Tonsor: Intellectual History: Is a "Liberal Conservative" an Oxymoron?

Winslow Homer, "The Fog Warning" (1885)

After the trip to Washington, DC, where I thrilled at seeing the U.S. Constitution in a bicentennial celebration at the National Archives, I returned to Ann Arbor intellectually stimulated by the experience and eager to resume my history apprenticeship. There was snap in the morning air when I set out to meet Tonsor during office hours. I spied him crossing the Diag in front of the Undergraduate Library (aptly called "the UGLI" because it looked like an IBM punch card). It was the first time I saw him wearing a hat. It looked reminiscent of a boater's hat from a Winslow Homer painting -- or the hat worn by the Paddington Bear. Yes, that student I'd met the first day of class had spoken perceptively: there was something ursine about Tonsor.

As our paths converged, I hailed my professor. He said hello in that expectant way of his, and then caught me up about the latest Trollope novel he was reading. When we reached the fourth floor of Haven Hall, there was a young man waiting outside his office; he was wearing a Red Wings cap. Tonsor greeted the undergraduate, showed him into the office, and put his hat down on the table. I remained standing outside the office, and what I saw next was unlike any interaction I'd ever witnessed between a professor and his student -- or between any two people. The student sat down but did not remove his cap. Tonsor also sat down and, annoyed that the student did not have the manners to remove his cap, put his hat back on his head. It was a ridiculous scene: The professor sitting stock still with his boater's hat on, staring down a hapless student whose felony was to keep his Red Wings cap on. Finally the chastised student got the hint and took his cap off, at which point Tonsor took his hat back off, and the two began conversing as if nothing had happened. It was very strange. If my professor had lived in the Middle Ages, he no doubt would have been called Stephen the Irascible. When my turn came to go into his office, I made sure to remove my ivy cap before crossing the threshold!

Rendering of the Undergraduate Library (UGLI)

"Come in, Mr. Whitney. You have not yet told me about your trip to Washington."

"The organizers kept us busy," I said, taking a seat where Red Wing boy had just been dressed down. "The highlight was seeing the Constitution on its 200th birthday, and the Declaration of Independence, too. Your lecture on liberalism was in my head as I walked around Washington, DC, taking in the sights of the 'Imperial City.' I also thought about something you said after the first class, when you referred to yourself as a 'liberal conservative.'[1] I need help understanding what that means because it seems like an oxymoron."

"This is true," said Tonsor. "It's an important question, and we don't have time to do it justice before class starts. But consistent with the sound practice of intellectual history, we can at least start with definitions in their historical context. There is not one liberalism but many, and its American permutations differ in significant respects from the liberalisms found elsewhere, or that developed previously. So one has to qualify what one means by 'liberal' and 'liberalism.'

"The same must be said of 'conservative.' There are many hyphenated conservatives nowadays -- traditionalist, economic, anti-communist, evangelical, neocon. Moreover, the American permutations differ in significant particulars from conservative thought elsewhere, or that developed previously. One has to specify what one means by 'conservative.'

"To define the term, 'liberal conservative,' I start with the observation that modern man lives with tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions -- oppositions that arise from our civilization's conflicting sources of intellectual and moral authority. In our shorthand way, we call those conflicting sources Christendom, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. As you know from class, they have a complex and overlapping relationship to one another, something like that of a child to a parent. They are continually clashing, continually generating conflicting ideas and discourse in our public affairs. As a result, the liberal conservative must be discerning. For he believes in freedom as well as in order. He believes in individualism as well as in community. He believes in the equality of all men as well as in hierarchy, natural aristocracy, and excellence. He believes in private enterprise, competition, and the market mechanism as well as in those human, moral, and cultural values that cannot be defined by the competition of interests in the marketplace.[2] These contradictions bring to mind the Walt Whitman verse which I recited to your class: 'Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large. I contain multitudes).'[3] No thriving society has ever existed that has not embraced the dynamic tensions that exist among opposing sets of values. Personally speaking, I will even say this: My behavior would be less honorable and my world more impoverished were I to abandon any one of these contradictory ideals."[4]

