“Defeats will be defeats and lassitude will be lassitude. But we can improve our propaganda.” (Carl Rowan, Director of the US Information Agency, June 1964, FRUS #189 I: 429).
In early June of 1964, major LBJ policy-makers met in Honolulu to discuss the bad and deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. SVN was on its third government in ten months (there had been a coup in November of 1963 and another in January of 1964), and advisors had spent the spring talking about how bad the situation was. In a March 1964 memo to LBJ, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reported that “the situation has unquestionably been growing worse” (FRUS #84). “Large groups of the population are now showing signs of apathy and indifference [….] Draft dodging is high while the Viet Cong are recruiting energetically and effectively [….] The political control structure extending from Saigon down into the hamlets disappeared following the November coup.” A CIA memo from May has this as the summary:
“The over-all situation in South Vietnam remains extremely fragile. Although there has been some improvement in GVN/ARVN performance, sustained Viet Cong pressure continues to erode GVN authority throughout the country, undercut US/GVN programs and depress South Vietnamese morale. We do not see any signs that these trends are yet ‘bottoming out.’ During the next several months there will be increasing danger than an assassination of Khanh, a successful coup, a grave military reverse, or a succession of military setbacks could have a critical psychological impact in South Vietnam. In any case, if the tide of deterioration has not been arrested by the end of the year, the anti-Communist position is likely to become untenable.” (FRUS #159)
At that June meeting, Carl Rowan presented a report as to what should be done, and he summarized it as: “Defeats will be defeats and lassitude will be lassitude. But we can improve our propaganda.” (FRUS #189). This is a recurrent theme in documents from that era, including military ones—the claim that effective messaging could solve what were structural problems. They didn’t. They couldn’t.
I was briefly involved in MLA, and I spent far too much time at meetings listening to people say that declining enrollments in the humanities could be solved by better messaging about the values of a humanistic education; I heard the same thing in far too many English Department meetings.
Just to be clear (and to try to head off people telling me that a humanistic education is valuable), I do not disagree with the message. I disagree that the problem can be solved by getting the message right, or getting the message out there. I’m saying that the rhetoric isn’t enough.
I am certain that there are tremendous benefits, both to an individual and to a culture, in a humanistic education, especially studying literature and language(s). That’s why I spent a career as a scholar and teacher in the humanities. But, enrollments weren’t (and aren’t) declining just because people haven’t gotten the message. There were, and are, declining enrollments for a variety of structural reasons, most of which are related to issues of funding for university educations. The fact is that the more that college costs, and the more that those costs are borne by students taking on crippling debt, the more that students want a degree that lands them a job right out of college.
Once again, I am not arguing that’s a good way for people to think about college; I am saying that the reason for declining enrollments isn’t something we can solve by better messaging about the values of a liberal arts education. For the rhetorical approach to be effective (and ethical) it has to be in conjunction with solving the structural problems. Any solution has to involve a more equitable system of funding higher education.
I am tired of people blaming the Dems’ “messaging” for the GOP’s success. I thought that Dem messaging was savvy and impressive. They couldn’t get it to enough people because people live in media enclaves. If you know any pro-GOP voters, then you know that they get all their information from media that won’t let one word of that message reach them, and that those voters choose to remain in enclaves. How, exactly, were the Dems supposed to reach your high school friend who rejects as “librul bullshit” anything that contradicts or complicates what their favorite pundit, youtuber, or podcaster tells them? What messaging would have worked?
The GOP is successful because enough people vote for the GOP and not enough vote against them. Voter suppression helps, but what most helps is anti-Dem rhetoric.
Several times I had the opportunity to hear Colin Allred speak, and his rhetoric was genius. It was perfect. Cruz didn’t try to refute Allred’s rhetoric; all Ted Cruz had to do was say, over and over (and he did), that Allred supported transgender rights.
From the Texas Observer: “Cruz and his allied political groups blitzed the airwaves with ads highlighting that vote and Allred’s other stances in favor of transgender rights. The ads, often featuring imagery of boys competing against girls in sports, reflected what Cruz’s team had found from focus groups and polling: Among the few million voters they’d identified who were truly on the fence, the transgender sports topic was most effective in driving support to Cruz, said Sam Cooper, a strategist for Cruz’s campaign.”
Transphobia is not a rhetorical problem that can be ended by the Dems getting the message right. Bigotry is systemic. Any solution will involve rhetoric, and rhetoric is important. But it isn’t enough.
In movies, struggling writers are portrayed as trying to come up with ideas. In my experience as a writer and teacher of writing, that isn’t the hard part. Ideas are easy, and are much better in our head than on the paper, so a very, very hard part of writing is to getting the smart and elegant ideas in our head to be comprehensible to someone else, let alone either persuasive or admired. But the even harder part is submitting something we’ve written—sending it off to be judged. It feels like the first day of sending a child to middle school—will they be bullied? Will they make friends? Will they change beyond recognition?
And I think there’s another reason that submitting a piece of writing is so hard. Our fantasies about what is going to happen when we submit a piece of writing are always more pleasurable than any plausible reality.
Somerset Maugham has a story called “Mirage,” about someone he knew when he was a medical student. Grosely was spending his time and money on wine and women, and eventually came up with a scam to get more money. He was caught, arrested, and kicked out of school. He became a kind of customs official in China, and, desperate to get back to partying in London, was as corrupt as possible: “He was consumed by one ambition, to save enough to be able to go back to England and live the life from which he had been snatched as a boy.”
After 25 years, he did go back to England, and he did try to live the life he’d lived at nineteen. But he couldn’t, of course. London was different, and so was he, and it was all a massive disappointment. He started to think about China, and what a great place it had been, and what a great time he could have there with all the money he’d made. So he headed back. He got almost to China, but stopped just shy of it (in Haiphong). Maugham explains:
“England had been such a terrible disappointment that now he was afraid to put China to the test too. If that failed him he had nothing. For years England had been like a mirage in the desert. But when he had yielded to the attraction, those shining pools and the palm trees and the green grass were nothing but the rolling sandy dunes. He had China, and so long as he never saw it again he kept it.”
I read that story as a graduate student trying to write a dissertation, and it resonated. As long as I didn’t finish the dissertation, I could entertain outrageous fantasies about its reception, quality, and impact. Once submitted, it was what it was. It was passable. (And unpublishable.) It was not anything like what I’d imagined it could be.
I have felt that way about every single piece of writing since (including this blog post)—I’m hesitant to finish it because of not wanting to give up the dream of what it could be.
Every writer of any genre has a lot of partially-written things. I knew a poet who actually had a drawer in his desk into which he dropped pieces of paper onto which he’d written lines that came to him that seemed good, but he didn’t have the rest of the poem. I don’t know if he ever pulled any of those pieces of paper out and wrote the rest of the poem (he did publish quite a bit of poetry). There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of incomplete projects, and lots of good reasons to leave them incomplete.
I once pulled out a ten-year old unsubmitted and unfinished piece of writing, revised it, and submitted it—it was published, and won an award. It took ten years for me to understand what that argument was really about, so leaving it unfinished for that long wasn’t a bad choice at all. There are others that will remain forever unfinished—also not a bad choice.
