PDF Summary:Thank You for Arguing, by Jay Heinrichs
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A solid grasp of rhetoric—the art of persuasion—is a leg up in every aspect of your life. Whether you’re trying to get out of doing the dishes, admit a mistake without getting into trouble, or understand the true meaning behind a politician’s words, Thank You For Arguing provides smarter ways to argue and weigh others’ arguments.
Jay Heinrichs explains not only how to persuade people to do what you want, but also how to help opposing groups find common ground, get a bully to talk himself down, and spot the faulty logic others use to manipulate you.
In this guide, we’ll supplement Heinrichs’s ideas with the psychological reasoning behind persuasive tools and provide further suggestions on how to deal effectively with everyday arguments.
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(Shortform note: Many people think that because someone is generally wise, they’re trustworthy in all situations. Research shows that this isn’t the case—wisdom varies greatly depending on the situation you’re in. Seeking out someone with experience ensures that you’ll be getting wisdom tailored to your specific situation.)
Clue 2: “That Depends On...”
Someone with practical wisdom understands that most situations don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution, so they’re careful to understand a situation fully before suggesting solutions. Heinrichs warns that if your persuader gives advice or solutions without asking for clarification on your situation, their advice isn’t trustworthy. For example, if you ask potential dog trainers, “How much exercise should my dog be getting?” a trainer with practical wisdom will take time to understand your situation rather than responding generically: “That depends on various factors. How old is your dog? What breed?”
(Shortform note: This clue is a trickle-down representation of Socrates’s idea that wisdom lies in knowing that you don’t know everything. Someone who is wise and trustworthy acknowledges that they need more information, while someone who is “smart” but untrustworthy feels that they already have all the necessary information.)
Use Logos to Persuade Your Audience
The second persuasive appeal, logos, bolsters arguments meant to achieve the goal of changing your audience’s mind. Heinrichs explains that logos helps you use your audience’s logic and beliefs to make your desired choice look as advantageous as possible. This means presenting the argument most persuasive to your audience rather than most persuasive to you.
(Shortform note: According to psychologists, nothing is more persuasive to a person than their own argument because we have a natural preference for consistency. In other words, we’d much prefer to stick by our viewpoint than switch to a new one. By mirroring your audience’s existing viewpoint, your argument circumvents this issue.)
Heinrichs explains that there are four steps to using logos effectively: finding your audience’s truism, determining the most persuasive reasoning type, defining the argument terms to your advantage, and turning your focus to the future.
Step 1: Find the Audience Truism
You first need to figure out your audience’s truism: a commonly held opinion or belief that represents the audience’s values. Heinrichs notes that different audiences will hold different truisms because truisms aren’t factual—a truism is more like a rule of thumb. For example, “I have a lot of money” is a fact. On the other hand, “Being rich is good because it means you’ve worked hard” is a truism.
(Shortform note: Whether you’re aware of it or not, most advertising these days is meant to tap into your truisms. In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin explains that while older marketing models relied on marketing leading the customer’s buying habits, modern marketing models let the customer lead the marketing. In other words, advertisers keep close tabs on your behaviors and habits to better understand your beliefs and world perspective, and then tailor their marketing campaigns to match.)
Heinrichs cites three ways to spot your audience’s truisms:
1) Repetition: Listen to the way your audience communicates. Often, they’ll have certain terms or phrases they repeat—these are their beliefs and opinions. For example, someone might say, “The candidate’s honesty is refreshing. I appreciate a politician who tells it like it is. With all the misinformation in DC nowadays, you want someone who gives it to you straight.” This person’s truism is that perceived honesty is desirable in a candidate.
(Shortform note: In Difficult Conversations, the authors note that repetition is a sign that someone feels like they’re not being heard. When you listen to—and use—someone’s repeated truism in your argument, you give yourself a significant leg up just by demonstrating that you’ve been listening closely to them.)
2) Rejection: If you present a choice that your audience rejects, listen to the phrases they use in rejecting you—often they’ll offer reasoning that reveals their truism.
For example, you’re trying to get a friend to adopt one of your pit bull’s puppies. She refuses, saying, “What’ll I do when it gets big and aggressive?” You explain that pit bulls aren’t necessarily an aggressive breed. “No way,” she says. “What if it bites my kid?” You stress that socialization and proper training prevent aggression. “Well,” she says, “a labrador would never go after you like a pit bull would.” From this exchange, you know your friend’s truism: Pit bulls are a dangerous and aggressive breed.
