Author: Trish

Demagoguery and scapegoating

I want to start with an interesting puzzle:

Republicans control Congress, the Supreme Court, now the Presidency; Republicans have a trifecta in 26 states, and the most popular cable news show is a tried-and-true propaganda outfit for Republican candidates and agenda.  Fifty-six percent of America’s richest families are GOP donors. By any reasonable measure, the GOP is the establishment.

The puzzle is that the rhetoric surrounding voting Republican is one of resistance to the establishment—the GOP has successfully framed itself as the anti-establishment party.  And they have managed to blame all problems on Democrats (even in absurd cases and in the face of all reasonable evidence). —the out-of-power party.[1] Now that they have complete control of the Federal government, and still can’t come through on their promises, they have a new narrative, the Deep State conspiracy  —so that it’s still liberals who are the source of all of our problems. That’s interesting. How are they managing that rhetorical sleight of hand?

There are various reasons, with three I want to mention here. The first is the one I won’t talk about at any length now, and it’s lay political theory. The dominant lay political theory is that the solutions to all political problems are obvious to any reasonable person—no political disagreement involves two or more people of intelligence and good faith.  The government doesn’t pursue those obvious solutions for various nefarious reasons—they know what they should do, but they don’t follow that course of action because of “special interests” (special interests being “anyone other than my in-group”).

The second is informational enclaves—that large swaths of Americans inhabit worlds impervious to accurate representations of out-group arguments (not just people on the right, and not just restricted to “political” issues). It isn’t just that these worlds involve the chanting of various assertions; it’s also that these enclaves engage in inoculation (a concept that really should be more prominent in rhetoric and comp). Inoculation works by giving people a weak form of an out-group ideology or political agenda—people sincerely believe they don’t need to listen to people who disagree because they think they already know the argument. Inoculation works because so many people believe that the first goal in listening to someone (or reading) is finding cues of identity group membership—if the rhetor can be identified as out-group, then everything they say can be rejected as “biased.” (I think this is worsened by how we teach “bias” in fyc classes, since we teach it as social group membership.)

Not all instances of inoculation are demagoguery, but demagoguery always involves inoculation. And the dominant form of discourse in those worlds is demagoguery, and that’s the third factor I want to talk about.

My argument about demagoguery is fairly straightforward—demagoguery is most effectively thought of as a way of arguing, not a rhetoric produced by a kind of person. It isn’t necessarily a cancer on the body politic, or a political evil. Thinking about demagogues and not demagoguery and thinking about demagoguery as a growth to be excised unintentionally ends up endorsing the very view of public discourse that is so problematically at the center of demagoguery: that political issues can be reduced to identity, and that they are solved through elimination. And that’s demagoguery.

I’ve suggested we think of demagoguery as:

Demagoguery is a polarizing discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the outgroup should be punished/scapegoated for the current problems of the ingroup. Public debate largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the ingroup, what signifies outgroup membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the ingroup); need (usually framed in terms of how evil the outgroup is); what level of punishment to enact against the outgroup (restriction of rights to extermination).     

Demagoguery depoliticizes political discourse by making all issues questions of identity (which amounts to in-group loyalty), it insists that all of our problems are caused by this group—the only failing of the in-group is insufficient will in pursuing a policy of purity.

I began with a description of something odd about Republican rhetoric—and I want to be clear, I’m not saying that the disingenuousness of Republican rhetoric (“we’re the victims here”) means Republicans are bad people, or the Republican political agenda should be dismissed on the grounds that they have disingenuous rhetoric. Republican policies should be debated on their merits and demerits as policies. I’m saying that advocates of the Republican political agenda need to defend that agenda with policy rhetoric. So should every other advocate of a political agenda. Political argument should be arguments about policies.

If we say the problem is that Republicans are demagogues, the implied solution is to purify our community of Republicans—and that’s demagoguery. If we say their rhetoric is demagogic, we are asking them to argue differently.

Saying that Republican policies are bad because Republican media engage in demagoguery is still not deliberating about policies; it’s arguing about who is the disease of the body politic. Jeremy Engels, who has identified a similar (but not identical) phenomenon with what he calls a “politics of resentment” points out that “Nixon argued that war protestors, and not the war itself, was the problem” (96) and that this “rhetoric was brilliant because [Nixon] subverted the democratic possibilities of resentment by redefining the conflict at the heart of democracy” (101).

As Kenneth Burke famously said in his prescient analysis of Hitler’s rhetoric, nothing unifies as much as a common enemy, and a common enemy is useful for enhancing nationalism. Anthony Marx’s recent book persuasively argues that nationalism—that is, a centralized allegiance—can’t be dictated top-down, but elites can employ “an indirect method for channeling popular loyalty, bringing religious passions and identities thus consolidated into the service of absolutism” (74). Marx says, “To consolidate their power and make governance possible and effective, elites embraced rising mass passions by encoding discriminatory laws enforcing those passions and cohering their supporters” (74). So, it’s Burke’s unification through division.

Marx’s narrative of the pre-Enlightenment founding of nationalism emphasizes the crucial role of religious passion in this foundation, which he argues fits the characteristics of what is now often inaccurately called “ethnic nationalism” (what the clash of cultures people present as an impaired and non-Western kind of nationalism). Thus, the “ethnic” versus “civic” nationalism operates by occluding Western nationalism’s reliance on religious/ethnic exclusion.

And I’d suggest that’s what we’re seeing now. I think it can be invisible to a lot of people the way that the policy arguments of the United States have been refit into an eschatological narrative. It is simply a given in some informational enclaves (including Fox News) that being Christian means being Republican, a sloppy and entirely false equation that enables the mobilizing of religious passion (and there are few passions stronger) in service of disenfranchising, excluding, or exterminating the scapegoated out-group. (And, as with the muddled way “Muslim” is troped as a race, in this enclave “Christian” is “white” thus non-Christians must not be white.)

Anthony Marx points out that groups that have relied on this process of cohesion through exclusion don’t recognize their reliance on exclusion because they renarrate their own history as one of inclusion (168). That ahistoric narrative of inclusion enables a useful amnesia about the violent and exclusive bases of nationalism. This narrative of inclusion is strengthened in several ways, including the faux diversity of seeing oneself as inclusive because one’s in-group doesn’t exclude as much as it could– having a Jew lawyer, a gay “friend,” a Catholic colleague. Because the initial violence is hidden, the current violence is framed as a new and necessary exception, and not a continuation of practice.

The violence is often legitimated through hyperbole, and there is a paradox in demagogic rhetoric created by its reliance on hyperbole. Demagoguery is about performing in-group loyalty—to persuade voters that I am the most passionate embodiment of our group, it’s useful if I’m impractical, irrational, and hyperbolic. My willingness to make absurd claims and commit myself to policies that probably won’t work shows just how loyal I am. Initially, when a rhetor does this, they want someone else to stand up and stop the community from enacting that impractical policy. But that isn’t generally what happens. If I say that the in-group needs to go to war with squirrels, then the people on whom I’ve dumped the rhetorical responsibility of actually deliberating pragmatically now have to argue that we aren’t capable of going to war with the squirrels (or of winning, or paying for the war, or something else that suggests we are flawed as a group). They look disloyal and less passionate about the in-group than I do. If Chester Burnette is running against me, he needs to match my hyperbole, so he’ll have to advocate either my policy or something even more impractical. In cultures of demagoguery, communities end up pursuing policies that were initially advocated just as performance of in-group loyalty.

There’s another paradox, and it’s a concerning one. The paradox of social control through demagoguery is that if it’s effective there is no longer a scapegoat to blame—proslavery scapegoating of abolitionists ensured that there was no antislavery discourse in slave state political deliberations. So, on whom could they blame slave resistance? They couldn’t acknowledge that it was the consequence of slavery, and then you get a rhetoric of conspiracy. [2] Conspiracy rhetoric, when it’s successful, leads to (or legitimates) policies of extraordinary surveillance—since the ability of the out-group to cause so many problems although they’ve been silenced and excluded shows a degree of nefariousness that requires extraordinary policies.

And that’s why this “deep state” rhetoric worries me. The ineffectiveness of an interventionist bullying foreign policy, neoliberal economic policies, and climate change denial should be up for argument—we should be having policy arguments about those policies. Their failure should be the moment for reconsideration. If their failures are instead blamed on a nonfalsifiable narrative about a deep conspiracy, then the next step will be debating the degree of surveillance and exclusion of the scapegoated group.

When a culture’s normal rhetorical practice is demagoguery, then there are demagogues in power—because there are demagogues everywhere, because demagoguery becomes the most profitable and cunning choice. When demagoguery is normalized, then demagogues arise.

So, instead of talking about who is or is not a demagogue, I think we should worry about when and how demagoguery gets normalized.

 

[1] I’m not puzzled or outraged that they blame all their problems on Democrats—all political parties do that. I’m intrigued that it’s effective.

[2] Another good example of this maneuver is what Stalin did when his agricultural policies were disastrous. Since the whole argument for the Soviet system was that central planning was more rational, he couldn’t admit that they had screwed up—so he invented (and probably sincerely believed) a conspiracy on the part of counter-revolutionaries.

