Writing about the proslavery argument in the antebellum era was actually painful. The Slave Power, as many people called it, completely dominated American policy deliberation for far too long. The antebellum era was wickedly factional, and not just in binaries. People could read nothing but information from a Van Buren or Calhoun (both Democratic), or Whig, or Whig Anti-Catholic….
Thus, people could live in a constructed world in which abolitionists were deliberately fanning the flames of slave insurrection, slaves were happy, “free” states were filled with runaway slaves, abolitionists were a powerful conspiracy about to use the Federal government to invade the South and engaged in immediate and forced emancipation, emancipation necessarily meant race war. That none of these things happened (think “Obama will take your guns”) didn’t have any impact on the certainty people felt about this world.
So, that’s one thing to keep in mind: for some people, being proven completely, totally, and thoroughly wrong doesn’t cause them to reconsider their beliefs.
In Fanatical Schemes I argued:
proslavery rhetors posited a consistently inconsistent philosophy of government, human nature, history, human rights, truth, and public discourse: the purpose of government is to compel obedience to the existing hierarchy; the secular and the sacred are conflated, not only in the sense that God endorses one political party and condemns the other, but that one holds political beliefs with the same degree and kind of conviction as tenets of religious faith; people are motivated to obey laws only through fear or thoughtless obedience; there was once more rigid order and obedience, but a period of flaccid indulgence has led to a degree of immorality and disorder that leaves us on the brink of chaos; the political realm is made up of good people, who are trying to maintain the order (from which they happen to benefit), and the malevolent, who are secretly plotting to bring about chaos (from which they hope to benefit); although the hierarchy benefits the privileged, and they are, openly, more privileged, they are also embattled, besieged, and martyred, albeit in obscure ways, by the system; at the same time, however, they are the system, so that anything that injures them (economically, socially, or emotionally) is an attack on the entire culture; there are no universal human rights, but socially constructed privileges that are distributed unevenly along the social hierarchy; truth is what those highest in the hierarchy say it is; disagreement not only fosters disorder, insofar as it complicates the thoughtlessness presumed necessary for obedience, but disloyalty, if it contradicts what the privileged say, as criticism or dishonors the privileged and hurts their feelings; the function of public discourse is to announce truth, rouse the public to a sense of its danger, and exhort them to take action against the malevolent plotters; freedom of speech is the freedom to agree with the dominant way of thinking; because dissent is disloyalty and fosters disorder, it is appropriate for individuals or the government to respond to it with violence; discussion alternates among epideictic, threats, and bargaining. Finally, the ends justify the means.
Of course, I wasn’t really talking about the antebellum era exclusively. I was talking about the argument for invading Iraq.
In any case, what I came to believe was that the anti-slavery rhetoric wasn’t just an anti-slavery argument—it was a different way of thinking about epistemology, citizenship, identity, biblical hermeneutics, and political discourse. And it wasn’t that proslavery and anti-slavery were contrasted by the amount of feeling they had, their degree of certainty, or their conviction. Anti-slavery activists weren’t exactly skeptical, at least not about the immorality of slavery or the urgency of their cause, but they were skeptical about “literal” readings of Scripture, and they did continuously assume a connection among compassion for others, the facts of slavery, and the privileging of the spirit of Scripture over conservative interpretations (albeit they had literal readings on their side in regard to slavery and Scripture). They inhabited a more nuanced world.
There are three very important facts about proslavery arguments: 1) they were internally inconsistent (slaves are happy, slaves are about to revolt, slaves thrive in swamp areas, slaves die in swamp areas); 2) they never appealed to premises that operated across ingroup/outgroups; 3) there was no long game in regard to slavery—it was not an economic system that could be maintained (since it depended on exporting slaves somewhere—slavery was not a labor system, but a market economy, and the product was the body of slaves)—so policy arguments had to be evaded in favor arguments about the identity of people arguing “for” or “against” slavery. (In fact, there weren’t two sides.)
But, again, the argument about slavery wasn’t just about slavery—it was about argument. Abolitionists imagined and assumed a world in which compassion, reason, fairness, and long-term consequences are part of how we reason. To give one example: Garrison published articles that attacked him. Proslavery rhetors didn’t. Proslavery rhetoric wasn’t about reason and compassion—it was about ingroup loyalty.
Garrison published arguments that attacked him because he believed his claims could withstand attack; proslavery rhetors argued for hanging anyone who disagreed. I think this means that, at some level, they knew their arguments couldn’t be defended rhetorically, and had to be enforced through violence. But, when talking about what proslavery rhetors “knew” it gets very complicated because they said things that blazingly contradicted other things they said, and yet I believe they probably believed all of them. They didn’t value consistency across arguments. They also didn’t value consistency across groups–it was clear to them that they should hold themselves to lower standards than they held others, because they were always and inherently better than those people.
So, this was an argument about arguments on three grounds—should your premises apply across arguments, and should we argue policy, and should the ingroup and outgroups be treated the same.
And what struck me is that proslavery rhetors did manage to control discourse such that they created a world in which certain blazingly false claims were accepted as true, simply because they were repeated. But, also, they assumed and reinforced the notion that participation in public discourse wasn’t about finding the best solution to a community’s problems—it was about looking the most loyal to the ingroup.
And, paradoxically, looking loyal to the ingroup is best displayed by an irrational commitment to an impractical policy. So, and this is really important, public discourse as performance of ingroup loyalty and public discourse as policy deliberation (including what is best for the ingroup) are completely at odds.
