I really wish more people read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Granted, it gets into the weeds about various battles, but the meta-arguments about argument are brilliant. There is, for instance, what’s typically called “The Melian Dialogue.” The Melians were neutral, a stance that the Athenians (in a “you’re with us or against us” attitude) took as hostile, and “plundered” the area, thereby completely alienating them. Then the Athenians decided to conquer the area, and offered two choices: surrender (and be conquered), or fight (and be conquered). The Athenians reject any possibility of deliberation, any appeal to higher values, and insist on a crude might makes right ethic. The Athenians refuse public deliberation (something they had been famous for loving), denigrate rhetoric, and begin the negotiations by saying persuasion is impossible, and the Melians should just be realistic: “the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.”[1] Justice, then, isn’t an overarching principle that applies in all situations, but only something you consider if you must.[2] The Athenians, famous for their love of argument, rhetoric, and deliberation, refuse to listen to arguments.
Instead, the Athenians tell the Melians that they should submit to what would likely be a brutal surrender because the Athenians are going to crush them either way. The Athenians frame the Melians as irrational because they choose not to submit, and the Athenians present their offer to let the Melians surrender as a kindness. The Melians, not the Athenians, are responsible for any violence or cruelty on the part of the Athenians.
That’s how abusers negotiate. There are two really interesting moves that abusers make in negotiating: first, they insist that they are entitled to what they want; second, and connected, since they are entitled to what they’re demanding, the other person (or group) is at fault for refusing, and is responsible for whatever the abuser does as a consequence of being refused.
Victims of their abuse are at fault for having “brought it on themselves,” and by “brought it on themselves” abusers mean that their victims didn’t do exactly what the abuser wanted. Abusers negotiate by doing anything they can to win, including violence, for which they don’t take responsibility. The victim is responsible for the consequences of the abuser not getting their way.
It’s also how they think. They believe they are genuinely entitled to whatever they’re trying to get, that their right to the thing they want is grounded in the fabric of the universe and God/Nature’s will, and therefore they are also entirely right to do anything to get their way: the ends justify the means when it’s their ends.[3]
Hitler did this a lot, and it always played with his base. He said that Germany was entitled to Czechoslovakia because reasons and if people refused him, they were responsible for the consequences of not letting him have his way—that is, a war he would frame as justifiable pre-emptive self-defense. The victim is responsible for the consequences of the abuser not getting his way.
Hitler was never willing to negotiate on a reasonable basis about whether Germany really had a right to Czechoslovakia—he was Athens screaming at Melos. He did the same with Poland. If England and France didn’t allow him
to take Poland, THEY were responsible for the ensuing war. If they didn’t let him get what he wanted, they were responsible for what he would do.
And, as Shirer describes, it went over beautifully with his base. Hitler’s base did believe that Germany was entitled to European hegemony, and so, when Hitler described his invasion of Poland as a counterattack, they were willing to see it that way. They didn’t want war, so they said, but they were willing to support war to get what they wanted. All they wanted was to get everything they wanted without having to go to war, but they wanted it enough to go to war. England, France, and Poland could have stopped him anytime by simply surrendering, so the war was their fault. And, oddly enough, Hitler’s rhetoric throughout the war that Germans were the victims of the war played well. Germans were victims because they hadn’t been able to get what they wanted.
That’s how abusers “negotiate”—they say they want everything, and anyone who doesn’t give the everything they want is responsible for the negotiations breaking down. They aren’t responsible for making unreasonable demands. They want the premise of the negotiations to be that they will get everything they want.
Trump promised a wall to his supporters. He is, and has always been, unwilling to deliberate about whether the wall is likely to be effective, good in terms of cost/benefit analysis, or in any way reasonable. He promised it; he wants it; and he will choose to do extraordinary harm to get that wall. And, when he chooses to do the harm for a wall he chooses to support, he will blame others for the choices he has made, on the grounds that they are responsible for his choices.
That’s how abusers negotiate.
[1] Another translation is: “since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
[2] This stance is often, inaccurately called “realist” (since it’s typically very divorced from reality, it seems to me strategic misnaming), and it’s often attributed to Thucydides by people who obviously didn’t read the whole book. He is condemning the attitude—Athens’ coming to reject deliberation in favor of power politics is, he is clear, a tragedy—a bastardization of the emphasis on expediency of rhetors like Pericles and Diodotus.
[3] Arguing for a “might makes right” ethic, social Darwinism, the miracle of the market, the prosperity gospel, or any other version of the “just world model” involves mental gymnastics when the in-group is not succeeding. When the in-group is succeeding (or has succeeded), success is proof of being entitled to success (the fittest survived, might made right), but when the in-group is failing, that isn’t disproof of the basic principle of might makes right, nor is the success of the out-group proof that they deserved their success. Success of the in-group is proof that the in-group is entitled to success, but success of the out-group is never proof that they were entitled to success.