Hitler and Rhetoric

As Nicholas O’Shaughnessy says, anyone looking at the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust is likely to wonder: “How was it possible for a nation as sophisticated as Germany to regress in the way that it did, for Hitler and the Nazis to enlist an entire people, willingly or otherwise, into a crusade of extermination that would kill anonymous millions?” (1) The conventional answer is to attribute tremendous rhetorical power to Adolf Hitler. Kenneth Burke calls Hitler “a man who swung a great deal of people into his wake” (“Rhetoric” 191). William Shirer, who was an American correspondent in Germany in the 30s, describes that, listening to a speech he knew was nonsense, “was again fascinated by [Hitler’s] oratory, and how by his use of it he was able to impose his outlandish ideas on his audience” (131). Shirer says Hitler “appeared able to swing his German hearers into any mood he wished” (128). Shirer is clear that Hitler owed his power to his rhetoric: “his eloquence, his astonishing ability to move a German audience by speech, that more than anything else had swept him from oblivion to power as dictator and seemed likely to keep him there” (127).

Scholars don’t necessarily agree, however. Ian Kershaw says, “Hitler alone, however important his role, is not enough to explain the extraordinary lurch of a society, relatively non-violent before 1914, into ever more radical brutality and such a frenzy of destruction” (Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution 347). While Hitler’s personal views were important, and neither the Holocaust nor war would have happened without his personal fanaticism and charisma, they weren’t all that was necessary: “Concentrating on Hitler’s personal worldview, no matter how fanatically he was inspired and motivated by it, cannot readily serve to explain why a society, which hardly shared the Arcanum of Hitler’s “philosophy,” gave him such growing support from 1929 on—in proportions that rose with astonishing rapidity. Nor can it explain why, from 1933 on, the non-Nationalist Socialist élites were prepared to play more and more into his hands in the process of “cumulative radicalization.”” (Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution 57)

In other words, Hitler’s followers were  not passive automatons controlled by Hitler’s rhetorical magic. So, how powerful was that rhetoric?

The answer to that question is more complicated than conventional wisdom suggests for several reasons. First, while Hitler was quick to use new technologies, including ones of travel, most of the Nazi rhetoric consumed by converts wasn’t by Hitler. People like Adolf Eichmann talk about being persuaded by other speakers, pamphlets, even books.

Second, no one claims that Hitler was a creative or inventive ideologue: “Hitler was not an originator but a serial plagiarist” (O’Shaughnessy 24). Joachim Fest said Hitler’s beliefs were the “sum of the clichés current in Vienna at the turn of the century” (qtd. in Gregor, 2), and Gregor says, “Neither can one claim that Hitler was an original thinker. There is little in his writings or speeches that we cannot find in the penny pamphlets of pre-1914 Vienna where he began to form his political views. His racial anti-Semitism rehearses the familiar slogans of many on the pre-war right. His visions of German expansion echo the ideas of the more extreme wing of the radical-nationalist Pan German movement [….] And, in essence, his anti-democratic, anti-Socialist sentiments similarly reproduce the conventional thinking of broad sectors of the German right from both before and after the First World War.” (2)

If Hitler wasn’t saying anything new, to what extent can we say he persuaded people? What did he persuade them of?

A closely related problem is that large numbers of Germans supported Hitler politically but rejected the central aspects of his ideology—such as his eliminationist racism and his desire for another war. Although he’d long been absolutely clear that those were central to his views, when he began to downplay them (especially in 1932 and 33), many people believed those were trivial aspects that could be ignored. Many people supported him strategically, especially the Catholic and Lutheran churches, both of which were outraged by the Social Democrats’ (democratic socialists) liberal social policies (e.g., legalizing homosexuality, supporting feminism, and, especially, breaking the religious monopoly on primary schools). Since Hitler and the Nazis were socially conservative, and Hitler promised to allow the churches more power than the Social Democrats would allow, many Protestants voted for Nazis, and the official Catholic Party (the Centre Party) Reichstag members voted unanimously for Hitler taking on dictatorial power (for more on this background, see Evans; Spicer).

Some scholars refer to “the propaganda of success,” by which they mean that Hitler gained the support of people not because he put forward good arguments, or even because of anything he said, but because they liked his locking up Marxists and Socialists, industrialists liked his support of big business, people liked the increased amount of order, they liked the improved economy, they liked his conservative social policies, a lot of Germans liked his persecution of immigrants, and a lot of people either liked or didn’t mind the legitimating and legalizing of discrimination against Jews (even the churches only objected to discrimination against converted Jews). And large numbers of Germans didn’t particularly like the idea of democracy—the premise of democracy is that political situations are complicated, and that there aren’t obvious solutions. Or, more accurately, there are solutions that appear to be obviously right from one perspective, but are obviously wrong from another perspective. Democratic processes assume that the various perspectives need to be taken into consideration, and so the best policy for the community as a whole will not be perfect for anyone and will take a lot of time to determine—many people would rather that a powerful leader make all the decisions and leave them out of it. After Hitler had been in power a year, many people felt that their lives were better, and that’s all they really cared about—that they were headed down a road that would make their lives much worse didn’t concern them because they didn’t think about it.

Finally, many people came to support Nazis because they liked that Hitler made them feel proud of being German again. He didn’t make them feel proud of being German by changing their minds about anything, but by insisting publicly and endlessly that they were victims—that nothing about their situation was the consequence of bad decisions they had made. He wasn’t saying anything that was new, but it was new for a political leader—he was simply the first major German political figure in a long time to say, unequivocally, Germany was for Germans, and Germans were entitled to run Europe (if not the world).

All these characteristics of Hitler’s relationship with his supporters—his lack of originality, strategic acquiescence, hostility to democracy, narrow self-interest on the part of many Germans, and the propaganda of success—mean that it’s actually an open question as to whether Hitler’s rhetoric was unique, let alone how much power we should ascribe to it. And so this course will consider the questions: what were Hitler’s rhetorical strategies? how unique or unusual was (is) it? what kind of impact does it have? to what extent (and under what circumstances) does it work?

 

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle.'” Philosophy of Literary Form. U of California P, 1974.

Evans, Richard. The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin, 2005.

Gregor, Neil. How to Read Hitler. Norton, 2005.

Kershaw, Ian.  Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution. Yale U P, 2009.

O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas. Selling Hitler: Propaganda and the Nazi Brand. Oxford UP, 2016.

Shirer, William. The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984.

Spicer, Kevin, ed. Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust. Indiana UP, 2007.

Ethos, pathos, and logos

Since the reintroduction of Aristotle to rhetoric in the 60s, there has been a tendency to read him in a post-positivist light. That is, the logical positivists (building on Cartesian thought) insisted on a new way of thinking about thinking—on an absolute binary between “logic” and “emotion.” This was new—prior to that binary, the dominant models of thinking involved multiple faculties (including memory and will) and a distinction within the category we call “emotions.” While it was granted that some emotions inhibited reasoning (such as anger and vengeance) theorists of political and ethical deliberation insisted on the importance of sentiments. The logical positivists (and popular culture), however, created a zero-sum relationship between emotion (bad) and reasoning (logic–good). Thus, when we read Aristotle’s comment about the three “modes” of persuasion post-positivist world, we tend to assume that he meant “pathos” in the same way we mean “emotion” and “logos” in the same (sloppy) way we use the word “logic.” And we get ourselves into a mess.

For instance, for many people, “logic” is an evaluative term—a “logical” argument is one that follows rules of logic. Yet, textbooks will describe an “appeal to facts” as a logos (logical) argument. That’s incoherent. Appealing to “facts” (let’s ignore how muckled that word is) isn’t necessarily logical—the “facts” might be irrelevant, they might be incorporated into an argument with an inconsistent major premise, the argument might have too many terms. In rhetoric, we unintentionally equivocate on the term “logical,” using it both to mean any attempt to reason and only logically correct ways of reasoning. (It’s both descriptive and evaluative.)

The second problem with the binary of emotion and reason is that, as is often the case with binaries, we argue for one by showing the other often fails. Since relying entirely on emotion often leads to bad decisions, then it must be bad, and relying on logic must be good. That’s an illogical argument because it has an invalid major premise. Were it valid, then someone who made that argument would also agree that relying on emotion must be good because relying purely on logic sometimes misleads (it’s the same major premise—if x sometimes has a bad outcome, then not-x must be good).

So, even were we to assume that emotion and logic are binaries (they aren’t), then what we would have to conclude is that neither is sufficient for deliberating.

And, in any case, there’s no reason to take a 19th century western notion and try to trap Aristotle into it.

A better way to think about Aristotle’s division is that he is talking about: what the argument of a speech is, who is making the speech, and how they are making it. So, the logos (discourse) in a speech can be summarized in an enthymeme because, he said, that’s how people reason about public affairs. There are better and worse ways of reasoning, and he names a few ways we get misled, but he didn’t hold rhetoric to the same standards he held disputation—that is where he went into details about inference. An appeal to logos, in Aristotle’s terms, isn’t necessarily what we mean by a logical argument.

Aristotle pointed out that who makes the speech has tremendous impact on how persuasive it is (and also how we should judge it)—both the sort of person the rhetor is (young, old, experienced, choleric), and how the person appears in the speech (reasonable, angry). And, finally, how the person makes the speech has a strong impact on the audience, whether it’s highly styled, plain, loud, and so on.

