A few days I argued that the Democrats could appeal to the visceral emotions of voters, as Drew Westen advocates and still make reasoned arguments. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, for there’s nothing that says you can’t make an impassioned argument that is consistent with reason.
I’m listening to a biography of Tom Paine these days, and it came to mind that Paine is a perfect example of someone who was able to appeal to both reason and emotion. Common Sense was brilliantly argued, and part of its effectiveness lay in the difficulty Paine’s opponents had in answering his arguments. But the pamphlet was brilliantly effective for another reason: Paine spoke to the common man in his own language, giving voice to inchoate resentments that seethed below the surface but had not been articulated so effectively before. He said very little that was new, but he said it in a way that was the opposite of the dispassionate, convoluted mode in which his contemporaries had been taught to write and argue. Before his pamphlet came out, anyone advocating Independence was a wild eyed radical; within weeks of its publication Independence was an unstoppable idea. Like master politicians and manipulators today, Paine knew how to frame an issue, but he stayed faithful to reason and intellectual honesty.
Reading it now, in the age of content free sound bites, we might easily miss the appeal to emotion that is embedded in Paine’s prose. But his audience didn’t. Maybe Michael Moore is our Tom Paine (he does strike fear in the hearts of the Tories), but things are bad. These days, one Tom Paine is not enough.
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