Patricia Roberts-Miller

The trouble with necessary counterfactuals. Or, Hitler and Art School

I’ve become fascinated by a specific kind of counterfactual argument that is often made, but is constraining and damaging in deliberation. Let’s call it the “necessary counterfactual.” It’s structurally unstable, but people tend not to see that, and often find it compelling. And its weaknesses are hard to explain.

Just to be clear: I’m not arguing the counterfactuals are always bad—they’re inescapable in policy deliberations, whether personal or “political.” Any causal argument implies a counterfactual (if I say that you feel sick because you ate a party-size bag of knock-off chocolate-covered fried bananas, I’m implying that you wouldn’t feel sick if you hadn’t).

The problems arise when the connections are asserted and assumed to be so necessarily connected that all dissent or disagreement is delegitimated.

For instance: When confronted with an expansionist and aggressive leader (Hitler) decision makers (the French and British) chose appeasement. Appeasement didn’t work; therefore, it is obvious that maximum aggression would have worked. We are now in a similar situation (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq), so it is obvious that we must do what would have worked then, and engage in maximum aggression.

Here’s the structure of the logic:
In [Situation Z], policymakers adopted [Policy A], and [Policy A] went badly; therefore, the correct policy must have been [Not-A]. [Policy B] is not-A; therefore, it is obvious that [Policy B] would have worked. We are now in a situation similar to [Situation Z]; therefore, it is obvious that we must adopt [Policy B], since that would have worked the prior time.

The “logic” is something like this:

A –>B; therefore ~A –>~B.

(A led to B, therefore not-A leads to not-B.) Appeasement led to failure; therefore, not-appeasement would have led to success.

What makes the “logic” of this kind of argument so troubling is the degree to which it assumes necessary consequences and necessary implications—the way that it shuts down reasonable disagreement.

This kind of “logic” ignores several important points:

1) That A didn’t work doesn’t necessarily mean that this not-A would have worked.

That sentence has a lot of negatives (which is probably why it’s hard for people to grasp). But my point is that this way of thinking assumes two false binaries that are falsely assumed to be necessarily connected.

There are plenty of events/policies other than maximum aggression that might have prevented Hitler’s coming to power, starting WWII, engaging in the multiple genocides: his getting into art school, von Hindenburg and von Papen refusing to work with him, the Reichstag growing a spine and refusing to pass the Enabling Act, anti-Nazi parties making a coalition, one of the assassination attempts working, a treaty that wasn’t as punitive as the Versailles Treaty, the US joining the League of Nations, economic policies that would have meant the Great Depression didn’t happen, Germany refusing to back Austria’s play in 1914, a different response on the part of the French in May of 1940, Napoleon III not taking the bait and declaring war in 1870…

2) Evidence isn’t proof.

Counterfactuals are generally supported by telling a story about what would have happened had the other course been taken. That maximum aggression would have worked with Hitler is argued through the telling of a compelling narrative. But that it’s compelling doesn’t mean it was likely, let alone guaranteed.

One narrative is that a military response to Hitler’s remilitarizing the Rhineland would have led to a military coup that would have removed Hitler from power. But the only evidence that a coup was even considered are things said in self-serving and jaw-droppingly dishonest post-war memoirs on the part of Nazis military leaders, who lied about everything else (such as the Wehrmacht’s participation in genocide), so why suddenly decide they’re being honest about that coup plot? Particularly since there is no other supporting evidence. A military response, which Hitler thought was likely, wouldn’t have stopped him from regaining that territory (they were going to get it anyway in a few years), and it wouldn’t have persuaded him to change his mind about his long-term plans. What might have made a difference would have been a more successful response to the Nazi invasion of France, and there are counterfactuals about what would have been better responses, but even a compelling counterfactual is still a counterfactual.

3) Assuming best case counterfactual scenarios isn’t even evidence.

Richard Ned Lebow makes this point quite neatly in Forbidden Fruit. Counterfactual narratives often make one major change, and then assume that there are necessary consequences of that change, all of which are the consequences most favorable to the argument. So, a military response to Hitler’s actions in the Rhineland would have successfully deterred him, there would have been a coup, it would have been successful (a very weak link in the chain of events), the Nazi military leaders would have put in place a non-aggressive, non-expansionist, and pacific government that would not have tried to refight the Great War.

There are other stories one might tell that are also plausible: it might not have deterred him from invading Czechoslovakia; it might have increased anti-war sentiment in France and Britain; there probably wouldn’t have been a coup; it was very unlikely that a coup would have been successful; Nazis would still have been Nazis.

4) Policies have to be politically available.

Many scholars argue that going to war over the Rhineland was not politically possible for France or Germany. It would have seemed to be a repeat of the Great War, which was (in the 20s and 30s) often narrated as a massive overreaction to a minor incident with no real importance.

5) That A didn’t work doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a not-A that would have worked, one which must be our current choice.

I’m not making some argument about history being determined, or non-contingent; I’m making a point about argument, but I’ll get to that. I’m saying that history is contingent and options are contextual. For instance, there are counterfactuals that I’m persuaded would have prevented WWII, at least in terms of the form it took. I’ll mention two: if Hitler had gotten into art school; if the Franco-Prussian War hadn’t happened.

If we follow the logic of the necessary counterfactual, then the implication of the first is that we should let everyone into art school. Or maybe just all Nazis? Or something.

What are the policy implications of the second counterfactual? Don’t go to war against Bismarck? That’s probably pretty good advice, but unlikely to be useful, and certainly not something that might have helped people trying to figure out what to do about Hitler. Or Vietnam.

So, counterfactuals about the past, even very plausible ones, don’t necessarily determine our current policy choices. We’re not in the realm of obviously correct decisions, but in a world of deliberation.

