Author: Trish

Was Hitler a vegetarian? What’s your onion?

Onions hanging from ceiling
Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Onion_bulbs#/media/File:Cebolas.JPG

When I first read that Hitler was vegetarian, I found all sorts of reasons to say he wasn’t really vegetarian. For instance, and this is just one of the deflections I found, I decided (and told people) that he was what snarky vegetarians call “carbotarian,” meaning he just ate pasta and dairy. And some people say he sometimes ate meat. The fact is that he was vegetarian. But the interesting question is: why did I care so much that I would engage in hair-splitting about it? Why was his being vegetarian such a threat to me that I, a scholar of argumentation, engaged in really bad arguments to make him not a vegetarian?

Because that’s how we all are when it comes to protecting our sense of our in-group as essentially good.

Vegetarians are an in-group for me. I have some grumps with vegetarians, but, since they’re an in-group, I always attribute basically good motives to them (even when I think they’re wrong). And that’s pretty typical for how all of us cognitively manage appalling behavior on the part of an in-group member. Once we’ve gone through “they didn’t do it,” “it wasn’t that thing,” “others have done worse,” and we’ve got Hitler, and he’s in our in-group, then we say, “he isn’t really in our in-group.”

So, obviously, this post isn’t really about Hitler, and it isn’t about vegetarians, but it’s about how we engage in actively stupid and irrational reasoning (“Hitler was a carbotarian”) because we’re really trying to hold onto the moral licensing that in-group membership gives us.

“Moral licensing” is the term that some researchers use for the fact that we all engage in very bad math about our own behavior. We have a tendency to engage in a credit/debit calculation: I did this good thing, so it’s okay for me to do that bad thing. But it’s always bad math. Giving some money to a homeless person on the freeway off-ramp doesn’t erase from the ledger voting for criminalizing homelessness or cutting services to the poor. But that’s how we reason.

I love the story in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov about the onion. A woman who has been completely evil in her life begs to be lifted from Hell on the basis of having once given a beggar an onion. It doesn’t work because that one act of kindness was just the only time she was ethical. In-group membership is the onion—it’s the one thing we do that we hope will justify everything we do and are.

The fantasy of in-group social licensing goes further—it goes into our fantasies about our in-group and history. We all want to believe that we would have been in the resistance, we would have been abolitionists, we would never have supported Hitler because our in-group is good, and therefore members of our in-group have always been on the right side of history, and therefore we would have made ethical choices.

But, if Hitler was vegetarian, and vegetarians are an in-group for me, then my in-group identification doesn’t guarantee I would never have supported Hitler. Hitler being a vegetarian means that being vegetarian isn’t a guarantee that I am and would always have been good.

And that is why I was so intent on profoundly irrational ways of trying to make Hitler not a vegetarian: because what was at stake was not whether he was vegetarian, but whether I was willing to admit that my in-group should have moral license—whether being a member of my in-group means that we are guaranteed to be right and good on the whole and can therefore be shitty at all sorts of individual moments.

What I had to do was to step back from my thinking about Hitler in terms of trying to hold onto a moral license for vegetarians and instead look at all the major scholars of Hitler, and admit that there was only one that would support my argument. More important, I had to think about how I was arguing. Could I find data to support my claim? Sure. Anyone can find data to support any claim. Having data doesn’t make an argument rational.

What I couldn’t do was make an argument that Hitler wasn’t really vegetarian that wouldn’t also mean all sorts of other people weren’t really vegetarian. What I couldn’t do was create a set of criteria of vegetarianism that I was willing to apply across people I do and don’t like (including me).

There are people who claim that Nazism was Protestant, left-wing, Catholic, or atheist, and they are making arguments as desperately irrational as my trying to claim that Hitler wasn’t vegetarian. They can find evidence to support their claims, but what they can’t do is come up with a set of criteria for Nazism being Protestant, left-wing, Catholic, atheist, or whatever that wouldn’t also apply to lots of governments, groups, and people (even including themselves) that they don’t want to condemn. For instance, if Hitler was left-wing because he supported a social safety net, then so was Reagan. If Hitler was Protestant because many of his supporters were Protestant, then Niemoller and Bonhoeffer were Nazis. If voting for Hitler becoming dictator means a group was Nazi, then Catholics were Nazis. Instead of deflecting the data, we need to think about the major premise: supporting a social safety net doesn’t make a person left-wing (as both Reagan and Eisenhower show); that Protestant areas gave Nazis a lot of support doesn’t change that the Catholic Party voted unanimously for Hitler becoming dictator. In-group membership is not some kind of “you’ve always been on the right side of history” guarantee.

Hitler was right-wing. There is simply no doubt about that. He was part of a right-wing coalition, he supported right-wing policies, and right-wing politicians saw him as any ally. The only people to vote against his becoming dictator were democratic socialists.

But, and this is the important point: Nazism eventually got buy-in from most Germans. Nazism was not a system of a small group of people who, because of their being members of some out-group, were able to force others to do tasks those people knew were wrong and didn’t want to do. Nazism was a group of policemen standing by a ditch murdering Jews even when they didn’t have to. And that group had people from all over the political, religious, and cultural spectrum. Nazism is not what that out-group does. It is what members of our in-group did. It isn’t what people like us would never do; it’s what people like us did. If we don’t understand that, then we will never understand Nazism.

We are so desperate to hold on to in-group moral licensing that we compulsively engage in all sorts of hair-splitting (not really vegetarian, dog-lover, conservative, Catholic, Protestant), even when that hair-splitting is completely inconsistent. That we use that kind of hair-splitting to pretend that people like us had nothing to do with Nazism (although they did) isn’t the worst consequence of in-group membership being treated as moral license.

In addition to in-group moral licensing enabling us to engage in bad math about behavior, and tell ourselves comfortable lies about how our in-group is always on the right side of history (and therefore we are, always will, and always would have been on the right side of history), it enables Machiavellianism and a sloppy moral relativism. Machiavellianism, in psychology, is a personality trait of people who “are temperamentally predisposed to be calculating, conniving, and deceptive. Essentially amoral, they use other people as stepping stones to reach their goals.” Machiavellianism says that strategies for getting what we want—the means—are amoral. Moral licensing says that lying, coercion, violating the law, blackmail—they’re amoral. What makes them moral or immoral is whether the person is engaged in them is in- or out-group. Since the in-group is essentially moral, then any act on the part of an in-group member oriented toward the triumph of the in-group is moral, even if we would condemn it as immoral were it done by out-group (once again, moral licensing). This sense that the in-group can behave in ways we would normally condemn as immoral and yet still praise their actions as moral is the basis of far too many Law and Order episodes, as well as almost all action movies.

In-group moral licensing is all about saying that we are allowed, in this moment, because of who we are and what we believe, to engage in behavior we on principle condemn, while we continue to claim that we are adherent to that principle. Moral licensing enables us to claim that we are committed to principles we violate (feminists and Bill Clinton, Mitch McConnell and the timing of appointing a SCOTUS justice). In-group moral licensing enables factional Machiavellianism.

I’m not saying that “both sides are equally bad”—I don’t think US politics is about two sides, and I’m not going to endorse the bad math of in-group moral licensing. More important, it doesn’t matter if the “other side” violates a principle. If we violate it, then it isn’t a principle for us. As Bill Murray says in Ghostbusters, it’s more of a guideline than a rule.

In-group moral licensing enables a kind of sloppy moral relativism in that the morality of an action is entirely dependent on whether the person engaged in the action is in- or out-group.

Here’s what I’m saying.

We can have a political world in which political leaders are motivated by the principles that maintain democracy or we can have factional Machiavellianism. If people want to engage in rabid factionalism, then they should own it, and stop claiming that they are acting on any principle other than promoting the in-group.

I’m a big fan of a guy who is very unpopular in US political discourse right now, who completely rejected the notion that your in-group membership means you can treat people in ways you would never want to be treated. If you take seriously what he said, then there is no such thing as moral licensing. That you believe that you are on the side of the good—that you believe your in-group is good—doesn’t, by his standards, mean that you can violate principles you want maintained on your behalf.

As I said, not a lot of people care about what he said. He didn’t say “do unto others in your in-group” or “do unto others except out-group.” He didn’t mumble.

And, if you’re claiming something is a principle, except when it isn’t, it isn’t a principle. It’s a rationalization. Hitler was a vegetarian. Your in-group membership is an onion. It will not pull you to heaven.

How defending the in-group can land us in unintentional racism

A stained glass from the Brussels Cathedral showing Jews desecrating the host, a libel that led to a massacre of Jews and a Catholic cult was recognized until 1968.


I retired for several reasons, but one of them was so that I could work more. I love visiting campuses and classes (it’s teaching without the grading), doing podcasts, and writing. I think I wrote five or six contributions to book collections this year, visited three or four classes, and gave two or three workshops. I made a lot of progress on a new book. That’s what I wanted to do with my retirement. If anything, I’d like more class visits, workshops, contributed chapters, and lectures than I had this year. I’m saying this just to be clear that I don’t object to working, but I object to working when something is supposed to be play.

