Thank-you so much for having me; I’ve been obsessed with the issue of a culture of demagoguery for at least fifteen years, and I’m always glad to talk about it with people who care.
My basic argument is that demagoguery is a way of shifting disagreements from policy argumentation to questions of group identity and loyalty.
People go along with that shift because policy argumentation is complicated, uncertain, and risky, and demagoguery promises to reduce its complexity, uncertainty, and risk.
As Hannah Arendt so elegantly argues in The Human Condition, participation in politics requires a certain amount of faith in our own agency, while it simultaneously so very clearly demonstrates the limits of human agency. Argumentation about politics requires that we make claims about the consequences of policies, all the while knowing that many—and perhaps all—of those claims will be wrong. Political decision-making is riddled with uncertainty. We might feel certain about a decision, but we can’t be certain about all of its consequences. Advocating a political argument is and should be a transcendental leap into the unknown. All the while, with data and reason to support that leap. And the profound uncertainty, and the deep argumentative support, are both part of that leap, when people are engaged in responsible argumentation.
Demagoguery is about dodging the responsibility, the argumentation, and the uncertainty by focusing instead on how much we all hate an out-group.
That simple fact about the uncertainty of decision making is a reminder the world is not fully constituted by how it looks to us—our viewpoint is not all there is.
What’s even more concerning is that it is possible to consider a policy with due diligence, to do one’s best to investigate it from various angles, and with all the best data available, to enact it, and then for our policy to cause tremendous harm. It’s probably impossible to find a policy that doesn’t hurt some innocent being, and some well-intentioned policies hurt a lot. A thorough process doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, even if the people involved have good intentions. Meaning well doesn’t guarantee that we will do the right thing.
All of these characteristics inherent, as Arendt would say, to the human condition mean that it is difficult for us to be honest with ourselves about our limitations and yet think of ourselves as good people with good judgment.
We want to think of ourselves as good people with good judgment and good intentions, and we want policy decisions that benefit us, but, if we support policy decisions that benefit us at the expense of others that is dissonant with our desires to think well of ourselves.
What I’m saying that participation in policy disagreements creates cognitive dissonance between who we want to think we are, what we think we’re capable of, how much control we like to think we have, and what we can see happen time after time—votes don’t turn out the way we want, they do and we still don’t get what we want, despite tremendous work problems still remain.
Because the stakes are so high in politics, we want certainty—we want there to be guarantees, necessary consequences, and promises that if you do this or believe that, things will get better. We all want a pony. But we want more than just certain policy outcomes—we want more than a pony—we want to feel that what we’re doing is good and right.
Demagoguery helps silence the cognitive dissonance by saying that there are certainties, and the main certainty is that the in-group is good and just and smart. Demagoguery says, “Politics is very simple, and the answers are obvious to people of intelligence and goodwill.” If policies promised by in-group politicians and pundits don’t play out the way they were supposed to, it’s the fault of an out-group. Were it not for that out-group, the policies that seem obviously right to us would be enacted and would make everything better.
Demagoguery says everything can be divided into binaries, with us v. them being the Ur binary. It isn’t always emotional; it isn’t always populist; but it does always make some version of the move of taking a very complicated situation and breaking it into two sides. Once that move is made, once we’re talking about “both sides” or “two sides,” we’re strengthening one of the foundational pillars of demagoguery.
So, the apparently “fair” claim that “both sides are just as bad” is actually demagogic. That isn’t to say that “both sides” aren’t just as bad—it’s saying that the second you move to “two sides” regarding political deliberation you’re in a realm of imagined identities and not policy argumentation. Not only is it reinforcing the fallacy of the false dilemma but it’s strengthening yet another foundational pillar of demagoguery—that all political questions should be cast in terms of group identity, that to raise a question about political deliberation is always really a question about which group is better.
A persistent hope of humans is that if you free your mind, your ass will follow—that, if you get your theory right, or your intentions right, then your actions will be right.
