2
Metaphor in Political Discourse
2.1 Metaphor and political thinking
2.1.1 Introduction – Gordon Brown’s ‘moral compass’
In this chapter I will develop the argument that in political contexts
metaphor can be, and often is, used for ideological purposes because it
activates unconscious emotional associations and thereby contributes to
myth creation: politicians use metaphor to tell the right story. I explain
my understanding of the term ‘metaphor’ and provide a number of illustrations
of the everyday, conventional metaphors that are the bread and
butter of political language. I hope to demonstrate how, rhetorically,
metaphors contribute to mental representations of political issues, making
alternative ways of understanding these issues more difficult and in
so doing ‘occupy’ the mind. However, I will also explain how metaphors
are contested by illustrating how the same type of metaphor may be
used by a politician’s critics to convey a completely different evaluation
from the one that was originally intended. In doing this I hope
to show – both in this chapter and the remainder of the book – how
analysis of metaphors contributes to our knowledge of political rhetoric
by enabling us to understand how world views are communicated
persuasively in language.
In this section I will illustrate how metaphor becomes persuasive
through establishing moral credibility (ethos). When announcing his
successful candidacy for leadership of the Labour Party in May 2007
at a critical point near the beginning of the speech leading up to the
announcement, Gordon Brown used the expression ‘moral compass’:
For me, my parents were – and their inspiration still is – my moral
compass. The compass which has guided me through each stage of my
28
Metaphor in Political Discourse 29
life. They taught me the importance of integrity and decency, treating
people fairly, and duty to others. And now the sheer joy of being a
father myself – seeing young children develop, grow and flourish –
like for all parents, has changed my life. Alongside millions juggling
the pressures of work, I struggle too to be what I want to be – a good
parent.
The moral compass metaphor makes an appeal based on ethos as he
describes himself as struggling to pass on a legacy of good parenting that
he has inherited from his parents. By referring to ‘like for all parents’,
he is broadening the metaphor frame to imply that he is a benevolent
and typical ‘parent’ of Britain; he is activating a highly pervasive
conceptual metaphor in politics: THE NATION IS A FAMILY. Ideas of
the national family (as in ‘motherland’ and ‘fatherland’) are persuasive
because the family symbolises a source of security, and the desire
to protect the family is at the basis of moral systems and therefore
contributes to the impression that a politician has the right intentions.
The metaphor fitted with a political image based on high morals
that had gained credence as he was already well known to the British
public – having been Chancellor of the Exchequer for a number of years.
Lakoff sees ‘family’ metaphors as central in political discourse and argues
that different projections of the metaphor distinguish between left- and
right-wing world views:
I believe that the Nation As Family metaphor is what links conservative
and liberal worldviews to the family-based moralities we
have been discussing. I believe that this metaphor projects the Strict
Father and Nurturant Parent moral systems onto politics to form the
conservative and liberal political worldviews. (Lakoff 2002: 154)
When referring to ‘his moral compass’ Brown may have been drawing
on THE NATION IS A FAMILY metaphor, although it was not entirely
clear what type of parent he considered himself as he goes on to say:
‘These are for me the best of British values: responsibilities required in
return for rights; fairness not just for some but all who earn it.’ The idea
of ‘earning’ fairness is a point of view associated with a ‘strict father’
as it implies a frame of ‘moral accounting’; this is the idea that moral
issues are discussed as if they were financial ones, as in expressions such
as ‘incurring a moral debt’, the ‘cost’ of war, or ‘paying the price’ for a
belief. Brown was successful in his bid for leadership of the party but
it may be that his rhetoric contributed to an uncertainty as to whether
30 Politicians and Rhetoric
he would be a ‘strict father’ or ‘nurturant parent’; this uncertainty may
have contributed to his lack of success in the General Election.
The ‘moral compass’ metaphor was taken up extensively by Brown’s
critics; for example, it occurred over 200 times in the Conservative newspaper
The Daily Mail, to question whether or not he did have the right
intentions. These counter-representations portray Brown as a hypocrite,
for example: ‘He always kept his head down when the going got rough
for Blair but we knew all along he was in there, plotting his next career
move with the aid of his “moral compass”.’1
Other right-wing newspapers
also used the metaphor for negative counter-representation, for
example The Sunday Times wrote: ‘Brown’s moral compass seems to have
lost its bearings; instead of pointing true north, it now seems to be jittering
in the direction of ravening ambition.’2
An aspect of the source
domain – here the instability of a compass – were exploited to argue that
Brown’s moral values were also likely to change. Mio (1997) provides
evidence that metaphors extending an opponent’s metaphor are more
effective than those that introduce a new source domain. Analysing
the source domain of a metaphor is therefore a way of exploiting it
persuasively in political discourse.
Linguists describe the interacting effect between some words and their
associated senses as semantic prosody (Louw 1993). These do not always
fit with our expectations; for example, while we may expect words associated
with the family to be positive, we might be surprised to find
that words associated with ‘conflict’ also have a positive association in
the British press – such senses do not usually appear under the definition
of ‘conflict’ in a dictionary. In an analysis of press sports reporting
I discovered that they were ubiquitous and invariably associated with
attributes that appealed to positive emotions such as strength, courage
and determination in notions such as a ‘relegation battle’ or to ‘surrender’
(Charteris-Black 2004). By this association such metaphors have
ideological potential because they evoke ideas based on having the
right intentions because protecting the nation from invasion is morally
justified. In British culture it seems that conflict metaphors activate
mental representations of the evacuation of the British Expeditionary
Force from Dunkirk in 1940 that was associated with national survival
and these associations are then exploited in sports reporting. The
1
‘Is Gordon any Better than Tony?’, Daily Mail, 11 September 2006.
2
‘Gordon Brown Betrays us all to Deliver his Diana Moment’, Minette Marrin,
14 February 2010.
Metaphor in Political Discourse 31
ideological potential of metaphor works by accessing powerful underlying
cultural evaluations that originate in personal, social and national
struggle.
2.1.2 What is metaphor?
What, given its ideological and myth-forming effect, is a metaphor?
