I frequently hate everything I’ve written. I hate that I rely on the same verbal tricks to cover that I don’t really know what I’m doing, that my vocabulary seems so limited, my metaphors are simultaneously mixed, cliché, and not quite right, a reader trying to follow the overall structure probably feels as though they’ve woken up in an MC Escher drawing, and that the insight that was so smart in my head looks as smart and interesting on the page as an aging hairball.
I hate that it never turns out to be what I was trying to write.
Robinson Jeffers’ “Love the Wild Swan” is something so useful at those moments.
“Love The Wild Swan”
“I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting Hash, of the splendor of things. Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax, The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.” —This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game. Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame. Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self? At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.
[If you like poetry, and don’t know Jeffers, read him. So good.]
Jeffers is referring to Yeats’ poem, “The Wild Swan at Coole,” and also to Jeffers’ own (I would say successful) attempts to write poetry about the natural world of Northern California. If I’m right about that, then the “one bird” is likely a Great Blue Heron, a bird that set me on a journey.
I’m not a literary critic, nor an expert on Jeffers, so I could be completely mistaken, but this poem seems to me about Jeffers’ feeling a failure when he compares what he’s written to a hero (Yeats) and to the thing about which he’s trying to write (the Great Blue Heron). And, while he’s a great poet, I think that’s all reasonable, to be honest. We’re never as good as our heroes (that’s why they’re heroes), and nothing we write is as beautiful, complicated, elegant, or powerful as the thing about which we’re trying to write.
One line I particularly like is “Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast.” I was incredibly troubled when I discovered that Audubon collected samples of birds by killing them, and I think that’s a good metaphor for a troubling way of thinking about writing. It’s more straightforward to write about something if you kill it—that is, if you stop it from moving. A lot of talk about writing relies on metaphors of aggression, as though writers are at war with our own writing. There are metaphors of domination, control, and force. What if, instead, we imagined the thing about which we’re writing as something we can love, and never kill or capture?
Adrienne Rich’s “Transcendental Etude” is another poem on which I rely when I hate my writing. For me, it’s an exploration of trying to imagine what it would mean to do good work without falling into thinking about achievement in terms of mastery and domination.
It ends with sitting down in a kitchen and bringing together all sorts of things—pretty, ugly, dangerous, comforting. I’ve also found that a really useful way to think about scholarship—sometimes it’s just bringing things together:
“a whole new poetry beginning here.
Vision begins to happen in such a life as if a woman quietly walked away from the argument and jargon in a room and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps, laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards in the lamplight, with small rainbow- colored shells sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow original domestic silk, the finest findings and the darkblue petal of the petunia, and the dry darkbrown face of seaweed; not forgotten either, the shed silver whisker of the cat, the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling beside the finch’s yellow feather. Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity, the striving for greatness, brilliance only with the musing of a mind one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing dark against bright; silk against roughness, putting the tenets of a life together with no mere will to mastery, only care for the many-lived, unending forms in which she finds herself, becoming now the sherd of broken glass slicing light in a corner, dangerous to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound; and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further forming underneath everything that grows.”
I read John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman a long time ago, but there is one part that still sticks with me. Sarah (the woman) is standing at a window in a storm, intending to jump from it. If you don’t know the book, then you might not know that Fowles frequently stops the action of the novel in order to say something about Victorian culture and politics, or his writing process. At this point, he says that his “plan” was that she would “lay bare” all of her thoughts. But she doesn’t. She walks away from the window. And Fowles explains why the novel doesn’t do what he planned. And then there’s a lovely excursus about writing. He says that authors cannot plan what their characters will do.
“We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.” (81)
He goes on to explain that his characters sometimes refused to do what he wanted them to do, such as the character Charles deciding to stop at a dairy, and he imagines that the reader suggests that Fowles changed his mind while writing because he imagined a more clever plot. Fowles then says,
“I can only report—and I am the most reliable witness—that the idea seemed to come to me clearly from Charles, not myself. It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy; I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if I want him to be real.” (82)
Yesterday, I had blocked out four hours for writing the conclusion to chapter five of the book I’m currently writing. This is the chapter about critics of US policy in Vietnam, and my plan for the chapter was that it would discuss MLK, Henry Steele Commager (a big deal at the time, and classic liberal), and Hans Morgenthau (a conservative, anti-communist “realist”), all of whom had extremely similar criticisms. My plan was to write about how, despite their different places on the political spectrum, they all shared criticisms that were dismissed at the time and later admitted to be accurate by no less than Robert McNamara, although they were demonized and dismissed at the time for making those arguments.
That’s a good argument; that was a good plan.
But, once I got near the end of it (and this was perhaps 2k words, which I’d taken four hours to write), I started to think that, not only was I making an argument very different from my plan, but that I wasn’t writing a conclusion to a chapter. I was writing the introduction to the book.
I was trained in a program that required that students turn in a thesis statement for their paper before they turned in the paper. Then there was a class day in which all those thesis statements were critiqued (by very sensible standards—and this was the thesis statement, not the topic sentence, and the paper had to be structured such that the thesis statement didn’t appear until the conclusion, if at all) [1] I often had students tell me that they worried that the more they researched or thought about the issue, the more they disagreed with their thesis, and they didn’t know what they were supposed to do.
“Change your thesis,” I said. They were always shocked at my saying that. For various reasons (mostly having to do with trying to prevent cheating), many of their teachers had told them that they were not allowed to change their argument.
It seems to me that it should be a premise of education, and of writing, that, if your argumentation doesn’t support your argument, then change your argument.
I think we have to respect our evidence and analysis as much as Fowles had to respect his characters. I think we should teach students to do the same.
I will say that I think Fowles was being hyperbolic. He did have a plan, and he changed the plan because the characters he’d created made the plan obsolete. If he had tried to write without any plan, it’s hard to imagine that he would have gotten there at all. Writers should plan—the plan is what gets you to the place that you can develop a new plan. Every plan is a ladder you should feel free to pick up and move to a new place. I think his point is that, if your writing is honest, you have be honest about where your writing has gotten you. And you create a new plan.
I’m not sure it’s the introduction, but I have to try to draft a version of the book in which it is.
[1] For non-writing geeks, I should explain: the thesis statement is the proposition that the text argues. In non-student writing, it is rarely in the introduction. It’s usually in the conclusion, but it’s sometimes never stated (e.g., “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The more controversial the claim, the more likely the thesis is to be delayed or unstated.
What a lot of people call the “thesis statement” is what is more usefully called the “contract.” Outside of student writing, it’s sometimes the problem statement, the hypothesis, the thesis question, a vaguer version of the thesis statement, a map (“this paper will discuss…”).
. I think his point is that, if your writing is honest, you have be honest about where your writing has gotten you. And you create a new plan.
I’m not sure it’s the introduction, but I have to try to draft a version of the book in which it is.
[1] For non-writing geeks, I should explain: the thesis statement is the proposition that the text argues. In non-student writing, it is rarely in the introduction. It’s usually in the conclusion, but it’s sometimes never stated (e.g., “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The more controversial the claim, the more likely the thesis is to be delayed or unstated.
What a lot of people call the “thesis statement” is what is more usefully called the “contract.” Outside of student writing, it’s sometimes the problem statement, the hypothesis, the thesis question, a vaguer version of the thesis statement, a map (“this paper will discuss…”).
On April 18, 1965, The New York Times published a long editorial written by Hans Morgenthau, in which he argued that, while he appreciated a recent statement of LBJ about Vietnam, on the whole, he thought that “the President reiterated the intellectual assumptions and policy proposals which brought us to an impasse and which make it impossible to extricate ourselves.” The assumptions were false, he argued, and the policies grounded in those assumptions were therefore unreasonable and unlikely to succeed. Morgenthau’s criticism of US policy in regard to Vietnam is interesting not because it was unusual (it wasn’t), but because the response to his criticism exemplifies how people avoid the responsibilities of democratic deliberation through motivism and fallacious arguments from association. That kind of response undermines useful policy deliberation, and ultimately contributes to authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter who it is used by or for.
Morgenthau was anti-communist, self-identified conservative, and one of the founders of what is generally called the “realist” school in international relations (e.g., Kissinger’s realpolitik). Thus, Morgenthau granted that China should be contained, but he argued that military intervention to prop up the Diem regime was not the way to do it. He argued that it was a fantasy to think that it could be contained in the same way that the USSR had been in Europe–that is, through “erecting a military wall at the periphery of her empire.” He insisted that the Vietnam situation was a civil war, not “an integral part of unlimited Chinese aggression.”