The problem with necessary counterfactuals is not that they’re counterfactual, but that they’re presented as necessary at every step—this is necessarily what would have happened, and that narrative makes it clear what is necessary for us to do. My point is about how they shut down potentially useful disagreement. My crank theory is that’s exactly why people are drawn to them—they don’t actually reduce uncertainty, but they make us feel less uncertain about the past, present, and future. The narrative about obvious choices is comfortable, since it ends the need to acknowledge uncertainty and risk.

And, obviously, I’m not just talking about Vietnam. Or Hitler. There are a lot of discussions right now about what went wrong such that we have a political party that simply refuses to hold its members accountable, that is openly pursuing competitive authoritarianism and abandoning democracy, and the question is: what should opponents of authoritarianism do now? And that question means thinking about how we got here—it involves counterfactuals. And it should. But what won’t help is swearing fealty to a necessary counterfactual. I mean, it might help people feel less uncertain, but it won’t help figure out our various options.

Is demagoguery the consequence of too much democracy?

Stone platform for the speakers at Athenian assemblies — The Athenian speakers’ box

There’s a long tradition of explaining the transformation of democracy into authoritarianism as the story of “too much democracy” enabling the rise of a demagogue who makes himself a tyrant. It is “too much democracy” in that the rise of the demagogue is the consequence of a decline in authority and a flattening of hierarchy. In this talk I want to focus on two relatively recent examples of that narrative (more recent that Plato or Plutarch, anyway), one because it was influential (Samuel Huntington’s chapter in the 1975 Trilateral Commission report “Crisis of Democracy”), and the other because it’s typical (Andrew Sullivan’s May 2016 “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic”). Full and additional quotes are here.

At the foundation of this narrative of too much democracy is the binary of “the elite” v. “real people,” and one of the points I’ll make is that rhetors are using those terms in wildly different ways, often in ways that are strategically ambiguous.

In what is generally called populism, the elite is “out of touch” with how real people live, authoritarian, self-serving, inauthentic, and isolated, and the people are real, authentic, deserving, and oppressed. The “too much democracy” narrative of someone like Huntington or Sullivan accepts the foundational binary of elite v. people, but bemoans the decline in power of some vague “elite.” So, for instance, here is Sullivan’s explanation of Trump’s success in the 2016 primaries:

“As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.” (New York May 1, 2016)

Sullivan’s rhetoric works to the extent that the reader is left to fill in the empty signifiers like “authority,” “elites,” “equality.” Depending on how the reader fills the empty signifier, the binary can seem apt.

But it is a grave mistake to think that toxic populism (a kind of demagoguery) does not appeal to the authority of elites, let alone advocates equality, or is in any way anti-authoritarian. For much current demagoguery, “liberals” or “the woke mob” are described as the powerful and authoritarian elite whose cultural dominance oppresses “real” people; that “liberal” elite is sometimes muddled with a notion of a cultural elite (as in the comicsgate or PBS controversies). Some kinds of populism describe the authoritarian elite in economic terms, billionaires or massive near-monopolistic corporations (Sanders, OWS, Mamdani). Even if we limit “elite” to “economic elite,” the term is usefully fluid. Andrew Jackson’s demagoguery about the national bank characterized the banking and manufacturing elite as a nefarious and alien group opposed to real people, and it was in service of the economic elite whose wealth and power came from slavery (and they were not restricted to the American South). It was a condemnation of one kind of elite in service to another.

For the “too much democracy” narrative, there is a kind of cultural/intellectual elite that should be treated with authority and deference, whose superiority should be recognized. And that’s where dignity comes in. In some models of democracy (such as participatory democracy), dignity is assumed to be a universal human right. In other kinds of democracy (such as herrenvolk democracy, democracy of the faithful, libertarian authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism) and all forms of authoritarianism, dignity is imagined as a limited resource, distributed proportionate to one’s place in a hierarchy. Dignity is about the privilege to dominate those lower on the hierarchy. In that latter model, the people “below” demanding dignity is perceived as trying to reduce the amount of dignity possessed by those higher up, and therefore it is equalizing of everyone, a rejection of authority, and “too much democracy.”

People afraid of losing their privilege—some, but not all, members of some kind of elite—will then sometimes work with a party or leader who promises to restore or protect the hierarchy of privilege and dignity—often an authoritarian demagogue. Pace Sullivan or Plato, when democracies die, it’s almost always because, as Levitsky and Ziblatt say, elites deliberately invited the authoritarian into power, expecting to be able to benefit from and control them: “In each case, elites believe the invitation to power would contain the outsider, leading to a restoration of control by mainstream politicians” (13).

Sullivan’s claim that barriers to equality were being removed in 2016, let alone that such removal was bad, is and was unmitigated nonsense. Neither Trump nor the demagogues who greased the skids for him ever preached equality. They condemned equality, preaching Jeremiads about how America had fallen from greatness by too much equality, too little deference to authority, and a failure to maintain the right hierarchy. Much demagoguery right now in the US is not about “elite” in general, but about the hobgoblin of the liberal elite. The economic elite like Trump, Musk, and others is actively admired and respected. Similarly, as is clear in the arguments for never holding police or ICE accountable, current pro-GOP demagoguery is not anti-authoritarian; in fact it’s about deference to authority, but the right authority. It’s about vertical morality and hierarchy.

It isn’t a question of believing or disbelieving experts, but of disagreements about what constitutes expertise. Expertise is rhetorically constructed, not an ontological category (Hartelius). Eugenics, segregation, smoking, homophobia, misogyny, climate change denial, and even the over-prescription of opioids all were or are advocated and defended by labs, research, and journals, many of which claim(ed) to be peer reviewed, and which sort of are.

