Trish, Author at Patricia Roberts-Miller

I was an idiot at 18 (aka, compromise and incrementalism and progressivism can work together)

gaetz shouting — Image from: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/10/politics/donald-trump-impeachment/index.html

When I moved to Berkeley at the age of 18, I was frustrated by various lefties who had, I thought, “given up” on their convictions. They were working for short-term gains and willing to compromise. I believed that they had been worn down by years of political activism, and that their mistake was having abandoned their pure faith in the right policies—they should have continued to insist on settling for nothing short of what is right.

I believed that political change happens because there are people who are so purely committed to the right thing that evil capitulates to the people who refuse to compromise. I wasn’t entirely wrong. And yet I was.

There were four errors in how I thought. First, and most important, I thought that my perspective on what was “the right” thing to do was correct. I began from the premise that someone died and made me Kant. I believed that there is a perfect policy on every issue because people don’t really disagree, and/or that the people who disagree don’t count or don’t understand their own real interests. I was a toxic populist.

Toxic populism is profoundly anti-democratic and implicitly authoritarian, since it denies the value of inclusive democratic deliberation by saying that only one perspective is right. It isn’t necessarily “left” or “right” or even “political.” As Jan-Werner Muller says,

But above all, [populists] tend to say that they — and only they — represent what they often call the real people or also, typically, the silent majority. Populists will deny the legitimacy of all other contenders for power. This is never merely about policy disagreements or even disagreements about values which, of course, are normal and ideally productive in a democracy. Populists always immediately make it personal and moral. They also suggest that citizens who do not share their understanding of the supposedly real people do not really belong to the people at all. So populists always morally exclude others at two levels: party politics, but also among the people themselves, where those who do not take their side politically are automatically deemed un-American, un-Polish, un-Turkish, etc.

Second, I believed in hope. I remember that I decided that I must like George Berkeley’s philosophy because I was told he was an idealist. I had no clue what that meant in philosophical terms, and I’m not sure I understood what little of him I tried to read, but I had some vague sense that it meant something like holding onto your dreams even when things are bad. I believed that ignoring your past in favor of what you hoped might happen in the future was positive, and, to be blunt, it was very positive in my life. My high school life had not been good, and I needed to believe that that past life was not a prediction of my future life. It wasn’t. And it can be literally life-saving to believe in hope. Believing in hope is good.

But, third, for reasons I still don’t understand, I came to believe that believing in hope is enough to make things happen. What I didn’t understand is that hope is necessary but not sufficient for good things to happen when they haven’t been happening. Hoping is good, and having hope makes it more likely that you’ll take advantages of opportunity; it’s necessary for change and achievement. But success is not guaranteed to people who hope, no matter how much you hope. We have to be hopeful enough to look at the past honestly.

I was engaged in magical thinking about politics. There are lots of kinds of magical thinking when it comes to politics—the just world model, prosperity “gospel,” Social Darwinism, politics as eschatology. [1] What they all have in common is the notion that we shouldn’t learn from the past—we should reject it in favor of what we hope for the future, as though hope is all we need.

I also saw compromise as in an inverse relationship to hope I thought that, if people refused to compromise, and hoped more, something would magically happen. I believed that the universe rewarded uncompromised hope. [2]

And all of these errors are included in the fourth, which was that I thought there was one way that people should try to enact political change, and that we should find that one way. I thought that political change had happened because of one person or one group and their one policy to which they were unanimously and completely committed. (Granted, that’s how US history is taught, so my idiocy wasn’t venal.)

In other words, I was unidimensional in my thinking about politics—I thought there was one perspective that correctly saw the policy that was right for everyone, and to which every reasonable person would assent. I thought disagreement was failure to have the right perspective. I thought that’s what history showed to be true.

For instance, I thought abolition happened because abolitionists refused to compromise, segregation ended because Civil Rights workers refused to compromise, women got the vote because suffragettes refused to compromise, but that isn’t what happened at all. All the abolitionists made compromises of various kinds, MLK was condemned for making too many compromises, and the suffragettes rhetorical compromises in terms of racism are just unbearable.

There are so many things I didn’t understand. Among them is no major change happens because of one individual or one group. Political change happens because there are lots of groups working toward the same end and using lots of different methods. I didn’t know that because we don’t like history to be that way—we like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or David v. Goliath; we like stories in which individuals, by standing up for their beliefs, changed everything. There are admirable individuals who made big changes in our world, but they were always part of a group, and that group was part of a coalition of groups, and they never got all that they wanted.

No one person, and no one group, makes significant change happen. Political change happens because there are people who are willing to compromise, and people who think that compromise is the first step in more changes. Incremental change works to move a big community toward major changes when the people who want more work with those who negotiate incremental changes and vice versa. It doesn’t work if we see politics as bargaining, in which we reach an agreement and we’re done. It does work if we see each compromise as incremental movement toward a goal—if it becomes the place from which we climb higher.

What I didn’t see (but what’s pretty clear in much history) is that people who demand more need to be part of the conversation, and need to make their demands clear, and need to agitate for those demands aggressively, and they need to push hard on the people who want incremental change without making incrementalists the enemy. Those people are absolutely crucial in political change. And incrementalists need to think of what changes they’ve achieved as not nearly enough. When incrementalists get an incremental achievement, those people who dislike the compromise need to push for more.

DADT—which was incrementalist–turned out to be a good move. At the time, I didn’t think it was. LBJ’s very incrementalist Medicare was a good move. So was the Voting Rights Act, insofar as it stayed in place for a while, but it wasn’t the basis of even better incremental changes. The Civil Rights Act was the basis for more changes. I still think Obamacare was good incrementalism, but I worry that it’s in the Voting Rights Act category.

In any case, our world is a little better for those compromises, so incremental can make things a little better. Our world is much worse, however, because of the incrementalist compromises in the GI Bill, the 1876 resolution of the disputed election, the Missouri Compromise, compromises about Workfare and “tough on crime” initiatives of the 90s, and so many compromises that FDR made with racists. Incrementalism isn’t always good, and it isn’t always bad, but even when it’s good it’s good only if it’s seen as a step from which we will move. Because we hope for more.

I was right to think that hope is good; I was wrong to think hoping means you never compromise. In fact, useful compromises require tremendous compromise.

[1] I have to point out the heartlessness of any of these ways of magical thinking. They’re all versions of the “bad things only happen to people who deserve them” lie, as though slaves just had to hope more and…what…slavery would have evaporated? Slavers would have said, “Oh, shit, what we’re doing is unjust!”? People who get cancer didn’t hope enough? Sometimes our desire to erase uncertainty from our loves is the basis for extraordinary cruelty.

[2] Refusing to compromise is a great and effective strategy under certain circumstances–it’s useful for someone who has all the power, or who has enough power to stop anything from happening if they don’t get their way, someone who wants to burn down the system, someone who is fine with how the system is working, and spoiled children.

Patricia Roberts-Miller cv

Patricia Roberts-Miller, Professor Emeritus
Department of Rhetoric and Writing
University of Texas at Austin
patriciarobertsmiller@gmail.com
patriciarobertsmiller.com

Scholar of pathologies of deliberation—that is, how communities persuade themselves to make decisions they later regret, although they had all the information necessary to make other decisions (e.g., demagoguery, propaganda, racism).

Education: University of California at Berkeley, Rhetoric PhD (1987), MA (Distinction, 1983), AB (Highest Honors, 1981)

Selected Books: Speaking of Race: How to Have Antiracist Conversations That Bring US Together (2021), Rhetoric and Demagoguery (2019), Demagoguery and Democracy (2017), Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (2009), Deliberate Conflict: Composition Classes and Political Spaces (2004), Voices in the Wilderness: The Paradox of the Puritan Public Sphere (1999).

Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters
• “Who Says What Is…Always Tells a Story”: White Supremacist Rhetoric, Then and Now” Nineteenth-Century Activist Rhetorics. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli. MLA. 2021. 279-289.
• “How to have more productive conversations about racism: Stop focusing on individual intent.” Salon (February 15, 2021)
• “On Not Bullshitting Yourself, or Your Teaching.” Composition Studies, 48:3, 129-131, 2020.
• “Demagoguery, Charismatic Leadership, and the Force of Habit,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49:3, 233-247, 2019. DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2019.1610638
• “Why “I don’t like his rhetoric, but I like what he’s doing with the economy” is not a good reason to support any leader.” Washington Spectator. September 25, 2019.
• “Ocasio-Cortez Exploited as Clickbait and Outrage Porn Magnet.” Washington Spectator April 2, 2019.
• “Trump’s Demagoguery.” Washington Spectator March 11, 2019.
• “Charisma Isn’t Leadership” Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump. Ed. Ryan Skinnell. Societas, 2018.
• “Demagoguery vs. democracy: How “us vs. them” can lead to state-led violence.” Salon (June 10, 2017).

Selected Recent Invited Lectures/Presentations
Rhetoric Society of America (co-leader of seminar on “Rhetoric in Dark Times,” 2021), University of Georgia Athens (2020), University of Pennsylvania Law School (2020), “Unbecoming a Democracy.” Open Mind (2/10/2020), University of Maryland College Park (First Year Book 2019), Penn State University (Kenneth Burke Lecture, 2019), “Demagogues are More Common Than You Think.” Democracy Works (May 20, 2019), “Demagoguery and Democracy” Pardubice University, and Clemintinium National Library, Czechia (2019), University of Nevada-Reno (2019), Scranton University (2019)

Referee/Reviewer (presses and journals): Canadian Journal of Political Science, CCC, College English, Composition Studies, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Journal of the History of Rhetoric (formerly Advances in the History of Rhetoric), Lexington Books, Oxford University Press, Penn State University Press, Political Studies, Praxis, Profession, Review of Politics, Rhetorica, Rhetoric Society Quarterly; Southern Illinois University Press, Texas A&M University Press, University of Alabama Press, University of Pittsburgh Press

Reviewer (promotion and tenure): Arizona State University, Cal State Los Angeles, Carnegie Mellon University, Florida State University, Iowa State University, Michigan State University, Simon Fraser University, Syracuse University, Temple University, Texas A&M University, University of Georgia, University of Illinois, University of Kansas, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Oregon, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, University of Texas San Antonio, Wayne State University

How myths about snakes can tell us a lot about how not to think about politics

Photo of Americans being sent to concentration camps — https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs

I grew up in an area that had a fair amount of non-landscaped areas, and so there were things like snakes and coyotes. Every year, the local fire department (who had, I think, not enough to do much of the time, but when they were needed, they were really needed) would come to my elementary school and engage in what is called “threat inflation” about snakes. I’m certain they felt justified—there were rattlesnakes in the area, and kids can be idiots about trying to tease or catch a snake. And, so, in order to prevent some kids who might be tempted to mess with snakes to be more careful they deliberately tried to terrify all of us about snakes (in rhetoric, this is called the problem of the “composite audience”). They persuaded me that rattlesnakes were under every rock and would at every chance try to leap out and attack me. I was terrified of snakes. There were gopher snakes in that area who looked a lot like rattlesnakes and, who, if in dry leaves, could seem to make a rattling sound. (I would later hear the real rattling sound, and it was completely different. Luckily, I had a dog who was better at identifying the danger of the real rattling sound.)

As I’ve often lived or hiked in areas with snakes, and so I’ve been told many things about them, all of which I believed. Here are some of the things I was told by people who seem authoritative.

• Venomous snakes have a triangle-shaped head, as opposed to beneficial snakes.

• Here’s how to identify a coral snake:

Red Touch Yellow – Kills a Fellow
Red Touch Black – Venom Lack
Yellow Touches Red – Soon You’ll Be Dead
Red Touches Black – Friend of Jack

• On my neighborhood mailing list, during a summer when water for wildlife was scarce, someone posted a warning that they had been standing on a pedestrian bridge that is twenty feet above a creek and saw at least a dozen cottonmouths congregating.

• Since many of my dogs have been only slightly smarter than slime mold, I’ve worried about them interacting even with a non-venomous snake (since they will bite), and have seen various commercial products that claim to repel snakes from your yard, as well as home remedies like using moth balls.

• Another person on the mailing list posted a picture of what she insisted was a Burmese Python that had been living in their shed until disturbed. When various other people said that the photo was a Texas Rat Snake, the poster insisted it wasn’t, since the person who said it was a Burmese Python was a Texas native, and therefore knew Texas snakes.

I believed all of these things (except the Burmese Python thing), and I am very well-educated. The person who insisted on the Burmese Python was also highly educated. Believing things that are completely wrong, even choosing to die on the hill of being wrong—all of that has very little to do with being educated or smart.

All of these ways of being wrong exemplify many of the ways all of us—not matter how well-educated—are wrong. But it’s wrong not because people are stupid when it comes to snakes, or beliefs about snakes are peculiarly prone to wrongness in some way. The way that these beliefs are wrong exemplify how people reason badly about all sorts of things, including politics.

Let’s start with the last way of thinking ineffectively, since it’s also the first, and it has to do with what constitutes expertise. Firefighters aren’t necessarily experts in snake behavior, and, in fact, having lived in Texas (or wherever) one’s whole life doesn’t necessarily mean that one’s identifications are correct. A person can spend a lifetime being wrong. What makes a person a reliable identifier of venomous snakes isn’t whether they’re certain about it being venomous, and especially not how often they’ve identified a venomous snake, but how often they’ve identified a non-venomous and yet similar-looking snake.

Of course, the firefighters weren’t trying to give accurate information about snake behavior. The snakes in that area are protective, not aggressive, and I suspect the firefighters knew it. But they also knew that kids are dumb, and would probably provoke snakes. The firefighters were engaged in threat inflation in order to try to get dumb kids to be a little less dumb. The problem with threat inflation as a rhetorical tactic is that it only works if the audience doesn’t realize it’s threat inflation, and so, unless someone comes along and explains that rattlesnakes will not go out of their way to attack a human, that person will spend a lifetime over-reacting to rattlesnakes, real and imagined. People who have been persuaded that rattlesnakes are out to get us will try to kill all rattlesnakes, and even all snakes who look like rattlesnakes.

And they are likely to make a lot of mistakes because it isn’t all that easy to distinguish venomous v. non-venomous snakes consistently.

It turns out, for instance, that quite a few non-venomous snakes have triangle-shaped heads, the rhyme about yellow v. black doesn’t work outside of the US, in the US (west of the Mississippi) there are four non-venomous species who would be misidentified as venomous by the rhyme, and there can be what are called “aberrant” individual snakes all over the US that don’t fit the rhyme (meaning venomous ones that wouldn’t appear venomous, and non-venomous ones that would appear venomous).

Take two water snakes in my area: cottonmouth and various kinds of nerodia, but especially the Diamond-Backed Water snake. Telling the difference between the two of them involves seeing their underside, their eye shape, and seeing how they swim (and the last isn’t foolproof). I mentioned someone who posted that there were cottonmouths gathering, but there is no way that the person on the bridge could know whether they were looking at cottonmouth or nerodia, since they weren’t watching the snakes swim, and they were too far away to see the eye shape. Even if they spent their whole life in Texas.

