April 2023 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Pro- and Anti-Communist Demagoguery and the Politics of the Obvious

people arguing — From the cover of Wayne Booth’s _Modern Dogma-

Deliberating reasonably and inclusively is difficult under conditions of war. Audiences do not demand reasonable policy argumentation, we tend to rely on in-group sources of information, and we tend to value loyalty more than rationality—so much so that we are prone to treat criticism or calls for deliberation as necessarily coming from bad motives (such as cowardice, disloyalty, or active treason). We are drawn to rhetors who seem to see the situation clearly, and we are averse to nuance or uncertainty. We give moral and rhetorical license to in-group rhetors. Thus, a rhetor who doesn’t want to take on the obligations of deliberation and reasonable argumentation might be tempted to try to evade them by persuading a base that we are already at war. This rhetorical framing is not necessarily done in bad faith—they may sincerely believe that the situation is an undeclared war, as did the anti-communist demagogues, or that the goodness of their intentions gives them moral and rhetorical license to engage in threat inflation (as did Truman). Rhetors who genuinely believe that they know what should be done may see public discourse as purely an opportunity to radicalize their base for the war they believe is going on.

Elsewhere, I’ve argued that anti-communist demagoguery relied on certain recurrent rhetorical strategies: treating all policy questions as really battles in war; invoking the frame of politics as war sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, and sometimes ambiguously both; the equation of their “side” (Good) with “the people” against a monolithic and Other (Evil); the assertion that, because the Other is determined on our extermination, we have moral, political, and rhetorical license to do whatever will help exterminate Them; a politics of certainty, in which the correct position on any issue is obvious to good people; the perception that diversity is weakness, and that everyone needs to fall in line. Those rhetorical strategies weren’t limited to anti-communists.

In 1969, a group of activists who would later call themselves “the Weathermen” issued a 13 thousand word manifesto, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows.” They said that their “goal is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism” (2). And this struggle, they were clear, is war: “A revolution is a war; when the Movement in this country can defend itself militarily against total repression it will be part of the revolutionary war” (23). That is, these were the kind of people about whom the anti-communist demagogues were worried; what’s interesting is that both they and the anti-communist demagogues engaged in the same rhetorical strategies.

For the Weathermen, our political world isn’t a complicated situation with multiple policy options that might be deliberated because there is legitimate disagreement about major issues. They advocate getting involved in various struggles (racism, sexism, labor) but always with the same end: “There is one system and so all these different problems have the same solution, revolution” (20). The goal isn’t to create better policies that will solve (or ameliorate) the problems that people have because “reform fights, fights for improvement of material conditions, cannot be won under imperialism” (16). The goal is to convert people to revolutionaries: “We must transform people’s everyday problems, and the issues and struggles growing out of them, into revolutionary consciousness, active and conscious opposition to racism and imperialism” (15). As it was for Hargis, the solution to our political problems is converting as many people as possible to the correct identity.

There is a war, and it has only two sides: “the people of the whole world against US imperialism and its lackeys.” They say, “The main struggle going on in the world today is between US imperialism and the national liberation struggle against it.” The US is evil, and evil is the US:
“Every other empire and petty dictator is in the long run dependent on US imperialism, which has unified, allied with, and defended all of the reactionary forces of the whole world. Thus, in considering every other force or phenomenon, from Soviet imperialism or Israeli imperialism to “workers struggle” in France or Czechoslovakia, we determine who are our friends and who are our enemies according to whether they help US imperialism or fight to defeat it.”
Just as anti-communist demagoguery defines the good group narrowly, and treats everything else as a monolithic communism, so the Weathermen have a narrow in-group and capacious out-group—there are different kinds or causes of imperialism, or multiple sources of oppression.

There is no legitimate disagreement with them. People who disagree are “lackeys,” “brainwashed,” misguided about their true interests. What is necessary is “a unified centralized organization” grounded in “a common revolutionary theory” made up of people who “have the correct understanding.” Because their goal is so good, so obviously good, and they are so obviously right, they are justified in advocating policies that hurt others—they have moral license. They celebrate that “the Vietnamese are winning,” and endorse Che Guevara’s call for more Vietnams (that is, the US engaging in more wars as unsuccessful as Vietnam), despite that, as King pointed out, the burden of Vietnam fell disproportionately on Black communities (whom the Weathermen claim to support). They advocate policies and practices that will increase repression to the point that there will be “a phase of all-out military repression.” In other words, like the anti-communist demagogues, they claim moral license.