Part of the authority comes from resonance. As with Hitler, the famous demagogues are famously unoriginal. McCarthy’s rhetoric was just a kind of warmed over anti-communist demagoguery that became popular in the thirties. That anticommunist rhetoric itself relied on the very old eschatological and chiliast frame for politics that has constrained policy deliberation in the US at least as far back as the Hutchinson controversy in the 17th century. Howell and Moe observe that every part of Trump’s agenda in 2016 was what Patrick Buchanan had promoted for years. It wasn’t just Buchanan. Part of what made Trump’s rhetoric resonate was the extent to which it repeated many of the points that had been hammered home for twenty to thirty years among various radio and TV pundits.

“By the 2016 election cycle American right-leaning audiences had been exposed for two decades on television (and nearly three on radio) to a propagandist mass media outlet built on feeding its viewers with news that fit and reinforced their world view while constantly pointing fingers at all other media sources as biased.” (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 324)

It was very inauthentic, and very elite, people and organizations that gave fuel to Trump’s campaign and continue to protect him and the GOP from any accountability. Unhappily, this is worsened by the monetization of the internet, which has enabled what Bratch calls “cyber-demagoguery:”

Ernesto Laclau has described the role of empty signifiers in populism, but it’s often not as much “empty” as unstated:
“In the United States and Europe, claims to speak for ‘ordinary people’ have often implicitly or explicitly meant ‘white people’ [and] many political parties have been rewarded at the ballot box for portraying themselves as the voice of a virtuous white people betrayed by predominantly white elites allied with people of color and immigrants, who are portrayed as outsiders unfairly draining resources.” (Bratich 85)

The unstated but assumed “whiteness” of “real” people is often an important assumption in the “too much democracy” narrative in that the people who are oppressed, losing ground, unappreciated are implicitly or explicitly white.

Huntington’s 1975 summary of the “too much democracy” of the 60s bemoans the changes of the 60s, which he identifies as increased political activism on the part of women and people of color (not his term):

“The challenging of the authority of established political, social, and economic institutions, increased popular participation in and control over those institutions, a reaction against the concentration of power in the executive branch of the federal government and in favor of the reassertion of the power of Congress and of state and local government, renewed commitment to the idea of equality on the part of intellectuals and other elites, the emergence of ‘public interest’ lobbying groups, increased concern for the rights of and provision of opportunities for minorities and women to participate in the polity and economy, and a pervasive criticism of those who possessed or were even thought to possess excessive power or wealth.” (59-60; 1975)

He would go on to publish an article in 2000 called (and I’m not kidding) “The Special Case of Mexican Immigration: Why Mexico is a Problem” in which he argued that “Mexican immigration [by which he means any and everyone from South or Central America] poses challenges to our policies and to our identity in a way nothing else has in the past” (20), an argument that largely ignores that exactly the same claims had previously been made about Irish and German Catholics (Morse), Jews (Grant), and non-WASPs generally (Stoddard). Thus, while he’s making exactly the same hyperbolic and unfounded arguments made about other groups, he’s claiming the situation is unprecedented. It’s very precedented.

Sullivan explains Trump’s popularity as a consequence of the “demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life”:

“For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. [….] Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to ‘check his privilege’ by students at Ivy League colleges.”

While there are very, very good reasons to acknowledge the harm that has been done to members of the working class, why the tendency to talk about what’s happened to the white working class? There were large numbers of people of color in the coal industry (Lewis), and decline in manufacturing jobs has had significant impact on non-whites as well (Gould).

Sullivan’s analysis of the problem, it should be emphasized, was that expertise about politics was no longer valued, implying it should be. Yet his analysis is strikingly absent of any familiarity with what actual experts had to say about how democracies die. Sullivan focused on his own expertise, based on something the elitist and anti-democratic Plato wrote that Sullivan read in college. Sullivan privileged his own personal experience and beliefs over what experts in the field said. He didn’t even seem to think he needed to check to see what they said. Google Scholar was around in 2016, after all. Juan Linz’s foundational text, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, came out in 1978, and it led to many studies about how democracies die. None of them mentioned too much democracy. Linz’s book points to a variety of factors such as “Unsolvable problems, a disloyal opposition ready to exploit them to challenge the regime, the decay of democratic authenticity among the regime supporting parties, and the loss of efficacy, effectiveness (particularly in the face of violence), and ultimately legitimacy” (51). Linz points out that that leading actors—that is, an elite–might be tempted to exploit the situation by removing the guardrails of democracy, strengthening the executive, purifying the polity, voter suppression, criminalizing opposition parties, –removing outgroup protections—that is, they mobilize support for ending democracy.

Thus, it isn’t too much democracy that ends democracy, but the fear that many people have that they are going to lose status; it’s the fear of democracy.

Quotes and sources for Demagoguery and “too much democracy”

Quotes
Sullivan, Andrew. “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.” New York. May 1, 2016.
“As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.” (New York May 1, 2016)

Sulllivan: “For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. [….] Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom run of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to ‘check his privilege’ by students at Ivy League colleges.”