In many ways, Morgenthau’s criticism of US policy was more or less the same as others elsewhere on the political spectrum (like Henry Steele Commager,MLK, Reinhold Niebuhr). He said that Ho Chi Minh “came to power not courtesy of another Communist nation’s victorious army but at the head of a victorious army of his own.” (so this was not like Soviet aggression in Europe). Ho Chi Minh had considerable popular support, whereas Diem did not, and therefore this was not a military, but a political, problem. Morgenthau argued that, “People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.” Supporters of Diem did not have at least a strong a faith because Diem’s policies resulted in his being unpopular (“on one side, Diem’s family, surrounded by a Pretorian guard; on the other, the Vietnamese people”). Morgenthau pointed out that trying to treat such situations in a military way–counter-insurgency–had not worked. The French tried it in Algeria and Indochina (i.e., Vietnam), and it didn’t work, and it wasn’t working for the US in Vietnam. Like other critics of US policy in Vietnam (e.g., MLK), he emphasized that Diem (and the US, by supporting Diem) had violated the Geneva agreement, especially in terms of refusing to have an election—a refusal that was an open admission that communism was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but a popular policy agenda (he notes, largely because of land reform). We were violating the fundamental characteristic of democracy—abiding by the results of elections—in some mistaken notion that it would protect democracy.
Morgenthau’s anti-communist, conservative, and realist opposition to Vietnam shows how false is our tendency to talk about policy affiliations in terms of identity (left v. right, “conservatives” v. “liberals”). To take a policy affiliation and assume it has a necessary relationship to an identity is anti-deliberative, anti-democratic, and proto-demagogic, and what happened to Morgenthau shows just how damaging that deflecting of argumentation is.
Being opposed to US policy in Vietnam didn’t necessarily mean that one was sympathetic to communism—it could, as it did with Morgenthau, be the consequence of such a commitment to anti-communism that one only wants to support polices that will actually succeed. Ironically, that would eventually be the position that Robert McNamara, the (liberal and Democratic) architect of US policy in Vietnam, would adopt. In his 1995 book In Retrospect, McNamara would say that he came to realize that everything people like MLK, Morgenthau, and Neibuhr had been saying was true. He didn’t mention them by name, or acknowledge that he could have listened to them. But he could have.
We now often equate opposing the Vietnam War with “liberals” and supporting the war with “conservatives” and we assume that “liberals” were Democrats and “conservatives” GOP. We do so, not because we’re operating from any coherent mapping of policy affiliation, but because reducing policy affiliation to a false binary or continuum of identity throws policy argumentation to the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And that’s the point, especially if the policy agenda of a party is contradictory. Under those circumstances, instead of trying to defend policies, the most short-term effective rhetorical strategy is to go on the offensive, and deflect attention from one’s policies to the motives of the critics.
That’s exactly what the liberal and Democratic LBJ and his supporters did in regard to his Vietnam policies, as exemplified in their treatment of Morgenthau. Morgenthau put forward a sensible plan that was, it should be emphasized, grounded in anti-communism: (1) recognition of the political and cultural predominance of China on the mainland of Asia as a fact of life; (2) liquidation of the peripheral military containment of China; (3) strengthening of the uncommitted nations of Asia by nonmilitary means; (4) assessment of Communist governments in Asia in terms not of Communist doctrine but of their relation to the interests and power of the United States. In other words, the US should be prepared to ally itself with communist regimes, as long as they were hostile to China. This plan was similar to the policy the US justified as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”–how we rationalized supporting unpopular authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records rather than allow elections that might lead to socialist or communist (even if democratic) regimes–but with a more realistic assessment of the varieties of communism and the possible benefits of those alliances. As Morgenthau says, “In fact, the United States encounters today less hostility from Tito, who is a Communist, than from de Gaulle, who is not.”
Realism, as a political theory, claims to value putting the best interests of the nation above “moral” considerations, and strives to separate moral assessments of the “goodness” of allies from their potential utility to the US. We were, after all, closely allied with Israel, Sweden, and various other highly socialistic countries; why not add North Vietnam to that list, as long as it would be an ally?
That’s an argument worth considering. Morgenthau thought we should. Clearly, McNamara should have. He didn’t. We didn’t. Defenders of LBJ’s policies neither debated nor refuted Morgenthau’s argument. Instead, they shifted the stasis to Morgenthau’s motives and identity, pathologizing him, misrepresenting his arguments, and depoliticizing debate about Vietnam.
The Chicago Tribune published a short guest editorial (from National Review) June 12, 1965, and it’s worth quoting in full:
Prof. Hans Morgenthau’s hyperactive role as a protestor against our policy in Viet Nam is embarrassing many of his friends, and may even be embarrassing to himself, who is not used to the kind of self-exposure he is submitting to or to the company he finds himself keeping. (He was, it is reliably reported, distressed to see a photograph of himself standing next to Linus Paulding, and we cannot believe he looks forward to sharing the Madison Square Garden platform with the infantile leftist, Joan Baez.)
Morgenthau is a fine scholar and a first-rate dialectician. His Asiatic policies are heavily conditioned by his adamant Europe-firstism—much as the politics of Dean Acheson were. Then too, in 1960-61, Morgenthau went to Harvard as a visiting professor, expecting appointment to a new chair of government, McGeorge Bundy, then dean, nixed it—and may thereby have lit a fuse that is now exploding in anti-Johnson (and anti-Bundy) rallies around the country.
The Tribune editorial doesn’t misrepresent Morgenthau’s argument—it doesn’t even acknowledge he has one—nor does it characterize him as a dangerous person. Instead, it infantilizes and trivializes him by associating him with Linus Paulding and Joan Baez, embarrassment, infantilism, and leftism. It never argues that he’s infantile, trivial, and so on—the argument is made through association (such as characterizing his criticism of US policy regarding Vietnam as a “hyperactive role”).
There is a gesture of fairness–acknowledging that Morgenthau is a Professor and intelligent, but with a smear and dismissal. Morgenthau was Jewish, and one of many anti-semitic strategies for othering Jews was to refer to them as “Asiatic” (and therefore not really white)—Morgenthau’s ethnic background is irrelevant to whether he’s making a good argument. But, given the anti-semitism of the time, it would discredit him for some audience members. Similarly, whether he was a “Europe First,” or even whether that’s a bad thing to be, is irrelevant to whether his claims are logical, reasonable, and so on. The narrative about what happened at Harvard—whether true or not—also has nothing to do with the quality of Morgenthau’s argument.
But, dismissing an opposition argument on the grounds that the person has bad motives for making it (and it isn’t therefore a real argument) is persuasive to people who believe dissent constitutes out-group membership. We have a tendency to attribute good motives to the in-group and bad motives to the out-group for exactly the same behavior. Thus, the editorial says Morgenthau’s stance on Vietnam is purely the consequence of an academic rivalry. Why not assume the same of McGeorge Bundy’s stance? Why not assume that Bundy, if he did “nix” Morgenthau’s appointment, did so out of personal spite, and personal spite means he is taking the opposite position on the war from Morgenthau?
The slippage between Cold War rhetoric and policies meant that, as in the case of Vietnam, the US was in the paradoxical position of claiming to promote democracy, freedom, and independence while helping major powers (like France) hold on to colonies, supporting anti-democratic (even openly fascist) governments, suppressing elections, and silencing free speech even in the US:
The cold war was an all-encompassing rhetorical reality that developed out of Soviet-American disputes but eventually transcended them to reach to American perceptions of Asia and to American actions against domestic dissidents. This ideological rhetoric became so embedded in American consciousness that it eventually limited the political choice leaders could make, created grossly distorted views of adversaries, and finally led to the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. (Hinds and Windt xix)
Given the way the Cold War rhetoric paired terms worked, to criticize an “ally” or any US policy could be framed as endorsing the USSR. This despite the fact that we were often not promoting democracy, that not all forms of communism were imposed by a Soviet-led minority on an unwilling populace, and that silence of dissent was one of the main criticisms of the USSR. Thus, in service of battling an enemy one of whose crimes was silencing dissent, we silenced dissent.
From https://www.newsbug.info/news/nation/commentary-attacks-on-critical-race-theory-reopen-old-wounds/article_7f053c53-270a-566e-99e3-622595161329.html
Persuading an audience to go to war necessitates radicalizing them. War always involves the killing of noncombatants–even the most carefully conducted wars kill noncombatants through bombings, drones, starvation, failure of infrastructure. When there is a fear of partisan action, there are massacres. If the war is intended to be a war of subjugation or extermination, then persuading people to go to war necessarily means persuading them to ignore normal ethical considerations about fairness, compassion, concern for innocent bystanders. Radicalizing an audience means that that extremism becomes a virtue, and that constraints on behavior are framed as weakness, cowardice, disloyalty, lack of patriotism (for more on this see Kruglanski et al). A radicalized audience doesn’t want to think, but wants to punish (Thucydides’ point).