And all of those play together. A vehement speech still has enthymemes, and it’s only credible if we believe the speaker to be angry—if we believe the speaker to be generally angry (or an angry sort of person) that will have a different impact from an angry speech on the part of someone we think of as normally calm. Ethos, pathos, and logos work together, and they don’t map onto our current binary about logic and emotion.

As long as I can think of someone more racist, I’m not racist at all

My *favorite* assignment in the Rhetoric of Racism course is having students look at a text (or practice) about which there is an argument (ideally a text they think is racist) and explain why there is a disagreement.

There are basically eight ways people argue that a text isn’t racist:

  1. a text isn’t racist if it doesn’t make a big deal about race;
  2. texts are either racist or not racist and so if there is any way in which this text criticizes racism, then it can’t be racist;
  3. it’s just a “feel-good” text and you’re over-reading;
  4. it isn’t racist because what it says is true (in other words, the person saying the text isn’t racist is racist);
  5. racists are people who explicitly and self-consciously hate everyone of every other race, and only racist people say racist things, so if the person created the text isn’t someone who never ever associates with or who never says anything “nice” about any member of any other race, then the text can’t be racist (also known as the “some of my best friends are…” defense);
  6. the author didn’t intend to be racist (so it’s only racist if the individual who created the text engaged in actions s/he knew to be racist);
  7. it doesn’t have the marks of hostility toward another race (the tone isn’t over-the-top, it doesn’t use racial epithets);
  8. it isn’t racist because there are other texts that are more racist, or it doesn’t endorse the most extreme versions of racism, or the person knows of people who are more racist (what I’ll call the “Eichmann defense”).

This is also a list of how racism is legitimated—these are the ways that people allow racist practices to continue. They’re all complicated to talk someone out of (although there are ways), and here I want to focus on two of them: 4) and 8), which often co-exist. These are the ones that really muckle my students, and they are really interesting.

I think the two of them share the assumption that calling a text racist is a personal attack on, not just the author(s) of the text in question, but anyone who likes it. The underlying logic is: racists are evil, evil people are entirely not-good, people who like something racist are racist, so calling someone racist, or saying something they like is racist, is saying they are entirely evil.

That logic is a good example of what Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca called “philosophical paired terms.” The logic maps out like a question on a standardized test “Dogs are to mammals as parakeets are to ____.”

And, therefore, since good and evil are binaries (something is entirely good or entirely evil), then, if you can imagine something more evil, you must have some good, and so can’t be entirely evil, and so you can’t be evil at all. Therefore, you must be on the “not racist” side of the equation.

Most of us (perhaps all) engage in judgments comparatively, so that, as long as we are more [whatever] than our peers, we feel good about ourselves. Clearly, 8) relies on that move—as long as you aren’t as racist as someone else, you can feel good about your attitudes.

Interestingly enough, Adolph Eichmann relied on that argument a lot. In the interrogations, he several times condemned people for a Streicher-kind of anti-Semitism—part of trying to persuade his Jewish interrogators that he wasn’t anti-Semitic. He also continually tried to represent his job as okay because it wasn’t as directly death-dealing as the people who actually pulled the triggers or applied the gas.

If someone else was more guilty, then he wasn’t guilty at all.

This move is sometimes characterized as “whataboutism” but it’s actually different. Whataboutism is sheer tu quoque—it’s an attempt to shift the stasis of the argument away from what I did to some competition as to which group or individual is better. It’s almost always an admission that the people making the argument are engaged in sheer factionalism (there are complicated exceptions). So, for instance, defenders of Trump said Clinton did it too (a fallacy). But, some critics of Bill Clinton pointed out that he claimed he was a feminist and supporter of women’s rights, so his sexually harassing women was a violation of feminist principles. That’s a legitimate and important argument.

People who claim that the GOP is morally superior to the DNC can’t logically use the “Clinton groped women” argument at all because it shows that they think both parties are just as bad—and they’re claiming theirs is better.

“Whataboutism” works by accusing the out-group of doing the same thing the in-group has recently been outed for doing. But this move doesn’t accuse the out-group of anything—it just points out that there is a worse version (perhaps even a worse in-group version) of this behavior.

Eichmann defended himself as not anti-Semitic because another Nazi was more extreme. During slavery, slaveholders defended their treatment of slaves on the grounds that there were other slaveholders who were worse (they also engaged in tu quoque, but that’s a different story); pro-segregationists posited the KKK and violent segregationists as worse than they; the people I know who drink the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News flavor-aid all name somein-group pundit too extreme for them.

That someone may be more racist doesn’t mean you aren’t racist. Both you and they might be racist.

Talking about racism means, I think, getting the argument away from whether people are racist, whether their intentions are deliberately racist, and whether racist/not racist is a binary.

[Image screenshot from here.]

On the precious little snowflakes who want to ban _To Kill a Mockingbird_

We have all read about the precious little snowflakes who want great pieces of literature banned because they feel that their group is attacked by some piece of literature generally considered by scholars to be great. This is a rallying point on the part of the Right-Wing Outrage Machine (RWOM), about how effeminate and sensitive students are being created by the faculty of political correctness who go on to insist that students not be allowed to read a book. That effeminate group is offended by something about the book, perhaps a word, more commonly the representation of a character who might be taken to represent their group. Perhaps the character is the only member of that group represented, or perhaps even every member of that group is represented as ignorant, violent, and criminal. The argument, according to the RWOM, is that these people say that you can’t have literature in K-12 classrooms that makes some of the students feel bad about their group, and the RWOM) is clear that they think that is a bad thing to do.

This claim—that people who object to great pieces of literature on the grounds that it makes them feel bad about their group—is an important plank in the platform of RWOM—that “liberals” are too precious to have their concerns taken seriously. “Liberals” are simultaneously sensitive and authoritarian—they can’t stand criticism of their group, and they will silence anyone who criticizes them. Thus, “liberals’” views on policy issues can be dismissed—they don’t understand that democracy is about being willing to be tough and listen to criticism of our in-group.

So, this issue, as far as the RWOM is concerned, isn’t just about the book—about whether “liberals’” concerns need to be considered at all.

And, for the RWOM, To Kill a Mockingbird (TKAM) is a case in point. There are people who object to this book being taught in K-12 because it portrays their group unfavorably. And the RWOM is univocal that those people are idiots, whose views on politics are so impaired (soft, weak, sensitive) that the people who make those arguments shouldn’t even be considered in political discourse.

The argument about TKAM, then, isn’t just an argument about that book—it’s an argument about who is should even have a voice in democratic political discourse. Democracy, as the founders said, is about disagreement. The principle of democracy is that a community benefits from different points of view. The RWOM argument about trying to censor TKAM is pretty clear: the people who want it banned from high schools are weak people who don’t understand democracy. It isn’t just that their views are bad, but that they are such weak and fragile people that their entire group should not be considered when we are thinking about policy.

Banning the book is “caving in” to people who want it banned is stupid.  Banning TKAM is a war on learning. The National Review asserts that the records suggest that all attempts to ban the book come from people who don’t like books with the “n word” in them (that isn’t true, but it is one of the reasons often given).

“But a different sin concerns today’s anti-Mockingbird crowd. In fact, the last time Mockingbird was challenged solely for its depiction of sexual intercourse, rape, or incest was in 2006 in Brentwood, Tenn. Since then, all five challenges — in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2016 — have involved parents or children made uncomfortable by the use of the “N-word” or the book’s depiction of racism.”

That National Review article condemns, in no uncertain terms, people who want the book banned because it makes them uncomfortable. So, as far as the National Review is concerned, banning the book is, prima facie, evidence of your entire political group being an idiot.

The RWOM is unusually unanimous on this point: people who object to teaching TKAM because it hurts their feelings are fragile little snowflakes whose views can be dismissed from consideration on the grounds that they are…well…too fragile. And they are clear that this isn’t a partisan issue: “But to consider To Kill a Mockingbird racially divisive is exactly backwards. The book is invaluable both for introducing students to the reality of America’s racial past and for exposing its injustices.” As in the above cases (both minor and major media), they were unequivocal that they were operating on a principle of education: that, as the National Review says, “Eliminating the hard stuff eliminates the reality.”

In other words, they aren’t taking this position because of partisan politics: it’s a principle that they hold universally.

For the sake of argument, let’s treat that as a principle. I have often argued that the RWOM makes arguments that present themselves as thoroughly, totally, and deeply principled, but are actually rabid factionalism. They were opposed to pedophilia till a pedophile was the GOP candidate for Senate; they wanted Clinton impeached for groping till they had a groper in chief. The RWOM says that their stance on TKAM is principled. Is it?

And here it’s useful to distinguish tu quoque from an argument from principle. If a person really cares about a principle, they will condemn anyone—in-group or not—for violating that principle. If concern about the principle is just a handy brick to throw at the outgroup, then, when it’s pointed out that they are violating a principle they claim to be sacred, they will say, “The out-group does it too!” That’s tu quoque. It’s a fallacy.

More important, it’s an admission that the principle didn’t matter. If I say, “You are bad because you pet squirrels,” then I am making an argument that has the major premise “people who pet squirrels are bad.” If I later defend someone who pets squirrels, I have violated the logic of my own argument. I am putting faction above principle. I don’t think someone is bad for petting squirrels—I think out-group members are bad for doing that, but not in-group members.

So, is the RWOM flinging itself around about sensitive snowflake lefties on the basis of a principle about democracy and the need to read unpleasant books? Or is this about faction?

