Noura Ahmed: Today we’re talking to Dr. Thimsen. A professor in the English department, where she teaches in the communications and public advocacy program. She teaches classes on feminist rhetoric, social movements, argumentation and public advocacy. Her research focuses on publicist and economic inequality rhetoric. In this episode we discuss how language can be weaponized to disenfranchise minorities, but it can also be used to mobilize the masses. 

Noura Ahmed: So, what is rhetoric?

Dr. Freya Thimsen: Most people define rhetoric as the art of persuasion. So, it’s been studied for thousands of years starting with Aristotle. And one of the central questions when studying rhetoric has always been, are some forms of persuasion more ethical than others? You know, can you really say this form of persuasion, or this form of public speech is an ethical one? I mean obviously there’s a distinction to be made between lying and telling the truth when you’re persuading but then also is it more ethical to use reason or emotion and is emotional persuasion something that we can embrace in the public sphere? And it’s a tricky question when it comes to rhetoric, because you know, emotion is what gets people engaged, right. Emotion helps people care about whatever is being talked about, whatever kind of political speech is happening, but there also always feels like there’s a kind of opportunity for manipulation and abuse. And so, it’s very hard to have good political speech that isn’t emotional in some way but when it is sometimes people will judge it for being too emotional and so, you know, should emotions be expressed in like a tactical way or a really raw way? And those are some tricky questions that come up in the study of rhetoric in the broadest terms.

Noura Ahmed: So, it’s kind of like just presenting facts and figures to people about poverty versus bringing in testimonials about people who live in poverty? 

Dr. Freya Thimsen: Yeah, first person narratives. Things like that. Yeah, they tend to grab people’s attention, be more accessible. People can identify with a real human as opposed to the data which is maybe more accurate in some ways and can give a clearer picture of some things, but like you say it’s going to have a limited impact. 

Eliza Craig: When is rhetoric the most powerful? 

Dr. Freya Thimsen: Rhetoric is always powerful. In its good forms, in its bad forms, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. I mean Aristotle’s original definition of rhetoric was the available means of persuasion that get mobilized in the absence of knowing exactly what to do. So, sometimes the sort of policy course is very clear. Everyone knows what the best idea is, but sometimes we have to act in the face of uncertain and incomplete information, so for instance, like a pandemic. People are trying to figure out what to do all the time without knowing what the best course is and so you have to persuade people. You have to kind of mobilize the best reasons you can come up with in order to figure out what needs to happen next. And I think that’s what politics is a lot of the time. Figuring out What to do in the absence of any clear course so people have to persuade each other and that’s not a science it’s an art. 

Eliza Craig: Could you talk a little bit about the origins of rhetoric and their relations to democratic ideals? 

Dr. Freya Thimsen: Yeah, that’s a big question. You know, a lot of people like to point at ancient Greece as the origin of democracy, of democratic practice because the ancient Greeks really pioneered a lot of practices of collective self-rule. Of course, their form of self-rule, their form of democracy excluded a lot of people. It excluded women. They held slaves. There were a lot of people in ancient Greek society that were not allowed to participate in politics It was mostly just land-owning men who participated in democratic politics in Greece. And so, I think it’s important to not idealize that kind of early Greek version of democracy but it’s also important I think, to note that the Founders of the U.S. weren’t particularly excited about democracy either. They didn’t see the government of the United States as fundamentally democratic; they saw it as being a republican government and also with wealthy landowning men doing most of the work of governance. 

Eliza Craig: So, you, our rhetoric expert, likely see rhetoric as vital to democracy or no? 

Dr. Freya Thimsen: Yeah, I think that there’s no getting away from it. Kind of what I was saying before which is sometimes, we have to act in the face of uncertain information and there’s no pure information to tell us what to do all the time. The government is always in negotiations between different perspectives and acting in the face of uncertain information and so rhetoric is unavoidable, and it can’t be boiled down to just the most reasonable or the most true argument. It’s always kind of a process of drawing people in and making them care while at the same time you create with them a vision of what’s possible. 