But there are times when one should just hit submit. The dreams may not come true, but there will be other pieces of writing about which we can dream.
I’m saying all this because I hope people who might be stuck in their writing will find it hopeful. Just hit submit.
“The most unreliable indication of whether your writing is good or bad is how you feel about it.” Susan Wells
I’m in the process of significantly rewriting an article (based on readers’ comments), and last night I dreamed that I wanted to get to the top of a building, and I couldn’t find the right way to get there. I kept taking stairs that led me elsewhere. Some of those other places were interesting, and some were dreary, but they weren’t where I was trying to go. I often have dreams like that when I’m in the Slough of Despond stage of a writing process.
A friend mentioned that when she is writing, she has dreams about trying to drive a vehicle that is too big, unfamiliar, or unwieldy.
When I was writing my dissertation, I had moments of thinking that I couldn’t possibly write a dissertation, but I did. At several points in every writing project I have found myself convinced I can’t do it, there’s no point in my doing it, and all my previous successes were meaningless flukes. It’s much like the Slough of Despond in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress:
This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place; and this is the reason of the badness of this ground.
Pilgrim’s Progress is a (very boring) book about the soul’s progress toward salvation, told in the form of “Christian” and his travels/travails. Initially, Christian is travelling with someone called Pliable, and they both fall into a bog. Pliable at that point gives up the journey entirely,
and angrily said to his fellow, Is this the happiness you have told me all this while of? If we have such ill speed at our first setting out, what may we expect between this and our journey’s end? May I get out again with my life, you shall possess the brave country alone for me. And with that he gave a desperate struggle or two, and got out of the mire on that side of the slough which was next to his own house: so away he went, and Christian saw him no more.
Christian gets help, appropriately enough from someone named Help, who explains that there are ways out of the bog, but it is despair itself that traps travellers.
I’m writing this because I wish it’s something that I had understood as a junior scholar. There may be people out there for whom writing a lot is a necessary part of their profession and who find it easy, or who go from start to finish on a project without falling into a bog, getting lost in a building, or driving a vehicle that just isn’t working the way it should. But I don’t know them.
The only way out of the bog is through. The moment of loss of confidence isn’t a moment of truth (although some of the insights I have in those moments are true—the introduction of this article really does suck pretty hard); it’s just a moment.
I’m often asked this question, and the answer is: it depends on the nature of their support, what we mean by “useful/effective,” and what we mean by “satire.”
1) Why do people support Trump?
There are, obviously, many reasons, and sometimes it’s a combination. But, for purposes of talking about satire’s effect, I’ll mention five:
A) Political Sociopathy (some people call it “political narcissism”). These are people who support Trump because they believe he will pass policies that will benefit them in the short run—lower taxes, eliminate environmental and employment protections, protect the wealthy from accountability, privatize public goods, and so on. They don’t care what the consequences will be for others, or what the long-term consequences might be—they only care that it will benefit them (they believe). Hence sociopathy.
B) Eschatalogical Understanding of Politics. This way of thinking isn’t necessarily explicitly religious—a certain kind of American Exceptionalism as well as Hegelian readings of history are also in this category, even if apparently secular. It reads history as inevitably headed toward [something]. That “something” might be: American hegemony, world capitalism, the return of Jesus, Armageddon, racial/ethnic domination, fascism, a people’s revolution, in-group dominance. People with this understanding don’t care about politics in terms of reasonable disagreements about policy, or even about specifics, but in terms of the apocalyptic battle or necessary triumph.
C) Resentment of Libs. (Stiiginit to the libs) These are people who support anything—regardless of its consequences even for them—that they believe pisses off “liberals.” That “liberals” are a hobgoblin, and that this orientation leads to “Vladimir’s Choice” doesn’t much matter.
D) Charismatic Leadership. This is a relationship that people have with a leader (sometimes several leaders). They believe that the leader is a kind of savior (the sacralized language is often striking), an embodiment of the in-group, who should be given unlimited power and held unaccountable so that they can “fight” on behalf of real people like them. (Charismatic leadership is often some kind of authoritarian populism—maybe always.
E) Purity politics. This group includes people who are radically committed to banning abortion—although there are policies that demonstrably reduce abortion, these people refuse to support them because they believe those policies (e.g., accurate sex education, access to effective birth control) are also sinful. Supporting birth control isn’t radially pure enough for them—that their policy will result in deaths in the short term doesn’t matter to them. They refuse to be pragmatic about short-term improvements or short-term devastation. People who refuse to vote for opposition candidates because that party or candidate isn’t radical enough are also in the category.
One characteristic shared among all of these kinds of supporters–in my experience is a tragic informational cycle—they refuse to look at anything that contradicts or complicates what they believe about Trump. They only pay attention to pro-Trump demagoguery because they believe that the entire complicated world of policy options and disagreements is really a tug-of-war between two groups. (A lot of people who aren’t Trump supporters think about politics that way–it isn’t helpful.) 2) Useful/Effective at what?
A) Persuading the interlocutor. People often assume that the point in engaging someone with whom we disagree is to get them to adopt our point of view.
B) Persuading bystanders. Sometimes, however, we aren’t trying to persuade the person with whom we’re disagreeing, but others who might be watching the disagreement.
C) Getting the topic off of Trump. Often, we’re just trying to get them to drop the subject, to let us enjoy dinner, a holiday, a coffee break, or whatever without talking about Trump, or taking swipes at the hobgoblin of “libs.” In other words, just get them to STFU about that topic.
D) Undermine the in- and out-group binary. We might want them to recognize the harm of their support for Trump and/or his policies—that is, to persuade them to empathize with an out-group.
3) What do we mean by “satire”? The loose category of satire can mean: stable irony (a statement with a clear meaning that is not the literal statement—saying, “Great weather” in the midst of a nasty storm); unstable irony (the rhetor clearly doesn’t mean the literal statement, but it isn’t clear what they do mean), parody (which might be loving, as in the case of Best in Show, or critical, as in the case of much Saturday Night Live sketches about politics), or Juvenalian satire (scathing and often scatological). (Wikipedia has a useful entry on satire.)
So, the short answer to the question about effectiveness of satire on Trump supporters is: it depends on the kind of supporter, what effect we’re trying to have, and what kind of satire we use.
Many people object to satire because they assume that it’s insulting, and believe we should always rely on kindness and reason. But, as Jonathan Swift famously said: “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.” (For more on this quote and various versions, see this.) This is not always true, but it is true that a person has to be open to changing their mind for a reasoned argument to work. And not everyone is. So, if we’re talking to a Trump supporter who is open to changing their mind—that is, whose beliefs about Trump and Trump’s policies are falsifiable–then satire might not be the best strategy. But, to be blunt, I haven’t run across a Trump supporter whose beliefs can be falsified through reasoned argument in a long time.
The first category—the person who is in it for their own short term gain, and who might actually hate Trump—can seem to be “rational” insofar as they’re engaged in an apparently amoral calculation of costs and benefits (in my experience) is generally grounded in some version of the “just world model.” (That people who are wealthy/powerful/dominant deserve to be wealthy/powerful/dominant.) So, their reason for supporting policies that benefit them in the short-term isn’t falsifiable. They can be persuaded, sometimes, on very specific points about specific policies. Sometimes. Satire certainly doesn’t alienate them (although it might piss them off); it neither strengthens nor weakens their support.