We tend to think in binaries, especially about something frightening (like snakes), and the basic binary we have is good v. bad. That’s generally a mistake, but it especially is when we decide that beings are good or bad. And, so, we talk about venomous v. harmless snakes (or more explicitly “bad v. beneficial” snakes), but that isn’t how nature works. (That isn’t how the world works, in fact.) Cottonmouths aren’t entirely harmful—they are beneficial in an environment—but a person with dogs or small children might legitimately feel that their yard is not a place in which their benefits outweigh the various serious problems. On the other hand, nerodia aren’t “harmless” if we believe that harmless is the same as good and friendly. So, oddly enough, if we talk about venomous v. harmless snakes we’re likely to set someone up to make bad decisions about whether to handle a nerodia. Harm is a question of degrees, and it’s contextual.

There are better and worse reasons that someone might be frightened at the prospect of a yard with snakes. The more that one lives in an area with a lot of backyard wildlife, the more likely there will be snakes. The various ways of making a yard inhospitable to snakes are a little complicated—essentially don’t create habitat. For people who have chickens, it’s even more complicated. And various products and home remedies are a waste of money and possibly even unsafe. Furthermore, there is no way to make a yard friendly to “good” snakes (e.g., rat snakes) and not “bad” snakes (e.g., venomous ones), because nature isn’t divided into good and bad. And if one succeeds at creating a yard that is entirely snake free, there might be more problems with other kinds of “bad” critters.

Just to be clear: what I’m saying is that the desire to divide snakes into “good” and “bad” and to find simple ways of purifying our community of the “bad” snakes (through expelling or exterminating) just sets us up for giving our money to grifters, exterminating “good” snakes, and making the whole situation worse. If we add to the mix relying on simple ways of identifying the good v. bad snakes (and simple solutions include relying people whose authority comes from their experience of believing themselves continually confirmed in their ability to identify “bad” snakes), then we are pretty much guaranteed to make a mess.

You can take that paragraph and substitute various words for “snakes”—people, political parties, nations, voters, and so on–and see what is wrong with how we tend to think about politics and policies. That there is something bad (dogs getting bitten by snakes) doesn’t mean that our problems are caused by there being bad beings in our world, nor that it can only be solved by ridding our world of those bad beings, let alone that there are simple ways of doing so.

When people make the argument I’m making (the situation is not a binary, there are various solutions and the ones most likely to be effective aren’t simple), the response is too often, “Oh, so you’re saying we should do nothing?” or “So you don’t think venomous snakes leaping out from under the couch and attacking babies is a problem?”

This post is already too long, so I can’t explain this part very well (a different post, I guess, although I say that a lot), but saying, “Your simple solution based on a completely false binary won’t work” is not the same as saying, “Let’s do nothing.”

I have had dogs for years, and have always had at least one who was barely smarter than many (but not all) rocks. I have no doubt they would be in grave danger if we had a venomous snake make a home in our yard. I think having a venomous snake take up residence in a yard with dumb dogs, small children, or adventurous older kids is a big problem that should be taken seriously. That I agree there is a problem doesn’t mean I endorse ineffective solutions grounded in misunderstandings of the situation–when it comes to snakes or politics.

One more post about writing

I frequently hate everything I’ve written. I hate that I rely on the same verbal tricks to cover that I don’t really know what I’m doing, that my vocabulary seems so limited, my metaphors are simultaneously mixed, cliché, and not quite right, a reader trying to follow the overall structure probably feels as though they’ve woken up in an MC Escher drawing, and that the insight that was so smart in my head looks as smart and interesting on the page as an aging hairball.

I hate that it never turns out to be what I was trying to write.

Robinson Jeffers’ “Love the Wild Swan” is something so useful at those moments.

“Love The Wild Swan”

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
—This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

[If you like poetry, and don’t know Jeffers, read him. So good.]

Jeffers is referring to Yeats’ poem, “The Wild Swan at Coole,” and also to Jeffers’ own (I would say successful) attempts to write poetry about the natural world of Northern California. If I’m right about that, then the “one bird” is likely a Great Blue Heron, a bird that set me on a journey.

I’m not a literary critic, nor an expert on Jeffers, so I could be completely mistaken, but this poem seems to me about Jeffers’ feeling a failure when he compares what he’s written to a hero (Yeats) and to the thing about which he’s trying to write (the Great Blue Heron). And, while he’s a great poet, I think that’s all reasonable, to be honest. We’re never as good as our heroes (that’s why they’re heroes), and nothing we write is as beautiful, complicated, elegant, or powerful as the thing about which we’re trying to write.

One line I particularly like is “Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast.” I was incredibly troubled when I discovered that Audubon collected samples of birds by killing them, and I think that’s a good metaphor for a troubling way of thinking about writing. It’s more straightforward to write about something if you kill it—that is, if you stop it from moving. A lot of talk about writing relies on metaphors of aggression, as though writers are at war with our own writing. There are metaphors of domination, control, and force. What if, instead, we imagined the thing about which we’re writing as something we can love, and never kill or capture?

Adrienne Rich’s “Transcendental Etude” is another poem on which I rely when I hate my writing. For me, it’s an exploration of trying to imagine what it would mean to do good work without falling into thinking about achievement in terms of mastery and domination.

It ends with sitting down in a kitchen and bringing together all sorts of things—pretty, ugly, dangerous, comforting. I’ve also found that a really useful way to think about scholarship—sometimes it’s just bringing things together:

“a whole new poetry beginning here.

Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow- colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow
original domestic silk, the finest findings
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and the dry darkbrown face of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
the striving for greatness, brilliance
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright; silk against roughness,
putting the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound;
and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows.”

Good writing isn’t creating an argument, but following one

I read John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman a long time ago, but there is one part that still sticks with me. Sarah (the woman) is standing at a window in a storm, intending to jump from it. If you don’t know the book, then you might not know that Fowles frequently stops the action of the novel in order to say something about Victorian culture and politics, or his writing process. At this point, he says that his “plan” was that she would “lay bare” all of her thoughts. But she doesn’t. She walks away from the window. And Fowles explains why the novel doesn’t do what he planned. And then there’s a lovely excursus about writing. He says that authors cannot plan what their characters will do.

“We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.” (81)

He goes on to explain that his characters sometimes refused to do what he wanted them to do, such as the character Charles deciding to stop at a dairy, and he imagines that the reader suggests that Fowles changed his mind while writing because he imagined a more clever plot. Fowles then says,

“I can only report—and I am the most reliable witness—that the idea seemed to come to me clearly from Charles, not myself. It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy; I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if I want him to be real.” (82)

Yesterday, I had blocked out four hours for writing the conclusion to chapter five of the book I’m currently writing. This is the chapter about critics of US policy in Vietnam, and my plan for the chapter was that it would discuss MLK, Henry Steele Commager (a big deal at the time, and classic liberal), and Hans Morgenthau (a conservative, anti-communist “realist”), all of whom had extremely similar criticisms. My plan was to write about how, despite their different places on the political spectrum, they all shared criticisms that were dismissed at the time and later admitted to be accurate by no less than Robert McNamara, although they were demonized and dismissed at the time for making those arguments.

That’s a good argument; that was a good plan.

But, once I got near the end of it (and this was perhaps 2k words, which I’d taken four hours to write), I started to think that, not only was I making an argument very different from my plan, but that I wasn’t writing a conclusion to a chapter. I was writing the introduction to the book.

I was trained in a program that required that students turn in a thesis statement for their paper before they turned in the paper. Then there was a class day in which all those thesis statements were critiqued (by very sensible standards—and this was the thesis statement, not the topic sentence, and the paper had to be structured such that the thesis statement didn’t appear until the conclusion, if at all) [1] I often had students tell me that they worried that the more they researched or thought about the issue, the more they disagreed with their thesis, and they didn’t know what they were supposed to do.

