Category: Uncategorized

Deliberation v. Radical Action

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press) https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids

We’re at a point when we have clear evidence that the previous President lost reelection, knew he lost reelection, and came up with various plans whereby he could break the law and stay in power. When those didn’t work, he deliberately incited an insurrection that he was hoping would enable him to stay President. The wife of a SCOTUS justice was actively involved in that insurrection. The previous GOP-dominated Senate violated democratic norms by refusing to hold hearings to name a justice, claiming a principle they promptly violated when it would benefit them. Two SCOTUS justices lied under oath, and the highly factional GOP justices are openly intending to roll back constitutional protections for practices that violate their (very narrow) religion.

A lot of people are furious about this. Including me. And I’m finding myself reading a lot of social media memes and posts about how “The GOP is the Uvalde shooter, and Dems are the Uvalde police,” “Dems bring a knife to a gun fight, “Dems have done nothing to stop this from happening, and now they’re asking for money to continue to do nothing more.” The refrain is that there is an obvious course of action that Dems could have done for the last fifty years, and instead dithered. The people sharing these memes often say that they are so frustrated with our political situation that they’re done with deliberation, civility, peaceful protests, taking the high ground, and normal politics (as though those are all the same thing), since it isn’t working, and they want radical action.

That reaction is simultaneously sensible and mistaken. Since 2003, I’ve been worried about our already factional and fraught political culture sliding into actively destroying democracy, so I share the sense of urgency. But we haven’t exhausted the effectiveness of deliberation–we haven’t been able to engage in it for decades. And that’s what this post is about.

I’m going to try to summarize what I think the situation is and what to do about, a project that also involves explaining why I think the above reaction is both sensible and mistaken. It’s going to be cogent to the point of cryptic (I’m actually trying to write a book about it), and so it’s easy for me to express myself badly and/or for various reasons to be understood as making an argument I’m not making. So, bear with me, as I’m going to begin by listing many of the things I’m not arguing.

I’m not saying that “both sides” are just as bad, or endorsing any way of describing our policy options as a binary (or continuum) of the GOP (synonymous with “conservative”) and the Dems (synonymous with the DNC and “liberal”).

I’m not saying that we need to be more compassionate toward people who support the current GOP agenda and behavior, engage in a more conciliatory rhetoric with them, be more understanding of their concerns, try to win them over through empathy, or in any other way endorsing the fantasy that we just need to be “nicer.”

I’m not saying that we need to be patient and trust in the system, look on the bright side, and just get out and vote, or endorsing any other version of Micawberism.

I’m not saying that the Dems (or leftists, or liberals, or critics of the GOP) have ignored the obvious course of action we should have pursued, and I know what it is, or in any way endorsing any other version of anti-pluralism.

I am advocating that we try to work toward policy discourse that is deliberative and pluralist. But, by deliberation, I do not mean a slow, decorous process, in which people civilly examine all the possible data from all possible perspectives, allowing everyone to “have their say” and treating all opinions as equally valid. Discussing complicated issues that way is rarely deliberative (it’s usually very exclusive), and even more rarely useful. It’s also a lively glimpse of Hell to be stuck in an organization that treats deliberation that way.

By deliberation, I mean a process of decision-making that is inclusive, participants are open to persuasion (they can identify the conditions under which they would change their minds), all participants are held to the same rules of “logic,” “evidence,” and so on, there is an attempt to account for common cognitive biases, arguments are internally consistent, and people genuinely engage with the best arguments from other perspectives. It can be vehement (anyone who knows me knows that I go for the jugular), passionate, outraged, rude; it doesn’t have to fit reductive notions of “rationality” (but whatever counts as “rational” for one group counts as “rational” for the other groups).

It’s important for me to say that I don’t think all public and political discourse should be deliberative—there’s plenty of room for epideictic, in the form of marches, speeches, memes, jokes, stories. There should be expressive discourse too. In fact, I don’t even think the majority of our political discourse should be deliberative, but a lot should be. And right now we have pretty much none, anywhere on the political spectrum. So, one way that people are mistaken in saying that they’re done with deliberation, is that they aren’t done, because we haven’t engaged in it for decades.