Similarly, people whose support comes from an eschatological view of history/politics have a non-falsifiable narrative (they’re very prone to conspiracy theories), and, in my experience, have long since dug in. So, similarly, satire neither strengthens nor weakens their support.
The “stigginit to the libs” type person sometimes change their mind about Trump when they or someone they love gets harmed by Trump’s policies, so—sometimes—their support can be falsified by personal experience. But reasonable argumentation is right off the table—they like that Trump critics get frustrated with how unreasonable they are. (And, often, they have an unreasonable understanding of reasonable argumentation.)
Satire can increase their resentment of “libs,” especially if it hits close to home, but it isn’t as though some other rhetorical strategy would work. In theory, what should work would be some strategy of rejiggering their sense of in- and out-groups, or that creates empathy for an out-group, but I’m not sure I’ve seen that happen short of direct personal experience.
Satire, including the Juvenalian, can shame some people into shutting up, or allowing a change of subject, but I think other strategies are more effective (like refusing to engage). It can also have an impact on observers, but whether satire will cause them to feel sorry for the Trump supporters, get mad at libs, or distance themselves from Trump support/ers varies from person to person.
Satire can be very effective for people in a charismatic leadership relationship because it emphasizes that they look foolish. Their fanatical commitment is not, as they want to see it, a deeply personal and reciprocated loyalty, but gullibility. They’ll deflect by projecting their own fanatical commitment onto “libs,” and so it can be useful to insist that it stay on the stasis of their commitment. After all, it doesn’t matter if there are people equally fanatically committed to Biden or whoever—two wrongs don’t make a right. Biden supporters might howl at the moon and eat broken glass; that doesn’t mean that fanatical support of Trump is reasonable.
That Biden supporters might be wrong about something doesn’t mean Trump supporters are right. (And vice versa. Our political world is not, actually, a tug-of-war between two groups.)
And that points to one problem with satire of a group—what’s wrong with our political discourse is the fundamental premise that politics is a zero-sum battle between two groups. So, any satire that confirms that premise is, I think, problematic, and much of it does.
The final group is the purity politics folks. For those people, politics is a performance of purity; there’s a kind of narcissism to it. I don’t know whether satire would do much either to shame or persuade them—personally, I’ve never found that kind of person open to persuasion (regardless of where they are on the political spectrum).
Despite the fact that invoking Hitler in arguments is so kneejerk that there’s even a meme about it, a surprising number of people misunderstand the situation. They misunderstand, for instance, that he was elected; he was even voted into dictatorship. So, why was he elected?
I want to focus on four factors that are commonly noted in scholarship but often absent from or misrepresented in popular invocations of Hitler: widespread resentment effectively mobilized by pro-Nazi rhetoric, an enclave-based media environment, authoritarian populism, agency by proxy/charismatic leadership.
I. Resentment
Resentment is often defined as a sense of grievance against a person, but grievances can be of various kinds, including motivating positive personal change or political action. Resentment is grievance drunk on jealousy. It’s common to distinguish jealousy from envy on the grounds that, while both involve being unhappy that someone has something we don’t, jealousy means wanting it taken from the other. If I envy someone’s nice shirt, I can solve that problem by buying one for myself; jealousy can only be satisfied if they lose that shirt, they are harmed for having the shirt, or the shirt is damaged. My jealousy can even be satisfied without my getting a shirt—as long as they lose theirs. Jealousy is zero-sum, but envy is not.
Resentment is a zero-sum hostility toward others whom I think look down on me. Although I feel victimized that they have something I don’t, I don’t necessarily want what they have. I do, however, want them to lose it; I want them crushed and humiliated for even having it. Resentment relies on a sense that others have things to which I am entitled, and they are not. In addition, resentment always has a little bit of unacknowledged shame.
Many Germans (most? all?) resented the Versailles Treaty, and they resented losing the Great War. They resented the accusation that they were responsible for the war, they resented that they lost a war they believed they were entitled to win, and they resented a treaty as punitive as the kind they were accustomed to impose on others.
Certainly, the Versailles Treaty was excessively punitive, but it was, oddly enough, fair—at least in the sense that it was an eye for an eye. Germans didn’t condemn equally punitive treaties they had imposed on others (e.g., the Treaty of Frankfurt or the 1918 Brest-Litvosk Treaty. They resented being treated as they felt entitled to treat others.
The war guilt clause was a particular point of resentment, and yet it was partially true. The notion that one nation and one nation only can cause a world war is implausible—few wars are monocausal—but certainly Germany held a large part of the responsibility. Yet Germans liked to see themselves as forced into a war they didn’t want—they were the real victims and completely blameless. Were the Germans actually truly blameless, I don’t think the Treaty of Versailles would have been as useful a tool for mobilizing resentment.
Sloppy pan-Germanism mixed with the even sloppier Social Darwinism promoted a narrative that victory always goes to the strongest, and that therefore whoever win deserved it. The German defeat in the Great War therefore was a massive blow to German ideology—if the best always win, and the winners are always the best, that loss was stuck in the craw. People who enjoyed Nazi rhetoric resented that they lost a war they felt entitled to win.
Important to Nazi mobilization of that resentment was continually reminding audiences of it—there are few (any?) Hitler speeches in which he didn’t remind his audience of the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, and of the way that other nations looked down on and victimized Germany.
Did everyone else really look down on Germany? The French probably did, but that’s just because they looked down on everyone. Some British and Americans did; some didn’t. But the Germans certainly looked down on everyone. So, like the resentment about punitive treaties, they weren’t on principle opposed to people looking down on others; they just resented when they thought they were being looked down on.
The Versailles Treaty didn’t actually end the fighting. Pogroms, forced emigration, violent clashes, and genocides raged through Eastern and Central Europe well after the war, causing a massive immigration crisis. And, as often happens, people resented the immigrants. They also resented liberals, intellectuals, Jews, and various other groups that they imagined looked down on them.
Resentment is an act of projection and imagination.
II. Enclave-based media environment
Weimar Germany had a lot of political parties (around forty, depending on how you count them), which can loosely be categorized as: Catholic, communist, conservative, fascist, liberal (in the European sense), and socialist. They all had their own media (mostly newspapers), and many of them were rabidly partisan in terms of coverage but without admitting to the partisan coverage. [The antebellum era in the US was much the same.]
The important consequence of this factionalized media landscape was that it was possible for a person to remain fully within an informational enclave: foundational narratives, myths, premises, and outright lies were continually repeated. Repetition is persuasive. Since factional media wouldn’t present criticism or even critics fairly (or at all), it was possible for someone to feel certain about various events and yet be completely wrong. Germany was not about to win the war when it capitulated.
Sometimes the narratives were specific (e.g.,The Protocols of the Elders of Zion documents the plot of international Jewry ), and sometimes about broader historical events, or history itself. One of the most important narratives was the shape-shifting “stab in the back” myth about the Great War. This myth said that Germany was just about to win the war, and would have, but the nation was stabbed in the back, and therefore had to accept a humiliating treaty. As Richard Evans has shown, just who stabbed the back, or when, or why, or even what back, varied considerably. Like a lot of myths, it was simultaneously detailed and inconsistent.