(Shortform note: If your audience isn’t forthcoming with their opinions, you can try to spur them on with what Kim Scott (Radical Candor) calls “loud listening.” This type of listening involves saying something that will prompt the other person to react strongly or push back on what you have to say—in all likelihood, exposing their truisms in doing so.)
3) Labeling: Sometimes, Heinrichs points out, people label an idea or proposition to make you feel a certain way about it. For example, politicians call tax cuts “tax relief” because people can generally agree on the truism, “It’s a good thing to be relieved of excessive taxes.”
(Shortform note: If you catch your opponent using labeling, be careful to stay focused on the central issue. Many people use labels as a “red herring” that distracts you from the main issue and sends you down an unrelated argumentative path.)
Step 2: Decide On the Most Persuasive Reasoning Type
Next, in an appeal based on logos, Heinrichs says you’ll use what you know of your audience’s values to either use their truism to your advantage (through deductive reasoning), or create a new truism that they can get on board with (through inductive reasoning).
Deductive Reasoning
A truism is “usable” when the choice you offer aligns with your audience’s beliefs. In these cases, you’ll use deductive reasoning, which uses the truism to demonstrate that your choice is best for them.
Heinrichs advises using an argument that connects the belief with an action: “Because you believe [truism], you should [choice].” You don’t explicitly state that the choice will deliver on the opinion or belief—instead, you depend on juxtaposition to prompt the audience to infer a link between the two.
For example, if your audience’s truism is that the American health care system should be improved, your argument might look like, “If you think the American health care system should be improved, you should vote for the Green Party.” You never state that the Green Party will do something to improve the health care system, but your audience will assume there’s a link.
(Shortform note: The argument that builds out of deductive reasoning is what Aristotle called the enthymeme. The defining characteristic of an enthymeme is that one of the premises that leads to the conclusion is omitted or implied—in the example above, the implied premise is, “The Green Party has a plan to improve the health care system.” Be aware that an astute audience may pick up on the fact that the vital premise that leads to the conclusion is missing—so be ready with an answer in case they ask you about it.)
Inductive Reasoning
A truism is “unusable” if a) you don’t know what it is, b) it seems that your choice is far from your audience’s beliefs, or c) the audience doesn’t have clear shared beliefs.
In these cases, Heinrichs says, you’ll need to use inductive reasoning, or give examples through facts or storytelling that prove your choice is the best one. (You can think of this as the inverse of deductive logic—whereas deductive logic views circumstances through the filter of audience belief, inductive logic creates the circumstances that form the belief.)
For example, your audience can’t agree on whether the health care system needs improvement, so you can’t use it as your truism. Change your reasoning to inductive—create proof that the Green Party is the best choice: “Studies show that cities with Green Party leadership have lower levels of pollution and higher levels of regular exercise. So, these cities pump fewer taxpayer dollars into Medicare and put more into education and infrastructure. I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see my taxes fixing our roads instead of being unnecessarily spent on preventable diseases! The Green Party can make that happen.”
(Shortform note: Heinrichs’s section on inductive reasoning is likely an area of focus for his critics that call his suggestions manipulative or deceptive. Inductive reasoning can feel like an especially problematic aspect of rhetoric because it relies heavily on inferences and comparison between non-alike subjects—thereby leading to inaccurate inferences and unfair judgments.)
Step 3: Define Terms to Your Advantage
Once you’ve figured out what your audience values, or you’ve given them something to value, use this knowledge to attach positively regarded terms to the concepts you’re going to argue. Additionally, be careful to refuse any negative or anti-truism terms your opponent tries to place on you. Heinrichs explains that these practices help you put your argument into a context that you control.
(Shortform note: Controlling the context of the argument is critical to your success because of the many subtle messages it sends to your audience. From context, they understand how much importance to place on your argument versus your opponent’s and what assumptions they can make about each person’s argument. If you lose control of the context, your audience may find your opponent’s argument more important and assume that their proposed choices will be better.)
Heinrichs notes several tools for tilting an argument in your favor: creating your own terms and redefining your opponent’s terms.
Tool 1: Create Your Own Terms
Frame issues in a way that emphasizes your audience’s truisms or beliefs—Heinrichs says this lends emotional impact to your argument. Attach positive and appealing terms to yourself and negative or unappealing words to your opponent.