I’m also in favor of a pluralist model of community. I don’t mean the voting mechanisms often called “pluralist” (I’m agnostic about them) but the first part of the Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies definition, that it is a perspective of politics which assumes “that society is divided into a broad variety of partly overlapping social groups with different ideas and interests. Within pluralism diversity is seen as a strength rather than a weakness” (499, emphasis added). Anti-pluralist models of community, disagreement, and politics assume that diversity of opinion weakens us because there is one right policy (ideology, belief, argument, language), and it’s the one we need to follow. And everyone who has a different policy (and so on) is a bad person who should be silenced.

Basically, there are three parts to the argument I want to make. As I said, although this is long, it’s a truncated version. If folks do want more explanation of some part, let me know.

Part I. GOP re-fashioning of Cold War rhetorical strategies. Cold War rhetoric was a reapplication of a specific strain in white fundagelical discourse that was eschatalogical and apocalyptic. That is said that we are in an absolute war between two groups (one Good and one Evil) that is simultaneously risky and predetermined. Paradoxically, the Good group, because it is Good, is justified in anything it does; it claims and is given moral, rhetorical, and political license. And it can therefore behave exactly like the out-group, doings things for which the out-group is condemned, and still claim the moral high-ground (e.g., misrepresent the opposition, lie, try to steal an election). The rhetoric for exterminating Native Americans had exactly this structure–the extermination was “justified” because it’s what they would do to us. There was often a projection of evil (sometimes explicitly insisting the out-group was in league with Satan). Cold War rhetoric simply changed the characters in this narrative, saying we could engage in anti-democratic actions, and even undermine democracies, in order to save democracy, while condemning the USSR for being anti-democratic.

Claiming it’s a zero-sum battle between Good and Evil, and claiming moral license, are characteristics of demagoguery, and this reframing of a political conflict as an eschatalogical and apocalyptic war is a kind of demagoguery. It is a particularly destructive kind for two reasons. First, because this war is eschatological (meaning it is the conflict toward which all history has been heading), there are no neutrals. People are either fanatically committed to our side, or they are Evil (perhaps unwittingly, but still Evil). Thus, this is always a war of extermination of everyone who doesn’t fanatically agree with us. Second, because this is a war of ideologies (and there are only two ideologies), then including other points of view, valuing difference, wanting to take time to consider options—all of those things are truckling with Satan. So, a variation on “our” ideology, or criticism of anything we’re doing, let alone doing something else, are all attempts to exterminate “us.”

What happens when a community believes it is in a war of extermination, and, if it loses, it will be exterminated, is that norms of fairness, legality, honesty, and reason seem to be unimportant if not actively dangerous. (Think about how many action movies have a moment when the hero breaks all the rules to save his family, country, world.) So, what might start as a morally unconstrained war with another nation because of its ideology (the USSR) necessarily becomes a morally unconstrained political war with other members of our own nation who dissent from or criticize our actions during that war (as happened with Martin Luther King Jr). We start down a path of increasing purification.

This shift to seeing normal political disagreement (such as people disagreeing as to whether this war is a good idea) as an eschatological and apocalyptic war began in the 60s, with how critics of Vietnam were treated (whether “liberal” like Martin Luther King, Jr. or “conservative” like Hans Morgenthau). It became common in pro-GOP political discourse and propaganda in the 90s, with people like Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh engaging in and advocating it. As this kind of demagoguery became more normalized among pro-GOP pundits, politicians, and voters, any attempt at even pretending to engage in deliberation evaporated. This was most striking when GOP candidates didn’t even bother putting forward policy statements in which their policies were rationally argued (the most extreme being Trump in 2016).