Moe, Terry M., and William G. Howell. Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. Princeton U P. 2025).
“To say that [Patrick] Buchanan paved the way for Trump is an understatement. Everything about Buchanan’s approach to politics anticipated what Trump […] would say and do. Almost none of Trump’s public presentation was original. [Buchanan] pushed for an “America First” approach to policy, one that looked skeptically upon free markets and globalization, supported protectionism, opposed interventionism and democracy-building overseas, and stepped back from America’s commitments to the United Nations, NATO, and the World Trade Organization. He insisted that America was locked in a battle for the soul of the nation and that “we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”41 He saw a nation in moral decay and advocated a greater public role for religion, for “Judeo-Christian values,” and our Western heritage. He vilified diversity and cast himself as an unapologetic guardian of whiteness and white identity. He opposed affirmative action and civil rights legislation. He saw immigration as perhaps the greatest danger of all—to jobs, but more importantly to white culture and its traditions. He spoke of “an invasion of the country” that needed to be stopped in its tracks. To do that, he proposed a wall at the Mexican border, an end to birthright citizenship, and a five-year moratorium on all (including legal) immigration.” (169)

Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. Oxford University Press, 2018.
“By the 2016 election cycle American right-leaning audiences had been exposed for two decades on television (and nearly three on radio) to a propagandist mass media outlet built on feeding its viewers with news that fit and reinforced their world view while constantly pointing fingers at all other media sources as biased. The strategy paid off for Fox in producing an immensely loyal viewership, and for the Republican Party with a core of support highly resilient to the vicissitudes of real-world failure or transient political winds.” (324)

Bratich, Jack Z. “The people and the public: cyber-demagoguery and populism as war.” Mapping Populism, eds. Ron, Amit, and Majia Nadesan. Routledge (2020): 42-54.
“Guidance via cyber-demagoguery is performed by algorithm, by crowdsourced peer suspicion, and by design choices. Media subjects, rather than participating in shaping the objectives, are recruited for harmony, alignment, and a shared definition of the situation with those who govern. While cyber-demagoguery doesn’t have a central charismatic leader, the nexus that guides it is nonetheless centrist in its aims” (50).

Huntington, Samuel, “The United States.” Crisis of Democracy. Trilateral Commission, 1975: 59-163. (Description of the 1960s (an era of “too much democracy”):
“The challenging of the authority of established political, social, and economic institutions, increased popular participation in and control over those institutions, a reaction against the concentration of power in the executive branch of the federal government and in favor of the reassertion of the power of Congress and of state and local government, renewed commitment to the idea of equality on the part of intellectuals and other elites, the emergence of ‘public interest’ lobbying groups, increased concern for the rights of and provision of opportunities for minorities and women to participate in the po9lity and economy, and a pervasive criticism of those who possessed or were even thought to possess excessive power or wealth.” (59-60; 1975)

McKean, Benjamin. “Populism, pluralism, and the ordinary.” Mapping Populism, eds. Ron, Amit, and Majia Nadesan. Routledge (2020): 85-95.
“In the United States and Europe, claims to speak for ‘ordinary people’ have often implicitly or explicitly meant ‘white people’ [and] many political parties have been rewarded at the ballot box for portraying themselves as the voice of a virtuous white people betrayed by predominantly white elites allied with people of color and immigrants, who are portrayed as outsiders unfairly draining resources.” (85)

References (not quoted)

Gould, Eric D. “Torn apart? The impact of manufacturing employment decline on black and white Americans.” Review of Economics and Statistics 103.4 (2021): 770-785.

Hartelius, Johanna. The Rhetoric of Expertise (Lexington 2011)

Huntington, Samuel. “The special case of Mexican immigration.” The American Enterprise 11.8 (2000).

Laclau, Ernesto. On populist reason. Verso, 2005.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How democracies die. Crown, 2019.

Lewis, Ronald L. Black coal miners in America: Race, class, and community conflict, 1780-1980. University Press of Kentucky, 1987.

Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. The breakdown of democratic regimes. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Demagoguery (again)

demagogic books of various kinds and perspectives

Many years ago, when I was first teaching about demagoguery, a high school friend got in touch with me. He was angry that one of my course documents said that a politician he admired had engaged in demagoguery at some point. The friend said that was “unfair,” without giving any evidence that my clear definition of demagoguery did not apply to his hero. Even defenders of this politician characterize his early rhetoric as demagoguery.

But my high school friend’s reaction seems reasonable from within a popular understanding of demagoguery. The most common way to think about demagoguery is that it is something that demagogues do. It’s an identity issue: a political figure is, or is not a demagogue. And demagogues are bad people with bad motives who use bad rhetoric to persuade the gullible masses to support bad policies.

That’s a bad way to think about demagoguery. For one thing, it’s rabidly self-serving. If demagogues are bad people, and their followers are gullible, then we are never going to identify beloved in-group rhetors as demagogues.

They (out-groups) have demagogues; We (our in-groups) have excellent communicators.

I’ve described elsewhere how I ended up on demagoguery, and why I’m more interested in cultures of demagoguery than individual demagogues.

My argument is that there are always individuals engaged in demagoguery; when demagoguery is likely to lead to authoritarian figures or disastrous policies is when there is a culture of demagoguery—when it’s common for major sources of information to frame policy disagreements as really a zero-sum existential, even apocalyptic, battle between Us and Them, when inclusive deliberation is treated as a trap set by villains, a weakness, a step down the slippery slope to [dogs lying with cats! Tattoos being legally required! The in-group being forced into FEMA camps!].

The important point about a culture of demagoguery, whether it’s how a neighborhood mailing list treats issues, or a nation faced with thinking about going to war, is that such a culture prohibits reasonable policy deliberation in favor of mobilizing a base to hate some hobgoblin. That mobilizing consists of rhetoric that says that:
1) the situation is simultaneously dire and simple; the urgency of the situation means that we should not deliberate.
2) our situation is not a complicated one in which there are various options we should consider, but a simple and urgent situation in which the right course of action is obvious to every and any reasonable and good person.
3) therefore, every manly, faithful, and reasonable person knows what the right course of action (i.e., policy) is.
4) because “the ill” or “need” is so obvious, anyone asking that we engage in deliberation about the proposed plan (in terms of feasibility, solvency, unintended consequences, costs) is a weak, overly-intellectual, effeminate, indecisive, cowardly villain or dupe who isn’t taking the “ill” seriously.
5) Therefore, when They argue plan, We argue need. Over and over, exaggerating or fabricating the threat if necessary.
6) And,because the situation is dire, and there are villains out there trying to seduce you into believing their lies, you should only get your information from in-group sources. Any rhetor, source, or information that complicates or contradicts what in-group media is saying is “biased.”