I signed up for a course that was supposed to be play—about the Inquisition (way out of my area of expertise). It wasn’t play; it was work. The first part of the course was about various heresies in the early Christian church, and it was fascinating, useful, thoughtful, and nuanced. And then we got to the Inquisition. And I dropped the course because it turned into work.

But the way that this class was work is a useful example for something I’ve had a lot of trouble explaining in my writing: how in-group favoritism can seem and feel harmless, since it happens when we’re focused on praising or defending (especially defending) our in-group, and we don’t necessarily mean to do so by denigrating, blaming, or negatively stereotyping some out-group. But it happens. What I have trouble explaining is that in-group favoritism can easily lead into defending the in-group in such a way that problematic in-group behavior gets minimized, redefined, dissociated, and deflected onto the victims, and then it becomes racist.

And that’s what happened in this class. And you see it all the time—people trying to defend Prince Philip end up diminishing (or seeming to justify) his racism, probably out of the impulse to give a very, very old guy a break.[1]

When we admire a person, civilization, or policy of the past, we’re almost certainly admiring something racist, colonialist, misogynist. That’s just how history works. It doesn’t mean that we can’t admire anything or anyone in the past. The false assumption that things (people, institutions, actions) are either good or evil, and that it is an absolute binary—good things are purely good, and anything not purely good is evil—means that we have trouble talking usefully about racism. If we think of racism as an evil, and that no good person has any evil, then we either have to condemn everyone as equally evil, or we have to find ways to say that the in-group wasn’t evil. And so we justify, deflect, and rationalize the racism of people, institutions, or practices that we believe aren’t completely evil.

And then we’re enabling racism.

If we stop thinking about racism as an evil pit in which evil people live, and instead as an unconscious and damaging way that we understand our world, then we can simultaneously say that someone was racist, and that that someone did a lot of good things. We can praise that for the good things, and yet condemn their racism. In other words, condemning racism isn’t condemning a person as a being spit into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth—it’s condemning what they’ve said or done. Similarly, condemning an institution for racism isn’t necessarily saying that the institution has never done anything good; it’s saying the institution engaged in racist practices.

And, once we can say and see that someone or some institution we admire has done and said racist things, then we are more open to seeing how we do racist things. And then we can try to be less racist. As long as we refuse to see or acknowledge racism in our in-group, we will not change the actions and beliefs that are racist.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, neither demagoguery nor racism are necessarily intentional—in fact, I think it’s pretty rare that someone believes that they are engaged in demagoguery or being racist and does so anyway.[2] And racism is not about individuals who are consciously hostile to members of other races, or individuals who decide that they will get up today and be racist; it’s often about how in-group favoritism fuels, justifies, or enables us to ignore systemic differential treatment of various groups. It’s about how people only think about this particular policy, person, incident, issue, or case affects us without thinking about how what we’re saying has larger and longer implications and consequences.

And here I should explain briefly about in- and out-groups. In-groups are groups we’re in—they’re groups we use to identify ourselves to others, and whose basic goodness is intermingled with our own. If I believe that my rescuing dogs from shelters is a good thing, then I will think of myself as in the category of people who rescue dogs from shelters—I’ll identify with them, in Kenneth Burke’s terms. And, since I think I’m good for rescuing dogs, then I’m very likely (illogically) to decide that people who rescue dogs are good. (Since I’m good for rescuing dogs, people who rescue dogs are good.) They’re in my in-group, and, if that group is accused of bad behavior, I’ll defend it as vigorously as I’d defend and deflect accusations of bad behavior against me.[3]

That’s what this prof was doing (and what we all do). He was responding to ways that Catholicism has been under attack. And, to be clear, it has. Most of our notions about the torture devices of the Inquisition are 19th and 20th century tourist trap bullshit or anti-Catholic demagoguery. And, like many people defending their in-group, he engaged in textbook in-group favoritism and its attendant deflection and dissociation (in the rhetorical sense, explained below). He over-defended his in-group to the point that he got into very creepy and not okay territory. As do we all. And that is my point in this (very long) post.

Here was his argument about the Inquisition. Initially, the “inquisition” was the first step in someone having been accused of heresy, and it was conducted by the church, and oriented toward persuasion. It only involved “minor” torture (he used that term multiple times), and the vast majority of people expressed sorrow that they had been wrong in their doctrine, and were happy to have been corrected. They were given some minor penance. Only a small percentage were handed over to the secular authorities, who tended toward execution. So “the Church” didn’t execute people; secular authorities did. The Spanish Inquisition was entirely secular authorities. The official position of the Catholic Church was that conversos (Jews who had been forcibly converted or only converted to escape death) could renounce their conversion with no punishment. Many didn’t, and so, when the Spanish Inquisition started—which he was clear was initially completely out of control, and basically a witch hunt—and conversos were particularly victimized, many came forward to prevent being executed, and they blamed their drifting back into Jewish practices on Jews (since they often chose to live in Jewish communities). So, the secular authorities decided that Jews were infecting the state and expelled them. The question of the burning of the Torahs also came up, which he described as, after the initial burning, very minor. As long as authorities didn’t know about the Torahs, they wouldn’t do anything, so, when it happened, it was because another Jew had reported that there was a Torah.

Like much in-group favoritism that drifts into racism, it was thoroughly well-intentioned. He was trying to counter the anti-Catholic demagoguery of the 18th and 19th centuries that created myths we still have about the Inquisition and Catholicism. Richard Hofstadter once said that “anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” and he was right. People opposed to pornography in principle could read descriptions of convents as whorehouses for priests and feel simultaneously pruriently stimulated and self-righteous. Six Months in a Convent and Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk were best sellers, after all.

Torture devices attributed to the Inquisition are almost all semi-pornographic (or full-on pornographic) imaginations of Protestants, such as the Iron Maiden (which was never used in the Inquisition). But, there is one device they used (as did the Nazis), the strappado. Since strappado is so horrifying, but I will link to something, and, just all the content warnings. It’s torture. This professor said the strappado was “minor” torture, and that people who were threatened with it were “persuaded.”

So, let’s take seriously what he was claiming (more seriously than he did). If the strappado was minor torture, and someone told, “Agree with me, or we’ll apply the strappado to you” was an object of persuasion and not coercion, then were I to say to him, “I think you’re wrong, so, either agree with me, or I’ll use the strappado against you,” then he would say I persuaded him.

Of course he wouldn’t. But, if he wouldn’t, then his whole argument about the “inquisition” being about persuasion and not coercion collapses.

He could say that people confronted with strappado were facing “minor” torture (and people who were threatened with their holy books being burned was “minor”) because he never imagined himself as the object of that behavior. I want to stop here for a moment, and emphasize this point. He would never have told the story of the Inquisition the same way he did had roles been reversed, and Catholics been treated exactly as Jews and Muslims were. He would never make the claims about the Inquisition had he been the one “persuaded” by the threat of the “minor” torture of the strappado.

In-group favoritism is always a failure of imagination. It means we deflect, dissociate, rationalize, or minimize behavior toward others we would be outraged were that behavior oriented toward us because we are imagining the situation only from the in-group position. We don’t imagine ourselves being the object of in-group action, only the subject.

We are all drawn to defending our in-group, and we therefore do what he did. We minimize the actions of our in-group (strappado was minor), put our behavior in the most favorable possible light (threatening someone with strappado if they don’t confess and renounce their beliefs is “persuasion”), deflect responsibility onto the victims (Jews turned other Jews in—this was an important point for him), engage in the most hair-splitting of rhetorical dissociation (so “the Catholic Church” is not what Catholics, nor Catholic governments do, even if they have officials of the Catholic Church participating, but only [the most rhetorically useful] statements on the part of the Pope).

I want to pause on a point that is easily lost. The Catholic church banned the Torah—he made a big point that Jews were allowed to argue for it not being banned—and so any Jewish community with a Torah had to live in constant fear that they would have their Torah confiscated and burned. He dismissed that condition as minor, and he said a Torah was only burned if a member of the Jewish community reported that there was a Torah.

He may be technically correct that Jews during the Inquisition and throughout the many years of the Torah being prohibited were “turned in” by other Jews. Why make that point? People who want to defend the slaveocracy of the US will often point out that African slaves were initially enslaved by other Africans. Why is that point relevant?

When I’ve asked people, they say, “Well, it’s true.” Well, lots of things are true. It’s also true that the “secular” authorities that engaged in the behavior he wants to deflect and dismiss were Catholic governments, who saw themselves as promoting Catholicism. It’s true that the Catholic church actively venerated the massacres of Jews until the 1960s. Simon of Trent was in the Roman Martyrology until 1965. The cult over the Brussels massacre of Jews was recognized by the Catholic Church until 1968. I could go on. (I could also go on about Protestant abuses of Jews.) It’s also true that conservative white Evangelicals defended slavery (and segregation), and still do.

That some Jews turned in a Jewish community for having a Torah, or that Africans sold other Africans into slavery has no relevance to the question of whether Catholics persecuted Jews or Americans bought slaves. Nor do those facts make the persecution of Jews or American slavery any less appalling and immoral than they were.

So why did he emphasize it?

People who are irrationally committed to defending the in-group shift the question of “did our in-group do this bad thing” to “are we, and we alone, responsible for the tragic consequences of our behavior?” And then we try to find other groups on whom we can fling some of the blame, as though that’s relevant. It isn’t. Whether Catholics who banned and burned Torahs were sometimes assisted by Jews doesn’t change that Catholics banned and burned Torahs. Whether Africans sometimes sold other Africans into slavery doesn’t change that Americans are entirely responsible for American slavery.

What if looking at history wasn’t about defending our in-group, but about understanding what happened? What if the question was one about rhetoric? Instead of trying to deflect, dissociate, and diminish the bad behavior of our in-group, what would it be like if we instead asked a question about rhetoric: how did our in-group–which we want to believe is good–get persuaded into doing that bad thing?

And then we don’t have to blame Jews for Torahs getting burned or Africans for US slavery. We don’t have to have a contest about Protestants v. Catholics in terms of bad behavior. We don’t have to call behavior “minor” that we would be outraged were it to happen to us. We can acknowledge that being a member of our in-group doesn’t guarantee that we’re right. We can be part of the vexed, complicated, and unclear world of doing wrong when we don’t mean to, of failing to think from the perspective of others.

Just to be clear: I think the professor is a very good man, and a great scholar, and almost everything he said was (technically) true—except calling strappado minor torture. That’s just false. Setting aside that (kind of horrifying) rationalization of Catholic practices, I’ll say that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he genuinely had very good friends who are Jews, and he would be outraged, I think, at the implication that he was even mildly anti-semitic. He was very clear that the treatment of Jews under Torquemada was appalling, and he didn’t defend the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at all. He is not hostile to Jews; he doesn’t want Jews expelled from anywhere; he doesn’t want Jews tortured. He’s just very invested in defending Catholicism.

So, I’m not writing about him because I think he is a terrible person—I think he’s a good person. He’s a careful scholar, and a dynamic teacher, and working hard to combat anti-Catholic demagoguery.[4] What I’m saying is that he is us.

We like to imagine that racism is a self-conscious hostility to members of another race, but I think it’s most often in-group defensiveness. People who refuse to think that policing might be racist are more interested in defending an in-group (white police officers) than they are in deliberately promoting violence against non-whites. Regardless of the intention, defending the police to the extent that it involves a refusal to acknowledge racist policing means defending racist policing. People who are committed Lutherans, Republicans, Democrats, vegans, second-wave feminists who are more interested in defending Lutherans, Republicans, and so than we are in trying to make our in-group less racist are racist.

Being Catholic, Republican, or supporting the police doesn’t mean you’re racist. Defending Catholics, Republics, or the police doesn’t make you racist. Being Protestant, Democrat, or criticizing the police doesn’t mean you aren’t racist. Supporting our in-group by deflecting or diminishing our in-group racism is racist.

It doesn’t matter if our in-group is gun owners, Lutherans, vegetarians, Texans, Democrats, Christians, dog-lovers, or anything else. Being right means admitting we’ve been wrong. It means not deflecting, dissociating, and minimizing about how our in-group has been very wrong.

The irony of this very good, and I think very devout, Christian promoting narratives that defend his in-group (Catholics) at the expense of his non-in-group (Jews) and his out-group (Protestants) is that he is, as are we all, rejecting what Christ said. He is a good scholar, but he’d be a better one, and we’d all be better people, were we to take seriously: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”







[1] Instead of refusing to call him racist, or pretend he didn’t say racist things, it would have made more sense just to say, “Yeah, racist.”

[2] I’m saying rare just because I don’t like all or never statements, but I honestly can’t think of a time. Even racists like David Duke or Adolf Hitler insisted that they were being realists, not racists.

[3] If I slip from believing that adopting surrendered dogs is a good thing to believing that adopting surrendered dogs is what good people do, then I’ll start to denigrate people who do something else, like get dogs from responsible breeders. That’s a different post.

[4] Which, oddly enough, still exists. For reasons to complicated to explain, I recently ran across work by a major figure among fundagelicals who gets lots of churches to support his work to spread “Christianity,” oriented entirely at Catholic areas.

Defenders of Georgia laws are lying about how Jim Crow restrictions worked

revisionist history books


Various people have said that what states like Georgia are doing is just Jim Crow voting practices—setting in place laws that keep Black people from voting, or from having their vote count as much as the votes of white people. The pro-GOP media sphere (and a shout-out to getting your people in line with repeating the talking points!) are saying that what Georgia did to restrict the ability of people to vote was not going back to Jim Crow because Jim Crow was racist, and this is not racist. It’s political. It’s about keeping Democrats from voting.

They say it’s fine to make it hard for Democrats to vote because they believe that Democrats don’t have a legitimate political position that should be represented in our democracy. They believe that Democrats are all dupes, and so Democratic-prone groups of people should be treated differently from how they want GOP-prone groups treated (thus, they’ve made rural voting easier, but urban voting harder).

I have to say that we’re at the point when it’s openly okay for the GOP to say that they want a one-party nation, while they accuse Dems of being fascist and authoritarian. You might quibble whether a one-party state is truly fascist, but it certainly isn’t democracy.

[There’s a long passage I deleted about how what the GOP is doing in regard to voting rights is a violation of what Jesus very clearly said, but I’m deleting it because it’s naive to pretend that the GOP cares about what Jesus said.]

But, back to the argument. We have a deliberately false narrative about the history of race in the US. That deliberately false narrative says that there were people who got up in the morning, looked themselves in the mirror, and said, “I hate Black people, and every day and every way I will make my hatred of them obvious.” And that is what racist people did. So, “Jim Crow” was racist people engaged in actions that they said were racist that they knew came out of hate. And, therefore, as long as we don’t feel hateful toward others, and we aren’t deliberately trying to hurt a race we know we hate, we aren’t doing something racist.

That’s a racist way to think about race. It’s racist because it’s a way of thinking about racism that enables racism.

In addition, there’s a lot of deliberate muddling of what segregation was and how it worked. “Jim Crow” is used in a broad manner to mean all the ways that various states (not just “Southern”) ensured that African Americans and other non-white groups were held to second-class citizen status.

Most people I know who live in segregated states don’t actually know what the culture of segregation meant. They have images of water fountains or food counters, and of lynchings on the part of toothless rednecks done in the dark who bragged about their racism, and far too many of them believe that most ministers opposed segregation.

Conservative Christians supported segregation as not just allowed by Scripture, but actively required—segregation was Christian, they argued, and opposition to segregation was godless communism. Segregation was also, Southern conservatives argued, necessary to prevent the downfall of civilization because, they believed, all other great civilizations decayed when they allowed “race-mixing” to happen. This unmitigated bullshit was popularized by Madison Grant’s incoherent Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard’s tremendously popular Rising Tide of Color (1920) and, although completely discredited by its importance to Nazis (the one good thing Nazis did), it was referenced in Virginia’s argument for prohibiting “miscegenation” in 1967 in their brief for Loving v. Virginia.

Most people I know who live in segregated states don’t actually know what the culture of segregation meant. It meant displays of the power of white supremacy, such as setting up statues to people who were traitors to the US and lost the pro-slavery insurrection they’d started. It meant deliberately reminding non-whites of the power of white supremacy, ranging from lynchings (which were often in public, and often had a pastor present to give a sermon) to separate water fountains or separate entrances to movie theaters (which you can often still see). It meant ensuring non-whites had deliberately inferior schools, health care, social services. It meant that the police were committed to protecting white supremacy, and the whole justice system was oriented toward the principle that the government should protect and not restrict white people, and restrict but not protect non-whites.

Non-whites (meaning African Americans in most places, but including other groups in many states) had to be prevented from voting since they would put in place political leaders who would undermine segregation. Restricting voting was the means to protect racism.

If white supremacists had believed that non-white voters would have voted to support white supremacism, they would have been in favor of non-whites voting.

The prohibitions and restrictions on non-whites voting weren’t advocated, enacted, and enforced by people who thought of themselves as racist. They were advocated, enacted, and enforced by people who thought of themselves as keeping people from voting whose political beliefs were not legitimate, people whose views were un-Christian, communist, and a threat to America. That was Jim Crow voting practices, and that is exactly what the GOP is openly advocating and doing.