“Change your thesis,” I said. They were always shocked at my saying that. For various reasons (mostly having to do with trying to prevent cheating), many of their teachers had told them that they were not allowed to change their argument.

It seems to me that it should be a premise of education, and of writing, that, if your argumentation doesn’t support your argument, then change your argument.

I think we have to respect our evidence and analysis as much as Fowles had to respect his characters. I think we should teach students to do the same.

I will say that I think Fowles was being hyperbolic. He did have a plan, and he changed the plan because the characters he’d created made the plan obsolete. If he had tried to write without any plan, it’s hard to imagine that he would have gotten there at all. Writers should plan—the plan is what gets you to the place that you can develop a new plan. Every plan is a ladder you should feel free to pick up and move to a new place. I think his point is that, if your writing is honest, you have be honest about where your writing has gotten you. And you create a new plan.

I’m not sure it’s the introduction, but I have to try to draft a version of the book in which it is.

[1] For non-writing geeks, I should explain: the thesis statement is the proposition that the text argues. In non-student writing, it is rarely in the introduction. It’s usually in the conclusion, but it’s sometimes never stated (e.g., “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The more controversial the claim, the more likely the thesis is to be delayed or unstated.

What a lot of people call the “thesis statement” is what is more usefully called the “contract.” Outside of student writing, it’s sometimes the problem statement, the hypothesis, the thesis question, a vaguer version of the thesis statement, a map (“this paper will discuss…”).

. I think his point is that, if your writing is honest, you have be honest about where your writing has gotten you. And you create a new plan.

I’m not sure it’s the introduction, but I have to try to draft a version of the book in which it is.

[1] For non-writing geeks, I should explain: the thesis statement is the proposition that the text argues. In non-student writing, it is rarely in the introduction. It’s usually in the conclusion, but it’s sometimes never stated (e.g., “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The more controversial the claim, the more likely the thesis is to be delayed or unstated.

What a lot of people call the “thesis statement” is what is more usefully called the “contract.” Outside of student writing, it’s sometimes the problem statement, the hypothesis, the thesis question, a vaguer version of the thesis statement, a map (“this paper will discuss…”).

Hans Morgenthau: what happened when a conservative criticized US policies in Vietnam

On April 18, 1965, The New York Times published a long editorial written by Hans Morgenthau, in which he argued that, while he appreciated a recent statement of LBJ about Vietnam, on the whole, he thought that “the President reiterated the intellectual assumptions and policy proposals which brought us to an impasse and which make it impossible to extricate ourselves.” The assumptions were false, he argued, and the policies grounded in those assumptions were therefore unreasonable and unlikely to succeed. Morgenthau’s criticism of US policy in regard to Vietnam is interesting not because it was unusual (it wasn’t), but because the response to his criticism exemplifies how people avoid the responsibilities of democratic deliberation through motivism and fallacious arguments from association. That kind of response undermines useful policy deliberation, and ultimately contributes to authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter who it is used by or for.

Morgenthau was anti-communist, self-identified conservative, and one of the founders of what is generally called the “realist” school in international relations (e.g., Kissinger’s realpolitik). Thus, Morgenthau granted that China should be contained, but he argued that military intervention to prop up the Diem regime was not the way to do it. He argued that it was a fantasy to think that it could be contained in the same way that the USSR had been in Europe–that is, through “erecting a military wall at the periphery of her empire.” He insisted that the Vietnam situation was a civil war, not “an integral part of unlimited Chinese aggression.”

In many ways, Morgenthau’s criticism of US policy was more or less the same as others elsewhere on the political spectrum (like Henry Steele Commager, MLK, Reinhold Niebuhr). He said that Ho Chi Minh “came to power not courtesy of another Communist nation’s victorious army but at the head of a victorious army of his own.” (so this was not like Soviet aggression in Europe). Ho Chi Minh had considerable popular support, whereas Diem did not, and therefore this was not a military, but a political, problem. Morgenthau argued that, “People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.” Supporters of Diem did not have at least a strong a faith because Diem’s policies resulted in his being unpopular (“on one side, Diem’s family, surrounded by a Pretorian guard; on the other, the Vietnamese people”). Morgenthau pointed out that trying to treat such situations in a military way–counter-insurgency–had not worked. The French tried it in Algeria and Indochina (i.e., Vietnam), and it didn’t work, and it wasn’t working for the US in Vietnam. Like other critics of US policy in Vietnam (e.g., MLK), he emphasized that Diem (and the US, by supporting Diem) had violated the Geneva agreement, especially in terms of refusing to have an election—a refusal that was an open admission that communism was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but a popular policy agenda (he notes, largely because of land reform). We were violating the fundamental characteristic of democracy—abiding by the results of elections—in some mistaken notion that it would protect democracy.

Morgenthau’s anti-communist, conservative, and realist opposition to Vietnam shows how false is our tendency to talk about policy affiliations in terms of identity (left v. right, “conservatives” v. “liberals”). To take a policy affiliation and assume it has a necessary relationship to an identity is anti-deliberative, anti-democratic, and proto-demagogic, and what happened to Morgenthau shows just how damaging that deflecting of argumentation is.

Being opposed to US policy in Vietnam didn’t necessarily mean that one was sympathetic to communism—it could, as it did with Morgenthau, be the consequence of such a commitment to anti-communism that one only wants to support polices that will actually succeed. Ironically, that would eventually be the position that Robert McNamara, the (liberal and Democratic) architect of US policy in Vietnam, would adopt. In his 1995 book In Retrospect, McNamara would say that he came to realize that everything people like MLK, Morgenthau, and Neibuhr had been saying was true. He didn’t mention them by name, or acknowledge that he could have listened to them. But he could have.

We now often equate opposing the Vietnam War with “liberals” and supporting the war with “conservatives” and we assume that “liberals” were Democrats and “conservatives” GOP. We do so, not because we’re operating from any coherent mapping of policy affiliation, but because reducing policy affiliation to a false binary or continuum of identity throws policy argumentation to the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And that’s the point, especially if the policy agenda of a party is contradictory. Under those circumstances, instead of trying to defend policies, the most short-term effective rhetorical strategy is to go on the offensive, and deflect attention from one’s policies to the motives of the critics.

That’s exactly what the liberal and Democratic LBJ and his supporters did in regard to his Vietnam policies, as exemplified in their treatment of Morgenthau. Morgenthau put forward a sensible plan that was, it should be emphasized, grounded in anti-communism:
(1) recognition of the political and cultural predominance of China on the mainland of Asia as a fact of life; (2) liquidation of the peripheral military containment of China; (3) strengthening of the uncommitted nations of Asia by nonmilitary means; (4) assessment of Communist governments in Asia in terms not of Communist doctrine but of their relation to the interests and power of the United States.
In other words, the US should be prepared to ally itself with communist regimes, as long as they were hostile to China. This plan was similar to the policy the US justified as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”–how we rationalized supporting unpopular authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records rather than allow elections that might lead to socialist or communist (even if democratic) regimes–but with a more realistic assessment of the varieties of communism and the possible benefits of those alliances. As Morgenthau says, “In fact, the United States encounters today less hostility from Tito, who is a Communist, than from de Gaulle, who is not.”

Realism, as a political theory, claims to value putting the best interests of the nation above “moral” considerations, and strives to separate moral assessments of the “goodness” of allies from their potential utility to the US. We were, after all, closely allied with Israel, Sweden, and various other highly socialistic countries; why not add North Vietnam to that list, as long as it would be an ally?