For example, in speaking to a fiscally conservative audience, you might call yourself “fiscally responsible” and your opponent “a frivolous spender.” In speaking to a fiscally liberal audience, you might call yourself “focused on sustainable choices” and your opponent “wasteful.”
Tool 2: Redefine Your Opponent’s Terms
If your opponent attaches certain terms to you, Heinrichs advises that you accept them, but redefine them so they work in your favor.
Imagine an opponent tries to attack your bid to increase funding for the postal service: “The postal service is outdated!” You can reply, “If by ‘outdated’ you mean ‘providing essential services to our country’s citizens for decades,’ then yes, it’s outdated.” Here, you’ve turned the negative “outdated” label into a positive.
Why Do the Terms Matter So Much?
Attaching certain terms to yourself, your opponent, and your argument is important because, as Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind, humans respond more strongly and quickly to intuition than they do reason. In other words, when you attach positive terms to yourself and your argument and negative terms to your opponent, your audience immediately, intuitively feels that you’re the better choice.
Even as their rational brains catch up and start to think critically about the arguments that you and your opponent present, their first impression of you sticks with them and gives you a significant leg up.
Step 4: Talk About the Future
Once you’ve identified the truisms and landed on a crowd-pleasing definition of the issue, move your argument toward the future—that is, explain what you plan to do about it.For example, you might say, “I want the postal service to continue providing its essential services. That’s why I’m proposing a new program that helps get younger employees in the door.”
(Shortform note: When announcing your plan, remember to continually remind your audience of its value to them. In Radical Candor, Kim Scott notes that when you fail to regularly communicate the value of a decision or plan to those affected by it, they start to feel unimportant and disconnected—feelings that may lead them to eventually turn against you.)
The Flipside: Use Logos to Judge Others’ Arguments
In the last section, we talked about logos, or rationale. In this section, we’ll look at ways to spot fallacies—weak, faulty, or illogical arguments your persuader might use to gloss over the gaps in their logic. Heinrichs emphasizes that while formal logic must be correct, rhetorical logic must only feel right. Instances of faulty reasoning, or rhetorical fallacies, are important to spot because logical gaps are a clear sign that someone is trying to persuade you of something.
(Shortform note: Note that an argument using rhetorical logic isn’t invalid due to its use of fallacy—this section is meant to raise your awareness of logical tricks a persuader may use, but doesn’t state that these tricks mean the argument is bad or the persuader is wrong. Dismissing a persuader’s conclusion as false simply because they used a fallacy is a fallacy itself, called “the Fallacy Fallacy.”)
Rhetorical fallacies typically fall into three categories—weak proof, wrong number of choices, and a proof-conclusion disconnect.
Fallacy Type #1: Weak Proof
Heinrichs says that weak proof fallacies often initially seem convincing. However, if you inspect the argument more closely, you’ll find that the proof doesn’t support the conclusion. Examples include:
False analogy: Your persuader argues that because she’s successful in one way, she’ll be successful in an unrelated way. You’ll see this frequently in politics. Many candidates discuss their life experiences—as a mother or a soldier or a businessperson—as “proof” of their ability. However, these experiences are unrelated to political experience and doing well in public office.
(Shortform note: Persuaders often use this tactic in a more subtle way than claiming that their experiences directly translate into ability. Instead, they use their experiences to convince you that they understand you in a way other people can’t, compelling you to trust them. For example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran much of her campaign for Congress on her background as a bartender in New York City. She pushed the idea that, with her background, she’s equipped to understand other “regular people” in a way most politicians can’t.)
Fallacy of power: Your persuader tries to convince you that because someone in a position of power made the same choice she’s advocating to you, it must be right. However, a powerful person won’t always make the best choices, and their choice may not be best for you. For example, if a colleague wants to convince you to start work at 6 a.m., he might say, “The CEO is always in his office by 6. If he does it, it must be a good idea.”
(Shortform note: This fallacy is often effective because it taps into a particular “heuristic,” or automatic shortcut your brain creates to quickly analyze situations and make decisions. Throughout your life, you were likely trained to obey and trust authority figures—this formed a heuristic: When an authority figure says something is the right thing to do, your brain automatically accepts it.)
