June 2025 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

The Politics of Purity

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

My area of expertise is how communities make bad decisions—train wrecks in public deliberation. These are times that big and small communities made a decision that resulted in an unforced disaster.

And the way this happens is oddly consistent. From the Athenians deciding to invade Sicily to Robert McNamara refusing to listen to good advice as to what to do in regard to Vietnam, individuals and communities that make disastrous decisions have a similar approach to disagreement:

• The most persuasive/powerful rhetors persuaded large numbers of people that this actually complicated issue is really just a just a question of dominance between Us and Them (and Them is always a hobgoblin).

• The more that oppositional rhetors accept that false framing of policy questions—Us v.Them—the more that they help (unintentionally or intentionally) those who hold the most power in the community. They’re helping to prevent thorough deliberation about the complicated situation.

• Once things are framed this way, then legitimate questions of policy can’t get argued in reasonable ways. If you disagree about in-group policy, then you’re really consciously or unconsciously out-group. Public disagreements aren’t about whether a proposed policy is feasible, likely to solve the problem, worth what it’s likely to cost, might have unintended consequences—they’re really about who you are and where your loyalties are.

• Instead of trying to give voters useful information about the policy agenda of various groups, media accepts the frame of policy disagreements as really a conflict between two groups and proceeds to treat policy disagreements through a motivistic and race horse frame because it seems “objective.” It isn’t. It’s toxic af, and depolitizes politics.

• Even worse is the rhetoric that reframes policy disagreements as an issue of dominance. As though, instead of people who can work together reasonably to find good solutions, politics is some kind of thunderdome fight.

What I’m saying, and have tried to say in so many books, is that the first error that makes a train wreck likely is to deflect the responsibilities of reasonable policy argumentation by saying that there is no such thing as reasonable disagreement about this issue. In those circumstances, to ask for reasonable policy deliberation on this issue is taken as proof that you’re not really in-group, and therefore you can be ignored. Under those circumstances, we too often end up with a politics of purity.

There’s an unfortunately expensive book Extremism and the Politics of Uncertainty that is a collection of essays from a symposium of political psychologists. And what turns up again and again in that book is that, when faced with an uncertain and complicated situation, people have a tendency to become more “extreme” in their commitment to the in-group. I would say that the scholars are describing a desire for more in-group purity—that the in-group should expel or convert dissenters, members of the in-group should be more purely committed, the in-group should refuse to work with other groups, and the policies should be more pure. While I understand why the scholars in the book describe this process as more “extreme,” I think it’s more useful to think about it in terms of purity. After all, it’s very possible for people to believe that we must purify ourselves of everyone who isn’t a centrist.

By “politics of purity” I mean a rhetoric (and policy agenda) that says that our problems are caused by the presence in the in-group of people who are not fully committed to an individual (the leader), a specific policy agenda, or the group. In any of three forms (and they’re not fully distinct, as I’ll explain below), the attraction of this approach to politics comes, I think, from its mingling ways of thinking about the power of belieeeving, what I think of as the P-Funk fallacy, the just world fallacy, what Eric Fromm calls “escape from freedom,” social dominance orientation, and the process(es) described by the political psychologists in the collection mentioned above. (Probably a few others.)

If you take all that and create a politics of purity oriented toward an individual (people must have a pure faith in the leader), then it’s charismatic leadership. The advantage to a leader of creating a politics of purity about an individual is that, as Hitler observed, policies can be completely reversed without losing followers. It’s worth remembering that, even as Allied troops were crashing through the west and Soviet troops through the east, and the horrors of the Holocaust were indisputable, about 25% of Germans still supported Hitler. They believed he’d been badly served by his underlings. For complicated reasons, this is pretty common–admitting that one’s commitment to a leader is irrational, let alone a mistake, is incredibly difficult for people. Often, in-group members don’t even know what the leader’s policies are, and are therefore completely wrong about what the leader has done, is doing, or intends to do.

It’s also important to note that charismatic leadership is never on its own. People enter a charismatic leadership relationship because there is an effective media promoting a particular narrative about the leader. In fact, refusing to pay attention to criticism of the leader is one of the ways that people keep their commitment pure.