That a policy is oriented toward the hegemony of a particular political party—the whole goal of segregation-era voting laws—doesn’t mean that policy gets a “get out of racism free” card. If a group is trying to prevent a party coming to power because that marginalized party would enact anti-racist policies, then trying to restrict the power of that party is trying to protect racism. It’s racist.

In theory, the poll tax wasn’t racist—it didn’t mention race. In practice, it was disparately applied, and it was all about race. It was all about white people believing that non-white people aren’t really citizens whose views on politics should have the same power as the beliefs of white people.

In the Jim Crow era, all sorts of laws were passed that didn’t explicitly mention race, but that were intended to make sure that non-whites couldn’t have the same political power as whites. That’s what Jim Crow voting did.

That’s what the GOP is doing. It’s racist.

Privilege is being able to make your feelings the basis of policy

a gopher snake
From here: http://www.californiaherps.com/identification/snakesid/gophersnakes.id.html

At one point when I was living in Berkeley in a very shared space, and in which I was the only woman, I had a house-mate who could not be relied on to lock the front door. I was the only female in that space, and I was the only one upset about his failure to lock the front door. He kept saying that we weren’t really in any danger, by which he meant he didn’t feel threatened by an unlocked front door. Even though the very helpful person who was going around Berkeley spraying sidewalks with “a woman was raped here” with the date had sprayed a relatively recent date quite near our front door, he continued to insist I was being irrational.

I have to say that the other guys in the household could only be persuaded to be more careful about locking the door because I threw a fit, and they liked me. I don’t think they ever thought my perception of threat was rational.

And that is one thing that is very wrong about American public discourse in a nutshell.

Largely because of the rational/irrational split, Americans tend to frame beliefs as emotional or rational—assuming that there is a binary, or at least a zero-sum between the two. The more emotional you are, the less rational you are. If you have strong feelings about something, then you aren’t rational about it. That’s wrong, but even more wrong is the inference, that, if feeling strongly makes you irrational, then if you don’t particularly care about something, your position is rational.

And, therefore, that housemate, call him Joe, could sincerely believe that his position was rational, whereas mine was distorted by my feelings.

In fact, his position was grounded in feelings, more so than mine. I could provide evidence that leaving a front door unlocked was unsafe. He didn’t try to refute that evidence. His argument was there wasn’t a threat because he didn’t feel threatened. His argument was profoundly an argument about feelings. His feelings. And his argument was grounded in a sense that only his feelings mattered. The problem with his position wasn’t that it was grounded in feelings, but that he lived in a world in which only his feelings should be the basis of policy (locking the front door or not).

I once completely alienated a colleague in another department who wanted to be able to have a gun while teaching because he had feelings about someone coming into his classroom and fantasies about shooting them. But he posted an argument that people opposed to campus carry were irrationally afraid of guns, whereas his position was rational. His opponents’ position was grounded in feelings, he said, but his was grounded in a rational assessment of the situation. His feelings. I took issue with that (with considerable vehemence) because I am so fucking tired of people (like him) whose position is grounded in feelings and fantasies yet who condemn any critics as irrational. The problem with his position wasn’t that it was grounded in feelings, but that he lived in a world in which only his feelings mattered because he pushed them out of the realm of argument (feeling safe by having a gun while teaching). (He unfriended me, and hasn’t had me on a graduate student committee since. I mention this simply because it made no difference to me, but could to a faculty member more vulnerable.)

I wasn’t saying that his position was wrong because it was grounded in feelings, but that his irrationalizing of the opposition was demagogic. We all have feelings. He had feelings of threat, and those feelings fueled his policy commitments. He felt threatened by the idea of a shooter who would invade his classroom (whom he could shoot before that shooter sprayed the room). The problem with his argument was that he normalized his own feelings, and irrationalized the feelings of anyone who disagreed with him. It wasn’t what he argued that was a problem, or even how he argued, but that how he argued–from his feelings–wasn’t open to argument. I was saying that wanting to have a gun in a classroom is a position based in fear was, for him, a rational position but that people fear guns in classroom is a reason to dismiss the argument. And that was an irrational way to think about various positions on the issue.

I’m not saying that his irrational irrationalizing of people who disagreed with him means that his position about guns was therefore wrong and mine right. I’m saying that his ignoring how his own position was grounded in feelings, and his irrationalizing of the opposition, meant that his position was irrational. It was grounded in treating the same behavior—policy positions grounded in fear—differently, based purely on the basis of in- or out-group.

The way to make his position rational wasn’t for him to dismiss his fears and fantasies about a classroom shooter, but to put those fears and fantasies up to the same conditions of falsifiability as the people who feared a shoot-out of people who all thought someone else was the bad guy, students implicitly threatening faculty, or various other concerns. The way to make his position rational was to make his feelings just as rational and just as much up for argument as the ones he was demagogically dismissing as irrational.

Does that mean he was wrong about guns in classrooms? No. But it does mean that he was claiming a privileged place in public deliberation—his feelings are beyond consideration, but that the people who disagree with him have feelings mean their arguments can be dismissed. And that is the problem.

We all have policy commitments that come from our feelings. We are never in a situation in which one set of people have rational policy affiliations free of feelings, and the other is driven by feelings. That isn’t to say that feelings are some kind of bedrock of belief, or that feelings are beyond argument, or that all feelings are equally valid. Not all feelings should be the basis of policy.

Imagine that I feel threatened by seeing a gopher snake. (By the way, I am.) I grew up in an area in which, for reasons I still don’t understand, the local fire department engaged in tremendous fear-mongering about rattlesnakes. Every year, they’d come to the elementary school and talk about the dangers of rattlesnakes. I still remember their saying you should never jump off a rock, since a rattlesnake might be under it. If you believed them, then rattlesnakes were not only everywhere, but spent all their time trying to bit people. I believed them.

Gopher snakes look like rattlesnakes, and a gopher snake on dry leaves can do a damn good impression of a rattlesnake rattling. I remain really bad at snake identification, and so I feel very threatened when I see a gopher snake (or, in Texas, a rat snake).

That I feel threatened by gopher snakes doesn’t mean gopher snakes are a threat.

Elsewhere, I argued that people advocated the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese ancestry because those advocates confused their feeling threatened by Americans of Japanese ancestry with those people being a threat.

Feelings are judgments. They are assessments of threat, trustworthiness, credibility. And feelings have evidence, and therefore can be changed, if people are 1) willing to consider why we believe what we do, and 2) we are willing to admit that our feelings do not constitute reality. I feel threatened by gopher and rat snakes. I probably always will. But I can consult a good guide to snake identification and determine that this snake is not a rattlesnake. I might still feel threatened by the snake, and that’s fine. What matters is that I do not advocate a policy–kill the snake–grounded in feelings that are about me, and not about the snake.

Politics is about feelings, and feelings are judgments, and policies are grounded in judgments, and policies should be open to falsification. My judgment about gopher snakes is falsifiable and false, and therefore shouldn’t be the basis of policy.[1] That some people feel threatened by interactions with police is a judgment, and open to falsification, and supported by data. That some people feel threatened by transgender people, immigrants exactly like the people from whom they’re descended, angry women, sex workers, the liberal elite, being asked to wear a mask, and so on—are those instances of people feeling threatened, or certain groups being threats? And we answer that question by asking whether the feeling of threat can be articulated as a falsifiable claim, and then look at the data that might falsify it.

We feel threatened by all sorts of things. But, if people want their personal hobgoblins to be the basis of policy, then we need to argue about whether our fears are rational (can we talked out of them, is the evidence we use to support them a kind we would consider good if it showed we were wrong, and so on).

If our feelings can’t be rationally defended, that doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to have them, or that we’re bad for having them. I can spend my whole life feeling threatened by gopher snakes, even if I can’t make a rational argument for their being threats. But that I feel threatened by gopher snakes shouldn’t mean I’m allowed to pass laws exterminating them.

The politics of irrational feelings is always a politics of privilege. The people with political power can make their rationally indefensible feelings the basis of politics by simply appealing to the feelings shared by others in power—fear of Democrats, Black voters, immigrants, accurate information about climate change, fairness in politics.

If we want a well-functioning democracy, then we need one in which we all argue about policies, and that means arguing about our policy commitments—i.e., our feelings. And it has to be a world in which we are open to feeling differently, or, at least, acknowledging the others feeling differently might be reasonable.

Feeling unconcerned about an intruder is not inherently more rational than feeling concerned about one.

[1] Were I to say that rattlesnakes are sometimes pretending to be gopher snakes, then my position would be non-falsifiable, and not an appropriate basis for policy.

