rhetoric over dialectic

I've been trying to think of a way of articulating a unity of the various currents which make societal discourse these days , such as it is, at the worst dangerous, at best irrelevant. It's not enough to identify the ills of the world, for the ingredients at work now have been among us all along, all through our past - the spinners of truth, the grabbers, the haters and the hatemongers, the fearful and those who manipulate their fears. And it has always been the case that we follow, inevitably, a course through history which again and again refuses to conform to our predictions of it, refuses to be the world which gets a little better, a little easier to be in, because we think we've made it better. we might have been right about that for awhile, it might have been better overnight, but tomorrow the problem changes into something else, something we haven't addressed or something that at first appears unamenable to improvement. But that is how history moves, it is how our lives move, and how reality unfolds moment to moment - one thing prompts reactions which cause a change to a third thing, and so on forever. And it's also how much of rational thought throughout history, including philosophy and science, proceeds -the smart guys call this the dialectic. The heirs of the Enlightenment called it progress. It was the means by which we moved from one problem, solved or not, to another; or one thought, logically met or not, to another, third thought. Underlying the dialectical method of thinking, however, required the rational good faith of the participants, a shared commitment to honesty in discourse, and of necessity a mutual absolute commitment to accepting the movement of the terms of discourse as logically compelled. Some of us liked to couch the terms of analysis as ideology - as reflective of a larger systemic conception; others liked to keep it on the empirical, the practical. But all, all who mattered, honored the terms - truth prevails, because truth needs no help, and if it's true it will be seen, known, as true. Both sides of the public debate argued different sides of agreed problems. That is no longer true. Now, what we read and hear in the public sphere is all just rhetoric, communicated in staccato fashion and designed to make a short-term impression, without regard to the larger framings of problems. There are many reasons - rapid communications, a distracted, lazy, largely contented public, and the appearance of opportunistic entertainers masquarading as political sages. But the most troubling reasons are 1) the failure of the commitment to honesty when voicing views for public consumption, and 2) the shift away from solving problems and towards simply being heard so the other guy won't be, for short-term gain. If one's purpose is nothing more than to "win the day", and the intended audience can be counted on to know not much more than what one says, then one can say anything and have a good chance that it will be accepted by somebody, maybe lots of somebodies. If one does this long and loud enough, one's intended audience truly becomes captive because it knows only that which you say, and before you know it, you have a political movement : witness the tea parties, townhall meetings, the bad dream that is Sarah Palin. Rhetoric has replaced dialectic as the means by which public discourse, and therefore history, moves.