So, what began as a foreign war to “contain” communism quickly became a domestic war of purification–exterminating “fifth columnists,” with “fifth columnists” increasingly broadly defined. In the last twenty years, the notion of a traitor to the cause has become so broadly defined, that it’s been a war of purification within the GOP. Normal dissent and disagreement over policies (intra- and inter-party) are treated as battles in that larger war of extermination. If disagreement is treason, then deliberation is impossible, and so is democracy. The GOP is at war with democracy, openly striving for competitive authoritarianism.

Both deliberation and normal politics require that the majority of political parties and actors are engaged in deliberating with one another and holding themselves to democratic norms. And the majority of pro-GOP media, pundits, voters, and candidates have done neither for decades. Thus, critics and opponents of the GOP aren’t “done with deliberation” or “normal politics” because we haven’t, as a political culture, been able to engage in them.

The best way out of this mess is for GOP voters to insist on deliberation and normal politics. But, as any of us who have been trying to deliberate (or argue) with Trump supporters know, that’s unlikely. So, many of the critics and opponents of the GOP say that we should fight fire with fire—that is, if it’s war, let’s win it.

Part II. Kinds of war. And that raises the second point: what kind of war is it? I find the 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz helpful on this point. He argued that most wars have political objectives, and so they can be ended when that objective has been achieved—gaining territory (US war with Mexico), getting or protecting access to a resource (many of Queen Victoria’s “little wars”), enforcing an agreement (Napoleon’s invasion of Russia), secession or independence (US Revolution), and so on. The other kind of war, “absolute” war, is intended to “destroy the adversary, to eliminate his existence as a State” (qtd in Clausewitz, A Very Short Introduction 17). Absolute war has the goal of ensuring that the opponent can never again be a threat, and so it requires, if not physical extermination, then political extermination—the complete destruction of political power.

If we assume that our political landscape is usefully mapped the way that people used to map the “free v. communist” world—that is, if we see politics as a zero-sum battle between two ideologies—then we’re necessarily imagining absolute war. Since that’s how pro-GOP pundits have been describing politics since the 90s (not just war, but an absolute war between “conservatives” and “liberals”), it makes sense that they would describe their goal as reduction of “Democrats” (which means everyone not fanatically pro-GOP) to a powerless party that wins a few elections in a few places. Political scientists call that kind of government “competitive authoritarianism,” and that is, for instance, what Dinesh D’Souza argues for in the unintentionally ironically titled The Big Lie.

The temptation is to decide that, since the GOP has more or less already declared war, and used that declaration of war to gain moral, rhetorical, and political license from its base, then we should do the same. And, so, we should help the GOP destroy democracy in the name of saving it. That strategy didn’t work particularly well in Vietnam—we never did actually save a village by destroying it—and it doesn’t work with democracy.

I’m not arguing that we should just pretend this isn’t happening, and engage in normal politics. That would be like playing tennis with someone, and holding ourselves to regulation tennis rules, when they refuse to acknowledge any faults, refuse to play if it’s our serve, and lie about the score. And they justify their behavior on the grounds that we would do the same if we could, we’re terrible people, they’re on God’s side, no one who plays against them deserves to win, and we probably already did all that.

So, if it isn’t normal politics, is it war? I’m not sure, but I am sure that, if we’re talking war, we need to talk about what kind of war it is. Because here’s the danger: if we decide that it’s war, and we assume that means an absolute war of extermination, and so we are justified in declaring us free from all democratic norms and constraints, who is “we”? And who is exterminated?

The US deciding that it was in an ideological zero-sum war of extermination with the USSR led to it treating its own citizens as enemies, and silencing legitimate dissent. The GOP persuading its base that they were in a similar war led to, first, it declaring Democrats to be traitors, then declaring anyone in the GOP who wanted dissent and deliberation to be the enemy, then anyone not fanatically committed to Trump being the enemy. The GOP is in a Stalinesque purge, essentially an internal war, and the pro-Trump faction is winning. That isn’t good for anyone.

So, who is “we”? Is it everyone who is critical of the current GOP regardless of political affiliation? Do we determine it by practice (that is, only people who reliably vote Dem), ideology (if so, what beliefs?), people who might vote Dem if approached in the right way? Who will decide who really counts as a Dem, and whose views can be dismissed as treason?

