes like to think they’re righteous. We expect our institutions to be morally pure, but are we sure this moralizing isn’t just another political pose? In chastising each other for our micro-aggressions, we’re like the New Testament’s Pharisees who supposedly carped about the letter of the law without appreciating its spirit.

If we underwent a heartfelt moral awakening, all the “progress” of advanced societies would cease in a nanosecond. Capitalism would be a thing of the past, and we’d devote all our resources to helping others and to solving existential problems like death and the universe’s godlessness. Much of what’s in the way of that awakening is the tide of distractions in which we sell each other on our favourite pretenses.