Insisting on a pure commitment to a policy agenda has a pretty clear history of factionalism, splitting, heresy-hunting, and even politicide, generally to the detriment of the group, and, paradoxically enough, to their ability to get their agenda through. There’s so much purifying of a group (i.e., expelling heretics) that there isn’t time for making strategic alliances with partially compatible individuals or groups. And, often, such alliances are demonized (often literally, as in the history of Christianity–just think about the wars of extermination engaged in against other Christians).

The second (purity of commitment to a specific policy agenda), I think, tends to morph either into the first (charismatic leadership, as happened with Stalin) or the third (a pure commitment to the group). It seems to me that, in the latter case, it’s a charismatic leadership relationship, but oriented toward the group, and it has all the dangers of charismatic leadership. “Believe, obey, fight,” as Mussolini said–he didn’t say, “Reason. Listen. Deliberate.”

There’s inevitably a move to retell history in terms of what will enhance obedience and fanatical loyalty rather than accuracy. Instead of hagiographies about the individual leader, the history(ies) of the group are entirely positive, triumphalist, and dismissive of criticism. Orwell talked a lot about this in various writings, especially Homage to Catalonia and his journalism.

What all three politics of purity do is depoliticize politics, by expelling, criminalizing, demonizing, or dismissing reasonable disagreements about policies. They characterize disagreement as a failure on the part of some people to see what is obviously the correct course of action.

We disagree about policies not because there are people who have gone into Plato’s cave and emerged knowing the true policies we all need to have, and others who are looking at shadows on the wall, but because any policy affects different people in different ways. While not all positions are equally valid, I don’t think there is a policy on any major issue that is the only reasonable one. We disagree about policies because, as Hannah Arendt says, political action is always a leap into the uncertain and unknown.

Recurrent terms in my posts

Authoritarianism. There’s a lot of scholarly debate about how to define authoritarianism, and it has to do with some scholars wanting to have a definition that includes ideology, epistemology, government, psychology, even parenting sometimes. And so there are different definitions because people are trying to do different things with those definition—nothing wrong with that. For purposes of thinking about rhetoric and train wrecks, I have found the most productive way to think about authoritarianism is as in-group favoritism on steroids, coupled with a sense that stability is the ideal and that only rigid hierarchies of dominance/submission provide stability.

Briefly, I use the term “authoritarians” for people who believe that societies should be controlled by people at the top of a pyramidal hierarchy (with, obviously, the person or the group at the top the purest in-group), with power and accountability flowing down. That is, people are only accountable to people above them in the hierarchy, and not to anyone below. An authoritarian system doesn’t imagine “justice” as something that should be applied to everyone the same way, nor that “fairness” is treating everyone equally. “Justice” is a system in which everyone “gets what they deserve,” meaning in-group members get more, and out-groups get less (if anything).

Therefore, people at different places in the hierarchy are treated differently. It’s kiss-up and kick-down. Subordinates are responsible for managing the feelings of superiors. Thus, “self-control” is equated with dominating those below; so, paradoxically, people at the top of the hierarchy are allowed to throw temper tantrums (that is, lose control) as long as the tantrums are directed downwards. Authoritarian systems put a lot of emphasis on control through fear.

Authoritarianism constrains public deliberation in several ways. Only in-group members are allowed to participate in deliberation, and even then only those toward the top. They might deliberate with each other in order to make decisions that are announced to those below them, who can only deliberate with others of a similar level about how to enact the dicta; they then tell those below what to do. In addition, authoritarianism tends to presume that there is an obviously correct answer to every problem; dissent and diversity of perspective/opinion are seen as destabilizing, as creating fractures in the stable hierarchy. Authoritarians therefore almost always emphasize the objective of education as instilling obedience, and that means they believe that education should never involve any criticism of the in-group (including facts about past in-group failures or unethical behavior). Authoritarians tend to think in binaries, and an important binary is shame v. honor. Criticism is always shame, and shame undermines obedience, so the “higher Truth” is always a version of events favorable to the in-group.

Authoritarianism isn’t particular to politics (cults are authoritarian), or necessarily connected to one specific policy agenda.

And here we have a moment of Trish Crank Theory time. I’ve read all sorts of authoritarians–from Alkibiades to the Weathermen (that’s alphabetical, rather than historical)–and what’s consistent is that they reason deductively from major premises about groups. That’s interesting.

Demagoguery. In Demagoguery and Democracy and Rhetoric and Demagoguery I define demagoguery as “discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric by framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and the means by which (not whether) the out-group should be scapegoated for the current problems of the in-group. Public disagreement largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the in-group, what signifies out-group membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the in-group); need (the terrible things the out-group is doing to us, and/or their very presence); and what level of punishment to enact against the out-group (ranging from the restriction of the out-group’s rights to the extermination of the out-group).”

Escape from freedom. Erich Fromm argued that freedom requires choice and responsibility, and inherently means making mistakes. For many people, that level of freedom (the freedom to) is terrifying, and so they escape from the responsibilities of freedom by becoming part of a kiss-up/kick-down hierarchy. They want a system in which they’re told what to do, so that they’re never responsible for bad outcomes. Being part of that hierarchy means they get the pleasure of ordering others around, while escaping the anxiety that comes from making decisions, and the accountability for any outcome.

In-group favoritism. We have a tendency to favor an in-group in various ways, most of which mean holding the in-group (and especially in-group leaders) to lower standards than out-groups (especially the Out-group) while claiming the moral highground. Because we believe that the in-group is essentially good, then we find ways to justify/rationalize anything in-group members do. For instance, we attribute good motives to in-group members and bad motives to out-group members for exactly the same behaviors. We explain the same behaviors differently:

people explain away good behavior on the part of the out-group and bad behavior on the part of the in-group

In-group favoritism always involve various kinds of bad math. An in-group political figure (Chester) might be caught having kicked twenty puppies, and an out-group political figure (Hubert) might be caught having kicked one puppy. Pro-Chester media and Chester’s supporter will treat Hubert’s one puppy-kicking incident as worse than Chester’s (despite the numerical difference) or use it to deflect discussing Chester’s puppy kicking. The one incident erases the twenty.

Similarly, one example of bad behavior on the part of an out-group member is proof about the essence of the out-group, who they really are, but the same is not true of in-group members. The bad behavior or bad in-group member is an exception (or not really in-group).

That’s bad math. One is not the same as twenty.

In-group/out-group. The “in-group” is a group we’re in (not necessarily the group in power). We have a lot of in-groups, some of which are tremendously important to our sense of self (e.g., Christian, American) and some that only intermittently become salient (e.g., rhetoric scholars, Austin resident). There are groups that are not in-group, but not particularly important to our identity (I tend to refer to them as non in-groups), but there are groups against whom we identify ourselves. That opposition is crucial to our sense of what it means to be “American” or “Christian.” It’s almost as though we couldn’t have a sense of what it means to be “American” unless we had the concept of “foreigner” (out-group). We take pride in who we are because we are not Them. Sometimes there is an Out-group (an Other) who is, more or less, the evil twin of our in-group. For many evangelicals Christians, Muslims are the Other; for much of Christianity, it was Jews. That Other often has little or nothing to do with how members of that group actually are. Often, the Other is a hobgoblin—an imagined and non-falsifiable stereotype.

Just World Fallacy (aka “just world model”). The just world fallacy/model assumes and asserts that people get what they deserve, and people deserve what they get. If bad things happen to a person, they did something that caused it to happen. This cognitive bias is tremendously comforting and non-falsifiable. It’s also always ableist and victim blaming.