And that’s a third foundational pillar of demagoguery—that bad things in human history are the consequence of groups with bad motives. That’s a non-falsifiable claim, since no group has entirely good people, and no human has entirely good motives. We’d like to believe that people engaged in genocide know that what they’re doing is murder, but they actually believe that what they’re doing is right. They thought they were on the side of right, and they thought they had good motives.
Right now, you’re probably feeling kind of discouraged—because I’m saying there is no perfect policy solution, that you shouldn’t be certain that your political agenda is right, and that, regardless of your motives, you’re going to make decisions that hurt people.
And demagoguery responds to that feeling of being discouraged by saying, “Don’t listen to her. It might seem complicated and imperfect, but with this one simple trick…” (Which is intriguing—demagoguery often relies on the same moves as self-help rhetoric. That isn’t to say that all self-help rhetoric is demagogic, although some is [such as PUA, get rich quick, and some MLM]) In this case, the simple trick is to stop thinking and settle for believing. It doesn’t frame the choice quite that way—it says, everything you believe is right, the answers to apparently complicated problems are actually simple and obvious to people like you, so you should invest all the power in people who think like you. Because the answers are simple and clear, anyone who says they aren’t, or who has answers different from you is evil, stupid, and/or biased. Any source that provides information different from what we tell you is “biased.”
In other words, demagoguery isn’t just a way of arguing; it’s a way of thinking about public discourse. Demagoguery is epistemic.
Demagoguery invites people into a world but it doesn’t reduce agency or responsibility of the people who accept that invitation. Increasingly, I’m coming to think that demagoguery works primarily by making people feel better about a choice they would already have made, and once they’ve made the initial choice to join a world of demagoguery, it’s easier to get them to commit more—it’s the Spanish Prisoner con of discourse. So, the media isn’t responsible for demagoguery; consumers of demagoguery are responsible for making it profitable.
Demagoguery doesn’t reduce agency or responsibility, but, when it’s a world of demagoguery, it can make people feel as though have more agency and less responsibility. It gives people agency by proxy (when members of their in-group triumph over an out-group, they feel powerful, and as though that was their agency) while always providing plausible deniability for responsibility. There are lots of ways that they have plausible deniability—the fallacy of false equivalence, claims of pre-emptive self-defense, projection of violent intention onto the out-group(s), holding the out-group responsible for their own reaction (what’s called complementary projection—if I feel angry toward you, you must be hostile)—but the one I want to pursue here is just not thinking about it.
If all of your policies would have worked if not for the mendacious and corrupt out-group, then you don’t really have to think about whether they failed for good reason. If every good person agrees with you, then you don’t have to think about the problems others point out with your beliefs, politicians, or policies. That doesn’t make you a mindless person, nor does it make you a person who can’t support their beliefs.
Here, again, I’m following Arendt. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem has been persistently misread in two important ways. First, an argument that the prosecutor made and that she reported (that Jewish Councils helped the Nazis) was attributed to her; second, her subtle argument about Eichmann was turned into a simplistic one, and then she was criticized for making a simplistic argument. She never claimed he was mindless, or an automaton, nor that he had no antisemitism. She argued inductively, and seems to have expected that people would understand her conclusion (an interesting pragmatic contradiction, as Deborah Lipstadt notes). In her last book, Life of the Mind, she explains how the Eichmann trial got her thinking about thinking. Since what Eichmann had done was so deeply evil, she (and many others) expected a Satanic figure who would glory in what he did—Milton’s Satan or Shakespeare’s Iago. So, she went to the trial expecting someone like that, someone like Goring, perhaps.
However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity, but thoughtlessness. (4)
Arendt doesn’t mean he was mindless; she meant he didn’t think. That understudied and underappreciated book is about arguing for her version of what thinking should be, and she doesn’t mean some reductive positivism. She never accepts the emotion/reason dichotomy, and she is interested in the role of language, of what we would now call talking points.
She was fascinated with how animated Eichmann became when he repeated various Nazi talking points, “but, when confronted with situations for which such [Nazi] routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless” (4). He had beliefs, about Jews, about Nazis, and, most of all, about his career, and he had been given a language that made him feel comfortable about those beliefs. But, when confronted with people who didn’t agree, he didn’t know what to say, and often said bizarre things (such as whingeing to his Jewish guards that he hadn’t advanced as much in the Nazi regime as he wanted).