Another important narrative was a similarly specific and vague narrative about the course of history, as a survival of the fittest conflict undermined by liberal democracy. This narrative typically cast Jews as intractably incapable of patriotism, assimilation, or German identity. German exceptionalism denied the actual heterogeneity of
Of those six kinds of political parties, three were explicitly and actively hostile to democracy, either advocating a return to the monarchy (Catholic) or a new system entirely (fascist, communist). Some “conservatives” parties advocated a return to monarchy, some advocated some other kind of authoritarian government, and some at least seemed willing to accommodate democratic decision-making practices. Only the liberals and socialists actively supported democracy (communists wanted a Marxist-Leninist revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, whereas socialists agreed with Marxist critiques of unconstrained capitalism, but wanted reform via democratic processes; “liberals” believed in a free market and democratic processes of decision-making).
What’s important about this kind of media environment is that it undermines democratic practices because it enables the demonization or dismissal of anyone who significantly disagrees. Repetition is persuasive. If you are repeatedly told that socialists want to kick bunnies, and never hear from socialists what they actually advocate, then you’ll believe that socialists want to kick bunnies. That makes them people who shouldn’t be included in the decision-making process at all; it personalizes policy disagreements. Policy disagreements, rather than being opportunities for arguing about the ads/disads, costs, feasibility, and so on of our various policy options (even vehemently arguing) is a contest of groups.
Tl;dr If you only get your information from in-group sources, then chances are that you never hear the most reasonable arguments for out-group policies; therefore everyone who is not in-group will seem unreasonable. Not hearing the arguments leads to refusing to listen to the people.
Repetition coupled with isolation from reasonable counterarguments radicalizes.
III. Authoritarian populism
One way to misunderstand how persuasion works is to imagine out-groups and their leaders as completely and obviously evil—by refusing to understand what some people find/found attractive about such leaders, we make ourselves feel more secure (“I would never have supported Hitler”), and thereby ignore that we might get talked into supporting someone like that.
Nazism is a kind of “authoritarian populism.” Populism is a political ideology that posits that politics is a conflict between two kinds of people: a real people whose concerns and beliefs are legitimate, moral, and true; a corrupt, out-of-touch, illegitimate elite who are parasitic on the real people. Populism is always anti-pluralist: there is only one real people, and they are in perfect agreement about everything. (Muller says populism is “a moralized form of antipluralism” 20).
Populism become authoritarian when the narrative that the real people have become so oppressed by the “elite” that they are in danger of extermination. At that point, there are no constraints on the behavior of populists or their leaders. This rejection of what are called “liberal norms” (not in the American sense of “liberal” but the political theory one) such as fairness, change from within, deliberation, transparent and consistent legal processes is the moment that a populist movement becomes authoritarian (and Machiavellian).
As Muller says, “Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people” (Muller 3). Therefore, any election that populists lose is not legitimate, any election they win is, regardless of what strategies they’ve used to win. Violence on the part of the in-group is admirable and always justified, purely on the grounds that it is in-group violence. The in-group is held to lower moral standards while claiming the moral highground.
Authoritarian populism always has an intriguing mix of victimhood, heroism, strength, and whining. Somehow whining about how oppressed “we are” and what meany-meany-bo-beanies They are is seen as strength. And that is what much of Hitler’s rhetoric was—so very, very much whining.
And that is something else that authoritarian populism promises: a promise of never being held morally accountable, as long as you are a loyal (even fanatical) member of the in-group (the real people).
In authoritarian populism, the morality comes from group membership, and the values the group claims to have—values which might have literally nothing to do with whatever policies they enact or ways they behave.
IV. Charismatic leadership/agency by proxy
Authoritarian populism needs an authority to embody the real people. It’s fine if they’re actually elite (many people were impressed by Hitler’s wealth). Kenneth Burke talked about the relationship in terms of “identification”—they saw him as their kind of guy. They imagined a seamless connection with him. In charismatic leadership relationships, the followers attribute all sorts of characteristics to their leader (which the leader may or may not actually have): extraordinary health, almost superhuman endurance, universal genius, a Midas touch, infallible and instantaneous judgment, and a perfect understanding of what “normal” people like and want.
In general, people engage in intention/motive-based explanations for good behavior on the part of the in-group and bad behavior on the part of non in-group leaders and members, and situational explanations for good behavior on the part of the non in-group and bad behavior for the in-group.
So, if Hubert (in-group) and Chester (out-group) give a cookie to a child (good behavior), then it shows that Hubert is good and generous (motive/intention), but Chester only did so because he was forced by circumstances (situational).
If Hubert (in-group) and Chester (out-group) both steal a cookie from a child (bad behavior), then it was because Hubert didn’t see the child, the child shouldn’t have been eating the cookie, he had no choice (situational explanations), but Chester stealing the cookie was deliberate and because Chester is evil.
One sign, then, of a charismatic leadership relationship is whether the follower holds a leader to the same standards of behavior as non in-group leaders, or if they flip the intention/situation explanations in order to hold on to the narrative that the in-group is essentially good.
What we get from a charismatic leadership relationship is a fairly simple way of understanding good and bad—it reduces moral complexity and uncertainty. Since our group is essentially good, we are guaranteed moral certainty simply by being a loyal member. And that is what Hitler promised.
Because Hitler is like us, and really gets us, then we are powerful—we take pride in everything he does; we have agency by proxy.
But, because we identify with him, then our attachment to him means we will not listen to criticism of him—criticism of him is an attack on our goodness. Our support becomes non-falsifiable, and therefore outside the realm of a reasonable disagreement about him, his actions, or his policies. Charismatic leadership is authoritarian. But oh so very, very pleasurable.
Sources:
There are still lots of arguments among scholars about Hitler, the Germans, and the Nazis, but nothing I’m saying here is either particularly controversial or something I’ve come up with on my own.
While it is a mistake to attribute magical qualities to Hitler’s rhetoric, and to attribute the various genocides and disasters to him personally (as though his personal magnetism was destroyed agency on the part of Germans), it is also a mistake to think the rhetoric was powerless. Germans elected him because they liked what he had to say.
There was a time when scholars were insistent that Hitler’s rhetoric wasn’t that great (an argument that Ryan Skinnell’s forthcoming book will show was an accusation made at the time, one that completely misses the rhetorical force of Hitler’s strategies), but that was partially a reaction to the immediate post-war deflecting of German responsibility for the war, the Holocaust, the various genocides (the argument was that Germans were overwhelmed by Hitler’s rhetoric, or secretly hated him—neither was true).
There are many excellent biographies of Hitler, the ones written after the opening of the records captured by the Soviets are the most useful. Kershaw’s writings are especially readable, but Volker Ullrich’s and Peter Longerich’s biographies have been able to take advantage of more recent research (If I were asked to recommend just one biography, it would be Longerich’s). Richard Evans’ three-volume study of Nazism (coming to power, in power, at war) is thorough and makes clear the enthusiastic participation of various other leaders.
Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction is a compelling and detailed analysis of the economy under the Nazis, and Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War shows the considerable support Nazis had throughout the war. There are a lot of books about the media and Hitler, but I think the best place to start is Despina Stratigakos’ Hitler at Home. Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished is a powerful discussion of the aftermath of the Great War.
Thomas Patterson has long criticized the “horse race” way of framing elections and politics more generally. It’s so dominant that people can’t imagine talking about elections in any other way. Briefly, the “horse race” frame treats elections as contests between two groups, rather than a call to discuss issues of governance.
Connected is the assumption that politics is about selling a candidate or policy; it’s all compliance-gaining. So, dominant coverage of proposed policies isn’t about whether they’ll work, what costs and consequences they might have, and so on—in other words, media doesn’t cover policy disagreements qua policies. Instead, candidates’ proposed policies are assessed in terms of their likelihood of attracting voters—i.e., whether the policies will help sell the candidate.
As Patterson and others have pointed out, the way of reporting on politics assumes (and therefore reinforces) the notion that political disagreements are identity conflicts—a conflict between two kinds of people. Obviously, policy disagreements are often conflicts among kinds of people, but not just two, let alone always the same two. People who disagree about abortion might strongly agree on the death penalty, bail reform, expanding Medicare, or all sorts of other specific policies. And there are few issues about which there are really only policy options. (Tbh, I can’t think of any, but I’ll hedge.)
The horse race/selling frame tragically limits our ability to talk about think usefully about the massive landscape of policy options.
There are two other damaging consequences of this frame. One is that it reduces intra-group deliberation about policies. If policy preferences are the consequence of identity, then we can’t treat intra-group disagreements about policies as reasonable disagreement—one of us must really be out-group (or duped by the out-group).
When a group fails, the impulse is purification of the in-group. People call for expelling the people who aren’t true believers, and blame them, when the real problem is the opposition.
and so in-group recriminations are about those intra-group disagreements or presumed failures in “selling” the product. We thereby double down on what damages policy discourse.
Right now, there are a lot of people blaming Harris or Dems for not selling the policies enough, or having the wrong policies, or in various other ways calling for a party purified of disparate elements. That is, to put it very clearly, anti-democratic and incipiently authoritarian. It’s also wrong.
People slip into calls for in-group purity after a failure or setback because it is reassuring. It is a way of thinking about the failure that keeps control within the in-group—it says we could have won, if we’d just done this thing. And it’s almost always the “thing” I think should have been done all along. So, it’s about maintaining the illusion of in-group control, denying the agency of the successful out-group, all while making myself seem prescient.
That kind of “I coulda been a contenduh” always happens after an unsuccessful war. Germans insisted they were about to win the Great War when they got stabbed in the back by a liberal and defeatist media, and I’ve recently been reading various books that argue that we were about to win in Vietnam when we a liberal and defeatist media caused us to give up, or we would have won if we’d just done this other thing.
The short version is that the federal government will operate as red states like Texas or Alabama have for some time. It will do so in terms of policy agenda (reactionary, neoliberal, evangelical moral panic) and what might be called political structures and practices (competitive authoritarianism).
For some time, the GOP has claimed to be conservative, and to have a policy agenda grounded in principles. It isn’t, and it doesn’t. It’s a coalition taped together by a strategic rhetoric of resentment, demagoguery, and in-group favoritism (e.g., if you support drones, and look forward to nuclear war in the Middle East, you are not pro-life).
So, the policy agenda will have a lot of moral panic/purity items that the “evangelicals” advocate (federal ban on abortion, probably some kind of requirement for prayer in schools, restriction of marriage rights, public funding of sectarian education, etc.). Neoliberals (really just the latest incarnation of sloppy Social Darwinists) will get draining and redirecting of public funds to private profit, policies that buttress current wealth disparities, and deflecting or demonizing of any discussion of long-term or structural issues like racism or global warming, (e.g., much of “Project 2025”). Reactionaries will get unlimited access to guns, removal of restraints on police, and generally in-group exemption from prosecution for violence, corruption, and abuse of power (e.g., Kenneth Paxton).
At the Federal level, we’ll also have the kind of “competitive authoritarianism” that states like Texas have been establishing. Political scientists (and others) have been warning about competitive authoritarianism for twenty years. From a 2002 article:
“In competitive authoritarian regimes, formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.” (52)
More recently Levitsky and Way have defined it as “in which the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions and serious incumbent abuse yields electoral competition that is real but unfair.”
It’s interesting to me that scholars rarely mention the US South, but it’s a good example of competitive authoritarianism. There was a Republican Party, and, on paper, African Americans could vote. But, in fact, various structural and interpersonal practices (from lynching to refusing to register voters) ensured that neither African Americans nor Republicans were completely excluded from power. It was herrenvolk democracy. [1]
There are two ways that this will play out in the US. In purple states, it will mean gerrymandering, disparate access to polling places, formal and informal harassment of non-GOP voters, strategic voter registration requirements, and demagoguery about voter fraud rather than voter suppression. In other words, Texas.
For the nation as a whole, it will mean “The Great Divorce.” Purple states with the GOP in the dominant position will keep from going violet by passing laws that cause potential Dem voters to congregate either in cities (that can be gerrymandered out of power) or to leave the purple states entirely. If the latter happens, then high-population states may be overwhelmingly Dem (and the US as a whole might be overwhelmingly Dem), but the GOP will hold control of the Senate and Electoral College, and hence SCOTUS and the Presidency.
Levitzky and Ziblatt laid out the plan that Trump started to follow in his first term, and he’ll complete it this time. Important to competitive authoritarianism is control of the media, so we should expect that Trump will immediately go after Bezos (assuming he hasn’t already—hence WaPo’s refusal to endorse Harris). Putin used a combination of extortion and threats of prosecution for tax fraud to get rid of critical media—that’s probably the route it will take.
Not all critical media will be silenced; competitive authoritarianism is about looking like a democracy. But, they will certainly be corralled and underfed.
Friendly media will continue to promote a narrative of existential war (demagoguery), victimized “conservatives” (in-group favoritism), snobby elitists (resentment), and aggression/corruption as justified self-defense (projection).
Welcome to Texas.
[The wikipedia article says the term was first used in 1967, but Wilbur Cash used it in his 1941 Mind of the South.]
They believe that their support of Trump is reasonable, and that it isn’t reasonable not to support him for two reasons (so to speak): 1) their media gives them “reasons” to support him; 2) their media gives them “reasons” to refuse to listen to anyone who disagrees.
And all of those “reasons” are unreasonable. The lowest bar for having a reasonable position is: you are open to persuasion on it, you’ve considered the best opposition arguments, and you hold all positions on the issue to the same standards of proof, civility, logic.
Trump supporters fail every single one of those standards. So, why don’t they notice that failure? There are several relevant factors. One is a misunderstanding about what it means to be reasonable (aka, the rational-irrational split). The second, and the point of this post, is that they’re inoculated against being reasonable about their support of Trump.
