Racism, Biden, Trump, and the bad math of whaddaboutism

John Stoehr has a nice piece about what he calls the “malicious nihilism” of Trump supporting media and pundits. They’ve stopped trying to argue that Trump is not racist, since he explicitly stokes racism, but, they’re saying, since Biden is a Democrat, and Democrats used to be the party of racists, then Biden is racist too: “Fine, the GOP partisans now say, Trump is a racist. The Democrats are just as bad, though. May as well vote for the Republican.”

That’s just plain bad math.

It’s easy to point to so many things Trump and his Administration has said and done that are racist. Critics of Biden point to one thing he said, and what the Democratic Party was like prior to 1970. Those are not comparable. That way of thinking about Biden v. Trump ignores the important questions of degrees, impact, persistence.

It’s a weirdly common way of arguing about politics, though, and even interpersonal issues. There was a narrative about the Civil War for a long time which was that “both sides were just as bad,” and it was the mutual extremism about the issue of slavery that led to war.[1] The “mutual extremism” was this same bad math. There was one President between John Adams and Abraham Lincoln who didn’t own slaves (JQ Adams), Congress was so proslavery that the House and Senate both banned criticism of slavery for years (the gag rules), the Supreme Court ruled that African Americans could never be citizens. Criticism of slavery in slaver states could be punished by hanging; the Fugitive Slave Laws enabled slavers to kidnap African Americans in “free” states. Pro-slavery rhetoric regularly called for race war should abolition happen, and began calling for secession to protect slavery in the 1820s. Commitment to slavery was so dominant in slaver states that they went to war against the US.

There were pro-slavery Presidents; there was no abolitionist President (JQAdams would, after his presidency, become anti-slavery, but not clearly abolitionist). No state had a death penalty for advocating slavery; there was no gag rule for advocating slavery; abolitionists didn’t advocate civil war or race war; no one could go into a slaver state and declare an African American to be free and face the same low bar that kidnappers in the “free” states faced.

They weren’t both “just as bad” because they didn’t equally advocate violence, they weren’t equally powerful, advocating civil war was commonplace on only one side, the laws and practices they advocated weren’t equally extreme.

I wrote a book about proslavery rhetoric, and when I would make this point—“both sides” weren’t “just as bad”—neo-Confederates would say, “What about John Brown?” That’s the bad math. If, on one side, advocating and engaging in violence is commonplace, then one example on the other side doesn’t mean they’re both just as bad. You can even bring in Bloody Kansas and not get the amount of violence (and advocacy of violence) commonplace in supporting slavery to be anything close to the violence on the part of critics of slavery.

Here is my crank theory about why people reason that way. A lot of people really don’t (perhaps can’t) think in terms of degrees. They think in terms of categories (this is not the crank theory party—it’s a fairly common observation). Thus, you’re racist or not, certain or clueless, proud or ashamed; something is good or bad, right or wrong, correct or incorrect; you’re in-group or out-group, loyal or disloyal. They don’t think about degrees of racism, certainty, pride, goodness, loyalty, and so on.

There’s a funny paradox. Because they don’t think in terms of degrees (or mixtures—something might be loyal in some ways and disloyal in others), they believe that you either have a rigid, black/white ethical system, or you’re what they call a “moral relativist.” They actually mean “nihilist.” So, they hear “right v. wrong might be a question of degrees rather than absolutes” as saying there is no difference between right and wrong—one of their crucial binaries is “rigid ethical system of categories or nihilism.” That binary imbues those other binaries with ethical value—being rigid about loyalty v. disloyalty seems to be part of being a “good” person.

Because people like this think in terms of putting things in a box—something goes in the box of good or bad, racist or not racist, loyal or disloyal, then, if they can find a single racist thing related to Biden, he and Trump are in the same box. And, therefore, that box can be ignored when it comes to comparing them, since they’re both in it.

And this brings us back to Stoehr’s point. The attachment to rigidity, the tendency to think in terms of absolutes and not degrees makes these people actually incapable of ethical decision-making. Since wildly different actions are thrown into the box of “bad” or “racist,” people who reason this way can’t tell right from wrong. They can end up allowing, tolerating, encouraging, or even actively supporting wildly unethical actions because of their inability to think in nuanced ways about ethics. It’s moral nihilism.




[1] There weren’t only two sides, so the claim that “both sides” were anything is nonsensical. There were, at least, six sides. Pro-slavery/pro-secession, pro-slavery/anti-secession, anti-slavery/pro-colonization, anti-slavery/pro-full citizenship, anti-anti-slavery, anti-pro-slavery.