That’s an argument worth considering. Morgenthau thought we should. Clearly, McNamara should have. He didn’t. We didn’t. Defenders of LBJ’s policies neither debated nor refuted Morgenthau’s argument. Instead, they shifted the stasis to Morgenthau’s motives and identity, pathologizing him, misrepresenting his arguments, and depoliticizing debate about Vietnam.

The Chicago Tribune published a short guest editorial (from National Review) June 12, 1965, and it’s worth quoting in full:

Prof. Hans Morgenthau’s hyperactive role as a protestor against our policy in Viet Nam is embarrassing many of his friends, and may even be embarrassing to himself, who is not used to the kind of self-exposure he is submitting to or to the company he finds himself keeping. (He was, it is reliably reported, distressed to see a photograph of himself standing next to Linus Paulding, and we cannot believe he looks forward to sharing the Madison Square Garden platform with the infantile leftist, Joan Baez.)

Morgenthau is a fine scholar and a first-rate dialectician. His Asiatic policies are heavily conditioned by his adamant Europe-firstism—much as the politics of Dean Acheson were. Then too, in 1960-61, Morgenthau went to Harvard as a visiting professor, expecting appointment to a new chair of government, McGeorge Bundy, then dean, nixed it—and may thereby have lit a fuse that is now exploding in anti-Johnson (and anti-Bundy) rallies around the country.

The Tribune editorial doesn’t misrepresent Morgenthau’s argument—it doesn’t even acknowledge he has one—nor does it characterize him as a dangerous person. Instead, it infantilizes and trivializes him by associating him with Linus Paulding and Joan Baez, embarrassment, infantilism, and leftism. It never argues that he’s infantile, trivial, and so on—the argument is made through association (such as characterizing his criticism of US policy regarding Vietnam as a “hyperactive role”).

There is a gesture of fairness–acknowledging that Morgenthau is a Professor and intelligent, but with a smear and dismissal. Morgenthau was Jewish, and one of many anti-semitic strategies for othering Jews was to refer to them as “Asiatic” (and therefore not really white)—Morgenthau’s ethnic background is irrelevant to whether he’s making a good argument. But, given the anti-semitism of the time, it would discredit him for some audience members. Similarly, whether he was a “Europe First,” or even whether that’s a bad thing to be, is irrelevant to whether his claims are logical, reasonable, and so on. The narrative about what happened at Harvard—whether true or not—also has nothing to do with the quality of Morgenthau’s argument.

But, dismissing an opposition argument on the grounds that the person has bad motives for making it (and it isn’t therefore a real argument) is persuasive to people who believe dissent constitutes out-group membership. We have a tendency to attribute good motives to the in-group and bad motives to the out-group for exactly the same behavior. Thus, the editorial says Morgenthau’s stance on Vietnam is purely the consequence of an academic rivalry. Why not assume the same of McGeorge Bundy’s stance? Why not assume that Bundy, if he did “nix” Morgenthau’s appointment, did so out of personal spite, and personal spite means he is taking the opposite position on the war from Morgenthau?

The slippage between Cold War rhetoric and policies meant that, as in the case of Vietnam, the US was in the paradoxical position of claiming to promote democracy, freedom, and independence while helping major powers (like France) hold on to colonies, supporting anti-democratic (even openly fascist) governments, suppressing elections, and silencing free speech even in the US:

The cold war was an all-encompassing rhetorical reality that developed out of Soviet-American disputes but eventually transcended them to reach to American perceptions of Asia and to American actions against domestic dissidents. This ideological rhetoric became so embedded in American consciousness that it eventually limited the political choice leaders could make, created grossly distorted views of adversaries, and finally led to the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. (Hinds and Windt xix)

Given the way the Cold War rhetoric paired terms worked, to criticize an “ally” or any US policy could be framed as endorsing the USSR. This despite the fact that we were often not promoting democracy, that not all forms of communism were imposed by a Soviet-led minority on an unwilling populace, and that silence of dissent was one of the main criticisms of the USSR. Thus, in service of battling an enemy one of whose crimes was silencing dissent, we silenced dissent.

Radicalizing an audience for political war (aka, CRT)

sign saying "I am not an oppressor" — From https://www.newsbug.info/news/nation/commentary-attacks-on-critical-race-theory-reopen-old-wounds/article_7f053c53-270a-566e-99e3-622595161329.html

Persuading an audience to go to war necessitates radicalizing them. War always involves the killing of noncombatants–even the most carefully conducted wars kill noncombatants through bombings, drones, starvation, failure of infrastructure. When there is a fear of partisan action, there are massacres. If the war is intended to be a war of subjugation or extermination, then persuading people to go to war necessarily means persuading them to ignore normal ethical considerations about fairness, compassion, concern for innocent bystanders. Radicalizing an audience means that that extremism becomes a virtue, and that constraints on behavior are framed as weakness, cowardice, disloyalty, lack of patriotism (for more on this see Kruglanski et al). A radicalized audience doesn’t want to think, but wants to punish (Thucydides’ point).

Radicalizing an audience is rhetorically straightforward. There are two main strategies. One is to create a hobgoblin—something that doesn’t actually exist at all (Jews poisoning wells, lesbians persuading women to get abortions, witches who seduce children, Satanic childcare workers). The other, much easier, is the junior high school mean girl strategy. Imagine that there are three people: both Chester and Abilene are friends with Hubert, and Chester wants Hubert to be irrationally committed to him–that is, radicalize Hubert. Chester would tell Hubert that Abilene is spreading rumors that Hubert [does something shameful]. If Chester wanted Hubert to attack Abilene physically, then the rumors would be relentless and extreme attacks on Hubert’s prestige.

Notice that this strategy only works if Chester can persuade Hubert not to talk to Abilene directly. That will be important later. It’s also useful to point out that Chester is the one making Hubert feel shamed.

Radicalizing an audience means framing the situation as a war against [this group] as justified because They are evil people committed to shaming or destroying us.

If a political figure succeeds at persuading a base that “we” (the political figure sometimes is, but often is not, a member of the group they’re claiming to protect) is threatened with a loss of prestige, power, or existence (and those three things get confused), then that political figure can count on zero accountability. It’s war, after all, and so in-group political figures are not constrained by any moral or legal norms other than crushing Them.

And, if you’re a political figure or party, then zero accountability is desirable. The more that you can persuade your base that you are a loyal fighter against some hobgoblin, the less they will hold you to any standards at all–the only standard is that you are an enemy of Them.

The easy and rich rewards of making our political world a zero-sum battle between Us and Them is a rhetorical trap.

As I said, the the whole process falls apart if Hubert talks to Abilene. The narrative that 1) our world is Us and Them, and 2) They want us to feel shame, or They want us to be exterminated generally collapses if we ask for primary sources, and if we assess sources fairly.

The claim that the broad array of actual policy affiliations in the US is accurately described as either a binary or continuum between the left and right is false, non-falsifiable, and/or a self-fulfilling prophecy. But for political figures or pundits or media to radicalize their base, it has to be a premise–no matter how false or non-falsifiable. Demagoguery means that, in order to maintain the false binary, we lump all sorts of people together.

And then we cherrypick (use a minor political official to represent the whole party), nutpick (use some random PETA person to represent vegetarians, or some pastor of a small church to represent Christians), or actively lie in order to claim that we are justified in behaving as though politics is war. Since it’s war, every member of our in-group is justified in any actions (aka, not accountable) due to moral licensing.

And that is how the radicalizing demagoguery about CRT works.

It starts by creating a hobgoblin (CRT) that has nothing to do with what advocates of Critical Race Theory say, let alone what people who talk about systemic racism say. All of which has little to do with a goal of making white people feel shame.