My synapses were lighting up like the Las Vegas Strip. If I understood him correctly, then Tonsor was blowing up all my preconceived notions. Not only was he stretching my understanding of what a liberal and a conservative were; but he was also, unexpectedly, grafting the one onto the other the way a gardener creates a new subspecies. Often the result is a new plant that is stronger than the originals. Before I started reading his work and listening to his lectures, I had little idea that Tonsor's liberal-conservative pairing could be so fresh, so undoctrinaire, so creative in approach -- and I wondered how widely known this remarkable teaching was. I would later learn that Russell Kirk, in his influential The Conservative Mind (1953), would devote a section of his book to a prominent group of thinkers he called "liberal conservatives" -- foremost among them Tocqueville -- and the type would prove highly influential in Tonsor's intellectual development.[5]

Stephen Tonsor (left) and Russell Kirk in 1977, courtesy of Annette Kirk

But to extend the biological metaphor, it seemed that Tonsor lived in an estuary of ambiguity; he was anchored neither to land nor to sea, but inhabited the richness that is found where salt water mixes with fresh, feasting in an ecosystem where nature most flourishes. It struck me how this strain of thought repositioned conservatism. It had nothing to do with the popular conception of of stalwarts fighting a rearguard action to defend the status quo, or promoting a politics of nostalgia that would return Americans to some golden age. Not at all. Rather, at the true heart of the conservative body of thought was the willingness to embrace the tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions of the human experience -- life as it really is experienced -- and subject it to critical analysis in light of abiding principles.

Tonsor continued speaking and my neurons continued lighting up. "Going all the way back to Aristotle," he said, "you see the development, in free societies, of the liberal-conservative pattern of thought. It was passed on, generation after generation, within a remnant. Then in the modern age, the liberal conservative emerged out of a powerful genealogy that includes Burke, John Adams, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, and Jacob Burckhardt.

When George H. Nash's classic treatment of
postwar conservatism came out in 1976,
Tonsor earned a spot on the dust jacket
as one of the nation's top 25
conservative thought leaders.
His photograph is in the lower left corner.

"Now, you may ask yourself: What is peculiarly conservative about the liberal conservative? Well, much of conservative thought is derived from the West's religion, from Christendom. The conservative is a tough-minded realist who understands that human beings are imperfect and imperfectible; that they are usually self-interested and often irrational. He thus values the historic reality of those statesmen, charters, and institutions that act as a check on man's libido dominandi which --"

Tonsor saw my brow furrow. "Libido dominandi comes from St. Augustine. It refers to man's disordered love of overreaching power. The liberal conservative is conservative in his belief that freedom is not enough. Freedom is only viable if it is ordered -- ordered by virtue. Virtue promotes order in the soul and order in the society. Although freedom and virtue are in inner tension, they complement each other. The more a man can govern himself by an interior law, the less he needs the government to impose an exterior law. Thus freedom thrives, paradoxically, when it grows out of a tolerable order. Let me be clear on this point: freedom is not freedom if separated from order.

"You may also ask yourself: What is peculiarly liberal about the liberal conservative? Well, the liberal -- at any rate, the classical nineteenth-century liberal -- derives much of his thought from both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Think of the French physiocrats, Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman. This type, the classical liberal, appreciates the spirit of freedom in man's nature, the restlessness to throw off oppression and improve his estate. Historically the classical liberal often had to struggle against the ancien regime and thus was a bit more eager for social, economic, and political reform than is his conservative friend. As John Cardinal Newman acknowledged, 'In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to aim for perfection is to have changed often.'[6]

"Newman's words suggest that the liberal believes freedom itself is as much a part of human nature as it is of the divine economy. Said his sometime friend, Lord Acton, 'Liberty is so holy a thing that God was forced to permit evil that it might exist.'[7] He understands that liberty is a worthy civilizational goal that has been hard won and easily lost. That's why he celebrates the organic growth of ordered liberty through time-tested constitutions, institutions, and laws. And it is why he frowns on revolutionary fixes and the do-your-own-thing behavior that soon results in anarchy or licentiousness. It is a faux freedom that cannot last.

"To tie these definitions together with your recent visit to Washington, DC, I would say that the liberal conservative today climbs onto the shoulders of giants -- of Aristotle, Burke, John Adams, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, Jacob Burckhardt, Jacques Maritain, and John Courtney Murray -- thinkers who were alive to politics as a form of conversation, of rational deliberation. Our American constitutions -- both written and unwritten, and at the state and federal levels -- seek to maintain a political order in which citizens can agree to disagree in a community of civil discourse, arguing and deliberating over the questions of how we shall order our lives together -- without resorting to civil war.[8]

"The liberal conservative thus values the virtue of prudence. He supports the prudent statesmen who can keep our state and federal constitutions balanced on a tightrope. On the one side is a government strong enough to enforce the rule of law as well as smother any incitement to mob rule; on the other side is a government weak enough that it cannot become its own self-interested, devouring tyrant -- because the governors will surely devour a people's freedom if given opportunity to do so. This perennial challenge in the human condition is what the framers of the U.S. Constitution debated. Their success is without parallel in world history. Indeed, at risk of oversimplifying because they possessed an extraordinary range of views, the founders turned out to be a great generation of liberal conservatives."

Tonsor slapped his knees to indicate that office hours were up -- we had to walk across the Diag to our class in East Engineering. But I was dazzled by my professor's lambent intellect. He had just given me the rudiments of an interpretive method by which to order a conservative political philosophy and the practice of intellectual history. I would eventually coin a term for Tonsor's method: "the hermeneutic of dynamic tension." He was teaching me about the unresolved opposites (in ideas, values, beliefs, institutions) that were nevertheless held together in the force fields of culture.

When we got settled in class, I noticed three words still on the blackboard: "Learn or die."

____________________

Notes

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2; letter in GW's private possession, courtesy of Alfred S. Regnery.

[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Why I Am a Republican and a Conservative," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 235.

[3] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Conservative Search for Identity," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 247.

[4] Tonsor, "Why I Am a Republican and a Conservative," in Equality, p. 235.

[5] Tonsor began adulthood as a war veteran and Truman Democrat. (See "Why I Am a Republican and a Conservative, in Equality, pp. 231-32; also my first of two interviews with his brother, Bernard Tonsor, July 1, 2014, in Jerseyville, IL.) So when did he begin defining himself as a "liberal conservative"? The seed was likely planted in high school when, thinking he was bound for the seminary, he was introduced to Aristotle's Golden Mean through the synthesizing works of Thomas Aquinas. When he resumed undergraduate study after World War II, he took philosophy courses that confirmed him as an Aristotelian thinker for the rest of his life. (GW correspondence with Ann Tonsor Zeddies, January 26, 2015.) The seed was watered when his dissertation advisor, Joseph Ward Swain, encouraged Tonsor to read Lord Acton in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Acton was "at the center of [his] world." ("Joseph Ward Swain," Equality, p. 316.) The seed was no doubt fertilized when Gertrude Himmelfarb's seminal study, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, was published in 1952 by the University of Chicago Press. But germination seems to have occurred when Tonsor encountered the work of Russell Kirk in 1953. He was employed by the U.S. Forest Service as a fire lookout in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, and he describes the remarkable experience of discovering The Conservative Mind on a mountaintop. (See "Joseph Ward Swain," Equality, p. 316; "Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative," Equality, p. 303; "Russell Kirk," Equality, pp. 317-20; and "Conservative Pluralism: The Foundation and the Academy," pp. 1-2, no date, typed lecture in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery). Tonsor describes the effect The Conservative Mind had on him using a powerful figure of speech: "I dipped my hand in the holy-water fount of Russell Kirk and said, 'Home at last!'" Tonsor tells us that it was when reading Kirk's important book in 1953 that he discovered he was already a conservative: "The event," he later reported, "was not a conversion experience, but a moment of self-revelation" ("Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative," Equality, p. 303). It is not a stretch to think that he already was defining himself as a "liberal conservative" around this same time. Further evidence is that in graduate school he was a great admirer of Tocqueville, who is explicitly treated by Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, as a liberal conservative. So the process of changing from a Truman Democrat to a liberal conservative probably occurred due to numerous influences between about 1949 and 1954. His later letters to Henry Regnery reveal that he continued to refer to himself as a liberal conservative as late as 1987 (Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery).

[6] John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), chapter 1, section 1, part 7.

[7] Acton quoted in Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in Equality, p. 256.

[8] Matthew Rose, "The Liberalism of Richard John Neuhaus," National Affairs, issue no. 28 (summer 2016); at URL http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-liberalism-of-richard-john-neuhaus, accessed October 24, 2016.

Tonsor #12 -- Conservatism, Liberalism, Reaction

View of Washington, DC, on the approach to National.

September 17, 1987, was the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution. That morning I was on a jet bound for Washington, DC, to see one of the world's great charters of ordered liberty.

The descent was turbulent. The view from the left side of the plane offered a welcome distraction. On the approach to National I could look east onto the Washington Monument, Capitol Hill, and neoclassical buildings on either side of the Mall. The White House was barely visible, but the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials were vivid and close. This first visit to the nation's capital made me feel like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Besides being infected with a corny kind of enthusiasm for historical sites, I was truly stirred by the monuments of civic republicanism.

But something else was stirring, too. Looking out at nation's capital, I thought the bleached monuments made the city look like a colony of the ancient Roman Empire. The scene reminded me of Stephen Tonsor's words: "Do not become corrupted by the Imperial City, Mr. Whitney. It's where scholars go to die."

In his autobiography, Edward Gibbon recounted his first trip to Rome where he experienced his "Capitoline vision." He ascended steps that overlooked the ruins of ancient Forum, musing as barefooted friars sang Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter. Suddenly he conceived the project to write what the world would later know as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776).

My view from the plane did not inspire a correspondingly ambitious project. But I was working hard to understand what Tonsor had said one week before, after our first History 416 class. It was the conversation that left me scratching my head, yet I felt it mattered. What did my professor mean when he said that both "liberal conservatives" and "reactionaries" were his kind of people? How did three quite different -isms -- liberalism, conservatism, reactionaryism -- fit together in one man's head? I sensed that the answer would help me understand not only Tonsor's view of modernity, but also his notions of civilizational decline, cultural decadence, and imperial decay.

*     *     *

On the flight's descent, I found my imagination taking off. I was embarking on a journey that would lead me into territory for which my map had only the broadest contours, and not very accurate contours at that. So the key at the start of the journey was to take Tonsor at his word. No ideologue, the man said that he embraced life's complexities. He contained multitudes.[1]

1. In time I would understand that the conservative in Tonsor was grounded in the West's Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman patrimony. Our civilization's first order had been informed by that synthesis during the Middle Ages. You can see it in the way St. Thomas Aquinas baptized and then went beyond the teachings of Aristotle. It's why the civilization Aquinas helped build was called "Christendom." Significantly Tonsor, a man of the modern age, did not cling to the forms of bygone Christendom. He would later tell me that a book like James J. Walsh's The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries was too nostalgic for his tastes. "The good old days," he like to say, "were not all that good."[2] So it was not the forms but rather the essence of the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman synthesis that inspired him -- its ethical precepts, religious insights, and spiritual comforts in a world wondrously made by its Creator. In essence, then, the conservatives were the guardians of civilization, men and women alive to Tocqueville's habits of the heart that are formed in families, religious communities, civil society, and local politics.

2. In time I would understand that the liberal in Tonsor celebrated the spirit of liberty in human nature. That spirit was always present in the West but emerged quite forcefully in the Enlightenment and challenged Christendom directly. (The Renaissance had challenged Christendom indirectly.) Our civilization succeeded in absorbing many of the resulting intellectual, moral, and spiritual tensions between Christendom and the Enlightenment, but these binary sources of authority led to the de facto renaming of our civilization. Henceforward we would be "the West" or "Western civilization" instead of Christendom. The Enlightenment was epitomized by Thomas Jefferson, whose newly articulated natural right to the pursuit of happiness would prove to be one of the most potent concepts to emerge from the so-called Age of Reason. The pursuit of happiness would justify the efforts of individuals to free themselves from "oppressive authority, outworn customs, arbitrary rules, unfair regulations, and tyrannical taboos." The process of liberation was good -- to a point -- so long as the pursuit was properly ordered to man's imperfect and imperfectible nature. Tonsor was no utopian.

Allow me to pause to emphasize Tonsor's argument that, in a healthy civilization, the liberal type who struggles to expand the empire of freedom must be balanced by the conservative type who is the guardian of the civilization's institutions and teachings. They are complementary types, these two -- the liberal reformer and conservative guardian -- and both are needed in productive tension. Indeed, it was that productive tension that gave rise to the dynamism of the West that we identify with modernity. Tonsor was teaching me to see modernity as successive experiments in freedom -- which sometimes turned out to be excessive experiments in freedom that had to be tested and sifted in light of our older Judeo-Christian patrimony.

3. In time I would understand that the reactionary in Tonsor required me to abandon the security of my Merriam-Webster preconceptions. Reaction, I would learn, was not a temporal concept -- it was not the politics of nostalgia that sought to turn back the clock to some mythic golden age. It was impossible to go back to anything. Rather, reaction was a philosophical or political or perhaps even a sociological concept at the center of what Tonsor called the "West's inner history."

Aristotle, son of the physician Nichomachus 

I had difficulty grasping Tonsor's unconventional notion of the reactionary, but my road-to-Damascus epiphany came when I could see the idea through his eyes as an Aristotelian.[3] If one sees the reactionary as a kind of physician in the Aristotelian mold, then the type makes sense.[4] The Aristotelian physician viewed diseases in terms of excesses or defects of elements in the body. Applied to politics, we see that the reactionary is an Aristotelian-like physician who seeks to restore the balance between the change element and the continuity element in a culture. Reaction is thus the cure for any disease of excess or defect in the body politic. It applied to the excess of liberalism (too much change) and to the excess of conservatism (too much continuity). When confronting liberals, the reactionary sought to reintroduce order in a society whose abuse of liberty had led to widespread disorder, anarchy, and licentiousness; thus the reactionary, seeing liberty abused, fought for order restored. When confronting conservatives, the reactionary sought to enliven the patient with an injection of reform that a dynamic society needs to stay healthy; otherwise the patient does not thrive.

Conservatism. Liberalism. Reaction. These three elements made sense in dynamic relation to one another and as part of the organic development of our civilization. Tonsor adopted the role of the Aristotelian physician. To preserve the West's humane order, the reactionary in him sought a balance between the liberal push for innovation and the conservative temperament for preservation. Thus the civilizational task of the reactionary-liberal-conservative to balance change and continuity was in no way ideological. From generation to generation the ideal is always evolving, always developing out of the tension between innovation and conservation. In his ethical critique of modernity, Tonsor's task was to discern the degree to which change and continuity were in right relation to one another.

I knew that it would take time fully to digest the meaning of these three concepts and their relation to one another. Tonsor's thought was not always easy to understand. His personal interactions were not always easy to navigate either, and in fact could get in the way of understanding his thought. As his colleague, fellow historian John Willson, observed, "Steve was often an enigma to me."[5] Willson's observation reminds me of a passage from Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: "A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!"[6]

*     *     *

With the plane's descent, the nation's civic monuments disappeared from view, one by one. Then came the bump of the wheels skidding on concrete followed by the rapid deceleration that pushed me forward in my seat. Soon I would be afoot in the Imperial City.

________________________

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Conservative Search for Identity," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 247.
[2] Bernard Tonsor interview with GW, Jerseyville, IL, July 1, 2014.
[3] Ann Tonsor Zeddies correspondence with GW, January 26, 2015.
[4] Aristotle's father, Nichomachus, was the court physician to the king of Macedon.
[5] John Willson correspondence with GW, November 8, 2016.
[6] My thanks to Winston Elliott for this passage by Dickens.

