Tag: demagoguery

Critics of Trump need to stop saying he’s unprecedented



Tl;dr the people who support a political figure who says, “I am so committed to the Real People that I will violate all legal and moral norms to enact my policies” always end up regretting it. Trump is very precedented, and it’s never worked out well.

I once had an unfortunate disagreement with a colleague whose work I so very, very much admire and have always supported. It came about because they kept saying that Trump and his actions are “unprecedented.” They were saying this for good reasons—wanting to mobilize outrage about Trump—but it is a historical claim, and, as such, it’s false. More important, it’s rhetorically (but understandably) misguided.

I think I came across as a pedant, crank, or someone who disliked their work. In reverse order, I love their work, and I am a crank and pedant, but, as it happens, when it comes to my insisting we not talk about Trump as unprecedented, I am neither.

His supporters believe he is unprecedented, and that’s one of the main reasons they support him. And they deflect any consideration of the precedents, as well as any criticism of him.

A lot of criticism of Trump has to do with who he is, and that kind of criticism helps him. All the evidence is that he is a corrupt, dishonest, racist, fiscally incompetent, and dishonest man who regularly sexually assaulted women, and who advocated insurrection. But there’s no point in emphasizing any of that when talking to his base because they agree that he is that person and did those things. They support him because he is a racist, corrupt, dishonest, rich person who gropes women. Most of them like that he is that person. They want to be him.

People who aren’t his base support him because they believe that they will benefit from the policies he’ll enact, especially “freeing” business owners and rich people from rules, restrictions, and taxes.

And there are people who will vote for him just because they have been trained to hate the hobgoblin of “liberals” by years of demagoguery. Some of them aren’t wild about Trump, and some have become wild about him because of the criticism. That kind of support is strengthened by the way that media and some scholars frame our vexed and complicated world of policy commitments as actually a third-rate reality show of a fight between “liberals” and “conservatives.” The single-axis model of policy affiliation depoliticizes policy argument, but that’s a book (which may come out fairly soon, fingers crossed).

Here’s the important point: just because that’s how the media frames something, and it’s possible to find supporting data, that doesn’t mean the frame is either accurate or useful. The media frames questions about birth control in terms of pro- or anti-abortion. It framed questions about the Iraq invasion as pro- or anti-war. Both of those policy disagreements are and were better served by acknowledging a a spectrum, rather than a single-axis continuum or binary.

The media frames all questions in terms of two identities at war (“left v. right”). To the extent to which media–even if they identify as “left”–frame issues in terms of identity, they help Trump.

There are a lot of reasons that people support Trump. People who rely on Fox News, the manosphere, Newsmax, for their information would vote for a cold turd as long as they were told voting for that turd would piss off “the woke mob.” Second, chiliastic fundagelicals love his aggressive actions in regard to Israel because they want nuclear war there–they believe it will reduce the number of Jews to 40k who will be converted, and thereby bring about Jesus’ reign on earth. That many Jews are choosing to support Trump because of his advocating policies that increase the likelihood of nuclear war in that region is just really frustrating. Third, descendants of immigrants pull up the ladder behind them. Unhappily, this has always been the case—the people most hostile to a new group of immigrants is the most recent group of immigrants. Fourth, toxic populism.

I think the first three are fairly clear, so I’ll emphasize the last.

Populism says that our world is not complicated, but actually a zero-sum battle between an elite and the real people. It says that we don’t have reasonable and legitimate disagreements about policies. It says that the correct course of action is obvious to all real Americans/Christians/workers/conservatives/whatevs. [1]

Commitment to a populist leader is generally irrational. Populist leaders say there is a real us, and that all our problems are caused by Them. They say that we can solve all our problems by fanatical commitment to the in-group, and refusing to listen to any criticisms of the in-group. The first move of toxic populists is to ensure their base dismisses as “biased” any criticism of them. They do so by demonizing (they’re evil), irrationalizing (they’re motivated by feelings, but we’re motivated by reason), and pathologizing (they’re lazy, criminal, corrupt) any source that is not fanatically committed to the leader/group.

Trump is a toxic populist.

The proof is that, if you say this to any of his supporters, and give the definition of a toxic populist, they won’t engage your argument.

Their first move will be whaddaboutism, their second will be deflecting the definition on the grounds that, since it applies to Trump, it must be “biased” (they’ll probably say “bias”), their third will either be harassing you (they like signing you up for Ashley Madison) or blocking you.

Claiming that Trump is unprecedented confirms his supporters’ belief that there is no already existing evidence that what he wants to do is politically, ethically, and economically disastrous. It enables them to deflect comparison to Castro, Chavez, Erdogan, Franco, Hitler, Jackson, Mussolini, Putin. Claiming that Trump is unprecedented saves them from the rhetorical responsibility of showing that supporting someone like Trump has worked out well. (Narrator: it hasn’t, especially for the working class, but even for plutocrats.)

Not all Trump supporters are the same, but the narrative that he is unprecedented enables every one of them to keep from thinking about the long-term consequences of their support. But, as I said, he’s following a playbook. It isn’t restricted to “right-wing” (I hate that term) leaders. What’s wrong with Trump isn’t about left v. right. It’s about whether a political leader values and honors democratic and legal norms or argues that he (almost always he) shouldn’t be held to them because reasons. And a leader who has made that argument has never worked out well.

Many of his supporters, like people who have supported authoritarian governments in Central Europe, are wealthy people who believe that they will profit from an authoritarian anti-socialist government. In Russia, they supported Putin, and they were wrong, as shown by what Putin did to the economy, and by the number of plutocrats who fell out of windows and landed on bullets. Paradoxically, capitalism requires innovation, and there isn’t much of that in an authoritarian culture. Authoritarian cultures/governments that have been profitable have done so by stealing ideas and innovations from democratic ones (e.g., printing or weaving).

But, and this is the important point, there are other examples of times when the people with a lot of monetary power backed a charismatic leader who was openly advocating an authoritarian government, and it didn’t work out well for them. There are precedents, and they show that charismatic leadership is actually a really bad way to run an organization, let alone a country.

The question Trump supporters should be asked is: when has support of this kind of political figure worked out well?

And that is the only aspect of Trump that is unprecedented.

[1] For a long time, I was averse to calling this “us v. them” false way of thinking about politics “populism.” I thought it should be called “toxic populism.” But, that train has left the station. Still and all, I’d argue that there is a difference between “our current political situation hurts these groups that don’t have a lot of political power” [what I think of a kind of populism—trying to worry about the ramifications of our policies on people not in power] and the binary thinking of toxic populism (our complicated political situation is actually a simple binary between people who are good/honest/real/authentic and Them). The best short book on populism is Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism. The best thorough work is the Oxford Handbook on Populism.

“AITA: I’m a Republican who is blaming the Democrats for the House of Representatives being shut down.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/04/republicans-voted-against-mccarthy-oust/

I often read a subreddit AmItheAsshole. People write in describing some incident where they think they were right, but someone tells them they behaved badly, and they’re asking for judgment.

For instance, there was recently a post by someone who said that his girlfriend dithered and delayed in the morning, and therefore regularly drove well over the speed limit in order to get to work on time. The Original Poster (OP) told her that her speeding was unsafe, and that she should get up earlier. She ignored him. She got a lot of speeding tickets. When she had gotten so many speeding tickets that she was about to lose her license, she told the OP that he should claim he was driving her car at the time of the last ticket–that he was the one speeding. That would cost him a lot of money (directly and indirectly) but it would enable her to keep speeding, since she could keep her license. He refused. She said he was the asshole because now she would not be able to drive to work. She told him that he would have to drive her to work, since he had caused this situation. He refused.

He was unwilling to take the hit of increased insurance rates and having to drive her to work just because she had ignored everything he warned her about, and had chosen to make really bad decisions. She said he was the asshole, since her current situation—having to take public transportation to work—what the consequence of a decision he’d made.

So, who is the asshole?

AITA is really a subreddit about blame and responsibility, and commenters are invited to make one of several judgments: YTA (you’re the asshole) meaning you, and you alone are responsible for this situation. In other words, the OP is responsible for her losing her license. Or, there’s NTA (not the asshole) meaning that there is an asshole (a person whose bad behavior led to this situation) but it isn’t the person who posted the question (for instance, the girlfriend who dithers in the morning). NAH (no assholes here) meaning that it’s a bad situation but not because anyone behaved badly. ESH (everyone sucks here) meaning that this situation came about because everyone is awful.