Radicalizing an audience is rhetorically straightforward. There are two main strategies. One is to create a hobgoblin—something that doesn’t actually exist at all (Jews poisoning wells, lesbians persuading women to get abortions, witches who seduce children, Satanic childcare workers). The other, much easier, is the junior high school mean girl strategy. Imagine that there are three people: both Chester and Abilene are friends with Hubert, and Chester wants Hubert to be irrationally committed to him–that is, radicalize Hubert. Chester would tell Hubert that Abilene is spreading rumors that Hubert [does something shameful]. If Chester wanted Hubert to attack Abilene physically, then the rumors would be relentless and extreme attacks on Hubert’s prestige.
Notice that this strategy only works if Chester can persuade Hubert not to talk to Abilene directly. That will be important later. It’s also useful to point out that Chester is the one making Hubert feel shamed.
Radicalizing an audience means framing the situation as a war against [this group] as justified because They are evil people committed to shaming or destroying us.
If a political figure succeeds at persuading a base that “we” (the political figure sometimes is, but often is not, a member of the group they’re claiming to protect) is threatened with a loss of prestige, power, or existence (and those three things get confused), then that political figure can count on zero accountability. It’s war, after all, and so in-group political figures are not constrained by any moral or legal norms other than crushing Them.
And, if you’re a political figure or party, then zero accountability is desirable. The more that you can persuade your base that you are a loyal fighter against some hobgoblin, the less they will hold you to any standards at all–the only standard is that you are an enemy of Them.
The easy and rich rewards of making our political world a zero-sum battle between Us and Them is a rhetorical trap.
As I said, the the whole process falls apart if Hubert talks to Abilene. The narrative that 1) our world is Us and Them, and 2) They want us to feel shame, or They want us to be exterminated generally collapses if we ask for primary sources, and if we assess sources fairly.
And then we cherrypick (use a minor political official to represent the whole party), nutpick (use some random PETA person to represent vegetarians, or some pastor of a small church to represent Christians), or actively lie in order to claim that we are justified in behaving as though politics is war. Since it’s war, every member of our in-group is justified in any actions (aka, not accountable) due to moral licensing.
And that is how the radicalizing demagoguery about CRT works.
It starts by creating a hobgoblin (CRT) that has nothing to do with what advocates of Critical Race Theory say, let alone what people who talk about systemic racism say. All of which has little to do with a goal of making white people feel shame.
It’s the anti-CRT people who want it to be about shame. Notice that they can’t quote anyone who says the goal of CRT is for white people to feel shame. That’s just eighth grade bullshit.
If you have to lie about what your opponent believes—and, let’s be clear, every pro-Trump attack on CRT lies about what CRT is—then maybe you should think about that. A group with a good argument doesn’t have to lie.
But if you are a political group that doesn’t want to be held to standards of morality, legality, fairness, or reciprocity, and you don’t have a good argument, then you need to radicalize your base for total war. And that is what this is about.
When I was working on the demagoguery book, I wanted to include pieces all over the political spectrum, including something by an author I really liked (Muir) and something from the radical left. Length made me cut the discussion of Muir’s “Hetch Hetchy Valley.” (At the time, I thought it would be part of my next book project. It’s now moved to the one after this at the earliest.) And I also spent some time thinking I’d write about the Weathermen, but writing about their rhetoric is really hard for a bunch of interesting reasons. Since I didn’t get to write about it in the book, I’ll blather about it here. I still think rhetoric from groups like the Weathermen should be talked about more in our scholarship and teaching for several reasons. But it’s tough.
First, their writings, especially Prairie Fire (1974), are mind-numbing in a kind of interesting way (so this is a reason for and against writing about them). That may be a deliberate rhetorical choice. It might be what used to be called mystagoguery, in which the rhetoric is basically unintelligible, but it seems smart, and the fact that the audience can’t follow the argument is taken to mean that the author is sooo smart, a prophet with direct connection to the Truth that the audience doesn’t have (but might get by putting all their faith in the prophet). A lot of New Age self-help rhetoric works this way, as do most conspiracy theories.
The term mystagoguery quickly fell out of favor among scholars because the accusation of mystagoguery was so often just anti-intellectualism or an unconsidered hostility to specialist discourse. The problem was that people called something mystagoguery (especially literary theory) simply because they didn’t understand it. But something not making sense to a particular person doesn’t mean it’s unintelligible in general. Early Habermas made no sense to me for a long time because I didn’t understand the references, context, counter-arguments, and terms. Once I took the time to try to understand them, it made sense. I can’t follow an argument about super-string theory to save my life, but it isn’t mystagoguery—I’m just not in the audience. So, to argue that something is mystagoguery requires first engaging in the most charitable reading possible—trying to make sure one understands the references and so on–, and then explaining why, even in that context and so on the text doesn’t make sense.
Arguing that Prairie Fire is mystagoguery would require going deep into the specific kind of Maoist Marxist discourse of the Weathermen, and then either showing that it didn’t make sense, or that their use of it didn’t make sense. That’s a long slog I didn’t feel like making.
To claim something is mystagoguery is to attribute a fairly specific relationship between the rhetor and audience. The audience isn’t persuaded of the arguments made in the text, because the audience can’t even say exactly what those arguments are (let alone explain what many of the terms or phrases mean), but they can get a general gist (capitalism = bad; weathermen = good), and they believe that the rhetor does understand everything they are saying. So, the audience believes there is a very clear set of arguments and the rhetor is a genius who understands them.
In another kind of discourse, however, neither the rhetor nor audience believes that there is a set of comprehensible claims logically related to one another. The claims might be clear to the reader in isolation, but their relationship to one another is nonsense. Much Weatherman rhetoric, for instance, lists various ways that different groups are oppressed by American capitalism, and makes claims about what a revolution would do, and why now is the moment that various oppressed groups will see their shared oppression, rise up together, and overthrow capitalism in favor of a communist society. There isn’t any argumentation showing the connections among the claims, and those connections are vexed.
The notion that the white working class would, any minute now, realize that their interests were the same as BIPOC (all of whom have the same interests), environmentalists, prisoners, gays, Palestinians, women, and every other group mentioned in the pamphlet seems to me implausible. Although it was doctrine in some (not all) Marxist circles that the first step in revolution was a massive coalition of people who had realized their shared oppression, that wasn’t how any revolution had happened. But Prairie Fire, like a lot of demagoguery, argues through assertion, not argumentation. There are specifics and data, but the specific cases described function to exemplify the point being made, not as minor premises logically connected to a valid major premise.
In other words, there’s a different kind of rhetoric going on here, discourse that is fundamentally epideictic but with all the discursive surface markers of argumentation. It looks like argumentation, but it isn’t. That’s interesting.
Another aspect of Weathermen rhetoric that’s interesting for scholars and teachers of rhetoric is the question of effectiveness. At the time of Prairie Fire (1974), there were authors engaged in Marxist critiques of American education, carceral system, economy that, whether we agree with them or not, were engaged in argumentation, and they did change minds. People did read, for instance, Angela Davis on the prison system and change their mind about it. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would read Prairie Fire and have their mind changed about abolition, China, Palestine, the Rosenbergs, or the other sometimes apparently random topics discussed. But, the authors might not have been trying to persuade their audience about those issues.
Prairie Fire is a manifesto, and one of the major rhetorical functions of a manifesto is persuading an audience somewhat committed to the cause to become fully committed. Augustine famously said that a sermon might inform pagans about Christianity, persuade Christians to believe correct doctrine, and convince committed Christians to walk the walk (not his exact words). A manifesto tries to convince believers to become beleevers, largely by trying to persuade them that the group is fully committed to success, and will be effective because it’s in a tradition of successful social movements.
It doesn’t make that latter argument through a careful comparison of strategies, but by providing a geneaology in which Weather Underground is placed at the end of a narrative that includes Harriet Tubman, unions, Toussaint L’O[u]verture, and others whose precise relationship to the Weathermen is never clearly explained. But I think the implication that one is supposed to draw is associative, and not logical. And that’s interesting.
There’s one other point I want to make about effectiveness. It’s hard to find a good secondary on the Weathermen—some of the histories make them heroes and others villains, with very little in between. All the authors seem to have an axe to grind. The people who were involved in it are not necessarily motivated to be entirely honest about their reasons for joining the group. Still and all, there’s some indication that, at least for some people, it was the sex and drugs. So, did the verbal rhetoric even need to be plausible, let alone persuasive?
The main reason I really wanted to write about the rhetoric of Prairie Fire is that its rhetorical approach—accumulation, association, assertion, dismissal of any opposition or criticism through motivism—might be connected to the epistemological premises of a certain kind of Marxism that was popular in that era: a kind of enlightened and omniscient naïve realism.
