Zagacki and Cherwitz: The dangers of controlling authoritarian rhetoric

Published 6:00 am Friday, March 8, 2024

As the U.S. turns to the 2024 presidential election, all democracy-loving Americans should be alarmed about the rise of authoritarian rhetoric — a growing amount of it now employed by American political representatives.

The cultural critic Kenneth Burke issued similar warnings in 1939. In “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” published in the Southern Review, Burke admonished against democracy-loving Americans uncritically accepting what he derisively called the rhetorical “remedies” offered by authoritarians like Adolph Hitler, and he called for diminishing the damage such rhetoric unleashes. Burke’s article implored Americans to reject authoritarian tendencies in American political discourse wherever and whenever they appeared.

Burke’s central argument was that political parties vying for complete political power need a unifying voice to be successful. Hitler, who claimed to represent the entire German nation, was that unifying voice for Germany during a tumultuous period following the country’s defeat in World War I.

Burke revealed how authoritarian leaders seductively picture themselves as embodying a nation’s true and pure values and adopt (but ultimately debase) powerful religious imagery by claiming to be saviors who can restore a nation’s lost pride. According to Burke, in Germany during the 1930s, these rhetorical appeals formed the basis of Hitler’s authoritarianism as a governing ideal, leading to the creation of the Nazi dictatorial state.

Burke suggested that such messianic rhetoric endures because it successfully magnifies problems through hyperbole and offers simplistic solutions by blaming problems on others. Indeed, according to Burke, authoritarians need to promote “victimage” by scapegoating innocent others for a nation’s complex problems. Authoritarians devise mythical dramas in which they heroically struggle against treacherous enemies. Hitler demonized Jews and his political opponents (e.g., communists), falsely asserting they were determined to destroy everything noble and good about Germany and that they were the cause of the nation’s ills.

Burke explained that, in authoritarian rhetoric, scapegoats symbolize the evils against which a nation’s people must unite. Authoritarians claim that only after scapegoats are purged can a nation be remade in the image of its strong leader, even as the nation, in purging those enemies, degenerates into despotism and lawlessness.

In addition to the above, Burke showed how authoritarians achieve control by taking over propaganda outlets that spread and authorize their crude ideas. The ideas then infiltrate public consciousness and rationalize all actions authoritarians undertake, however corrupt and cataclysmic, once they turn their rhetoric into reality.

By promising absolute certainty and order that only they can provide, authoritarians rhetorically create the conditions to harm opponents, destroy existing political institutions, and, in the case of some authoritarians, wage devastating wars. This is why, as the communication researchers Richard Johannesen, Kathleen Valde and Karen Whedbee argue, the Nazis’ constant scapegoating of Jews “as parasites” and “a cancerous disease” to be excised from the national body made the Final Solution seem justifiable.

Burke would have been appalled that authoritarian rhetoric thrives today. In Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian appeals excuse his murderous autocratic ways and his quashing of all opposition.

Burke would have especially urged Americans to repudiate home-grown authoritarians who praise Putin, then claim to be persecuted like his victims.

Burke remained acutely aware that it is sometimes frustrating for democratic nations to solve problems through political dialogue and compromise. Democracies require rhetoric to induce peaceful cooperation between citizens who disagree. But they also require citizens who critically assess manipulative authoritarian appeals.

The lasting importance of Burke’s essay is how it reveals the alluring but dangerous rhetorical “‘medicine’” authoritarian leaders offer frustrated audiences who are distrustful of democratic institutions or openly hostile to them.

Burke hoped democracy-loving Americans, then and now, would “know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”

Zagacki is a communication professor at North Carolina State University. Cherwitz is a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin