Eloquence Has Grown Passé. Let’s Bring it Back into Fashion.

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John McWhorter

Opinion

Eloquence Has Grown Passé. Let’s Bring it Back into Fashion.

April 2, 2026,

3:00 p.m. ET

Credit...

Vivek Thakker

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By

John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth uses language the way an adolescent boy uses Axe body spray — subtlety’s for wimps. President Trump speaks in a stew of unfinished sentences, misused words (“

excursion

” instead of “incursion”) and useless repetition (

“the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead”

). Some Democrats use vulgarity to convince voters that if they talk tough, they will act tough.

Public figures have often been notably coarse in private. But at a time when average Americans seem less able to speak clearly and fluently, and those in prominent positions could provide a useful model for graceful expression, eloquence is no longer a priority in public speaking.

Articulateness once had a central place in American manners. “He could speak fluently and learnedly on all subjects,” a fur trader said of the explorer Meriwether Lewis around 1810, “but his inveterate disposition against the British stained, at least in our eyes, all his eloquence.” What a finely expressed appreciation by a fur trader for a man of action.

By the late 1950s, Norman Podhoretz turned a harsh light on the new bohemians’ discourse. For them, he said, “

to be articulate

is to admit that you have no feelings.” Perhaps that was when we began to favor relatability over articulateness.

A healthier culture, and a healthier political culture, would more explicitly value people for speaking well. We hardly need to be as flowery as Cicero or aspire to the heights of the Athenian orators. Bill Clinton’s plain-spoken powers of suasion were much of why he succeeded as well as he did. So, too, with Barack Obama. Other public figures are rarely recognized for their verbal deftness, even on their feet. I think of Senators Amy Klobuchar and Jon Ossoff, and — surprise! — Hegseth’s equivalent under George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld. He spoke clearly and crisply, in what often sounded like spontaneously composed paragraphs. That’s a skill,

independent of what he actually had to say

.

As the lure of authenticity leads politicians adrift from eloquence, an engine of inauthenticity may be having a similar effect on young people.

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