Motivism/motivistic (aka “appeal to motive fallacy”). We’re engaged in motivism when we refuse to engage a reasonable argument on the grounds that the person making the argument has bad motives. People only do this with opposition arguments (I don’t think I’ve ever run across a person dismissing an in-group argument on the grounds that the person making it has bad motives). It’s important to note that this is a fallacy when the interlocutor whom we’re dismissing has made a reasonable argument. I often give the advice that you don’t have to engage with someone whose position on the issue is non-falsifiable, who is not engaged in good faith argumentation. You can if you like rattling chains or poking fire ants’ nests, but it’s generally a waste of time. This fallacy is sometimes categorized as a kind of ad hominem (a fallacy of relevance).

So, for instance, if you’ve rejected everything I’ve said in this post on the basis that I’m an out-group member, then your position is fallacious. If I’m wrong, show I’m wrong through reasonable argument instead of flicking this away like something that scares you too much to engage.

PFunk fallacy. This is sort of unfair to PFunk, but I like the quote: “If you free your mind, your ass will follow.” People often seem to assume that things have gone wrong because we didn’t approach with the right theory. If we get our theory (or beliefs) right, then good actions will necessarily follow, and so they spend a lot of time trying to get everyone to agree on the principles. (It’s like a bad Platonic dialogue.) There’s nothing wrong with trying to make sure a group is oriented toward the same goals, at least in the abstract—to be able to answer the question, “What the hell are we trying to do here?” And it’s useful to try to figure out what caused a problem that we’re trying to solve. The problematic hidden assumption is that there is such a thing as getting the theory right (there is One Right Theory). There is one real cause for any problem (what’s usefully called “a monocausal narrative”). Such a claim is often in service of denying legitimate disagreement by saying that we can derive from the One Right Theory (or the One Right Narrative) the One Right Policy.

There was a time when people seemed to describe every bad incident as “a perfect storm,” and I realize that got tedious, perhaps because it’s almost always true that the big failures and disasters are multicausal. Were I Queen of the Universe, you couldn’t graduate from high school without understanding the concept of “necessary but not sufficient.” Widespread and deep hostility to Jews was necessary for the Holocaust but not sufficient. As Ian Kershaw said, “No Hitler, no Holocaust.” But, were it not for that deep and wide hostility, Hitler wouldn’t have risen to power.

I’m making two points. First, the solution to our problems is not to get everyone to agree on The One Right Theory—univocality can itself be a problem, and it’s unlikely that there is One Right Theory that gets it all exactly right. Second, what is probably more useful to talk about is what are the several necessary but not sufficient conditions or factors that led to this problem. Such a way of approaching problems implies that there is also a variety of possible policy responses to any situation—not that all are equally good, but that deductively determining The Right Policy from The Right Theory is both fallacious and harmful.

Politicide. The sociologist Michael Mann has an extraordinary, albeit depressing, book about mass killing (that is, mass killing based on group identity). One part of his argument is that, unhappily, people who are trying to create a new nation-state with an ethos choose to equate the national ethos with an ethnos. And that necessarily means purifying the new state of the people not in that ethnos. The non in-groups.

So, as both Kenneth Burke (in “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”) and the Wizard of Oz (in Wicked) point out, one very straightforward way of unifying a disparate group is to find a common enemy.[1] Mann notes that it isn’t always an ethnic group. Mass killing might happen to a religious minority (religicide, as in the Spanish Inquisition), an economic or social class (classicide, Khmer Rouge in Cambodia), or political group, politicide (mass killing of people whose politics present a threat, as in Argentina and Chile).

Power of belieeeeeving. This is the one that makes people way mad at me when I mention it. It’s a kind of magical thinking, and maybe a subset of the just world model. It’s also complicated because there’s a bit of truth to it (the more that a person thinks in binaries, the more truth there seems to be). It’s promoted in a lot of dodgy self-help rhetoric (not all self-help rhetoric is dodgy–I’ve found a lot of it tremendously helpful), scams, heartless policies. It says that you can succeed at anything if you just belieeeeeeve enough.

The sensible version is that you should adopt policies you believe can work–whether it’s about personal change, military action, policies–but having faith doesn’t exempt you from taking practical action to achieve your ends: “Trust in God but keep your powder dry.”