It’s the anti-CRT people who want it to be about shame. Notice that they can’t quote anyone who says the goal of CRT is for white people to feel shame. That’s just eighth grade bullshit.

If you have to lie about what your opponent believes—and, let’s be clear, every pro-Trump attack on CRT lies about what CRT is—then maybe you should think about that. A group with a good argument doesn’t have to lie.

But if you are a political group that doesn’t want to be held to standards of morality, legality, fairness, or reciprocity, and you don’t have a good argument, then you need to radicalize your base for total war. And that is what this is about.

A rough sketch of what I wanted to write about the Weathermen in the Demagoguery book

When I was working on the demagoguery book, I wanted to include pieces all over the political spectrum, including something by an author I really liked (Muir) and something from the radical left. Length made me cut the discussion of Muir’s “Hetch Hetchy Valley.” (At the time, I thought it would be part of my next book project. It’s now moved to the one after this at the earliest.) And I also spent some time thinking I’d write about the Weathermen, but writing about their rhetoric is really hard for a bunch of interesting reasons. Since I didn’t get to write about it in the book, I’ll blather about it here. I still think rhetoric from groups like the Weathermen should be talked about more in our scholarship and teaching for several reasons. But it’s tough.

First, their writings, especially Prairie Fire (1974), are mind-numbing in a kind of interesting way (so this is a reason for and against writing about them). That may be a deliberate rhetorical choice. It might be what used to be called mystagoguery, in which the rhetoric is basically unintelligible, but it seems smart, and the fact that the audience can’t follow the argument is taken to mean that the author is sooo smart, a prophet with direct connection to the Truth that the audience doesn’t have (but might get by putting all their faith in the prophet). A lot of New Age self-help rhetoric works this way, as do most conspiracy theories.

The term mystagoguery quickly fell out of favor among scholars because the accusation of mystagoguery was so often just anti-intellectualism or an unconsidered hostility to specialist discourse. The problem was that people called something mystagoguery (especially literary theory) simply because they didn’t understand it. But something not making sense to a particular person doesn’t mean it’s unintelligible in general. Early Habermas made no sense to me for a long time because I didn’t understand the references, context, counter-arguments, and terms. Once I took the time to try to understand them, it made sense. I can’t follow an argument about super-string theory to save my life, but it isn’t mystagoguery—I’m just not in the audience. So, to argue that something is mystagoguery requires first engaging in the most charitable reading possible—trying to make sure one understands the references and so on–, and then explaining why, even in that context and so on the text doesn’t make sense.

Arguing that Prairie Fire is mystagoguery would require going deep into the specific kind of Maoist Marxist discourse of the Weathermen, and then either showing that it didn’t make sense, or that their use of it didn’t make sense. That’s a long slog I didn’t feel like making.

To claim something is mystagoguery is to attribute a fairly specific relationship between the rhetor and audience. The audience isn’t persuaded of the arguments made in the text, because the audience can’t even say exactly what those arguments are (let alone explain what many of the terms or phrases mean), but they can get a general gist (capitalism = bad; weathermen = good), and they believe that the rhetor does understand everything they are saying. So, the audience believes there is a very clear set of arguments and the rhetor is a genius who understands them.

In another kind of discourse, however, neither the rhetor nor audience believes that there is a set of comprehensible claims logically related to one another. The claims might be clear to the reader in isolation, but their relationship to one another is nonsense. Much Weatherman rhetoric, for instance, lists various ways that different groups are oppressed by American capitalism, and makes claims about what a revolution would do, and why now is the moment that various oppressed groups will see their shared oppression, rise up together, and overthrow capitalism in favor of a communist society. There isn’t any argumentation showing the connections among the claims, and those connections are vexed.

The notion that the white working class would, any minute now, realize that their interests were the same as BIPOC (all of whom have the same interests), environmentalists, prisoners, gays, Palestinians, women, and every other group mentioned in the pamphlet seems to me implausible. Although it was doctrine in some (not all) Marxist circles that the first step in revolution was a massive coalition of people who had realized their shared oppression, that wasn’t how any revolution had happened. But Prairie Fire, like a lot of demagoguery, argues through assertion, not argumentation. There are specifics and data, but the specific cases described function to exemplify the point being made, not as minor premises logically connected to a valid major premise.

In other words, there’s a different kind of rhetoric going on here, discourse that is fundamentally epideictic but with all the discursive surface markers of argumentation. It looks like argumentation, but it isn’t. That’s interesting.

Another aspect of Weathermen rhetoric that’s interesting for scholars and teachers of rhetoric is the question of effectiveness. At the time of Prairie Fire (1974), there were authors engaged in Marxist critiques of American education, carceral system, economy that, whether we agree with them or not, were engaged in argumentation, and they did change minds. People did read, for instance, Angela Davis on the prison system and change their mind about it. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would read Prairie Fire and have their mind changed about abolition, China, Palestine, the Rosenbergs, or the other sometimes apparently random topics discussed. But, the authors might not have been trying to persuade their audience about those issues.

Prairie Fire is a manifesto, and one of the major rhetorical functions of a manifesto is persuading an audience somewhat committed to the cause to become fully committed. Augustine famously said that a sermon might inform pagans about Christianity, persuade Christians to believe correct doctrine, and convince committed Christians to walk the walk (not his exact words). A manifesto tries to convince believers to become beleevers, largely by trying to persuade them that the group is fully committed to success, and will be effective because it’s in a tradition of successful social movements.

It doesn’t make that latter argument through a careful comparison of strategies, but by providing a geneaology in which Weather Underground is placed at the end of a narrative that includes Harriet Tubman, unions, Toussaint L’O[u]verture, and others whose precise relationship to the Weathermen is never clearly explained. But I think the implication that one is supposed to draw is associative, and not logical. And that’s interesting.

There’s one other point I want to make about effectiveness. It’s hard to find a good secondary on the Weathermen—some of the histories make them heroes and others villains, with very little in between. All the authors seem to have an axe to grind. The people who were involved in it are not necessarily motivated to be entirely honest about their reasons for joining the group. Still and all, there’s some indication that, at least for some people, it was the sex and drugs. So, did the verbal rhetoric even need to be plausible, let alone persuasive?

The main reason I really wanted to write about the rhetoric of Prairie Fire is that its rhetorical approach—accumulation, association, assertion, dismissal of any opposition or criticism through motivism—might be connected to the epistemological premises of a certain kind of Marxism that was popular in that era: a kind of enlightened and omniscient naïve realism.

Naïve realism says that the world is as it appears, and that, if we get back to direct perception (which is relatively easy for sensible people to do) then we will all see the same thing: the truth. Disagreement is necessarily a sign that someone is biased and their views should be dismissed.

There is also a kind of naïve realism that says that only some people (those who have been enlightened) can have that unmediated perception of the truth, and that their perception is universally valid—they are omniscient. This way of thinking about thinking is deeply anti-democratic, and yet common in democracies. It isn’t particular to democracies, nor is it specific to any one political affiliation.

There are four important assumptions involved in the enlightened and omniscient naïve realism model of identity and perception: 1) that there is a truth in any situation—a true way of thinking about religion, the truly best policy, a true narrative about a historical event; 2) a single individual can perceive this truth (that is, they can have a perspective-free, omniscient viewpoint, from which they can see everything that is true about poverty, the Trinity, WWI); 3) certain experiences (a particular kind of education, a conversion experience, success in business, military prowess) and/or group identity (wealthy, poor, GOP, Dem, white, young, old, so on) have either given them or signify their enlightened and omniscient naïve realism; 4) because their point of view is omniscient, everyone who disagrees with them is biased (by cupidity or stupidity), limited to one perspective (seeing only part of the situation), or lying (they know what the truth is, but it’s inconvenient, risky, or unpleasant, so they deliberately or choose the obviously wrong policy).