Most of the articles I could find on the right were about the Biloxi, Mississippi controversy, when a school board decided that the book would not be required reading in eighth grade English classes, and I couldn’t find any major right-wing media who endorsed banning the book. So, this might look as the RWOM is acting on principle.

But there is some sneaky partisanship: snowflakes are lefties, and people who want to ban the book are fragile snowflakes—a term that has become a synonym for social justice warriors. So, condemning the specific policy point of wanting TKAM banned isn’t just a condemnation of that policy point—as far as the RWOM is concerned, the stance of various groups about banning TKAM can be used to condemn the entire group.

The RWOM is so drunk on outrage about the fragile lefties who want the book banned that they make objection to the book, on principle, a sign of being partisan: “I wonder if any of the Biloxi school district’s administrators know how to read.” Obviously, anyone who wants it banned is an idiot, regardless of party.

And it’s interesting to me how the metaphors work in this argument—the people who want the book banned from classrooms are girly (weak, fragile, frail, sensitive) while the people who want it taught are masculine (strong enough to see criticism of America), anti-racist (they univocally endorse Atticus Finch’s stance), and, unlike flaccid lefties, not people who demand “to soften education, to remove any pain or discomfort.” They are firm, strong, and standing tall. (The tendency on the part of the RWOM to use metaphors of hardness for their view and softness for the opposition is both sad and hilarious.)

Were this a principled stance—if the people who have worked themselves into outrage about Biloxi are acting on principle and not just partisanship–then the National Review would fling accusations of flaccidity and girlyness at anyone who objected to TKAM on the grounds that it criticized their group. Do they?

Nope.

There are two, very different ways, this book is challenged.

First, there is the argument it is racist, and that’s complicated. That argument is public because it gets to school boards—the first thing a parent does when objecting to a book is go to the teacher, then the principal, so going to the school board means the teacher and principal are holding their ground.

So, what, exactly, are the arguments that TKAM is racist?

Well, for one thing, it uses the ‘n word’ a lot. And here I will say that I frequently teach material with racist epithets in it, and I make sure they know it on the first day of class. I believe, firmly, in the notion that students should be warned about what they’re getting into, and students who don’t want to read anything with racist epithets shouldn’t take the class. That isn’t because there’s anything wrong with students who would rather not read a lot of appalling racist things, but because they have a right to make choices as to whether they will read them. So I try to be clear about just how awful the reading will be.

My courses are not required; my students are college students. I thoughtfully design my classes so that students can choose to skip a fair number of readings a semester and still get a good grade on the “keeping up with the reading” part of the grade because I know that some of the readings may be unhelpfully provocative, and they can miss up to two weeks up class with no penalty. So, students who are “triggered” by readings can make strategic choices about readings and attendance. High school students don’t have those choices.

The use of the ‘n word’ in TKAM is complicated, as it is in comedy, and high school students aren’t very good at that kind of complexity, and it is used in the book in a way intended to inflict damage. Granted, one can (and, I think, should) read the book as condemning that usage, but reading the book that way involves understanding other minds and perspective-shifting, and not all high school students are there. In other words, as anyone remotely aware of scholarship in rhetoric, reader-response, or, well, basic teacher-training knows, whether a particular class can understand the complicated relationship between the narrator and the events being narrated is something only the teacher of that class could know.

But, let’s side aside the notion that audiences are different from one another and that people receive texts in different ways (really, that only means setting aside sixty years of research, so not that much).

There is another argument, mentioned above. Malcolm Gladwell has made this argument best, and I would simply add that there is a toxic and racist narrative about the Civil Rights movement in our world. That narrative is that people were racist—meaning they irrationally hated everyone who wasn’t “white” and knew that they hated everyone and knew it was irrational. So, a racist person got up in the morning and said, “In every way and every day I will irrationally hate all other races.” As long as you didn’t say that (if, for instance, you said to yourself, “I will only rationally hate all other races”), you weren’t racist.

This is the classic move of feeling good about your decisions because you could imagine someone who was behaving worse. Cheating on this exam by glancing over is okay because you didn’t get the whole exam ahead of time like someone might. Cheating That Race on the rent is okay because you didn’t try to evict them for their race. Adolph Eichmann justified his racism because he wasn’t like Julius Streicher.

What did Atticus Finch do? He, against his will, defended a black man whom he knew to be innocent in a case he knew to be entirely the kind of case Ida B. Wells-Barnett had already named years before. And, throughout the book, he insisted that the racism that would put Tom Robinson to death was one that could (magically?) be cured if people were… what? nicer? less redneck?

Finch acknowledges that the system is SO racist that Robinson telling the truth will tank his case. Robinson mentions that he was nice to the young white woman because he felt sorry for her. And Finch flinches. That moment is why this movie, and the book, are racist.

He knew he lost the case at that moment because he had a racist jury. So, does he try to do anything about their racism? Nope.

Instead, the moral center of the tale says that you need to be nice to racists and hope they’ll be a little bit less racist.

That’s racist.

I love the book. I love that one of my sisters called me “Scout” for a while because I looked like Scout. The movie and book rocked my world, and helped me to see how racist my community and culture were. It was a great book. Now it’s racist.

In its era, it wasn’t. A major issue in 1960 was that “good” people accommodated the KKK, lynchings, Citizens Councils, and that juries couldn’t be counted on to do the sensible thing. So, something that said that the KKK is not actually okay, and that juries that endorsed state-sponsored terrorism were bad was making a useful argument.

We’re way beyond that. There are various problems with TKAM in our era. Atticus Finch is a white savior, his whole stance is the progressive mystique, and the basic message of the story is that racists are rednecks, but we should all submit in a civil fashion to racist justice systems while privately bemoaning that we can’t get a better outcome. (Too bad about Tom!) To be clear, had more people in the South been like Finch in 1960 the world would have been a better place. But, in 2017 we don’t need to make heroes of people who believe that racism is a question of individual intention and feeling, and who think there are good people on both sides. There aren’t. There weren’t. Atticus was wrong about that.

And a text that can make white students feel that racism is over because it isn’t as bad as it was then, and that they would totally have been Atticus Finch (even though they do nothing that involves the same level of risk his actions involved) doesn’t do any kind of anti-racist work. It might even (albeit unintentionally) endorse racist beliefs, insofar as it makes all racism an issue of personal feeling.

This isn’t 1960, and what Finch proposes (and does) isn’t enough for where we are now. That’s another way that people can argue it’s racist—that it can make people feel that we just need to be like Finch and racism will end (or worse yet, that racism did end). So, the argument that the book is racist isn’t a stupid argument, and it certainly isn’t one that assumes some inability to handle difficult or unpleasant material—on the contrary, it’s grounded in the notion that TKAM is simplistic. And, so, as far as the Right Wing Outrage Machine goes, I am a precious and fragile snowflake because anyone who makes the kind of argument I am making is a snowflake.

But, let’s consider fairly the RWOM argument that lefties are weenies who want to silence free speech. Granted, the RWOM never engages the argument I made above—a nuanced and complicated argument about TKAM. Their argument is (as I hope I’ve shown) the false argument that anyone who objects to TKAM being taught in K-12 is a weeny who doesn’t want to hear criticism of their in-group.

If you are intellectually generous, you can find an implied syllogism in the RWOM outrage about TKAM: Lefties are people whose views can be dismissed because they oppose texts like TKAM on the grounds that it offends their feelings about their in-group.

That’s a potentially logically argument, and argument from principle: anyone who objects to TKAM on the grounds that it offends their feelings about their in-group is promoting a political agenda we should dismiss.

Recently, I spent the day with high school teachers from various places in Texas, and the issue of TKAM came up, especially their being told they couldn’t teach it. I was familiar with the cases when it came to school boards, and was willing to defend the case that it wasn’t a useful book for teaching about racism because we’ve moved beyond when aversive racism was the major issue, but that wasn’t the main complaint for any of them.

Every one of them said that the book was pulled because parents of white students complained that it made white Southerners feel bad about their past. They complained to the principal, and the book was pulled.[1] That’s the second reason the book is pulled, and you can see it in the ALA list of reasons the book is challenged.

So, I’m sure, now that I’ve said that racist white Southerners feel hurt about TKAM the RWOM will, because it’s a principle about criticism, insist that TKAM be taught. Who is the snowflake here?

I’m sure, since the Right Wing Outrage Machine is all about principle, they’ll now look into this issue.

I’m also sure I have a unicorn in my garden that poops gold.

[1] Here is the interesting point. Yes, parents who didn’t want TKAM taught because of the n word, and because of complicated issues about its racism, went to school boards. Presumably they didn’t first go to the school boards; they went to the principal and didn’t get anywhere, so they kept taking it up the ladder. Parents who didn’t want their white students to have to confront white racism went to the principal, and got their way. In other words, people who wanted to protect the fragile feelings of white Southerners didn’t need to go to the School Board—they could count on principals protecting the feelings of their previous snowflakes white students who didn’t want to hear that segregation might have been bad. Parents with more complicated issues had to go to the School Board.

What it means when someone says “Calling something racist is anti-white”

Every once in a while, someone will claim that condemning racism is anti-white. That’s racist. By its own logic.

