Garrett Kincaid — November 02, 2023

In last month’s GOP primary debate, Chris Christie made a canned quip about how we’re all going to start calling Donald Trump Donald Duck, because he’s been “ducking” the debates (woah, burn…). It was cringy and disappointing and disorienting — especially since he was asked a question about crime. But it wasn’t surprising.

Chris Christie used 30 seconds of a 90-second response to set up the playground-punchline of “Donald Duck.” That may seem misguided, or at least a little kookie, for someone who wants to be elected as the next president. But Christie’s strategy is not misguided, not in the Age of Social Media! (The fact that I’m referencing his little insult means that it was a success.) It’s no secret that social media incentivizes sensational clips and salacious sound bites. Christie was simply following the playbook: make everything a meme and optimize for viral moments, rather than compelling arguments.

Social media is a gameshow. Anyone can be a contestant, and the game’s currency is attention — the most valuable commodity of our time. To win the game, capture the most attention. To capture attention, abduct eyeballs, monopolize ear-holes, pluck heart strings, and poke nerves. Only the magnitude of the public’s reaction matters, not whether it is positive or negative; it’s all attention. If they’re reacting, you’re winning.

As technology has progressed to bring us greater quality of life, more equal opportunity, easy access to information and education, rapid transportation, and longevity, it’s also brought about new forms of media that have slowly degraded civil discourse. The best way to track this decline is to look at presidential debates through time, one for each new media-paradigm. Buckle up for a rhetorical safari through the wild lands of American politics, from Abraham Lincoln to "Donald Duck.”

Beside me, in the passenger seat, is Neil Postman, who will serve as our tour guide. In 1985 — more than two decades before the invention of the iPhone — Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death and prophesied the modern media-paradigm. Today, we use media almost exclusively as a means of entertainment, rarely as a means of education. This was true when Postman said it, and it’s doubly true today: “In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.”[1]

Over time, as a byproduct of technological progress, we’ve swapped soundness and rigor for sound bites and bicker. Pathos killed logos, and no one has found the body.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln challenged the first-ever political pop-star to a series of debates in Illinois for a seat in the senate. His opponent was the incumbent democrat, Stephen A. Douglas. Over a few months, these men had seven debates, each of which were three hours long and had more than 10,000 people in attendance.

There were no news anchors, no prompts, no commercials. There was just two men speaking in turn, without interruption, as they delivered hour-long speeches. These debates for the Illinois senate seat were of such interest to the public that correspondents from national newspapers attended to transcribe the debates in shorthand. The entire transcripts were then printed in the papers and read by literate people across the country.

These speeches, like others of their time, were grounded in logic, reason, and rigor — punctuated by a series of long-winded dependent clauses that would confuse any contemporary listener for their tact and nuance. Here is an excerpt from President Lincoln’s first speech of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In it, he poses a question to the American people: Has slavery ever been something to unite us, or is it unlike the other goods of free trade? Is it, instead, a threat to our Union?

Notice how Lincoln subtly equates slavery to sin, calling it "an apple of discord." He doesn't come out and say "slavery is a sin," because that would alienate and enrage the thousands of Christian democrats in attendance, but he still gets the point across. This passage sits at the pinnacle of rhetoric and appeals to the listeners' minds rather than their eyeballs or bellies. Compare this to an excerpt from any debate this century, and you'd see a contrast more stark than dog shit in snow.

Radio did not change the importance of speech or audio. Leaders for all time have had to be articulate, charismatic orators. What radio changed was the way people listened, which demanded a new manner of speaking.

Suddenly, the president was in your living room, and his presence was no different than overhearing your uncle from the other room, ranting about current events on Thanksgiving. Suddenly, the president had to sound like a member of your family. President Roosevelt understood this, which is why he held his series of “Fireside Chats.” FDR could speak to American families as if he had personally called their landlines to quell their concerns during some of the most tumultuous periods of our nation’s history: The Great Depression and World War II.

The medium of radio demands simplicity and brevity (because that's how your uncle talks). FDR held 27 Fireside Chats over ten years. Only one lasted 45 minutes. Most lasted 30. And all of them focused on a single issue, aimed to communicate one idea. Forget those hour-long speeches and long-winded dependent clauses from the Age of Typography. On the radio, you need to keep it brief. Keep it simple. Make them comfortable.[3]

Here’s an excerpt from FDR’s final Fireside Chat, on June 12, 1944:

With the advent of radio, words were no longer presented only as speeches to in-person crowds and in papers to individual readers. Your message had to make sense and seem compelling to casual listeners in their kitchens, as they cooked dinner. FDR was competing with the clanking of pots and pans, so he spoke simply and clearly. Otherwise, he’d lose his listeners to the other objects of their attention.

In the Age of Typography, what mattered was what you said — above all else. In the Age of Audio, it was how you sounded. Then, in the Age of Television, what mattered most was how you looked.