Naïve realism says that the world is as it appears, and that, if we get back to direct perception (which is relatively easy for sensible people to do) then we will all see the same thing: the truth. Disagreement is necessarily a sign that someone is biased and their views should be dismissed.
There is also a kind of naïve realism that says that only some people (those who have been enlightened) can have that unmediated perception of the truth, and that their perception is universally valid—they are omniscient. This way of thinking about thinking is deeply anti-democratic, and yet common in democracies. It isn’t particular to democracies, nor is it specific to any one political affiliation.
There are four important assumptions involved in the enlightened and omniscient naïve realism model of identity and perception: 1) that there is a truth in any situation—a true way of thinking about religion, the truly best policy, a true narrative about a historical event; 2) a single individual can perceive this truth (that is, they can have a perspective-free, omniscient viewpoint, from which they can see everything that is true about poverty, the Trinity, WWI); 3) certain experiences (a particular kind of education, a conversion experience, success in business, military prowess) and/or group identity (wealthy, poor, GOP, Dem, white, young, old, so on) have either given them or signify their enlightened and omniscient naïve realism; 4) because their point of view is omniscient, everyone who disagrees with them is biased (by cupidity or stupidity), limited to one perspective (seeing only part of the situation), or lying (they know what the truth is, but it’s inconvenient, risky, or unpleasant, so they deliberately or choose the obviously wrong policy).
The political implications are pretty clear: there is one right policy solution to every problem. There is no such thing as intelligent and informed good faith disagreement. That one right solution is obvious to the right people, so disagreement is itself a reason to ban someone from the discussion, and to keep political power limited to the people who demonstrate enlightened omniscience. In other words, it’s anti-democratic. There may be forms and norms that appear democratic–the communist bloc nations had constitutions and Bills of Rights, and Massachusetts Bay Colony claimed to support “freedom of conscience.” But, in all those cases, people had the right to be right–that is, the right to agree and not the right to disagree.[1]
Ultimately, enlightened omniscient naive realism ends up in a tyranny of some form, perhaps a one-party state (such as Dinesh D’Souza advocates), a theocracy, herrrenvolk democracy, oligarchy, and so on.
In the case of the Weathermen, it ended up with their being racist, and that’s another interesting aspect of them. Because they were enlightened by virtue of their ideology, they saw themselves as better judges of the conditions of Black Americans than Black Americans, with the obvious consequence that they became notorious for whitesplaining. Their epistemology undermined their sincere attempts to be anti-racist.
Participating in politics is, as Hannah Arendt elegantly argued, a transcendental leap into uncertainty. We can reduce the uncertainty of any particular leap by using processes that reduce our reliance on cognitive biases, such as trying to find the smartest opposition arguments we can, trying to think about what evidence would cause us to change our mind, and making a distinction between agreeing with an argument and thinking it’s reasonable. Believing that there is only one right policy, and that we happen to know it is like making that leap without a rope, parachute, rescue plan, or map.
[1] When I make this argument, sometimes people think I’m arguing against vehemence, and I’m not. I think it’s great for people to be passionately committed to their argument. Being passionately committed to our argument, and arguing vehemently that someone else’s argument is wrong because their evidence is flawed, they’re missing important information, their sources are bad, and so on—that’s what democracy needs to be. Arguing that one’s preferred policy is the best is how people are likely to argue. But arguing that one’s preferred policy is the only possibility, and that every single other policy is obviously wrong, and obviously every single person who disagrees is a benighted, biased, corrupt, bigoted fool—that’s profoundly anti-democratic. Dismissing arguments because everyone not in the in-group has bad motives is the problem. It’s also false. None of us is actually the person who crawled out of Plato’s cave and sees the truth in every situation.
From https://www.newsbug.info/news/nation/commentary-attacks-on-critical-race-theory-reopen-old-wounds/article_7f053c53-270a-566e-99e3-622595161329.html
Recently, I broke my ankle, went to the ER, got put in a boot and handed crutches (which I haven’t used since I was a kid), and was told DO NOT PUT ANY WEIGHT ON YOUR FOOT.
The next day, I got up and went to the airport for a long-planned trip to see our son. My husband had called ahead and arranged for a wheelchair at every point. We left from Austin, and had to change planes in Philadelphia. It was awful. Humiliating, exhausting, frustrating, and literally painful.
Most people were kind, a lot were just self-absorbed to the point of hurtful (who walks right in front of someone on crutches?), several were rude, and no one was deliberately trying to cause me pain. Even those who did cause me pain didn’t do so because they wanted to cause me pain. They were over-worked, understaffed, underpaid, trying to get their job done in circumstances less than propitious.
The worst experience was TSA in Austin. The wheelchair person asked if I could stand, and I said no. She asked if I could take the boot off, and I said no (as I’d been told). She told that to security. We happened to arrive at security within half an hour of a shift change. If you can’t go through the scanner, then you have to get groped. Seriously groped. It’s a pain for the TSA agent, none of whom had any interest in groping a pudgy 60-year-old woman like me. It isn’t fun to be groped like that, and I’m sure they get a lot of grief from the gropee when they have to do it.
After much waiting, and the wheelchair person approaching various female TSA agents and getting turned away (they were clearly hoping to kick the can down the road to the next shift), there was what appeared to be a shift change, and then more of the wheelchair person approaching female agents, a very young female TSA came up. Let’s call her Chester. The wheelchair person told her that I couldn’t stand, and couldn’t take off the boot. Chester then turned to me and said, “Can you stand?” I said “On one foot, but not very well.” She said, “Can you take the boot off?” I said no. She made no attempt to hide how irritated she was about the situation, and that irritation was getting directed at me.
Perhaps because I was raised by dogs, when I’m dealing with someone who has a shitty job and they’re irritated, my impulse is to be as nice as I possibly can. So I was doing my best to be thankful and helpful. She remained irritated; she continued to direct that irritation at me.
We go through the initial complicated procedures necessary when someone can’t go through the scanner, she takes me through and to the grope place, says, “Can you stand?” I said, “On one foot, but not very well.” She points me to a table I can touch, and she is very grumpy about exactly how much I can touch it. She is grumpy about the whole process—I need to lift my pants leg so she can get to the boot, but not before she tells me to. I can’t touch my wheelchair. If I touch things before the right moment, she has to do things over. And she is not happy when that happens.
We get through most of the groping, and she says, “Can you take off your boot?” I say, “No.” She says, really irritated now, “You told me you could take off your boot.” I hadn’t. I had told her I couldn’t.
I took off the boot. It hurt to do so. She checked out the boot and my purple and swollen foot, and gave me the boot back. It hurt to put it back on. I hated being lied to; I hated being accused of lying. Also, my ankle now hurt enough that I was working hard not to cry.
There were other glitches in our travels—not being able to get on a tram because the wheelchair person was on break, my husband commandeering an apparently unused wheelchair, American Airlines agents commandeering wheelchairs because there weren’t enough people on the wheelchair staff, and just so many delays waiting for wheelchair assistance that sometimes never arrived. There were also kind people.
Nothing bad or inconvenient that happened to me was because someone hated people with disabilities and therefore intentionally harmed me. Nobody got up in the morning hoping to oppress people with disabilities. Chester had no personal hostility to me, although a lot to her job. And I don’t really blame her. All of the people who were rude or hurtful, by things done or undone, will (if they live long enough) someday be on crutches or in a wheelchair; they probably already have. They know and love people with disabilities. Some of their best friends are in wheelchairs or on crutches. Everyone reading this will be on crutches or in a wheelchair if they live long enough; everyone reading this loves someone who is or will be on crutches or in a wheelchair. This isn’t about individual intention.
I wasn’t treated badly because individuals wanted to hurt me personally or because of any individual’s desire to hurt people with disabilities; I was treated badly because airports weren’t built for post-9/11 security needs, and so security is shoved into whatever places happened to be available (in one airport, we had to go upstairs for security and then downstair for the flight), Chester was probably legitimately grumpy about why she always ended up doing the groping of Olds simply because she’s the newest employee, and all the other women had enough seniority to dodge that part of their job. Other people were grumpy or failed to show up because airports don’t pay wheelchair people enough, any kind of accommodation for people with disabilities is duct tape and bailing wire on existing airports and TSA screening processes, people cut me off because they were distracted, planes aren’t built for people with disabilities, and so on. It isn’t about individuals. It’s about institutions, systems, and decisions made fifty years ago.
So, how do we solve this problem?
Should people without disabilities be filled with shame? No. That does no one any good.
Is it a question of individual agency? Could I have willed myself to a better experience? No. It’s a systemic issue about how things, even the physical environment, were designed.
