In the last few days, a common claim (what scholars of rhetoric would call a topos) has emerged among Trump and GOP loyalists, and it’s that, if Democrats gain the House and Senate, they will force their political agenda on the country, block Trump at every point, and be vindictive toward Republicans. And, because they will be so awful to us, we are justified in amping up the aggression of rhetoric and actions against them. In other words, Democrats will treat Republicans as Republicans have treated Democrats, and therefore you must act aggressively toward them as a kind of self-defense.
This argument will work. It generally does. It worked when Democrats used it (and Democrats have used it several times). It also worked when Athenians, proslavery rhetors, and Germans did it.
To people good at logic, it seems like an incoherent argument, but to people who think entirely in terms of in-group/out-group domination, it looks good. It’s also appealing to abusers, but that’s a different point. It’s a kind of pre-emptive self-defense.
And it works because it’s a way of resolving the cognitive dissonance created by the wobbling of a previous argument—that God wants us to triumph over our enemies, and anyone not fanatically committed to the political agenda currently determined to be the in-group desiderata is an enemy. Because we are engaged in God’s will, normal ethical conditions don’t apply—we can do to others things we would be outraged were they done to us.
An ethics of in-group domination is, so it is claimed, God’s will. And God will reward us for our destroying our enemies. Giorgio Agamben calls it a “state of exception” in which we are excepted from normal rules about behavior—we honor the law by not obeying the specifics of the law. We are open that the powers of government will be used to favor one political party, but, while doing that, we’ll claim that that party is really the only legitimate one—all real Athenians, Germans, Americans vote this one way.
Members of that party believes themselves entirely entitled to something (such as political domination of various other countries, enslaving other people, exterminating various groups, political domination within a state or country). So, while that party is in power, it is shameless in its harnessing as much of the governmental power as it can to further its interests and crush any other parties. And, this is the important part: it is a party that believes there are no restrictions on what it is entitled to do in order to get its way. That’s why it has no shame—because it thinks of the world in zero-sum terms (we either eliminate or are eliminated).
And, when its power begins to wobble, it begins to reckon with how the groups it has oppressed might feel about their oppression. And it projects onto other groups how it thinks of the world—you either eliminate or are eliminated. Because it can’t imagine a world in which disparate groups coexist, it assumes everyone else behaves the same way. Because it is a group with an inchoate reptilian brain way of responding to situations that makes everything zero-sum (if something benefits the other group it must hurt you), it assumes that the “other” group getting any power will mean that group will respond in just as eliminationist as they have.
If you have a propaganda machine that has been cranking up in-group fanaticism by reducing all issues to in-group/out-group, and presenting politics as a zero-sum (any gain on their part must be a loss for us)—in other words, Fox, Limbaugh, Savage, and all sorts of other media and pundits (Mother Jones, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore)—and your claim of eschatological determinism means that you have been excepted from normal rules of ethics, then you are rhetorically boxed in. You can’t just say “We were wrong about this policy.”
You either have to say that you were wrong, not about your claims about policies, but your claims about how politics and thinking about politics works. If your audience thinks about how, you lose them, since how you’ve argued is obviously wrong.
So, what you do is persuade them that the Other is just as awful as you are, and will behave just as badly as you have. That’s the argument Cleon used to persuade people to endorse genocide (he lost on the second vote), it’s how proslavery rhetors argued for violating the property rights of slaveholders (by prohibiting the manumission of slave contracts), and it’s how Nazis argued for continuing the war when it had obviously been lost.
It should, therefore, be troubling that McConnell is now using this argument, and that it’s become a right-wing talking point.
One of the logical problems with it is that the only way that the audience can be fearful or outraged at the possibility of Democrats’ forcing their political agenda on the country, blocking the sitting President at every point, and being vindictive toward Republicans is if they don’t object to that kind of behavior in principle. They think it’s fine to do that to the other party, but they would never stand for being treated that way. They are thereby admitting it’s bad behavior.
But, they say, it isn’t bad because their group is good and the other is bad. Or, in other words, they think they should treat others as they would not want to be treated. They are, quite explicitly, rejecting any ethics (or anyone who would promote an ethics) that says you should do unto others as you would have done unto you.
The people who argue that democracy is based in Judeo-Christian ethics are, as any history of the Enlightenment makes clear, right in that the notion of universal human rights and fairness across groups was grounded in the notion (not particular to Christians or Jews, but supposedly a foundational value of both) that a deeply religious ethical system treats all groups the same, regardless of their religious (or political) affiliation.
They’re wrong about most other things, but they’re right about that. So, it’s interesting that that is the rule they’re so unwilling to follow.
The current GOP/support Trump talking point is that the Democrats will behave as badly as the GOP has. And that’s taken as a reason to vote GOP. Isn’t it actually a reason to condemn the current GOP? It’s actually an admission that the current GOP is shameless, unethical, and an open rejection of what Christ calls us to do. The GOP has officially rejected Christ. Since they claim the moral highground, that’s more than a little problematic.