Clearly, she hadn’t learned from this situation. She had no intention of driving any differently. She didn’t see the consequences of her behavior as…well, the consequences of her behavior. She thought someone else should step in and save her, so that she could continue to be irresponsible. Technically speaking, OP could have kept her from losing her license. But she would never have been in that situation had she been more responsible about her time management.

I taught college writing for about forty years. And, when I was the teacher of record, I sometimes had a student who was flunking my class (because they hadn’t turned in any work, they’d plagiarized, what they did turn in had little relation to the assignments, and so on), and they would say to me, “If I flunk this class, I’ll be kicked out of college; because of you, I’ll be thrown out of college.” Technically speaking, my flunking them might be the final straw, and so, if I didn’t flunk them, they could stay in college, until they flunked the next class.

But, if they hadn’t flunked (and weren’t flunking) lots of other classes, what grade I gave them wouldn’t matter. What I did only mattered because of the situation they’d gotten themselves into. I didn’t force them to flunk; I didn’t keep them from doing the work. Like the girlfriend who regularly violated speed limits, the situation they were in–about to flunk out of college–was the predictable consequence of choices they’d made.

The claim that Democrats are responsible for the House impasse reads to me like an AITA post. So, imagine that the Republicans claiming that the House inability to get any work done is the fault of the Democrats wrote in to AITA. What would the judgment be?

Demagoguery means reducing complicated, nuanced, and uncertain policy issues to questions of fanatical loyalty to us (including refusing to look at any non-fanatically in-group media) and Them (everyone else). Demagoguery means refusing to compromise. The GOP has promoted an anti-government demagoguery since the 80s. The basic message of that demagoguery is that the government is the cause of all problems, so shutting down the government would be good. No reasonable person believes that, but it’s been a winning frame for the GOP. So, they’ve spend forty years promoting it.

The GOP decided to engage in a kind of gerrymandering that meant that winning a primary rewarded the most demagogic candidate. The GOP (and its media enablers) decided to reward demagoguery. The GOP decided to refuse to hold its most demagogic members accountable for anything, ranging from an attempted to coup to sex-trafficking underage girls.

And now, having enabled the election of people who think refusal to compromise is a good thing, whose policy agenda is entirely negative and fairly incoherent, and who couldn’t reason their way out of a paper bag if both ends were open and there were flashing EXIT signs, but who are fanatical and in districts that would elect a dead dog if it had R next to its name, the GOP is realizing that they’re held hostage by unreasonable people.

And they think the Dems should save them.

That girlfriend thought the OP should take the hit. She thought he should lie, take the insurance hit, and pay the fine, so that she could keep speeding.

So, who is the asshole?

“Christians” who are outraged about drag queens don’t actually care about sexualizing children

Photos from a purity ball and children's "beauty pageants"
One of these is from this article about purity balls (https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/06/11/purity-ball-father-daughter-christianity-pledge-virginity-marriage_n_5484341.html), and the others you can get if you GIS children’s beauty pageants. I won’t give the URL, since one leads directly to a porn site. In other words, children’s beauty pageant images are one-step away from porn. Or not even one step.

I’ll start with my thesis, which I don’t usually like to do. Banning drag shows, or criminalizing people in drag (or trans people) interacting with children, isn’t a policy advocated by people for whom preventing the raping or sexualizing children is the highest priority, or even an even very high priority at all. Were they actually concerned about sexualizing and raping children, then they would be up in arms about what is happening in Christian churches. They aren’t because they aren’t.

They don’t actually care very much about raping or sexualizing children, as long as it’s done by in-group members. The best proof of that fact is that no one outraged about drag performers will read any more of this post, nor will they look at the data on sexual abuse in churches. If they really cared about sexual abuse, they’d want to know what causes it.

They don’t because they don’t.

I spend a lot of time drifting around various spaces on social media, and I try to get people to explain their position on various issues.. (Since so many people use social media simply to show they hate the out-group, that’s not easy.) I’ve never managed to get anyone to explain why they worry more about drag queens than about the people most likely to rape children. Most child abusers are religious, as even the very conservative Missouri Synod admits. Were people outraged about drag queens actually concerned about sexual exploitation of children, and I think we all should be, then they would have been demanding changes in major churches, like the SBC , evangelical churches , or the Catholic Church, which still isn’t managing the accusations responsibly . The SBC, like the Catholic Church , hid its sexual abuse problem for years , and “conservatives” helped them do so .

So, why, instead of trying to enact reasonable policies that deal with what is actually the problem, are people passing laws about drag queens?

They never explain that.

I’ll emphasize that point, since every person with whom I’ve engaged on this issue, or the rhetors I’ve read, never explain why we should care more about a group that has no record of sexually abusing children than the group with the highest incidence of actually doing so.

I know why, but I’d like them to admit it. They care more about preserving the reputation of their in-group than they care about in-group members raping children.

That’s really it in a nutshell, but I think there are other ways of thinking that help them rationalize that privileging of in-group loyalty over raped children.

It seems to me that there are several factors 1) binary thinking about sin; 2) rigidity about categories and order, so assuming that easing up on any of the categories of any kind will lead to chaos; 3) privileging in-group loyalty over anything, including principles, logical arguments, what Jesus said; 4) believing that “cross-dressing” is a sexual kink, and so drag queens are sexually stimulated when reading to children 5) s strategic deflection; 6) desperate deflection.

1) Binary thinking. As even G.K. Chesterton said, people have a tendency to flatten sin, and so assume that engaging in one sin necessarily leads to them all. So, if you do one of the sins, you do them all. That fallacy means that people assume that a person who is trans or dresses in drag is violating a gender norm, and therefore must be violating all the sexual norms. On the contrary, child molesters are likely to be Christian, active in the church, and very nice.

2) Fundagelicals are binary thinkers, and so they believe that a person is either saved (in-group) or a sinner (not in-group). The way that they decide that someone is in-group is that they are loyal to the in-group—they say the right things, are nice to the right people, claim to have the same values. A person gets “moral license” by being a member of the group, and therefore any of their transgressions are forgiven, regardless of how often they transgress, or the consequences of their transgression. And, for them, “forgiveness” means “pretending it never happened” and therefore never mentioning it again.

In other words, at least in my experience of how “conservative” Christians explain how their moral standards work, it’s all about in- v. out-group, and not able holding everyone to the same standards.

3) It’s interesting to me the way that “conservative” “Christians” flatten transgressions, ignoring the question of harm. This flattening became clear to me when Daniel Lavery (a trans man) exposed that, not only was his brother sexually attracted to minors, but he was being protected by the leader of the church, and put in positions of working with children. The leader of the church was Lavery’s father. He had long known that Lavery’s brother was sexually attracted to children, and yet had kept him in a place where he was regularly interacting with children, and had not divulged that information to anyone in the church. When Lavery confronted his father, his father said something along the lines of, “Who are you to judge? You’re violating sexual norms too.”

Lavery, an adult engaged in consensual relationships with other adults, was treated as just as bad as someone who wanted to molest children.

While both being trans and wanting to molest children are transgressions, as far as Ortberg was concerned, they are not the same in terms of harm. If John Ortberg actually and genuinely cared about child rape, he would deal with the massive beam in his own eye. Were “conservative Christians” genuinely concerned about child molestation, they would clean their own house before they went after drag queens reading in a library. They don’t because they don’t.

4) Fundagelicals care more about drag queens than in-group child rapists because they can dismiss the in-group child rapists as exceptions. Upstanding church member child rapists are exceptions to the rule—there are far more upstanding church members who aren’t child rapists. Which is true. But why not use that same math for drag queens?

This is the point that makes it clear that their obsession with drag queens is irrational. It’s just deflection.

So why are drag queens more threatening than the actual child rapist in your church? Because they call into question rigid notions about gender.

5) It seems to me—and this is just based on my sometimes drifting into that world—that they believe that drag queens point out that our notions of gender are open to discussion. (Anyone even a little bit aware of the history of gender knows that, but these people refuse to admit that their categories of gender don’t match biology, let alone the variety of cultural norms. I’ve had this argument with them.) As far as I can tell, they have the sense that if we ease up on the categories in this binary about gender, then we’ll have no categories at all, and all hell will break loose.

It seems to me very similar to pro-segregation rhetoric.

It’s just fear of change, an inability to deal with nuance, and a refusal to think about the world in terms of anything other than rigid categories.

Child rapists don’t call into question gender norms, and, and I’m not kidding, many people therefore seem to find it easier to normalize child rape than they do drag queens.

6) Their only experience of something like drag queens is sexual (cross-dressing as a sexual kink), and so they assume that drag queens are turned on by being in front of children.

This is one of those arguments that seems to me shows more about the person making the argument than I really wanted to know.

It’s like someone saying we shouldn’t have shoe stores because some people get turned on by handling women’s feet. Anyone who makes that argument is someone very attached to the notion that handling feet is sexually stimulating. They think a lot about feet.

Every once in a while, someone will point out that a gay couple was accused of molesting a child, or that someone in drag did something bad. I’m sure that gay people and drag queens sometimes do something inappropriate, but the numbers of them who rape children is miniscule compared to the number of self-identified Christians who rape and sexualize children.

Jesus once said stop worrying about the tiny thing someone else is doing, and worry more about the big thing you’re doing.

And, really, that’s what all this comes down to. This isn’t about drag queens; this is about deflecting and projecting the epidemic of sexual abuse in Christian churches.

People who follow Jesus should worry more about the sexual exploitation of children that we Christians are doing, since it is so much more than what drag queens are doing. Unless we don’t really care about children, and don’t really care about what Jesus said.

And, yeah, that’s my experience of “conservative” Christians–they don’t really care about children, and they care even less about what Jesus said.


Trump supporters, like Stalinists, refuse to look at any evidence that might complicate their views

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press) https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids



I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with Stalinists (I was in Berkeley for many years), and no one so much reminds me of arguing with them as arguing with Trump supporters. Neither Stalinists nor Trump supporters could (or can) reasonably engage opposition arguments. In fact, like Stalinists, Trump supporters refuse to look at anything written by someone who doesn’t fanatically support Trump. Because, like Stalinists, they think that “being rational” means “being fanatically committed to our leader.” They ignore that people who actually have a rational/reasonable position can make an argument that responds to the best opposition arguments.

I’m happy to engage in a reasonable discussion with any Trump supporters who did read this far.

(That would be zero. If I’m wrong, please let me know.) So, this post is about how to think about how Trump supporters argue.

I grew up in a family of arguers, and it sometimes ended up in violence. But it didn’t always end there, and so I got interested in the relationship between argument and violence pretty early on.

For reasons too complicated to explain, I ended up taking rhetoric classes. In those days, the Berkeley Department of Rhetoric was (I now understand) very oriented toward neo-Ciceronian understandings of rhetoric—that is, what might be called responsible agonism. It’s rhetoric as the area (not discipline) of responsibly engaging the best opposition arguments.

And so, since I was in Berkeley, I spent a lot of time arguing with the four kinds of communists (who spent most of their time breaking up each other’s meetings), as well as Libertarians, Republicans, liberals (we can improve things through incremental changes), various kinds of environmentalists, constructivist and essentialist feminists, and everyone except Moonies (since they wouldn’t argue, or even admit they were Moonies).

I think I learned the most about argument by arguing with Stalinists. Maoists and Trotskyites didn’t even try to argue with me—once they found out I disagreed, they just said, “Come the revolution, motherfucker, you’re the first one up against the wall.” It’s weird how often I was told that.

What I think of as “Stalinists” didn’t call themselves that—maybe Leninists? I’ve forgotten the terminology—but they defended every single thing the USSR did. It could do no wrong. As it happens, for complicated reasons, I had visited the USSR in 1974 (or so, maybe 1973?), and I had no love for the USSR. It would take me another twenty years to find the terminology to describe what they were doing (demagoguery), but the short version is that if the USSR was accused of doing something wrong—if I said I’d actually seen something, or there was an documented event—they refused to think about it. Anything that might complicate their commitment to the USSR, they dismissed as anti-USSR propaganda.

They said it was, so to speak, fake news.

They were suckers. Anyone who refuses to consider evidence that they might be wrong is a sucker.[1]

Sometimes the Stalinists would argue with a bit, but they too would eventually say, “When the revolution comes, you’re the first up against the wall, motherfucker.” In other words, because they couldn’t defend their position rationally, they resorted to threatening me.

They couldn’t defend their position reasonably because it wasn’t a reasonable position. And that’s why they had to resort to threatening me.

That’s why so many Trump supporters threaten or harass anyone who disagrees with them. That’s why so many gun nuts threaten or harass anyone who disagrees with them. That’s why Trump supporters end up shouting at people over Thanksgiving dinner. Because they can’t argue any better than a Stalinist—because, in fact, they can’t argue in a way that responds reasonably to critics of their position. If you can’t respond reasonably to your best critics, you have a bad argument.

What Stalinists couldn’t do (and Trump supporters can’t do) is hold themselves, their in-group, or their in-group arguments to the same standards they held/hold anyone who disagreed with them. That’s what it means to have a rational argument—not that you have a calm tone, or that you have data, but that you hold yourself and your opposition(s) to the same standards of proof and logic as you hold yourself. The way I got Stalinists so mad was pointing out that they held themselves to lower standards than they held others’ arguments. And that’s why Trump supporters get so mad at me now. They’re mad that I’ve pointed out that even they think their argument will fall apart if they have to treat opposition arguments reasonably.

In other words, Trump supporters (like Stalinists) agree with me that they can’t defend their arguments reasonably. And that’s why they engage in ad hominem, motivism, whaddaboutism, and threats.

The difference is that Stalinists didn’t care if they were reasonable. Like Trump supporters, they were clear that they held their beliefs because those were the beliefs of their group—they believed what it was loyal to believe, and they refused to consider any data that might complicate their loyalty to Stalinism. Trump supporters similarly believe what it’s loyal to believe in order to support Trump, and they refuse to look at anything that might complicate their fanatical loyalty. But Trump supporters claim to follow Jesus.

Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” Trump supporters rage when their position is misrepresented, when people make fun of them, when people cite bad data, when he is treated as they wanted HRC or do want Hunter Biden treated. They rage at “libruls” who, they say, live in a propaganda bubble.

So, do they treat others as they want to be treated?

Nope.

Were Trump or his supporters followers of Jesus, then they would never misrepresent others’ positions, lie, cherry-pick, refuse to engage the smartest opposition, or argue as they do.

Trump supporters reject Jesus because they worship someone who treats as others as he doesn’t want to be treated, and their worship of him means that they treat others as they don’t want to be treated.

There are two ways to make a Trump supporter incoherently, foaming-at-the-mouth, pound on the table mad: 1) ask them if their commitment to Trump is open to falsification—what evidence would cause them to reconsider their commitment? 2) ask them if they are willing to hold their out-group(s) to the same standards they hold Trump.

They get triggered because they’re very sensitive. While they have a position they can, in their minds, support with lots of data, even they know that their arguments are such fragile gossamer that they disappear if touched with the slightest breath of a reasonable opposition argument.

Here’s how Trump supporters can prove me wrong: they link to sites that support Trump and engage the opposition arguments as they want their arguments treated, arguments that hold themselves and others to the same standards of evidence, proof, and logic. Or they PM or email me to have a reasonable discussion.

Here’s how Trump supporters prove I’m right: they attack me personally, harass me, make an argument about “libruls,” or otherwise admit that it isn’t possible to support Trump and follow Jesus’ rule about treating others as they want to be treated.

Maybe they should think about that. Jesus didn’t mumble.

[1] That doesn’t mean we have to consider every piece of evidence that contradicts what we believe.

On Procrastinating Writing Your [Thesis/First Book/Second Book]

marked up page from 2012 manuscript

[photo of a page from the 2012 version of Rhetoric and Demagoguery]

I’ve written elsewhere a lot about procrastinating…

…in the draft of a book I never finished. I put off finishing it.

