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‘Gish galloping’ to victory – and to governing again?
On one side, President Biden’s withdrawn from the race. On the other, it’s now on the is-he, isn’t-he-Trumpian questions about the vice presidential choice of the Republicans: J. D. Vance, whose melodramatic back story has led to calls not of “Four More Years” (after an interruption) but “Twelve More Years”. To prepare ourselves for what’s to come, let’s step back just a few weeks and to the enduring matter of how political debate informs democratic choice. Political speech is political action. It’s an example, perhaps an exemplar, of “how to do things with words”.[1]
The “Gish gallop” is the practice of galloping through a string of lies so quickly that no one notices how false it all is. It’s and the subject of academic analysis (Satta, 2024) as well the electoral dismay. It works by inducing “epistemic exhaustion” on the listener, switching off the brain and numbing cognition. This is several steps beyond humbug and even a few beyond what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as bullshit. The practice draws its name from Duane Gish, who used the technique in debates against proponents of evolution. It’s sometimes referred to as firehosing.
Satta’s analysis deals with the way that Gish galloping helps political actors retain power. In Donald Trump’s case, it's epistemic exhaustion with the aim of the resumption of power.
Let’s look for examples in Trump’s side of the Biden’s ill-fated attempt to debate perhaps the most prolific liar in American political history. Here’s Trump’s opening statement during the debate (CNN’s own transcription), with the annotations Biden wasn’t allowed, by the debate rules, even to try to make:
We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We had never done so well. Every – everybody was amazed by it. Other countries were copying us. [Yes. As they have been for decades, a century, maybe two. And still are.]
We got hit with COVID. And when we did, we spent the money necessary so we wouldn’t end up in a Great Depression the likes of which we had in 1929. [Yes. Most of it spent by the Biden administration, having tamped down the opposition from Republicans in Congress, which you had stoked.]
By the time we finished – so we did a great job. [No, not at all by the time we thought you were finished.]
We got a lot of credit for the economy, a lot of credit for the military, and no wars and so many other things. [Partly. If you forget Afghanistan, the war you didn’t end and then moaned about how Biden ended.]
Everything was rocking good. [In part, if you don’t count covid, fiscal deficits, etc.]
But the thing we never got the credit for, and we should have, is getting us out of that COVID mess. [Your administration started the search for vaccines, but you misdirected the population to quack remedies that compounded the problem, undermined your own covid advisers, and then encouraged counterproductive behaviour from your supporters after you were thrown out of office and before the vaccines became available.]
He created mandates; that was a disaster for our country. [Yes, he did; and no, it wasn’t. Perhaps the opposite.]
But other than that, we had – we had given them back a – a country where the stock market actually was higher than pre-COVID, and nobody thought that was even possible. [No, the stock market really soared after you left office, and after Biden overcame your resistance to infrastructure spending. And no, a lot of people thought it was possible.]
The only jobs he created are for illegal immigrants and bounceback jobs; they’re bounced back from the COVID. [Listing even some of the ways this claim is incorrect would bore readers. Listeners have even less time to react.]
He has not done a good job. He’s done a poor job. And inflation’s killing our country. It is absolutely killing us. [Inflation rose, a direct result of supply chain issues after covid and the war in Ukraine, and is falling as surprisingly well functioning markets adjusted to the disruptions. Indirectly, inflation arose from the loose fiscal policy you just took credit for running, but which happened mainly after you left office.]
The annotations break the gallop, apply the brakes, given us time to think. Listen to the pace of the recording, watch the video. The visuals will occupy even more of your brain than the audio can, and much more than the words themselves. And that’s just the opening statement. Gish galloping is most effective when the speaker has the time to prepare a litany of lies and the listener has no time to process one lie before being smacked across both ears by the next two.
Here’s Satta’s explication of Gish gallop:
A Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique where the user seeks to overwhelm their interlocutor by putting forward more claims or arguments than it is feasible to respond to. The Gish galloper’s burden-shifting tool is volume. If the Gish galloper rattles off a dozen claims in close succession, each of which would be time consuming to respond to, they create a substantial burden for the interlocutor who attempts to respond point by point. Rattling off multiple claims is easy. Responding point by point, especially if offering useful responses requires research, is difficult.
And here’s his definition of epistemic exhaustion:
cognitive fatigue generated by efforts to determine, retain, or communicate what one believes under conditions that make doing so especially taxing.
Keep your ears pealed as you listen to the rest of the campaign. It’s a lesson in
[1] “How to do things with words” is the title of an influential work of the philosopher J. L. Austin (1962), based on lectures he gave at Oxford in the mid-1950s. There’s a YouTube series that explains its themes for those wary of the sleep settling in. Many would-be statements are not descriptions of truths; they are “performative”. As an example, Austin writes: “When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c., ‘I do’, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it” (p. 6).
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Satta, M. (2024). Epistemic Exhaustion and the Retention of Power. Hypatia, Online first. doi:10.1017/hyp.2024.1