President Kennedy was good-looking and charismatic enough, as the gossip goes, to have gotten with Marylin Monroe. You think the American public had any chance of resisting his charm? (Wait, who did Lincoln hook up with? Was his wife as beautiful as Jackie? This is the stuff that matters, right?) JFK’s looks helped him in his race against Nixon, and he was the clear winner of those televised debates — mostly for his presence and presentation. Here’s one of the most punchy, persuasive bits from the first-ever televised presidential debate, in 1960. As you’ll notice, these words lack the weight and depth of Lincoln’s, but remember: for the first time ever, words weren’t what mattered most.

The whole debate, actually, is a little lackluster — both the candidates’ arguments and their emotions. But can you blame them? It had to be uncanny to have camera pointed at you the whole time, to know you’re speaking to a whole nation from a sparse studio.

In the Age of Television, suddenly, everyone expected the president to be pretty. How you looked and how you sounded became more important than what you said. TV was the biggest leap from logic and rigor since the Age of Typography. It completely changed the incentives, changed the rules of the game. To succeed, JFK and Nixon had to appeal to people’s eyeballs as much as their hearts and minds.

We’ve made it — the final stop on our rhetorical safari: the Age of Social Media.

Do you remember the criteria for winning in the modern media-paradigm? Capture the most attention by provoking the greatest emotional response, and you will clean house. What better contestant could there possibly be for that game than Donald Trump?

No matter your feelings about his presidency, it’s clear why he won in 2016. Trump won because he understood the message and metaphor of the Age of Social Media (or maybe because he was just naturally suited for it). The message: “I will entertain you, and it will happen immediately.” The metaphor: a gameshow (not unlike his own long-running reality show, The Apprentice).

If his opponents had understood media as well as Trump, they wouldn’t have given him so much negative press, so much airtime. In the Age of Social Media, any emotional response contributes to your score; positive or negative, it’s all attention, all eyeballs and ear-holes.

We’re now so far removed from Lincoln and the Age of Typography that media has become not at all about exposition or education; it is, unapologetically and overtly, all about entertainment. And — crazy enough — presidential debates are no exception. They are a spectacle optimized for the highlight reels, diss-clips, memes, comedy sketches, and partisan commentary to be posted in the next hour or the next day.

Forgive me for subjecting you to this, but please (try to) read the following transcript in full. This is the best way I can illustrate our fall from the Age of Typography: to render a modern presidential debate as text. (In case you were waiting for it, this is the proverbial "dog shit" to Lincoln's freshly fallen snow.) Here is an excerpt from the first presidential debate in 2016, between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — featuring a news-anchor-moderator-celebrity-person (read "Child-Wrangler"), Lester Holt:

What's so terrible about optimizing for entertainment over education? Why do soundness and rigor even matter? What could be more important than knowing how much Trump paid in federal taxes and where I can pick up Clinton's book? Hopefully, you know the answers to these questions. Without soundness and rigor, we'd have no hope of finding truth, and if we keep on this track long enough, we won't even bother to ask what is true; we'll be too busy amusing ourselves to death.

Well folks, that's the end our rhetorical safari. You saw all the big cats and the wild wombats. Now, there's nothing else out here but a barren wasteland, devoid of life, devoid of logic. Thank you for joining Neil and I today. If you are concerned about the decline of civil discourse and would like to support our conservation efforts, please grab a brochure on your way out.

We live in a democracy. That means, while you are bound to our systems and to the prevailing forms of media, you are free to rebel against the incentive-structures that undermine thoughtful, civil discourse. Within the arena of modern media, you can choose how you consume information.

Every day, every social-media scroll-session, you vote with your attention for the media-paradigm that will pervade our culture. So, vote wisely.

We are each resource-rich wells, containing a finite quantity of the most valuable commodity on the planet: attention. The objective of every social media platform, every news outlet, every product team, is to harvest that scarce resource from you. But you have the freedom to withhold it. You have the freedom to spend the most valuable commodity on the planet in any way you like, in every moment.

So, scroll with intent. Embrace exposition, argumentation, and rhetoric. Seek soundness and rigor, and swipe away from media that doesn't meet those standards. Choose logos.

To be clear, this has not been a regressive take on our nation’s technological or social progress. Rather, it is a sober account of the slow decline of one aspect of our culture and the causes of it. So, before you leave with a dystopian aftertaste in your mouth, here’s a breath-mint of optimism — a look at the progress we’ve made in areas other than civil discourse.

In the glorious Age of Typography, our leaders were debating about whether we should buy and sell humans as property, and trying not to kill each other over the issue. In the cozy Age of Audio, we were in the midst of the most gruesome war in human history; the U.S. deployed the first-ever atomic bombs; and the most popular president of all time instituted internment camps for Japanese-Americans. During the captivating Age of Television, our nation was legally segregated based on skin color, and the beloved JFK was assassinated, followed five years later by the assassination of Dr. King.

Sure, today, we may struggle to construct or comprehend logical arguments, and maybe we care too much about how we look. But at least we aren’t debating the question of slavery, losing hundreds of thousands of Americans in a global conflict, or segregating our schools.

We have come a long way as a society. But if we want to keep it from unraveling, we need to conjure the lost spirit of the Age of Typography. Otherwise, we'll continue to seek only pleasure, comfort, and entertainment from media. If we want to accelerate our nation’s progress without falling off the rails, we need to save civil discourse.