Could Chester have willed herself to a better experience? She could have been nicer to me, sure. But that wouldn’t have necessarily reduced her justifiable irritation about the situations. The system requires that a female grope women like me, many of whom are grumpy about being groped. A better system would have included people with disabilities in the design plans from the beginning, instead of suddenly discovering they exist. Could she have been nicer to me? Yes. But should she? Her job sucks, and it sucks because the way TSA handles people with disabilities sucks. It isn’t her, and it isn’t her boss. It might not even be TSA. It might be the laws, regulations, and policies TSA is required to follow. She had to grope me because the system makes her grope me. It sucked less if I could take off the boot, so she lied to make her job slightly less sucky.
She isn’t the problem. Her feelings aren’t the problem. Her intentions aren’t the problem. The people who wrote the laws, regulations, and policies didn’t necessarily, as individuals, have any intention to discriminate against people with disabilities. It wasn’t their intention to harm that causes the harm. It was their failure to think about inclusion.
My experience was a brief summer shower of what it’s like to try to fly when you have a mild and temporary disability, and has little or nothing to do with what it’s like for people to try to fly who have a more serious or long-term disability. I’m not talking about my experience because it exemplifies what travelling with a disability is like.
My point is that travelling even with a minor and temporary disability shows that we have a system that discriminates against a group of people, regardless of the feelings or intentions of the individuals who happen to be the momentary agent in that system, or even the intentions of people enforcing the rules. There can be discrimination and harm not because of individual intentional hatred, let alone a desire to “oppress,” but as a consequence of systemic thoughtlessness.
Discrimination isn’t about the intentions of individuals, good or bad. Oppression doesn’t actually require oppressors. It’s about systems that were put in place a long time ago but that still constrain what we do; it’s about policies and processes that are thoughtless and convenient; it’s about how saving money or time by relying on stereotypes about what’s normal does harm; it’s about certain kinds of discrimination, such as discrimination against a person who needs crutches, is baked into our buildings.
If we can admit that discrimination against people with disabilities is not about individuals, or shame, or hostility, but a systemic problem, then we can think about other kinds of discrimination as systemic. It shouldn’t be that hard.
People often forget or ignore the “aggressive” part of passive-aggressive. And people who are really skilled at being passive-aggressive—that is, abusive people—use passive-aggressive tactics that enable them to hurt others while looking so blameless that if the victim calls attention to the harm, the victim looks “sensitive,” or as though they’re “over-reading.” People skilled at being passive-aggressive are good at hurting others and evading the responsibility or accountability for it.
There are a few ways they do that. One of the most common is burying the aggression in the major premise (i.e., the logical fallacy of assuming what is at stake or what used to be called “begging the question”). Here are some ways of burying the aggression in the major premise:
Love the sinner; hate the sin. Well, as a liberal/conservative/teacher/atheist/Christian, you’d of course think that. You shouldn’t criticize this war because you should support the troops.
Were I Queen of the Universe, I would make people learn about enthymemes and syllogisms, not because they’re how people should reason, but because they’re how people reason badly. In logic, the fallacy is called the “undistributed middle,” and you can often show the problems with Venn diagrams.
I want to start with the second example because it’s simultaneously the one I run across most often, and the most problematic.
Let’s imagine that we’re arguing about whether small dogs are on the side of squirrels in the squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball (this was an issue about which two of my dogs disagreed). You say they aren’t, I say they are, and you have an IRA with stock investments making you a Wall Street investor, so I say, “Well, you just say that because you’re a capitalist pig.”
Here’s the argument I’m making:
All Wall Street investors are capitalist pigs. All capitalist pigs support the squirrels or don’t see the danger of their conspiracy. Therefore, your being a Wall Street investor means your position can be dismissed.
That’s the syllogism. The two major premises (the unstated assumptions) are false. Not all investors are capitalist pigs (since many people have pension funds); not all all capitalist pigs support or don’t see the danger of the squirrel conspiracy (since that’s something we can’t possibly know, not having asked every capitalist pig about the squirrel conspiracy).
Here’s another way to think about my argument. Were my argument logical, then the Venn diagram would have a circle of “people who support (or don’t see) the squirrel conspiracy” and every Wall Street investor would be in that circle (because they would all be in the circle of capitalist pig, and that circle is completely in the squirrel conspiracy circle). Notice also that there’s considerable ambiguity about the term “capitalist pig,” as there is about the term “sinner.”
Obviously, the assumptions in this argument are wrong, or, at least, shouldn’t simply be presented as premises out of the range of argument. But it’s so hard to point out that the argument is bad because the assumptions are wrong, since so few people understand that a statement they believe is true that has bad assumptions is definitely not a logical argument, and probably not true.
When people are engaged in this kind of passive-aggressive argument, you have to bring up their premises, and then it’s easy for them to frame you as a pedant or quibbler. But, for a good conversation (which is not what they want to happen), their assumptions need to be argued.
Burying the argument in the premises gives rhetors a rhetorical advantage, especially if they’re appealing to common stereotypes. It enables them to avoid the rhetorical responsibility of fulling defending your position—that is, including your premises.
So, for instance, the “love the sinner, but hate the sin” enthymeme has as its major premise that some group is sinning, as well as an unstated premise that “hating the sin” justifies discriminating against the “sinner” whom they claim to love. They love the sinner, but, in the name of “hating the sin,” they want to be able to pass laws that restrict the civil rights of a group they claim not to hate.
What, exactly, does it mean to say that you love someone, but you won’t let them have the same rights as you?
They might say it isn’t hating the sinner, but it’s certainly quacking like it.
Further, they do not want to have to defend how they’re defining sins that should be hated. They will say, “It’s in Scripture.” Of course the term “homosexuality” isn’t in Scripture, but there are things (ranging from pederasty to rape) that get translated as “homosexual” acts.
Setting aside the translation issues, which are huge, what assumptions are they making about what should be considered a sin?
If they are defining “sins that should be hated” as anything condemned in Leviticus or Paul (or pseudo-Paul), then they’ve got a lot of sins they need to be hating. Do they?Whether homosexuality is a sin is a surprisingly complicated issue. Whether homosexuality is a graver sin than braided hair in church, paying interest on loans (or benefitting from an economic system that involves getting money from money being loaned), adultery, having non-procreative sex, getting a tattoo, exploiting or ignoring the poor, endorsing the death penalty, is an argument they need to make to support the enthymeme they throw out. They don’t.
They don’t, because they can’t come up with a consistent hermeneutic that justifies their hating the sin of homosexuality more than they hate the sin of charging interest (let alone exorbitant interest). Were their hierarchy of sin-hating rationally defensible, they’d be insisting on SCOTUS justices who go after pawn shops. I wouldn’t recommend that you hold your breath till that happens.
Basically, they neither value nor understand that simply being able to support your point with a quote from Scripture is not logical proof, unless you’re consistent as granting an argumentative win to every person who can do that. Everyone can, so that’s a problem. And therefore they don’t. That’s a winning strategy for them, but no one else.
As long as they can keep themselves and others from noticing the ethical and logical train wreck of their position, they’ll continue to think that discriminating against non-cishet people is okay, as are pawn shops, braided hair, and a justice system grounded in “an eye for an eye.”
They won’t accept the burden of proof because they believe that their personal conviction is all the proof they need.
So, we should throw the burden of proof on them. We all have people in our lives who are bigots, and whom we try to love.
Instead of trying to drag into the sunlight and then dissect their appalling major premises and assumptions, we should take as our motto that they’re bigots, and we will try to love them. They are, and we do try. And then they might notice what it’s like to have one’s condemnation buried in the premises. Let them try to figure out why the logic of an argument matters.
Or, put it this way: imagine that your passive-aggressive relative says, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” and you reply with a smile and a kiss, “Love the bigot, hate the bigotry.” Think about what happens next.
[This is from a book I’m writing about how we deliberate about war]
In this book I’ve emphasized “paired terms” because (too) much public discourse presumes that issues can be thought of in terms of a set of associations and opposition as though: 1) those characteristics are necessarily associated or opposed, and 2) are necessarily epitomized in the association/opposition of liberal v. conservative, democrat/republican, and 3) these relationships are causal. That is, we too often talk as though Martin Luther King opposed the Vietnam War because he was liberal, and liberals opposed the Vietnam War because of their liberalism. This way of thinking about politics depoliticizes public discourse, in the sense that we don’t argue about whether, for instance, the policies regarding Vietnam are sensible, likely to get a good outcome, worth the costs, and other policy issues—instead, we argue (or, more accurately, fling assertions) about whether “liberals” or “conservatives” are better people. The false assumption is that, if we can prove that our group is good (or that the out-group is bad), we have thereby proven that our policies are good. That way of thinking about politics in terms of associations and oppositions is false at every step, and the public discourse about Vietnam exemplifies how inaccurate and damaging it is to displace policy argumentation with paired terms.