“Inoculation” is a metaphor that scholars of propaganda use for the strategy of getting people not to listen to non in-group arguments. [The in-group isn’t “the group in power” but “the group you’re in.”] If I am trying to vote for Chester, and I’m worried you might vote for Hubert, then I will—like exposing someone to cowpox so that their body rejects smallpox—try to train you to reject pro-Hubert arguments by misrepresenting them, nut-picking (equating Hubert with some unhinged or extreme critic of Chester), motivism (saying all critics of Chester are jealous, sad, or have bad motives), taking quotes out of context, or just plain lying about Hubert. If I’m successful, then, when confronted with strong arguments for Hubert and his policies, you’ll reject them without even listening.
I’ll give two examples. Trump supporters believe that the 2020 election was stolen, although the legal cases making that claim (including before Trump-appointed judges) have overwhelmingly lost, generally on the grounds that they have little to no merit or evidence. Trump supporters don’t know the outcome of these cases because their media doesn’t tell them. (Trump supporters open to a reasonable discussion about this can email me. They aren’t. They won’t.)
Second, your Trump supporting family and friends are probably completely supportive of anti-DEI policies, which they conflate with CRT. And the argument against CRT is an illogical argument by association. It runs like this: All concerns about inclusion are really CRT, and CRT can be associatively (not reasonably) related to some Marxists; therefore, if anyone indicates concerns about inclusion, they’re CRT, and, therefore, you shouldn’t listen to them—they’re Marxist.
Argument by association is unreasonable. The CRT argument has the same logic as: God is love; love is blind; Stevie Wonder is blind; therefore Stevie Wonder is God.
Or, more to the point, Nazis believed in the Great Replacement narrative; Tucker Carlson advocates the Great Replacement narrative; therefore, Tucker Carlson is a Nazi.
But Trump supporters only consider argument by association reasonable when it confirms what they believe. That isn’t reasonable. They might provide data that look like reasons, but their argument isn’t reasonable.
When inoculation works, and it often does, it means that you are trained to listen to people in terms of a binary—are they with me, or against me. If they give any sign of not being fully supportive of Chester, then they must support Hubert, and that makes them a squirrel-loving communist who probably kicks little dogs for fun. And that binary thinking goes to the very source—they only get information from sources that support Trump, so they don’t even know what the best opposition arguments are.
Trump media, pundits, and rhetors aren’t the only people to engage in inoculation. A lot of demagoguery does, all over the political and cultural spectrum.
Political parties and figures, advertisers, salespeople, even manipulative individuals engage in inoculation only because they know that they’re unlikely to persuade people if their audience gives a fair hearing to the various opposition positions and critics. Inoculation is not only unreasonable; it is a pragmatic admission that the entire case is unreasonable. If you have to lie to make your case, you have a bad case.
On December 3, 2020, the Missouri Gateway Pundit promoted the conspiracy theory that originated with Trump’s legal team: that there was had video showing two Georgia election workers “secretly inject tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots into the vote count and process the fraudulent ballots for counting multiple times without detection, despite several machine hand recounts” (“First Amended” 51). Later that same day, Gateway Pundit named one of the workers, Ruby Freeman, and would later also name and give identifying information about her mother, Wandrea Moss. Despite the immediate debunking of the conspiracy, Gateway Pundit continued to promote the lie (and they’ve never retracted it). In December of 2021, Freeman and Moss sued the owners of the site—two brothers named James and Joseph Hoft, and in January of 2022 the Hofts replied. The goal of that response was to avoid accountability for what they did and are still doing, and what I want to explore in this talk is the role that the “it’s just rhetoric” strategy plays in that evasion.
The Hofts made six major “affirmative” arguments: • The statements they made are true. “Defendants aver that all statements allegedly made by Defendants complained of by Plaintiffs are true […] Any complained-of statements allegedly made by Defendants that may happen to lack 100% factual veracity are substantially true, and thus treated as true as a matter of law. ( 18) • The gist of the statements is true. “Any statements made by Defendants complained of by Plaintiffs that are not literally true are substantially true, in that the “gist” or “sting” of the statements is true” (18) • The statements aren’t literally true, but are opinion or rhetorical hyperbole (i.e., “just rhetoric”). “The statements at issue in the First Amended Complaint are either statements of opinion based on disclosed facts or statements of rhetorical hyperbole that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.” (19) • Moss and Freeman are public figures, so it doesn’t matter if the statements are true. “Due to the media scrutiny they received in connection with the 2020 presidential election, Plaintiffs are limited purpose public figures.” (19) • Truth doesn’t matter because they were just repeating what reliable sources said. “Defendants’ statements were published in reliance on statements published by credible sources, including President Donald J. Trump and his campaign.” (19) • Everybody was saying it. (“Incremental Harm”) “Defendants are far from the only persons to publish statements regarding Plaintiffs.” (20)
What’s striking about this set of arguments is the degree to which they contradict one another. Put simply, the Hofts are claiming that what they said is and is not true, and they did and did not believe it to be true, they did and did not want or expect their readers to take the statements literally. If what they said was literally true, and they believed it to be such, and they expected their audience to understand it as true, then it wasn’t hyperbole. The Hofts’ are using what I’m arguing should be called “strategically ambiguous hyperbole.”
Affirmative defenses are often contradictory because it’s legally acceptable to engage in “arguing in the alternative”—more or less a series of arguendo claims. Also known as throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. To claim that all of their statements were hyperbole is to say that they not only didn’t believe them, but didn’t think their audience would. Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones each tried this defense, and bungled it, Tucker Carlson tried it and succeeded. I want to talk briefly about the Carlson case, because it’s significant.
Carlson and his guest Alan Dershowitz had agreed that a woman who got hush money from Trump had committed “textbook extortion”—that is, a crime. She sued for defamation. Fox argued that the “extortion” accusation was hyperbole, and a judge agreed, saying that the “general tenor” (Memorandum 11, 17) and “context surrounding the statement” (14) would make it clear to any “reasonable” viewer that Carlson was not reporting facts, but engaged in opinion. Carlson’s “accusations of extortion are a familiar rhetorical device” of hyperbole (13). The judge said “that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes” (12), and “Carlson’s ‘dialogue was taking place on an animated, non-literal plane’” (16). The judge said that it didn’t matter whether some viewers took the statement as literally true; what matters is what a “reasonable” person would do, and that’s a common standard in law.
Common definitions of hyperbole emphasize that it is an “obvious and intentional exaggeration” (dictionary.com), “a rhetorical trope by means of which statements are made that are obviously exaggerated and thus untrue or unwarranted” (Snoeck Henkemans 269) That is, a hyperbolic statement is obviously not true, and not meant to be taken as true. But that isn’t true, as one can see in the Hofts’ brief—it isn’t obvious at all whether they believe their claims to be literally true. They are ambiguous on that point.
This ambiguity has consequences for our ability to make policy decisions. If someone uses a textbook example of hyperbole—“my suitcase weighs a ton”—and a listener refutes it by weighing the suitcase and showing that it only weighs forty pounds, the critic just looks like a humorless jerk. There’s no point in refuting a textbook case of hyperbole. But the Hofts’ claims were ambiguously hyperbolic—they were absurd, and they were false, and they were and are obviously false to any reasonable person, but they were and are not obviously false to someone who lives in a world of hyperbolic claims about the villainy of Democrats. Large numbers of Gateway Pundit readers didn’t understand those claims to be hyperbolic—they thought they were factually accurate–which is why the women got death threats. Those supporters may not be reasonable people, but that’s a legal and not rhetorical standard.