When thinking of politics as war leads to a war on democracy

berlin holocaust memorial

A lot of people believe that politics is war. We gain ground, lose ground, attack other positions, undermine the opposition. While it might be nice if we could engage in political disagreements without aggression, that’s probably unreasonable. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s harmless or inevitable that people treat politics as war. The question is: what kind of war?[1]

The kind of war matters for two main reasons. First, we argue for different kinds of war in different ways, and the rhetorical strategies we use, if effective, create an imagined world that constrains our policy options. For instance, if I give a speech that effectively persuades large numbers of people that climate change is an urgent issue that must be dealt with immediately, then those people will advocate for policies that at least purport to ameliorate the problem. As will be explained, how we argue for war establishes expectations about what it would mean to win or lose the war. If we argue that we have to go to war in order to regain this territory because we are entitled to it, then the war can end when we’ve regained that territory. We might be able to avoid the war entirely if our threatening military action enables us to gain that territory in negotiations. Some ways of arguing for war give us a broad range of outcomes that could be considered victory (or at least acceptable), and some give us a very narrow range.

Second, different kinds of wars have different associated practices of engagement. Some kinds of war can involve very limited engagement, with very few troops, and little impact on civilians, whereas others are wars of elimination, in which the win condition is the extermination of another people (not just their military or leaders). Seeing politics as a battle between political figures to achieve certain specific policies might be problematic, but seeing politics as a war in which we must exterminate all and any opponents exterminates democracy.

It’s useful to think of wars as lying on a continuum of pure necessity (the Athenians have declared war and are at the city-state borders, a war of self-defense) to pure choice (let’s go attack Syracuse, although they’ve done nothing to threaten us, because they’re weak and have resources we’d like, a war of conquest). There are two kinds of war that lie between those extremes (or at least that are rhetorically presented as between them) that I want to talk about: preemptive and preventive wars.

The Encyclopedia of United States National Security defines preemptive war as:
waging war in an attempt to avoid an imminent attack or to gain a strategic advantage over an impending threat. The main aim of a preemptive attack is to gain the advantage of initiative by using military force before the opponent does. A typical example of a preemptive strike is an attack against enemy troops massed at a state’s border ready to invade. (592)
The entry gives the example of Sir Francis Drake attacking the Spanish Armada while it was still in harbor; scholars frequently cite Israel’s actions in the Six-Day War of 1967.

An especially troubling example is WWI. Many people argue that France, Russia, and Germany—that is, opposing forces– all believed that the situation necessitated preemptive war.[2] Russia mobilized, believing that Germany was about to attack; so did France; Germany, seeing its enemies mobilizing, attacked. That is, believing that war is inevitable and imminent can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s important if we’re thinking that politics is war.

Preemptive war does involve choice—the nation doesn’t have to go to war immediately, and could wait and see if the other really attacks. But the choices are clearly limited, in that, if the evidence is accurate, and the interpretation of the opponent’s intentions is accurate, peaceful co-existence is not one of the options.

A kind of war of choice sometimes rhetorically presented as preemptive war is preventive war–we start a war because we believe the other side intends to start one at some point in the future, and now is the most advantageous moment for our side. Preventive and preemptive wars can seem similar, but they are very different. Robert Jervis says “The difference between the two is in the timescale: The former means an attack against an adversary that is about to strike; the latter is a move to prevent a threat from fully emerging” (Jervis R. Mutual Assured Destruction. Foreign Policy. 2002;(133):40). The Encyclopedia of United States National Security defines preventive war: “Attacking an enemy now in order to avoid the risk of war under worsening circumstances later”

Preventive war doesn’t prevent war; it’s supposed to prevent losing a war we believe is inevitable, but not imminent. Hitler’s invasion of Poland was preventive war, not toward Poland (which wasn’t ever going to invade Germany), but as the most advantageous moment for Hitler to start the apocalyptic war he believed was inevitable (discussed later). The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, Third Punic War, and Iraq invasion were all preventive wars.

What I want to show in this post is that the rhetorical challenges inherent to advocating preventive war can easily create a kind of rhetorical trap for a rhetor and community, in which we end up constraining our win condition to extermination/subjugation of the Other.

Arguing for preventive war is rhetorically challenging for many reasons. The main problem is that an advocate of defensive war has to thread the needle of saying that the threat is and is not imminent. It isn’t imminent in the sense that we are about to be attacked, but the threat is such that we have to act now.

Rhetors arguing for preemptive war have evidence that an attack is imminent because they can point to massing of troops, documents that say war is intended, military installations, and so on. There is a demonstrable imminent existential threat. Rhetors arguing for preventive war try to redefine the situation justifying our aggression right now by projecting out-group aggression into the future. What evidence can they give to justify a hypothetical case about the future? It’s difficult (but not impossible) for advocates to make a falsfiable argument, since they’re talking about hypotheticals. A community is likely to respond, since the threat is not imminent, why go to war now? An advocate of preventive war has to show that diplomatic measures are unavailable, implausible, already exhausted, or futile. One way to argue that they’re futile is to argue that the Other is essentially and eternally a threat to us–that there are not specific material objectives we can reach (get this land, that resource) that would change their basic nature.

The case for preventive war is almost always inherently speculative, grounded in signs rather than evidence. Until Japan and Germany declared war on the US, any participation in WWII on the part of the US would have been a preventive war. Any military response on the part of the UK or France to Hitler’s various provocative acts (short of his invasion of Czechoslovakia) would have been preventive war. Various rhetors tried to argue for preventive war against Nazi Germany, but were completely unsuccessful. The arguments they were making seemed too much like the arguments for the Great War, which many people in the UK and US considered an unnecessary escalation of what could and should have been Hapsburg squabbling with Serbia.

Arguments for an aggressive response to Hitler were grounded in arguments about Hitler, who he was, and what he’d always said he wanted—they were arguments about identity and intention. And they could be countered by pointing out how often he talked about wanting peace (which he did, after about 1932), his having toned down his antisemitism (he shifted to dog whistle), arguments about sovereignty (we have no business going to war because of what a government does to its own citizens), and a shift in sympathy, what Robert Graves and Alan Hodge refer to as “anti-French feeling” that “caused a revulsion in favour of the poor downtrodden Germans” (which they date as early as 1922, The Long Week-End 90). Quotes from Mein Kampf had to be taken as more authoritative evidence than quotes from his latest speeches.

Just to be clear: I’m not saying preventive war against Hitler would have been wrong, or that the arguments for and against a more aggressive stance toward Hitler were equally strong. On the contrary, I think that, if ever there was a justified preventive war, it would have been one against Hitler, and that the evidence that he was a threat was better than the arguments people made that he wasn’t. I’m saying that, even with a case that seems so clearcut to us, at the time, it was a very difficult case to make. Arguing for preventive war is hard. The rhetorical solution is generally, as it was with Hitler, to argue that Hitler was essentially an existential threat to Europe.

It’s a funny kind of historical irony that Hitler made the mirror image of that argument. Hitler had an apocalyptic narrative about nations and races. An oversimplified version of it is something like this: nations are locked in a battle of survival—wars are inevitable. A nation prepares itself for war through racial purity, martial training, and being in continual war. A pure Aryan nation is, if fueled by sufficient will, destined and entitled to be the master race. If it isn’t the master race, it will be destroyed by others. Thus, anything less than complete domination means extermination by some other nation or race. We must conquer the other, or they will do to us what we are advocating doing to them.[3] The win condition for Hitler was extermination or subjugation of all countries other than Nazi Germany. There was no such thing as peaceful coexistence of equals.[4]

For a while, I had the hypothesis that preventive war necessarily has win conditions of extermination/subjugation because the rhetorical strategy that rhetors inevitably adopt is an argument about essential threat–because the very existence of the Other is essentially and eternally threatening for us, the only solution is extermination (or subjugation so severe it amount to political extermination). The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 is a striking counterexample.

Russia was building a railway and fortress close enough to Japan that they would enable effective military action when completed. Neither the railway nor fortress were a threat at the moment, and they wouldn’t even be an existential threat when completed, but they would give considerable military advantage to Russia in case of a war over Korea. Japan had reason to believe that Russia intended just such a war. Japan was successful in the war, but didn’t try to exterminate or subjugate Russia. There were limited and specific win conditions—eliminate the threat of the railway and deter Russia from mucking around in Korea. Once it achieved those goals, the conflict could end.

There were two things that made Japan’s rhetoric about the war different from, for instance, Hitler’s. First, given the governmental structure, there wasn’t much need to mobilize the Japanese people through arguments about the need to go to war. Second, the “need” was very specific, and so the case was very specific—Russia’s behavior in a specific region in Asia. Japan didn’t need to make the argument that there was an apocalyptic battle between Russia and Japan made inevitable by their very natures (the argument made for preventive war between Sparta and Athens, for instance) or by the nature of history itself (Hitler’s argument). In other words, the rhetoric for starting the war implies the conditions that can end it. If the argument for the war is that the very existence of the Other presents an existential threat to us, then the Other will have to be exterminated. If the argument for the war is that the Other will use its power to subjugate us, then the Other will have to be subjugated so thoroughly that it has almost no power.