My point is not the Weathermen are “just as bad” as the anti-communists, or that “both sides do it,” but that this framing of politics as war isn’t tied to any particular spot on the political spectrum. And what this rhetoric does—whether it’s the John Birch Society or the Weathermen—is depoliticize politics. The Weathermen did deliberate; they argued and debated among themselves at great length. In the 1969 document, they admit that they were previously mistaken (about the role of Black Power in their movement). In 1974, they would publish the 188-page Prairie Fire, after much internal debate and disagreement, that admittedly revised earlier manifestoes. Yet, having been wrong, having disagreed with one another, and having come to new conclusions, didn’t change the basic stance that now they had the obviously right answer. Like the anti-communist demagogues, who disagreed with each other, changed their minds, changed their policies, they did so without abandoning their commitment to a politics of the obvious. Even though their own experience proved that it was a lie.

On writing

In elementary school, I was taught to write in pen, and we lost points if we made a correction on something we’d written. When I was 11, my family went to London, and we went to the British museum, and I saw a page of a Jane Austen novel. SHE CROSSED THINGS OUT. My first reaction was as though I’d caught her cheating at cards, or pilfering from the collection plate. My second (and much later) reaction was that punishing someone for correcting their own writing was indefensible.

When I was a newbie grad student, I was TA for a rhetoric prof who, in the midst of a lecture about something or other (he was a good prof, so it was a good lecture, but I don’t remember them) related a story about Yeats. Apparently, there was some filmed interview with Yeats, where the interviewer asked about a particular word in one of Yeats’ most famous poems, and Yeats is supposed to have said something like, “Yeah, I don’t like that word,” and crossed it out and tried a few others. According to the prof, the interviewer was horrified. For him, the poem was an autonomous mobile floating in space. For Yeats, it was something he was still trying to get right. The prof’s point was that no writer is satisfied with what they’ve written; poems are not sacred texts transcribed from a muse, but even the best are works in progress.

I happened to mention to a friend/writing buddy that I love the last part of “East Coker,” and she didn’t know it. It’s this: http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/2-coker.htm

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I’ll admit that I deliberately misinterpret this poem. He was the kind of modernist who believed in the objective/subjective split, and so he means something by that “imprecision of feeling…squads of emotion” that I think is nonsense. What I think is true is that we bring to writing a lot of feelings—imposter syndrome, fear of failure, anxiety about readers who are fully committed to reenacting generational trauma, perfectionism—that are undisciplined squads of emotion, attacking us every time we try to write.

And, so I find this poem https://allpoetry.com/Love-The-Wild-Swan really helpful in response:

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
—This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

When I’m editing my work, I frequently have that first line in my head.

I’ve always assumed that he’s writing about his worrying that he’ll never write a poem as good as Yeats’ “Wild Swans at Coole,” and that may be true. But, as a writer, I like the ambiguity that it’s both about the fear of not measuring up to that poem and not measuring up to the reality he was trying to describe—the wildlife of California at that moment. I suspect he’s writing about a Great Blue Heron. I’ve written elsewhere about what a Great Blue Heron meant in my life, so maybe I’m just projecting. California has no shortage of beautiful birds, and Great Blue Herons don’t have a white breast.

And I love the answer—anything we write will never measure up to reality. We can hate our writing, hate our selves, but still continue to write because we love the thing we’re trying to write about.

Good writing has to come from love, I think. In working with graduate students, I’ve often felt that there was a theme—in the musical sense—in the topics that interested them. So much about being a graduate student is demoralizing, probably unnecessarily, but it seems to me that the students who finish (and the junior scholars who publish enough to get tenure) do so because they’ve heard the music. Or someone has helped them hear it.

I know that there are faculty who believe that their job is to “train” graduate students, “toughen them up,” create disciples. I always thought my job was to help them hear the music.

I’m not saying that people should follow their bliss. That’s toxically bad advice. I am saying that finishing a dissertation (or publishing a first book) is less fraught if people can be passionate about something in their project. Passionate enough to want to write about it, without aspiring to turn it into taxidermy.

Love the wild swan.

Thucydides, Aristotle, emotions, deliberation, and the rational/irrational split

Stone platform — The Athenian speakers’ box

When I was in grad school, a fellow grad student remarked that every Rhetoric dissertation was about how the rational/irrational split was wrong. While slightly hyperbolic, it wasn’t entirely wrong. In fact, I think it’s still fairly accurate.

There are two major problems with the rational/irrational split (both pointed out by Wayne Booth in Modern Dogma). The first is that it’s an accurate description of two completely opposed ways of approaching problems: through logic or feeling. Booth pointed out that many people privileged the “rational” approach, which was defined incoherently and largely through negation (a rational argument has certain surface features, such as an unemotional tone or appeal to numbers and data, which is assumed to signify how the rhetor thinks), but other people denigrated the “rational” approach, privileging emotion and passion. His point was that we didn’t solve the many problems created by the binary by flipping the privilege. The binary was wrong.

It seems to me that work in cognitive science did a good job on dismantling the binary—there isn’t a binary between rational and its presumed associations (thinking, objectivity, neutrality, unbiased) and irrational and its presumed associations (feeling, subjectivity, prejudice, biased). After all, cognitive biases are cognitive.

This still leaves the second problem with the split—the narrative that all major Western philosophies relied on the split until the 20th century. I think it’s fair to say that it became hegemonic in Western philosophy at a certain point, but that point was much more recent than many people think. My crank theory is that people who wrote influential histories of philosophies relied on that frame, and so themselves imagined that all philosophies could fit within it (e.g., Russell—Booth’s example–, but also Durant, and various nineteenth century figures). Since it fits neatly with the cognitive bias of naïve realism, it resonates with people, and so it’s the one you’re likely to hear if you stop someone on the street.

While there are major figures who can fit in that frame (e.g., Plato), but others who only sort of do (while Augustine was very a believer in the mind/body split, he didn’t diss feeling). Various figures in the British Enlightenment didn’t accept the binary of emotional or unemotional, let alone denigrate “emotion.” Many argued or assumed that “sentiments” benefitted deliberation, although “passions” inhibited it (but passions weren’t bad, exactly—they had/have their place).

Aristotle is often assumed to be an adherent of the rational/irrational split, and certainly several translations try to make him fit it, but what he meant by alogos and logos doesn’t map neatly onto irrational and rational. The “logos” of a text, for Aristotle, is the “argument” (probably an enthymeme in public discourse—that is, rhetoric as opposed to philosophy or math).

In the book we call Rhetoric (I wish we called it The Craft of Rhetoric, as I think that’s a more accurate and useful translation) Aristotle appears to be all over the place about emotion, but I think it starts to make sense if we keep in mind that the term “pathos” doesn’t mean either “irrational” or “emotion” (as we use those terms), and he didn’t think a text could have only one. Ethos, pathos, and logos are always in play. Aristotle was mostly interested in the taxonomy of deliberative, forensic, and epideictic (and most interested in the first and last of those three). And I can’t help but read him as making an argument similar to the British Enlightenment philosophers—that various “emotions” (however we define them) function differently in the three genres. Aristotle was interested in methods of public deliberation that led to good policies, trials that resulted in the truth, and effective ceremonial orations. (Except when he wasn’t, as in the weird passage about testimony gained through torture.)

I happened to read Aristotle after taking a class in which we read selections from Thucydides. Thucydides has several situations in which rhetors reflect on rhetoric, on how publics should reason about policies, and there are several points that come up (some repeatedly) that influenced my reading of Aristotle. I’ll mention two.

First, several speakers disagree about whether publics should make decisions in anger. The rhetors who argue we should (such as the un-named Corinthian and Stheneslaides in the “Debate at Sparta” and Cleon in the “Mytilenean Debate) are advocating policies of which Thucydides clearly disapproves. The people who argue we should not make decisions in anger (Archidamus, Diodotus, Pericles) are all rhetors whom Thucydides identifies as wise, insightful, and reasonable, ad they are advocating policies of which Thucydides approves. They are not unemotional speakers, and they do appeal to emotions (because, who doesn’t?). They all speak, for instance, of their fears, such as Archidamus saying that he feared that the war with Athens would last generations (it did). They argue for taking time to deliberate, and to consider the issue. Archidamus, speaking after the un-named Corinthian has tried to use the timeless strategy of shaming Sparta into war by saying it’s only procrastination and cowardice that causes them to delay, says:

“And the slowness and procrastination, the parts of our character that are most assailed by their criticism, need not make you blush. If we undertake the war without preparation, we should by hastening its commencement only delay its conclusion: further, a free and a famous city has through all time been ours. The quality which they condemn is really nothing but a wise moderation; thanks to its possession, we alone do not become insolent in success and give way less than others in misfortune; we are not carried away by the pleasure of hearing ourselves cheered on to risks which our judgment condemns; nor, if annoyed, are we any the more convinced by attempts to exasperate us by accusation. We are both warlike and wise, and it is our sense of order that makes us so.” (I:84)

The second theme that comes up is not to confuse genres. That’s particularly strong in the “Mytilenean Debate” when Cleon has argued for genocide of Mytileneans, using arguments of guilt and innocence. He says that reopening the debate about what to do is “causing a delay which is all in favour of the guilty, by making the sufferer proceed against the offender with the edge of his anger blunted; although where vengeance follows most closely upon the wrong, it best equals it and most amply requites it.” (3:38). His opponent, Diodotus, points out that this isn’t a trial, but a deliberative assembly, and so the decision should be made in terms of what is often translated as “expediency”: “the question before us as sensible men is not their guilt, but our interests.” We should make policy decisions in light of “the good of the country.” (3:44)

Thucydides doesn’t say we should never engage in questions of guilt and innocence (and he is also not saying he doesn’t care about justice), but that deliberative assemblies are about pragmatic deliberation. Making policy decisions in the midst of anger, arrogance, factionalism, vengeance inhibits deliberation, and leads to bad decision. That isn’t an argument that we should never be angry and so on–it’s about genre.

Thucydides’ ideal rhetor is Pericles, and it’s interesting that we get three different kinds of speeches from him: Aristotle’s taxonomy. The speech about how to respond to Sparta’s demands is deliberative, and it’s about pragmatic considerations. The speech he gives when he’s been attacked by Cleon is an apologia, a defense speech, and it’s about motive and emotions. And the “Funeral Oration” is epideictic, and it’s a flag-waving tearjerker.

It seems to me that Aristotle is imagine rhetoric in similar ways. He doesn’t have a binary of emotional/unemotional, but he has a sense about place and genre, and sees those different genres as doing different work.

The final point I’ll make is that both Thucydides and Aristotle seem to assume not a binary, but a different emphasis, in deliberative rhetoric v. both judicial and ceremonial. The goal of a deliberative speech is not to persuade but to participate in deliberation. Of course, there’s a sense in which one wants to persuade people to one’s point of view, but advocates of deliberation in deliberative setting emphasize the goal of “considering” the situation. Judicial and ceremonial are much more about persuasion, about making a one-sided case. It isn’t a binary, as I said, but a question of emphasis.

And it has nothing to do with how we now think about rational/irrational people or arguments.

[DRAFT] Part of the introduction for Deliberating War

There are five ways of imagining policy conflicts that make it likely we will see ourselves as having no option but some degree of aggression—that is, to see a policy disagreement as discursively insoluble. The first is believing that one is a voice crying in the wilderness, a prophet sent by God speaking an unpopular and yet immediately recognized Truth. Claiming that no one is listening, that one is all alone, is a lively glimpse of being fourteen, and, as in the case of Muir, it isn’t necessarily entangled with victimization or persecution. By claiming that God is on one’s side, one does seem to be implying that opponents are un-Godly, a characterization that fosters motivism (discussed later). It also seems to imply that negotiation, bargaining, and even inclusive deliberation are problematic—prophets aren’t known for sitting down at a table with opponents and working out a yes-yes solution. But (again, as in the case of Muir), it’s often nothing more than rhetorical flourish, venting, or a bit of hyperbole. It doesn’t inevitably or necessarily prohibit using deliberation to find a political solution far short of violence against the Other.

The second is shifting from policy disagreements to questions of identity. If, for instance, there is a minister with a different interpretation of the faith/grace/works conundrum from us, we may feel threatened by his rhetorical success. If we confuse our feeling threatened with his being a threat, then we’ve made him the problem—not his rhetorical effectiveness, nor our ineffectiveness, nor the conundrum, but his presence in our community. A policy issue has become a conflict of identities.