Because what matters is the culture of demagoguery, the solution is not deeper commitment to a purer and more fanatical in-group and its preferred policy, relying even more on in-group sources, or getting defensive about political figures we like, but doing the work necessary to have a broader understanding of policy options. We respond to demagoguery by getting out of demagogic cultures.

How I ended up defining demagoguery as I do

train wreck — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montparnasse_derailment

Why does demagoguery matter? And why does it matter how we define it?

Those two questions are actually in reverse order of importance. People sometimes seem to think that the meaning of a word was baked into the physical matter of the universe, and so has One Meaning To Rule Them All. But, very few terms have only one meaning, and concepts often have disputed meanings. So, what are we trying to do by defining a term.. Often, it’s just so we can agree on referents and thereby communicate more clearly.

If we share a definition of cats that makes them different from dogs, then your story about a “cat” climbing a tree is plausible and maybe even boring. If I think the word “cat” refers to dogs, I might find your story unbelievable and shocking. I would also be dubious about your story if I thought you were referring to a “Cat”—that is, a Caterpillar tractor.

There are consequences of definitions. How terms like “citizen,” “murder,” “minor,” “disabled” are defined can have life-changing consequences.

So, what are we doing when we try to define demagoguery?

For many people who write about demagoguery, it’s about trying to understand how a bad person came to power, mobilize a base, and overthrew democratic norms. So, they look back through history at individuals of whom they disapprove who did those things (or nearly did), and try to see what they had in common. They start with the individuals already on their list of “bad people who did bad things” and then look at the rhetoric. (This is also true of a lot of the political scientists who write about populism.)

I came around to demagoguery via a different route.

I was the kind of kid who turned over rocks to see what was there. My father was a pathologist, and sometimes took me to his lab that had various samples in jars of problematic specimens. I think he was trying to persuade me to become a doctor, but he unintentionally persuaded me that looking at how things go wrong is necessary for understanding what it might mean for things to go right.

I’ve said this elsewhere, but, when I was a graduate student in rhetoric (I have four degrees in it), most scholars seemed to be focused on times that rhetors changed history in positive ways. I unintentionally followed the footsteps of my father, and looked at a debate that should have been a clear win for the group that lost. The decision to dam and flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley was a bad decision; it violated the principles of a national park; it was the most expensive option; the arguments for why it was good not only involved lying about the costs of the various options, but imagined physically impossible improvements. They weren’t bad people, but those were bad arguments.

It was a moment of a complete failure in public deliberation. It was a train wreck because the frame for policy deliberation at the time (efficiency) didn’t allow for the kind of argument that John Muir was trying to make. His arguments about the sacrality of some spaces, the importance of spaces of renewal, the notion that beauty was itself a public good, and even a different sense of who should benefit and how from publics lands were just dismissed, often on the grounds of the kind of person he was.

And the disagreement was much more complicated than either he or the major advocates of the dam acknowledged. It wasn’t two sides. It could look like it was two sides, since it was, ultimately, whether San Francisco should be allowed to dam and flood the valley or not, but it was actually a lot of groups (a corrupt water company, Progressives who hoped to make a point about public ownership of basic needs, a fairly loony and thoroughly dishonest [or maybe incompetent] engineer tasked with providing numbers that no one checked, boosters who wanted a splashy exposition, conservationists v. preservationists).

When I was writing my dissertation about John Muir and the Hetch Hetchy Valley debate, the dominant narrative about American policies in regard to nature was by a really, really sloppy scholar who had a binary narrative in which Christians and Christianity were the cause of American exploitation of nature. So, since I didn’t have great mentors at that time, I decided that my first book would be a refutation of his argument by writing a history of American attitudes toward nature, showing that it wasn’t a binary, let alone that Christians and Christianity were the villains.

I started with the 17th century American Puritans (where he started), and it turned out that not only was their attitude toward nature pretty complicated, but that they wrecked a lot of trains.

I’ll spare you the whole narrative, but what it comes down to is that my area of expertise ended up being times when communities had all the information they needed in order to make good decisions, and they didn’t. They wrecked the train.

It was never the case of a spell-binding individual who hypnotized a passive public into supporting policies they would never otherwise have supported. It was never about a rhetor who swept a people in his wake.

While there often were powerful people who did mobilize a base, they were just the scum on the top of a wave that wasn’t caused by any single individual. In many cases (e.g., eugenics, anti-immigration legislation, slavery, segregation, Japanese internment, various unnecessary wars), there wasn’t an individual primarily responsible for the bad decisions. The go-to example of a demagogue (Hitler) was notoriously uninventive in the claims he was making about Jews, WWI, and so on. These disastrous decisions weren’t one forced by the masses over the objections and resistance of the elite or experts. In the cases when individuals did end up front and center (when the culture of demagoguery enabled a charismatic leadership situation, as in the case of Hitler), that leader rose because they had elite support. They also always had experts on their side.

So what struck me in the various cases was that, while they didn’t have in common some individual rhetor who transmogrified a public, they did have a similar rhetorical culture—they had similar ways of framing deliberation (sometimes in general and sometimes just about one topic). There was no such thing as a complicated problem. The conflict was between good people who saw what the obvious right answer was and people who were stupid, corrupt, duped, or just plain spit from the bowels of Satan. Much of the rhetoric was about decision-making—that what was needed was not some kind of careful review of the information, inclusive deliberation, consideration of long-term consequences but strength of will, fanatical loyalty to the in-group and in-group representatives, silencing or expelling/exterminating) the Out-group and its stooges, mobilizing (or silencing) any non in-group members, and full commitment to whatever policies seemed to most oriented toward domination and extermination. These communities emphasized believing rather than thinking, let alone listening. They were also communities in which it was easy to remain in a monologic informational world—so, even if there were diverse media options (that is, not all media advocated the same message), it was difficult and sometimes nearly impossible for an individual to hear them all. People were in informational enclaves, perhaps by choice, and perhaps because of region or access or something else.