I really wish we didn’t think of politics as war, but that’s a different post. Here I’m saying that, if we are going to imagine it as war, then, it matters what kind of war we imagine. If it’s a war to achieve certain specific objectives, then it’s a war that can end when the Other grants those objectives. If it’s preventive war necessitated by the very existence of the Other being an existential threat to us, then it’s a war of extermination or subjugation. Then it’s a war on democracy.



[1] To keep from getting excessively pedantic and having too many terms, I’m using “war” in the broadest sense, including any kind of military action, and not just formally declared wars between nations.
[2] The possibility of a nation engaging in preemptive war means that nations have to be careful with threats of military action, even if intended as bluffs to get better terms in negotiation. If they are understood as bluffs, they have no impact on negotiation. But, if they are taken as genuine massing of forces for aggression, they can provoke preemptive war on the part of the other nation.
[3] One of the paradoxes of this way of thinking about co-existence is that it’s basically self-fulfilling. The belief that sharing power with the Other, for instance, means that, if they ever want power (and it’s likely they will), then we are started on the ladder of extermination, then we start on the ladder of a war of extermination.
[4] There was, at best, and perhaps only temporarily, a sphere of influence coexistence. Japan might be allowed to be dominant in Asia, and Hitler intermittently said that he would allow Britain to keep its colonies, but no country could exist that could ever present a threat to Germany hegemony.

Homophobes who vote for Lindsey Graham aren’t hypocrites

books about demagoguery

It seems plausible to infer that Lindsey Graham is gay, and that he is regularly serviced by male sex workers. He is a huge hero to the homophobic fundagelicals—people who want to enable discrimination against non-hets (and other people, but that’s a different post) in terms of employment, civil rights, housing. Critics of that agenda say that both Graham and homophobic fundagelicals are hypocrites, since they continue to employ someone who persistently works for the persecution of people like him.

It isn’t hypocrisy. I’m not saying it’s good or okay–I’ll argue it’s a rejection of Christ—I’m saying that voting for Graham doesn’t violate their understanding of what homosexuality is and how it should function in our culture, and it doesn’t violate any principle of theirs because they don’t have a political agenda grounded in any particular principle.

That’s partially because they’ve lost the thread of their own argument. Homophobic fundagelicals are like that uncle at Thanksgiving who started out defending a position about which he feels strongly, but also about which he’s never thought particularly carefully. And now he’s had too much to drink to remember exactly what he’s said so far in its defense, or even what exactly his position is. But he’ll defend it, or something like it, by God.

At one time, the argument was that homosexuality and pedophilia were identical, and therefore it was necessary to criminalize and pathologize homosexuality in order to protect children. Then there was the Sodom argument. Both of those finally collapsed as indefensible, but many people still held on to the notion that homosexual desire was Satanic, and could be prayed away. After a while, they gave up on that argument too, and started making the analogy to addiction—you might be an alcoholic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stop drinking.

There’s an old joke among Baptists—who supposedly don’t drink—as to “what mile” a Baptist is. A ten-mile Baptist doesn’t drink within ten miles of his church. A one-mile Baptist only waits a mile.

They see Lindsey Graham as a ten-mile gay, and they’re good with that. He supports their homophobic political agenda, and he isn’t open about his sexuality.

At this point, most (all?) fundagelicals who support a homophobic political agenda all have relatives whom they know are queer in some way or other, and they just want the person not to say it out loud. And that is the important part—they are fine with queer people who don’t talk openly about being queer. Supporting Graham is consistent with the principle that queer people are okay if they aren’t out, and they support a homophobic agenda. 

These same people say that they are victimized when they aren’t allowed to use taxpayer money and governmental institutions to try to convert people to their religion. They don’t just want to be open about their beliefs and practices—they want to be able to pressure people to convert. Queers should be out of the public space, and fundagelicals should be at the center of it.

In other words, they do not do unto others as they would have done unto them.

They reject the guy who said that was important.

They don’t violate their own principles, but they violate his.

By supporting Lindsey Graham while also supporting a homophobic policy agenda, they don’t violate their own principles, because their principle about homosexuality is that it’s fine if it’s in the closet, and Graham is, but they violate the pretty clear principle set out by that guy whom they reject. And that is the problem.

Vladimir’s Choice and student loan forgiveness

stairs at university of texas

Student loan forgiveness would help everyone, but it wouldn’t help everyone equally. Everyone would benefit a lot, and the people who still owe money would benefit somewhat more than the people who paid off their debts.

Let’s call the people who paid off their debts Vladimir, and the people who still owe are Ivan.

Just to be clear: student loan forgiveness means that Vladimir and Ivan would get all the benefits that the US as a whole would get from the program. Ivan would get the additional benefit of not having to pay back as much money. So, Ivan would benefit more.

“Vladimir’s Choice” is a Russian folk tale that is used by cognitive pscyhologists to explain why people will often choose not to benefit just in order to make sure an out-group doesn’t also benefit. Vladimir, an impoverished peasant, was one day visited by God, who said, “Vladimir, I will give you anything you want.” While Vladimir was thinking about what he wanted, God said, “But there is one condition. Whatever I give you, I will give twice that to Ivan.” Vladimir thought about it for a while, and then said, “Gouge out one of my eyes.”

There is a classic experiment along these lines. People are broken into two groups, and one group (Vladimir) is given the option of getting ten dollars, in which case five dollars will be given to the other group (Ivan), or getting twenty dollars, in which case fifteen dollars will be given to Ivan.

It’s astonishing the number of people who choose the first option—Vladimir’s Choice. The book Dying of Whiteness has a chapter about people who would materially benefit if Medicaid were expanded to their state (by which I mean they would live longer) but they would rather suffer than allow those same benefits to go to minorities.

There are, I think, some really good objections to student loan forgiveness in terms of disproportionate benefit (some of which are mentioned here and here). These objectons have to do with such a transfer of wealth benefitting people who are already reasonably well off (I think they’re reasonable, and imply some methods of forgiveness are better than others, not that the whole idea is bad). But that isn’t the kind of objection I hear most often—the one I hear is Vladimir’s Choice.




The Just World Model, faith in the will, and institutional racism

Mural of George Floyd
Photograph by Omer Messinger / Sipa / AP

Why do some Libertarians have so much trouble with the concept of systemic/institutional racism?

Why can people who believe complicated conspiracy theories not believe that a little bit of racism on the part of a lot of people adds up to a lot of racism? Why can people who believe that government regulations are oppressive refuse to think that oppression might have valences? Why can people who believe that big institutions do everything wrong not think that they might also get issues of race wrong?

The contradiction is particularly troubling when it comes to Libertarians, since, in my experience, they strive to be consistent and logical in how their policies relate to their beliefs (unlike, for instance, Trump supporters). And Reason talks about institutional racism as a problem, so it isn’t that Libertarianism is essentially hostile to recognizing institutional racism.

Libertarians say that the basis of their belief is that individuals should be fully free in order to achieve what they can. Obviously, a person born into poverty isn’t as free in terms of the possible achievements as someone born into wealth. So, were Libertarians genuinely committed to a notion of a system that made sure all individuals are equally free, they would fully support systems that levelled the playing-field, so to speak, of the rich and poor, the abled and disabled, the stigmatized and the privileged.

In this post, I want to talk about the Libertarians who refuse to support such policies, and that isn’t all of them (in other words, #notallLibertarians).

These Libertarians like the strictures of birth that make sure the game is rigged, but they don’t like the strictures of government that try to make sure that individuals are free to achieve their best. They don’t want a fully free system, in which all people are equally free to achieve all things; they want a system in which they can thrive without restriction. They argue that help from the government creates dependency, while accepting the help they’ve gotten from their birth hasn’t. That doesn’t make sense. If accepting help creates dependency, then they’re dependent on their birth.

I have spent a non-trivial amount of time arguing with this kind of Libertarian, and my experience is that their entire way of arguing makes no sense unless you assume the just world model, and engage in a non-trivial amount of “no true Scotsman.” When pushed on the point that they can’t actually defend their position, they start the whaddaboutism. I’ve also never met a Libertarian who knew much of anything about the economic history of the nineteenth century, but that’s a different crank theory.

I like Libertarians. In my experience, they’re logical af. Thus, unlike people on various other points on the political spectrum (it isn’t a binary or continuum), most of them are consistent regarding their major premises. They follow their arguments out. I admire that. They take unpopular positions because those positions logically follow from the premises they value. They reason deductively.

That they are true to their principles makes them very different from a lot of people with whom I argue, and I think they should praised for that consistency. The problem is that some Libertarians reason from the premise that all individuals should be equally free to achieve, while some reason deductively from the just world model and faith in the will. Let’s call this latter kind of Libertarian Just World Libertarians.[1]

The “just world model” says that people, products, and ideas that are good will succeed. As a corollary, the most successful people, products, and ideas are the best.