Aristotle (in Poetics [Ross 1952]: 1457b) defined metaphor as ‘giving the
thing a name that belongs to something else’. The etymological origin of
the word ‘metaphor’ is from the Greek metapherein ‘to transfer’; clearly,
the central notion of metaphor is one in which meanings are transferred,
the question is what they are transferred from and to – given that
word senses are not stable over time. I will define a metaphor as a word
or phrase that is used with a sense that differs from another more common
or more basic sense that this word or phrase has. The sense that
a word commonly has is its literal meaning; when analysing the conceptual
basis of metaphor, we use the term ‘source domain’ to refer to
this common-sense, literal meaning. The metaphoric sense differs from
the common or basic sense and is known as the ‘target domain’ of the
metaphor. So a metaphor is a shift in the use of a word or phrase by
giving it a new sense. If the innovative sense is taken up, it will eventually
change the meaning of a word that is used metaphorically. It is the
shift in meaning that enables metaphors to evoke emotional responses
and we should recall that ‘motion’ and ‘emotion’ have the same etymological
source and so we may think of metaphors as bearers of affective
meaning.
Metaphors arise from how language is used: any word can be a
metaphor if the way that it is used makes it so. So metaphors come
into being when there is a change in how a word is used: this is why
metaphor is a feature of language use or ‘discourse’. We understand the
‘common’ sense of a word as it appears in a dictionary, and so when
it is not being used in this way we know that it is a metaphor. So,
crucially, metaphor arises from our expectations about meaning that are
based on our knowledge of how words have previously been used. So a
pure metaphor is a word or phrase that undergoes a change of use from
a common or basic sense to another sense that is contrary to the common
use. Metaphor therefore arises only from discourse knowledge (or
knowledge of language in use).
Expectations of the common senses of words vary between individuals
according to their differing experiences of language and what for
one speaker is novel may be familiar for another because experience of
language is unique and personal. However expectations may be socially
32 Politicians and Rhetoric
influenced. A hearer may not initially experience a word as a metaphor,
because he or she does not recognise the sense as differing in any way
from the common, basic use, however, on knowing more about the earlier
sense(s) of a word, the hearer may accept it as a metaphor when
used in a new discourse context. Not to have this broader interpretation
would otherwise exclude many political metaphors because – especially
with rapid recycling in the media – they are often of this conventional
type: we do not immediately recognise them as metaphors in the way
that we might when encountering the same words in a poem.
For example, when a British politician refers to achievements on the
way to an objective as ‘milestones’ a hearer who knows the literal meaning
of ‘a milestone’ may consider this a metaphor, whereas someone
who only ever comes across the word in political contexts may not consider
it a metaphor because this hearer does not know the basic sense of
‘milestone’ – it is simply the conventional way of talking about political
‘progress’. This is why people vary in how many instances of metaphor
they find a particular text: this should not surprise us, nor should it
be a problem. At any one instance in time a word may be more or less
metaphoric for an individual speaker because judgements of what is normal,
or conventional, depend on language users’ unique experiences of
discourse. Fortunately, much current metaphor research relies on multiple
instances of language use stored on computers: these corpora as they
are known give us the context necessary for disambiguation – allowing
us to see how people use words as metaphors by giving them new senses.
Not all individuals – because of their different experience of language –
will agree on which words are metaphors, however they will hopefully
be tolerant of what are metaphors for others. Waves of novel metaphors
exist in an ocean of conventional metaphors. Metaphors change how
we understand and think about politics by influencing our feelings and
thoughts and the question I would like to answer in the next section is
how do they do this?
2.1.3 The purpose of metaphor – conventional metaphor
In political rhetoric the primary purpose of metaphors is to frame
how we view or understand political issues by eliminating alternative
points of view. Politicians use metaphors for negative representations of
states of affairs that are construed as problematic and positive representations
of future scenarios that are construed as solutions to problems;
they also use them for negative and positive representations of outgroups
(i.e. opponents) and of in-groups (i.e. supporters) respectively.
Metaphor in Political Discourse 33
So they combine the rhetoric of right thinking with sounding right and
having the right intentions. Chilton (2004) summarises the legitimising
purpose of political discourse as follows:
... political discourse involves, among other things, the promotion
of representations, and a pervasive feature of representation is the
evident need for political speakers to imbue their utterances with
evidence, authority and truth, a process that we shall refer to in
broad terms, in the context of political discourse, as ‘legitimisation’.
Political speakers have to guard against the operation of their audience’s
‘cheater detectors’ and provide guarantees for the truth of their
sayings. (Chilton 2004: 23)
An important purpose of much metaphor use in political rhetoric is to
establish the speaker as a legitimate source of authority by ‘sounding
right’, and part of this in the democratic tradition is to attack political
opponents and their ideas, not with weapons but with words – as
Chilton explains:
Delegitimisation can manifest itself in acts of negative otherpresentation,
acts of blaming, scape-goating, marginalising, excluding
attacking the moral character of some individual or group,
attacking the communicative cooperation of the other, attacking
the rationality and sanity of the other. The extreme is to deny the
humanness of the other. (Chilton 2004: 47)
I identified these delegitimising strategies in Chapter 1 where Margaret
Thatcher framed political opponents as the enemy by using metaphors
from the source domain of war. Many political issues are complicated
and abstract – about which the majority of people have only a partial
understanding (and often for example in the case of financial matters,
none at all), so it is valuable to political audiences when abstract issues
are explained by image-based metaphors that make them more intelligible
by representing them as visual and tangible. Over time it is often
such cognitively accessible metaphors that become conventionalised.
As Mio (1997: 130) explains that: ‘Because of information-processing
demands, people cannot pay attention to all aspects of political evidence.
Therefore, something is needed to simplify decision making, and
metaphor and other shortcut devices (e.g. cognitive heuristics) address
this need’, so a metaphor like ‘the winds of change’ is more accessible
34 Politicians and Rhetoric
than a concept such as ‘decolonization’. Metaphor therefore provides
the mental means of accessing a concept by for example referring to
something that is abstract such as ‘immovability’, ‘justice’ or ‘victory’
using a word or phrase that in other contexts refers to something material
such as ‘path’ or ‘road’ or ‘iron’. Part of right thinking is then to
simplify abstract issues by activating pre-existing knowledge so as to
comprehend them.
The metaphors most commonly used by politicians lie between new
and familiar uses of language; politicians are not poets and so their language
is characterised by conventional metaphors such as ‘the path of
justice’ or ‘the road to victory’. In a study I undertook comparing the
use of metaphor by male and female politicians I interpreted the greater
use of conventional metaphors by male politicians as arising from
their longer experience of political discourse (Charteris-Black 2009b) –
metaphors contribute to sounding right. Though occasionally they may
speak of ‘an iron curtain descending across Europe’ (Churchill), ‘the
winds of change’ (Macmillan) or ‘a river of blood’ (Powell), and these
expressions were originally creative, they gradually became conventionalised
to become the quickest way of referring respectively to the Cold
War, decolonisation and immigration anxieties. But this will happen
to varying degrees: compare ‘the Iron Curtain’ with the ‘Iron Lady’ –
the first became highly conventional quite rapidly whereas the second
retained its status as an innovative metaphor much longer, perhaps
because of the greater unlikelihood of a woman made of metal as
compared with curtains made of metal.
The sorts of words that are used metaphorically are influenced by
the values placed on what these words refer to when used literally in
different cultures. For example, some cultures place a negative value
on physical conflict and so avoid metaphoric uses of ‘fight’ and ‘battle’
in leisure and entertainment contexts such as sport. In Asia the
expression ‘Bamboo Curtain’ was used in place of ‘Iron Curtain’ to refer
to the boundary between Communist China and its non-Communist
neighbours because bamboo is more part of everyday experience than
iron. Words readily become used as conventional metaphors when they
transfer a set of readily available cultural knowledge associations.
To be persuaded, the audience should initially be aware of some mild
difference between an original or common sense of a word or phrase,
and a novel sense: otherwise classification as a ‘metaphor’ would be a
purely academic exercise only possible for linguists who knew earlier
senses of a word. However, over time, repeated use erodes the status
of a word or phrase as a metaphor, so, for example, once the ‘Iron
Metaphor in Political Discourse 35
Curtain had descended across Europe’ it became the only way of talking
about Soviet–Western relations. When metaphors displace other ways
of talking about the same thing, language has acted upon the world by
colonising rival ways of thinking about it, and in doing so frames our
understanding of the political world.
My thinking about metaphor owes a huge debt to extensive work
of others, some of which I will mention at this point. Conceptual
metaphor theory owes its birth to Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and the
field of research continues to take its inspiration from Lakoff (1991,
1993, 2002). More recent work such as Ahrens (2009), Musolff and
Zinken (2009) and Semino (2008) all provide overviews of various
aspects of metaphor in political discourse. Beer and de Landtsheer (2004)
offer a valuable collection of empirical studies into metaphor and politics
in diverse national settings. Other earlier research that formed a
platform for this more recent work includes Cameron and Low (1999),
Charteris-Black (2004, 2006, 2007, 2009a, b), Chilton (1996, 2004),
Chilton and Ilyin (1993), Chilton and Schaffner (2002), Howe (1988),
Jansen and Sabo (1994), Koller (2004), Musolff (2004, 2006), Semino
and Masci (1996), Straehle et al. (1999), Thornborrow (1993) and Voss
et al. (1992). All the research has contributed to a burgeoning and
rich tradition of research into various aspects of metaphor and political
discourse.
2.2 Metaphor in political persuasion
2.2.1 Right thinking
Metaphor is an effective means for politicians to develop persuasive
arguments by applying what is familiar, and already experienced, to new
topics to demonstrate that they are thinking rationally about political
issues. For example, both Margaret Thatcher, and the current Chancellor
of the Exchequer, George Osborne, have used metaphors based on
ordinary household budgeting to argue about how to manage a nation’s
economy – for example the need not to spend more than one earns.
People understand more about their personal finances than they do
about national finances. Thatcher often used a metaphor based on this
understanding:
Protecting the taxpayer’s purse, protecting the public services – these
are our two great tasks, and their demands have to be reconciled.
How very pleasant it would be, how very popular it would be, to say
‘spend more on this, expand more on that’. We all have our favourite
36 Politicians and Rhetoric
causes – I know I do. But someone has to add up the figures. Every
business has to do it, every housewife has to do it, every Government
should do it, and this one will. (14 October 1983)
Here public expenditure is discussed in terms of the family budget: the
principles of a housewife managing a household budget are used to
argue by analogy a case for how the government should manage the
national budget. It implied that a nation should avoid living beyond
its means just as a family should ‘cut its coat according to its cloth’.
Personal debt arising from domestic expenditure was likened to the
national debt caused by government overspending. The reactivation of
the historical sense of economics as ‘household management’3
creates
a metaphor concept based on personification by which abstract financial
decisions of government are described as if they were the more
familiar financial decisions made by families. The metaphor extends
the knowledge that the audience already has to new situations that
are more complex and leads them to make inferences on the basis of
this extended meaning – even though in reality personal and national
finances work in rather different ways.
In political argumentation metaphors frequently become dialogical
as they are employed by different political interests for their own purposes.
It is part of right thinking that metaphor scenarios are employed
to frame arguments in a way that is favourable to the case being proposed
by the speaker; they do this through a process of foregrounding
and revealing some aspects of a political issue and at the same time
concealing other aspects by putting them into the background. I will
illustrate this by examining a few well-known metaphors that have been
used in relation to British foreign policy since the Second World War,
one of which I have already mentioned. When Churchill spoke of ‘an
Iron Curtain descending across Europe’ this brought to the fore the idea
that Europe would be divided by a solid barrier that would not be easily
moved, it predicted and contributed to reality, but it concealed any
human agency for the descent of the Curtain: as if it were wound down
by an invisible hand in a theatre. The idea of irreversibility and permanence
would have been different had a term such as ‘silk curtain’
been used.
Similarly, when Harold Macmillan spoke of a ‘wind of change blowing
through this continent’ it again concealed agency and represented
3
‘Economics’ originates from the Greek oikonomikos, ‘household management’.
Metaphor in Political Discourse 37
change as if it were inevitable because of the limits of control we have
over natural processes: we may harvest the wind, or find the answer in
it, but we cannot stop it blowing. It concealed the fact that the Conservative
government of the time was not prepared to fight to retain
what remained of the British Empire and this was a way of facilitating
decolonisation by representing it as beyond the control of politicians.
Most would agree that it fitted with new political realities but it did so
rhetorically in a way that would escape blame falling on the government
of the day!
Metaphors provide the ammunition for debate – since nowhere is
Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR
more appropriate than in political debates. Once a particular metaphor
scenario has entered political discourse it becomes difficult to displace
and demonstrates its rhetorical success; as Semino (2008: 117) puts it:
‘once a particular metaphor occupies a prominent position in the public
domain, it can be alluded to and exploited in different ways by different
participants in political debates’. Typically, skilled debaters will not
reject a particular metaphor outright but will draw on different aspects
of the source domain to extend the metaphor to generate a different
inference from the one intended by the person who first used it, as we
saw when the press media picked up on and exploited Gordon Brown’s
use of the ‘moral compass’ metaphor.
Musolff (2006) employs the term ‘metaphor scenario’ to refer to the
explanatory but also potentially argumentative role for metaphor that
combines what I refer to as ‘right thinking’ and ‘telling the right story’.
A scenario provides details of the scenes and plot and therefore turns
a series of political events such as the negotiations between European
states over EU membership into a narrative about marriage and relationships
that is accessible – because – like a televised soap opera – it
involves love and sex. In the classic scenario countries joining the EU
are described as ‘getting engaged’, ‘marrying’, ‘flirting’ and ‘getting into
bed’ with each other. However, our knowledge of the problematic nature
of human relationships also has the potential to be used in political
debates to construe other representations so they might also ‘fall out
of love with’, or ‘divorce’ each other. Another European example was
the discussion of European monetary union as ‘a train’ in which all the
cars of the train – representing the economies of each of the separate
nations – needed to travel at the same speed (Semino 2008: 94) which
argued for convergence and against late arrivals joining the euro.
Metaphor can be used to legitimise and to delegitimise political actors;
for example, Sandikcioglu (2000) contrasts positive self-representations
38 Politicians and Rhetoric
of the West as the centre of Civilisation, Power, Maturity, Rationality
and Stability with negative frames of Other representation: Barbarism
Weakness, Immaturity, Irrationality and Instability. Such contrasting
evaluations were also found in press reporting of political ideas, as
Musolff (2003) identifies how even the same metaphor of ‘a two-speed
Europe’ can be positively evaluated by the German press while negatively
evaluated in the British press. Similarly, Tony Blair was mocked
in the House of Commons for having reversed an earlier decision on
whether to have a referendum over the proposed EU constitution; this
is because he claimed in his September 2003 Conference speech to ‘have
no reverse gear’,4
and his positive self-representation was explicitly challenged.
In this way metaphors may be turned against their authors and a
rhetorical strategy that was intended to legitimise may be used to undermine
this. Skill in debate depends on speed and versatility in extending
a particular metaphor to the speaker’s own goals.
2.2.2 Myth making: telling the right story
In this section, I will illustrate how one of the main rhetorical purposes
of metaphor is to contribute to developing political myths that I have
referred to as telling the right story. One of the major advantages of
metaphor is that, because it is not too specific or precise, it is open to
multiple interpretations and like many persuasive mental representations,
allows hearers to bring their own meanings to a text. I would like
to illustrate this first with reference to the central and all-pervasive myth
of American politics: ‘the American Dream’ and then with reference to
what I suggest is an equivalent ‘British Dream’ proposed by Margaret
Thatcher (although this metaphor is never actually used and is only
implied). I will first briefly illustrate the ‘American Dream’ metaphor:
I came to this hallowed chamber two years ago on a mission: To
restore the American dream for all our people and to make sure that
we move into the 21st century still the strongest force for freedom
and democracy in the entire world. (Bill Clinton, 24 January 1995)
This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of
opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause
of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental
truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope,
4
Semino (2008: 81ff.) provides an analysis of this metaphor and I discuss it
further in section 2.3.
Metaphor in Political Discourse 39
and where we are met with cynicism and doubt, and those who tell
us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums
up the spirit of a people: yes, we can. (Barack Obama, 15 June 2008)
Like all myths, the American Dream serves as a narrative that spans geographical
space and historical time and is therefore expressed with a
high level of certainty. The narrative activates a set of positive associations
and may broadly be paraphrased as ‘hopes for a future that is
better than the present’; but the nature of these hopes varies according
to the individual and the groups with whom he or she identifies. The
metaphoric use of ‘dream’ therefore creates a very flexible myth of an
imagined ideal future that accommodates to personal desires. The narrative
is based on aspirations for the future that are based on a golden
age of the past – notice the use of ‘restore’ and ‘reclaim’ in the extracts
above. Most versions of this myth are historically rooted in the notion
of an ideal community based on religious values that have been lost.
The myth originates in the historical memory of many present-day
Americans that they came to North America to build a better life that
was free from the persecution, poverty or famine that they had experienced
elsewhere. However, it does not have ubiquitous appeal since
there are those whose lives are very far from what they had hoped for
and others, such as first nation (‘native’) Americans, who never felt part
of the narrative in the first place – since their dream time pre-dated the
arrival of the white man.
But the flexibility of the ‘dream’ metaphor enables it to be used to refer
either to personal hopes – since real dreams are only experienced individually
– or, more metaphorically, to social hopes, as when people unite
to understand and realise a shared social purpose. Although the narrative
appears simple, drawing on bodily experience of sleep, it is its very
flexibility (since really we can dream or imagine anything we want) that
allows it to be ideologically exploited in political debate. There is no single
‘right story’ and an attractive myth is one that can tell many different
stories. It is this versatility that activates what has been described as a
logico-rhetorical module (Sperber 2001). The interpretation of a ‘dream’
as private or personal is a right-wing republican myth, while the idea
that a dream being social is a left-wing democratic myth, the fact it can
be either activates the logico-rhetorical module. Such variation in interpretation
led to different political arguments as to who exactly would
have access to the American Dream. The anti-Vietnam War, post-war
baby boom generation claimed that all were ‘entitled’ to the American
Dream, whereas supporters of an American global hegemony based on
40 Politicians and Rhetoric
capitalism held that the American Dream had to be earned and therefore,
by implication, was only available to those who worked hard. This
interpretation appealed to the work ethic value system associated with
Protestantism and was the basis of the moral accounting myth that
I have summarised in section 2.1.1 (Lakoff 2002).
What both versions of the narrative share is that although the dream
is in the future, they imply action or experience in the present. Some
of the most common verbs that precede the expression in the Corpus
of Contemporary American English (COCA)5
are: the verbs ‘chase’ and
‘pursue’ (32 and 27 occurrences respectively) which imply a future orientation.
However, there are also those who are ‘living’ or have ‘achieved’
the American Dream (74 and 31 occurrences respectively) – meaning
that their past efforts have already realised the dream. The rhetorical
effect of metaphor originates in the connotations aroused by words from
their basic, literal senses. When ‘dream’ means ‘hope’, we experience
positive connotations that are not fully explicit in the everyday sense
of ‘dream’. Yet, like a nebula, these positive associations of hope, and
the value placed on optimism in American culture, circulate around
the word ‘dream’ and provide the potential for its use in mythic narrative.
Equally, the creative extensions of the metaphor can express a
sense of disillusionment and deep pessimism by using its antonym ‘The
American Nightmare’– as for example in a CBS debate on the topic of
the global credit crisis:
It would have been illegal during most of the 20th century, but eight
years ago Congress gave Wall Street an exemption. And it’s turned to
have been a very bad idea. Unidentified Man 1: ‘The term “derivative”
is almost becoming a household word.’ Unidentified Woman 1: ‘The
cat’s kind of out of the bag here.’ Senator Richard Lugar: ‘This is not
the American dream. It’s an American nightmare.’ (COCA)
It is the opportunity for multiple interpretations that has enabled the
metaphor ‘The American Dream’ to be used in political argumentation
to express contesting versions of the myth.
I would now like to illustrate how on other occasions politicians may
express contested myths within their own discourse by offering one
myth that provides a positive representation of their own party and an
alternative counter-myth about the opposing party. Margaret Thatcher
5
Available at http://www.americancorpus.org/
Metaphor in Political Discourse 41
employed metaphor in combination with other rhetorical strategies in
developing a political myth that was a British version of the American
Dream: Britain could, like America, become a successful free enterprise
economy. In her 1987 Conference address at Blackpool (after her third
consecutive election victory), a relation of contrast, or antithesis, underlay
Thatcher’s representation of the policies of the Labour Party when
they were in power with current Conservative policies. The basic contrast
can be summarised by two conceptual metaphors that account
for a range of actual metaphors that she used to represent each party’s
position: CONSERVATIVE POLICY IS A LIFE FORCE and LABOUR POLICY
IS A DEATH FORCE. These conceptual metaphors interact with the
other rhetorical strategies such as three-part lists and contrasting pairs
to legitimise the free market. I will indicate metaphors using italics:
All too often, the planners cut the heart out of our cities. They swept
aside the familiar city centres that had grown up over the centuries.
They replaced them with a wedge of tower blocks and linking expressways,
interspersed with token patches of grass and a few windswept
piazzas, where pedestrians fear to tread.
Oh! the schemes won a number of architectural awards. But they
were a nightmare for the people. They snuffed out any spark of local
enterprise. And they made people entirely dependent on the local
authorities and the services they chose to provide. ...
So dying industries, soulless planning, municipal socialism – these
deprived the people of the most precious things in life: hope, confidence
and belief in themselves. And that sapping of the spirit is at
the very heart of urban decay.
Mr President, to give back heart to our cities we must give back hope
to the people.
And it’s beginning to happen.
Because today Britain has a strong and growing economy. Oh yes,
recovery has come faster in some parts of the country than others. But
now it is taking root in our most depressed urban landscapes. We all
applaud the organisation ‘Business in the Community’ – it is over 300
major firms that have come together to assist in reviving the urban
communities from which so many of them sprang.
Each of the first three paragraphs contains a three-part list that identifies
three negative characteristics of Labour policy (the context shows
42 Politicians and Rhetoric
that Labour is equated with urban planners). The creation of a scapegoat
for negative social phenomena is an important way of pre-empting
criticism of the effect of Conservative policies. The fourth paragraph
highlights the positive results of Conservative policy that will legitimise
free enterprise by offering it as a British version of the American Dream.
An evaluative framework is created by the contrast that is set up
between two interacting chains of metaphor. The first is associated with
the negative feelings aroused by death images and includes: cut the
heart, snuff out, dying, sapping, decay; the other is associated with the
positive feelings aroused by life images: spark, give back heart, growing,
recovery, take root, sprang. The first chain associates Labour policy with
death while the contrasting chain associates Conservative policies with
life. These two interacting metaphor chains are employed in a set of
contrastive pairs – both at level of the individual paragraph but also over
larger units of text because death metaphors are employed throughout
the first three paragraphs, while life metaphors occur only in the last
paragraph. The use of the address term ‘Mr President’ serves to draw
attention to the switch from the chain of death metaphors to the chain
of life metaphors. Inevitably, these associations are likely to arouse powerful
feelings. So here metaphor – both in terms of individual metaphor
choices and the conceptual level – combines with other rhetorical strategies
such as three-part lists and contrasting pairs to tell a story about
free enterprise as a British version of the ‘Dream’.
Further evidence occurs in the conclusion to the speech, where she
returns to the life–death theme:
But the philosophy of enterprise and opportunity, which has put the
spark back into our national economy – that is the way – and the only
way – to rejuvenate our cities and restore their confidence and pride.
The two italicised phrases are life images – one is based on an inanimate
notion (fire) while the other is based on an animate one (youth).
Both animate and inanimate images serve to reinforce each other and
the use of transitive verbs implies the positive effect of the free enterprise
that characterised the British version of the Dream. Leadership is
based on such imaginative rhetoric because even though the evidence
from reality may be limited, metaphor assists in the creation of a reality
by a politically motivated representation that is based on fundamental
knowledge that death is to be avoided and life embraced.
There is extensive evidence in the speeches of Margaret Thatcher that
she is able to draw on life images to convey very strong and potent
Metaphor in Political Discourse 43
political evaluations. Further evidence of the role of language in leadership
occurs in her first conference address after Britain’s victory against
Argentina in the Falklands War:
This is not going to be a speech about the Falklands campaign,
though I would be proud to make one. But I want to say just this,
because it is true for all our people. The spirit of the South Atlantic
was the spirit of Britain at her best. It has been said that we surprised
the world, that British patriotism was rediscovered in those spring
days. (October 1982)
Here ‘patriotism’ is associated with ‘spirit’ which is, in turn, associated
with ‘those spring days’. Had Thatcher simply used an expression such
as ‘earlier in the year’, the emotional impact of her oratory would have
been reduced: ‘spring’ is an iconographic choice that activates the same
underlying conceptualisation CONSERVATIVE POLICY IS A LIFE FORCE
that contributed to the British version of the American Dream; this
was a persuasive story because it assumed that Britain still had imperial
aspirations.
2.2.3 Evaluating metaphor in political persuasion
We may think of metaphor as intellectually seductive in argument precisely
because it gains the hearer’s submission, and eventual compliance,
by taking as a premise something that the hearer already believes in
and so avoids arousing Chilton’s ‘cheat detectors’. A crucial issue in
evaluating the act of persuasion is the question of the extent to which
an audience is aware of the seductive intentions of the speaker: where
they lack such awareness there is the risk of manipulation. Van Dijk
explains the difference between persuasion and manipulation and the
consequences of the latter as follows:
... in persuasion the interlocutors are free to believe or act as they
please, depending on whether or not they accept the arguments
of the persuader, whereas in manipulation recipients are typically
assigned a more passive role: they are victims of manipulation. This
negative consequence of manipulative discourse typically occurs
when the recipients are unable to understand the real intentions or
to see the full consequences of the beliefs or actions advocated by
the manipulator. This may be the case especially when the recipients
lack the specific knowledge that might be used to resist manipulation.
(Van Dijk 2006: 361)
44 Politicians and Rhetoric
Metaphor can be manipulative but is more commonly persuasive. What
we may note from images such as the ‘Iron Curtain’, the ‘moral compass’
and the ‘rivers of blood’ is that they are sufficiently vague to permit multiple
interpretations and such vagueness is highly attractive in political
debate because the politician cannot be subsequently held to account.
For example, American politicians cannot be held responsible for their
failure to realise the American Dream since the notion itself is sufficiently
vague that we would never know when it had been attained.
It is an idea that, like paradise, is just around the corner at an indeterminate
point in the future. Yet at the same time these images are
striking and memorable: it is often the iconicity of metaphors that leads
to them becoming historical myths. It is through such encoding processes
that social cognition is influenced by highly symbolic forms of
mental representation.
Metaphor is a figure of speech that is typically used in persuasive political
myths and arguments; this is because it represents a certain mental
representation that reflects a shared system of belief as to what the world
is and culture-specific beliefs about mankind’s place in it. It offers a way
of looking at the world that may differ from the way we normally look
at it and, as a result, offers some fresh insight. Because of this cognitive
and culturally rooted role, metaphor is important in influencing
emotional responses; as Martin (2000: 155) proposes: ‘... where affectual
meaning is evoked, a distinction can be drawn between metaphorical
language which in a sense provokes an affectual response ... and
non-metaphorical language which simply invites a response’. Metaphor
provokes affective responses because it draws on value systems by exploiting
the associative power of language; these systems may be embedded
in a culture where certain types of entity are associated with positive
or negative experiences, or they may be universal. As I have illustrated
above, these associations may not always be ones of which we are conscious
and successful leaders are those who can subliminally connect
with our experiences of life and death.
When evaluating metaphor we should therefore always consider how
far metaphors conceal a speaker’s intentions; one of the purposes of
this book is to develop a public awareness of rhetoric so that manipulation
is more readily identified when it arises from metaphor. This
is important because of the inherently persuasive power of metaphor.
A greater understanding of how metaphor can be persuasive is a
way of ensuring that audiences are not manipulated – even though
they may be persuaded, as when they recognise that the implications
Metaphor in Political Discourse 45
of speakers’ metaphors comply with their own best interests. When
they do, the metaphors demonstrate that the speaker has the right
intentions.
2.3 Critical metaphor analysis and cognitive semantics
Critical metaphor analysis is an approach to the analysis of metaphors
that aims to identify the intentions and ideologies underlying language
use (Charteris-Black 2004: 34). There are three stages to this
approach: first metaphors are identified, then they are interpreted and
then explained. Metaphors are identified using the criteria of whether
a word or phrase is used with a sense that differs from another more
common or more basic sense as demonstrated by identifying a source
domain that differs from the target domain. This is a necessary stage
for metaphor identification because without two separate domains there
can be no transferred meaning. In each of the following chapters I illustrate
some of the considerations that were used in identifying metaphors
in the sections entitled ‘Metaphor analysis’.
To assist in the interpretation of metaphors I employ the cognitive
semantic approach towards metaphor. This was originated by Lakoff
and Johnson’s classic work Metaphors We Live By, and modified in later
work (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1999, Lakoff 1987, 1993, 2002, Lakoff and
Turner 1989, Johnson 1987). The basic claims of this approach are that
the mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious and
abstract concepts are largely metaphorical (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 3).
The claim of conceptual metaphor theory is that because thought has
evolved out of the sensory, motor and neural systems, metaphorical
expressions originate in underlying (or conceptual) metaphors that originate
in human bodily and neural experiences of space, movement,
containment, etc. (Johnson 1987). There is a single idea (a proposition
or a conceptual metaphor) linking a physical with a non-physical experience
– that underlies a number of different metaphoric uses of language.
I will illustrate the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY by considering
a few metaphors from Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour Party
Conference in 2003:
I remember when our journey to Government began ... And what
I learnt that day was not about the far left. It was about leadership.
Get rid of the false choice: principles or no principles. Replace it
with the true choice. Forward or back. I can only go one way. I’ve not got
46 Politicians and Rhetoric
a reverse gear. The time to trust a politician most is not when they’re
taking the easy option. Any politician can do the popular things.
I know, I used to do a few of them.
Blair creates a contrast between his supporters – ‘modernising’, New
Labour whose critics accused it of lacking principles – and his
opponents – traditional, ‘Old’ Labour and its claim to be based on principles.