For instance, we now use the term “conservative” as though it were interchangeable with “Republican,” even when the Republican Party advocates a policy that is a striking violation with past practices (such as Romneycare, the adoption of preventive war in regard to Iraq, the level of governmental surveillance allowed by the USAPATRIOT Act ). Many people use the term “liberal” as though it were interchangeable with “democratic socialist,” “progressive,” and “communist” (when those are four different political philosophies). Democrats are not consistently “liberal,” and Republicans are not consistently “conservative.” In fact, it is simply not possible to define either “liberal” or “conservative” as a political philosophy that either the Democrats or Republicans consistently pursue in terms of policies—both parties advocate small government, big government, low taxes, high taxes, military intervention, states’ rights, federalism, and so on at different points, for different reasons, and generally because of short-term election strategies. Sometimes one party takes a stance simply because it is the opposite of what the other party is advocating—as when the GOP flipped on Romneycare. This observation is not a criticism of either party—that’s what political parties do–, but it is a criticism of thinking that partisanship is an intelligent substitution for policy argumentation.
Martin Luther King and Henry Steele Commager criticized US policies in regard to Vietnam, and both did so from what might usefully be called a “liberal” and Christian perspective, both believing that American foreign policy had to be grounded in moral principles. Hans Morgenthau, conservative, Jewish, and a “realist” in regard to international relations, was also a severe critic of American policies in Vietnam, and on April 18, 1965, The New York Times published a long editorial he wrote in which he argued that, while he appreciated a recent statement of LBJ about Vietnam, on the whole, he thought that “the President reiterated the intellectual assumptions and policy proposals which brought us to an impasse and which make it impossible to extricate ourselves.”
Although Morgenthau had a very different philosophical perspective from either HSC or MLK, his criticisms of American policies in Vietnam had some overlap with theirs. While he agreed that China should be contained, he argued that it was a wrongheaded fantasy to think that it could be contained in the same way that the USSR had been in Europe–that is, through “erecting a military wall at the periphery of her empire.” Like HSC and MLK (and as even Robert McNamara would later admit was true), he insisted that the Vietnam situation was a civil war, not “an integral part of unlimited Chinese aggression.” Ho Chi Minh “came to power not courtesy of another Communist nation’s victorious army but at the head of a victorious army of his own.” Ho Chi Minh had considerable popular support, whereas Diem did not, and therefore this was not a military, but a political, problem. Morgenthau argued that, “People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.” Supporters of Diem did not have at least a strong a faith because Diem’s policies resulted in his being unpopular (“on one side, Diem’s family, surrounded by a Pretorian guard; on the other, the Vietnamese people”). Morgenthau pointed out that trying to treat such situations in a military way–counter-insurgency–had not worked. The French tried it in Algeria and Indochina (i.e., Vietnam), and it didn’t work, and it wasn’t working for the US in Vietnam. Like HSC and MLK, he emphasized that Diem (and the US, by supporting Diem) had violated the Geneva agreement, especially in terms of refusing to have an election—a refusal that was an open admission that communism was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but a popular policy agenda (he notes, largely because of land reform).
Unlike HSC and MLK, Morgenthau spelled out a plan that went beyond simply negotiating with North Vietnam. His plan had four parts: (1) recognition of the political and cultural predominance of China on the mainland of Asia as a fact of life; (2) liquidation of the peripheral military containment of China; (3) strengthening of the uncommitted nations of Asia by nonmilitary means; (4) assessment of Communist governments in Asia in terms not of Communist doctrine but of their relation to the interests and power of the United States. In other words, the US should be prepared to ally itself with communist regimes, as long as they were hostile to China. This plan was similar to the policy the US justified as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”–how we rationalized supporting unpopular authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records rather than allow elections that might lead to socialist or communist (even if democratic) regimes–but with a more realistic assessment of the varieties of communism and the possible benefits of those alliances. As Morgenthau says, “In fact, the United States encounters today less hostility from Tito, who is a Communist, than from de Gaulle, who is not.”
Just to be clear: Morgenthau had no sympathy for communism. His argument that we should ally ourselves with some communist regimes was, as I said, exactly the same one used for rationalizing our alliances with authoritarian–even fascistic–regimes. His argument that communists should be included in the group that might be the enemy of our enemies was grounded in realism. Realism, as a political theory, values putting the best interests of the nation above “moral” considerations, and strives to separate moral assessments of the “goodness” of allies from their potential utility to the US. We were, after all, closely allied with Israel, Sweden, and various other highly socialistic countries; why not add North Vietnam to that list, as long as it would be an ally?
If we think about the point of public discourse as debating various reasonable arguments, rather than a realm in which we will strive to silence all other points of view, then his is an argument that should be considered. Since support for Diem was grounded in the assumption that we should tolerate mass killings, corruption, incompetence, and authoritarianism if the regime is useful to the US, why not try to assess utility without assuming that an unpopular and incompetent anti-Chinese anti-communist is necessarily and inevitably more useful than a competent, popular, anti-Chinese communist?
Because of paired terms. Because, as Morgenthau says, public discourse, and especially the PR about how Vietnam was being handled, was based in an obviously flawed binary: It is ironic that this simple juxtaposition of “Communism” and “free world” was erected by John Fuster Dulles ‘s crusading moralism into the guiding principle of American foreign policy at a time when the national Communism of Yugoslavia, the neutralism of the third world and the incipient split between the Soviet Union and China were rendering that juxtaposition invalid. After all, Nixon decided that China could be treated as an ally–why not North Vietnam? In other words, the foaming-at-the-mouth anti-communism was an act (or, as Morgenthau said, PR); it wasn’t grounded in a consistent set of criteria of assessment utility to the US, even about shared enemies. Morgenthau’s point was that we shouldn’t be alternately moralist and realist, and that is what American foreign policy was—“realist” (that is, thinking purely in terms of utility) when it came to authoritarian governments, but “moralist” when it came to self-identified “communist.”
Whether we should be more consistent about those criteria is an interesting argument, and Morgenthau makes the argument for a more consistent approach to other countries from a coherent realist position. I don’t agree with Morgenthau (I think it’s unrealistic, in a different sense of the term, to believe that power politics is amoral), but even I will say it’s an argument worth making, debating, and considering. To say that an argument is worth being taken seriously is not to say we think it’s true, but it’s plausible.
Defenders of LBJ’s policies neither debated nor refuted his argument. Instead, they shifted the stasis to Morgenthau’s motives and identity, pathologizing him, misrepresenting his arguments, and depoliticizing debate about Vietnam. They shifted the stasis away from defending LBJ’s Vietnam policies to whether Morgenthau was a good person whose view should be considered. On April 23, 1965, Joseph Alsop responded (sort of) to Morgenthau’s argument in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times called “Expansionism Is a Continuing Theme in the History of China.”
In rhetorical terms, Morgenthau’s argument was a “counter-plan.” Morgenthau agreed with the goal of constraining China, but argued that the current strategy was an ineffective means of achieving that goal. Thus, a reasonable response to Morgenthau’s argument would argue that these means (a military response in Vietnam supporting the unpopular Diem regime) are likely to work in these conditions. That wasn’t Alsop’s response. He characterized Morgenthau’s argument as an argument for appeasing China and letting it “gobble their neighbors at will, even though their neighbors happen to be our friends and allies.” Morgenthau never argued for allowing China to gobble up other countries; he argued that the current American strategy for trying to stop China was ineffective. Alsop was not an idiot; he knew what Morgenthau was arguing. He chose to misrepresent it.
And he chose to take swipes along the way at professors who don’t really know what they’re talking about—as though being a journalist makes someone more of an expert on foreign policy?
Alsop’s argument, in other words, never responded to Morgenthau’s, instead attributing to Morgenthau a profoundly dumb argument that had nothing to do with what he’d actually said. Alsop’s argument wouldn’t work with anyone who’d read Morgenthau’s argument, but it would work with someone who already believed that the only legitimate position in regard to Vietnam was the one advocating a military solution—that is, people unwilling to engage in argumentation about their policy preferences, who instead believed that the way to think about policy option is good (us) v. evil (every other position). McNamara—the architect of the Vietnam War–would later decide that people like Morgenthau, MLK, and HSC were right. It was a civil war, Minh had considerable popular support, communism was not being forced on a completely unwilling populace by the Chinese, the situation was not amenable to a military solution. There were over 50,000 US deaths in the Vietnam conflict after Morgenthau made his argument. If even McNamara came around to Morgenthau’s position, doesn’t that suggest it was a position worth taking seriously in 1965?
I’m not saying Morgenthau’s policy should have been adopted in 1965; I’m saying it should have been argued.