We have a tendency to personalize everything, from politics to writing process. By that I mean that we talk in terms of identity rather than behavior (“I’m a procrastinator” instead of “I procrastinated finishing that book”). We really need to stop. Behavior doesn’t have a necessary connection to identity. I procrastinate, and have a lot of half-finished projects. But, I’ve published six books and over a dozen peer-reviewed articles in my career, and six book chapters in the last three years alone. So, I procrastinate, but I also get things done—the two behaviors aren’t mutually exclusive.

Let’s be clear: I made some bad errors in my career, but they weren’t because I’m a procrastinator. I wasn’t procrastinating. I was working like the Tasmanian Devil in the Looney Tunes Cartoons. My errors were, or were the consequence of, being bad at time management, having unrealistic notions about publishing, not having mentors who could give me field-specific publishing advice, not being in a relationship that was supportive of my career, pissing off a powerful realist in the Philosophy Department, and many other things I probably can’t name.

Everyone procrastinates, in the sense that not everyone gets everything done right now—you can’t. Procrastinating means putting some things off till later, and, since we can’t actually do everything right now, putting things off is often a good time management strategy. I never finished the book about scholarly writing because other projects (about our current political moment) seemed to me more urgent. They were. They are. When we have people over to dinner, we don’t set the table till the last minutes. We have cats.

Sometimes procrastinating isn’t a good strategy. It can be a kind of self-sabotage; it can mean getting caught a terrible loop of shame. I think a lot of self-help rhetoric ensures that people get caught in that loop. It says that there is a simple solution, and you should follow it. Since there isn’t a simple solution for how hard it is to write a dissertation, then people for whom the simple solution doesn’t work think they’re the problem. They aren’t. The simple solution is the problem.

There is no simple solution for how hard academic writing is.

Also, the Easter Bunny was your parents. And I have bad news about Santa Claus.

One way to try to distinguish sensible v. self-sabotaging procrastination is to try understand why we’re putting something off. And those ways work differently, I think, for what kind of writing people are trying to do. This post is for scholarly writers who believe that their procrastination is hurting them.[1] In fact, it’s for a specific way that a specific motive for procrastination might be hurting them. In other words, I am not laying down rules that will work for everyone under every circumstance.

Putting off a project can be a savvy time and career management choice if the project requires resources we don’t have (e.g., travel money, fluency in a specific language), is less urgent than something else (e.g., it won’t count for promotion or tenure, won’t be part of a dissertation, or, in my case, is a less urgent argument to make given our political situation), or in various other ways isn’t something we should be pursuing right now.

My personal crank theory is that the unproductive kinds of procrastination, and the unproductive ways of trying to stop procrastinating, all involve shame. But people who’ve done actual research on this say that the unproductive kind of procrastination tends to have one of three triggers: drudgery, existential threat, decisional ambiguity.

And here I want to stop for a moment and point out that writing a thesis, article, or book has every single one of these three triggers and way too much shame, and often way too many advisors who think shame and panic are necessary to the writing process. That’s how those advisors work. That isn’t how you have to work.

Most of the advice out there about procrastination assumes that the trigger is drudgery, and so, if that’s your problem, google away. Lots of strategies —the emergent task planner, giving yourself rewards, breaking things down into manageable steps, telling yourself you have to do either [whatever it is] or a more unpleasant task [e.g., clean the litterbox]–are great advice if that’s your motive for procrastinating.

There’s less about existential threat. This is a pretty good article about that trigger. The short version is that the more we succeed, the more likely we are to worry that we will be exposed as imposters. (The only people I’ve ever known who didn’t have imposter syndrome were narcissists, and were, in fact, imposters.) The temptation is to engage in self-sabotage (e.g., get involved with a high-maintenance partner who doesn’t support your career, take on too many responsibilities) so that it’s always possible to say that no manuscript was your best effort. Therefore, if it’s trashed by someone, that isn’t actually an indication of whether you are a smart and good person.

Weirdly enough, outright failure can be less threatening to our self-esteem than trying hard and turning out something that gets a lot of criticism, or doesn’t have the impact we’d hoped, or is otherwise okay but not great. (I’ve often thought that it was a kind of gift that I have never been the smartest person in my family, friend group, work group, any class I’ve taken, or just about any group larger than me and one of my dogs, and not always then. I still had/have imposter syndrome, but there was always less at stake for me.)

The most effective way to manage this kind of trigger for procrastination and other forms of self-sabotage is therapy. (Ideally with someone who has worked with other academics.) I can’t say that strongly enough.

I want to focus on decisional ambiguity because I think it’s the least-discussed in resources for academic writers. That trigger occurs when we’re pressed to make a decision that we could make in a relatively straightforward way if we had information we don’t have at this moment. The situation is ambiguous, but it could be clear if we had certain information. The impulse is to delay the decision until we get that information.

Just to be clear, that can be a good choice. A very popular book advocates a method of setting aside decisions till you have more information (Getting Things Done).

But, when writing a dissertation or book, while teaching, having service requirements, we can find ourselves suffering from decision fatigue. The tl;dr version is that we make decisions better when we have a limited number of them we ask ourselves to make. If we have to make too many decisions (and “too many” depends on all sorts of factors), then we just stop making decisions, or start flipping coins.

So, what does that mean for scholarly writing?

If you’re writing a book, thesis, article, grant proposal, or anything else in a scholarly genre, then, even in the first draft, you’re faced with too many decisions. Is this the right organization, should I move this argument there, should I read that [article/book], am I representing that argument fairly, what the hell is my point, should I use this word, should I drop out of grad school/academia, maybe I should read that other [article/book], am I explaining this point, is that the right quote, how much should I cite that [article/book], have I cited this source correctly, will my readers hate/love this, and so many other decisions that range all over the place: your argument, your readers’ possible responses, your relationship to others who’ve written about this, your career, the job market, the text you’re producing (from sentence-level correctness to genre questions).

A lot of conventional writing process advice is useful: expect to have multiple drafts, and begin by focussing on big picture issues (wtf is my argument before you worry about what tense you should use); expect that writing is recursive (so that when you think you’re at editing stages, you might find that trying to correct passive agency or a mixed metaphor might make you rethink important parts of your argument).

It also means: limit the decisions you need to make on any given day.

Decide ahead of time that you’re going to spend certain times in the week writing—don’t leave that till the day. And then, when you’re in that writing time, it might mean that you write a blathery draft in which you don’t try to get much of anything right. (In a first draft, I often have sentences like, “As Blarghy McBlarghy said, democracy depends upon interlocutors blarghing with each other while focused on blargh.” Or it might be, “As Shirer says in that book with the blue cover, Hitler was [effective? that’s the wrong word])”

One friend described “the narcissistic pleasures of the first draft.” Don’t try to get your argument right; decide you’re just trying to get your thoughts—fuzzy, incoherent, rambling, passionate–in writing.

I never have a strict outline at this point (actually I never have a Ramistic outline ever), but I sometimes (not always) have a flow chart of the four or five concepts/cases I want to discuss. It’s never what the structure actually turns out to be. So I don’t decide on an order of ideas as much as throw out a possible order.

It’s like planning a road trip—you throw out the places you’d like to see, and make a guess as to what route makes sense. But, as you travel, you change your mind about where you want to go. You follow the evidence.

The next pass is deciding that I’m going to try to get my argument somewhat more clear. This means that I reread what I’ve written in a purely critical mood (deciding what’s not working, but not trying to decide what would make it better). Sometimes I use different colored pens, or different colored post its. There are: sentence-level gerfuckedness (orange or red), parts that require more research or bringing in research (green), significant rewriting but the argument is good (blue), changes in wording I know are right (black).

Sometimes I don’t do it that way, and each color is a different pass on reading. So, all the comments I made 1/3/2020 are in pink; the ones from 2/15/2021 are in blue. (In other words, don’t get too rigid about your process, or you’ll have too many decisions to make, and too many ways to shame yourself.)

Loosely, my method is: blather, then critique, then blather oriented toward responding to the critique, then critique. Rinse and Repeat. Do that till you’re working on the Works Cited.

And it’s generally working from big picture (WTF is my point) through issues of organization and citation to paragraph to sentence. But it’s pretty common that I hit a “sentence-level” issue (e.g., do I mean “contact” or “impact”) that causes me to rethink important parts of my argument—from the underlying model (in other words, my argument) to organization.