There’s a kind of narcissism in thinking that God will rearrange the world because of your faith, as though the people opposing you don’t also have faith. I’m not against praying (I do it every day), but history shows that radical and fanatical faith is not a guarantee of success. Hitler was wrong when he said, “Where there’s a will there’s a ferry.” He was wrong to think that sheer will could enable the soldiers to withstand Russian winters.

Social Dominance Orientation. This is a way of describing the preference that some people have for hierarchical systems. People with a social dominance orientation tend to be Social Darwinists (which is neither Darwinian nor social).

[1] I’d like to believe that this is not the first time that Kenneth Burke and a musical have been cited together.

Consumerism and Democracy

Marjorie Taylor Greene saying she voted for a bill she neither read nor understood

At various moments in my career, I was the Director of the first-year composition program, and so dealt with grade complaints. My sense was that about 1/3 of the complaints were misunderstandings; in about 1/3 the instructor had really screwed up. For both of those, I was grateful that a student (or several) had complained, since it was an issue that needed to be resolved at the institutional level.

But the other third was … something. There were all sorts of odd things. But MTG’s defense of her failure to do her job competently reminds me of something I ran across when responding to some students in that other third. More than once, I found myself talking to a student who had not read the assignment sheet (let’s forget reading the syllabus) or paid attention in class, and who therefore failed to meet the assignment criteria. They were complaining to me because they sincerely believed that their not having met the assignment criteria was the fault of the teacher. They didn’t dispute that the information was in writing that they had been given and told to read, nor that other students understood the assignment just fine. In other words, there was never any claim that the information (about due dates, grading criteria, and so on) hadn’t been communicated. They admitted that they hadn’t read/listened. But, their argument was that the instructor was at fault for the student having ignored the information they’d been given, because the instructor’s rhetoric wasn’t good enough.

That narrative of causality–the student failed to meet the criteria of the assignment because the teacher/rhetor wasn’t persuasive enough–is an instance of the transmission model of communication (a good rhetor transmits the message effectively to a passive recipient). It’s also a consumerist model of education: students are consumers, passively waiting to be sold a product. The teacher’s job is to sell the product effectively.

But students aren’t consumers, and teachers aren’t selling a product. You can talk and think about education this way, but that doesn’t make it good.

I used to use this analogy with my students. Imagine that you’re a server in a restaurant, and your boss says, “Those people over there need water.” And you aren’t clear what table your boss means. If, later, your boss asked whether you’d given that table water, and you said that you weren’t sure what table, so you didn’t do anything, what do you think would happen? And they said, “I’d get fired.”

Learning something–anything–doesn’t mean being a passive container into which information is poured; it’s an action that requires agency.

This way of thinking is often applied to politics, both the consumerist model of relationships and the transmission model of communication.[1] It’s a train wreck way of thinking about communication of any sort, but especially politics.

The consumerist model of going to a restaurant does apply to the actual customers—the consumers of what the restaurant offers. They can choose to come back to that restaurant or not on the basis of whether that restaurant gives them what they want. If you choose not to buy a car because the advertising doesn’t really speak to you, or you choose to buy a car because you love the rhetoric about that car, well, you do you. You can buy (consume) whatever car you choose on whatever bases you choose.

Currently, the dominant model for thinking about politics is that voters are consumers. This is a recent model, from the mid twentieth century, as far as I can tell. [2] The argument is that if voters like the “message” a party portrays, then they should vote for that party. It’s up to the party and political figures to provide an appealing product (policies, rhetoric). Voters are passively sitting at the table waiting to be sold a product. Like the student who doesn’t feel obligated to read the syllabus or assignment sheet, voters aren’t seen as responsible for educating themselves about the issues.

In a democracy, voters aren’t sitting at a table wanting to be given the most pleasing product in the most timely manner.

Voters are the servers.

[1] One of my many crank theories is that the transmission model of communication is necessarily tied to consumerist models of interactions, but I’m not sure why that is the case.
[2] Prior to that, voters were described as needing to be able to deliberate—you can see that in The Federalist Papers, for instance. The reasoning behind the electoral college, and indirect election of Senators, was that voters didn’t have enough information to deliberate about the competence of people they didn’t know.)