The important variable in democracies shifting to authoritarianism is media.
When people can remain within an informational world that frames all policy issues as zero-sum battles between good and bad people, the foundation of democracy (pluralism) is actively is undermined. And, the response of “both sides are bad,” or any version of “left v. right,” makes the situation worse. We can’t undermine or escape authoritarianism by trying to argue within its frames.
Authoritarianism is a politics of identity, so the more that we accept the depoliticizing of policy questions by framing them as questions of loyalty, univocality, or identity to Us or Them, the more that authoritarianism thrives.
If you argue with Trump supporters about Trump, you’ll get nowhere. And, really, he isn’t the problem. If it hadn’t been Trump, it would have been someone else. (As I argued in a book I tried to publish in 2013. Not that I’m bitter.)
Trump supporters live in a world that has trained them to reject any evidence that he is corrupt, dishonest, incompetent, and mentally unwell as “biased.” This is important.
The way that people get persuaded to reconsider their support of Trump has to be direct and personal, when the leopard eats their face. That isn’t something we can count on happening, so I’m not sure it’s a great strategy (although it is useful to point out that it’s likely to happen).
Scholars sometimes pose the question: why did the slaver states secede? They were doing fine, actually, and Lincoln wasn’t really a threat. The answer is that their media had worked them up about secession. It was possible to be in an informational world that presented innumerable (and I do mean that) abolitionist conspiracies, plots on the part of African Americans (free and enslaved), and threats to the slave economy. Almost all were fabrications, wild exaggerations, nothing more than rumors, or misrepresentations of actual events. The AAS did not flood the South with anti-slavery pamphlets in 1835, but it was continually repeated that they did (and still is because it was so commonly repeated).
Weimar Germany was a world of informational enclaves, in which it was possible to believe that Jews had been proven to be…whatever. As I mentioned in the previous post, and as anyone who has regular contact with a Trump supporter knows, they are in an informational enclave.
So, here’s my crank theory.
Don’t argue with family members about Trump. Instead, try to point out the flaws of their information. Try to get them to understand that they’re being lied to.
I’m not entirely sure about the best strategy, but here are some ideas:
1) Ask them if there is any evidence or information that would persuade them to change their mind on X. X might be whether they should support Trump, if Fox is reliable, specific claims about Trump.
2) Ask them if their media holds Trump’s family to the same standards they held Biden’s.
3) Ask them if their media showed them [this] or reported on [this].
My intuition is that, when they say no to each of these questions, they’re likely to respond with whaddaboutism. I’m not sure that continuing the discussion is worth the time—they’ll just use it to persuade themselves that they’re right. The whole point of being MAGA is upsetting “libruls,” so if you aren’t upset, and just refuse to engage, and treat them as not worth engaging, they don’t get the rush of being an edgelord upsetting a lib.
So, asking things like, “Did you know Trump fell asleep during the NBA game?” “Do you think a family member profiting from what the President does is bad?” and so on. And then don’t engage an argument about whether it happened. If you have them in your social media world, then post information from sites that cite, and that you have double-checked. Sharing information they can easily show is false or misleading confirms their commitment to their media enclave.
Sharing that well-sourced and accurate information is a way of usefully disagreeing. Without arguing.
Leave them uncomfortable. Not about Trump, but about Fox, or wherever they get their information.
You’re putting a hole in the dam, and eventually they’ll run out of fingers.
As y’all know, I intermittently pay attention to what pro-GOP sources are saying about events. And it’s really worrisome. I’m so far left that I’m not in favor of any flavor of authoritarianism; that is, an anti-deliberative approach to policy questions. An anti-deliberative approach is always a politics of the obvious: the correct answer is obvious to all good people, and anyone who disagrees with this very specific policy is obvious not a good person.
I’m not saying this because I’m about to advocate some incoherent and irrational both sides are bad (all versions of BSAB are incoherent and irrational), or the hobgoblin of relativism (all ideologies are equally valid—a position I don’t think anyone has actually held). But I will say that I think conservatism is a legitimate political position, and should be included in the conversation, as should be lots of other positions with which I disagree (libertarianism, for instance). I believe in useful disagreement.
By useful disagreement, I don’t mean one in which people are nice to each other, or stay calm, or end up persuading one another, finding common ground. Useful disagreement can be vehement and frustrating.
The problem with pro-GOP media, and many media that are opposed to the GOP and its current turn toward authoritarianism is that they don’t believe in useful disagreement. There was a time when there were shows where people with different political identities shouted at each other, but that wasn’t useful disagreement because they just shouted slogans at each other, without actually responding to what the other was saying. It was like a staged fight in a not very good movie–what one is doing has nothing to do with what the other is doing.
As I’ve said many times, my area of scholarship is how communities wreck the train on which they (we) all live, and they (we) do so by refusing to acknowledge that disagreement is useful. If you define demagoguery as rhetoric that causes communities to wreck the train on which we live, then the first and most important characteristic is that demagoguery is anti-deliberative. It says that the correct course of action is obvious, and there is no reason to engage anyone who disagrees with Us about that correct course of action. It says disagreement is never useful.
Demagoguery says disagreement isn’t about people who have different ways of thinking, perspectives, values, experiences, goals, but a fight between people who are right and everyone else (people who are wrong). Demagoguery says that, for every and situation or problem, there is a perfect solution that all reasonable people recognize as the correct solution. And, therefore, politics is not about understanding why people disagree, but about persuading, coercing, or excluding everyone who disagrees.