Once I started looking at it this way, it became clear that it was a question of degrees of several factors (described at the beginning of Rhetoric and Demagoguery). So, a community might drift into this kind of rhetorical culture briefly or on one issue, with no particular harm, and possibly even benefit (as John Muir did with his article on the Hetch Hetchy Valley). Demagoguery isn’t necessarily insincere (in fact, I’d guess it’s most often very sincere), and not restricted to bad people (Earl Warren did a lot of good things). Looking at demagoguery is part of what persuaded me of the fundamental toxicity of the left/right way of talking about politics. Where would one put Theodore Bilbo, Earl Warren, or LBJ on that continuum?

Because I am constitutionally averse to inventing new terms, I not tocome up with a new term for the kind of rhetoric and rhetorical culture, but instead to adopt the existing term closest to what I was describing: demagoguery. (I sometimes regret that decision.)

That’s why I’m not interested in demagogues, I don’t think people who engage in demagoguery are necessarily evil, I don’t even think demagoguery is always bad. The more that a culture is demagogic, the more that powerful rhetors engage in demagoguery, the more that there is a dominant demagoguery about a specific group, and the more that people are in informational enclaves, the more likely that train is headed to the station. And not in a good way.
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Authoritarianism and self-control

people explain away good behavior on the part of the out-group and bad behavior on the part of the in-group

Here’s my crank theory. If you think about authoritarianism from a rhetorical/mobilizing passion perspective, rather than a political arrangement, policy agenda, or place on the fantastical left/right axis, then it’s most useful to define authoritarians as people who believe that the ideal world is one with a stable hierarchy of submission and domination. Authoritarians believe that the in-group is entitled to dominate others, and should not be held to the same standards as those “below” them on the hierarchy.

Authoritarian systems rationalize the hierarchy on the grounds that those toward the top have more self-control than the people/groups below them, and therefore have the “right” to demand submission. There’s more here. One of the characteristics of an abusive relationship is that the abuse is narrated so that the victim is the one responsible for the abuser’s behavior.

The victim is framed as responsible for having provoked the abuse on the grounds that, had they been more submissive, compliant, polite, accommodating, the abuser would not have been forced into abusing them. So, the behavior of the object of abuse forced the abuser to be abusive. If you think about this way of narrating the situation, the victim was the one in control of the situation, and could have chosen not to trigger the abuse, whereas the abuser had no choices.

This is a narrative about abuse, a way of assigning people roles of good or bad, victims or villains.

It’s the narrative used to defend police use of excessive force, parents who sent a kid to the ER, slavers’ mass killing of African-Americans in the middle of a fabricated panic about insurrection, mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans, lynchings, DV, and so much else.

That is authoritarianism.

There are three points I want to make about it. First, the people justifying the violence on the grounds of insubordination never imagine that it might have happened to them. Were they (or an in-group member) treated that way, their hair would catch fire because of outraged they would be.

The second is an inherent problem with authoritarianism and the fantasy of rationality. Authoritarianism is the belief that the ideal political/cultural/social situation is one in which an in-group leader (or group) who has universal genius is at the top, making the decisions, and power flows down. The people below them are supposed to enact those decisions, and they are also all in-group. So, it is a structure of a person with access to the truth dictating true policies to those below them. And everyone should kiss up and kick down.

Third, what’s so weird about this way of narrating the ideal relations (and I’m not the first or only person to point this out) is that the argument is that many people make the argument that (usually white) males need to be in charge of everything because women and non-whites aren’t in control of their emotions. But, when white male patriarchs respond with an out of control level of violence (e.g. slavers,, the police, or a parent who sends a wife or kid to the ER), it’s the fault of the victims for having provoked them. So, white males should be in charge because they are in control of their emotions, except they aren’t–the victims are.

They aren’t actually in control of their emotions because, as their defenders say, they have no choice as to how they respond to insubordination.

Sit with that.

The whole argument for “white men should be in control because no one else has control of their emotions” is in direct contradiction with the defense of white men who get out of control on the grounds that they couldn’t control their response to insubordination.

Pick a lane.

Authoritarianism is never actually about some group being more rational than others. It’s about a lot of things—deflecting uncertainty, in-group favoritism, confirmation bias, projection—but it’s never about doing unto others as we would have done unto us. And it’s interesting what happens if you point that out to people who claim to be Christian authoritarians. Suddenly, they know better than Jesus what it means to be Christian. Christian authoritarians who want to reject treating others as they would be treated cheerfully reject the authority of Jesus.

Lying about Talarico

showing full version of a Talarico quote

One of the ways it’s possible to know that a political group is frightened is when they start to lie about opponents.

As far as I can tell, a political group, media, pundit, or whatever lies about what the opponent has said when they’re very frightened that the opponent might win, and they think they will lose if they try to make their case via reasonable and ethical responses. In other words, they misrepresent (a polite word for “lie”) about the stances of their opponent because they don’t have a reasonable response. If they had a reasonable response, they wouldn’t have to lie.

I’ll say it again for the people in the back: Lying and misrepresenting is an admission that you don’t have a reasonable argument.

One way of admitting you don’t have a reasonable argument is this meme about Talarico. Much pro-GOP media misrepresented his argument. Either that media/pundit/political figure deliberately lied about what Talarico said, or they’re too stupid to understand how doors work.