The “just world model” is one of those models not smart enough to be wrong. Its adherents (they’re all over the ideological spectrum) can find data to support the just world model, but arguing with them always reminds me of Catholic arguments for the virgin birth (involving parrots and light through glass). They refuse to name the data that would prove them wrong. The just world model supportable, but non-falsifiable. They almost always end up in the “no true Scotsman” fallacy or Gnosticism.

There is an old joke: someone says, “All Scots like haggis,” and Joe says, “I’m a Scotsman, and I don’t like haggis,” and the person responds, “You don’t count. You aren’t a true Scotsman.” That’s how the “just world model” works—it’s an Escher argument, in which each claim disappears into the premise that can’t be falsified.

The second non-falsifiable principle to which Just World Libertarians are committed is that if an individual wants something badly enough, they can get it. It’s still “no true Scotsman” because an individual who doesn’t achieve their goals can be dismissed as not having enough will.

Libertarians are far from alone in reasoning about politics in this way—they have premises that they refuse to consider rationally. Were I Queen of the Universe, I would dictate that instead of talking about a binary or continuum of left or right, we would map the spectrum of political affiliations in terms of how people reason about politics, rather than what their politics are. Thus, people who refuse to look at disconfirming data, read opposition information, or identify what would make them change their mind would all be grouped together, regardless of how they vote. Unhappily, I am not Queen of the Universe.

What matters in a democracy isn’t what your political affiliations are. Democracies can manage a lot of very different political affiliations. What matters is our commitment to democracy. It doesn’t matter if media would say that you’re “left” or “right” or “centrist.” If you aspire to a one-party state, if you think your policy agenda is obviously right and people only disagree with you because they’re deluded or corrupt, if you refuse to look at information that contradicts what you believe, if you don’t worry about whether your argument is rational, you’re opposed to democracy.

The two premises of Just World Libertarianism—people get what they deserve, and an individual can achieve whatever he wants with sufficient will (the gendered pronoun is deliberate)—are confounded by African-American men being stopped more often, searched more often, charged more often, and getting harsher penalties than white men. If our system doesn’t treat African American men in the same way it treats white men, and therefore African-American men are not equally able to achieve whatever they want, then the major premises of Just World Libertarianism are wrong.

And they are. Racism isn’t the consequence of individuals who deliberately choose to engage in racist actions out of hate or fear. Racism is a system that ensures that people of variously imagined stigmatized “races” are held to different standards from others, given diminished options, and perceived as deserving their diminished status because that they have a diminished status is proof that they are worse.

And that’s why Just World Libertarianism is racist. The adherents of that ideology are, in my experience, non-falsifiably committed to exactly the premises that fuel institutional racism. Of course, it isn’t only Just World Libertarians who are irrationally committed to the just world model and faith in the will—so are American fundagelicals.

And that is why fundagelicals fling themselves around like over-tired two-year olds when anyone talks about institutional racism: because if institutional racism is a plausible explanation about how the world works, then the basic premises of their political agenda are flawed. It is, and they are. And they’re racist.



[1] In my experience, the self-described Libertarians who consistently vote GOP are in this latter category. So I suppose someone could say, “Not real Libertarians.”

Demagoguery is not specific to democracies

Theodore Bilbo

Every once in a while I find myself arguing with people about an apparently pedantic, but actually very important, point about demagoguery. People I respect and think are very smart insist that demagoguery is a condition unique to democracy.

I think that this argument comes from several sources. One is Mortimer Adler, who argued that the Athenian empire collapsed because of “too much democracy.” (It didn’t.) Another is sloppy inference from morphemes. Demagoguery and democracy share the “dem” after all.

Although pedantic, this argument is also really troubling, in that it implies that the solution to demagoguery is to abandon democracy, and/or that only the masses are susceptible to demagoguery, a solution that also implies some degree of authoritarianism.

It’s not only pedantic, but wrong.

Were Adler right, then the elites in Athens would have been right in their decisions, and the problems would have come from bad decisions on the part of the “demes” (the small landowners). Alcibiades was elite; he was a jerk out for himself. There’s no reason to think he was only supported by the small landowners. And that term—the demes, small landowners–is the linguistic source of demagoguery and democracy. Demagogues were leaders of the small landowners—the demes. Democracy is a system that includes them.

Alcibiades was an example of what was toxic in Athenian democracy, but his success had nothing to do with too much inclusion. It was about too much factionalism on the part of oligarchs and demes.

What happened is that what had been a neutral term for the leader of a political party (the demes) became a term for an unscrupulous rhetor, largely as a consequence of anti-democratic elitists like Plato and Plutarch.

Thucydides used the term in a neutral way, meaning the leader of the party of the demes. So, his use of the term is like someone saying “the leading Libertarian” or “the leader of the Republicans.” His hero Pericles was a leader of the demes, a demagogue. One of his villains, Cleon, was a leader of the demes, a demagogue. Alcibiades was a disaster, and not a leader of the demes, and another disastrous leader, Nikias, was not a demagogue.

What made Cleon, Alcibiades, and Nikias disastrous leaders wasn’t that they were demagogues (only Cleon was) but that they didn’t have Pericles’ combination of good judgment and rhetorical skill. Thucydides wasn’t making a point about democracy, but about rhetoric and judgment.

Aristotle (whose understanding of demagoguery is pretty interesting) says that a demagogue—that is, a populist politician—can gain power when the rich so oppress the poor that the poor are desperate. Then, the rich get worried about the agitation of the poor and so support a tyrant. And democracy ends.

Plato and Plutarch both took up the issue of demagoguery, and both were profoundly elitist, thinking that the demes should have no part in politics. Plutarch’s narrative about politics was that there are two groups: the rich (basically reasonable) and the poor (completely driven by emotions). Poor people are basically irrational, and easily roused to authoritarianism. A good government gives more power to the rich, but also gives the poor a way to express their concerns that the rich can consider. (This is a misunderstanding of what happened in Athens, by the way.)

The Founders were strongly influenced by Plutarch. And, therefore, their ideal was not the Athenian democracy, but the Roman republic. They believed the republic solved the problem of rich v. poor. And they knew that the Roman republic had its demagogues. So even the Founders understood that demagoguery was not just a problem of democracies—it arose in republics.

Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides because he was worried about the presence and damage of demagogues, and he lived in a monarchy. His horror of demagoguery was the consequence of his seeing the devastation created by the Thirty Years War and the English Civil Wars, neither of which happened in a democracy or republic.

It would be difficult to claim that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not demagoguery, and it was created under an authoritarian monarchy. Hitler’s rhetoric began in the conditions of democracy, and remained the same under fascism. Did he stop being a demagogue March 24, 1933 when he became dictator? Stalin’s rhetoric (not a democracy) is exactly like Father Charles Coughlin (democracy). But only Coughlin’s is demagoguery? If people have the same rhetorical strategies, shouldn’t we characterize their rhetoric with the same term?

Insisting that demagoguery is a condition of democracy means that we say that the Founders and Hobbes were wrong to worry about it, that Hitler stopped being a demagogue March 24, 1933, that neither Castro nor Stalin ever engaged in it, that there was never demagoguery about Jews, Slavs, Africans, and…well, this list is way too long, except in democracies.

Really? Is that a claim anyone wants to defend? That the rhetoric that blamed Jews for the plague was not demagoguery? Even if it was exactly like the demagoguery during the Weimar democracy that blamed them for Germans losing the Great War? So, exactly the same rhetoric is not the same just because of the governmental system under which it happened?

Pedantic much?

Demagoguery is not a form of rhetoric that only arises in democracies.




What happens next: arguing (or not) with people who still support Trump

vivien leigh raising an eyebrow
Image from here https://belldora.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/vivien-leigh-vii.jpg

As I said a long time ago, a lot of Trump supporters stopped trying to defend him through rational-critical argumentation fairly early on in his Administration. I’ve read defenses of him, ranging from your high school friend to scholars. It’s either fallacious zero-sum demagoguery–non-Trump supporters are SO bad that nothing Trump can do is something I will condemn– or, more commonly, charismatic leadership. A lot simply refuse to engage, and those who do try to engage in argumentation are kind of impressive in terms of how many fallacies they can fit into a few words.

Trump supporters (and not just Trump supporters) believe our political spectrum is a binary, and so believe “fairness” is saying that “both sides are just as bad.” So here I should say, “both sides” are not just as bad because there aren’t two sides. Politics isn’t a binary or continuum. More important, while there are people who can’t defend their position through rational-critical argumentation who have all sorts of affiliations, I haven’t run across a Trump supporter who can in a long time.[1] So, much of what I’m saying applies to people who aren’t Trump supporters but are irrationally committed to Paleo, Brittney, Obama, single-payer health care, Santana, hating Santana, and, well, everything.

And here I should explain why I use the term “argumentation” rather than argument. An argument is a claim. That you can make a claim and support it with data from a reliable source doesn’t mean that you’ve supported your claim rationally, nor that your commitment to that claim is rational.