If we decide that we’re in an absolute war of two ideologies, then we have to have a pure community with one ideology. And so now we’re anti-pluralist. We’ll end up saying that there is one right policy (ideology, belief, argument, language), and it’s the one we need to follow, and everyone who has a different policy (and so on) is a bad person who should be silenced. I think we’ll end up yelling “SPLITTER!!!” at each other rather than winning elections.

Or, maybe, we could decide it isn’t an absolute war of extermination, and then we don’t have to decide who gets silenced and purged.

Part III. Obvious Politics. When people are frightened, having recently had a big failure or setback, and the situation is uncertain, there is a natural impulse to believe the solution is a more unified in-group; that is, to believe we need to purify it of dissent and doubt. (Much of this research is summarized and cited in Hoagg’s Extremism and the Politics of Uncertainty.) The greater the threat, the more that we are likely to believe that unity is necessary, as is action. If we fall for the false binary of action v. deliberation, then we’re likely to become authoritarian in our decision-making process, refusing to compromise, negotiate, or deliberate with each other.

Because the most frightening kind of tragedy is the one that we could have caused, or that couldn’t have been prevented, we are tempted to believe that this tragedy came about because people didn’t do the obviously right thing. Believing that every problem has an obvious solution, and tragedies only happen because people in power do something that is obviously wrong and refuse to do what is obviously right (because they’re lazy, corrupt, self-serving) is self-serving, anti-deliberative, anti-pluralist, and wrong.

People are suggesting a lot of policies for dealing with the very real threat that Trump and the current GOP present for democracy, and arguing vehemently and passionately for them, and that’s great. But it isn’t great if we do so assuming that the policy we want is the only defensible one, that there are no arguments against those policies or for other ones—that is, if we are anti-pluralist. If we deliberate well, none of us will get what we think is the best policy. Deliberation can’t be oriented toward finding the One Right Policy without ceasing to become deliberation and instead becoming some purging of the unworthies. It seems to me that deliberation involves trying to identify the policies and arguments that are good enough.

If our goal is to get the GOP to go back to behaving like a responsible political party, engaged in normal political discourse and behavior, then we have to make sure their current strategy doesn’t win elections. I don’t see how our (their critics and opponents) engaging in their strategy will do that. I do think that the most effective strategy is probably some version of creating a coalition—that’s what’s worked in the past. But creating a coalition is hard because it means that we compromise with each other on policies.

My preference is that we should talk policy, but I might be wrong. One way to make an effective coalition is to agree on a policy agenda that ensures everyone gets something, although no one gets exactly what they wanted, and no one gets everything. That kind of compromise means that everyone will hate something on the final slate of policies. My concern is that that kind of specific discussion of policy goals is throwing something low and slow over the plate for pro-GOP ads– “Why should you pay for some kid to get a college degree in basket weaving?” “Why should you pay so some lib can drive an electric car?” All they’d have to do is show that one policy is something a voter might hate.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been using the term “conservative” for pro-GOP, and I haven’t assumed that everyone who is not “pro-GOP” is Dem. That isn’t because I think there’s a continuum (there isn’t—that’s just as false as the binary), but because I think the first mistake—and the one that enables the pro-GOP claim that “the libs” are at war with us, and so we’re justified in throwing off the shackles of moral norms—is thinking of our politics as a binary of two groups. It’s false. I’ve talked with more than one self-identified lefty who wanted no restrictions on the sale of guns of any kind, on the grounds that third-world revolutionaries needed all the weapons. If our policy commitments can be described as a binary or continuum of identity, and advocating gun control is a characteristic of “the left,” where do those people fit? I know self-identified “conservatives” who want easy access to birth control and safe abortions–where are they?