Again, I’m not saying that all positions are equally valid, or even that all positions are valid. I’m saying that reasonable and inclusive disagreements hold all participants to the same standards of reason, proof, evidence, ethics. And I really wish people understood enthymemes, and major premises.
For instance, imagine that we’re disagreeing about whether policing is systemically racist, and that people of color are more likely to be pulled over or treated worse than white people.
One personal experience might be: a person of color getting seriously harassed by a police officer for a minor parking violation. The logic of that argument is: people of color are treated differently by the police because Terry (a person of color) was seriously harassed for a minor parking violation. The assumption is that Terry getting seriously harassed for a parking violation is a sign of police harassment for people like Terry.
That’s taking a single instance of a sign of a larger problem and, as even Aristotle said, that isn’t necessarily proof of the grander claim, but it is evidence. It is a datapoint. So the way to engage that argument, for someone who believed that policing is not racist, would be to argue about whether that datapoint is representative—whether, on the whole, police interactions with people of color are strikingly different from interactions with white people.
But, instead, at least as far as my drifting around in various spaces suggests, the most likely counter-argument is: I am a white person, and I have no trouble with the police because I am polite to them, and therefore the police are not racist.
That is missing the point of the disagreement entirely. That a polite white person has never had a bad interaction with the police is not proof that policing is not racist.
Here is my crank theory: people think it’s proof because they can’t imagine that other people have different experiences. They imagine that they are fully in control of what happens—their behavior, not their identity, caused the police officer’s reaction—and so they assume everyone has that level of control. To think otherwise would threaten their perception of a just world. I once had a bizarre conversation with someone who said that the government should not impose any controls about environmental policy. I asked if she would be okay if someone put a smelting plant next to her house, and she said then the neighbors should band together and buy out the smelting plant. I asked what should happen if the neighbors were poor, and she said, and I’m not kidding, they should stop being poor. She thought that was obvious—it’s a politics of the obvious combined with the (unjust) just world theory.
Rejecting a politics of the obvious means acknowledging that disagreement is useful. That doesn’t mean that people disagreeing have to be nice, or shouldn’t be emotional, or should always soft-pedal their arguments and avoid direct contradiction. It doesn’t mean every point of view is equally valid, or that every disagreement can or should be talked through. But it does mean advocating pluralism (not sloppy relativism). It means disagreeing by responding to the argument someone has actually made, holding all parties to the same standards (e.g., of tone, evidence, rationality), and trying to be internally consistent. It means disagreeing usefully.
I urge anyone who has strong opinions about what the Dems should do to read Asymmetric Politics.
I hate to put my thesis first, but here I will. I’m seeing a lot of centrists arguing that the DNC should support centrist candidates, and self-identified leftists saying it should be leftists. And there are people who are saying that the DNC should have a coherent message, or various other narratives that assume the DNC is at the wheel. The DNC cannot guarantee that opponents of authoritarianism can win the midterms by only putting forward candidates with one ideology and one policy agenda. What will work is cracking holes in the dyke of support for Trump, and that means NOT sharing posts from irresponsible anti-Trump sites. Sharing information that it’s easy for Trump supporters to dismiss as false or misleading confirms their support for him, and their sense of a binary of unbiased and objective people (Trump supporters) and biased liars (his critics and opponents).
Here’s the longer version. Whenever there is a really complicated and nasty political situation, there is a tendency for some people to assert that it’s actually really straightforward, and there is a simple solution. That response is emotionally satisfying, since it’s what people really, really want to hear when things are getting twitchy, but, as a scholar of train wrecks, I can say it’s never true.[1]
There is always a tendency for people to think about policy questions from our own perspective. We unintentionally assume that what we want is what everyone wants (or should want). I always think of this as the Rousseau problem. Rousseau assumed some univocal identity of “the people” who had all the same needs and interests.
Drifting around the digitally-connected world, I’ve learned that there’s an interesting variation on the notion that all real people really have the same needs and interests, and it’s one that troubles anti-authoritarians particularly: the tendency to assume that everyone reasons as we do. There is a tendency among people who oppose Trump to assume that the Dems could win if they just used different rhetoric and/or had a different policy agenda. And it’s always the rhetoric or policy agenda that person endorses. So, it’s an argument that, were the people making decisions in the DNC to behave more like the GOP (one policy agenda, one rhetoric) and find the right policy agenda and rhetoric, then the Dems could win. That isn’t how Dems and potential Dems approach politics.
GOP voters will vote for a dead person rather than a Dem. People likely to vote Dem don’t have that kind of party loyalty. (Which, I think, is good on the whole, but it’s a problem when we’re no longer in a pluralist system.) Dem and potential voters are about policies. So, all that the GOP has to do to win is to persuade potential Dem voters not to vote Dem. That’s how the math works. So, what does that mean about what voters who will not vote GOP, but are unhappy about Dem policies and candidates, should do? And I should say that I really hate the DNC. For all the reasons.
But here’s where I’ve landed.
The current GOP, which is not conservative, has a base that is about ideology and ingroup loyalty (as the conservative Haidt long ago showed). It is reactionary (a topic on which Mark Lilla has written beautifully). And the ideology is strategically vague, but functionally mostly negative (as Paul Johnson has shown): supporting the GOP means [slogans not reasonably attached to GOP policies] and actions that are simply about feeling victimized by the hobgoblin of “libruls.” That approach to politics works because self-identified “conservatives” commitment to loyalty means that they are loyal to their sources of information.