I’m not saying that people should do what I do. That’s pretty much the opposite of my point. I don’t know anyone else who uses this specific method. I’m describing it precisely because I think it wouldn’t work for most people—I’m hoping to inspire people to come up with one that works for them, even if it seems weird.

I’ve long been grumpy that research on the writing process turned into writing procedures [I’m looking at you: mental mapping.] My point is that one way to get around the trigger of decisional ambiguity is to restrict the choices you’re making at any given time. A decision you should not make in the moment is how you will do that.

Everyone should have a day they do not work. (I broke this rule about four times a semester when I had to grade papers, but I tracked my time, so that I got that time back for vacation.) Work needs to have limited space.

There are some other strategies that people find useful. One is sometimes called ‘chutes and ladders.’ When you don’t have the cognitive capacity for the choices that also trigger existential threat, you make the decisions that procrastinate and yet enable that kind of decision. Before leaving your workspace (and, really, try to have a workspace—I know it’s hard; at one point in grad school my workspace was a closet), pull up on your computer (or have piled on your desk) the sources you think you should use (the Blarghs). Or, before you walk away from that space (and you do need to walk away), write out a sentence or two of what you hope to write the next time you’re back to work.

Limit your work time. But, when you’re working, actually work. And give yourself breaks (about ten minutes of every hour). Some people leave a note to future self—here’s what I did, and here’s what I hope to do next.

If there are other decisions important to your writing, then set them up for yourself before leaving your workspace—cue up the playlist, put the coffee in the fridge, set up the coffeemaker, move the shaming books/articles away, organize your pens, clean off your desk, make sure the cat’s bed is up to your cat’s standards.

And procrastinate. Put off till later worrying about whether your advisor or the press or the journal will like what you’re writing, what the response to this book will be, whether it will get you a job or tenure.There are times for worrying about all those things, but not while you’re trying to write the first (or even third) version of your thesis/article/chapter/book.

We procrastinate setting the table because our cats will step all over the plates if we turn our backs. But we do eventually set the table. And we do so before the guests arrive.

Procrastination can be your friend. It can be a sensible way to think about what to worry about now, and what worries to deflect till later. But you do need to get your dissertation done before the guests arrive.

[1] Obviously, not because I think other kinds of writing are less important, but, especially when it comes to decisional ambiguity, the decisions are different.

“But they’re faaaaaamily”

Trump with bad spray tan
Photo from here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-unhappy-returns-11601333853


If, like me, you’re an avid reader of advice columns, then you know the thought-terminating cliche, “but they’re faaaaaamily.” A thought-terminating cliché is something people say to ourselves that enables us to stop thinking about what otherwise might be a troubling situation. It enables us to resolve cognitive dissonance. This particular thought-terminating cliche comes up when a family member (call them YTA) has repeatedly behaved hurtfully, and the person they’ve hurt (usually the person writing in for advice, so “Letter Writer,” LW) wants the hurting to stop. LW is proposing setting a boundary of some kind, holding YTA accountable, getting some kind of meaningful commitment that YTA will change. LW wants the family to take on the problem that YTA hurts LW.

Often, the family refuses. Getting YTA to stop hurting LW is often part of a family system, and so getting real change would mean rethinking assumptions, changing how the family systems work, dealing directly with uncomfortable things people have been evading. If they aren’t hurt by YTA, then it would be easier just to try to get LW to shut up. The conflict would still be there, but it would only be between LW and YTA.

And here is the moment of truth. A family (or group) can decide that it is committed to principles of treatment–such as reciprocity (everyone does unto others as we would have done unto us)–in which case they would be willing to take on the hard work of ensuring that every individual is going to be treated as we would have done unto us.

Or, the family/group can decide that the conflict is not YTA’s shabby behavior, but LW’s objecting to it. After all, that’s what seems make it everyone’s problem. So, many families and groups treat naming the conflict and naming the shabby behavior as the real problem, and say that this naming so violates in-group loyalty. That’s how a lot of families and groups treat the accusation of intra-group violation of ethical norms (aka, being a shit). Instead of saying the person being a shit is a problem, the person complaining is the problem.

Sometimes YTA apologizes (or is made to apologize), and LW is expected to behave as though the slate is wiped clean—no matter how many times YTA has hurt LW in exactly the same way and apologized, and then gone on to hurt again. It’s reasonable that LW might, especially if YTA has apologized, and hurt again, not think an apology is good enough. A healthy situation would mean that people would want to think about the systems that caused the hurt; an unhealthy one says LW has to “get over” the hurt, even if it’s still happening, and will keep happening. The problem gets reframed as LW being over-sensitive, too focused on the past, unforgiving, and insensitive as to the hurt they’re causing YTA by calling out past behavior.

Having deflected the problem onto LW’s being sensitive or unforgiving, the family can then fleck off any obligation to do anything. If LW resists, and, for instance, doesn’t want to loan YTA money (knowing it will never be paid back), let them move in (knowing they’ll be hurtful and irresponsible), invite them to an important event, and so on, then the family says, “But you can’t treat YTA that way, because they’re faaaaamily.” YTA, so the argument runs, would be or is hurt by LW, and YTA is family, LW is therefore in the wrong.

I have to point out that LW is also faaaaamily, so were family obligations reciprocal, then YTA would be told in no uncertain terms to knock that shit off, but they aren’t. That’s important. This narrative reframes a reasonable description of the situation–YTA has hurt LW and will continue to do so–into YTA being the victim of LW because LW named the behavior out loud and is trying to change it.

What LW wants is in-group accountability, and LW makes themselves out-group simply by asking for it. “But it’s faaaaamily” is a way of saying that in-group members (family) cannot be held accountable—it’s a violation of loyalty to the family to ask for accountability from any member of the family.

Sometimes there’s a minor amount of hand-wringing, and perhaps even a talking-to, but most often LW is framed as doing something that means they “deserve” YTA’s bad treatment, and so BSAB (Both Sides Are Bad).

It’s rarely BSAB; YTA has rarely been hurt by LW as much as LW has been hurt by YTA, but wildly different standards are applied to make the math work. So, for instance, an adult offspring wanting to move out is just as bad as another family member having stolen their identity, a bride not wanting her father to walk her down the aisle is just as bad as his having skedaddled out of financial and emotional obligations for most of her life, and, well, anyone who reads advice columns can list lots of other examples.

Thus, the more that a group values in-group loyalty, the less able they are to manage in-group conflict reasonably, the more hostile they are to holding in-group members accountable, the more hostile they are to anyone who asks for accountability, and the more likely they are to engage in bad math BSAB.

This post isn’t about families. It’s about politics.

When I began working on what’s euphemistically called “the slavery debate,” I discovered that one of the most common post-Civil War narratives was BSAB–the Civil War happened, so this fantasy goes, because slavers and abolitionists were equally fanatical. There’s an interesting history of that narrative. In the antebellum era, it was a repeated (and powerful) argument that enabled people who directly benefited from slavery to claim that they didn’t have a position on it; it died during the Civil War (at least in the North), but sprang up again after the end of Reconstruction with Democrats wanting to get the support of southern states (the Solid South strategy, although people who should have known better, like Oliver Wendall Holmes believed it), It slowly retreated after the Civil Rights movement, but never really surrendered. And I’m seeing it come back.

It’s unmitigated nonsense.

It meant equating criticizing slavery with lynching abolitionists; it meant equating factory work (which was bad) with slavery (which was worse); it meant equating the kind of physical punishment often used with children with the brutality of treatment of enslaved people; it meant equating the sometimes vehement rhetoric of abolitionists with the attempt to make all states into slave states.

But, it’s an attractive narrative for people who believe that loyalty to in-group is the highest value. I think it was Michael Sandel who said that you have to honor Robert E. Lee’s decision to value his loyalty to his state. No, you don’t. Lee valued his loyalty to his state over his loyalty to his country—he was, literally, a traitor to his country, and violated oaths, and he did so in order to protect slavery.

Jonathan Haidt, a conservative, showed that self-identified “conservatives” value in-group loyalty more than self-identified “liberals.” As I’ve argued, I think the “conservative v. liberal” way of describing our policy and political world is either false or non-falsifiable. Tl;dr, the “left v. right” binary or continuum is as useful as describing religious views as Christian v. atheist. You don’t make the Christian/atheist binary more accurate by making it a continuum between the two.