However, what was in reality a political choice between the
left and right is represented as only a ‘false choice’ through metaphor
(in italics) and is framed as ‘going forward’ or ‘backward’. This frame
is based on our embodied experience that we know what is in front
of us (because we can see it) and that forward movement is inherently
purposeful. These positive associations of forward motion show
in expressions such as ‘looking forward to’ which is inevitably followed
by something good (unless ironic). This positive self-representation is
combined with the self-conviction that comes from the use of imperative
forms (‘get rid of’, ‘replace’, ‘trust’). It is reinforced by a proverb-like
hyperbole – the image of a car without a reverse gear. Layer upon layer,
the idea that he has the right intentions, is reinforced from all rhetorical
angles, including pathos – as he then shifts to ‘sounding right’ by
making a joke at his own expense.
As I indicated in Chapter 1, the essence of politics is about building
trust, and Blair did this by establishing his moral credibility by appealing
to ethos through metaphors from the source domain of journeys
and then an appeal to pathos through humour. The appeal to ethos
demonstrates what I describe as ‘having the right intentions’ and the
appeal to humour as ‘sounding right’. In logical terms the purpose of
the metaphor is to simplify the complexity of leadership by defining in
the straightforward terms of making up your mind, taking a decision
and keeping to it. A very similar journey-based metaphor had been used
by Margaret Thatcher in September 1980: ‘To those waiting with bated
breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the “U” turn, I have only
one thing to say. “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning”’;
here she was conveying her intention to continue with her policies
in spite of a deepening recession and rising unemployment (cf. Jones
1996: 27). Blair’s use of the metaphor was an allusion as he was emulating
Thatcher’s leadership style, but needed to avoid repeating the phrase
‘not turning’ by using a synonym ‘only go one way’. The idea of ‘turning’
is a metaphor grounded in physical experience and refers to ‘changing
one’s mind’; both leaders rejected this as incompatible with a style
of leadership that was based on conviction, resolution and certitude.
Metaphor in Political Discourse 47
I suggest a conceptual metaphor POLITICS IS A JOURNEY is a specific
realisation of LIFE IS A JOURNEY that explains the choice of phrases
such as ‘forward or back’ and ‘U-turn’. This means that there are a
range of metaphors where a complex abstract target (POLITICS) is systematically
related to a source domain that is better known because it
is grounded in bodily experience of movement (JOURNEYS). The conceptual
metaphor takes the form A is B and represents the experiential
basis that underlies a set of metaphors. It does not mean that metaphors
can only take this form or predict all the forms that will occur, but it
explains a pattern of language use by representing what is normal or
expected in language use. The journey metaphor frame provides a mental
representation that allows the various aspects of political experience
to be understood and expressed through embodied experience of movement.
The journey schema is rhetorically attractive to politicians and
leaders because it can be turned into a whole scenario when they represent
themselves as ‘guides’, their policies as ‘maps’ and their supporters
as ‘fellow travelling companions’. All of these entailments of the source
domain contribute to the trust they seek to establish. Identification of
conceptual metaphors assists in explaining the ideological motivation of
language use. The use of journey metaphors and political myths enabled
conflict to be represented as ethically motivated in the discourse of
Tony Blair. Critical metaphor analysis therefore enables us to identify
which metaphors were chosen and to explain why these metaphors were
chosen by illustrating how they contribute to political myths.
Political myths can be identified by identifying conceptual metaphors
that account for systematic preference by a politician for particular
metaphors. I am not proposing that critical metaphor analysis is the only
method for understanding and explaining a political myth. A number
of other and related methods have been developed in critical discourse
analysis by researchers such as Chilton (1996, 2004), Hodge and Kress
(1993), Fairclough (1989, 1995, 2000, 2006), van Dijk6
(1995, 1998,
2006, 2008, 2009) and Wodak and Meyer (2009). Van Dijk summarises
critical discourse studies as ‘typically interested in the way discourse
(re)produces social domination, that is, the power abuse of one group
over others, and how dominated groups may discursively resist such
abuse’ (van Dijk 2009: 63) and goes on to state that scholars working in
this field ‘aim to analyse, and thus to contribute to the understanding
6
A full publication list for van Dijk is available at http://www.discourses.org/cv/
Publications%20Teun%20A%20van%20Dijk.pdf
48 Politicians and Rhetoric
and the solution of, serious social problems, especially those that are
caused or exacerbated by public text and talk, such as various forms
of social power abuse (domination) and their resulting social inequality’
(ibid.). Although the approach taken here is not directly oriented to
power abuse of specific groups, it is motivated by providing insight into
how power is maintained in democracies. This is because I am focusing
on speeches by mainstream politicians addressed to the general public
rather than to specific social groups.
Conceptual metaphor analysis is not the only way of identifying political
myths; it is also possible to draw on other theories of metaphor
such as blending theory. This theory proposes that metaphor is understood
with reference to four distinct cognitive spaces. They arise when
there is cross-domain mapping between two input spaces, a generic
space that includes what is common to the two separate input spaces,
and a blended space where the elements from the two input spaces are
integrated; this blended space has an emergent structure where these
fused elements can be elaborated. This theory challenges many assumptions
in conceptual metaphor theory such as that the senses of words
in ‘source domains’ are more basic or primary than the other senses in
‘target domains’. By rejecting the distinction between source and target,
it also rejects the idea of there being a direction of cognition from
the literal senses to metaphoric ones. Instead, rather like gestalt theory,
conceptual blending proposes that metaphor is holistic processing with
only the blended integration taking place in the conscious mind. I will
illustrate how the ideology behind some complex creative metaphors
used by politicians can be analysed using blending theory. In this regard
blending is simply a further theory that can be integrated into critical
metaphor analysis.