Fallacy Type #2: Bad Conclusion
Heinrichs warns you to keep an eye on how many choices your persuader is giving you in their argument. Bad conclusion fallacies often give you only one or two choices, instead of the true range of available choices. The most common version is the false dilemma fallacy:
False dilemma: This fallacy frames your choice as “either, or” when there are actually many choices available. For example, if your CEO is looking for ways to save money, he might say, “We can cut either overtime pay or Christmas bonuses.” There are many ways for an organization to save money, but the false dilemma restricts the choices to two types of pay cuts.
(Shortform note: In The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli says that by artificially constricting your options, this fallacy can easily manipulate you into choosing the “better” of the two given options (though often, neither is particularly good). He suggests taking a step back to consider a wider pool of alternatives that your opponent may be keeping from you.)
Fallacy Type #3: Proof-Conclusion Disconnect
Heinrichs explains that proof-conclusion disconnect fallacies either deliver a conclusion that’s irrelevant to the argument, or they create a false link between proof and conclusion.
The straw man fallacy: Your opponent focuses on one part of your argument and distorts it, misinterprets it, or oversimplifies it so that it becomes an easy-to-attack “straw man.” For example, “You’re against abstinence-only sex education? You’re basically encouraging teenagers to have sex and end up pregnant.” The argument shifts from the complex issue of sex education toward the simple, easy-to-attack issue of whether to encourage teen pregnancy.
(Shortform note: It can be frustrating to have your opponent distort your argument in this way, but be careful not to engage with their distortion. This is what they want—for you to adopt, in any way, the easy-to-attack position they’ve assigned you. Instead, stay calm and continually redirect the conversation back to the original argument: “I think you’ve gotten off track here. What we’re discussing is what type of sex education to provide in our school.”)
The Chanticleer fallacy: This fallacy assumes that when one incident follows another, the first must have caused the second (named for the fabled rooster Chanticleer, who thought that his crowing caused the sun to rise). In other words, there’s a mix-up between causation and correlation. For example: “Women who own horses have a longer average lifespan than those who don’t. Having a horse therefore contributes to longevity.” This argument assumes that horse ownership causes longevity, but the two are only correlated. It’s more likely that the type of women who can afford horses can also afford top-notch health care.
(Shortform note: If your opponent uses this fallacy to convince you of causation where you feel there may only be correlation, try deliberately slowing down your thinking. Look for more obvious causes by repeatedly asking yourself, “Why?” (for example, “Why would the type of women who own horses live longer?”) and considering the situation’s nuances.)
Use Pathos to Persuade Your Audience
The third persuasive appeal after ethos and logos is pathos, or emotion. Heinrichs notes that our emotions are much stronger than our rationale—therefore, a pathos-based argument is best for accomplishing the most difficult of the three audience goals: spurring your audience into action. Pathos helps you bridge the gap between your audience agreeing to your choice and acting on it.
Heinrichs says there are two ways to use pathos effectively: Tell a vivid story, and appeal to strong emotions.
Tell a Vivid Story
Aristotle contended that one of the best ways to change an audience’s mood is to tell a vivid story. Heinrichs says this works because emotions are built on experience or expectation: what your audience believes happened or will happen. Vivid storytelling creates both scenarios—the event feels real to the audience (experience), and they believe it could happen to them (expectation). In this way, your story builds genuine, persuasive emotions.
(Shortform note: The effectiveness of vivid storytelling is due to the way people’s brains communicate with each other. Researchers have found that when someone is listening to a vivid story, their brain lights up in the same places on an MRI as that of the storyteller herself. In other words, your brain is convinced it’s experiencing the story’s events and reacts to them as such.)
How Do You Make a Story Vivid?
Heinrichs outlines three aspects of telling a vivid story: First, describe the sensations of the event in detail. (For example, the scent of your childhood home or the feeling of your stomach dropping.) This helps your audience “experience” the event alongside you, and they’ll react to it the same way you did. Second, convey emotion carefully. Keep your emotions under control while you speak, but make sure your audience can see that you’re struggling to hold back. Instead of forcing exaggerated emotions (which can feel theatrical or inauthentic) on them, you let them sense the emotion they should be feeling and exaggerate it themselves.
Lastly, keep your speech as simple as possible to let the audience fill in their own understanding of the experience. In other words, instead of telling them how to feel (“Doesn’t that make you angry?”), simply suggest emotions they can build on (“She kicked my cat. Boy, was I livid. I went over there and...”).