People likely to vote Dem are not motivated by ideology. They (we) care about policies. It’s a coalition. I have to say Asymmetric Politics surprised me—I thought the GOP was a coalition, in that it has people who actually wildly disagree with each other on all sorts of policies, yet they work together. That seemed like a coalition. But a coalition is a group of people with disparate interests who agree to work together.
What I’ve come to believe from drifting into pro-GOP sites and conversations is that supporters of the GOP don’t know they disagree—they just agree on hating on the hobgoblin. Fox is not as extreme as some pro-GOP media sites, and that’s the only one I intermittently check, and they never mention anything that might undermine support for Trump—ranging from his falling asleep, rambling incoherently, openly lying, how many of his policies are oriented toward his family’s pockets, or the irresponsibility and internal incoherence of his policies.
Here’s my point: What matters most about people who currently support the GOP is that their sense of loyalty means that they have no clue what the GOP is actually currently doing.
Showing that progressives won in very pro-Dem areas is not evidence that that particular agenda and rhetoric will work in other areas (although I really, really wish it did.) That advice falsely assumes that Dems are like the GOP—that there is one ideology and one set of policies will work for all potential Dems. There isn’t. There shouldn’t be. That would make the Dems just a mirror image of the GOP; that is, anti-democratic and anti-pluralist.
[1] The book I’ve never written is about toxic self-help rhetoric, and how toxic self-help rhetoric promises “this one weird trick” or “you just have to”. (The adjective is restrictive.) Not all self-help rhetoric is toxic. I’ve got a site that has a lot of advice about scholarly writing—in other words, self-help rhetoric. And it cites a lot of advice and sources that are self-help rhetoric.)
There’s a long tradition of explaining the transformation of democracy into authoritarianism as the story of “too much democracy” enabling the rise of a demagogue who makes himself a tyrant. It is “too much democracy” in that the rise of the demagogue is the consequence of a decline in authority and a flattening of hierarchy. In this talk I want to focus on two relatively recent examples of that narrative (more recent that Plato or Plutarch, anyway), one because it was influential (Samuel Huntington’s chapter in the 1975 Trilateral Commission report “Crisis of Democracy”), and the other because it’s typical (Andrew Sullivan’s May 2016 “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic”). Full and additional quotes are here.
At the foundation of this narrative of too much democracy is the binary of “the elite” v. “real people,” and one of the points I’ll make is that rhetors are using those terms in wildly different ways, often in ways that are strategically ambiguous.
In what is generally called populism, the elite is “out of touch” with how real people live, authoritarian, self-serving, inauthentic, and isolated, and the people are real, authentic, deserving, and oppressed. The “too much democracy” narrative of someone like Huntington or Sullivan accepts the foundational binary of elite v. people, but bemoans the decline in power of some vague “elite.” So, for instance, here is Sullivan’s explanation of Trump’s success in the 2016 primaries:
“As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.” (New York May 1, 2016)
Sullivan’s rhetoric works to the extent that the reader is left to fill in the empty signifiers like “authority,” “elites,” “equality.” Depending on how the reader fills the empty signifier, the binary can seem apt.
But it is a grave mistake to think that toxic populism (a kind of demagoguery) does not appeal to the authority of elites, let alone advocates equality, or is in any way anti-authoritarian. For much current demagoguery, “liberals” or “the woke mob” are described as the powerful and authoritarian elite whose cultural dominance oppresses “real” people; that “liberal” elite is sometimes muddled with a notion of a cultural elite (as in the comicsgate or PBS controversies). Some kinds of populism describe the authoritarian elite in economic terms, billionaires or massive near-monopolistic corporations (Sanders, OWS, Mamdani). Even if we limit “elite” to “economic elite,” the term is usefully fluid. Andrew Jackson’s demagoguery about the national bank characterized the banking and manufacturing elite as a nefarious and alien group opposed to real people, and it was in service of the economic elite whose wealth and power came from slavery (and they were not restricted to the American South). It was a condemnation of one kind of elite in service to another.
For the “too much democracy” narrative, there is a kind of cultural/intellectual elite that should be treated with authority and deference, whose superiority should be recognized. And that’s where dignity comes in. In some models of democracy (such as participatory democracy), dignity is assumed to be a universal human right. In other kinds of democracy (such as herrenvolk democracy, democracy of the faithful, libertarian authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism) and all forms of authoritarianism, dignity is imagined as a limited resource, distributed proportionate to one’s place in a hierarchy. Dignity is about the privilege to dominate those lower on the hierarchy. In that latter model, the people “below” demanding dignity is perceived as trying to reduce the amount of dignity possessed by those higher up, and therefore it is equalizing of everyone, a rejection of authority, and “too much democracy.”
People afraid of losing their privilege—some, but not all, members of some kind of elite—will then sometimes work with a party or leader who promises to restore or protect the hierarchy of privilege and dignity—often an authoritarian demagogue. Pace Sullivan or Plato, when democracies die, it’s almost always because, as Levitsky and Ziblatt say, elites deliberately invited the authoritarian into power, expecting to be able to benefit from and control them: “In each case, elites believe the invitation to power would contain the outsider, leading to a restoration of control by mainstream politicians” (13).
