Here’s my basic argument: demagoguery is best seen as the reduction of the complicated array of political—that is, policy—options to the false binary of us and them. There are various characteristics that reduction tends to have (projection, scapegoating, binaries, and others). But, here’s another part of my argument that matters: we’re all demagogues. We like demagoguery; we promote it. Demagoguery isn’t just something they do; in fact, if my book enabled you to be better at identifying their demagoguery, then I just contributed, unintentionally, to our culture of demagoguery.
We are in a culture of demagoguery. We are in a world in which every argument is assessed demagogically—that is, when presented with a claim, the first thing we want to know is whether the person is in or out group. If they’re in-group, then we’re open to their argument; if they’re out-group, we think skeptically.
Demagoguery assumes that our vexed and uncertain political world is really a zero-sum battle between us (good) and them (evil). Thus, any political action that helps them hurts us; any political action that hurts them helps us. It’s kind of like seeing politics as a game of basketball—if they make any baskets, that’s bad for us; if we keep them from making any baskets, that’s essentially a gain for us. One of their players getting injured, their getting a bad call against them, a bad bounce of the ball—that’s all good for us.
Except a loss for them isn’t necessarily a gain for us, even in basketball. If they got the bad call because it’s an incompetent ref, we’ll get hurt too. Setting fire to the stadium, committing an egregious foul that hurts their best player, delaying the game by supergluing the doors to their locker room, breaking the play clock, filing a lawsuit that prevents the game from being played—those are all actions that hurt the other team, but they don’t help us, and they might even hurt us more than they hurt the other team. And that is the problem with assuming that hurting or “stigginit” to them is necessarily a win for us. It isn’t.
This way of thinking about politics—hurting them is just as good as helping us because it amounts to the same thing—is also called the “fixed pie” bias. It’s a notorious cognitive bias, an unconscious way we approach decisions.
It’s as though all the goods in our shared world—access to clean water, good schools, low taxes, personal safety, good roads, honest political figures—are a pie. The more you get, the less I do, so anything that keeps you from getting pie helps me. But it doesn’t, even as far as pie. I’m not hurt by your getting good water; I’m not helped by your getting bad water. I can keep you from getting pie by throwing it out uneaten; I can harm your pie eating by poisoning the pie, and then we both die.
The zero-sum model is actively harmful in systems of mutual dependence. We all benefit by having a citizenry that doesn’t have anyone consuming water that has brain-damaging levels of lead, that has good public schools available to everyone, that has tax burdens shared reasonably, that isn’t afraid, that can trust that political figures are (on the whole) not making political decisions purely on the basis of what benefits them personally, nor are they trying to claim that—because they won an election—the law doesn’t apply to them.
We think politics is a zero-sum game because that’s how the media frame it—the media says there are two (and only two) sides to every political issue (the Democrats and the Republicans), and the media (through what is called the “horse race frame”) discusses every policy issue in terms of how it might help or hurt the Dems or Republicans in elections.
That isn’t information that citizens need to know. But it’s what media do because people think (falsely) that such coverage—this person is doing this to try to win an election—is objective. It isn’t. What we need to know is whether what various political figures are saying about policies is within the realm of rationally defensible policy argumentation.
But it’s hard to get that information because it requires reading the best arguments from a variety of points of view, and that’s really hard. The algorithms of social media mean you’ll get exclusively in-group sources.
And, so, a lot of people—especially people under the age of thirty—don’t rely on mainstream media sources (which, btw, includes Fox News, which is the main source of information for a plurality of people). They rely on whatever shows up in their world—youtube, perhaps Facebook, groupchats, google. That’s the same informational strategy that people over thirty have, but it’s just a different set of sources—more reliance on Facebook, cable and broadcast news. We are in a world in which most people make important political decisions on the basis of sources that will confirm our sense that we are right because we are good people, and so we are on the side of good, and we are opposing bad people who are, well, really bad.
Because they’re so bad, we shouldn’t listen to them.
This way of thinking about politics—we are in an action movie battle between the obviously good and the obviously bad—is how democracies end.
Of course, neither the Athenians nor the Romans were watching action movies, but they both tanked their democratic republics (neither was purely democratic, nor purely republic) because the rich and varied world of their political options got reduced to a zero-sum game between political factions. People were cheerfully willing to make decisions that hurt the community as a whole just because (they thought) it hurt “the other side” more than it hurt them. They burnt down their own stadium to keep “the other side” from winning.
What should they have done?
They shouldn’t have assumed that their side was so good, and the other side so evil, that winning at any cost was morally or even rationally justified. They shouldn’t have assumed that there were only two sides. That’s a false binary.
When I say this, a lot of people—who are still mired in thinking that there are two sides—assume that, since I’m saying that our political options are not accurately represented as a contest between good and evil, think I’m saying there is no evil, or there is no good, or all positions are equal. That’s another false binary: you either believe that there is a clear binary between good and evil and it’s easy to see and you’re some kind of hippy-dippy moral relativist.
I believe in evil. Slavery was evil. Nazism was evil. But, even in regard to slavery, there wasn’t a binary between two positions. There were people who argued that slavery was evil, but slavery had to be protected because reasons. This is called the “necessary evil” argument.
There were people who argued that slavery was evil, but we couldn’t possibly have freed slaves in our country (the anti-slavery/pro-colonialism argument), we should abolish slavery and immediately grant all slaves the full rights of citizenship, we should end slavery gradually, we should give slaves 40 acres and a mule, and others.
Demagoguery says there are only two choices. Democracy says there aren’t.
There are people making arguments in bad faith; there are bad arguments. But our political world is not a binary in which all the good arguments are on our side and all the bad arguments are on the other.
No one deliberately chooses to succumb to a rhetoric we recognize as demagoguery. We never think we’re suckered by demagoguery. They are.
And that is how a culture of demagoguery thrives.
Demagoguery withers when people recognize our own attraction to it, when we call out in-group demagoguery, when we hold in- and out-group rhetoric to the same argumentative standards.
Demagoguery thrives when we approach every issue from the perspective that the in-group deserves to be treated differently (because we are good, with good motives) from any out-group. It withers when we decide that we will treat others, and their arguments, as we would want to be treated. People who believe that you should treat others as you want to be treated are called to step away from thinking that any harm to others is a win for us. It isn’t.