Eliza Craig: In what ways does rhetoric preserve democratic values?

Dr. Freya Thimsen: I do really think that democracy is a matter of dissent. A lot of people really believe that democracy is a form of government. So, people who are voting, selecting their leaders by free open and accessible elections, that’s a democracy. And I think that that form of government is a good one and it’s good to have people choosing their leaders but I think that when you really see democracy at work it’s usually kind of like in the middle of a crisis or a big upheaval. People are really trying hard and in like a mass way are getting involved in ways that go way beyond voting in elections. I think that’s what democratic politics really looks like. 

When you have that sense of like, we don’t really know what to do here and we really don’t know what's going to happen and so we’re all going to get involved and weigh in because if we don’t the result is going to be bad. And very often that looks like people saying, “The people we’ve elected aren’t getting it done. There’s a problem here that’s much bigger than our current government can handle and so we need a different kind of mass mobilization”

Dr. Freya Thimsen: For me easily identifiable as democracy. So social movements are a great example of that. Sometimes social movements are working hard to get people elected or to influence people who have been elected and that work is really important but sometimes it’s a matter of really trying to change the way of thinking about society and values, and deeper issues and how things are structured and how goods and resources are distributed. You know, to really raise consciousness, to change the culture, to have an impact on how people live especially, in the twentieth and twenty-first century, that work has been really central to what social movements do. And it goes well beyond trying to get the right case in front of the supreme court or trying to get the right president in the office. 

Noura Ahmed: When things get a little too much into the facts and the figures and talk about this pie chart, how that kind of excludes people and how leaning more into the testimonials of rhetoric is more persuasive and can include more people but it might be more dishonest.  

Dr. Freya Thimsen: I think your intuition of that is exactly right. That if you see experts as the people who are most qualified to govern then all of the data, all of the facts sure the experts can kind of handle those things and figure out what to do, but if you’re going to have real rule by the people, if the people are going to rule themselves, if there’s going to be mass participation in government where people have a say in their own destiny, then you have to figure out how to get people involved. Which like you say, just having forms of persuasion that are more accessible, that are more relatable. Figuring out how to turn that data into something that means something to people even if they don’t have that expert background. I think that that’s a great point.

Dr. Freya Thimsen: There’s an argument implicit in what you’re saying, that I agree with, and I think is really important. I think that right now one of the terms that is used to explain good political rhetoric or to identify good political rhetoric, I guess, is something like civility. People are really worried about something like polarization in politics and so they say, everyone needs to be more civil to each other.

Dr. Freya Thimsen: So, in addition to politics being more informed by expert knowledge, they’ll say, we all need to be more polite, respectful ect. And I think that that way of formulating political rhetoric is very often used to exclude people as well. People who are impassioned, people who are angry, people who are really concerned about injustice. If they're not being civil, they’re aiding polarization. I think that’s another kind of way of framing political rhetoric that can be exclusionary and leave people out. 

Noura Ahmed: That kind of reminds me of the Colin Kaepernick kneeling, and that people were like, “That’s so disrespectful.” And now with the current protests people are like, “Why can’t they do this quietly and respectfully?” So, it’s kind of seems like that discourse around civility can never be met. That it’s never something that you can win at and that it just excludes certain conversations.   

Dr. Freya Thimsen: Exactly. The Colin Kaepernick example is a perfect example of sort of saying, well no matter what people do that idea of the civil and the uncivil; the respectful and the excessive forms of political speech can always be mobilized to sort of delegitimize people who, you know, are engaging in forms of political speech that have long histories and that have been very effective and important in many points in the past in the U.S. and all over the world. I think that’s a great example.

Noura Ahmed: How does political rhetoric create hysteria? 

Dr. Freya Thimsen: You know, hysteria is a tricky word. The etymology of the word is closely tied to hysterectomy, right, this identification of feminine anatomy. So, like, there’s this idea that hysteria is this uncontrolled feminine emotion. There’s a set of gender connotations. So, you know, to call something hysterical brings in those connotations. Which is like a woman out of control. Do you know what I mean?