Sullivan’s claim that barriers to equality were being removed in 2016, let alone that such removal was bad, is and was unmitigated nonsense. Neither Trump nor the demagogues who greased the skids for him ever preached equality. They condemned equality, preaching Jeremiads about how America had fallen from greatness by too much equality, too little deference to authority, and a failure to maintain the right hierarchy. Much demagoguery right now in the US is not about “elite” in general, but about the hobgoblin of the liberal elite. The economic elite like Trump, Musk, and others is actively admired and respected. Similarly, as is clear in the arguments for never holding police or ICE accountable, current pro-GOP demagoguery is not anti-authoritarian; in fact it’s about deference to authority, but the right authority. It’s about vertical morality and hierarchy.
It isn’t a question of believing or disbelieving experts, but of disagreements about what constitutes expertise. Expertise is rhetorically constructed, not an ontological category (Hartelius). Eugenics, segregation, smoking, homophobia, misogyny, climate change denial, and even the over-prescription of opioids all were or are advocated and defended by labs, research, and journals, many of which claim(ed) to be peer reviewed, and which sort of are.
Part of the authority comes from resonance. As with Hitler, the famous demagogues are famously unoriginal. McCarthy’s rhetoric was just a kind of warmed over anti-communist demagoguery that became popular in the thirties. That anticommunist rhetoric itself relied on the very old eschatological and chiliast frame for politics that has constrained policy deliberation in the US at least as far back as the Hutchinson controversy in the 17th century. Howell and Moe observe that every part of Trump’s agenda in 2016 was what Patrick Buchanan had promoted for years. It wasn’t just Buchanan. Part of what made Trump’s rhetoric resonate was the extent to which it repeated many of the points that had been hammered home for twenty to thirty years among various radio and TV pundits.
“By the 2016 election cycle American right-leaning audiences had been exposed for two decades on television (and nearly three on radio) to a propagandist mass media outlet built on feeding its viewers with news that fit and reinforced their world view while constantly pointing fingers at all other media sources as biased.” (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 324)
It was very inauthentic, and very elite, people and organizations that gave fuel to Trump’s campaign and continue to protect him and the GOP from any accountability. Unhappily, this is worsened by the monetization of the internet, which has enabled what Bratch calls “cyber-demagoguery:”
Ernesto Laclau has described the role of empty signifiers in populism, but it’s often not as much “empty” as unstated: “In the United States and Europe, claims to speak for ‘ordinary people’ have often implicitly or explicitly meant ‘white people’ [and] many political parties have been rewarded at the ballot box for portraying themselves as the voice of a virtuous white people betrayed by predominantly white elites allied with people of color and immigrants, who are portrayed as outsiders unfairly draining resources.” (Bratich 85)
The unstated but assumed “whiteness” of “real” people is often an important assumption in the “too much democracy” narrative in that the people who are oppressed, losing ground, unappreciated are implicitly or explicitly white.
Huntington’s 1975 summary of the “too much democracy” of the 60s bemoans the changes of the 60s, which he identifies as increased political activism on the part of women and people of color (not his term):
“The challenging of the authority of established political, social, and economic institutions, increased popular participation in and control over those institutions, a reaction against the concentration of power in the executive branch of the federal government and in favor of the reassertion of the power of Congress and of state and local government, renewed commitment to the idea of equality on the part of intellectuals and other elites, the emergence of ‘public interest’ lobbying groups, increased concern for the rights of and provision of opportunities for minorities and women to participate in the polity and economy, and a pervasive criticism of those who possessed or were even thought to possess excessive power or wealth.” (59-60; 1975)
He would go on to publish an article in 2000 called (and I’m not kidding) “The Special Case of Mexican Immigration: Why Mexico is a Problem” in which he argued that “Mexican immigration [by which he means any and everyone from South or Central America] poses challenges to our policies and to our identity in a way nothing else has in the past” (20), an argument that largely ignores that exactly the same claims had previously been made about Irish and German Catholics (Morse), Jews (Grant), and non-WASPs generally (Stoddard). Thus, while he’s making exactly the same hyperbolic and unfounded arguments made about other groups, he’s claiming the situation is unprecedented. It’s very precedented.
Sullivan explains Trump’s popularity as a consequence of the “demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life”:
“For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. [….] Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to ‘check his privilege’ by students at Ivy League colleges.”
While there are very, very good reasons to acknowledge the harm that has been done to members of the working class, why the tendency to talk about what’s happened to the white working class? There were large numbers of people of color in the coal industry (Lewis), and decline in manufacturing jobs has had significant impact on non-whites as well (Gould).
Sullivan’s analysis of the problem, it should be emphasized, was that expertise about politics was no longer valued, implying it should be. Yet his analysis is strikingly absent of any familiarity with what actual experts had to say about how democracies die. Sullivan focused on his own expertise, based on something the elitist and anti-democratic Plato wrote that Sullivan read in college. Sullivan privileged his own personal experience and beliefs over what experts in the field said. He didn’t even seem to think he needed to check to see what they said. Google Scholar was around in 2016, after all. Juan Linz’s foundational text, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, came out in 1978, and it led to many studies about how democracies die. None of them mentioned too much democracy. Linz’s book points to a variety of factors such as “Unsolvable problems, a disloyal opposition ready to exploit them to challenge the regime, the decay of democratic authenticity among the regime supporting parties, and the loss of efficacy, effectiveness (particularly in the face of violence), and ultimately legitimacy” (51). Linz points out that that leading actors—that is, an elite–might be tempted to exploit the situation by removing the guardrails of democracy, strengthening the executive, purifying the polity, voter suppression, criminalizing opposition parties, –removing outgroup protections—that is, they mobilize support for ending democracy.
