Dr. Ryan David Leack teaches writing and rhetoric in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California.
Traditional values are declining, according to a recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, indicating that few core beliefs unite us as a country. Congress mirrors these divisions. Partisan rifts seem rhetorically modulated, with emotion-charged language running high no matter the issue.
Tune into any political discussion today after a speech and the opposing party labels it empty rhetoric. The aim of such speeches is to persuade the audience of a certain view using rhetorical devices. Yet, if political discourse is steeped in rhetoric, how can we distinguish genuine sincerity from persuasive tactics? It seems we can’t. This type of rhetoric prevents genuine exchange. The question to explore is whether all rhetoric precludes compromise and fossilizes value judgments.
To understand the power and potential of rhetoric, we must return to its origin in ancient Greece. Aristotle knew that most people are persuaded by emotion rather than reason. That is certainly the predominant rhetoric in politics today in which former President Trump excels.
Before Plato and Aristotle arrived on the scene, during the height of radical democracy in 5th-century Athens, a ragtag band of men known as Sophists—literally “wise men”—dominated the political arena. Understanding effective or persuasive communication, they traveled through some 1,000 city-states, teaching young men how to argue effectively in public debates and preparing them for political life. In effect, they argue both sides of an argument to test ideas and arrive at the best course of action.
They also noticed that customs changed across city-states in ways that exceeded today’s red and blue districts. Although the Sophists shared no united doctrine—similar to the gulf between Democrats and Republicans—they employed complementary practices that, if used today, may aid stalemates across bipartisan biases, free speech debates, de-platforming, and so-called “cancel culture.” These situations have in common a core of rigid assumptions on all sides, not amenable to inquiry, exchange, and productive pressure.
Plato viewed the Sophists’ rhetoric as an impediment to the “truth.” Rhetoric, he believed, was only valuable if indexed to his question-and-answer, dialectical method toward truth. Ironically, Plato practiced the rhetoric he professed to abhor to lambaste the Sophists, efficiently lumping them together and denigrating them, thereby warping a venerable title into a contemptible one. Eventually, Plato’s repetitive harangues stuck, and they became known as cheats or wholesalers of words. Trump’s style of effortlessly denigrating his opponents, creating clever nicknames to demean them—“Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary,” “Ron DeSanctimonious”—mimics Plato’s rhetoric.
And like Plato, Trump is certain of his truth. His dialogues exhibit, as rhetoricians know, an astounding skill in evading genuine pressure on assumptions and beliefs. Morality and truth, well-intended they may be, can impede and preclude this pressure, enabling one to fall back upon certitudes.
Could these Sophist-rhetoricians teach us something? Is a more constructive form of rhetoric possible?
The Sophists challenged conventional wisdom. The first Sophist, Protagoras, introduced the "man-measure” doctrine, where humans create and shape criteria for goodness. He argued that some views are "better" but not necessarily "truer" than others. Plato criticized his works as "mere relativism," and Athens' governing body was so threatened by his ideas that they burned his works.
In today's socio-political landscape, seeking truth may be too much to ask or perhaps too much of a distraction to initiate constructive dialogue. On recent abortion rights turmoil, for instance, how can we decide when life “begins” when there is no shared definition of “life” to start with? Truth here, like Protagoras said, is a matter of perception and definition.
Plato believed that Sophists made the weak argument stronger. The Sophists, however, provide a better method for our politics: a practice for exerting maximum pressure on convictions, placing arguments side-by-side, and seeing how they “measure up” to other measures, helping us determine what's best. Although it may not lead to absolute truth, aligning with probable reasoning ( eikos) like the Sophists did in the Dissoi Logoi could counter our partisan thinking by ascertaining what is “good enough” for action today.
Today’s politicians could learn from this method of arguing all sides of an issue. Imagine Speaker Kevin McCarthy advocating to raise the debt ceiling without conditions while President Biden seeks spending cuts. This approach, today called a "Steel Man" argument, led to the Sophists' infamy, but it also led to the defensive and prosecutorial modes of law, where even the “obviously” guilty deserve a defense.
We face in Trump and other rhetors who brand quickly and proffer easy answers to complex problems a modern-day Plato, thereby petrifying deep-rooted assumptions. We need a more sophisticated approach that pressures our convictions through listening to opposing sides. The famous 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger redefined rhetoric as "the art of listening." This may open our ears to the value of community involvement, hard work, and tolerance, which have declined, according to a WSJ poll. To do this, we must be less Platonic and more Sophistic.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.