How to Build a Vivid Story
Once you know how you’ll convey your emotions during a story, think about how you’ll structure the story in the most compelling way possible. For this, look to Freytag’s Pyramid: a five-part pattern to dramatic storytelling. The pyramid was designed by novelist Gustav Freytag, based on Aristotle’s unified plot structure. The five parts cover:
Exposition: This stage establishes the setting, characters, and so on to give the listener a clear picture of the story’s beginning.
Rising action: This stage works through the story’s conflict—often explaining how things get worse for the main character. This continues up to the climax.
Climax (the peak of the pyramid): The conflict comes to a head and the main character reaches a significant turning point.
Falling action: The main character reflects on the climax and its aftermath—exploring their feelings about the conflict and climax and occasionally finding new conflicts.
Resolution: The resolution simply closes out the story and ties up the loose ends.
This framework carries the reader through the emotions of a story at the right moments—this timing, combined with the right emotions, evokes a strong response.
Use Strong Emotions
Besides telling a vivid story to generate emotions, Heinrichs says there are other ways to create emotions that get your audience on your side and ready to act on your ideas. One of the most effective is appealing to tribalism, or group identity.
Heinrichs notes that the strongest form of tribalism is patriotism, or loyalty to a country, school, town, or other entity. He explains that this feeling is largely due to your body’s oxytocin (the bonding hormone) levels. Oxytocin naturally spikes slightly when you’re in a group, helping you feel closer to other members. However, when your group is threatened in any way, your oxytocin levels go through the roof, triggering strong emotions such as defensiveness, jealousy, and competition—all of which can lead to impulsive actions and decisions.
(Shortform note: Heinrichs argues that highlighting your audience’s common belief or goal belongs in the realm of logos and isn’t part of the pathos agenda to get your audience to act. However, Seth Godin disagrees in Tribes: He argues that having a collective belief is what gives tribes a sense of intrinsic motivation. Without this motivation, tribes don’t feel driven to act or gather beyond the initial moment of excitement that Heinrichs describes—and therefore don’t really qualify as a “tribe” at all.)
Heinrichs notes an easy two-step process to manipulate an audience’s oxytocin levels to harness the power of tribalism:
- Create a strong group bonding moment: Speak to your audience warmly and with love, and focus on what everyone in the group has in common.
- Turn your focus to discussion of a rival group, and make your audience feel threatened—point out the ways “they” hold an advantage over “us,” or ways they’ve insulted “our” group and symbols.
(Shortform note: One thing that Heinrichs doesn’t mention is that certain people are more susceptible to the tribalism appeal than others. Researchers say that people with low self-esteem are most easily persuaded by tribalism because they see their group membership as a central facet of their identity. They perceive threats to their group as threats to themselves, and therefore react more strongly than someone with high self-esteem and a sense of identity outside the group.)
The Flipside: Use Pathos to Judge Others’ Arguments
When you understand pathos, it’s easier to see when someone is trying to emotionally manipulate you or bully you until they get an emotional rise out of you. Heinrichs recommends two ways to gain the upper hand in these situations:
Method #1: Appeal to Your Audience
If your argument has an audience, they can likely see that the person trying to get a rise out of you isn’t a good person, and they’ll feel sympathy toward you. Heinrichs urges you to compound their sympathy by demonstrating that you’re the bigger person: Stay calm and try joking about the situation, revealing the contrast between your strong character and the bully’s weak, foolish character. (Shortform note: A well-known example of this is Kurt Cobain smilingly asking a heckler, “Why are you here?”)
Usually, a bully will stop when he sees that you have the audience’s support. If he doesn’t stop, continue using the audience's support against him. (Shortform note: Cobain likely could have gotten the audience to boo the heckler out of the room if he hadn’t quieted down.)
Method #2: Feign Aggressive Interest
You may have a bully who “argues” by being louder and more aggressive than you are. Heinrichs suggests that you calmly respond with aggressive interest—that is, ask many questions and push for details. This won’t convince your bully that he’s wrong, but he’ll likely talk himself down: Research shows that people often moderate their opinions when they must explain themselves—unchallenged opinions are usually the most extreme.
Heinrichs explains that aggressive interest relies on pushing your bully to define the terms they’re using. This forces them to consider how their opinions rest on assumptions and stereotypes and thereby takes some of the power out of their argument.