Thus, it isn’t too much democracy that ends democracy, but the fear that many people have that they are going to lose status; it’s the fear of democracy.
Many years ago, when I was first teaching about demagoguery, a high school friend got in touch with me. He was angry that one of my course documents said that a politician he admired had engaged in demagoguery at some point. The friend said that was “unfair,” without giving any evidence that my clear definition of demagoguery did not apply to his hero. Even defenders of this politician characterize his early rhetoric as demagoguery.
But my high school friend’s reaction seems reasonable from within a popular understanding of demagoguery. The most common way to think about demagoguery is that it is something that demagogues do. It’s an identity issue: a political figure is, or is not a demagogue. And demagogues are bad people with bad motives who use bad rhetoric to persuade the gullible masses to support bad policies.
That’s a bad way to think about demagoguery. For one thing, it’s rabidly self-serving. If demagogues are bad people, and their followers are gullible, then we are never going to identify beloved in-group rhetors as demagogues.
They (out-groups) have demagogues; We (our in-groups) have excellent communicators.
My argument is that there are always individuals engaged in demagoguery; when demagoguery is likely to lead to authoritarian figures or disastrous policies is when there is a culture of demagoguery—when it’s common for major sources of information to frame policy disagreements as really a zero-sum existential, even apocalyptic, battle between Us and Them, when inclusive deliberation is treated as a trap set by villains, a weakness, a step down the slippery slope to [dogs lying with cats! Tattoos being legally required! The in-group being forced into FEMA camps!].
The important point about a culture of demagoguery, whether it’s how a neighborhood mailing list treats issues, or a nation faced with thinking about going to war, is that such a culture prohibits reasonable policy deliberation in favor of mobilizing a base to hate some hobgoblin. That mobilizing consists of rhetoric that says that: 1) the situation is simultaneously dire and simple; the urgency of the situation means that we should not deliberate. 2) our situation is not a complicated one in which there are various options we should consider, but a simple and urgent situation in which the right course of action is obvious to every and any reasonable and good person. 3) therefore, every manly, faithful, and reasonable person knows what the right course of action (i.e., policy) is. 4) because “the ill” or “need” is so obvious, anyone asking that we engage in deliberation about the proposed plan (in terms of feasibility, solvency, unintended consequences, costs) is a weak, overly-intellectual, effeminate, indecisive, cowardly villain or dupe who isn’t taking the “ill” seriously. 5) Therefore, when They argue plan, We argue need. Over and over, exaggerating or fabricating the threat if necessary. 6) And,because the situation is dire, and there are villains out there trying to seduce you into believing their lies, you should only get your information from in-group sources. Any rhetor, source, or information that complicates or contradicts what in-group media is saying is “biased.”
Because what matters is the culture of demagoguery, the solution is not deeper commitment to a purer and more fanatical in-group and its preferred policy, relying even more on in-group sources, or getting defensive about political figures we like, but doing the work necessary to have a broader understanding of policy options. We respond to demagoguery by getting out of demagogic cultures.
Why does demagoguery matter? And why does it matter how we define it?
Those two questions are actually in reverse order of importance. People sometimes seem to think that the meaning of a word was baked into the physical matter of the universe, and so has One Meaning To Rule Them All. But, very few terms have only one meaning, and concepts often have disputed meanings. So, what are we trying to do by defining a term.. Often, it’s just so we can agree on referents and thereby communicate more clearly.
If we share a definition of cats that makes them different from dogs, then your story about a “cat” climbing a tree is plausible and maybe even boring. If I think the word “cat” refers to dogs, I might find your story unbelievable and shocking. I would also be dubious about your story if I thought you were referring to a “Cat”—that is, a Caterpillar tractor.
There are consequences of definitions. How terms like “citizen,” “murder,” “minor,” “disabled” are defined can have life-changing consequences.
So, what are we doing when we try to define demagoguery?
For many people who write about demagoguery, it’s about trying to understand how a bad person came to power, mobilize a base, and overthrew democratic norms. So, they look back through history at individuals of whom they disapprove who did those things (or nearly did), and try to see what they had in common. They start with the individuals already on their list of “bad people who did bad things” and then look at the rhetoric. (This is also true of a lot of the political scientists who write about populism.)
I came around to demagoguery via a different route.
I was the kind of kid who turned over rocks to see what was there. My father was a pathologist, and sometimes took me to his lab that had various samples in jars of problematic specimens. I think he was trying to persuade me to become a doctor, but he unintentionally persuaded me that looking at how things go wrong is necessary for understanding what it might mean for things to go right.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but, when I was a graduate student in rhetoric (I have four degrees in it), most scholars seemed to be focused on times that rhetors changed history in positive ways. I unintentionally followed the footsteps of my father, and looked at a debate that should have been a clear win for the group that lost. The decision to dam and flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley was a bad decision; it violated the principles of a national park; it was the most expensive option; the arguments for why it was good not only involved lying about the costs of the various options, but imagined physically impossible improvements. They weren’t bad people, but those were bad arguments.
It was a moment of a complete failure in public deliberation. It was a train wreck because the frame for policy deliberation at the time (efficiency) didn’t allow for the kind of argument that John Muir was trying to make. His arguments about the sacrality of some spaces, the importance of spaces of renewal, the notion that beauty was itself a public good, and even a different sense of who should benefit and how from publics lands were just dismissed, often on the grounds of the kind of person he was.