I think a more nuanced research project would complicate (aka show to be bullshit) Haidt’s conclusions (especially his conclusion that in-group loyalty is a good, and “libruls” are wrong not to value it). I think some consideration of the history of appeals to in-group loyalty (aka, scholarship in rhetoric) would show that valuing loyalty is anti-democratic and anti-pluralist. Democracy demands reciprocity; in-group loyalty means being willing to violate reciprocity.

A more useful research program would look at who values in-group loyalty over pluralism and reciprocity, regardless of the media construction of liberal/conservative.

“But they’re faaaamily” is all about violating reciprocity. Refusing to hold in-group members to the same standards as we hold out-group members is just another version of the toxic “But they’re faaaamily.” It’s a refusal to do unto others as we want done unto us; it’s a rejection of the notion of acting on the basis of principles; it’s a skedaddling away from defending our policies reasonably, and therefore an admission that they can’t be defended if we hold in- and out-group members to the same standards.

So, let’s talk about GOP outrage about Hunter Biden, and the refusal on the part of every single GOP politico, pundit, or supporter on social media to hold Trump to the same standards they’re holding Biden.

“But he’s faaaaamily.”




White Evangelical Spiritual Narcissism

Painting of American Puritans


Here are some quotes to consider:

“Being afflicted last NIght, with discouraging Thoughts as if unavoidable Marks, of the Divine Displeasure must overtake my Family, for my not appearing with Vigor enough to stop the proceedings of the Judges, when the Inextricable Storm from the Invisible World assaulted the Countrey, I did this morning, in prayer with my Family, putt my Family into the Merciful hands of the Lord. And with Tears, I received Assurance of the Lord, that Marks of His Indignation should not follow my Family.” (Cotton Mather, Diary I: 216, February 1696/7)

“As confident as I’d like to be about my own health, and despite my joking that I’m blessed to constantly breathe in the most sterile (frozen!) air, my case is perhaps one of those that proves anyone can catch this.” (Sarah Palin, interview with People April 2021 https://people.com/politics/sarah-palin-tests-positive-coronavirus-urges-others-wear-masks/)

“What he’s asking […] is does [abstinence only education] work. You know what? Doesn’t matter [….] AIDS is not the enemy. HPV and a hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can shake their fist in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence, and my child spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy. I will not tell my child they can sin safely.” (Pam Stenzel, quoted in Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming 135-6).

“One of the big issues that we have heard today and we’ve talked about lately is that without [gender-affirming] surgery the risk of suicide goes way up. Well, I am one of those parents who lived with a daughter who was suicidal for three years […] Someone once asked me, ‘Wouldn’t I just do anything to help save her?’ And I really had to think and the answer was, ‘No.’ [….] I was not going to give in to her emotional manipulation because she was incapable of making those decisions, and I had to make those decisions for her. I was not going to let her tear apart my family.” (Kerri Seekins-Crowe speech to Montana House of Representatives )


Cotton Mather was a major figure in the 17th and early 18th century New England Puritan culture. The son and grandson of major figures, he was educated at Harvard (finishing his degree early), a prolific author, and the minister of a major church in Boston. When, in 1692, Salem Village started on a witch hunt that was unprecedented in so many ways—no bonds required of accusers, testimony done in public, the accused not interviewed separately, and the reliance on spectral evidence—Mather didn’t say anything. After it had gone on for a few months, and the number of people executed, accused, jailed, and “afflicted” was unprecedented, Mather had some doubts about the trials, which he expressed in private. He was particularly concerned about the trials’ reliance on “spectral evidence.”

Spectral evidence is the term for testimony from people who claim to have been visited by a spectre—so, Mercy Lewis saying that she had been attacked (or was being attacked) by Rebecca Nurse, although no one had been present to see the attack. Spectral evidence was suspect for many very good reasons. I’ll mention two. First, the devil could attack the “afflicted” (as the accusers were called) in the shape of anyone he chose. He was, after all, the devil. Another reason was that the “afflicted” all admitted that they were in communication with the devil; they could be testifying under his power.

Although in private Mather admitted that spectral evidence was problematic, in public (especially his book Wonders of the Invisible World) he defended the trials unequivocally and yet, as the author Stacy Schiff says, at times incoherently (Witches 347).

His reasons for defending the trials in public were mixed and many. He was part of the existing power structure (his father had hand-picked the new Governor), and he might have been worried that admitting to an out-of-control witch hunt didn’t reflect well on that power structure; some scholars say he was worried that substantial criticism of the trials would lead to chaos (which is just another version of the first); he was personally ambitious, and might have thought that the most strategic choice was to support the trials; his diaries show him to be someone who believed he was chosen by God to succeed (just world model), so he might have believed that he could ignore the possibility of innocent people being executed—God wouldn’t let that happen.

God let that happen.

More important, so did Mather.

After the smoke cleared, and it was clear that innocent people had been executed, Samuel Parris (the minister who was initially most vehement in unhinged witchcraft accusations) publicly apologized. He did so because several of his children died (not as a direct result of the witch hunt chaos), and he believed that God was punishing him for his part in the witch hunt. Mather’s family also suffered tragedies, and he worried that he was being punished—through his family members’ suffering—for not having been more public in his criticism of the trials. He wrote in his diary:

“Being afflicted last NIght, with discouraging Thoughts as if unavoidable Marks, of the Divine Displeasure must overtake my Family, for my not appearing with Vigor enough to stop the proceedings of the Judges, when the Inextricable Storm from the Invisible World assaulted the Countrey, I did this morning, in prayer with my Family, putt my Family into the Merciful hands of the Lord. And with Tears, I received Assurance of the Lord, that Marks of His Indignation should not follow my Family.” (Cotton Mather, Diary I: 216, February 1696/7)

Take a minute to think about that. Mather knew he’d been wrong; he believed God thought he’d been wrong. But he decided not to go public about his having been wrong because he believed God wouldn’t punish his family.

It was always about him.

Sarah Palin was a covid denier and minimizer, until she got it. Then, suddenly, she cared about covid. It was only real when it affected her. Covid was about her.

It’s very clear how we could lower our abortion rate: give easy access to effective birth control; have accurate sex education; lower teen unemployment. When I argue with people who want to criminalize abortion rather than engage in those policies that would actually reduce it, they always say some version of, “I will not support sexual immorality.”

Goldberg has a nice quote to that effect. Michelle Goldberg quotes an anti-birth control advocate (Stenzel) who said, when it was pointed out to her that the policies she advocates don’t work, “You know what? Doesn’t matter.” (135) It’s about her being rigid to the rules, regardless of the consequences. It’s about her salvation.

Recently, a Montana legislator said that she had a child who wanted to transition, and she prayed constantly that the child would change their mind. She knew that the child was so unhappy that they might kill themselves. Instead of getting her child help, she chose to pray. She said, “I was not going to let her tear apart my family and I was not going to let her tear apart me.”

It was about her.

There are people, who consider(ed) themselves Christians, who believe that what God wants is for them to be fanatically committed to the rules they believe he’s set, because commitment to those rules will get them into heaven. They are more concerned with their personal commitment to those rules because that fanatical commitment will get them into heaven than they are with what that fanatical commitment does to others in this world and in this life.

They are looking out for themselves.

I don’t think God wanted Mather to look out for himself, his political faction, and his family. I don’t think God cares more about whether we follow the rules than we prevent abortion. I think Palin could have figured out about masks before she got covid. I think a parent should care more about preventing a child’s suicide than about following the rules.

I don’t think God is calling us to look out for ourselves.


Pro- and Anti-Communist Demagoguery and the Politics of the Obvious

people arguing
From the cover of Wayne Booth’s _Modern Dogma-

Deliberating reasonably and inclusively is difficult under conditions of war. Audiences do not demand reasonable policy argumentation, we tend to rely on in-group sources of information, and we tend to value loyalty more than rationality—so much so that we are prone to treat criticism or calls for deliberation as necessarily coming from bad motives (such as cowardice, disloyalty, or active treason). We are drawn to rhetors who seem to see the situation clearly, and we are averse to nuance or uncertainty. We give moral and rhetorical license to in-group rhetors. Thus, a rhetor who doesn’t want to take on the obligations of deliberation and reasonable argumentation might be tempted to try to evade them by persuading a base that we are already at war. This rhetorical framing is not necessarily done in bad faith—they may sincerely believe that the situation is an undeclared war, as did the anti-communist demagogues, or that the goodness of their intentions gives them moral and rhetorical license to engage in threat inflation (as did Truman). Rhetors who genuinely believe that they know what should be done may see public discourse as purely an opportunity to radicalize their base for the war they believe is going on.