That binary/continuum model of our political world assumes that our disagreements with one another are all on a single line, so it’s assuming what’s at stake—that we have a conflict of identity. If we make that mistake, and see the war as between two implacably hostile identities, then we can never have a strategic war about specific achievable policy goals. In fact, if we argue about policy, we’ve got a lot of common ground with people all over the political spectrum, as well as disagreement. Immigration policies, bail reform, decriminalizing addiction, access to health insurance, restrictions on gun ownership—all of these issues don’t actually break neatly into a binary or continuum of identity.

And that’s why I keep coming back to the question of what kind of war. People appalled at what the GOP is currently doing do not have the same ideology or policy agenda. We disagree with each other, passionately and sincerely, and not because everyone except me (or you) is a stooge of some corrupt entity, not really thinking things through, a milquetoast or irresponsible firebrand. We disagree with one another because politics is uncertain, multi-causal, ambiguous, and we really have different interests. If the people critical of the GOP and what it’s doing decide that the solution is for us to be a purer group more radically committed to destroying democratic norms in service of the one course of action that is obviously right, then, at best, we’ll destroy democracy.

And I think we’ll lose even more elections. For one thing, people likely to vote Democrat don’t particularly value in-group loyalty, as both history and Jonathan Haidt suggest, and are unlikely to be motivated by war rhetoric. Non-violent protests (which aren’t necessarily civil at all) tend to be more effective than violent protests or rioting, and that’s a datapoint (for more on that see Chenoweth Why Civil Resistance Works). I also can’t help but note that wars tend to be won by the group with the largest war chest, and the GOP has a lot of billionaires.

When we’re frightened, we want a clear course of action, and I haven’t provided one, and I won’t. That would be a contradiction of everything I’m saying. There have been people who have been predicting this outcome—someone like Trump, a SCOTUS like this, a GOP that would endorse insurrection–for years. This isn’t new. The one thing about which I’m sure is that, at times when a nation was threatened with an authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist party and government who clearly indicated they would support a forcible coup in order to gain or stay in power, the more their opponents refused to build a coalition because they instead insisted on in-group purity, the more likely that democracy was over.

At this point, democratic deliberation is radical action.


Criminalizing abortion is spiritual narcissism

Imagine that we work at a charity together, and I advocate a policy that will actively hurt what we claim we’re trying to do—and the research is clear on that—and I say that I’m advocating this policy because it will get me in good with the boss. Actually making our world better and helping the people we claim to want to help is less important to me than getting in good with the boss. You’d decide I’m a narcissistic jerk. That would be a correct inference.

People who want to criminalize abortion, who have never advocated the policies that actually reduce abortion, aren’t actually concerned about abortion. We could reduce abortion if we offered easy access to cheap and effective birth control, offered accurate sex education, had universal health care, publicly supported childcare, reasonable parental leave. When I point out to people who advocate criminalizing abortion (and birth control) that there are other methods more effective at reducing abortion, they say that they are more opposed to those policies than they are to abortion.

I want to stop here for a moment. They pass by that quickly, but it’s actually really important. They’re fine with women dying from unsafe abortions. They’d rather have that outcome than women having access to effective to birth control.

So, let’s do the math. Reducing abortion is not their highest priority. They aren’t actually trying to reduce abortion. They are only opposed to safe abortions. More concerning, they are more opposed to women having access to safe birth control (and the various social safety nets) than they are to abortion.

In my experience, what they say is that they are more concerned with doing what God wants than with actually reducing teen pregnancy (Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming talks about this, see especially 135-6). They think God wants them to lie (that is, say things that are factually untrue but true to their policy agenda), and that God doesn’t care if that lying means people get pregnant, spread STD, or otherwise suffer in ways they wouldn’t have if they had been given good information and good healthcare.

As a Christian, I’ll engage in an aside, and say that, when I argue with people like this, they can never reconcile what they’re doing with Jesus saying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” They can’t imagine a God who wants everyone held to the same standards; they seem to imagine God as someone just like them, with all their petty hatreds, grievances, and in- out-group affiliations but with superpowers. They think God wants them to reward their in-group and punish their out-group; that is, treat the out-group in ways we would never want to be treated.

