The Rhetorical Presidency Made Flesh: A Political Science Classic in the Age of Donald Trump

ABSTRACT

This article revisits Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency in the age of Trump, discussing the debates to which it originally responded, its core thesis and empirical evidence, as well as its impact on political science in the last three decades. The article’s second half turns to a recent critique of Tulis’s thesis by Ann C. Pluta, which manifests many of the misunderstandings that have persisted since The Rhetorical Presidency’s original publication. Habits of thought revealed in Pluta’s misunderstandings, I argue, are emblematic of the political culture that is amenable to the simplistic yet politically effective appeals characteristic of rhetorical presidents like Donald Trump. Elements of the broader political-science world that are on display in Pluta’s article are symptomatic of political pathologies sustained and aggravated by the culture of the polity that political scientists inhabit and purport to study—the culture of the rhetorical presidency.

Keywords:

• American political development
• constitutional theory
• demagoguery
• rhetorical presidency
• Jeffrey Tulis

Notes

1 See, respectively, Federalist Nos. 35 and 36 (Alexander Hamilton), and Storing 1995, 287-306.

2 Regarding the availability of records of nineteenth-century presidential speech, Tulis (2017, 62) explains: “there are no official collections of unofficial speech. I canvassed three major sources for manuscripts or references to speeches: (1) the Library of Congress collections of nineteenth-century presidential papers, (2) the private ‘unofficial’ compilations of presidential speeches and addresses published in the nineteenth century, and (3) biographies of each of the nineteenth-century presidents. … I discovered approximately one thousand ‘unofficial’ popular speeches delivered by nineteenth-century presidents.” In addition to these sources of unofficial speech, Tulis included the official collection of official speech, known as the Richardson Papers.

3 Pluta also criticizes the work of Elvin T. Lim (2002 and 2008).

4 The papers are available here: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/metabook?id=mppresidents.

5 Tulis (2017, 117-118) also points out that William Howard Taft, who came after Roosevelt and before Wilson, began a “popular practice” “of his own.”

6 In so doing, Wilson sought to achieve the Constitution’s own substantive ends by “reinterpreting” its existing institutions (the presidency and Congress), rather than by designing a wholly new set of institutions (ibid., 118). The actual product of Wilson’s reinterpretation—the rhetorical presidency—is therefore best understood as a second interpretive layer “superimposed” upon the “text” of the American Constitutional polity (see, e.g., ibid., 20-22; 205). This view stands as an alternative to those that posit multiple “foundings” in American political development, such as the constitutional-moments thesis of Bruce Ackerman (1993) and the multiple-republics thesis of Theodore Lowi (2009). For a fuller treatment of these alternatives, see Tulis and Mellow 2018.

7 Jefferson, for his part, remained within the same basic framework when he decided to deliver his address in writing rather than in speech (Tulis 2017, 56).

8 Kraig 2004, 209n38, cites several other now-defunct newspapers making similar claims.

9 Tulis (2017, 15) by no means denies that it was a partial cause, as his discussion of “ideas as semi-autonomous factors in American political development” makes eminently clear.

10 E.g., Azari 2018: “Forget Norms. Our Democracy Depends on Values.”

11 Tulis (2017, 234-235) suggests the form such an alternative today might take: “A thoughtful and restrained constitutionally informed president might use Twitter or other social media platforms sparingly and effectively to set a political agenda or to alert the polity to an emergency. As a rare, selectively used resource, one can see a good side to this new technology for constitutional politics. As a routinely used political tool by presidents, it is hard to find any good in it.”