Elsewhere, I’ve argued that anti-communist demagoguery relied on certain recurrent rhetorical strategies: treating all policy questions as really battles in war; invoking the frame of politics as war sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, and sometimes ambiguously both; the equation of their “side” (Good) with “the people” against a monolithic and Other (Evil); the assertion that, because the Other is determined on our extermination, we have moral, political, and rhetorical license to do whatever will help exterminate Them; a politics of certainty, in which the correct position on any issue is obvious to good people; the perception that diversity is weakness, and that everyone needs to fall in line. Those rhetorical strategies weren’t limited to anti-communists.

In 1969, a group of activists who would later call themselves “the Weathermen” issued a 13 thousand word manifesto, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows.” They said that their “goal is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism” (2). And this struggle, they were clear, is war: “A revolution is a war; when the Movement in this country can defend itself militarily against total repression it will be part of the revolutionary war” (23). That is, these were the kind of people about whom the anti-communist demagogues were worried; what’s interesting is that both they and the anti-communist demagogues engaged in the same rhetorical strategies.

For the Weathermen, our political world isn’t a complicated situation with multiple policy options that might be deliberated because there is legitimate disagreement about major issues. They advocate getting involved in various struggles (racism, sexism, labor) but always with the same end: “There is one system and so all these different problems have the same solution, revolution” (20). The goal isn’t to create better policies that will solve (or ameliorate) the problems that people have because “reform fights, fights for improvement of material conditions, cannot be won under imperialism” (16). The goal is to convert people to revolutionaries: “We must transform people’s everyday problems, and the issues and struggles growing out of them, into revolutionary consciousness, active and conscious opposition to racism and imperialism” (15). As it was for Hargis, the solution to our political problems is converting as many people as possible to the correct identity.

There is a war, and it has only two sides: “the people of the whole world against US imperialism and its lackeys.” They say, “The main struggle going on in the world today is between US imperialism and the national liberation struggle against it.” The US is evil, and evil is the US:
“Every other empire and petty dictator is in the long run dependent on US imperialism, which has unified, allied with, and defended all of the reactionary forces of the whole world. Thus, in considering every other force or phenomenon, from Soviet imperialism or Israeli imperialism to “workers struggle” in France or Czechoslovakia, we determine who are our friends and who are our enemies according to whether they help US imperialism or fight to defeat it.”
Just as anti-communist demagoguery defines the good group narrowly, and treats everything else as a monolithic communism, so the Weathermen have a narrow in-group and capacious out-group—there are different kinds or causes of imperialism, or multiple sources of oppression.

There is no legitimate disagreement with them. People who disagree are “lackeys,” “brainwashed,” misguided about their true interests. What is necessary is “a unified centralized organization” grounded in “a common revolutionary theory” made up of people who “have the correct understanding.” Because their goal is so good, so obviously good, and they are so obviously right, they are justified in advocating policies that hurt others—they have moral license. They celebrate that “the Vietnamese are winning,” and endorse Che Guevara’s call for more Vietnams (that is, the US engaging in more wars as unsuccessful as Vietnam), despite that, as King pointed out, the burden of Vietnam fell disproportionately on Black communities (whom the Weathermen claim to support). They advocate policies and practices that will increase repression to the point that there will be “a phase of all-out military repression.” In other words, like the anti-communist demagogues, they claim moral license.

My point is not the Weathermen are “just as bad” as the anti-communists, or that “both sides do it,” but that this framing of politics as war isn’t tied to any particular spot on the political spectrum. And what this rhetoric does—whether it’s the John Birch Society or the Weathermen—is depoliticize politics. The Weathermen did deliberate; they argued and debated among themselves at great length. In the 1969 document, they admit that they were previously mistaken (about the role of Black Power in their movement). In 1974, they would publish the 188-page Prairie Fire, after much internal debate and disagreement, that admittedly revised earlier manifestoes. Yet, having been wrong, having disagreed with one another, and having come to new conclusions, didn’t change the basic stance that now they had the obviously right answer. Like the anti-communist demagogues, who disagreed with each other, changed their minds, changed their policies, they did so without abandoning their commitment to a politics of the obvious. Even though their own experience proved that it was a lie.

Trump supporters’ bad faith appeal to “the law”

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press) https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids

Many years ago, I was in a conversation with someone who was defending the police violence against Rodney King. He said, “After all, King had broken the law, so he was guilty.” I pointed out that, in the first place, by US conceptions of law he was innocent until he’d been through a trial, and second, that, even were he guilty, the punishment for what he’d done was not being physically beaten. He wasn’t bothered by the first one at all, and only a little bothered by the second.

He was a self-identified Libertarian. A “Libertarian” who believed that a police officer could not only determine guilt or innocence on the stop, but enact whatever levels of punishment felt right. That is very much not what a “Libertarian” should not believe. It’s authoritarianism. It’s believing that judgment should be giving to authorities.

That conversation was another datapoint that led to my belief that it’s really, really important that we stop thinking our political world in terms of a binary or continuum of “left v. right.” The data for the left/right continuum is from polls about self-identification, or a circular argument about support for X policy meaning that you have Y identity.

What matters for a thriving democracy isn’t who people are, nor where people are on some fantastical binary or continuum. Among the thing that do matter is that we believe that “the law”—whatever it is—applies equally to in- and out-group. The Libertarian didn’t believe that; he wanted complete liberty for his in-group, but didn’t mind if the police violated the supposed principle of Libertarianism, since it was against an out-group member.

Briefly, what I’ve come to understand—by spending a lot of time arguing with people all over the political spectrum—is that there are several ways of thinking about what “the law” is supposed to do.

In this post, I want to mention two that have a shared premise: that “the law” is supposed to enable communities to get along in a reasonably ordered way.

One way that people imagine the law doing that is to see law as a series of compromises and conventions that are, at best, striving to help everyone get along while holding everyone to the same standards. Some of them are purely arbitrary, and yet necessary–we all have to agree as to whether we’ll drive on the left or right side of the road (and the fact that right side is more common probably should figure into our deliberations), but there’s nothing inherently better about one or the other. If most of the world drove on the left side, after all, then that should figure in our deliberations.

And the law can change. For instance, there was in the 19th century a general sense that the law shouldn’t interfere in private contracts. But, after a while, people started to think that child labor was appalling, but passing laws about it would violate that principle about contracts, so they decided they had to reconsider that principle. So, “the law” works as a series of decisions and arguments in which we’re trying to get a community of diverse people to function effectively within the constraints of principles about rights.

The second way of thinking about the law, an authoritarian one, assumes that the law should maintain order by holding in- and out-group to different standards—it should maintain order by letting good people (the in-group) do pretty much whatever they want, and controlling bad people (the out-group) through punishment.[1] Ann Coulter, ends her book Treason with this argument:

“Liberals promote the rights of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and communists. They instinctively root for anarchy and against civilization. The inevitable logic of the liberal position to to be for treason.” (202)

It’s an astonishing argument, even for Coulter. That rights are human rights–that is, granted to all people simply by virtue of their being human–is a principle of American law. So, yes, pornographers have rights; that isn’t treason–that’s how the law is supposed to work. But, for Coulter, bad people shouldn’t have rights.

In my experience, people who imagine the law functioning this way are also prone to claiming that their condemnation of out-group figures is grounded in principle, but it isn’t.

I recently had an argument with someone who claimed that he was opposed to Biden because Biden lies. He supports Trump. That Biden lies is, unfortunately, a fact, and I will be angry af if he’s the Dem candidate for President in 2024. But Trump also lies, and he lies even more than Biden, yet that Trump lies was not a reason for that person to oppose Trump. That person was engaged in strategic appeals to principle. His opposition to Biden wasn’t grounded in some principle about lying—his support of Trump showed that he doesn’t care about lying on principle. He was engaged in cultish levels of support for Trump, while pretending to himself that his opposition to Biden was principled.

