In 2003, Bill O’Reilly declared a “War on Christmas.” Or, to be more precise, he declared that there already was a war on Christmas being conducted by “liberals” (sometimes “secular progressives”), and therefore “we” had to fight back. Just why “secular progressives” would care very much about Christmas, let alone engage in war about it, might seem puzzling, and so O’Reilly explained the long-term goal of this war:
“Secular progressives realize that America as it is now will never approve of gay marriage, partial birth abortion, euthanasia, legalized drugs, income redistribution through taxation, and many other progressive visions because of religious opposition. But if the secularists can destroy religion in the public arena, the brave new progressive world is a possibility. That’s what happened in Canada.” (Wildau)
To anyone familiar with the principles of argumentation, or even Canada, this description is absurd. And yet O’Reilly was not the first person to insist that there was already a “war on Christmas,” nor that specific and normal policy disagreements should really be understood as part of “liberals’ war” on America (Coulter), business (Lin), Christians (Media Matters “Fox News”), Christmas (Gibson, O’Reilly, qtd. in Wildau), conservatives (Hasson), the family (Stoll), men (“Coming War,” Venker), the police (Grassley, MacDonald), religion (Gregg), Republicans (Knefel), the rich (Perkins), the right (Hanson), statues (Robertson), suburban property values (Limbaugh), Trump (Goodwin), the unborn (Cassidy), white males (Lifson), white people (Cegielski), “you and your family” (O’Reilly, qtd. in Stabile).
This reframing of normal policy disagreements as war is common all over the political spectrum. Both Avik Roy (an editor for Forbes) and Congressional Representative Barbara Boxer agreed that the dispute over Obamacare was a “war on women.” Roy said Obamacare was a war on women, and Boxer said opposition to it was. I regularly receive mailings about the war on the environment, education, science. Nor is the framing of politics as war very new. Criticism of slavery was characterized as treason, as was disagreeing with 17th century Massachusetts authorities about the precise nature of salvation.
Because it is so common to refer to a policy disagreement as a war on the in-group, it is tempting to dismiss the frame as a metaphor, simply a rhetorical strategy to mobilize a base and get attention. That is, to treat the metaphor of politics as war as a meaningless stylistic choice (mere rhetoric). Another way to dismiss the significance of the framing is to normalize it, to say that politics is a kind of war. Advocates of such a strategy often cite the 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz: “War is politics by other means.” The former approach treats the politics as war frame metaphorically and the latter literally, but neither takes the frame seriously. And both thereby normalize treating policy disagreements as skirmishes in a larger war.
There have long been people who argued that metaphors of war for disagreements was something to be taken seriously (Kenneth Burke in War of Words [unpublished until 2018], George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By [1980]). This book is in that tradition, arguing that treating normal policy disagreements as war constrains democratic deliberation to varying degrees depending on the kind of war imagined. It does so for several reasons, and in several ways.
First, even under the best of circumstances, deliberating about war is vexed. A community has (or should have) the opportunity to deliberate about whether we should go to war, how it’s being conducted, when and whether to end it, and, in retrospect, what happened and why. Yet many people sincerely believe that we shouldn’t deliberate about whether to go to war; if we are attacked (or are about to be attacked), we should—in a state of anger and outrage—respond with however much aggression is necessary to crush the antagonist. Many people believe that a community shouldn’t deliberate about war once it’s started, since to question whether to continue the war dishonors those who have already died for it, or who are currently risking their lives for it. For similar reasons (dishonoring those who have sacrificed), we shouldn’t deliberate about a war afterwards—whether it was well-conducted, necessary, could have been ended earlier. Thus, for many people, we shouldn’t deliberate about a war before, during, or after—that is, at all. In such a situation, those who call for deliberation are easily characterized as cowards, ditherers, unmanly overthinkers, traitors, dupes of the enemy. Characterizing a disagreement as war makes deliberation harder.
Second, this deep aversion to deliberating about war can be strategically manipulated by rhetors who want to evade deliberation for other reasons. This book doesn’t advocate a very complicated model of “deliberation,” instead settling for “good enough” deliberation—more or less reduced to treating others’ (and Other’s) arguments as we’d like ours treated, and holding in- and out-group arguments to the same standards. Although a fairly low bar, it’s one a large number of rhetors can’t or don’t want to meet, so, instead of deliberating, they evade, truncate, or vilify deliberation. They argue that the truth is obvious, only bad people disagree with them, and deliberation aids the enemy. The more that an community believes that the situation is war, the less likely we are to insist on deliberation—the more likely we are to exempt in-group rhetors, political actors, and institutions from moral, legal, and rhetorical norms.
Third, there are kinds of wars, and not all kinds have the same consequences for the extent to which we allow in-group actors to violate moral, legal, and rhetorical norms. Wars can vary both in terms of means and ends. There are and have long been legal and/or moral norms concerning the means that antagonists use. Even before the United Nations, there were expectations regarding such issues as treatment of civilians, civilian territories, neutrals, neutral territory, POW, exchange of prisoners, and so on.
Wars have different ends, ranging from limited territorial to political/physical extermination of the Other. Wars with limited territorial goals (such as the 1859 Pig War) assume the continued coexistence of all parties (except the pig). At the other extreme are wars oriented toward the complete destruction of a political, cultural, religious, or ethnic entity (the Third Punic War, Hitler’s goals in WWII). While limited political goals doesn’t necessarily mean limited destruction, or limited violation of norms (e.g, the Iraq invasion had limited goals—regime change—but high levels of destruction and norm violation), wars of extermination necessarily require almost complete violation of norms. Communities faced with an antagonist determined on our destruction generally give complete moral, legal, military, and rhetorical license to in-group actors. Thus, paradoxically, a political or military leader who wants to violate norms can get license to do so by claiming that the community is already faced with an antagonist determined on in-group extermination. They can get permission to conduct a war of extermination by claiming it already is one.
So, if politics is war, what kind of war?
If it’s a war of extermination in which actors are granted full license to violate any and all legal, moral, and rhetorical norms, then it’s a war on democracy.