http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/03/rhetorical-speeches-brown-obamaOur leaders have lost the rhetorical arts at the very moment when I most need to hear a speech of convincing reassurance
Words, words, words. We hear them these days by the million, in communiques, minutes, memorandums, press releases. They are a running commentary on disaster. Yet as they are about economics they carry no meaning for most people. So why bother?
The answer is that the words do matter. When policy has failed, the words of leaders patrol the border between economic failure and political disaster. The much-vaunted collapse of the last recessionary conference in 1933 led, so it is said, to the brief but costly triumph of fascism. The failure was not of economics, which was gradually righting itself, but of democratic politicians to stop that failure corrupting the politics of the most afflicted states. They could not stop recession leading to war.
Those who treasure words find these times trying. When asked how he means to solve the credit crunch, the prime minister intones constantly that he and his colleagues "will do whatever it takes". In so far as these words carry meaning they are now untrue. They thus fail the test of political reassurance. Barack Obama likewise talks of "the world working together". The French and Germans want to be "stronger", others to be "careful", others to be rescued, but they all sign the same communique in the end.
People understand war. It is when soldiers kill each other and one side usually wins. Most people understand disease, poverty and science. Almost nobody understands a financial collapse. They are therefore peculiarly gullible to the language of blame, as the G20 protesters have shown.
We may have learned the word trillion, but we cannot comprehend the talk of banking, stockbroking and derivatives that describes the present horror. We see only the consequences - P45s and hoardings going up in familiar high streets. Recession is a stealth bomber that comes inexplicably at night.
A short article by the American Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, in yesterday's Herald Tribune, neatly and utterly demolishes the financial rescue plan of the American and British governments. It was summed up in plain, almost twitterable, English. To Stiglitz, hurling billions in public money at bankrupt private banks was "far worse than nationalisation: it is the privatising of gains and the socialising of losses". There was no conceivable way such money could redeem the burden of toxic debt liability. It was mad and would not work.
The article recalled Keynes's devastation of the great powers' plan after the first world war. Two other economists who have also descended from Olympus and into print - the American, Paul Krugman, and the British Liberal Democrat Vince Cable (in an admirable book on the crisis out next week) - have analysed the response to the collapse. In essence they agree with Stiglitz.
There are no two ways about this. Either Stiglitz, Krugman and Cable are right - and they have the advantage of objectivity - or the British and American governments are right. Assuming the former, the only reason the governments do not change tack must be ignorance, impotence or sheer panic.
At this point I need to know only one thing. Can the government at least convey enough comfort to reassure frightened people that they can handle the consequence of their folly? Even if the west's finances are wrecked by government deflation (under the guise of reflation), are the institutions of democracy safe in the hands of Obama, Brown, Sarkozy, Merkel and the rest? This must be the 1933 test.
We are back to words. The press has covered the froth of the crisis, abetted by politicians (such as the Commons Treasury committee) eager for any distraction from the enveloping guilt. Pages are devoted to personalities, to bonuses for bankers, a pension for Sir Fred Goodwin, Madoff's yachts or the "G20 Wags".
In London this week more media space has gone on the leaders' retinues and their ostentatious security than on asking whatever happened to £200bn of taxpayers' money since the start of the crash. No one would understand it even if they knew. London on Wednesday night was like the Duchess of Richmond's ball before Waterloo.
The G20 communique has had to conceal what has been a mind-boggling collapse in the power of world government. Its words cannot convey substance because there is little, but they must restore confidence in power, confidence that leaders do still know what they are about and are struggling to rescue things. If they cannot rescue the economy, they must set minds at rest.
The trouble is that their words are so poor. Even Obama, the master of modern rhetoric, has found no Churchillian moment. The man who, out of power, could thrill the spine of his nation with the emptiest of phrases, such as "Yes we can", is now bereft of reassuring prose. When Brown, whose speeches are truly dreadful, repeats his version, "We shall do whatever it takes", it falls flat.
To Aristotle, rhetoric was not about telling the truth, which was for judges and philosophers. It was the art of persuasion. Until the 19th century it was regarded as an essential tool for living. Young men should go out into the world adept at dialectic. They should know how to turn facts to their advantage, think on their feet, speak in sentences. To an infuriated Disraeli, Gladstone was a "rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity". Yet audiences revered Gladstone and came in thousands to hear him.
When a good speech fails, it is not because its words are mendacious - many of the best speeches have been stuffed with lies - but because it is boring. It is today called spin, rhetoric gone sour. Tony Blair was a good rhetorician because he knew how to command an audience. He talked his way through three election victories, two wars and a financial crisis.
No art form has a higher failure rate than the public deployment of words. Of the tens of thousands of speeches that must be made in Britain each day, almost none is any good. It is significant that those rare British politicians who have mastered this art have prospered - Blair, Ken Livingstone, David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
They convey confidence to their audiences by setting aside props and notes, maintaining eye contact with their listeners, and exploiting that aid to sincerity, the appearance of having only just thought what they are about to say. Their words seem fresh and unexpected.
How reassuring it would be if the leaders had come out of their G20 meeting yesterday, shorn of notes, prompts, autocues and flam, and had told the world in convincing terms that all was going to be well. They had got the world economy into a mess and Stiglitz was right, but they were determined to stop the rot from going political.
As it is, I heard nothing to suggest that the mistakes of the last six months are over - or were not mistakes - and no reassurance that worse is not to come. I did not need to know if this was true, I just wanted to be led to believe it, lest my faith in democracy waver. I wanted high-quality rhetoric, not common spin. But nobody had read Aristotle.
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