Leaders -- the importance of presentation

Your Rhetoric Is an Opportunity to Create the Perception You Want

Research has shown that people form an opinion of you in the first few minutes of an encounter. First, they take in how you stand, walk, and hold yourself. They note your clothing and grooming. Before you ever say a word, they try to figure out what your face is conveying. Your non-verbals paint a picture in their mind about your intelligence, personality, and character. After you begin speaking, their opinion of you gets tweaked and then begins to consolidate. Again, all this takes place in the first few minutes of the encounter.

That first impression is difficult to dislodge. If people have doubts about your words, they rely on what they know of your actions. If they have doubts about the sincerity of your actions, they default to their first impression of you. So it's important to pay attention to how you come across in the first 3-4 minutes of any encounter.

Ethical, effective leaders strive for consistency of words, actions, and impressions. They choose their words carefully; make sure they are consistent with their behavior (after all, actions speak louder than words); and take care to make a good first impression.

Moreover: ethical, effective leaders possess the ability to communicate their vision, values, strategies, expectations, and directives to followers. It starts with the capacity to think clearly, imaginatively, and with intention. Whether their aim is to inform, persuade, and/or entertain, leaders take care with the written and spoken word. They understand the power of symbols. They are conscious of their body language -- carriage, demeanor, facial expressions, hard gestures, and eye contact -- to uphold the dignity of their authority and to reinforce the message they seek to communicate.

Learning from Others 

Whatever your experience with presentations to groups, you can continuously learn to be a better communicator by observing and studying other presenters. One of our Hauenstein Center seminars for emerging leaders asks participants to pick a U.S. president, study his life, identify his leadership style(s) and traits, tell us how he made a few tough decisions, and evaluate the end result. Following are some questions to help presenters create and structure the exercise. The art of rhetoric has been studied by some of the greatest thinkers of all time, so the questions arise primarily from two classical sources -- Aristotle's Rhetoric and Cicero's De Inventione, whose five canons of rhetoric were influential for many centuries.

Questions

1. Does the introduction hook the audience with humor, a shocking statistic, or an interesting anecdote? Moreover, within the first minute, is the audience clear about which president is going to be the focus of the presentation? Is the presentation arguing that the president is a model of what to be, or an antimodel of what not to be -- or a combination of both good and bad leadership traits? Does the introduction also lay out a clear roadmap of where the presentation will take us? Finally, does the introduction include an improptu reference to a previous presentation?

2. Good organization (Cicero's dispositio) is essential to an effective presentation. Readers can re-read what they did not get the first time. However, an audience is at the mercy of the oral presenter's organizational skills in real time. Is the body of the presentation well organized? Has the presenter selected two or more decisions that are interesting and instructive? Does the presenter develop how the decisions came about through good story-telling and analysis? Are the president's leadership styles and traits discussed? Is there an attempt to show how a president grew from his experiences and became a better leader?

3. How does the presenter keep the audience engaged? For example, has the best material been culled to keep the audience interested (Cicero's inventio)? Are questions put to the audience? Is an interesting prop brought out and explained? Does the presenter refer to earlier presentations in an impromptu manner that wins admiration?

4. To what extent does the presenter apply the leadership styles, traits, and lessons to his or her own professional circumstances -- and to ours?

5. Aristotle wrote that a leader's reputation and integrity (ethos) are a key component of persuasion. Sometimes a leader's private life is not as exemplary as that leader's public performance. How does the presenter deal with the discrepency?

6. To what extent are credible, authoritative sources cited in the presentation? To associate oneself with the best experts also builds up a speaker's ethos.

7. Aristotle also observed that smart reasoning (logos) is another key component of persuasion. Does the presenter avoid fallacies and make the argument using sound reason?

8. Aristotle moreover observed that emotion (pathos) is yet another key component of persuasion. How passionate and enthusiastic is the presenter about the topic? Is a story used to move the audience?

7. Does the conclusion helpfully reiterate the main points, the "take-aways"? In speeches in which it is appropriate, is there a clear call to action?

8. To what extent is the presenter comfortable with the material (Cicero's memoria)? Good eye contact is essential.

9. During the delivery (Cicero's pronuntiatio), does the presenter use appropriate non-verbals -- body language, demeanor, carriage, hand gestures, and voice modulation (all part of what Cicero called actio) -- to reinforce the verbal message?