But it’s a kind of normalized racism, a racism so deep in the structures of thought that a person saying it wouldn’t feel what they think of as racist (that is, hostility to all other races). They think that condemning racism is itself racist because they think that racism is “hostility to another race.” Since condemning racism is condemning whites (see below), and condemnation is hostile, then condemning racism is being hostiles to whites. Q fucking ED.

In addition, the underlying assumption is that, if you’re white, you should be entirely “loyal” to your in-group. For authoritarians, in-group loyalty means refusing to criticize the in-group in any way. If you are condemning racism, you are condemning whites (an interesting admission that whites engage in actions that look pretty racist to people), and so you are disloyal to whites.

So, that argument is assuming 1) there are races; 2) the races are in a zero-sum relationship (concern for a non-white race is hostility to whites); 3) whites engage in racist actions; 4) you shouldn’t draw attention to those actions because that helps non-white racists; 5) helping non-white races hurts whites.

In other words, that “criticism” assumes that people should be hostile to all other races, and it defines racism as hostility to other races.

It’s a bad definition, but that doesn’t really matter here—what matters is that, by its own logic, it’s racist.

On normalizing Nazis

 

I often find myself telling people that we demonize Hitler and his followers, and therefore we can’t learn from their example. But even I am unhappy about the NYTimes article about a neo-Nazi because it doesn’t make a Nazi more understandable—it actually makes him less understandable while making him more empathetic.

What’s clear from scholars of the Holocaust is that Nazism was normalized, largely through identification with Hitler (people saw him as the person they would be if the leader), and also through normalizing him and other Nazis. Hitler at Home does a thorough job of showing just how that normalizing worked—careful control of his public image, including the design of his private spaces. And Hitlerland shows how many people were suckered by Hitler and Nazis, to think that their concerns were legitimate (when outside of in audience spaces, Hitler didn’t talk much about Jews, and talked mostly about the Versailles Treaty and reparations), that Nazis were persuaded to become Nazis because of desperation about their economic situation, and that the antisemitism was just rhetoric, so to speak.

That isn’t how it actually worked then, nor is it how it works now. Nazis were anti-Semitic, and the antisemitism was central to their identity—more important, they were deeply committed to doing anything necessary to destroy democracy. Neo-Nazis and KKK and alt-righters aren’t people moved to that position because of some single action or a single book or concerns about their economic situation—they are racist, and they are deeply and violently committed to ending democracy. They were generally racist from the beginning (although they will often insist they aren’t racist, and then cite “science” that they say shows non-white races are inferior). They aren’t very bright, as is demonstrated by how often they respond to argumentation with violence or threats of violence—they can’t put forward a logically persuasive argument to save their lives.

And they don’t care about argument, just as they don’t like democracy. They want an authoritarian government.

I think it’s important to understand that people like that don’t necessarily walk around with swastikas on their foreheads, and they aren’t always screaming, and they can be the people next door, or someone at work. They can be very normal in appearance, but their politics are not normal. And emphasizing one and not the other raises the spectre of just what happened in the Weimar, when Hitler and Nazis persuaded people to support them on the grounds that, despite their politics, they seemed like good people.

The NYTimes article didn’t mention any of that. It didn’t ask the Nazi about democracy, or race.  It just made him seem like a normal person, which he sort of is.

And that’s dangerous in a world in which people believe that they can make all political decisions on the basis of whether advocates/critics seem to be in their in-group.

The underlying assumption is that good people support good policies and bad people support bad policies, and that bad and good are in a binary relationship—something/someone is either entirely good or entirely bad. Thus, if you show that, say, a Nazi is a good person in some way (someone with whom you identify) then some number of people are likely to conclude that Nazism isn’t all that bad.

For instance, notice that it’s common for someone accused of saying or doing something racist to be defended by other people saying “They aren’t a bad person.” As Kenneth Burke said (an author of probably the single most apt analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in its era), Hitler’s rhetoric depended on readers identifying with him. If his readers accepted that there is an us/them dichotomy, then the more he looked like “us” the more they would accept his “us” as normal and his “them” as dangerous.

Nazis want to end democracy. They might be nice, they might claim to be worried about the same things we are, but they blame democracy on the Jews, and they want to exterminate the Jews (and lots of other groups). And any mention of Nazis should keep front and center that they respond to any criticism with violence, they want a violent response, and they want genocide.

And the NYTimes article didn’t do that.  It didn’t explain what a Nazi believed; it just made him seem like a nice guy.

 

 

Magical thinking and not admitting wrong-doing

I’m a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—when communities take a lot of time, and a lot of talk, to come to a decision they later regret. There are certain characteristics those train wrecks have, and one of them is that large numbers of people believe that speech creates reality.

I have found this topic almost impossibly entangled to explain, so bear with me.

People who committed to disastrous decisions (so disastrous they often claimed they’d never made the decisions, and tried to claim they were victims of the decisions they had made themselves) simultaneously claimed (and believed?) that their claims about reality were unmediated—what they said absolutely and obviously perfectly correlated with Reality. Yet they prohibited, punished, or dismissed any disconfirming evidence or claims—if you’re certain that you’re obviously right, then you don’t need to silence dissent. You only need to silence dissent if you either think the truth is not obvious, or if you think you aren’t really speaking the truth.

That seems really abstract, so I’ll give a straightforward example.

Slavers raped slaves. Everyone knew that. Harriet Beecher Stowe said that was a fact and made it part of her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Mary Chesnut in her diary condemned Stowe for her including slave rape in her novel, not on the grounds that rape never happened, but on the grounds that she didn’t appreciate how much naming such rapes hurt women like her, and how painful it was for Chesnut to have to think about the fact Stowe was bringing to her attention. Chesnut wasn’t saying Stowe was wrong—what made Stowe’s claim so painful was that it was true.

So, while Chesnut knew her father and brothers raped slaves, she was only uncomfortable when their actions were brought to her attention by being named as rape. As long as the actions could avoid the name, she could manage the cognitive dissonance.

In Chesnut’s world, an act (that she had siblings among slaves) wasn’t a fact to be managed until it was named by Stowe as a crime.

I could give lots of other examples, but they’re all pretty much the same. James Henry Hammond, notorious for his abuse of slaves, was the most ardent advocate of silencing criticism of slavery, and the whole premise of the dueling culture wasn’t that it mattered whether something was true, but whether it was said.

One of the characteristics of a deliberative train wreck is that people define reality in terms of what is admitted by the in-group to be true—as long as the in-group can keep the claim from being admitted, the claim is untrue, and they can get kind of bizarre in their verbal contortions to keep something out of the realm of a public claim. There’s a kind of magical thinking involved—as long as you can keep slave rape out of the realm of the spoken, you can feel you aren’t obligated to do something about it.

Trump bragged that he sexually assaulted women. That’s a fact.

But, he and his supporters say, he hasn’t admitted it was wrong. Sarah Huckabee is Mary Chesnut.

Teaching about racism from a position of privilege

I’ve taught a course on rhetoric and racism multiple times (I think this is the third, but maybe fourth). It came out of a couple of other courses—one on the rhetoric of free speech, and the other on demagoguery, but also from my complete inability to get smart and well-intentioned people to engage in productive discussions about racism.

I never wanted to teach a class on racism because I thought that there wasn’t really a need for a person who almost always has all the privileges of whiteness to tell people about racism. But I had a few experiences that changed my mind. And so I decided to do it, but it is the most emotionally difficult class I teach, and it is really a set of minefields, and there is no way to teach it that doesn’t offend someone. And yet I think it’s important, and I think other white people should teach about racism, but with a few caveats.

Like many people, I was trained to create the seminar classroom, in which students are supposed to “learn to think for themselves” by arguing with other students. The teacher was supposed to act as referee if things got too out of hand, but, on the whole, to treat all opinions as equally valid. I was teaching a class on the rhetoric of free speech—with the chairs in a circle, like a good teacher–when a white student said, “Why can black people tell jokes about white people, but white people can’t tell jokes about black people?”

And all the African-American students in the class shoved their chairs out of the circle, and one of them looked directly at me.

That’s when I realized how outrageously the “good teaching” method—in which every opinion expressed by a student should be treated as just as valid as the opinion of every other student—was institutionalized privilege.

What I hadn’t realized till that moment was that the apparently “neutral” classroom I had been taught to create wasn’t neutral at all. I was trained at a university and a department at which nonwhites and women were in the minority, and so every discussion in which all values are treated as equal in the classroom necessarily meant that straight male whiteness dominated, just in terms of sheer numbers. Then I went to a university that was predominantly women, and white males still dominated. White males dominate discussion, while white fragility ensures that treating all views as though they’re equal is doing nothing of the kind. The “neutral” classroom treats the white students’ hurt feelings with being called racist as precisely the same as anything racist s/he might say. And they aren’t the same.

That “liberal” model of class discussion is so vexed, and so specifically vexed in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. Often being one of few women in a class, and not uncommonly being one of few who openly identified as feminist, I was not uncommonly asked to represent what “feminists” thought about an issue, and I’ve unhappily observed classes (or was in classes) where the teacher asked a student to speak for an entire group (“Chester, what do gay people think about this?”) It’s interesting that not all identities get that request to speak for their entire group. While I have seen teachers call on a veteran to ask what the entire class of “veterans” think, I have never been in a class where anyone said, “Chester, what do “working class people” think about this issue?” I’ve also never been in a class, even ones where het white Christian males were in the minority, where anyone asked a het white Christian male to speak for all het white males.