Eliza Craig: Totally.

Dr. Freya Thimsen: But at the same time the connection between political rhetoric and that kind of uncontrolled emotional expression and social media, I think that those things are connected in an important way. Because a lot of what we’ve seen in the transformation of the news environment is the kind of clickbaitification of the news and so headlines are increasingly sensational. People increasingly scroll through headlines without reading the substantive news articles and so I think that the way that social media creates these sort of niche markets where people are just kind of consuming opinions that they already agree with in ways that are sort of self-gratifying in a shallow way. So, I’m going to follow people who I agree with, I’m gonna read the headlines that I agree with, I’m going to use the news to confirm the beliefs that I already had and make me feel more self-righteous about the beliefs that I already have. And we’re all guilty of this on some level. People will talk about echo chambers. That’s one way to talk about it, but it’s important to be aware of that as a dynamic. You know, I don’t necessarily advise people like my students to go out and start reading Breitbart, like just to get a balanced opinion. I wouldn’t go that far but I do think that it’s important to kind of seek out longer more complicated forms of journalism and engage in a deeper explanation of the issues and that aren’t just trying to get you to like them and recirculate them because the headline says something in a snarky way. 

Eliza Craig: So, I’m curious if you have any thoughts about the way that media consumption and news consumption has changed and the connotations that that holds?  

Dr. Freya Thimsen: I think that you’re saying the exact situation, which is that news consumption happens almost entirely online and some people will subscribe to a specific news production agency, you know, what might have formally been a newspaper or something that might be called a blog or whatever. And they’ll get their news. They have some kind of identification or loyalty to that news agency but a lot of the time we’re just getting whatever our friends repost. And there’s that filter of you know, who are we friends with, who’s following us or who are we following? So, we’re already kind of opting into the sensibilities of people who are like us, people who agree with us. But I think the kind of backdrop for all that is the way that news media has been consolidated. 

Dr. Freya Thimsen: There have been a few big agencies that have purchased most of for instance the local newspapers in the country and so it’s really hard to get local news. It’s something that everybody is feeling right now. We all kind of want to know what’s happening in our area.  Like, what are the infection rates? What is the government doing right around here? And it’s really hard to get the news because of how so many local newspapers have been kind of swept up into bigger agencies. And traditionally newspapers haven’t been very profitable and certainly television news was never designed to be profitable. It used to operate at a loss. So, like, the big news agencies like NBC, CBS, those kind of legacy news agencies, used to run their news agencies at a loss. The news agency was never expected to turn a profit. It was a prestige business. It was like yeah; we make enough money on entertainment so we can provide this public service. And of course, now the news has been totally reconceptualized so something more enmeshed in entertainment and it’s supposed to be profitable in its own terms. Some people are in the process of rethinking that and buying newspapers and other kinds of news production companies with other motivations other than, you know figuring out a way to make them profitable. And so, there’s maybe a shift back to that kind of idea of owning a newspaper as a matter of a public services and prestige rather than for money. 

Noura Ahmed: So, Dr. Thimsen, how can political rhetoric be weaponized with dog whistles like, super-predator and welfare queen?

Dr. Freya Thimsen: Here again your question is saying it already. I think that those are really good terms to bring attention to and we have, especially with a term like a welfare queen. Decades of really insightful African Americanist scholarship on where that term came from and what some of the problems with it are. Also, how its racial connotations really misrepresent the nature of welfare in the United States. I mean most people who receive what we think of as welfare benefits, public assistance in various kinds, most of them are white and the vast majority of them are white. Like, African American women receive very few of those benefits. And so, I think a concept like that and the way that it can be unpacked has revealed a lot of those biases and assumptions but, the whole idea of a dog whistle is a concept that I’ve kind of struggled with a little bit, because I feel like there’s so much political language that works that way. 