But a lot of people think that a claim “supported” by a piece of evidence from a reputable source is a good argument. That the best-selling argument textbook endorses this view has made me ragey for years.

When you arguing with someone whose commitment isn’t capable of rational defense, and you point out that 1) they don’t believe their own major premise (explained below), 2) and/or their claim is contradicted by other sources, 3) and/or they’ve put forward a fallacious argument, or 4) and, the most important point, that the way they’re deliberating about politics is a way they would never make decisions in their own area of expertise, in my experience, people respond in one of three ways.

  1. A fair number of people never get your point. It isn’t about whether they can find evidence to support their position; it’s about whether they’re willing to think about how they’re thinking. They just get confused when you talk about major premises and non-falsifiability. These people aren’t uneducated. My most recent failures to get someone to understand that their way of reasoning about Trump is a bad way to reason include an anesthesiologist and mechanical engineer.
  2. Some people (in my experience, this is less common than it used to be) will say, now that you’ve shown their position is completely irrational, that everyone’s position is irrational. That’s just projection, and the kind of universalizing that comes from being in such a position of privilege that they’ve never had to listen to others. This response is deflection–instead of defending their inability to engage in rational argumentation, they just declare that no one engages in it.

    It’s motivism. The problem for them, of course, is that there are lots of examples of people engaging in rational-critical discourse and thereby changing their minds about an issue. But they won’t look at those examples because being a Trump supporter means refusing to look at any disconfirming data. They’re in a vicious circle of irrationality.

    They believe that what they believe is true, and they so much believe that it’s true that they refuse to look at evidence that it isn’t true. If they are presented with evidence that their beliefs aren’t true, they reject that evidence on the grounds that it’s biased, since it says their beliefs aren’t true.
  3. They say that they aren’t really engaged in good faith argumentation—they’re just teasing libruls. They seem to think that their admitting to be unable to defend their position rationally is a virtue.

    I’ve said elsewhere that it’s like when cats get entangled in the blinds and pretend they meant it, but it’s actually worse.

Not all extremists are Trump supporters, but, in my experience, all Trump supporters are extremists in that they refuse to think about how their commitment might be wrong. What has happened, as always happens in demagoguery, is that their sense of themselves as good people has gotten attached to the claim that supporting Trump was/is a good choice. They believe that admitting that their support was mistaken would be shameful submitting to anti-Trumpers. They live in a world of demagoguery in which there are two groups: the good and the bad. They think that admitting that Trump was bad means admitting that they are the bad group.

Everyone makes bad decisions. Imagine that you decided to invest in a Redball, Inc project that claimed it would eternally keep squirrels from the redball, and it went bust. Does that mean you’re a bad person, that what the squirrels said was right?

No. It means you made a bad decision. And making better decisions means understanding why investing in Redball, Inc seemed like a good idea. Having gotten suckered doesn’t make you a bad person, but a person who has reasoned badly. If we think about decision-making as good or bad people, then we’re in a world of demagoguery. If we think about decision-making in terms of better or worse ways, then we have ways of agreeing with wildly different people. We’re in the world of democracy.

The problem is that Fox, a completely demagogic site, is trusted by 40% of people because it is demagogic. Fox, Limbaugh, and various others are completely anti-democratic. They’re authoritarian populist. And that’s why people like them. People like hearing that their point of view is the only legitimate one, that they are the real people, and so only the political agenda promoted by someone who embodies real people is democracy (that’s how current GOP rhetoric says that their minority views are the real American views).

Because the premise of the pro-GOP propaganda machine is that only their political position is the real position of real people, then people advocating it can feel that they’re the realists, arguing from a real position. It isn’t real in terms of being falsifiable; it’s real in terms of feeling real. And it’s real because they can find evidence.

Fox’s talking points are derived deductively from whatever talking points will be most effective at supporting today’s GOP agenda. And their rhetoric is irrational (such as inconsistent appeals to major premises and refusal to look at disconfirming data, lame whaddaboutism).

What’s kind of genius about the rabid pro-Trump propaganda is that it is telling people, “Say this, and, then, when people point out that what we’ve told you to say is stupid, false, fallacious, and you can’t defend it, then say you’re just triggering libs.” They’ve found a way to transform the pro-Trump camp’s inability to support Trump rationally into a virtue.

I think this rhetorical strategy is an admission that the GOP political agenda—especially supporting Trump—is a fragile house of cards that can’t stand even the breath of rational-critical policy argumentation. I think that’s important. People with good policies can support them in argumentation. People with bad policies can’t. So, we should start with the observation that supporting Trump is rationally indefensible.

Supporters of Trump and the GOP are well-trained in deflection. If a critic points out that, for instance, Trump’s vacations not only cost taxpayers far more than the trips Obama took that had Fox pundits and viewers choking with rage, but a tremendous amount of that money went directly to Trump. If you point that out, though, you’ll get deflection, usually some version of whaddaboutism. The basic argument is that “Trump is good because Biden kicked a squirrel.” The impulse for critics of Trump is to take issue with the minor premise. We’ll try to show that Biden didn’t kick a squirrel, or it wasn’t a squirrel, or Trump has kicked more squirrels. If you want to do that (and I often do) go for it, but just be clear that it won’t work because Trump supporters don’t support Trump because of his behavior to squirrels. They support Trump. They then find reasons to justify their support. Their position isn’t rational.

Here’s a digression that won’t be interesting to most people, but, if you teach argumentation, you need to be able to follow this.

“Trump is good because Biden kicked a squirrel” is an enthymeme with an undistributed middle.

A is B b/c C did D.

A [Trump] is B [good] because C [Biden] kicked a squirrel [D].

Instead of arguing the minor premise (whether Biden kicked a squirrel), point out that the whole argument is fallacious. They might both be bad.

So, how do you argue with people who won’t (can’t) argue their case rationally, engage in deflection, and when, pantsed, will just claim to be trolling when they’ve made a fool of themselves argumentatively?

You can argue with them to see if you can get them to change their minds. (You can, but they’ll never admit to it, which is interesting–they think being closed to persuasion is a virtue. I find that very odd.)

There are, I think, three responses that sometimes work. First, if it’s possible, show them that their claims are refuted by in-group sources.

Second, show them that the way they reason about politics isn’t how they reason about their job. A doctor who had a commitment to a particular treatment and refused to look at any studies that showed his commitment might be wrong would be a terrible doctor. A citizen who does the same is a terrible citizen.[2]

Third, and the most effective, is refusing to argue with them unless they put forward a rational argument. Ask them: are your beliefs about Trump falsifiable? What evidence would cause you to change your mind about Trump?

If the answer is no, and nothing, then you say, “Fine, your beliefs aren’t rational, and we aren’t talking politics.”

They will try to make you defend whatever they think Biden believes, and you have several options.

You can say, “We aren’t talking politics. Have more pie.” You can also say, “If Biden is wrong, that doesn’t mean Trump is right. Are your beliefs about Trump falsifiable? What evidence would cause you to change your mind about Trump? If not and nothing, then we aren’t talking politics because your position isn’t rational.” You can be very loving in what you say, “I love you so much, and this topic makes us all unhappy, so let’s talk about cousin Dwerp winning a hokey-pokey trophy.” Some people I know have said, “You taught me to reason thoughtfully, and you can’t when it comes to Trump, and that makes me sad. Let’s change the subject.”

Stand your ground. Refuse to talk about politics. They will do everything they can to shift the burden of proof to you, but you can just refuse to take it on. They’ll engage in passive-aggressive swipes at Biden and Democrats. When they do so, raise an eyebrow like Vivien Leigh, ask them if they’re trying to talk politics, snicker, smirk, walk out of the room, take a careful assessment of your fingernails, offer them pie, ignore them, do complicated math problems in your head, but you are under no obligation to engage people who are engaged in demagoguery. If they won’t say that their beliefs are falsifiable and that they can name the evidence that would cause them to change their minds, then they aren’t open to argumentation.

They will explode like someone throwing a match into a fireworks stand. In my experience, they and their enablers will try to use norms of “let’s get along” to allow them to make their arguments while silencing you. You might have to leave. Authoritarian families will try to make you the villain, although the Trump supporter is the one who violated boundaries (in authoritarian families, only the asshole is allowed to set boundaries).

It is not your job to put out the fire they have started on themselves by supporting someone who is rationally indefensible. Trump appeals to authoritarians. Paradoxically, insisting on the authority of argument, which means a lot of walking away and refusing to engage, has far more impact than staying in the authoritarian space and trying to refute demagogic arguments point by point.

Change the subject, and, if that doesn’t work, walk away.

[1] I have run across figures who can defend specific actions of his. I’m not saying that they’re right, or that I agree with them–being right and being able to put forward a rational-critical argument aren’t the same thing.

[2] Here is another issue that makes me ragey. Propaganda is for free, since it’s paid for by groups that can profit from it getting out there. Being actually informed about politics is incredibly expensive.