Hillary Clinton and the Rhetoric of Trust
This article is part of a two-part series using ancient rhetorical theory to analyze Hillary Clinton’s speeches. The other article is Joanna Kenty’s Hillary Clinton’s Rhetorical Persona.
Clinton may be leading Donald Trump in the polls, but there’s a general sense that she owes that lead more to Trump’s even higher unfavorability than anything positive. Many voters still say they don’t trust her. Some argue this is the work of the Republican smear machine and others that she’s actually corrupt — but what if Clinton’s problem is that the only tools she has to convince us of her trustworthiness weren’t designed for her?
This will be my third presidential election teaching a course called “Classical Rhetoric and the [20xx] Presidential Campaign.” In it my students and I read ancient Greek and Roman theories of persuasion and ask whether and how our candidates are using the techniques recommended by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and others. My students are always surprised to discover how well rhetorical theorists who lived more than 2000 years ago describe what our candidates do. The more perceptive ones also recognize that their evaluations of candidates are the product of various forms of persuasion enacted on them not only by candidates themselves, their campaign advertisements, and super PACs, but also by where they get their news, the commentators they follow, the friends they sit with at the dining hall, and how their parents raised them.
How voters respond to candidates can easily be analyzed in terms of the techniques and categories of classical rhetorical theory, especially those described by Aristotle in his Rhetoric. If you’ve felt fear about the direction the Supreme Court might take after this election, it’s because someone persuaded you to feel it (fear is a sub-category of Aristotle’s theory of pathos, “emotion”). If what a candidate has done in the past makes you more or less likely to vote for him or her, you’re accepting an inductive argument from examples (one subcategory of Aristotle’s theory of logos, “argumentation”). And if you think you make your decision about how to vote based not on rhetoric but on facts, well, Aristotle has you covered there too, since facts are usually nothing more than (partial) premises in deductive arguments (the other half of his theory of logos). It’s all rhetoric, at least in Aristotelian terms.
Aristotle addresses the question of how a politician like Hillary Clinton can win an audience’s trust. He devotes a portion of his Rhetoric to what he calls “persuasion by character” (in Greek: by ethos), which makes the speaker axiopistos, literally “worthy” (axio-) of “trust” (pistis) (Rhetoric 1.2 1356a). To achieve this, a speaker must convey that she possesses three things (Rhet. 2.1 1378a): phronesis (usually translated as “judgment”), arete (usually translated as “virtue”), and eunoia (“goodwill” toward the audience).
But Aristotle is never one to give only one level of subcategorization; he names the nine “virtues” that the speaker must convince her audience that she possesses: justice (dikaiosyne), courage (andreia), self-control (sophrosyne), magnificence (megaloprepeia), magnanimity (megalopsychia), generosity (eleutheriotes), gentleness (praotes), judgment (phronesis, the same thing that Aristotle listed alongside “virtue” above), and wisdom (sophia, Rhet. 1.9 1366b).
If you listen to the candidates with this list in mind, you’ll hear them appealing to these virtues. Compassion for the struggles of working people is an attempt to show justice, magnanimity, and generosity. Standing up to special interest groups reflects justice, courage, and judgment. Pointing out that an opponent has changed her position conveys the opposite: lack of wisdom, lack of self-control, cowardice. The Clinton campaign’s strategy of addressing trust explicitly and having others highlight “the real Hillary Clinton” is an attempt to argue that she possesses Aristotle’s rhetorical virtues. Why hasn’t it been more effective with voters?
Clinton’s candidacy has made one feature of Aristotle’s list of virtues stand out in a way it didn’t when Barack Obama was running against John McCain or Mitt Romney. The Greek word that Aristotle uses for the virtue of “courage” is andreia, which is derived from the word aner/andros, which means, simply, “man”. Not some generic “person”, “man”. As opposed to woman. Translating the term as “courage”, as is often done, occludes this etymology. Almost by definition this virtue — “manliness” — is something that only men, or people trying to act like a man, can possess. It’s not that women can’t be courageous — it’s that the version of courage that Aristotle says a speaker should show to convince an audience she’s trustworthy is inescapably gendered masculine. For a woman to possess andreia in the sense that Aristotle meant it, she has to act like something she’s not, which is not a position from which trust can easily be won.