Dr. Freya Thimsen: That’s used by the right and the left, that you hear a certain term and you can already sort of draw out what some of the assumptions are of the people who are making it and so the real problem comes when terms like that are supposed to be value neutral and then the accusation is, well the other people’s terms are not value neutral. Like, they’re biased, but our language is neutral. And I think that when the right criticizes the left it comes in this context. It comes in terms of like a critique of something like political correctness. That’s one way of saying, oh that’s just political correctness to use that language.

Dr. Freya Thimsen: And I think one of the things activists on the left and commentators on the left are a little bit more honest about is they’re like, “no we’re picking these words for a reason. Like, we’re not going to pretend that they are the most true, the most accurate, the most transparent or value neutral. Our values are in the words and we want to claim that and we’re picking these words because of their values. Not to sort of pretend that the words don’t have value.”

Dr. Freya Thimsen: And so, take for instance like recent...It’s hard to talk about without already using the words. But like the difference between using the word riot versus protest. In describing what’s been going on in the cities in the U.S. What is it you know? And Sometimes you’ll see a newspaper use the word unrest, right. It’s sort of like so I’m trying to be value neutral or whatever, but most people are going to say riots or they’re going to say protest. There’s a whole set of assumptions about what’s going on there that is built in. Or like illegal aliens versus undocumented immigrants. So, people who are very critical of immigration policy or are critical of immigrants are going to say illegal aliens. They really want to exclude people. They don’t want anyone coming from outside the country. They want to demonize those people and make all kinds of claims about what they do to us. They have this distinction between us and them. There’s not that recognition that there’s something about the values that underlay this word choice that I’m going to defend, whereas if somebody says undocumented immigrant they’re ten times more likely to be like, no I’m choosing these words for a reason and I don’t want to say illegal alien. I think this is better terminology. It’s not because it’s more accurate, it’s because it really reflects the values that I think everyone can get behind. 

Dr. Freya Thimsen: And I guess the whole idea of a dog whistle is that only the people who are kind of in the know can hear it or there’s something invisible about it but I think, - well I’m not sure if that’s actually the case. I think that most people when they hear a term like super-predator or welfare queen then you’re like, that's not invisible. Like that’s telling me where you’re coming from and whether I agree with you or don’t. You know, I think a lot gets communicated that’s not below the surface, it’s kind of above the surface at this point. People are looking for those signs and signals. Everybody is. 

Eliza Craig: I was wondering if there’s sort of any historical social movements maybe related to the feminist cause where a certain phrase or rhetoric that has become symbolic of a cause that has shifted a public understanding? 

Freya Thimsen: In terms of feminist politics I think that the whole idea of the personal is political has had a big impact on not just feminism but a range of movement politics. That idea which is strongly associated with feminism, I don’t think it can be totally divorced from black liberation politics of the 60’s which was definitely attuned to the ways of people’s personal experiences of racism and discrimination shaped the way that they were able to see and understand and engage in politics. You know, feminism and black liberation politics have a very tight history in the 1960’s and 70’s but nevertheless it is associated with feminism.

Freya Thimsen: You know, that idea that how it is that you live and what your experiences of living with a certain identity and a set of experiences of social inequality is the best way to understand how political change needs to happen. That idea wasn’t as powerful before that phrase but ultimately when it comes to slogans like that it’s hard to dissociate from all the hard work that’s done year after year. Printing mailers organizing meetings. I mean it’s hard to say well the slogan did it. I mean, there’s a lot of really hard work by thousands and thousands of people that did it and a lot of it wasn’t visible in the way that the slogan is something that you could say is something that is visible. I think it’s a little hard to say well, these words did this. I mean like in the Occupy movement you could say, we are the 99 percent. And this idea of the 99 percent, I mean obviously it's gotten a lot of traction, like we still see that kind of phrasing to describe economic equality. It’s kind of got hold of our imaginations in the way that we are able to see these huge gaps in to access to resources that are in our society, but I think to say, well it’s the words themselves versus all of the labor of all of the people who’ve been working on the ground for years and in some cases decades to try and create change, to bring people together, and learn from their past mistakes and learn from movements history and there’s a lot there so…

Eliza Craig: It is interesting the association the words come to have with the movements. 

