The liberal turn

The public reaction to the election of the new leader of the Malta Labour Party, Joseph Muscat, has tended to focus on two things: how he scored on their wow!-graph or cringe-o-meter and whether his declarations are credible. Less attention has been given to the political spirit that he declares he wants to embody.

On the one hand, this inattention is surprising. Dr Muscat has, after all, unilaterally declared a perestroika for Malta. On the other hand, ethos, credibility and impact are closely linked. Saying he makes one cringe, for example, or that his "new political season" is simply a crass attempt to offload his baggage as former party apparatchik, says something about what one makes of his ethos as well.

But despite the practical fuzziness, the classical study of rhetoric discriminates between pathos (impact on audience), logos (what a thoughtful judge would make of an argument) and ethos (the spirit incarnated by an argument). These conceptual distinctions help us notice certain moves and slides in Dr Muscat's rhetoric and its likely future force.

He has so far got away - at least in TV interviews - with changing questions of logos, so to speak, into matters of ethos. He has been asked questions about his collusion with Alfred Sant's negation of the EU referendum result and the MLP's anti-membership stance five years ago. These were questions about his ethics and judgement - forensic, logos-related questions. He answered them by making very limited concessions about "hindsight". In doing so, however, he has had the chutzpah to use his limited admissions of mistakes as symbols of his virtue: his political openness.

Some commentators have pointed out the weasel nature of the answers. But the logos-ethos distinction shows how the rhetorical trick works. The TV interviewers are reluctant to press forward since their persistence might be mistaken for an "old spirit" of politics: How does one insist on closure with someone spouting openness? One risks appearing to be part of the social-closure problem oneself.

By blurring logos and ethos, Dr Muscat gets away with the oldest trick in the political book: When faced with an uncomfortable question, change the subject. Insist the question is about social openness, or ethos, when, in fact, it is about logical closure.

Beyond showing how Dr Muscat deals with his political baggage, the focus on ethos is also useful for thinking about his broad hint that he wants to be Malta's Zapatero. It is a social liberalism that incarnates his ambition to coalesce Malta's progressives and moderates. That and his claim for the courageousness of the ambition.

In fact, political calculation features far more than courage. People aged 50 in 2013 will have been born in 1963 - a group that has consistently been shown in surveys to be significantly liberal on sexual arrangements and legislation. At the next general election, the demographics will favour social liberalism - a political stance that sees the most important political units to be the state and the individual, with far less importance granted to those middle-range groupings, like families, trade unions and schools, that traditionally both Christian and Social Democrats have paid some attention to.

While in the name of openness Dr Muscat is proposing to dissolve political polarisation in Malta, what he in fact wants to do is replace one polarisation with another: the PN-MLP divide will be substituted by a "conservative-liberal" divide. He has already accused Lawrence Gonzi of being a conservative.

It is a label that might stick. If so, the MLP will make inroads among some of the demographic groups where the Nationalist Party has in recent elections registered significant strength: youth and the middle-aged professional class.

In fact, so far anyway, the PN is neither conservative nor progressive. Like the MLP it embraces a practical, if more fragile, synthesis of both. As the politics of Romano Prodi indicate, there is nothing in Christian Democrat principles that inhibits progressive legislation in social matters. But unless the PN is careful and responsive, two conditions will help Dr Muscat frame the issues the way he wants.

First, there is the increasing Americanisation of European politics. One effect is that the conservative-liberal polarity is increasingly appearing to be a more truthful representation of political differences. In Italy, for example, the characterisation between the major parties appears to be a plausible one.

Second, Dr Muscat will be aided by true conservatives - who accept the polarity and borrow techniques and arguments from the US. For their different reasons they too will seek to get the PN to accept the mantle of defender of conservative "traditional values".

If the PN accepts, it would be a significant political victory for Dr Muscat. Whatever the PN scores on substantial issues, he would have asserted control and authorship of the ethos of the times. After scoring high on ethos, good scores on logos and pathos will surely follow.

ranierfsadni@europe.com