The political implications are pretty clear: there is one right policy solution to every problem. There is no such thing as intelligent and informed good faith disagreement. That one right solution is obvious to the right people, so disagreement is itself a reason to ban someone from the discussion, and to keep political power limited to the people who demonstrate enlightened omniscience. In other words, it’s anti-democratic. There may be forms and norms that appear democratic–the communist bloc nations had constitutions and Bills of Rights, and Massachusetts Bay Colony claimed to support “freedom of conscience.” But, in all those cases, people had the right to be right–that is, the right to agree and not the right to disagree.[1]

Ultimately, enlightened omniscient naive realism ends up in a tyranny of some form, perhaps a one-party state (such as Dinesh D’Souza advocates), a theocracy, herrrenvolk democracy, oligarchy, and so on.

In the case of the Weathermen, it ended up with their being racist, and that’s another interesting aspect of them. Because they were enlightened by virtue of their ideology, they saw themselves as better judges of the conditions of Black Americans than Black Americans, with the obvious consequence that they became notorious for whitesplaining. Their epistemology undermined their sincere attempts to be anti-racist.

Participating in politics is, as Hannah Arendt elegantly argued, a transcendental leap into uncertainty. We can reduce the uncertainty of any particular leap by using processes that reduce our reliance on cognitive biases, such as trying to find the smartest opposition arguments we can, trying to think about what evidence would cause us to change our mind, and making a distinction between agreeing with an argument and thinking it’s reasonable. Believing that there is only one right policy, and that we happen to know it is like making that leap without a rope, parachute, rescue plan, or map.

[1] When I make this argument, sometimes people think I’m arguing against vehemence, and I’m not. I think it’s great for people to be passionately committed to their argument. Being passionately committed to our argument, and arguing vehemently that someone else’s argument is wrong because their evidence is flawed, they’re missing important information, their sources are bad, and so on—that’s what democracy needs to be. Arguing that one’s preferred policy is the best is how people are likely to argue. But arguing that one’s preferred policy is the only possibility, and that every single other policy is obviously wrong, and obviously every single person who disagrees is a benighted, biased, corrupt, bigoted fool—that’s profoundly anti-democratic. Dismissing arguments because everyone not in the in-group has bad motives is the problem. It’s also false. None of us is actually the person who crawled out of Plato’s cave and sees the truth in every situation.

On travelling with a disability

Recently, I broke my ankle, went to the ER, got put in a boot and handed crutches (which I haven’t used since I was a kid), and was told DO NOT PUT ANY WEIGHT ON YOUR FOOT.

The next day, I got up and went to the airport for a long-planned trip to see our son. My husband had called ahead and arranged for a wheelchair at every point. We left from Austin, and had to change planes in Philadelphia. It was awful. Humiliating, exhausting, frustrating, and literally painful.

Most people were kind, a lot were just self-absorbed to the point of hurtful (who walks right in front of someone on crutches?), several were rude, and no one was deliberately trying to cause me pain. Even those who did cause me pain didn’t do so because they wanted to cause me pain. They were over-worked, understaffed, underpaid, trying to get their job done in circumstances less than propitious.

The worst experience was TSA in Austin. The wheelchair person asked if I could stand, and I said no. She asked if I could take the boot off, and I said no (as I’d been told). She told that to security. We happened to arrive at security within half an hour of a shift change. If you can’t go through the scanner, then you have to get groped. Seriously groped. It’s a pain for the TSA agent, none of whom had any interest in groping a pudgy 60-year-old woman like me. It isn’t fun to be groped like that, and I’m sure they get a lot of grief from the gropee when they have to do it.

After much waiting, and the wheelchair person approaching various female TSA agents and getting turned away (they were clearly hoping to kick the can down the road to the next shift), there was what appeared to be a shift change, and then more of the wheelchair person approaching female agents, a very young female TSA came up. Let’s call her Chester. The wheelchair person told her that I couldn’t stand, and couldn’t take off the boot. Chester then turned to me and said, “Can you stand?” I said “On one foot, but not very well.” She said, “Can you take the boot off?” I said no. She made no attempt to hide how irritated she was about the situation, and that irritation was getting directed at me.

Perhaps because I was raised by dogs, when I’m dealing with someone who has a shitty job and they’re irritated, my impulse is to be as nice as I possibly can. So I was doing my best to be thankful and helpful. She remained irritated; she continued to direct that irritation at me.

We go through the initial complicated procedures necessary when someone can’t go through the scanner, she takes me through and to the grope place, says, “Can you stand?” I said, “On one foot, but not very well.” She points me to a table I can touch, and she is very grumpy about exactly how much I can touch it. She is grumpy about the whole process—I need to lift my pants leg so she can get to the boot, but not before she tells me to. I can’t touch my wheelchair. If I touch things before the right moment, she has to do things over. And she is not happy when that happens.

We get through most of the groping, and she says, “Can you take off your boot?” I say, “No.” She says, really irritated now, “You told me you could take off your boot.” I hadn’t. I had told her I couldn’t.

I took off the boot. It hurt to do so. She checked out the boot and my purple and swollen foot, and gave me the boot back. It hurt to put it back on. I hated being lied to; I hated being accused of lying. Also, my ankle now hurt enough that I was working hard not to cry.

There were other glitches in our travels—not being able to get on a tram because the wheelchair person was on break, my husband commandeering an apparently unused wheelchair, American Airlines agents commandeering wheelchairs because there weren’t enough people on the wheelchair staff, and just so many delays waiting for wheelchair assistance that sometimes never arrived. There were also kind people.

Nothing bad or inconvenient that happened to me was because someone hated people with disabilities and therefore intentionally harmed me. Nobody got up in the morning hoping to oppress people with disabilities. Chester had no personal hostility to me, although a lot to her job. And I don’t really blame her. All of the people who were rude or hurtful, by things done or undone, will (if they live long enough) someday be on crutches or in a wheelchair; they probably already have. They know and love people with disabilities. Some of their best friends are in wheelchairs or on crutches. Everyone reading this will be on crutches or in a wheelchair if they live long enough; everyone reading this loves someone who is or will be on crutches or in a wheelchair. This isn’t about individual intention.

I wasn’t treated badly because individuals wanted to hurt me personally or because of any individual’s desire to hurt people with disabilities; I was treated badly because airports weren’t built for post-9/11 security needs, and so security is shoved into whatever places happened to be available (in one airport, we had to go upstairs for security and then downstair for the flight), Chester was probably legitimately grumpy about why she always ended up doing the groping of Olds simply because she’s the newest employee, and all the other women had enough seniority to dodge that part of their job. Other people were grumpy or failed to show up because airports don’t pay wheelchair people enough, any kind of accommodation for people with disabilities is duct tape and bailing wire on existing airports and TSA screening processes, people cut me off because they were distracted, planes aren’t built for people with disabilities, and so on. It isn’t about individuals. It’s about institutions, systems, and decisions made fifty years ago.

So, how do we solve this problem?

Should people without disabilities be filled with shame? No. That does no one any good.

Is it a question of individual agency? Could I have willed myself to a better experience? No. It’s a systemic issue about how things, even the physical environment, were designed.

Could Chester have willed herself to a better experience? She could have been nicer to me, sure. But that wouldn’t have necessarily reduced her justifiable irritation about the situations. The system requires that a female grope women like me, many of whom are grumpy about being groped. A better system would have included people with disabilities in the design plans from the beginning, instead of suddenly discovering they exist. Could she have been nicer to me? Yes. But should she? Her job sucks, and it sucks because the way TSA handles people with disabilities sucks. It isn’t her, and it isn’t her boss. It might not even be TSA. It might be the laws, regulations, and policies TSA is required to follow. She had to grope me because the system makes her grope me. It sucked less if I could take off the boot, so she lied to make her job slightly less sucky.