The third is to frame that conflict of identities in terms of essential, almost ontological, strife between good and evil—those who disagree with us do so, not out of principle, but out of their identity as bad people, and their loathing for good. John Winthrop, for instance, categorized all the conflicts as parts of Satan’s plot to destroy the Puritan project. Cotton Mather, when more or less forced to admit that the witch trials had been badly managed, still deflected responsibility, maintaining that the events were Satan’s fault.

Once such a plot is posited, then it cannot be falsified. Disconfirming evidence (for instance, that the witchcraft convictions depended on violating evidentiary norms, that there is a long history of disagreement about Scripture) is deflected and dismissed. Hutchinson’s death at the hands of Siwonoy is proof that she was wrong; he doesn’t draw that conclusion about others killed in wars on indigenous peoples. It’s only evidence when it confirms the already existing beliefs.

Because we are threatened with extermination by an Other plotting against us, we have moral license. “Moral license” is the fifth way of imagining policy conflict, and it follows from the others. We don’t condemn victims who violate ethical norms in order to save themselves or their group; moral license means that individuals or groups are free to violate those norms while still claiming the moral highground. One of the crucial tenets of reasonable deliberation is that discourse rules (e.g., is it okay to lie?) are reciprocal—all parties are held to them. But, if it is a question of extermination, we’re likely to allow the victim to lie, but condemn lying in the aggressor. If we believe ourselves to be already or imminently victimized, we are likely to believe ourselves and our in-group rhetors and leads to be justified in lying—to be unbound by any discourse rules, especially reciprocity. Thus, if we are rhetorically successful in persuading ourselves or others that we face an existential threat, we are less bound to find non-violent ways of resolving the conflict, and will be seen as more justified in violating norms. Sometimes that violating of moral and rhetorical norms is hypothetical, as when slavers justified mass killings of African Americans on the grounds that the slaves would do it if they could (what’s called “the wolf by the ears” argument).

What I hope this list suggests is what will be pursued in this book: there is a complicated relationship between rhetoric and war. The more that we believe that our disagreements can be solved discursively—that is, the more faith we have in the power of pluralistic approaches to persuasion and deliberation–, the less likely we are to believe that our only choice is war. The more that we are persuaded that there is an evil Other already at war with us, and determined on our extermination, the less likely we are to value or demand inclusive, pluralist, and reasonable rhetorical approaches to our disagreements. The more we are persuaded that this war is total war, signified and engaged in major and minor ways, the less likely we are to believe that there are neutral actions or actors, and the more likely we are to find ourselves treating normal policy disagreements as themselves a kind of war. When politics becomes a kind of war, I will argue, we have to think carefully about what kind it is.

This isn’t a book about military strategy, or military history; it’s about rhetoric. We’re primed to reason badly when it comes to questions about war because the prospect of being the victim of violence activates so many cognitive biases, especially binary thinking. Under those circumstances, deliberation can easily be framed as opting for cowardly flight instead of courageous fight, as unnecessary at best and treasonous at worst. It’s precisely because disagreements about war are so triggering, so to speak, that we need to be deliberately deliberative. To say that we should deliberate reasonably before going to war is banal in the abstract, but oddly fraught in the moment, and this book uses several cases to explore why it is that we often evade deliberation even (or especially?) when the stakes are so high.

But, if war and deliberation are incompatible, then war and democracy are incompatible, because democracy thrives on deliberation. This isn’t to say that every decision about a conflict should be thoroughly deliberated—that would be impossible and unwise—but that deliberation doesn’t weaken the will for war if there is a strong case to be made for that war. If advocates of war can’t make their case through reasonable policy argumentation, then they probably have a bad case, and it’s likely an unnecessary war. War triggers cognitive biases, and so deliberation is necessary to counter the effects of those biases—contrary to popular belief, we can’t simply will ourselves not to rely on biases; deliberating with people who disagree can, however, do some work in reducing the power of the biases. But, not all rhetors want us to reduce the power of cognitive biases. Because we are averse to deliberating about or during war, rhetors engaged in normal political disagreements who are unable or unwilling to advocate a policy rationally are tempted to claim that this isn’t normal politics; it’s war. If they can persuade their base that this situation is war, then they won’t be expected to deliberate. The cognitive biases triggered by war will motivate the audience to believe beyond and without reason, and some political leaders and media pundits want exactly that. We shouldn’t.