So, those of you with anti-Talarico people in your world who shared that lie, here’s how I think they will respond when told, very clearly, that they believe and share information from sources that lie.

Reasonable people stop getting their information from that media/pundit. (Why I stopped getting information, or passing along links, from Mother Jones, the Heritage Foundation, or Occupy Democrats without vetting them carefully first).

If you had an uncle who lied to you about things, if you’re a reasonable person, you would stop believing him. If, on the other hand, you had some notion of fanatical loyalty to family, you might choose to keep believing him no matter how many times he lies to you. That would not be reasonable. You might choose to do so because of values like family loyalty, or he’s got a lot of money that you’re hoping to inherit. I think one of the most powerful motivations for continuing to believe your lying uncle is that you’ve repeated his stories in public, and so you’d be publicly admitting you were duped. If other people told you he was lying, and you refused to believe then, then (especially if you’re the kind of person who thinks of interpersonal interactions as domination and submission), you’d be particularly motivated to refuse to admit what you now know to be true. It might feel like submitting to the others.

We all get duped at times. A reasonable person responds to being told they’re repeating information from a lying source by saying, “Whoops!” And then they’re more careful about what they repeat from that that source.

Here’s how unreasonable people reply to having it pointed out to them that they’re sharing information from a media source that is lying/deliberately misrepresenting. (I learned this by arguing with Stalinists many years ago): “So, what, Dems do that too.” Even if every Dem source also lied and misrepresented, it still means you’re getting your information from a source that lies. Or is stupid. You don’t have to abandon that source—just keep those grains of salt nearby.

-“Well, even if this quote is misleading, he’s still a bad person.” He might still be someone for whom you don’t want to vote, but you’re still getting your information from media/pundits that lie to you.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at various definitions of a “reasonable” argument, and I’ve ended up deciding that Jesus said it best. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” So, instead of trying to justify believing sources that consistently lie and misrepresent, ask yourself? Are you okay when other people lie about or misrepresent what you’ve said? Is that how you want to be treated?

The issue is that you are getting your information from a source that will lie and try to fool you, and the various ways of swatting away that issue are unreasonable. But they’re more than that. Being okay with treating Talarico in a way you wouldn’t want you or your political figures treated means being okay with telling Jesus he got it wrong.

If Talarico is that bad, there’s no need to lie about him or deliberately misrepresent what he said. Lying and misrepresenting is a pragmatic admission that he’s pretty good.

What do we do now?

2009 Irish tug of war team — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tug_of_war#/media/File:Irish_600kg_euro_chap_2009_(cropped).JPG

I’ve spent thirty years worried that our media environment would either create a civil war or a fascist overthrow of democracy. In the midst of the pro-Iraq invasion demagoguery I was researching pro-slavery demagoguery, and I realized in both cases, the problem wasn’t demagogues. The problem was a culture of demagoguery.

In both cases, complicated policy options were reduced to a single-axis binary or continuum of identity (a person is pro- or anti-slavery, or pro- or anti-invasion). So, the frame for politics was identitarian.

In both cases, that was a completely false way of representing the policy options. In both cases, it was a way of framing the conflict that benefitted the authoritarians. The very complicated set of policy options that the United States had in regard to slavery were reduced to a binary of identity: pro- or anti-slavery. That helped slavers (there is no distinction between slaveholders and slavers—the institution of slavery was profitable because “slaveholders” bought and sold slaves; they were all slavers). It helped slavers because the “anti-slavery” position could be fallaciously equated with advocating slave rebellion.

It’s the genus-species fallacy. Since some people who are anti-slavery advocate slave resistance (e.g., David Walker), and slave resistance is the same as slave rebellion (as a famous court decision concluded), then anyone who criticizes slavery is advocating slave rebellion. (That’s the summary of actual arguments made by people who were taken seriously.)

It was the same fallacy that showed up in regard to Iraq—terrorists oppose the war (actually, they didn’t), therefore people who oppose the war are terrorists. The genus-species fallacy is repeated thrice over in the claim that “anyone who says racism is systemic is advocating CRT because that’s what CRT says and CRT is Marxist, so they’re Marxist.”

The genus-species fallacy is built in to any identitarian model of politics. Identitarian models of politics say that the world of policy disagreements isn’t actually about individual (or small group) concerns, needs, problems, goals and therefore different policy commitments (e.g., an anti-choice soybean farmer) . It says that our policy world is really a zero-sum tug-of war of people along a single axis, or even a binary (that soybean farmer is far right).

Just to be clear: we all are members of many social groups, some of which are important to our sense of identity. Chester might be a Lutheran, 49ers fan, parrot owner, parcheesi fanatic. Those are Chester’s “in-groups” if they are how he defines himself. We also all have a lot of groups we are in that aren’t important to our sense of identity—the way you can tell whether your group identification is in-group is if you get defensive if someone criticizes that group. So, if someone said parcheesi sucks, and they prefer chess, Chester would only care if his sense of himself as a parcheesi player was important to him.

In-groups always have out-groups. In fact, in-groups are generally defined by their not being out-group. Unhappily, self-worth tends to be comparative. We can think of ourselves as good, or justified, or successful, or whatever, if we can compare ourselves to others around us and say we’re better. (“Maybe parcheesi players do yell at kittens, but that’s nowhere as bad as what chess players do, so I’m not going to feel bad about it.”) So, out-groups help us feel good about ourselves because they’re so much worse than we are.

Because people have a lot of in-groups, there are a lot of ways that we can be called on to identify ourselves, and a lot of policy commitments we might have. Media that promote the identitarian model evade discussions of the various policy options, instead narrating the zero-sum conflict along that continuum of identity (this is also called the “horse race” frame).