Nor does critical metaphor analysis limit itself to the analysis of
metaphors; it is equally concerned with metonyms. A metonym is
when a word, or phrase, is used to refer to something within the same
semantic field; for example, in politics a date such as 9/11 was used
to refer to the attack on the World Trade Center; the date in some
way stands for, or symbolises, the event. Similarly, the names of capital
cities, and sometimes specific buildings or addresses are used as a form
of shorthand meaning the governments of nation states. The essential
feature of a metonym is that the two entities that are associated are
closely related (or ‘congruous’) in experience; this is not the case with
metaphor that may associate entities that are cognitively distant from
each other. Metonyms tend to be more invisible than metaphors and
therefore have even more ideological potential through creating hidden
Metaphor in Political Discourse 49
meanings and forming the very infrastructure of thought about political
issues. However, they can be exploited creatively too; for example
by blending: when Enoch Powell used the expression ‘river of blood’
in his anti-immigration speech in April 1968 he was blending two
metonyms: BLOOD FOR CONFLICT and BLOOD FOR ETHNICITY – we
know through our understanding of DNA that ethnicity and blood are
closely related in experience and we also know that conflict is closely
related, causally, with blood. It is the activation of metonymic thinking
that made the image so powerful – especially when linked with
a classical reference. Chilton (2004: 117) argues in his analysis of this
speech:
The speaker claims, explicitly or implicitly, to be not only ‘right’ in
a cognitive sense, but ‘right’ in a moral sense. There is an important
overlap in this domain with feelings as well as ‘factual’ representations.
The speaker will seek to ground his or her position in moral
feelings or intuitions that no one will challenge. The analysis suggests
that certain intuitive, emotionally linked mental schemas are being
evoked. Certain emotions that can be reasonably regarded as in some
way basic are evidentially stimulated – most obviously fear, anger,
sense of security, protectiveness, loyalty.
Figurative language – including metaphors and metonyms – is effective
in combining this moral and emotional intuition. Similarly, in the
lead-up to the Iraq War there was much discussion as to whether there
was a ‘smoking gun’ that would prove that Iraq was in possession of
weapons of mass destruction. Here ‘smoking gun’ was a particular type
of metonym referring to all types of destructive weapon; in this case a
single object stands for a whole script of events, the loading, aiming and
shooting of a gun. The smoking gun activates a schema of intentional
behaviour and therefore means ‘evidence of culpability’. The metonym
evokes emotions of fear and danger that arise from witnessing a gun
crime. Metonyms therefore also contribute to sounding right.
In the second edition of this book I continue to suggest that persuasion
in political speeches is realised through the effective choice
of metaphors in combination with other rhetorical strategies. Critical
metaphor analysis provides us with a methodology for the analysis
and interpretation of ideology and illustrates how rhetoric is used for
the purpose of legitimisation. Identification of conceptual metaphors
is inevitably subjective, like all qualitative judgements, but the analytical
method is clear and the reader is free to challenge metaphor
50 Politicians and Rhetoric
classifications. As I have argued in my definition of metaphor, there
is an element of subjectivity in all experience of metaphor – and this
is inevitable because it is not possible to anticipate or fully predict an
individual’s experience of discourse and the extent to which he or she
will experience words as having meanings that are transferred from
other contexts of use. This does not mean that language-based enquiry
should be restricted to what is predictable. Identification and discussion
of possible ideological intentions underlying metaphor choices
through conceptual metaphor analysis is a way of forming theories
about persuasive language use.
When analysing political speeches using critical metaphor analysis
the cognitive semantic approach needs to be complemented with a
summary of the social context in which the speeches were made and
of the overall verbal context of metaphor. Cognitive characteristics of
metaphor cannot be treated in isolation from other persuasive rhetorical
features in the discourse context. One attraction of the cognitive
semantic approach is that it allows us to compare how metaphor is used
by different politicians, both in terms of what metaphors are chosen
and the concepts, ideologies and myths that underlie these. Although
politicians sometimes use different metaphors, others are common to
many, and for most politicians metaphor is a method that enables
them to display their expertise in political rhetoric through knowledge
and command of one of its major linguistic characteristics. In order to
understand questions such as why one metaphor is preferred to another
we need necessarily also consider rhetorical issues such as the leader’s
intentions within specific speech-making contexts: metaphors are not a
requirement of the semantic system but are matters of speaker choice.
Cognitive semantics and critical metaphor analysis are important linguistic
contributions towards a theory of rhetoric and persuasion for
political communication.
2.4 Summary
In these first two chapters I have argued that metaphor is vital to
the language of leadership because it mediates between the conscious
and rational basis of ideology and its unconscious mythical elements.
Metaphor draws on the unconscious emotional associations of words,
the values of which are rooted in cultural knowledge. For this reason
it potentially has a highly persuasive force because of its activation of
both conscious and unconscious resources to influence our rational,
moral and emotional response, both directly – through describing and
Metaphor in Political Discourse 51
analysing political issues – and indirectly by influencing how we feel
about things. It therefore plays a crucial social role in communicating
ideology that I have argued is vital to the discourse of politics.
I have argued that metaphor does not work in isolation from
other rhetorical strategies: to the contrary, I have outlined a range of
strategies – such as metonymy – that occur independently or in conjunction
with metaphor. Many of these strategies have continued in
traditions of public speaking even after we have forgotten the classical
rhetorical terms that were originally used to describe them. Metaphor
becomes more persuasive when it is used in combination with other
strategies. When a political leader employs a rhetorical strategy in isolation
the audience is quick to identify that there is a conscious persuasive
strategy at work. They become aware of the presence of a performer at
work and their defences or ‘cheat detectors’ may be aroused against his
or her linguistic exploits. However, when strategies occur in combination
with each other, the audience is more likely to give itself over to
the speaker because the focus of attention is on processing the message
itself rather than on how it is communicated. Rhetoric therefore creates
uncritical followers and political leaders may legitimise themselves
most effectively through an interaction of rhetorical strategies because
the total effect is greater than when each occurs separately. Persuasion
is a multi-layered discourse function that is the outcome of a complex
interaction between intention, linguistic choice and context.
The aim of this second edition is to raise further critical awareness
of the rhetoric that is used by political leaders to persuade others of
their thoughts, beliefs and values through establishing trust, convincing
them that they are right thinking, that they sound right and can tell
the right story. I propose that a better understanding of the conceptual
basis for metaphor – and how this relates with other aspects of rhetoric
and persuasion – will provide a clearer understanding of the nature of
these thoughts, beliefs and values and the myths through which they
are communicated. Critical awareness of how discourse is used to persuade
and to create legitimacy is an important area of knowledge for
those who wish to engage politically within a democracy. We can only
ever have the possibility of trusting potential leaders once the language
of leadership is better understood.