The most important privilege that het white Christian males have is the privilege of toggling between individualism and universalism on the basis of which position is most rhetorically useful in the moment. In situations in which het male whiteness is the dominant epistemology, someone with that identity can speak as an individual, about his experience. When he generalizes from his experience, it’s to position himself as the universal experience. Het white males are simultaneously entirely individual and perfectly universal.

The “liberal” classroom presumes people who are speaking to one another as equals, but what if they aren’t? The “liberal” classroom puts tremendous work on identities who walk into that room as not equal—they have to be the homophobic, racist, sexist whisperers. That isn’t their job. That’s my job. I realized I was making students do my work.

That faux neutrality also guarantees other unhappy classroom practices. For instance, students who disagree with that falsely neutral position do so from a position of particularity. The “normal” undergrad has asserted a position which seems to be from a position of universal vision, and so any student who refutes his experience is now not only identifying with a stigmatized identity, but self-identifying as a speaker who is simultaneously particular and a representative of an entire group. When your identity is normalized, you claim to speak for Americans; when your identity is marked as other, you speak for all the others in that category.

There’s a weird paradox here. Both the het white Christian male and the [other] are taken as speaking for a much larger group, but in the case of the het white male it’s that he is speaking for humanity at a whole. If he isn’t, if his identity as het white male isn’t taken as universal in a classroom, then some number of people in that category will be enraged and genuinely feel victimized and dismiss as “political correctness” that they have to honor the experience of others as much as they honor their own experience.

What the white panic media characterizes as “political correctness” is rarely about suppression of free speech (they’re actually the ones engaged in political correctness)—it’s about holding all identities to the same standards of expression. The strategic misnaming of trying to honor peoples’ understanding of themselves as “political correctness” ignores the actual history of the term, which was about pivoting on a dime in order to spin facts in a way that supported faction. In other words, the whole flinging poo of throwing the term “political correctness” at people asking for equality is strategic misnaming and projection.

The second experience was in a class that was about the history about conceptions of citizenship, I was trying to make the point that identification is often racial, and that the notion of “universal” is often racist. I gave the class the statistics about Congress—that it was about 90% male and also in the 90% (or more) white. I asked the white males in the class whether they would feel that they were represented if Congress were around 90% nonwhite nonmale. Normally, this set off light bulbs for students. But, this time, one student raised his hand and said, “Well, yes, because white males aren’t angry.”

Of course, that isn’t true, and I’d bet they’d be pretty angry about not being represented, but, even were it true, it would be irrelevant. That student was assuming that being angry makes people less capable of political deliberation—that anger has no place in political argument. That’s an assumption often made in the “liberal” classroom, in which people get very, very uncomfortable with feelings being expressed. And it naturally privileges the privileged because, if being emotional (especially angry) means that a person shouldn’t be participating (or their participation is somehow impaired) then we either can’t talk about things that bother any students (which would leave a small number of topics appropriate for discussion), or people who are angry about aspects of our world (likely to be the less privileged) are silenced before they speak—they’re silenced on the grounds of the feelings they might legitimately have.

So, if we’re going to have a class about racism, we’re going to have a class in which people get angry, and not everyone’s anger is the same. Racist discourse is (and long has been) much more complicated than a lot of people want it to be—we want to think that it’s easy to identify, that it’s marked by hostility, that it’s open in its attacks on another race. But there has always been what we now call “modern racism”—racism that pretends to be grounded in objective science, that says “nice” things about the denigrated group, that purports to be acting out of concern and even affection. That is the kind of reading that angers students the most, and I think it’s important we read it because it’s the most effective at promoting and legitimating racist practices. But it will offend students to read it.

And so the class is really hard to teach, and even risky. And that was the other point I realized. If we have institutions in which only people of color are teaching classes about racism, we’re making them take on the politically riskier courses. That’s racist.

I remain uncomfortable being a white person teaching about racism, and I think my privilege probably means I do it pretty badly. But I think it needs to be done.

III. Trying to solve the problems of factionalized politics by creating a more unified faction

[This is part of a longer piece, but I really want this part to be separate–it’s about Democrats trying to relitigate the 2016 election. And my basic argument is that we’re engaged in demagoguery about that election.]

In a healthy deliberative situation, people will consider the policy first and faction second. In a culture of demagoguery, people frame every issue as “us vs. them.” We’re in such a culture now, and the US was in such a culture in the antebellum era. And I think that culture meant that the people who wanted to deliberate—who wanted to consider various policy options, listen to various sides, think about the long-term consequences for all of us, who had a broader vision of “us” (one that included everyone affected by policy decisions), were demonized. And they are now.

And, unhappily, there are within the Democratic Party the two factionalized narratives about 2016 mentioned at the beginning. My basic argument about them is that they’re both wrong, as are a lot of narratives about 2016, insofar as they say that progressives’ winning more elections just requires… anything, or that it’s obvious that progressives need to do…. anything. What makes those narratives wrong is that they are monocausal (one thing caused our problems and/or one thing will solve them), and they rely on naive realism (the notion that the truth is obvious).

Factionalized narratives say “there are two choices, and every right-thinking person chooses this one.” Deliberative narratives say, “there are many choices, and each has to be assessed in the circumstance, and each one has to be considered in terms of the past and future.” Factionalized narratives say the right answer is obvious; deliberative narratives say it isn’t. People committed to factionalized narratives say “everyone does it.” I don’t think that’s true.

And I think the comparison to the very similar antebellum situation explains why I don’t think everyone does it. I’m not convinced that this simultaneous entirely factionalized reasoning and condemnation of faction was “true of both sides.” I didn’t read a lot of Northern newspapers from the 1830s, so I can’t say whether they were just as much engaged in doublethink regarding factionalism (it’s great and every member of the faction should do it and every member of the faction should condemn factionalism), but my reading of the Congressional Record suggests they didn’t. The book I never wrote was about how proslavery rhetors tended toward deductive reasoning (the facts on the ground must be these because that’s what my principles say they should be) on every political issue before them. The rhetors who were antislavery (or just nonproslavery) tended to reason inductively, and say that a principle must be wrong because the facts on the ground suggest so. I think that’s a research project that could be useful for thinking about our current political situation—to what extent are people holding their premises safe from disproof?

For instance, William Lloyd Garrison had a journal, The Liberator, and he also had a very specific stance on abolition. Within the community of people who believed that slavery should be abolished immediately, there were profound and passionate disagreements about whether: slaves’ engaging in self-defense violence was justified, the Constitution was neutral on slavery or actively proslavery, abolitionists should insist on immediate and full citizenship for all slaves, abolishing slavery necessarily meant full citizenship for women. Garrison had his views on those issues, which he held passionately and argued for vehemently, he was no saint (Frederick Douglass noted that Garrison was not free of racist notions), and he may not even have been right in his arguments, but his paper published full and fair arguments against his positions. He believed in his arguments so thoroughly that he was willing to read and publish arguments he thought wrong.

How much current media could withstand that test? How many citizens could be like Garrison, and read and publish arguments with which we disagree? And this isn’t even setting a high bar, since Garrison was far from perfect—in fact, he was deeply flawed. It wouldn’t be that hard to be Garrison, and yet most of us fail to meet that low bar.

Antebellum proslavery media never published anything critical of slavery, and the factionalized southern media never published anything critical of their faction. What they did is what’s called “inoculation.” The goal of this media was to become the only source of information for its faction members, and they did that through reprinting articles about the evil behavior of outgroups (even about completely fabricated non-events). The main thrust was 1) deliberation is unnecessary because all you need to know is that we’re good and they’re bad; 2) DON’T LISTEN TO THEM—here’s what they’re going to say, and it’s obviously stupid and evil; 3) there is a war on us, and anyone who doesn’t recognize that is either knowingly or unknowingly on the side of our enemies.

So, in a democracy, a lot of public discourse was about how political deliberation was not only unnecessary, but actively bad (and unmanly). And they condemned the other side by presenting bastardized versions of “the other side’s” argument, as though they knew that their position of “it’s absolutely clear” would be weakened by showing the other side in a reasonably accurate way. And this fascinates me about authoritarian discourse: there is an odd admission that authoritarian discourse relies on single-party rhetoric, that it can’t withstand argumentation. So, perhaps, what it’s claiming isn’t so obvious?

The goal of much political discourse in the antebellum era, as it was in Thucydides’ era, and as it is now, was the establishment of a single-party state. Thus, much democratic discourse was oriented toward the destruction of democracy in the name of only allowing one faction to participate in the setting of policy. Unhappily, that is the argument happening on the left. The argument—whether centrists or progressives should set the policy agenda—is profoundly and irrationally anti-democratic because it’s making the assumption is that the Democratic Party must be a single-faction party. Why make that assumption?

Arguments for policy only seem sensible when the policy seems to arise naturally from a narrative about our current situation. The two dominant purity policy solutions arise naturally from two different narratives about why we are in our current situation. So, in order to argue for a non-purity policy, I have to show what’s wrong with both purity narratives about 2016.

And, really, there are a lot of plausible explanations about the 2016 election. There are, loosely, two purity narratives: first, that Clinton lost because too many of Sanders’ supporters were fanatics who refused to be pragmatic and vote for a less than pure candidate (let’s call that fanatical group Sandersistas, and let’s call the people who promote this narrative the Clintonistas);[3] second, that Trump is President because the DNC foisted a weak milquetoast candidate on the Dems instead of an energizing progressive with a clearly populist policy agenda. But it’s worth looking at all the other narratives as well (I’ll list eight here and mention a few others along the way).