Trump supporters are authoritarian to the extent that they refuse to hold him (or themselves) to the standards they hold others.

For instance, Trump supporters frequently condemn BLM protests, many of which got violent. If those protests should be condemned, then so should January 6. That is, a person who was, on principle, opposed to violent protests would condemn both. Like the Trump cultist member who only objected to Biden’s lies but justified or refused to consider Trump’s lies, Trump supporters who defend January 6 and condemn BLM protests are not, actually, reasoning from a principle they value. They’re just people who hold their in-group to lower standards (or no standards at all).

And yet they do believe in “the law.”

MLK argued that there is a higher law than the laws supporting segregation, and he appealed to the higher law of people being treated equally regardless of in- or out-group. He advocated that everyone be held to the same standards. I’ll say he had Jesus on his side.

Trump appeals to a different understanding of a “higher law.” His supporters don’t hold in- and out-groups to the same standards. They believe that order is about domination and submission.

They believe that they are justified in violence if they don’t get their way. That is, if they can’t dominate. And Trump believes the same. And that is not democracy. And it isn’t Christian.

[1] There’s a quote going around describing this principle as being the central tenet of “conservativism,” and, while I think it’s true that a lot of people who self-identify as conservative do believe this, I’ve also heard the same principle expressed by self-identified leftists. I think authoritarianism is more usefully seen as another axis in a political map rather than a point on a single-axis continuum of political affiliation.



What the 431 BCE “Debate at Sparta” can show us about “identity politics” v. “politics of identity”

According to the Greek historian Thucydides, during the “Debate at Sparta” (431 BCE), an un-named Corinthian tried to persuade the city-state of Sparta to get involved in a fight Corinth was having with another city-state, Corcyra.

Why?

Corinth was fighting with Corcyra about yet another city-state, Potidea. Athens and Sparta were the dominant city-states in the Hellenic region. So, both Corinth and Corcyra were trying to get one of the big players to intervene, and the “Debate at Sparta” includes a speech by a Corinthian speaker trying to get Sparta to takes its side. But, if either Sparta or Athens got involved, it would not remain a proxy war–they’d go to war with each other. That war was unnecessary and would be unpredictable–while Sparta was far superior in land troops, the troops couldn’t be gone too long (they feared a slave rebellion), and they were far inferior in terms of naval strength.

The Corinthian speech is important for people now because it exemplifies how a rhetor can use demagoguery to persuade a community to opt for an unnecessary and highly destructive war.

We are in a culture of demagoguery, when normal policy disagreements are treated as battles in an existential war, and we’re in that situation because it’s profitable for media to give rhetors like the Corinthian air time. And ambitious rhetors can get air time by using that kind of demagoguery.

But, back to the debate.

Presumably, here’s the plan: If the Corinthian could get Sparta and Athens to go to war, then Athens would be too busy to take Corcyra’s side (which Athens was seriously considering) if Corinth and Corcyra went to war. It’s as though I wanted to get in a fight with Chester, but I’m afraid that you’ll take Chester’s side and the two of you will kick my ass. If I could get Hubert to start a fight with you, then you won’t be able to get involved in my fight with Chester.

But, here’s the Corinthian’s rhetorical problem. He has a really weak case, so weak that the standard moves of policy argument (what Aristotle would later call “deliberative” rhetoric) wouldn’t work. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is largely a book about rhetoric and decision-making. And the admirable leaders, generals, and rhetors in the book all make a similar argument about argument: when we are arguing about policy, we shouldn’t make the issue about the character of our opponent (what Aristotle calls “epideictic”), or the justice or injustice of the situation (appropriate for a courtroom).[1] Deliberation should be about expediency—what are our goals, and what policy(ies) are most likely to enable success?

Here I’m going to get into the weeds a bit, but the important point is that the Corinthian can’t make a reasonable argument claiming that Sparta is faced with an imminent threat from Corcyra, Athens, or Corinth losing its conflict with Corcyra.

Here’s the weeds. It isn’t expedient for Sparta to take Corinth’s side. There’s no particular gain for Sparta, and neither Corcyra nor Athens present an imminent threat to Sparta. Corcyra could win the conflict with Corinth, and it would make no difference for Spartan security. Athens is quite some distance away, not threatening to invade Sparta (which would be improbable). The two were useful allies during the most recent Persian invasion, and they’re oddly balanced—Sparta has a better infantry, and Athens has a better navy. Most important, the Hellenes (what we call the Greeks) only repelled Persia because Athens and Sparta allied against them. Were Athens and Sparta to go to war, Persia would benefit, as it would improve the likelihood that Persia would succeed with its next invasion.

So, since the Corinthian can’t make the argument in reasonable policy terms, he shifts the stasis[2]—that is, he tries to reframe the issue in a way that might enable him to persuade Sparta to make a decision both unnecessary and very risky. What the Corinthian does is make it an issue of implacably opposed identities, an existential battle, rather than a pragmatic question about savvy policy.

He says that the real conflict is not Corinth’s entirely self-serving goal of getting Sparta and Athens to go to war so Corinth can beat Corcyra, but a grand, existential, and inevitable battle between Sparta and Athens. He doesn’t argue that Athens’ actions present an imminent threat (he couldn’t, since they didn’t), but that its identity does. He doesn’t argue that Athens’ policy of expanding threatens Sparta (since it didn’t), but that Athens’ identity as an expansionist city-state did. So, in both cases, he shifts the stasis from actions to identity.

This shift from actions (expanding) to identity (expansionist) is a relatively common rhetorical strategy. It’s a particularly common move when rhetors would have trouble persuading an audience of their case through deliberation. We can deliberate about actions, since we can have evidence about what someone did or didn’t do, and we can use those actions as evidence about what they might do in the future. We can talk usefully about goals (especially if a person or party has said what they are), since stated goals are evidence about what someone will do.

But neither previous actions nor stated goals are proof of what someone or some group will do. People and groups don’t always behave in the same way, and so we often have to figure out which of the past actions and statements are relevant to what they will do now. There are a lot of ways that people try to make that determination, and I’ll mention two.

One is what my father (an expert on arteriosclerosis) called “hardening of the categories.” By that, he meant people who believed that every aspect of the world can be put into a Linneaus-like (or Ramistic, if you know your rhetoric) tree of discrete and binary categories. A person (or group, or nation) is either pacific or aggressive, rational or irrational. If you think of individuals or groups this way, then you look at what they’ve done and try to put them into the pacific or aggressive box, and then make your policy decisions. You’ve decided that they’re really aggressive or passive or whatever, and all the disconfirming data can be dismissed. This strategy of prediction doesn’t make the situation any less uncertain, but it can give people the feeling of certainty because it makes the situation more stark. It deflects or hides the inherent uncertainty to any political act.

The other method I want to mention says that people have tendencies, but context matters. They tend to be aggressive under these circumstances, not under those. This way of predicting behavior is more complicated than the first, and it includes rather than deflects uncertainty–that the relationship between Athens and Sparta is a conflict of essential identity.

The Corinthian makes the first kind of argument. The Athenians are, he says, aggressive, brave, risk-takers. Like many demagogues, he includes a little shaming. Spartans have declined to get involved in Hellenic issues (probably because of the problem their version of slavery brought them), and he says they procrastinate. It’s a politics of identity, in which city-states make decisions not because of advantages, disadvantages, policy options, contextual constraints, compromises, but because behavior is determined by identity.

If you know anything about policy argumentation, then you know that rational policy argumentation first means identifying the “ill.” What is the problem we’re trying to solve? So, what is the problem for the Corinthian?

It’s the war with Corcyra. That isn’t a compelling problem for Sparta, so the shift to identity enables the Corinthian to redefine the problem. It also redefines the solution. If the problem is the identity of the Athenians, and it’s their essential identity, then the Corinthian is advocating a war of extermination.

This is a politics of identity. This is always a politics of extermination.

[1] This point is a major part of the speech Diodotus gives in a debate about genocide. Diodotus is almost certainly a fabrication of Thucydides.

[2] “Stasis” means place or hinge. What some people now call “stasis theory” is a modification of something Cicero said, and it’s one way to categorize stases. It’s much less useful and accurate than it might appear. It isn’t what I mean.