Article

Comment

Language

Politics

27 June 2025

5 min read

Our public discourse needs responsible rhetoric before it is too late

The right turn of phrase can turn a nation, the wrong one can destroy

Tom Dove

Tom has a PhD in Theology and works as a hospital physician.

A crowd of people stand in the side steps of the Lincoln Memorial

Easter services, Lincoln Memorial.

George Pflueger, via Unspash.

When was the last time a brilliant piece of rhetoric made the headlines?

“Empty rhetoric.”

“Form over function.”

“Sloganeering.”

These—and other accolades—are stock trade when it comes to the art of denouncing public discourse. Red flags are rightly waved in the face of baseless claims and insincere promises. Scroll through a news reel; open a newspaper: language far stronger in style than in substance is not hard to find.

Nowadays we are sensitive to these kinds of abuses of public platforms. When Donald Trump speaks of the ‘Great Big Beautiful Bill’ or Elon Musk of the ‘Big Ugly Bill’ we know the cogs at BBC Verify are likely to be turning. Fact-checking is an established trade.

Sometimes political turns of phrase are just careless, inadequately thought through. Granted, a politician’s public address is often put together at a pace. Time is so remarkably tight that phrasing and formulations are not interrogated as fully as they might be. (Krish Kandiah recently picked up the Prime Minister’s “island of strangers” line and its unfortunate resonance)

But of course, the critiques I’ve listed above are themselves sharply rhetorical. They are punchy. Not drawn-out logical deductions. They aim to make us sit upright and win us over. Or move us to a course of action.

So: is rhetoric the problem? No. Its misuse is the problem. This isn’t always clear. And it’s the reason why simply decrying “rhetoric” won’t get us very far.

I am sympathetic to the suspicion. When efficiency and pragmatism tower high among the canons of public discourse, it is easier to trade in polarising x versus y expressions. Being guarded in the face of such potent idiom is understandable.

And yet the most remarkable public discourses in human history have been rich in rhetoric.

Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial: “I have a dream.”

Churchill in the House of Commons: “we shall fight them on the beaches.”

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

All these speakers knew that bare understanding doesn’t typically move people to action. An impassioned speech, a plea to respond, or beautifully woven prose often serve as the tipping point for social engagement.

Which leads me to wonder, what if a suspicion of smart speech-making ends up stunting social engagement, rather than fostering it? Perhaps political discourse today has gone too far; perhaps rhetoric is beyond repair. And yet: abuse doesn’t mean there isn’t proper use. There is a better way.

When persuasive powers are uncoupled from sound argument, then rhetoric obscures understanding and has become irresponsible.

In the classical era, training in rhetoric was a prominent feature of an education. You might say it was the way to avoid the charge: “All substance, no style”. It was about turning a sound argument into an art form. For Aristotle, rhetoric was about making use of the tools of persuasion—substance with style. But skill in persuasion was not a virtue of itself; it never stood alone. As Roger Standing has reminded us, “the function of rhetorical skills was not to persuade in and of themselves.” Indeed, training in rhetoric was training in responsibility.

In his classic 1950s text Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver put his finger on this. He highlighted that “rhetoric passes from mere scientific demonstration of an idea to its relation to prudential conduct.” True rhetoric, then, is this: the art of lighting up the path that leads from sound logic to good action.

Today, it seems that when it comes to the rules of rhetoric, communicators are answerable to polls and popularity. These ends justify the means, which makes fancy formulations fair game. If style secures votes, then it’s a good job done. But this means the communicator has no real accountability for his or her language. Pragmatism is in the driving seat. In a sense, responsibility has been handed over to the hearer.

This is problematic. When persuasive powers are uncoupled from sound argument, then rhetoric obscures understanding and has become irresponsible. Language is no longer illuminating, but misleading. It is trading on falsehood, or perhaps half-truths, instead of magnifying what is true for the sake of what is good.

Take an example. In the recent parliamentary debate over amendments to the assisted dying bill, the proceedings opened with the claim that “if we do not vote to change the law, we are essentially saying that the status quo is acceptable.” I don’t for a moment doubt the good intent in this claim—securing the most compassionate care possible for terminally ill adults. But let it be said: no, those who do not advocate assisted dying are not “essentially” saying this. This claim is a non sequitur: the conclusion does not follow the premise. It is logically unsound.

Like many tools, the art of persuasion can be wielded carelessly; sometimes maliciously. But rhetoric-free public discourse would make for a colourless and lifeless thing indeed. What we need now is rhetoric that is responsible—responsible to what is true and responsible to good outcomes. These should not be split; as soon as they are, speech-making becomes sterile or hollow. I recently heard the neat phrase: “Some people reach your mind by going through the heart, and some people reach your heart by going through your mind.” Yes, as the Christian faith has always maintained: mind and heart belong together. Give us words that awaken both, like those once spoken by that obscure wandering rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, in one of the most studied and penetrating speeches in human history:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

I pray for public discourse brimming with both substance and style. It might help lead us to better things.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.