Political Rhetoric Within The Current Times Politics Essay

Political Rhetoric Within The Current Times Politics EssayAristotle described three major(ip) rhetorical means of persuasion ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos uses trust to persuade the audience. A politician uses his or her respective reputation and what is perceived and said rough them nonetheless there is a close connection between reputation and reality. Credibility depends both on expertise and how this is portrayed. In order to persuade the audience, you must offset believe in yourself. Pathos does not directly involve the business line itself instead pathos relies on the senses of the audience. An efficient charge to move the audience is to supplication to their values. Logos is Greek for logic and is used to persuade the audience by demonstrating the truth and is based on scientific facts. Logos is also used to orison to the intellect of the audience, and is numerateed an argument of logic.PRESENT-DAY POLITICAL RHETORIC 4The use of rhetoric is very apparent in indemn ity-making speeches and the outcome is measured by a vote placed by each member of the audience. Aristotelian rhetoric assumes that you believethe politician, and disbelieve all other politicians that have different views. The lastingnessor manipulation of a speech not only depends on the nature of the speech, but also on thebelievability of its origin and beliefs shared by the speaker and the audience. The audienceis attracted to the integrity, passion and reasoning of the speaker. The speaker must find theproper balance of the aforementioned qualities in the debate in order to be effective. In the endthe audience is persuaded because they sense that the speaker is an expert on the topic based onhis or her substantial confidence and the amount of emotion involved.Rhetoric used in the pastThe foundation of the modern approach to society, including the entirety of the modern governmental system, is fallout from the medieval rediscovery of Aristotles work during theCrusades, European s re-discovered Latin translations of Aristotle in various libraries throughoutthe Islamic world. When rhetoric is applied to political speech, therefore, it may beconcluded that the politician is attempting to sway the publics opinion in a bearing that is unjustand false.Today political parties in the United States play an integral role in political elections,local, state and national. Parties have become a fomite for exerting the ideas and agenda of largeand collective groups of citizens. However, political parties in colonial American and the earlyRepublic were viewed negatively, by both early politicians and philosophers. Even the foundingfathers had issues with political parties. Parties were thought to divide Americans. Also, thinkersof the time thought that masterminding parties would result in spawning a winning side and a losingside in elections, which would further split Americans. bulk in society today are greatlyinfluenced by what they read. The articles in the news papers skew heaps beliefs of politicalaffairs and real events in the same way that colored articles in popular magazines seem toshape the way the general public views different types of cultural aspects. Keeping this in mind,it is especially key to note that during the 1800s, the people lacked other forms of mediaand communication that people in modern times are influenced by. Instead, they relied heavilyon literature to entertain themselves, most of which shaped the way they viewed culture, politics,and behavior itself. Consider how politicians use rhetoric to promote their policies. We focus on aparticular type of rhetorical appeal-those based on emotionally charged predictions aboutpolicy consequences. For politicians, we emphasize maximizing and strategic behavior,reflecting their full-time employment in politics and large personal stakes in political outcomes.Political leading want to win policy debates and they employ rhetoric in an effort to move publicopinion to their respective sides. The very reason for public political debate between parties is tosway those preferences in one or the other direction. Politicians often try to shape citizensbeliefs about current conditions and the likelihood that particular outcomes leave alone occur if a policyis or is not put into law (e.g., Jerit, 2009 Lupia Menning, 2009). Politicians can attempt toform and change such beliefs, fundamentally, because of the role of uncertainty in policydecisions. There is always considerable and sometimes enormous uncertainty about the impact ofproposed policies (see, e.g., Riker, 1996).1 Not even experts really know the consequences of apolicy in advance. We agree that value-based arguments are an important part of politiciansrhetoric. If politics were solely about values, each side would assert its values early, and citizenswould line up on one side or the other. Politicians say many things during the course of a policydebate, and so the first task is to identify the form s that political rhetoric and argument can take.From the perspective of politicians seeking to persuade citizens, the three potentially mostvaluable forms are assertions of core party values and principles, predictions of future states,3and factual descriptions of current circumstances. All three forms of political rhetoric aremotivated by party leaders desires to sway opinion in the preferred direction, although eachform has its own purpose. If parties can shape beliefs, and thence preferences, by taking advantageof uncertainty and strategically using rhetoric, then winning elections and winning policy debatesthrough rhetorical persuasion are both possible, if not mutually reinforcing. Political rhetoric willnot evolve in precisely the same way across different policy debates.We have offered several propositions about how politicians should behave when they believethey can shape citizens beliefs. They also show that neither politicians nor the media seem to hand over citizens with reliable, readily identified cues to help distinguish those that are worthtaking seriously from those that are just hot air. Under such circumstances, what can we fair expect from citizens who are asked to render political judgments? Speculations onCitizens Responses to Political Rhetoric To address citizens responses to predictive rhetoric,we first comment on two important perspectives in political psychology that appear to suggestgrounds for expecting quite competent performance. test is crucial to understanding the uses ofpredictive rhetoric and its consequences for citizen competence. Unfortunately, we are about topilot largely uncharted waters. 11 Citizens Assessments of Asserted Links in PredictiveArguments Assuming that citizens care about the outcome, they will consciously orunconsciously consider the claimed link between the focal policy and that outcome. Does animportant causal linkage exist? To avoid effort, and lacking expertise in the policy area, citizenswill intend their answers to a simple categorical question Is there a genuine, significant link of thesort claimed, or is the claimed link minimal or nonexistent? opposed experts, ordinary peoplegenerally will not bother with refined distinctions, for example, attempting to distinguishbetween a very important and a somewhat important link. To avoid being manipulated,unaligned citizens will not take politicians at their word, but rather will try to assess the validityof an alleged link independently. In searching for independent corroboration, they will employsimple heuristics, including the following three in particular. We concluded that rhetoricalpredictions about the consequences of policies create obstacles for citizens who seek to make average decisions.ConclusionIn this very exploratory chapter, we have considered the political logic of policy rhetoric the prominence of appeals that rely on extreme and mostly negative predictions and seek to elicit an emotional response the processes tha t citizens use in determining their response and the consequences of those processes for the competence of individual and collective decisions about policy. To put our findings simply, the information surround in which citizens make decisions about policies presents a constant stream of dramatic, emotionally salient predictive claims, covering a wide range of outcomes, and presented largely without bread and butter evidence or other diagnostic information. The highly partisan cope with this constant stream by adopting the party line. The unaligned have no such luxury, and gum olibanum must try to make sense of the political rhetoric. Sometimes the dire predictions elicit some form of corroborating information-apertinent schema, an example from daily life, or the like-in the minds of these citizens, thus ringing a bell with them. There is little reason to suppose that the predictive appeals that ring a bell in this way correspond at all closely to the considerations that would pro ve decisive in an environment that encouraged deliberate judgment on the basis of realistic claims and the best available diagnostic information. But, then, there is no reason to believe that taking party cues does, either.