#BernieSanders #DemDebate The art of rhetoric goes back to the days of Greece and Rome. Aristotle taught that skilled rhetoricians will master a balanced presentation, employing personal ethics, logical argument, and emotional appeal whenever addressing an audience. Alexander Hamilton used Aristotle to great affect in order to take down the majority Antifederalists during the ratification debate that took place in Poughkeepsie, NY, 1788. In modern times, few can surpass Dr. King’s rhetorical skill. The primary example of his skill, according to the Aristotelian lines that have been drawn, remains his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Anyone who watched Sanders and Clinton debate the other night were taught some real lessons in the art of Rhetoric. And one of the sophistic rhetorical tactics deployed by Clinton was to paint Sanders as a "one-issue candidate." It is unfortunate that Sanders and his advisors are not as rhetorically saavy as is the Clinton camp, who certainly pulled out all the guns. They are well-practiced in the art.
When in any argument, a debater cuts right to the root of some overarching matter--that is to say, that one ubiquitous issue which connects many if not all other issues (be it the boon of a strong federal government or the bane of an inhumane economic system)--the winning debater will skillfully close the argument by also pointing out how that issue touches what appear at first glance to be separate issues.
Sanders' opposition is quick to raise those supposedly separate issues--issues of racism (systemic and otherwise), of criminal justice and the courts, of foreign policy and national defense, of job creation, yadayadayada--as if they are all separate from economics and from one another. Bernie gets accused of being a one-issue candidate.
So, instead of Sanders reiterating what we all know by now, that "wealth is flowing upward to the top 1%," perhaps a little elaboration about the ways that a system like ours--a system bent on 1. property rights and 2. deregulation--both alienates and demoralizes a people while also diminishing its democratic vision or imagination, would help those of us not quite up to the task of understanding why economic inequality and the structures that sustain it are so important right now.
I am always amazed that the prison reform championed by the Clintons was next handed over, in many cases, to private "for-profit" companies. The same is true for the spaces where "the illegals" are housed pending deportation. Tamir Rice's family, after the government gunned down their 12-year-old son, was sent a bill for services rendered to the fatally wounded boy. I could go but I'll spare you, dear reader.
So much of our institutional-societal structures, which happen to be the real safeguards against tyranny (not our puny guns), have been undermined by the infiltration of private greed and profit motive. Get to it Mr. Sanders. You're doing an amazing job, but we've still got work to do! Clinton has showed her hand and it is not going to change. Now we need to show the world that as long as the current economic frame is kept in place, her hand is in fact empty of any real substance for working people and the poor. The most she will do is throw them a bone, in a time when all that is good and right calls for a helluva lot more than that.