Alsop (and others) did their best to ensure it wouldn’t be argued by making sure their audience never heard it, and instead heard a position too dumb to argue. And that is what partisans all over the political spectrum do—take all the various, nuanced, and sometimes smart critics of their position and homogenize them into the dumbest possible version, and they can count on an audience that never takes the time to figure out if they’re reading straw man versions of the various possible oppositions and critics. There are two lessons from Morgenthau’s treatment by people like Alsop. First, don’t be that audience.
We would never think we have been heard if people have only heard what our enemies say about us. Why should we think we have heard what others have to say if we only listen to what their enemies say about them?
Second, Morgenthau was conservative. He was a critic of how LBJ, a liberal, was handling the Vietnam conflict. MLK was liberal. He was a critic of how LBJ, a liberal, was handling the Vietnam conflict. Paired terms are wrong. It isn’t an accurate map of how beliefs and political affiliations and policies actually work. Good people endorse bad policies; our political options are not bifurcated into liberal v. conservative; being “conservative” (or atheist, Christian, democratic socialist, Jewish, liberal, libertarian, Muslim, progressive, reactionary, realist) doesn’t mean you necessarily endorse one of only two options in terms of policy agenda.
We need to argue policies.
McGeorge Bundy “debated” Han Morgenthau on CBS in June of 1965, and the scholar of rhetoric Robert Newman wrote a critique of Bundy’s rhetoric in the journal Today’s Speech. He said, and it’s worth quoting at length: Much of the profound disquiet about Viet Nam policy results from the increasing and systematic distortion of official news. There are, of course, especially in academic circles, the “doves” who want peace and noninvolvement even if this means communist control of some distant land. Bundy was not talking to them; nor is Morgenthau one of them. But even those of us who are inclined to be “hawks” are not anxious to back losers. We have had enough of this with Chiang Kai-Shek. We are afraid that Viet Nam, also, is the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. And we are tired of being lied to.
Newman goes on to list the post-war intelligence debacles of the CIA—the Bay of Pigs, wishful thinking about what the Chicoms would do in the Korean conflict, bad predictions about the Viet Cong in 1961. He mentions Secretary Rusk claiming in 1963 that the “strategic hamlet program was producing excellent results” when, actually, “this whole operation was a disastrous failure,” and, well, many other, if not outright lies, then instances of unmoored optimism that were quickly and unequivocally exposed as false. Newman concludes about Bundy’s treatment of Morgenthau, “Thus i[n] a situation where what was desperately needed was reinforcement of the shattered credibility of the government which Mr. Bundy represents, we got only ad hominem attack on a critical professor.”
And that is the problem with our political discourse, all over the political spectrum. That’s all we get, Two Minutes Hate about “the” opposition. What we need is policy argumentation. If you don’t read primary opposition sources, and you only rely on in-group sources for what “they” believe, you’re no better off than fans of Alsop.
In May of 1943, Adolph Hitler had to face that the Nazis could no longer hold Sicily. Hitler, relunctantly and uncharacteristically, agreed to an evacuation of the Nazi troops from Sicily to the Italian mainland, but was told that the evacuation would be difficult because several of the ferries that might take the troops to the mainland had been destroyed. Hitler told his generals, “the decisive element is not the ferry, but the will” and “Where there is a will there is a ferry” (137). In another discussion with his generals in December of 1942 about the situation in the Stalingrad encirclement—100,000 troops were surrounded by Soviet forces and quickly starving and freezing to death—he was told that some of the troops were simply dropping dead of exhaustion. He deflected the question of whether there should be a fighting retreat (or even a set of strategic small retreats) to the question of medals. The connection seemed to be that soldiers were dying because they weren’t sufficiently motivated to continue living, something medals would help. He clearly believed that the will could conquer anything, from freezing to death to getting across a strait.
This belief, that the will could triumph over everything, meant that he fired anyone who didn’t seem to him to have sufficient will. This belief in the power of the will was a narrative: people of a certain kind (good people with sufficient will) can triumph over anything, including the lack of a ferry, or starvation and freezing temperatures. Hitler’s decision-making about war was always within that narrative.
Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by other means. If war is politics, then politics is war, and figures ranging from Mao Tse Tung to Steve Bannon have made exactly that argument. Of course, they don’t mean it is literally war, but that the stories we tell about politics are the same stories we tell about war. Many people have argued that we shouldn’t think of politics as war, and I don’t entirely disagree, but I have a different question: what kind of war? What story of war are we telling that we think is the story of politics?
Is the story about groups who are destined to go to war, who cannot possibly co-exist, or about groups who have conflicting material needs that might be negotiated? Is the story that our group has already is already under attack by an enemy determined on our extermination, and so we are in an extraordinary situation in which we are unconstrained by normal notions about moral behavior? Or, is the case that we are bargaining with another group about material goals, and threatening to go to war will enhance our bargaining situation, and so we have one narrative for the people bargaining (this is all a bluff), and another for the general public (we need to go to war)?
Not all wars are the same, not just in that they have different costs and causes, but they are very different kinds. There are limited wars, oriented toward very specific goals, or intended as one of the pressures brought to bear while bargaining. There are total wars, wars of extermination, preventive, pre-emptive, proxy. There are a lot of kinds of wars. So, if we are saying that politics is like war, whether we imagine war as limited and temporary violence or as extermination of the other matters tremendously.
Democracy is a method of government that can withstand passionate fighting among partisans, but when politics is seen as a war of extermination of all but one political position, then democracy is exterminated. This book is an attempt to persuade readers of that claim, but also to explain how and why it is that we move from seeing conflict and disagreement as beneficial to requiring extermination. That part of the argument is more complicated.
By “politics,” people usually mean the policies that are enacted by political figures, and the rhetoric we have about those policies. And, perhaps paradoxically, or perhaps not, the kind of political discourse—that is, rhetoric—we have about whether to go to war can help or hinder effective deliberation about war, whether and how to go to war, how to conduct it, whether to continue it. That is, if we see political discourse itself as war, then what kind of war we think it is (a war of extermination, bluffing, strategic) constrains or even prohibits effective political deliberation about whether we should go to war.
The argument I will make in this book is that how we think about discourse (which I’ll call rhetoric) and how we think about war are mutually inflecting. Take, for example, Hitler. Hitler thought about rhetoric as a kind of war—a war of extermination of opposition points of view that he would win through a combination of seduction, trickery, intimidation, jailing, shooting, sheer will, and success. That rhetoric worked tremendously well with his base, and reasonably well with the German public from 1933 until 1944. In other words, it worked as long as he was winning; it failed when he wasn’t. Equally important for the purposes of this book, that’s how he approached the deliberations with his generals about how to conduct the war. He bribed, lied to, intimidated, fired, and shot his generals until he had a loyal cadre who would support him completely—the same goal he had about Germans in general. He believed that politics and war should both be approached by having a clear vision of and fanatical commitment to in-group domination, as well as expulsion or extermination of all people not fanatically loyal to that vision.
And, because of those beliefs about belief, rhetoric, and war, he lost the war.
As an aside, I’ll mention that there are lots of other examples of leaders in both business and politics whose insistence on only listening to people with fanatical commitment to the vision led them to disaster, whether it’s the disaster of the USSR, or of Theranos.
We like to believe that evil people, and I think Hitler was evil, know that they are evil. But they don’t. Hitler thought he was on the side of Good. He sincerely believed that the world was facing an apocalyptic battle between Good (Aryans) and Evil (Jews and their stooges and tools). And, because he was on the side of Good, anything he did was good. That’s Machiavellianism—the means (even if they’re actions or policies we would normally condemn as immoral) are transmuted to morally good if our ends are good. But we all think our ends are good. Hitler’s weren’t, but he thought they were.
There is a long battle in western European philosophy grounded in what some (including me) would argue is a misreading of Plato: philosophy is the study of what is, and rhetoric is the study of what people can be persuaded is. Since Plato employed Aristotle to teach rhetoric in his Academy, I don’t think Plato was as dismissive of rhetoric as some philosophers would like to think. But, in any case, there is some justice to the characterization of rhetoric as the study of what and how people can come to believe that a particular way of seeing the world, a restricted range of our policy options, this representation of that group, what it means to be loyal—that is, how people come to believe. After all, we don’t go to war because of what the world is, but because of what we believe the world to be.
And we’re often wrong.
While we aren’t Hitler, we’re all people who engage in self-justification, self-servedness, short-term grasping, and in-group favoritism, and those tendencies don’t help us make good decisions. Those impulses constrain our abilities to listen to others, treat others fairly, imagine other experiences, reflect effectively on our own commitments, reason usefully about our policy options, consider unpleasant data, hold ourselves to the same standards we hold others. This book is about how and why we do that, especially when it comes to the question of war.
