Watch for the Gish Gallop tonight

The Gallop deals a pack of lies. Does the audience see a full deck?

Bella Silverstein, one of Soul Bending’s more active subscribers, points out a rhetorical technique that earned the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Bella explains, “It's basically a firehose of lies, too overwhelming to refute in the confines of a timed debate.”

It works like this: When a debater floods the zone with a barrage of outlandish claims, misleading half-truths, and outright fibs, the opponent finds herself struggling to counter each one. The strategy seeks to keep that beleaguered opponent from making her own points.

The Gish Gallop first appeared in 1994, thanks to the physical anthropologist Eugenie Carol Scott, a passionate opponent of creationism. Using a hard-edged piece of rhetoric herself, Scott created an eponym out of one of her own opponents, the creationist Duane Gish. He was known for throwing red herrings around his arguments.

If the Gallop works so well to dominate a debate, why did Kamala Harris want the microphones to remain unmuted? Wouldn’t that allow Donald Trump to gallop all over the evening?

Clearly, Harris believes that a monological Trump would come across as an unhinged windbag. And, indeed, some of his more recent, um, statements do seem to escape the political time/space continuum. Mothers killing their own babies after birth? Schools performing sex-change surgery? He actually said this the other day:

“Can you imagine you're a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

Poor Jimmy!

How should a debater respond to zingers like this? The best recourse is an ad hominem attack, going after the galloper’s character: If you saw someone in the street yelling things like this, you’d want them to get mental health support. In formal logic, ad hominem is a fallacy. In political rhetoric, it’s a necessity.

But the Gish Gallop may not be on display as much as the Dems had hoped. Trump’s mic will remain muted when it’s Harris’s turn to speak. Interestingly, the Trump campaign had insisted on the muting. Clearly, they believed that ranting and interruptions would hurt him.

But Trump’s flurry of outrageous inventions doesn’t seem to have cost him much so far this season. One reason may be that people have grown used to them, to the point where a mind-boggling lie becomes mere exaggeration:

Oh, Trump doesn’t actually believe that Jimmy’s elementary school will send him home “with a brutal operation.” He just means young people shouldn’t be allowed gender-affirming care.

Listeners may also turn his fibs into tropes rather than literal statements. When he says illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of this country”? By “blood,” surely he really means “culture” or “law and order.”

Among his more ardent followers, something more insidious is going on. When politics become tribal, membership trumps truth. Calling your leader’s lie a lie could get you banished from the tribe.

This isn’t to pick on Republicans alone. Back in 2015, my wife and I were invited to dinner in Vermont with a group of left-leaning Democrats. They were confident that Hillary Clinton would win the election in a landslide. I made the mistake of saying, “I’ve been looking at the data from swing states, and Trump has a good chance of winning.” Total angry silence. No one talked to me for the rest of the evening, and we left early. Banished.

Back to this evening: To see how tribal things get, monitor the tense the candidates use. Aristotle wrote that present-tense “demonstrative” rhetoric focuses on values: what’s good and what’s bad, and more importantly, who’s good and who’s bad. That’s the tense of tribal rhetoric.

The past tense is the realm of forensic rhetoric, which deals with crime and punishment, convictions and Afghanistan.

Aristotle believed that only deliberative rhetoric, which debates choices that affect the future, is appropriate for political speech. I’ll be looking for arguments that speak to a better, happier future, along with the policies that will get us there.

And personally, I’m glad for the microphone muting.