And the disagreement was much more complicated than either he or the major advocates of the dam acknowledged. It wasn’t two sides. It could look like it was two sides, since it was, ultimately, whether San Francisco should be allowed to dam and flood the valley or not, but it was actually a lot of groups (a corrupt water company, Progressives who hoped to make a point about public ownership of basic needs, a fairly loony and thoroughly dishonest [or maybe incompetent] engineer tasked with providing numbers that no one checked, boosters who wanted a splashy exposition, conservationists v. preservationists).
When I was writing my dissertation about John Muir and the Hetch Hetchy Valley debate, the dominant narrative about American policies in regard to nature was by a really, really sloppy scholar who had a binary narrative in which Christians and Christianity were the cause of American exploitation of nature. So, since I didn’t have great mentors at that time, I decided that my first book would be a refutation of his argument by writing a history of American attitudes toward nature, showing that it wasn’t a binary, let alone that Christians and Christianity were the villains.
I started with the 17th century American Puritans (where he started), and it turned out that not only was their attitude toward nature pretty complicated, but that they wrecked a lot of trains.
I’ll spare you the whole narrative, but what it comes down to is that my area of expertise ended up being times when communities had all the information they needed in order to make good decisions, and they didn’t. They wrecked the train.
It was never the case of a spell-binding individual who hypnotized a passive public into supporting policies they would never otherwise have supported. It was never about a rhetor who swept a people in his wake.
While there often were powerful people who did mobilize a base, they were just the scum on the top of a wave that wasn’t caused by any single individual. In many cases (e.g., eugenics, anti-immigration legislation, slavery, segregation, Japanese internment, various unnecessary wars), there wasn’t an individual primarily responsible for the bad decisions. The go-to example of a demagogue (Hitler) was notoriously uninventive in the claims he was making about Jews, WWI, and so on. These disastrous decisions weren’t one forced by the masses over the objections and resistance of the elite or experts. In the cases when individuals did end up front and center (when the culture of demagoguery enabled a charismatic leadership situation, as in the case of Hitler), that leader rose because they had elite support. They also always had experts on their side.
So what struck me in the various cases was that, while they didn’t have in common some individual rhetor who transmogrified a public, they did have a similar rhetorical culture—they had similar ways of framing deliberation (sometimes in general and sometimes just about one topic). There was no such thing as a complicated problem. The conflict was between good people who saw what the obvious right answer was and people who were stupid, corrupt, duped, or just plain spit from the bowels of Satan. Much of the rhetoric was about decision-making—that what was needed was not some kind of careful review of the information, inclusive deliberation, consideration of long-term consequences but strength of will, fanatical loyalty to the in-group and in-group representatives, silencing or expelling/exterminating) the Out-group and its stooges, mobilizing (or silencing) any non in-group members, and full commitment to whatever policies seemed to most oriented toward domination and extermination. These communities emphasized believing rather than thinking, let alone listening. They were also communities in which it was easy to remain in a monologic informational world—so, even if there were diverse media options (that is, not all media advocated the same message), it was difficult and sometimes nearly impossible for an individual to hear them all. People were in informational enclaves, perhaps by choice, and perhaps because of region or access or something else.
Once I started looking at it this way, it became clear that it was a question of degrees of several factors (described at the beginning of Rhetoric and Demagoguery). So, a community might drift into this kind of rhetorical culture briefly or on one issue, with no particular harm, and possibly even benefit (as John Muir did with his article on the Hetch Hetchy Valley). Demagoguery isn’t necessarily insincere (in fact, I’d guess it’s most often very sincere), and not restricted to bad people (Earl Warren did a lot of good things). Looking at demagoguery is part of what persuaded me of the fundamental toxicity of the left/right way of talking about politics. Where would one put Theodore Bilbo, Earl Warren, or LBJ on that continuum?
Because I am constitutionally averse to inventing new terms, I not tocome up with a new term for the kind of rhetoric and rhetorical culture, but instead to adopt the existing term closest to what I was describing: demagoguery. (I sometimes regret that decision.)
That’s why I’m not interested in demagogues, I don’t think people who engage in demagoguery are necessarily evil, I don’t even think demagoguery is always bad. The more that a culture is demagogic, the more that powerful rhetors engage in demagoguery, the more that there is a dominant demagoguery about a specific group, and the more that people are in informational enclaves, the more likely that train is headed to the station. And not in a good way. .
One of the ways it’s possible to know that a political group is frightened is when they start to lie about opponents.
As far as I can tell, a political group, media, pundit, or whatever lies about what the opponent has said when they’re very frightened that the opponent might win, and they think they will lose if they try to make their case via reasonable and ethical responses. In other words, they misrepresent (a polite word for “lie”) about the stances of their opponent because they don’t have a reasonable response. If they had a reasonable response, they wouldn’t have to lie.
I’ll say it again for the people in the back: Lying and misrepresenting is an admission that you don’t have a reasonable argument.
One way of admitting you don’t have a reasonable argument is this meme about Talarico. Much pro-GOP media misrepresented his argument. Either that media/pundit/political figure deliberately lied about what Talarico said, or they’re too stupid to understand how doors work.
So, those of you with anti-Talarico people in your world who shared that lie, here’s how I think they will respond when told, very clearly, that they believe and share information from sources that lie.
