Decibels but no dialogue

It’s probably no accident that the ancient Greeks invented both democracy and drama.

Both, in some elemental way, affirm the value of a people’s communal life. The Athenians, for example, regarded a willingness to participate in the civic conversation as one of the irreducible duties of citizenship. “Debate and social groups dedicated to inquiry and discussion are the enemies of tyranny,” wrote Aristotle, “since they encourage intelligent thought and trust among citizens.”

Yeah ... well, thanks for sharing that with the group, old-timer, and welcome to these United States of America. (Actually, nowadays it’s more like red states united with red states and blue states united with blue states, but we’ll get to that.)

Today, as the Republican National Convention moves toward its close and this presidential campaign enters its hammer-and-tongs phase, it’s clear that this divided nation’s politics and the media swirl around them never have been so noisy -- or so unsatisfying. This campaign may be many things, but it is not a conversation. With a scant handful of exceptions, paid media, free media, electronic media, print media, cyber media, all have become little more than megaphones in a national shouting match.

Thus, there is contention, but no debate; quarrels, but no argument.

In fact, what is most absent from our politics today is something that used to be regarded as the essence of campaigning -- the attempt to persuade others to your position. The death of persuasion is the singular aspect of this political moment. And while the causes of its demise are several and obscure, the evidence of persuasion’s passing is clear. Take just two large-scale examples:

At no time within memory have the nation’s nonfiction bestseller lists been as dominated by politically themed books and biographies. Names like Bill O’Reilly, Al Franken, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Michael Moore have become weekly fixtures of such reports. And the readers’ appetite for such work shows no signs of slacking. At the moment, Amazon.com’s bestselling book is “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.”

All this has led some to argue that we’ve entered a kind of golden age for political publishing. The commonplace comparison is with the 19th century, when political pamphleteering was not simply a political but also an entertainment staple.

But there is a profound difference.

Whether they promoted the cause of abolition, temperance, women’s suffrage, vegetarianism or the single tax, the old-style pamphleteers were written to win new adherents to the cause -- in other words, to persuade.

Books by O’Reilly, Hannity, Moore et al. are designed for another purpose entirely, to confirm the faithful in their creed and not to win converts. What we have here is a new genre -- call it secular apologetics. Believers flock to buy books by those with whom they already know they agree and expect to come away from the experience of reading with their faith reinforced and armed with fresh arguments with which to bludgeon the infidel.

No matter how many books are sold, you won’t find many Kerry voters with Bill O’Reilly’s collected works on their shelf, nor Bush partisans with Al Franken’s latest in their briefcase.

Campaign strategy

The reality of an electorate split down the middle and unwilling to hear, let alone engage the other side’s position, can hardly be lost on political strategists. As the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page story Monday, “religious conservatives are at the heart of a Bush campaign that is turning traditional general election strategy on its head. Instead of focusing on undecided swing voters, Bush advisors are putting top priority on maximizing voter turnout among conservative constituencies already disposed to back the president.”

In part, the Journal reported, the incumbent’s campaign is responding to the GOP’s analysis of demographic change. “The nation’s face is being reshaped in ways that aren’t helpful to the Bush effort. The Hispanic population is exploding in size, and Hispanic voters are heavily Democratic. Other nonwhite ethnic groups are also growing. If all demographic groups slip as they did in 2000, the Bush team estimates that Bush would finish with 3 million fewer votes than

Thus, the Republicans’ decision to preach to the choir and to make sure that as many members as possible show up to sing on election day. Karl Rove, the GOP’s strategist-in-chief, calls this new-style campaigning “a mobilization election.”

The death of persuasion as political style will have consequences beyond a mere coarsening of our public discourse. A series of campaigns designed solely to hold and energize the already faithful will further divide this pluralistic society. Compromise is persuasion’s practical handmaid. The big winners in a political system preoccupied with comforting its true believers will be the single-issue constituencies that cluster so rabidly around issues such as abortion, gun control and gay marriage.

Just how far do we want to go toward a faith-based politics? It takes little imagination to conceive just how much more unlovely this society may become, if the biggest predictor of a voter’s decision on election day is whether they regularly attend a church on Sunday.

Not long before his untimely death in 1967, the great Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray wrote: “Argument ceases to be civil when it is dominated by passion and prejudice; when its vocabulary becomes solipsist, premised on the theory that my insight is mine alone and cannot be shared; when dialogue gives way to a series of monologues; when the parties to the conversation cease to listen to one another, or hear only what they want to hear.... When things like this happen, men cannot be locked together in argument. Conversation becomes merely quarrelsome or querulous. Civility dies with the death of dialogue.”

As we consider the arid topology of campaign 2004, and envision the dreary passage to be traversed in the months ahead, Murray’s thoughts seem less a caution than a prophecy.