Thus, the exaggerated and fabricated claims of voting fraud enable Trump supporters to persuade their base that violence, negating election results, and various other authoritarian and extreme responses are justified self-defense, while evading accountability for the consequences of their persuasion. The absurdity of the claims also enables potential Trump voters who might “dislike Trump’s rhetoric,” but like his policies to deflect criticism for what they are supporting. They see his inciting violence and calling for authoritarian policies as “just rhetoric.” The same claims are hyperbole when strategically useful to call them that, and true or substantially true when that’s the useful strategy. And that’s what I mean by strategically ambiguous hyperbole.
I mentioned earlier that hyperbole isn’t always oriented toward rousing an audience. Sometimes it’s a strategy of deflection, by shifting the stasis. When Trump characterizes immigration as an “invasion,” that strategically ambiguous hyperbole means we’re now arguing about just how dangerous or criminal immigrants are. We are arguing about whether Moss and Freeman introduced tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots—that is, just how big the fraud was. That immigrants are dangerous, and that the election was stolen, are part of the frame, not part of the argument. And so we don’t talk about whether Trump tried to incite a riot that would steal the election—even if he did, it seems justified by the fraud that never happened.
Strategically ambiguous hyperbole also aids in the deflection of responsibility on the part of voters who intend to support Trump even if they don’t “like his rhetoric.” A common way of deflecting reasonable discussion of Trump’s corruption, fraud, and lying is to respond with, “All politicians lie”—a hyperbolic statement not intended to rouse but deflect. “All politicians lie” is simultaneously true and false. All politicians do lie—all humans lie—but that statement is used, implicitly, to dismiss the degree and kind of lies that Trump tells. It’s hyperbolic in its implications.
In addition to evading accountability, this flipping in and out of defending their rhetoric as hyperbole enables them to forestall refutation. To be effective at rousing an audience (and hyperbole can have other functions), a hyperbolic statement has to resonate as “true” in at least two ways: plausibility of the overall thrust of the argument, and sincerity of the rhetor.
In this case, the base believed/s that Democrats can only win elections by cheating; even if Democrats didn’t cheat exactly as much as the Hofts said, or in the specific ways they said. Claudia Claridge calls this kind of hyperbole “emotional truth” versus “factual truth” (18), but I don’t think invoking the rational/irrational split is either accurate or useful here. The people who find this kind of hyperbole powerful think they’re relying on factually and literally true assertions about reality. They consider it a fact that the election was stolen; the details don’t matter. The data presented as proof (analysis of the video, claims about a fake flooding) don’t have a particularly important relationship to the conclusion, so it doesn’t matter if they turn out to be false (Jenny Rice’s book on conspiracy thinking describes this process elegantly). I want to emphasize this point—that there is no expectation of a logical relationship between major claims and supposedly supporting evidence means that the argument cannot be refuted. If it can’t be refuted, it can’t be deliberated.
The Hofts, like Alex Jones, Giuliani, and Trump, openly violate the norms, even of a legal case, as it is going on, and as they claim they are honoring them. Alex Jones continued promoting on his radio show the very conspiracy theories and false claims he was in the midst of a lawsuit about, during which he testified under oath that he had stopped making those claims, and for which he had apologized enough already. He has testified in court to facts about his wealth, mental health, and intentions that he promptly and deliberately contradicted on his radio show; Giuliani signed and contradicted an admission of lying. The Hofts, in a legal document, said their claims were true and untrue. The incoherence is the point.
In addition, for some people, wild exaggeration adds credibility to an argument because it shows the passionate and sincere commitment of the rhetor to the in-group. It is a kind of performative appeal to authority—you should trust me because my commitment to the in-group is unconstrained, as shown by my being rhetorically unconstrained–and that appeal to authority works in several ways. It shows passionate commitment to the in-group (“the power of the irrational rhetor”), as well as an authoritarian understanding of truth (the argument made by Robert Paxton). The “truth” of the statement might be the sincerity of the rhetor. It can be an instance of what Ryan Skinnell calls “deceiving sincerely,” a characteristic Skinnell (and others, like Paxton) have argued is present in fascism (Rhetoric of Fascism). The truth of the statement is that the speaker is truly committed to dominating, exterminating, or expelling the out-groups. And that makes everything they say, even if false, true because the “gist” (Democrats stole the election) is true.
Brad Serber has argued that Trump and his supporters don’t engage in “dog whistles,” but “howling.” Serber says, “Dog Whistling carefully avoids the direct use of epithets, calls for violence, and other more overt kinds of hate speech, [but] Howling drops all pretense of civility and political correctness” (194). The rhetor is willing to violate rhetorical norms, and so will be willing to violate other norms as well to get the policies the in-group wants. What Trump models and offers to his followers is the opportunity to participate, via agency by proxy, in grandiose violation of legal, moral, and rhetorical norms without accountability.
Finally, it isn’t just rhetoric. The strategically ambiguous hyperbole is in service of policies that cannot be deliberated because the affirmative case is made up of claims that cannot be refuted. Both the rhetors and the policies they advocate are rhetorically, ethically, and politically unmoored. As Mary Stuckey has shown, hyperbole tends to correlate to times of increased incivility—that is, violations of discursive norms, “a certain vagueness regarding means and ends” (that is, what I’ve called a depoliticized public sphere), “and a reliance on hope and nostalgia” (676). If being irrational and extreme becomes the criterion for having credibility, then deliberation, nuance, complexity, uncertainty, reciprocity, inclusion, are all deflected if not demonized. The point of strategically ambiguous hyperbole is to evade the responsibilities of rhetoric, and the requirements of democratic deliberation. When Trump says that, on his first day in office, “we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” it is tempting for people who like certain policies of Trump’s (overheating the economy, reducing environmental protection, ending gay marriage) to dismiss the anti-democratic and authoritarian policy agenda as hyperbole. That’s a mistake. It isn’t just rhetoric.
