The Role Of Persuasion In Contemporary Political Culture

The biggest challenges to persuasion in contemporary political culture is speakers are listening to the other party and tend to be a popularity contest. When I think of persuasion, I think of debate and with debate comes rebuttal. Although we are encouraged to listen to our opponents, we do not truly listen to them, but rather we look to cherry pick certain points, statements or words that would ultimately be useful to our argument. This is a modern-day challenge because of the emphasis being placed on winning. To be regarded as an eloquent/ great speaker, there are characteristics that the speakers must embody. With people modeling their speech patterns to meet those requirements and with speeches being redundant, the speaker would want to stand out amongst other speakers, and so they would want to persuade the audience, and rather than tailoring their speech to the public, they would want to show out their opponent and therefore cherry-picking. A classic example of my point would be the primaries debate between the presidential candidates in the 2016 presidential election. Typically this event/ debate is held so the candidates can tell the voters, citizens and the nations what their agendas are, why they are the better candidate and persuade us to either vote for or
To experience good political speech for the most time, one must either listen to NPR or C-Span because other media are mostly interested in only headlines or speakers that would garner attention and bring my viewership and traffic to their network. In a society where the president tweeting habit is more attractive than impending nuclear attack and other grievous events, it’s only fair to say that the problem with today’s political persuasion is that it has lost its substance and is now an empty shell of