For example, someone might say, “All politicians are corrupt.” Not every politician in the world is corrupt—he’s stating a stereotype as truth. Push him to define his terms: Ask if he really means “all” politicians, or ask him to explain what he considers “corruption.”
Beyond asking for clear definitions, Heinrichs stresses the importance of questioning your bully’s beliefs respectfully, so they understand that you genuinely want to gain understanding. If they feel that you’re mocking or fighting them, they may become defensive or angry.
Consider Your Argument From the Bully’s Perspective
A limiting aspect of Heinrichs’s methods for dealing with bullies is his assumption that you’re in the right and superior to your bully. This sentiment is implied in the outcome of his methods—either your audience agrees that you’re the better person or your bully discovers his argument’s shortcomings and stops talking. Heinrichs doesn’t suggest that you consider whether you’re the foolish or incorrect person in the argument.
When you encounter a bully, psychologists say, taking a moment to consider why you think they’re a bully may lead to a more productive approach than Heinrichs’s suggested methods. They suggest asking yourself three questions to determine why your bully isn’t receptive to your argument.
Are they unable to meaningfully listen to your argument?
Is it that they don’t want to listen to your argument?
Do they feel unsure if they should listen to your argument?
When you consider your bully’s stance from this more nuanced perspective, you may find that your approach is the problem, not the bully’s receptiveness.
If your bully seems unable to be receptive, your argument may lack clarity. Make sure that you’re explaining your argument in a way the other person can understand.
If your bully seems like they don’t want to listen, you may be inadvertently angering or provoking them—this usually prompts defensiveness, which psychologists pinpoint as one of the worst emotions for getting someone to change.
If they feel unsure if they should listen, there may be something wrong with your argument. Perhaps it seems self-serving or otherwise disadvantageous to the other person, or you have your facts wrong.
Conclusion: Rhetoric’s Revival
Heinrichs acknowledges that critical thinking and meaningful argument may seem hard to come by nowadays. He notes that a glaring issue driving this sentiment is our current political landscape. (Shortform note: A recent Gallup poll shows that Biden’s approval rating has the largest gap between parties of any president in recent history.) He says politics are becoming increasingly polarized due to two factors:
1) No one has a clear handle on what “truth” looks like anymore. Most people can’t agree on the value of information we receive from the government, media, and scientists. Heinrichs says this is largely because modern politicians build their campaigns around feelings, tribalism, and an appeal to morals, rather than facts and truth. For example, politicians discuss issues like abortion and climate change in terms of “wrong” and “right” rather than deliberating about an agreeable path forward.
(Shortform note: In Don’t Think of an Elephant! cognitive linguist George Lakoff explains that this framing is deliberate. Often, conservative politicians frame arguments in terms of wrong and right to appeal to their supporters’ cognitive biases, because they know that these biases whip people up into a defensive frenzy that helps obscure the truth of their statements.)
2) Deliberative argument isn’t considered effective against tactics like tribalism, which has become particularly dangerous to meaningful debate due to an evolving understanding of “virtue.” Heinrichs explains that, whereas virtue used to refer to middle-ground, future-focused decision making, we now consider someone “virtuous” if they choose a camp (or tribe) and defend their position no matter what. In modern rhetoric, compromise and consensus are not goals, but weaknesses.
(Shortform note: In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt attribute the fierce tribalism in modern politics to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who believed in defeating his rivals—not working with them. In short, he viewed politics as warfare and formed the political-action committee GOPAC to train rising Republicans to follow similar no-compromise strategies. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that by 1994, Gingrich had achieved his goal: a Republican Party entirely committed to their agreed-upon values and opposed to compromise.)
A Shift Away From Post-Fact America
However, on the positive side, Heinrichs contends that as schools increasingly reintroduce rhetoric into their curricula, more people will have the skills to debate meaningfully, spot weak arguments, and make decisions that benefit a wider range of people. He believes increasing rhetorical education could transform politics: Instead of depending on tribalism to succeed, candidates would have to demonstrate intelligence, disinterest, relevant experience, and a focus on the future.
(Shortform note: Heinrichs’s prediction may seem surprising—youth voter turnout is often low. However, this pattern isn’t due to apathy or disliking candidates, as many assume. Studies show that it’s mainly due to logistics—elections are largely inaccessible to youth due to timing, distance, or (in the case of mail-in ballots at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic) unclear instructions. As young people gain independence and experience, they may become better equipped, more consistent voters.)
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