{"id":4915,"date":"2006-03-01T08:13:44","date_gmt":"2006-03-01T08:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4915"},"modified":"2006-03-01T08:13:44","modified_gmt":"2006-03-01T08:13:44","slug":"the-hortatory-we","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4915","title":{"rendered":"the hortatory &#8220;we&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;We must stop the obesity epidemic.&#8221; &#8220;We need to tap the energies and talents of young people.&#8221; &#8220;We have to defeat these incumbents.&#8221; &#8230; Those are exhortations aimed at an unspecified &#8220;we.&#8221; They are very common in politics and political commentary. But I am increasingly impatient with that rhetorical style. It begs the critical questions: Who has a reason to, or an interest in, making the proposed change? How are such people organized? What assets do they have? What strategies or incentives would make them act in favor of the recommendation?<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a paradox: <i>We<\/i> need to drop the hortatory &#8220;we&#8221; and start thinking more strategically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;We must stop the obesity epidemic.&#8221; &#8220;We need to tap the energies and talents of young people.&#8221; &#8220;We have to defeat these incumbents.&#8221; &#8230; Those are exhortations aimed at an unspecified &#8220;we.&#8221; They are very common in politics and political commentary. But I am increasingly impatient with that rhetorical style. It begs the critical questions: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}