Reasonable people stop getting their information from that media/pundit. (Why I stopped getting information, or passing along links, from Mother Jones, the Heritage Foundation, or Occupy Democrats without vetting them carefully first).
If you had an uncle who lied to you about things, if you’re a reasonable person, you would stop believing him. If, on the other hand, you had some notion of fanatical loyalty to family, you might choose to keep believing him no matter how many times he lies to you. That would not be reasonable. You might choose to do so because of values like family loyalty, or he’s got a lot of money that you’re hoping to inherit. I think one of the most powerful motivations for continuing to believe your lying uncle is that you’ve repeated his stories in public, and so you’d be publicly admitting you were duped. If other people told you he was lying, and you refused to believe then, then (especially if you’re the kind of person who thinks of interpersonal interactions as domination and submission), you’d be particularly motivated to refuse to admit what you now know to be true. It might feel like submitting to the others.
We all get duped at times. A reasonable person responds to being told they’re repeating information from a lying source by saying, “Whoops!” And then they’re more careful about what they repeat from that that source.
Here’s how unreasonable people reply to having it pointed out to them that they’re sharing information from a media source that is lying/deliberately misrepresenting. (I learned this by arguing with Stalinists many years ago): “So, what, Dems do that too.” Even if every Dem source also lied and misrepresented, it still means you’re getting your information from a source that lies. Or is stupid. You don’t have to abandon that source—just keep those grains of salt nearby.
-“Well, even if this quote is misleading, he’s still a bad person.” He might still be someone for whom you don’t want to vote, but you’re still getting your information from media/pundits that lie to you.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at various definitions of a “reasonable” argument, and I’ve ended up deciding that Jesus said it best. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” So, instead of trying to justify believing sources that consistently lie and misrepresent, ask yourself? Are you okay when other people lie about or misrepresent what you’ve said? Is that how you want to be treated?
The issue is that you are getting your information from a source that will lie and try to fool you, and the various ways of swatting away that issue are unreasonable. But they’re more than that. Being okay with treating Talarico in a way you wouldn’t want you or your political figures treated means being okay with telling Jesus he got it wrong.
If Talarico is that bad, there’s no need to lie about him or deliberately misrepresent what he said. Lying and misrepresenting is a pragmatic admission that he’s pretty good.
I’ve spent thirty years worried that our media environment would either create a civil war or a fascist overthrow of democracy. In the midst of the pro-Iraq invasion demagoguery I was researching pro-slavery demagoguery, and I realized in both cases, the problem wasn’t demagogues. The problem was a culture of demagoguery.
In both cases, complicated policy options were reduced to a single-axis binary or continuum of identity (a person is pro- or anti-slavery, or pro- or anti-invasion). So, the frame for politics was identitarian.
In both cases, that was a completely false way of representing the policy options. In both cases, it was a way of framing the conflict that benefitted the authoritarians. The very complicated set of policy options that the United States had in regard to slavery were reduced to a binary of identity: pro- or anti-slavery. That helped slavers (there is no distinction between slaveholders and slavers—the institution of slavery was profitable because “slaveholders” bought and sold slaves; they were all slavers). It helped slavers because the “anti-slavery” position could be fallaciously equated with advocating slave rebellion.
It’s the genus-species fallacy. Since some people who are anti-slavery advocate slave resistance (e.g., David Walker), and slave resistance is the same as slave rebellion (as a famous court decision concluded), then anyone who criticizes slavery is advocating slave rebellion. (That’s the summary of actual arguments made by people who were taken seriously.)
It was the same fallacy that showed up in regard to Iraq—terrorists oppose the war (actually, they didn’t), therefore people who oppose the war are terrorists. The genus-species fallacy is repeated thrice over in the claim that “anyone who says racism is systemic is advocating CRT because that’s what CRT says and CRT is Marxist, so they’re Marxist.”
The genus-species fallacy is built in to any identitarian model of politics. Identitarian models of politics say that the world of policy disagreements isn’t actually about individual (or small group) concerns, needs, problems, goals and therefore different policy commitments (e.g., an anti-choice soybean farmer) . It says that our policy world is really a zero-sum tug-of war of people along a single axis, or even a binary (that soybean farmer is far right).
Just to be clear: we all are members of many social groups, some of which are important to our sense of identity. Chester might be a Lutheran, 49ers fan, parrot owner, parcheesi fanatic. Those are Chester’s “in-groups” if they are how he defines himself. We also all have a lot of groups we are in that aren’t important to our sense of identity—the way you can tell whether your group identification is in-group is if you get defensive if someone criticizes that group. So, if someone said parcheesi sucks, and they prefer chess, Chester would only care if his sense of himself as a parcheesi player was important to him.
In-groups always have out-groups. In fact, in-groups are generally defined by their not being out-group. Unhappily, self-worth tends to be comparative. We can think of ourselves as good, or justified, or successful, or whatever, if we can compare ourselves to others around us and say we’re better. (“Maybe parcheesi players do yell at kittens, but that’s nowhere as bad as what chess players do, so I’m not going to feel bad about it.”) So, out-groups help us feel good about ourselves because they’re so much worse than we are.
Because people have a lot of in-groups, there are a lot of ways that we can be called on to identify ourselves, and a lot of policy commitments we might have. Media that promote the identitarian model evade discussions of the various policy options, instead narrating the zero-sum conflict along that continuum of identity (this is also called the “horse race” frame).