Works Cited
Claridge, Claudia. Hyperbole in English: A corpus-based study of exaggeration. Cambridge University Press, 2010. “Defendants’ Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Petition and Counterclaims.” https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2023.01.16-Defs-Answer-to-Pltffs-2nd-Amended-Petition-Counterclaims.pdf Fioroni, Sarah. “Following Public Individuals for News in 7 Charts.” Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/506084/following-public-individuals-news-charts.aspx “First Amended Complaint.” Case: 4:21-cv-01424-HEA Doc. #: 33 Filed: 01/14/22. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21315827-tgp_amendedcomplaint Gerstein, Josh and Kyle Cheney. “‘He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob’” Politico 12/14/2023 01:03 PM EST https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/14/rudy-giuliani-jury-georgia-election-00131796 Updated: 12/14/2023 05:06 PM EST (Giuliani) Nolo Contendre [sic] Stipulation. Case No. 1:21-cv-03354 (BAH). https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Defendant-Giulianis-Superseding-Nolo-Contendre-Stipulation-Conceding-to-Default-Liability.pdf Henkemans, A. Francisca Snoeck. “Strategic manoeuvring with hyperbole in political debate.” Contextualizing pragma-dialectics 12 (2017): 269-280. “Hyperbole.” Dictonary.com https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hyperbole Kreider, A. J. “Argumentative Hyperbole as Fallacy.” Informal Logic 42.2 (2022): 417-437. Levine, Sam. “Jury in Rudy Giuliani Defamation Trial Urged to Send Message: ‘Don’t Do It’” Thu 14 Dec 2023 15.05 EST https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/14/rudy-giuliani-testimony-federal-defamation-case-atlanta-election-workers Memorandum in Support of Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss. McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC, No. 1:2019cv11161 – Document 39 (S.D.N.Y. 2020). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/ McFadden, K. “Hyperbole.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, 4th ed., Princeton UP, 2012, p. 648. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2388000525/GVRL?u=txshracd2598&sid=bookmarkGVRL&xid=776ca8ac. Memorandum in Support of Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss. McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC, No. 1:2019cv11161 – Document 39 (S.D.N.Y. 2020). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/ Paxton, Robert O. The anatomy of fascism. Vintage, 2005. Rice, Jenny. Awful archives: Conspiracy theory, rhetoric, and acts of evidence. The Ohio State University Press, 2020. Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Fanatical schemes: Proslavery rhetoric and the tragedy of consensus. University of Alabama Press, 2010. Skinnell, Ryan. “Deceiving Sincerely: The Embrace of Sincerity-as-Truth in Fascist Rhetoric.” Rhetoric of Fascism. Ed. Nathan Crick. 2022. Stuckey, Mary E. “American elections and the rhetoric of political change: Hyperbole, anger, and hope in US politics.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs. (2017): 667-694. Trump, Donald. ”We Will Begin.” Right Side Broadcasting Network https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GF_SRHFlmc
Imagine this. You and I are house-mates having trouble making rent, and I say, “We should get a bunch of bunnies.” You say, “I think getting bunnies would be spending more money, when our whole problem is that we don’t have enough money.” And I say, “You just think we should get evicted?” And then I go on about how disastrous it would be to get evicted. I accuse you of not caring about whether we get evicted.[1]
You’d recognize my response as unreasonable. Because it is.
Yet, that is exactly the pattern of our public discourse about politics. Too often, we assume that there is only one “plan” (solution, policy, approach), so if someone rejects our preferred plan, it’s because they don’t acknowledge the need. Therefore, our political discourse is all about need, and how horrible (irrational, corrupt, stupid) everyone is who disagrees with our plan. I’ll come back to that, but let’s start with what a good disagreement looks like.
And here’s where some concepts shared by folks in conflict resolution, policy argumentation, and a bunch of other fields come in. It’s useful to think about a problem in terms of seven questions: 1) What is the problem? 2) How bad is this problem? (What are the consequences of not solving it? Will it go away on its own?) 3) What caused this problem? How did this problem arise? 4) What are our options for solving this problem? (What are the various plans we might adopt?) 5) Which plans solve the problem we’ve identified? 6) What is the likelihood of success, ads/disads, costs/benefits for the most plausible plans? How do they compare to one another? 7) What are the likely consequences of the various plans? Is there a possibility of unintended consequences worse than the problem we’re trying to solve?
1) For you and me, the problem is that we can’t make rent, and 2) that’s a bad problem, since if we can’t solve it, we’ll get evicted.
3) So, what caused it? Our problem might be that the rent has gone up astronomically, or that I lost my job and haven’t tried to get another one, or that I’ve been spending money recklessly.
Here’s why the narrative as to how we got here matters: each of those causes implies a different kind of solution.
4) If the only reason is that the rent has gone up astronomically, then one approach might be to see if that was legal—did the landlord violate the lease? Laws regarding rent? If the only reason is that I lost my job and haven’t tried to find another, then it would make sense for me to try to find another job, or it might make sense for you to evict me, and get a new house-mate. If I’ve been spending recklessly, then I should stop doing that, and you might have some trouble figuring out how to get that to happen.
It’s possible that there are several contributing factors, in which case the approaches most likely to be successful might be combinations—I try to get a job and get my spending under control; you give me a deadline by which I’ve gotten a job or you’ll evict me; I try to get a job and we get a third room-mate.
One option is for us to get bunnies; it isn’t necessarily a good option, but it’s an option. And so the question is: why do I think that would solve the problem? How is that related to how we got here? If I am unable to pay rent because I keep getting involved in MLM, and I’ve become enamored of a bunny MLM, it would be reasonable for you to point out that I’m repeating exactly the behavior that caused the problem.
I might argue that I’ve always wanted bunnies, or that getting evicted is making me sad and bunnies will cheer me up—getting bunnies might solve some problem (my desire, my sadness), but not this problem: our facing eviction. In fact, since there would be added expenses, it might make the problem worse.
It’s also possible that there is no solution—that I can’t get a job that would enable us to afford the astronomical rent. In that case, it might make sense to try to find a way to break the lease that doesn’t involve eviction (so we don’t have an eviction on our financial record).
6) Winning the lottery would solve the problem, but that doesn’t mean that spending all our money on lottery tickets is a good plan; the likelihood of success is small. Advocating that we spend all our money on lottery tickets presumes that it’s a successful plan—people sometimes advocate a plan on the grounds that it would work, when in fact it might not. Seeing if the landlord has violated the lease (or the law) might work, but adopting that plan would mean getting expert advice (which might cost). Getting a job might also require expenditures, or be difficult in various ways. Every possible plan has advantages and disadvantages, and some plans are incompatible. We can’t spend all our money on lottery tickets and spend money to get expert advice on the lease. If I’m spending all my time job hunting, I wouldn’t have time to talk with experts about the lease.
7) Talking about unintended consequences is that hardest, I think. It’s basically worst case scenario thinking (how might this go wrong), and many people are superstitious about worst case scenario thinking. But thinking about it ahead of adopting a plan can mean that we put things in place to prevent the worst case from happening (e.g., have a backup plan), or that will let us know things are going south. Hiring an attorney to fight the rent increase might cost a lot of money and simply enrage the landlord, guaranteeing our eviction. Getting bunnies might be a violation of the lease, another way of guaranteeing our eviction.
My basic point is that acknowledging that there is a need is not necessarily associated with one solution. Similarly, disagreeing about what we should do (the plan) doesn’t mean disagreeing that there is a need. You might believe that we should have a lemonade stand, or cut back on what we’re spending in various areas, or get a loan—we have a lot of policy options, and we need to talk about them.
What happens in too much political discourse, though, is the bunny move. We have a problem, and disagree about the plan, and then instead of going through the various questions, we stay on the first. We either accuse the opponent of not really caring about the problem. Or, if we don’t like what we think are the only possible plans, or have no idea what to do, we deny that there is a problem. Neither tactic gets us reasonable disagreement or effective policies.
[1] For added unreasonable points, I might accuse you of being a bunny hater, communist, fascist, or some other group I hate.