In all my research of train wrecks in public deliberation—from the Sicilian Expedition to Bush’s failure to plan for an occupation—a major factor is identitarian politics. Identitarian politics makes disagreement about policies seem pointless, trivial, or even distracting. It thereby fosters authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is a model of society, culture, and government that assumes that politics is a question of identity, with one identity entitled to dominate the others.

All authoritarian politics are identitarian. All ethnic cleansings are identitarian. All train wrecks in public deliberation are identitarian.

We are in what might be end times for democracy. The way we should respond to this crisis is NOT to engage in purity wars, although that’s the impulse. We don’t stop authoritarianism by being more authoritarian about our allies (i.e., condemning people who haven’t take a strong enough stance), or purifying the in-group and insisted that everyone “get on the same page;” we stop it by forming alliances. There has never been a time when opponents of authoritarianism successfully prevented an authoritarian takeover by fighting among ourselves.

We shouldn’t spend our time (and social media) mobilizing resentment about potential allies. If your impulse is to respond to what I’m saying is that I’m telling you that you can’t criticize Dems, then you’re completely misunderstanding. Absolutely criticize the Dems. But do so in a way that is likely to have impact without mobilizing resentment. Email the DNC. Email the Dem politicians who are taking stands you think are wrong.

The DNC and Dem politicians care about what email they get. They don’t know, and therefore don’t care, about what you or I post on FB. But posting about how the Dems suck (especially when it’s reposting something that is just wrong about how Congressional practices work) helps authoritarians.

Keep in mind that it’s documented that Russian trolls spent much of their effort, not promoting Trump, but mobilizing resentment about “liberals” and the Dems. So, just to be clear: criticize the Dems, but do so in ways that are likely to get the Dems to change, and not in ways that help authoritarians.

My final point is: don’t try to create alliances of identity, but of policy.

I often attend the Texas TribFest, and it’s where policy wonks wonk together. They make an effort to bring in people with different points of view. And one of the most moving panels I saw was two Texas state legislators who both self-identify as Christian, and one is a Dem and the other GOP. And they talked about their going together to Death Row, and praying with the people there, their working together on abolishing the Death Penalty, and their failure to get any pro-Death Penalty legislators to come with them. They said they disagree vehemently with one another about all sorts of issues, but they agree on this. Alliances can be policy specific, and yet effective and important.

[A friend sent along this vid, which makes a similar argument.]

Demagoguery and Emotions

Demagogic books from various perspectives

I’ve been writing about demagoguery for twenty years, and I think just today I’ve figured out how to explain something that has long bothered me about the “demagoguery is an appeal to emotions” notion. In addition to the problems I’ve mentioned before—that assumes it’s possible to have a stance on politics that is devoid of emotion (a person who didn’t care about anything would have no basis for preferring one outcome over another and hence no policy preferences), the rational-irrational binary is itself irrational, people should be emotional about politics—there is a performative contradiction in saying that demagoguery is bad and demagoguery is emotional.

Many of the condemnations of demagoguery that assume the problem is that it’s an emotional appeal talk about the dangers, immorality, damage, and threats that a specific demagogue presents—they appeal to fear. And many of them are pretty dang emotional in doing so. Often by “emotional rhetoric” people mean style or tone (e.g., highly figurative language, especially such figures as hyperbole, superlatives, binaries). But, it’s quite possible (and often very moving) to make a fear-mongering irrational argument in plain style and an “unemotional” tone.

More important, the identification of someone as a demagogue tends to be grounded in emotion; that is, whether they like or dislike the rhetor and/or the rhetor’s agenda. Only out-group rhetors are demagogues.

So, if emotions are bad in public discourse, and appeals to emotion are demagogic, then it’s always demagogic to call someone a demagogue.

And that’s why I think we should focus on demagoguery rather than demagogues, and why I have a chapter in the book on demagoguery about Earl Warren’s very unemotional tone.

What should opponents of authoritarianism do?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

[I posted this on FB, but I should have posted it here also.]

People keep asking me what opponents of our authoritarian administation should be doing, and it’s pretty straightforward in the abstract but very much up for argument in the specific:

DO WHAT HAS WORKED IN THE PAST, AND DON’T DO WHAT HAS NEVER WORKED.

Things that, as far as I know, have worked in the past under similar circumstances:
-have a big tent, make alliances, work together on the shared goal of saving democracy, make some compromises if necessary.
-try to crack the hardshell of the informational bubble that Trump supporters are in. Just try getting the information in front of them. If you have Trump supporters in your social media, post double-checked facts about Trump, ICE, and so on.
-make it personal; show how they’re supporting someone who is hurting people they love.
-you can try to point out that they’re rejecting Jesus, that they hold out-groups to much, much higher standards than they hold themselves or in-group members. (They know, and don’t care, but you can try.)
-you can try pointing out that they don’t really know what’s going on because they get their information from sources that misrepresent the situation. If you tell them something that they don’t want to hear, and they say it’s “fake news,” you can ask them if they get their information from a source that would tell them if it was true.
-support the groups who are filing the lawsuits.
-block walk, make phone calls, put up signs, subscribe to, and otherwise personally help opposition organizations and individuals, even if you disagree with them on many things.
If there are other things that you are aware have worked, do them (and tell others about them).

Here’s what, as far as I know, has never worked under these circumstances:
-violent protests;
-various versions of purifying the in-group (refusing to compromise, insisting on univocality or unanimity in terms of ideology, strategy, or policy), refusing to support anyone who isn’t fully in line with our policy agenda/rhetoric
-talking and thinking about policy disagreements in the pro-authoritarian “right/center/left” binary or continuum (a single axis)
-giving up

I’m open to persuasion about the specifics. But I’ll point out, if your response is that this post shows I’m a centrist/librul/whatev for making this argument, look again at the “what hasn’t worked” list.