In all my research of train wrecks in public deliberation—from the Sicilian Expedition to Bush’s failure to plan for an occupation—a major factor is identitarian politics. Identitarian politics makes disagreement about policies seem pointless, trivial, or even distracting. It thereby fosters authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is a model of society, culture, and government that assumes that politics is a question of identity, with one identity entitled to dominate the others.
All authoritarian politics are identitarian. All ethnic cleansings are identitarian. All train wrecks in public deliberation are identitarian.
We are in what might be end times for democracy. The way we should respond to this crisis is NOT to engage in purity wars, although that’s the impulse. We don’t stop authoritarianism by being more authoritarian about our allies (i.e., condemning people who haven’t take a strong enough stance), or purifying the in-group and insisted that everyone “get on the same page;” we stop it by forming alliances. There has never been a time when opponents of authoritarianism successfully prevented an authoritarian takeover by fighting among ourselves.
We shouldn’t spend our time (and social media) mobilizing resentment about potential allies. If your impulse is to respond to what I’m saying is that I’m telling you that you can’t criticize Dems, then you’re completely misunderstanding. Absolutely criticize the Dems. But do so in a way that is likely to have impact without mobilizing resentment. Email the DNC. Email the Dem politicians who are taking stands you think are wrong.
The DNC and Dem politicians care about what email they get. They don’t know, and therefore don’t care, about what you or I post on FB. But posting about how the Dems suck (especially when it’s reposting something that is just wrong about how Congressional practices work) helps authoritarians.
My final point is: don’t try to create alliances of identity, but of policy.
I often attend the Texas TribFest, and it’s where policy wonks wonk together. They make an effort to bring in people with different points of view. And one of the most moving panels I saw was two Texas state legislators who both self-identify as Christian, and one is a Dem and the other GOP. And they talked about their going together to Death Row, and praying with the people there, their working together on abolishing the Death Penalty, and their failure to get any pro-Death Penalty legislators to come with them. They said they disagree vehemently with one another about all sorts of issues, but they agree on this. Alliances can be policy specific, and yet effective and important.
[A friend sent along this vid, which makes a similar argument.]
I’ve been writing about demagoguery for twenty years, and I think just today I’ve figured out how to explain something that has long bothered me about the “demagoguery is an appeal to emotions” notion. In addition to the problems I’ve mentioned before—that assumes it’s possible to have a stance on politics that is devoid of emotion (a person who didn’t care about anything would have no basis for preferring one outcome over another and hence no policy preferences), the rational-irrational binary is itself irrational, people should be emotional about politics—there is a performative contradiction in saying that demagoguery is bad and demagoguery is emotional.
Many of the condemnations of demagoguery that assume the problem is that it’s an emotional appeal talk about the dangers, immorality, damage, and threats that a specific demagogue presents—they appeal to fear. And many of them are pretty dang emotional in doing so. Often by “emotional rhetoric” people mean style or tone (e.g., highly figurative language, especially such figures as hyperbole, superlatives, binaries). But, it’s quite possible (and often very moving) to make a fear-mongering irrational argument in plain style and an “unemotional” tone.
More important, the identification of someone as a demagogue tends to be grounded in emotion; that is, whether they like or dislike the rhetor and/or the rhetor’s agenda. Only out-group rhetors are demagogues.
So, if emotions are bad in public discourse, and appeals to emotion are demagogic, then it’s always demagogic to call someone a demagogue.
And that’s why I think we should focus on demagoguery rather than demagogues, and why I have a chapter in the book on demagoguery about Earl Warren’s very unemotional tone.
[I posted this on FB, but I should have posted it here also.]
People keep asking me what opponents of our authoritarian administation should be doing, and it’s pretty straightforward in the abstract but very much up for argument in the specific:
DO WHAT HAS WORKED IN THE PAST, AND DON’T DO WHAT HAS NEVER WORKED.
Things that, as far as I know, have worked in the past under similar circumstances: -have a big tent, make alliances, work together on the shared goal of saving democracy, make some compromises if necessary. -try to crack the hardshell of the informational bubble that Trump supporters are in. Just try getting the information in front of them. If you have Trump supporters in your social media, post double-checked facts about Trump, ICE, and so on. -make it personal; show how they’re supporting someone who is hurting people they love. -you can try to point out that they’re rejecting Jesus, that they hold out-groups to much, much higher standards than they hold themselves or in-group members. (They know, and don’t care, but you can try.) -you can try pointing out that they don’t really know what’s going on because they get their information from sources that misrepresent the situation. If you tell them something that they don’t want to hear, and they say it’s “fake news,” you can ask them if they get their information from a source that would tell them if it was true. -support the groups who are filing the lawsuits. -block walk, make phone calls, put up signs, subscribe to, and otherwise personally help opposition organizations and individuals, even if you disagree with them on many things. If there are other things that you are aware have worked, do them (and tell others about them).
Here’s what, as far as I know, has never worked under these circumstances: -violent protests; -various versions of purifying the in-group (refusing to compromise, insisting on univocality or unanimity in terms of ideology, strategy, or policy), refusing to support anyone who isn’t fully in line with our policy agenda/rhetoric -talking and thinking about policy disagreements in the pro-authoritarian “right/center/left” binary or continuum (a single axis) -giving up
I’m open to persuasion about the specifics. But I’ll point out, if your response is that this post shows I’m a centrist/librul/whatev for making this argument, look again at the “what hasn’t worked” list.