That’s the situation we’ve been in for some time—for many people, and entire chunks of the media (including internet)—those proslavery assumptions about public discourse are the basis of their decisions. That is, all arguments can be reduced to ones of identity, not policy, logic, or fairness.
Trump never articulated a coherent policy agenda. He has an identity. He made assertions about policy that even his followers didn’t believe were literally true (Mexico would pay for the wall) and he regularly said things that were either obviously false or that contradicted something he had said or would say (his net worth, his claims he hadn’t said things he had). But he seems authentic to many people in that he seems unfiltered, and he seems to perform ingroup identity consistently.
For many people, our problem is that we have bad people in office. They are bad because they are cunning and intellectual. For many people, the claim that something is complicated is simply an attempt to obfuscate an obvious situation. Good people aren’t cunning, and they just act on gut instinct. Someone who says it’s complicated is, duh, bad.
Someone who continually says the wrong thing (especially if it’s the kind of “wrong” thing their audience would like to say) and who claims desires they have and can’t reach (“We’ll make Mexico build the wall”) is authentic. Since our problems come from cunning politicians, an authentic one will solve our problems.
I’ve spent a long time crawling around dark parts of the interwebz, and it’s true that Trump supporters have an awful lot of fake news sites on their pages (they aren’t alone in getting suckered—Berniebros shared a lot of those same links). Figuring out those are fake news sites isn’t rocket science; you just have to read the article and scroll to the bottom of the page. But they didn’t. For many people, participating in public discourse isn’t about investigating your position; it’s about supporting it. If you find a link that has a headline that supports your point, you share it. You don’t read it, let alone look into it enough to find out it’s false.
So, what do we do? Trump wasn’t elected because he had good policies; he was elected because people liked what they thought was his identity, and they didn’t like what they thought was Clinton’s. This situation isn’t a simple question of trying and failing to get our policy agenda passed. What we have here is a failure to agree about what public deliberation should be.
And that is what makes this so hard. Abolitionists didn’t just argue for a new policy regarding slavery; they argued for a new conception of American-ness. They won the argument about slavery, but they lost the argument about American-ness. And they responded to that loss in various ways. Some of them threw themselves into one fight heart and soul and then retired to something less exhausting (teaching, as it turns out, which shows how hard that fight was). Some of them just stayed in the game (Douglass, for instance). Some of them sort of turned it over to younger crowds. But that was after a semi-triumph (some of the Amistad case folks stepped back after they won that case, and others moved on to other things after slavery was abolished).
A few instances keep coming to mind. During the era that the Slave Power would have looked unbeatable—the 30s and 40s—people just kept sending petitions to end slavery in DC. Many of those people were women, who didn’t even have the vote. And they just didn’t stop. And they made proslavery politicians crazy, who then made the missteps that would undermine their own power (such as the gag rule)—thus, oddly enough, one of the worst losses for reasonable people turned out to be worse for proslavery folks than anyone else.
Another instance that comes to mind is Kristallnacht, when the Nazis overplayed their hand and called for open violence against Jews. Germans objected, and Nazis decided not to do that again. What they did was keep it less open, so I think we need to object when rights are violated, and just keep objecting.
I’ve mentioned before that I think our problem is the problem identified by Stealth Democracy—for many people, policy arguments are silly. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse argue that most people believe that “any specific plan for achieving a desire goal is about as good as any other plan” (224). So, most people think that politicians could solve all of our problems if they had the will, but they don’t because politicians (mysteriously) benefit from keeping the problems—loosely, they’re owned by “special interests.” People who believe this don’t believe that their interests are special interests—if they’re gun owners, they don’t see the NRA as “special interests” (but American interests); if they’re dairy farmers then special subsidies for dairy farmers isn’t special interests (and the dairy lobby isn’t really a lobby). Anti-gun lobbyists, or pig farmers, now those folks are special interests.
This is what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse say we should do: “Teaching people to appreciate democratic processes designed to deal with diverse interests is an important step toward improving their view of government” (226). That means we need to teach people that people genuinely disagree, that we are all wrong, and that what matters is now what we argue, but how we argue.
I think what we should do is :
-
- Call out authoritarians on their rejection of fairness. Point out, relentlessly, that they don’t have a consistent argument about anything—their politics are “if my group does it, it’s okay.” Just keep hammering on that.
- Insist that folks with whom we argue cite sources. Don’t let them off on this, and then go back to #1,
- Stop teaching bullshit about bias. Comp is still prone to a binary of biased or objective, so we end up teaching a really shitty version of relativism.
- Similarly, we need to teach a sensible version of logic and fallacies—everything I can find in rhet/comp is pre-1970s in terms of notions of about logic. So, we’re endorsing the rational/irrational split when argumentation hasn’t done that since about 1970. It’s embarrassing.
- I think we should probably just keep signing petitions and sending email and complaining. I used to think that was a waste of time, because Ted Cruz doesn’t care what I think. And he doesn’t. He isn’t going to change his position on anything because of anything I say. But, if the GOP understands that there are a lot of people who are willing to take the time to sign a petition or send an email or make a call who object to this law or that appointment, they might understand the cost.
- I think we should worry less about niceness, and also call out incipient racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism, and so on. We need to shut people the fuck up if they condemn something as political correctness. We don’t have to argue, but just indicate we’re not okay with it.
- And I guess we just have to keep hoping, and realize that we are where we are because people put one foot in front of the other in much worse situations.