She isn’t the problem. Her feelings aren’t the problem. Her intentions aren’t the problem. The people who wrote the laws, regulations, and policies didn’t necessarily, as individuals, have any intention to discriminate against people with disabilities. It wasn’t their intention to harm that causes the harm. It was their failure to think about inclusion.

My experience was a brief summer shower of what it’s like to try to fly when you have a mild and temporary disability, and has little or nothing to do with what it’s like for people to try to fly who have a more serious or long-term disability. I’m not talking about my experience because it exemplifies what travelling with a disability is like.

My point is that travelling even with a minor and temporary disability shows that we have a system that discriminates against a group of people, regardless of the feelings or intentions of the individuals who happen to be the momentary agent in that system, or even the intentions of people enforcing the rules. There can be discrimination and harm not because of individual intentional hatred, let alone a desire to “oppress,” but as a consequence of systemic thoughtlessness.

Discrimination isn’t about the intentions of individuals, good or bad. Oppression doesn’t actually require oppressors. It’s about systems that were put in place a long time ago but that still constrain what we do; it’s about policies and processes that are thoughtless and convenient; it’s about how saving money or time by relying on stereotypes about what’s normal does harm; it’s about certain kinds of discrimination, such as discrimination against a person who needs crutches, is baked into our buildings.

If we can admit that discrimination against people with disabilities is not about individuals, or shame, or hostility, but a systemic problem, then we can think about other kinds of discrimination as systemic. It shouldn’t be that hard.

Love the bigot; hate the bigotry

People often forget or ignore the “aggressive” part of passive-aggressive. And people who are really skilled at being passive-aggressive—that is, abusive people—use passive-aggressive tactics that enable them to hurt others while looking so blameless that if the victim calls attention to the harm, the victim looks “sensitive,” or as though they’re “over-reading.” People skilled at being passive-aggressive are good at hurting others and evading the responsibility or accountability for it.

There are a few ways they do that. One of the most common is burying the aggression in the major premise (i.e., the logical fallacy of assuming what is at stake or what used to be called “begging the question”). Here are some ways of burying the aggression in the major premise:

Love the sinner; hate the sin.
Well, as a liberal/conservative/teacher/atheist/Christian, you’d of course think that.
You shouldn’t criticize this war because you should support the troops.

Were I Queen of the Universe, I would make people learn about enthymemes and syllogisms, not because they’re how people should reason, but because they’re how people reason badly. In logic, the fallacy is called the “undistributed middle,” and you can often show the problems with Venn diagrams.

I want to start with the second example because it’s simultaneously the one I run across most often, and the most problematic.

Let’s imagine that we’re arguing about whether small dogs are on the side of squirrels in the squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball (this was an issue about which two of my dogs disagreed). You say they aren’t, I say they are, and you have an IRA with stock investments making you a Wall Street investor, so I say, “Well, you just say that because you’re a capitalist pig.”

Here’s the argument I’m making:

All Wall Street investors are capitalist pigs.
All capitalist pigs support the squirrels or don’t see the danger of their conspiracy.
Therefore, your being a Wall Street investor means your position can be dismissed.

That’s the syllogism. The two major premises (the unstated assumptions) are false. Not all investors are capitalist pigs (since many people have pension funds); not all all capitalist pigs support or don’t see the danger of the squirrel conspiracy (since that’s something we can’t possibly know, not having asked every capitalist pig about the squirrel conspiracy).

Here’s another way to think about my argument. Were my argument logical, then the Venn diagram would have a circle of “people who support (or don’t see) the squirrel conspiracy” and every Wall Street investor would be in that circle (because they would all be in the circle of capitalist pig, and that circle is completely in the squirrel conspiracy circle). Notice also that there’s considerable ambiguity about the term “capitalist pig,” as there is about the term “sinner.”

Obviously, the assumptions in this argument are wrong, or, at least, shouldn’t simply be presented as premises out of the range of argument. But it’s so hard to point out that the argument is bad because the assumptions are wrong, since so few people understand that a statement they believe is true that has bad assumptions is definitely not a logical argument, and probably not true.

When people are engaged in this kind of passive-aggressive argument, you have to bring up their premises, and then it’s easy for them to frame you as a pedant or quibbler. But, for a good conversation (which is not what they want to happen), their assumptions need to be argued.

Burying the argument in the premises gives rhetors a rhetorical advantage, especially if they’re appealing to common stereotypes. It enables them to avoid the rhetorical responsibility of fulling defending your position—that is, including your premises.

So, for instance, the “love the sinner, but hate the sin” enthymeme has as its major premise that some group is sinning, as well as an unstated premise that “hating the sin” justifies discriminating against the “sinner” whom they claim to love. They love the sinner, but, in the name of “hating the sin,” they want to be able to pass laws that restrict the civil rights of a group they claim not to hate.

What, exactly, does it mean to say that you love someone, but you won’t let them have the same rights as you?

They might say it isn’t hating the sinner, but it’s certainly quacking like it.

Further, they do not want to have to defend how they’re defining sins that should be hated. They will say, “It’s in Scripture.” Of course the term “homosexuality” isn’t in Scripture, but there are things (ranging from pederasty to rape) that get translated as “homosexual” acts.

Setting aside the translation issues, which are huge, what assumptions are they making about what should be considered a sin?

If they are defining “sins that should be hated” as anything condemned in Leviticus or Paul (or pseudo-Paul), then they’ve got a lot of sins they need to be hating. Do they? Whether homosexuality is a sin is a surprisingly complicated issue. Whether homosexuality is a graver sin than braided hair in church, paying interest on loans (or benefitting from an economic system that involves getting money from money being loaned), adultery, having non-procreative sex, getting a tattoo, exploiting or ignoring the poor, endorsing the death penalty, is an argument they need to make to support the enthymeme they throw out. They don’t.

They don’t, because they can’t come up with a consistent hermeneutic that justifies their hating the sin of homosexuality more than they hate the sin of charging interest (let alone exorbitant interest). Were their hierarchy of sin-hating rationally defensible, they’d be insisting on SCOTUS justices who go after pawn shops. I wouldn’t recommend that you hold your breath till that happens.

When I’ve pointed out this inability to explain why homosexuality and not braided hair should be a major cultural issue to homophobes, they said the former is not a cultural rule. They defend that distinction with arguments so shabby that, were they clothes, Goodwill would throw them out.

Basically, they neither value nor understand that simply being able to support your point with a quote from Scripture is not logical proof, unless you’re consistent as granting an argumentative win to every person who can do that. Everyone can, so that’s a problem. And therefore they don’t. That’s a winning strategy for them, but no one else.

As long as they can keep themselves and others from noticing the ethical and logical train wreck of their position, they’ll continue to think that discriminating against non-cishet people is okay, as are pawn shops, braided hair, and a justice system grounded in “an eye for an eye.”

They won’t accept the burden of proof because they believe that their personal conviction is all the proof they need.

So, we should throw the burden of proof on them. We all have people in our lives who are bigots, and whom we try to love.

Instead of trying to drag into the sunlight and then dissect their appalling major premises and assumptions, we should take as our motto that they’re bigots, and we will try to love them. They are, and we do try. And then they might notice what it’s like to have one’s condemnation buried in the premises. Let them try to figure out why the logic of an argument matters.

Or, put it this way: imagine that your passive-aggressive relative says, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” and you reply with a smile and a kiss, “Love the bigot, hate the bigotry.” Think about what happens next.