The Morality of Spin

Virtue and Vice in Political Rhetoric and the Christian Right

By (author) Nathaniel J. Klemp

Publication date:

01 March 2012

Length of book:

210 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442210523

The Morality of Spin explores the ethics of political rhetoric crafted to persuade and possibly manipulate potential voters. Based on extensive insider interviews with leaders of Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful Christian right organizations in America, Nathaniel Klemp asks whether the tactic of tailoring a message to a particular audience is politically legitimate or amounts to democratic malpractice. Klemp’s nuanced assessment, highlighting both democratic vices and virtues of the political rhetoric, provides a welcome contribution to recent scholarship on deliberative democracy, rhetoric, and the growing empirical literature on the American Christian right.

Abstract
Introduction
PART 1: Existing Accounts
Chapter 1: Deliberative Democracy and Political Rhetoric: Rawls and Habermas on Rhetoric’s Moral Status
PART 2: The Moral Qualities of Rhetorical Speech
Chapter 2: When Rhetoric Turns Manipulative: Disentangling Persuasion and Manipulation
Chapter 3: From Theoretical to Actual Manipulation: The Christian Right’s Two Tiered Rhetoric
PART 3: The Moral Qualities of Rhetorical Context
Chapter 4: Contextualizing Rhetoric: From Contestatory to One-Sided Information Spaces
Chapter 5: Counter Cultural Christian Enclaves: Focus on the Family’s Anti-Contestatory Practices
Conclusion

Klemp (Pepperdine Univ.) examines the place of rhetoric in a free society marked by popular sovereignty. Noting that the merits of rhetoric in politics has been a hotly contested topic within the realm of political theory since the days of Plato and Aristotle, Klemp astutely points out that this very important question has received very little attention at the real-world level of actual boots-on-the-ground politics. In this work, Klemp joins these two approaches, and he does it very well. Building off the work of Plato, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and more heavily from the work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, Klemp breaks down rhetoric into three categories--"deliberative persuasion," "strategic persuasion," and "manipulation"--and proceeds to examine the moral qualities of each of these categories. After establishing his theoretical foundations, Klemp moves into real-world politics and examines the implications of the various types of rhetoric in different contextual environments using case studies of three Christian Right groups. This is a very strong piece of work. Summing Up: Highly recommended.