But before even going into them, it’s important to remember that Clinton won the popular vote by a large amount (that’s important for every explanation). And she was predicted as having a 95% chance of winning; the most dire polls put her chances at around 70%.

One factor to keep in mind is that a lot of Obama voters went for Trump, and the first explanation is a lot of them were motivated by sheer sexism. Second, the Right Wing Propaganda Machine had been attacking Clinton for 25 years, and if you throw enough mud, some of it sticks. Third, voter turnout. Fourth, her campaign blew it because they focused on meetings with big money donors toward the end rather than hand-clasping in battleground states because Clinton was arrogant.  Fifth, voter suppression.  The sixth explanation is millennial sexism. Seventh, there is the argument that Sanders poisoned the millennial vote.  Eighth, the DNC was wrong to go for a third-way neoliberal instead of Sanders, who would have won (a surprisingly complicated narrative, explained below).[4]

1 and 2. The first and second can be combined in that they represent simply the problems that come with a candidate who has spent a lot of time committing the crime of being a woman in public. And there is an argument that her faults in those regards are reasons she shouldn’t have gotten the Dem nomination. I sometimes hear those arguments made by people who like Clinton and her policies, and I understand the impulse behind them. I certainly met even young people who had what even they admitted was an irrational aversion to her—the research is pretty clear that it’s harder to remember that every attack on a person has been debunked than it is to have a vague cumulative semi-memory that the person is guilty. For some people, that Clinton had these liabilities was a reason that she shouldn’t get the nomination, and I think there are two versions of that argument—one seems to me reasonable (even if, ultimately, I disagreed with it) and the other is disturbingly anti-democratic.

The first is that, even if it’s through no fault of her own, Clinton was carrying unsurmountable liabilities, and therefore Democrats voting in the primaries shouldn’t vote for her. Women who have also committed Clinton’s crime often bristle at this argument, since they’ve heard it as the reason they can’t be promoted (“unfortunately, sexist men just don’t work as well with women, so you’ll never be a good manager”), given certain jobs (“juries just don’t like women lawyers”), pursue certain careers (“people just don’t trust the financial acuity of women money managers”). Their argument is that you don’t reduce sexism by pandering to it. And that’s a good argument.

But I also think it’s not unwise to think strategically about the likelihood of a candidate winning. So, while I wasn’t persuaded to vote against Clinton in the primaries on the basis of the argument that sexism and propaganda made her a bad candidate, I don’t think people who put it forward are spit from the bowels of Satan. They’re just people with whom I disagree.

The second version of this argument is more disturbing.  That argument is that the DNC should have put forward a “better” candidate. I find this disturbing because I don’t think the DNC should “put forward” any candidate. I realize that is, at least to some extent, what all organizations do—the elite in the organization try to position for election the people they think will make the best candidates—so I’m not naïve enough to think the DNC will remain absolutely neutral (and, in fact, I ranted at a lot of DNC fund raisers during the primaries because I was outraged that there were DNC-funded ads attacking Sanders). But, the absolute most the DNC should do is put its finger on the scale (and even that is problematic, discussed below)—Democrats need to elect candidates, not have them selected for us. Because Dems haven’t been doing well at the level of Governor or Senator, there weren’t a lot of possible candidates. Warren, Biden, and Booker all had reasons not to run, and other possibilities weren’t experienced enough. Thus, I reject the basis premise that the DNC should have selected any candidate for the Dems.

Third, voter turnout. Although there is some debate as to whether voter turnout cost Clinton the election, there remains a strong argument that it did. Or, at least, there’s a consensus that better turnout among nonwhite voters would have helped Clinton. But even people who agree that voter turnout would have led to a Clinton victory disagree as to what that factor means. Some people connect it to the argument below—that voter suppression was crucial in the election. Others argue that yet another reason that Dems (or the DNC) shouldn’t have gone for Clinton—she didn’t have the charisma to get people to put up with the (probably deliberate) long lines in heavily Dem polling places. Some people argue that the low voter turnout out was Sandersistas who refused to vote for Clinton (part of the narrative that they cost Dems the election) but I’ve never seen good evidence for that claim—it’s belied by the demographics of Sanderistas versus the low turnout. My impression, admittedly just from listening to (or reading) people who didn’t vote or didn’t vote for Clinton but might have, was that they believed the polls; they were certain she was going to win, and so didn’t think it was necessary for them to vote. They either didn’t vote, or engaged in a protest vote (to show the DNC that there are progressive voters). I’ll admit that, especially for people for whom voting would have required considerable sacrifice (such as taking unpaid time off work), this seems to me a reasonable attitude—95% is pretty much a sure thing for most people.

Fourth, the argument that Clinton’s campaign blew it because they focused on meetings with big money donors toward the end rather than hand-clasping in battleground states is unfortunately often connected to presenting Clinton as arrogant. And I have to say that I get twitchy when anyone uses the word “arrogant” in regard to a powerful woman (or powerful nonwhite).

It is not actually clear that Clinton did make a mistake with serious consequences in her strategies. More important, when we engage in hindsight, and consider counterfactuals (something I do in my scholarship frequently) we have to think about whether our sense that the outcome was obvious is the consequence of knowing the outcome. If you know of the dotcom crash of 2001, you can look back to various factors in 2000 and see all the evidence that it was coming, and then you can think to yourself what idiots people were for not seeing it. (You might even find quotes from some people who predicted it, and think what idiots everyone was for not listening to those geniuses). But that’s just intellectual shoulder-patting. Certainly, there was evidence of coming disaster, but there was also evidence that this was a new model of economic growth—you have to look at all the evidence people had in front of them in the moment and understand what reasons they gave for the choices they made.

To make considering counterfactual anything other than 20/20 hindsight, you have to ask: Were the choices reasonable within the context of that evidence, regardless of outcome?

Even if Clinton made the wrong decision, and there were people at the time who said that, the question should be whether she was making a decision that was obviously unreasonable in the moment, and I don’t think it was. For instance, her believing polls doesn’t make her arrogant—I think it’s reasonable for someone with her background to think she might know what she is doing. And what she was doing was believing the polls, and spending her energy getting money to throw downticket.

Had Clinton decided not to meet with big money donors and had instead worked on ensuring she won a supposedly unlosable election by on the ground campaigning, and had she won, I think the same people who are lambasting her now would be lambasting her as arrogant for just trying to get herself elected instead of raising more money for Dems generally.

I think this criticism amounts to lambasting her for having believed the polls. Since it’s a criticism I’ve heard repeated by people who themselves cited the polls as authoritative in October, I don’t find it a very interesting argument.

Fifth, Voter suppression. This is an interesting argument. There are lots of arguments that there was voter suppression, and that it was enough to flip the election. But, it’s also disputed, and there are also major sources that are silent on the issue (such as 538). There are two reasons I think it probably did happen—or at least there was a determined effort to make it happen. The GOP Noise Machine works by deflection and projection (or, more accurately, projection as deflection) and the ginned-up fear-mongering about voter fraud quacks and walks like a projection/deflection move. If it is projection/deflection, there either there was actual voter fraud—that is, interference with voting machines—or voter suppression. But that’s sheer speculation on my part.

The more plausible reason to think there was voter suppression and it was effective is that the GOP has spent so much money, time, and effort trying to make it harder for nonwhites to vote. They must think it’s effective.

The sixth and seventh are generally connected—that millennials are sexist, or Sanders otherwise ruined the election for Clinton (every once in a while someone makes the claim about Stein, but that’s rare).

Let’s start with the Clintonista explanation that Sanders is entirely to blame (and keep in mind that isn’t Clinton’s explanation). It doesn’t hold up to empirical testing. It’s generally made on the basis of several leaps of inference. The best empirical support (and it isn’t very good) for blaming Sanders’ supporters relies on equating Sanders’ supporters and millennials, and that’s a false equation.  Clinton won the popular vote, and lost by small amounts in key states. So, a good argument for Sandersistas having cost Clinton the election would show that there were enough of them in the very close states who didn’t vote for Clinton to have shifted the election. And I’ve looked for that data, and I can’t find it.

The closest is some numbers run by Brian Schaffner, who estimates that 12% of Sanders voters voted for Trump (but the number might be 6%).  In a tweet, Schaffner estimated the state levels. If those estimates are correct, then, had all of those people voted for Clinton, she would have won. (All of this is explained in John Sides’ August 24, 2017 Washington Post article, “Did Enough Bernie Sanders supporters vote for Trump to cost Clinton the election?”)

So, does that mean that Sanders supporters cost Clinton the election, or, as another article terms them, Sanders “defectors”? Note the loaded language.

This whole narrative makes me nervous, especially since it’s taking Schaffner’s work as more definitive than even he says it is. And it seems to be getting used as a weapon in the purity war rumbling around the left—Sanders voters are unreliable, likely to defect, were too self-righteous to vote sensibly, or too unwilling to compromise. It’s also getting used by people who want to argue that Dems should have gone for Sanders, since it’s proof that he would have won. (It isn’t, since Clinton picked up more than that number in GOP voters who “defected.”)