Chester Burnette arrived in my life as a gangly puppy that the kindly neighbors had found hiding under a car at a gas station. We lived in an area just far enough outside of Chapel Hill that assholes would consider it an appropriate area for dumping a puppy “in the country.” Do not get me started on those assholes.
The short version is that there are a lot of assholes whose whole approach to decision-making is: what course of action will cause me the least trouble in the short term, since I am a moral nihilist when it comes to thinking about how my actions affect anyone else?
They dump puppies “in the country.” They do a lot of asshole things.
Our neighbors brought us the gangly puppy, and I said we would take him while we found his home (I assumed he was lost). I noticed he had a hole in his thigh, so I decided to take him to the vet. The vet looked him over, removed the bb from his thigh, and started telling me about how to feed and raise a Great Dane. I kept saying, “Oh, we aren’t going to keep him,” and he’d say, “Yeah, so about protein….”
Reader, I kept him.
He wasn’t a pure Great Dane—there was almost certainly a fair amount of shepherd, but he was half to three-quarters Dane. He came into my life at a point that a marriage was imploding and I was getting denied tenure (short version: don’t piss off a Dean or that random asshole in another department with a lot of power in the college, and I did both). He was clearly going to be a big guy, and clearly a comfort to me, so I named him Chester Burnette (I was relying on an album that had the name misspelled) after Howlin’ Wolf, because of his song “300 Pounds of Comfort and Joy.”
Life got complicated, including my finding myself driving a 40 ft. manual transmission moving truck that only had an am radio and a intermittently failing a/c, having missed the crossing of the Mississippi, at some random rest stop in Tennessee, with Chester showing signs of lower intestine shenanigans, and a cat I hadn’t seen in hours in the cab. Their food was in the back of the truck that had a jammed door ever since some asshole had cut me off. I’d blown up a marriage, been denied tenure, and couldn’t even feed these beings dependent on me. I had no reason to think I would get tenure at my new job given how thoroughly I’d fucked up my previous job.
I was suicidal.
I could not imagine facing another day. But I couldn’t figure out a way to kill myself that wouldn’t endanger Chester and the invisible cat. So, I decided I would get through this drive, and if I still wanted to kill myself in four years I would do it. (I have no clue why I set on the number four, but I did.) Procrastination can be your friend.
I got a funny little place in Columbia with a huge backyard, picked up another cat that Chester loved. They chased each other inside and out of the house. It was a long and mild spring, so I kept the back door open. As I sat at my computer, trying to write the book that would save my career, the cat would come crashing into that room with Chester behind him. Then the cat would turn around and chase Chester into the yard. It was a huge backyard with beautiful huge trees. He had a red ball, that he was convinced the squirrels were trying to get, and he spent hours banging the ball around the yard, keeping it from the squirrels. I loved watching him.
He was obsessed with the red ball, an “unbreakable” ball I got at Petsmart or something. It was big, about 14” in diameter, and he loved to carry it around. He would show it to the cat he liked, who never seemed to want to play with it. But the squirrels. When he saw a squirrel, he’d run to the ball and knock it away from them. Sitting at my computer, staring out the window, I invented a fairly complicated narrative about Chester believing that there was a squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball, and he had to keep it from happening.
Of course, when he got excited, he’d run to the ball and knock it around. When he was bored, he’d run to the ball and knock it around. Basically, he was stimulus:: red ball. I would throw it for him, but it was big and I couldn’t throw it far. He was carefully polite (although clearly disappointed) in my lame throwing abilities.
Since I was broke, Chester and I spent a lot of time walking. Hours, especially nights. He almost literally walked me through one of the most difficult parts of my life.
One night, when I was walking along a very isolated trail, a guy stepped out of the bushes directly in front of me, took one look at Chester, and stepped back in. It was only days later that I realized what had happened.
While Chester had never grown to be 300 pounds of comfort and joy, he had grown to be 135 pounds of comfort and joy. And protection.
I took ten days to drive to LA to visit family, and Chester and I wandered through parks. When I thought I might stay in a park in Kansas, and it turned out to be meth heaven, it was Chester who let me know this was not an okay situation. He also scared the shit out of a guy who thought about harassing me. Another time in Texas (which has “parking areas” but not enough rest stops), I stopped at a parking area filled with trucks, and I needed to pee. So I went off toward the bushes, and was mildly puzzled by a rattling noise from the bushes. Chester simply stopped at some point and would not let me go further. This obedient dog was not letting me get near those bushes, and he remained on full alert. When I’d had more sleep, I realized why.
He hated little dogs. I don’t know why. With much work, I got him to think they were okay. Then there was the puppy with whom he was playing who rolled under his belly and bit the most prominent thing. After that, I never tried to persuade him to like little dogs. He also once got entangled in a painting because he was wearing one of those e-collar things, and I had to get a neighbor help me get him untangled.
I was broke, but had a nice chair I’d inherited from my grandmother. He was not allowed in that chair. Every day when I came home from work, I’d see him jump out of that chair as I approached the front door.
His dog food bag was open, and the cat food bowl was on the ground, but he never ate more of his food than he should, and he only ate cat food that fell out of the bowl. On the other hand, a raccoon attacked one of my cats, and he ran to the rescue, but she was badly beaten up, and was on appetite stimulant cat food. He got the nearly-empty can out of the trash, licked it clean, and then ate a bag of potatoes, a box of cereal, and various other things I no longer remember. Frantically, I called the vet to say what had happened, and she said, “How big is your dog?” I said, “135 pounds,” and she said, “Oh, he’s fine.”
If she had had to pick up the poop I had to pick up later I’m not sure she would have said “fine,” but certainly good enough.
I sometimes took him to meetings on campus for complicated reasons, and he was productively bored. When I started to date Jim, Chester would bring the red ball to him rather than me. Chester was a good judge of character. Also a good judge of who had a decent throwing arm.
While I was pregnant, we were told Chester had pancreatic cancer, so we let him get on the couch. He didn’t have pancreatic cancer. He had eaten something he shouldn’t have. After that, he was always allowed on the couch. In fact, after that, every dog has been allowed on the couch. We just get couches with washable covers. It was a dumb rule.
The only time he did something really bad was when my pregnancy got glitchy, and I went to the hospital. He was so upset that he stood on the dishwasher door and ate a plate of chocolate chip cookies off the counter. The next day, I came back and was restricted to bed rest. He would not leave my side unless he absolutely had to for the next ten days. But the cookies, although they didn’t have enough chocolate to do him any harm, gave him terrible gas. I thought I was going to get brain damage. Someone recommended I keep a candle lit, but all I could think was the image of this huge sheet of flame from time to time.
Chester loved Jacob. And sometimes when every other attempt to get Jacob to nap had failed, I would put Chester on the ground, and Jacob up against him. I still don’t understand why that wasn’t my first choice. It always worked. Jacob could pull Chester’s tongue, ears, paws, or poke him in the eye, and Chester didn’t care. Jacob loved books that had pictures of various trucks, and sometimes Jacob would “read” the books to Chester. Chester loved that boy so much.
One winter, we accidentally left the red ball on the back porch, and it froze. The house was, from the back, three stories (it was split-level), and when Chester rolled the ball off it, the ball hit the ground and shattered. So, we bought another “unbreakable” ball (that’s when we learned why it was in scare quotes), but it was blue. Dogs are color-blind, so it would be fine.
It was not.
I would throw it, he would run after it, and then get to it, and turn around and give me the most guilt-inducing look you can imagine. And my mother was Irish Catholic, so I have a pretty high standards for guilt-induing looks. We rubbed butter on it, we used excited voices, Jim scored it with a drill so it was like the one that broke. No go. We found a red one.
When things get serious with someone, you say, “Here is something that has to happen in our lives.” While we were dating, Jim had said, “If we have a child it has to have the middle name of Allison,” and I had said, “We have to have a Harlequin Dane named Hubert Sumlin.”
Later I found out that Harlequin Danes are often deaf, and they are wickedly over-bred in Texas, so we rescued a blue, named him Hubert Sumlin, and Chester had a buddy. They had so much fun. We lived in a place with a dog next door that they loved to hate, and they would run up and down the fence barking at that dog. If Hubert got hold of the red ball, Chester would run to the fence and bark as though the dog next door was out. Hubert would drop the ball and run to the fence.
The neighbor dog wasn’t there.
Chester lived much longer than Danes usually do—perhaps because the false diagnosis of pancreatic cancer meant his stomach was nailed down. But he also lived longer than he should have, in that I could not let that boy go. He was over twelve when we finally had to make the right decision, but we made it.
I love that dog, and so, when I need a name for someone, especially someone with whom I don’t have a lot of sympathy, I use his name. It keeps me honest about others.