The terms Aristotle uses for his other virtues don’t have masculinity inscribed into them to the same degree, but you don’t have to look very far in ancient Greek culture to find that most, if not all, of them were regarded as characteristic of men and not women. Take sophrosyne, “self-control”. In an influential analysis Michel Foucault demonstrated that, in a man, this virtue was considered an indicator of fitness to hold political power: the man who has control of himself has the right to control others. This definition, and not the version of sophrosyne praised in women (according to Joseph Roisman, “chastity, reserved conduct, conformity to familial roles”), seems likely to have been what Aristotle had in mind when he put it on his list.
For Aristotle, all forms of “ruling” are the domain of men: “The free man rules the slave, the male the female, the man the child” (Politics 1.13 1260a). Aristotle allows that women, and even children and slaves, can possess virtues — “but in the measure as is proper to each in relation to his own function…the sophrosyne of a woman and that of a man are not the same, nor their ‘courage’ (andreia), and ‘justice’ (dikaiosyne, another one of the virtues of ethos).” He uses andreia as an example: “one [the man’s] is a courage of command, and the other that of subordination, and the case is similar with the other virtues.” He does not elaborate further just what “the courage of subordination” might be, but it’s safe to say it won’t get you elected President of the United States.
Aristotle’s other virtues of character are similarly gendered. The person who shows phronesis, “judgment”, is, according to Aristotle, “the person who is good at deliberating (bouleutikos)” (Nicomachean Ethics 6.5 1140a). I’ve translated here without gendered pronouns, but we can be sure that Aristotle is talking about men, because elsewhere (Pol. 1.13 1260a) he says that the woman’s deliberative faculty, again using the term bouleutikos to refer to this essential quality of those who possess phronesis, is “without authority,” a phrase whose precise meaning is debated but whose misogynist tone is unmistakable.
Praotes, “gentleness”, might seem on face to be a virtue that women could possess, but Aristotle excludes them here too by defining this virtue as “a calm temper, not led by emotion” (NE 4.11 1125b). Women in ancient Greece were, unlike the self-controlled man, assumed to be ruled by their emotions. Eleutheriotes may be translated “generosity” but the root of the word is the adjective (eleutheros) used to describe freeborn men, and women, as Aristotle’s remark about sophrosyne has already shown, were regarded as having more in common with slaves than with men.
Aristotle did not discuss sophia, “wisdom”, in concrete terms, but a fragment of Euripides declares that “a woman-hearted spirit is not a part of a wise (sophos) man” (Erechtheus fr. 53.33 Austin). One of the ways to recognize a person who possesses megalopsychia, “magnanimity”, is, according to Aristotle, by his “deep voice” (NE 4.8 1125a). Each of the virtues that Aristotle says can win an audience’s trust is a virtue that he and many of his contemporaries would have regarded as characteristic of men, not women.
From one point of view, times have changed. Women have run for, and been elected, heads of state, suggesting that ancient attitudes toward these virtues do not present an insurmountable obstacle for female candidates. But the number of women holding the highest offices in their countries remains small, and it could be argued that only Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, and Dilma Rousseff faced electorates comparable in size and complexity to that which Clinton faces in the US (we might expect Aristotle’s legacy to have less influence in these non-European countries as well).
Aristotle had probably never seen a woman participate in politics. He was describing what he saw, not saying how things should be. But my students’ quadrennial discovery of how well Aristotle’s descriptions of what he saw in politics fit what we see in politics suggests that somewhere along the line his description became a prescription. We expect our politicians to use his techniques, because that’s what they’ve always done and it’s what we’re used to hearing. It doesn’t matter that somewhere between zero and almost zero of our candidates, their speechwriters, and their campaign managers have ever read Aristotle’s rhetorical theory. They don’t need to. After 2500 years his techniques of persuasion are so deeply ingrained in our political understanding that we don’t know any other way to persuade.
In the absence of a new system of persuasion and a new set of expectations on the part of the American people for what constitutes trustworthiness, Aristotle’s system leaves Hillary Clinton in a difficult position. She doesn’t have to convince us that she’s courageous, just, prudent, or generous. She has to convince us that she’s a man. No wonder so many people feel they don’t know the “real” her.
Curtis Dozier teaches in the department of Greek and Roman Studies and
serves as faculty advisor to veterans on campus at Vassar College in
Poughkeepsie, NY. He is the author of a series of articles on the
Roman rhetorician Quintilian. Follow him on Twitter.