Freya Thimsen: Yeah, it definitely is. I think that right now when people use a word like a movement. Like, oh it’s a movement, right? A lot of times what they’re talking about is a hashtag. You know when people say, it’s a movement they’re talking about Metoo or Black Lives Matter. Those hashtags are the movement. The movement is the hashtag. And hashtags are doing a tremendous amount of work to get people together and kind of consolidate and draw into the conversation people with similar sentiments and concerns and to raise awareness and to raise the profile of certain kinds of problems. And so, hashtags are an interesting development in movement politics but as a scholar of social movements I tend to think of a movement as something a little bit bigger and more long term than a hashtag. 

Dr. Freya Thimsen: I mean we have fifty, sixty years, or seventy years of movement politics in some of these areas and activist right now are very much aware of their own history and all the people who came before them and who have learned lessons the hard way about what kind of things work and what kinds of things don’t work and how to fight different kinds of battles on the ground. And so I tend to think of the movement as the sort of more long term historical group of activities that people really identity with when they’re kind of deeper into the work and the hashtags are an important part of that right now but I think sometimes when it’s like, well the Metoo movement but it’s like yeah, but there’s a feminist movement that happened for quite a long time before that and Metoo is an important part of that. Super important. And social media hashtag activism it’s really interesting and it is really different than the forms of movement rhetoric that have come before and I think it’s totally appropriate to say, wow what is this? How’s it working? Because it really is something different. The types of tactics, it’s good to make note of what those differences are without losing sight of the kind of crusty perspective of, we’ve been around for a while. I think they’re both needed.

Eliza Craig: In your studies but also just experiencing of movements of the last decade do you find that the hashtag activism is unsubstantiated? There’s this discussion now about performative activism on social media. Like I’ve noticed that a lot of my peers who don’t typically engage ideas of race posting about Black Lives Matter and then maybe moving on. Is there any part of hashtag activism that is just to make the individual feel self-righteous and then move on? 

Freya Thimsen: It seems inevitable I guess for some people that that’s what it is in a lot of instances. There’re certain moments when it becomes a problem. Like when white allies are trying to take credit for the work that people of color have done. They’re like, oh yeah, Black Lives Matter and I’m going to plan this thing without consulting any people of color. I’m going to collect money for it even though other people are doing most of the work and all kinds of ways in which the labor of people of color and black people and black activists are sort of sidelined by people who think they can kind of swoop in. And I suppose it’s also the case that for a lot of people it’s just, oh this is trending right now, I should do it too. That’s it. But that kind of gets into a bigger set of questions about the role social media has in movement activism. And there’s a couple schools of thought on it. Some people really believe that taking that step of advocating for things of social media is an important first step and that it’s like the first rung on a ladder of engagement or something. Like, if you do that first then you’re more likely to go do something else. Maybe you go to a meeting, maybe you contribute to planning a bigger event, maybe you donate money, maybe you get involved. And so, for people it’s the first step in a longer process for some people. I mean obviously, some people think that it dissipates energy. So, people care about an issue. They see the problem. They want to be involved and they're like oh, I like it and I reposted it and that’s as far as it goes when if they didn’t have that outlet then maybe they would have done more. And all they get is that sense of self-righteous fulfillment from it instead of doing something that would have been in the end more effective, but the reality is that for some people it’s one and for others it’s the others. You can’t make generalizations. Social media’s definitely creating opportunities to raise awareness about issues and its part of a space that didn’t exist before and we’ve yet to see real fundamental changes and governmental structures as a result of raising that awareness. And that may just be we haven’t gotten there yet but it’s coming, or it might be that people need to really rethink, like how they’re organizing in order to change more permanent structures and not just what people believe but where the power really resides.