First of all, we need to stop with the language of “defecting” and even “costing.” Even Schaffner points out that the people who did that weren’t typically Democrats, and they were racist. Sanders always did worse than Clinton as far as non-whites, but his defenders argue that he was changing his message, and he would have attracted more. Had he genuinely persuaded the public that he was not racist, he would probably have lost this 12%. Schaffner’s speculation is important to note: “I think what this starts to suggest to me is that these are old holdovers from the Democratic Party that are conservative on race issues. And while Bernie wasn’t campaigning on that kind of thing, Clinton was much more forthright about courting the votes of minorities — and maybe that offended them, and then eventually pushed them out and toward Trump.”

So, these weren’t Sanders supporters, I’d say—just people who voted for him in the primaries. And they certainly don’t represent anything important about Bernie-bros, or the young progressives who want the Dems to become more progressive—this isn’t that category. In fact, Schaffner’s evidence suggest that group did vote for Clinton, or, at least, didn’t cost her the election.

It might be that the fact that Sanders’ supporters repeated a lot of fake news reports and pro-Trump talking points on social media convinced others in their feed to vote Trump or third party, but I haven’t found a study to suggest that’s the case. My highly individualistic impression is that the people who voted for Sanders in the primaries and refused to vote for Clinton were the kind that had never voted for a Dem anyway (and didn’t vote for Obama, on purity grounds), or they lived in Texas, so they don’t really count as game-changers. I know that there were people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump, but the research doesn’t suggest that many of them were Sanders’ supporters who refused to vote for Clinton.

So, the notion that Clinton lost just because of Sandersistas doesn’t really make the grade of a falsifiable claim. It’s just a guess, and not even a very good one.

And why would we make that guess? There is much better evidence about other factors, such as voter suppression and overconfidence among Clinton supporters (who thought she had it in the bag and so they didn’t need to vote). 538 persuasively argues it was the Comey scandal and the impact on undecided voters (most of whom weren’t millennials). Why make a guess that blames fellow lefties? That seems to me unnecessarily and strategically unwise.

People tend to blame the outgroup for anything bad that happens, and, unhappily, it’s not unheard of for people to be more concerned about heretics than heathens. That is, we can be more concerned about cleansing our group of people who aren’t like-minded enough than about people who are openly opposed to us. It’s an irrational act to which people are drawn when the ingroup is shamed, and that’s what I think we’re doing. It seems to me a skirmish in a purity war.

It’s also incredibly patronizing and delegitimates a point of view—that Sanders was the better candidate—of people with whom there are shared goals.

I think this kind of move (like all skirmishes in a purity war) sets up a nasty dynamic—like two people fighting over who is at fault for burning the Thanksgiving turkey. Once a person says, “It’s your fault,” it’s incredibly difficult to get the conversation back into a useful realm in which people are problem-solving—it’s all about defending yourself.

I mentioned that I do know Sanders supporters who refused to vote for Clinton, some of whom never vote in Presidential elections (basically, any candidate popular enough to get a nomination isn’t pure enough for them—they liked that candidate when you had to buy the speech on vinyl at the show; it’s just hipster politics), but some of whom probably would have. And they live in Texas. In Texas, we are accustomed to being systematically disenfranchised, and every vote other than GOP is a symbolic action, so, although I disagree with that choice, I don’t think it’s evil or ridiculous or illegitimate or even unreasonable.

Eighth, Many people for whom I care deeply make the argument that the DNC was wrong to go for a third-way neoliberal instead of Sanders, who would definitely have won. In some versions, the argument is that the DNC pushed a lousy candidate onto the Dems and is therefore responsible.

I find it really weird that so many reasonable people make that argument without seeing how odd it is. It’s either false or nonfalsifiable (like the Clintonista narrative that blames Sandersistas). It’s also really patronizing since it delegitimates anyone who voted for Clinton.

I see this argument a lot. It necessarily has two sub-points: that Clinton only won because of DNC support, and that Sanders would have won the general election.  That first argument, although repeated a lot in certain circles, has some implications that, I think (I hope), the people making it would reject if made explicit.

Clinton won the open primaries, and Sanders won the caucuses. So, by any reckoning, Clinton got more votes than Sanders. This argument says that she did so only because the DNC supported her. That’s a really offensive argument. If Clinton only won because of the DNC support, then the underlying assumption is that all those people who voted for Clinton would have voted for Sanders if the DNC had supported him—that they would do whatever the DNC told them to do.

I want to leave that out there because I really think that people haven’t thought that one through. Is that really an argument they believe?

That argument is saying that Clinton supporters were mindless sheeple who would do whatever the DNC told them to. The narrative is that Sanders’ supporters really know how to vote and how to solve our problems, and Clinton supporters were just mindless followers who don’t really know what we need and how we should vote.

That’s patronizing, just as patronizing as Clinton’s saying that Sanders supporters were young and misled. I think it’s wrong—factually, morally, and strategically–in both cases. Clinton supporters, like Sanders supporters, had good reasons and good arguments for their point of view; neither group should be delegitimated. And the second someone argues for delegitimating the other major group in a community, they’re engaged in a purity war.

Since Sanders never did as well with nonwhites and women as Clinton, and Clinton never did as well as Sanders with young people, any narrative that says THEY didn’t have legitimate reasons for supporting their candidate is just appallingly patronizing. It has to stop.

But, let’s take it a step further. Is it clear that Sanders would have won? The poll that Sandersistas cite shows that Clinton would win. So, either it’s a bad poll, or Clinton might have been a less good choice, but not bad.

Sanders might have done better because he has the dangly bits, and so might not have been hurt by sexism, but Clinton lost white evangelical women, and there’s no reason to think Sanders would have gotten them (especially since he would have had anti-Semitism against him—a mirror image argument of the “don’t vote for Clinton because other people are sexist”), and there’s even less reason to think he would have gotten nonwhites. He still doesn’t get issues about race, after all. He still talks about “working class people” when he means “white working class.”

Antisemitism in the US is a non-trivial issue, and there has never been a candidate who wasn’t a practicing something, so there isn’t any good reason to think that he could have won over any bigots that Clinton lost. Unhappily, I think arguing that we shouldn’t have nominated Clinton because of sexism logically implies we shouldn’t have nominated Sanders because of anti-Semitism. If you’re arguing for Dems needing to pander to prejudices, then you need to be consistent in that (and there are still huge swaths of American public opinion that equates “liberal Jew” and “communist”). And that’s why I think they’re both troubling arguments.

At the time of the poll that showed that Sanders was the better candidate, there was a counter-argument that the GOP wanted Sanders to be the candidate, as they knew they could win against a Jewish socialist, and so they were holding fire. I was extremely dubious about that argument, so I spent a few hours looking at my normal Right Wing Propaganda Machine sources, and I ended up deciding it was true. It was striking that there weren’t any negative articles about Sanders after October or so of 2015. For instance, Sanders’ wife had some complicated financial dealings (personally, I don’t think they were even on the same radar as Trump), but there was no mention of them in the Noise Machine. The few articles about him were about how Clinton was victimizing him. That doesn’t mean that supporting Sanders was definitely a bad idea and anyone who did was an idiot. It just means that it’s reasonable to have supported Sanders but unreasonable to think he would definitely have won.

And here I have to emphasize the point I’m making—I think politics is very rarely capable of definitely right judgments, and it’s almost always a question of probabilities. Thus, there are a lot of positions on an issue that are reasonable, but they don’t all necessarily turn out to be right. Being reasonable doesn’t guarantee that one is right, and turning out to be wrong doesn’t mean that one’s position was unreasonable. So, I don’t think it’s obvious that Sanders would have won, but that doesn’t mean I’m certain he wouldn’t have. I do think his situation was more wobbly than many people realize. Therefore, people who voted for Clinton aren’t (and weren’t) obviously wrong, and people who voted for Sanders aren’t (and weren’t) obviously wrong–the right answer is not certain.

What most of my lefty friends don’t know (since, unlike me, they are sensible enough not to wander around in the GOP Noise Machine) is that Clinton was slammed for being socialist. I saw this a lot on friends’ social media too (and still do). For instance, here’s the National Review, not even a very extreme site (not as rabidly factional as Fox, let alone hate radio): I think it would have been an issue for Sanders as a candidate—perhaps not fatal (Obama got past it)—but an issue.

And here’s another point for which I have no data other than listening to people. The evangelical right has thoroughly politicized their churches, as they did during segregation, and it’s all about abortion. Unless Sanders was going to change the Dem stance on reproductive rights (which would have lost him huge numbers of people), he would have faced opposition from them. So, again, I think it was reasonable to support Sanders in the primary on the grounds that he was most likely to win; I think it was reasonable to support Clinton on those same grounds. I think it was reasonable to be unhappy there wasn’t a third Dem candidate.

I think we’re reasonable people. The premise of democracy is that no individual or group knows what is best for the community as a whole, that a community benefits from having people passionately committed to different political agenda, that pure agreement is never possible but respectful and grudging compromise is good enough, that listening to people with whom you disagree is useful, that important political change happens slowly, and that being certain and being right aren’t the same thing. I think Democrats should value democracy. I think we agree to have at least that much democracy within our party, and that means acknowledging that difference as to which is (or was) the best candidate is perfectly fine—people might have good reasons for disagreeing.

If the Dems are going to win elections (rather than replay what happened in the 80s) we need to agree to disagree together.