And, like Orwell, Arendt noted the relationship of “winged words” (again, talking points) and Eichmann’s ability to not think about what he was doing.
Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. (4)
Arendt goes on to say, in one of those moments that explain why I admire her so much, “If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all” (4).
Eichmann was rabidly antisemitic, but, when he was faced with the reality of what he was doing, he threw up. (Supposedly, so did Himmler.) He could follow a policy as long as he didn’t think about what the policy really meant. After throwing up, he went back to his office and kept doing the thing that resulted in a situation that made him throw up because, as he said to anyone who would listen, he wasn’t killing anyone; he was just making sure they got on trains. The rhetoric of the danger of Jews, the rhetoric about a Jewish conspiracy, the rhetoric about being loyal to Germany—the rhetoric didn’t persuade him to do what he was doing (careerism did that), but it made him feel better about what he wanted to do (that is, get advancement and kill a lot of Jews).
When he was confronted with what his desires really meant, he was appalled, so he tried not to think about it. And he succeeded, because the whole function of Nazi propaganda was why you shouldn’t think about what it might be like to be a Jew. And that is Arendt’s whole point: what she means by “thinking” isn’t some positivist exclusion of feeling; it’s about stepping above your position to consider the situation from various positions. For Arendt, thinking is imagining.
It’s imagining being someone else.
Imagining being someone else and having compassion for them are two very different things. I spend a lot of time trying to understand the worldviews of people I think are engaged in inexcusably harmful actions. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, I don’t have to like them, even if my religion says I should love them. I’m not sure how the conversion of white supremacists works, since all the data is anecdotal, and I think, from that kind of research, that sometimes compassion works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes shaming does, and sometimes just ignoring them works. But I think worrying about white supremacists might be the wrong concern.
I think there are two different ways that demagoguery can be hopelessly damaging. One is when a culture is dominated by demagoguery as the only form of public reasoning. In that case, a demagogic post on a cooking blog is harmful, insofar as it confirms that this is how we manage disagreement. But, if the culture isn’t demagogic, there’s no real harm.
In other words, and I hope it’s clear this is my main point in my whole career: there are always two arguments going on in a culture: what should we do, and how should we argue about what to do.
Demagoguery answers both questions with “be rabidly loyal to the in-group.”
In a weird way, then, this means that, when we’re arguing with someone who is deep in a culture of demagoguery, and repeating the talking points that make them feel good about their political agenda, we shouldn’t argue with them about what they believe, we should argue with them about how they believe—about whether their beliefs are falsifiable, why they’re so afraid of out-group sources of information, whether they believe their own major premises.
And so I keep ending up back on teaching. We need to teach logic (not as unemotional, and not as a list of formal fallacies, but as failures in a person’s consistency—a sign (but not a necessary one) of in-group thinking, and our intervention is to get people to move to meta-cognition.
When we moved into this neighborhood, an older man stopped by to welcome us, and we thought that was sweet. But, pretty quickly, it became clear that his agenda was warning us against the lesbian couple who lived across from him. He told us that “some people around here” were doing things “forbidden by the Bible.” I became very animated about my need to unpack this box in exactly the right way and said something about being really busy. But he went on spouting fundagelical (and false) talking points about homosexuality and Christianity, and put the cherry on the top by telling me, condescendingly, that he was an expert on the Bible, and willing to help me with it. That happened to be a point in my life when my ancient Greek was crappy, but manageable for the work I was doing (I couldn’t sit down and read Scripture in Greek because both my vocabulary and grammar sucked, but I could follow the arguments about translation in interesting ways), but I was furious. I said something along the lines of, “Oh, really, do you read Hebrew and Greek?” And he said, “No.” And I said something like, “Oh, well, I read Greek, but I’m always looking for someone who reads Hebrew.” He left. Chagrined.
[Edited to include the meme I’d seen elsewhere that I couldn’t find at the time I wrote this.]