Criminalizing abortion means women die. Women with ectopic pregnancies, for instance.

And, just to be clear: they want to criminalize abortion, not reduce it. This is about people wanting to believe that what they’re doing is so right that it will get them good with God, even if it means tragedy for all sorts of people. They don’t care about those other people. They think God doesn’t. They think God only care about them. Their personal relationship with Jesus is an eighth-grade Mean Girl relationship that involves bonding with God on how much they hate someone else.

I think they’re wrong about God giving them moral license. I think God cares about the people they want punished and the tragedies they know they’re causing. I think they’re narcissistic fucks just looking out for themselves, so concerned about their own salvation that they are sociopathic about the people their policies hurt. I think they’re worse than the people more concerned about their own purity than they were about helping a bleeding stranger.

All media (including “mainstream/lamestream”) support the NRA

books

Once again, a mass shooting, and, once again, a committed unwillingness or inability to deliberate sensibly about our policy options regarding gun violence. The most common narrative–and most damaging–is that we are at impasse because the issue is a zero-sum battle between two essentially hostile groups (“pro- v. anti-gun” or “pro- v. anti-gun control). The NRA, for instance, says that this (actually complicated) issue is a binary of people who are pro- or anti-gun. They claim that “pro-gun” is the same group as “gun owners.” They tell their base that gun owners are facing a binary: either support the NRA, or Obama personally kicks down your doors and takes all your guns.

All major media endorses that false binary and the resulting false narrative.

To the extent that media frame issues about gun ownership as pro- or anti-gun (or gun control), they endorse the NRA narrative.

This binary is false, and doesn’t describe our situation at all. The more we think our world is made up of two groups–people who want all the guns in all the hands and all the places, and a group that wants no guns of any kind for anyone or anywhere–the more we are going to stay caught in a trap we’ve set for ourselves. And that benefits the NRA, and guarantees lots more mass shooters.

In fact, the NRA does not represent gun owners–it has much more extreme stances on all sorts of policy questions about access to guns than most gun owners–but gun owners do tend to believe NRA demagoguery about the opposition wanting to take all their guns. Thus, to the extent that media describe our policy discourse about gun ownership as pro- or anti– (and especially pro- or anti-“guns”), it helps the NRA in its demagoguery.

There is a tendency to assume that, when it comes to gun violence, we have a polarized public. One side is reasonable, principled, and caring, and the other is irrational, intransigent, and extremist. Oddly enough, everyone agrees that’s the situation (it isn’t), but, if we agree that’s the situation then we just fight about who is sensible.

In pro-NRA rhetoric, gun owners are reasonable, and anyone who wants any kind of restrictions on gun ownership is in the group of irrational and fearful extremist. NRA rhetoric characterizes “gun control advocates” as “anti-gun,” who want to criminalize all gun ownership and repeal the Second Amendment. Any change in gun policies other than more guns is a step on a slippery slope to the world of Obama kicking in your door to take your guns. Many critics of the NRA accept the false premise of two groups, and simply flip the characterizations. They paint gun owners as irrational extremists who need guns because they are fearful and fragile, whereas gun control advocates are rational and realistic. As long as we begin with the false assumption that “the” gun debate is a battle between two groups, we’ll waste all our time arguing which one is the irrational one instead of reducing gun violence.

That media, all media, frame our complicated disagreements about policies as a binary of identities means that they are endorsing the NRA argument that this is an existential battle between people who own guns and people who want them banned.

If we focus on policies instead of thinking about this issue about identity, then two things immediately become clear. First, in terms of policy affiliation, there is not a zero-sum war between a group that wants no restrictions on gun ownership and another that wants no gun ownership at all. In fact, the majority of gun owners are advocates of gun control.

As numerous polls show, gun owners overwhelming support some restrictions on gun ownership. A 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center (“Views on gun policy”) shows that approximately 80% of the gun owners polled support background checks, preventing the mentally ill, people on watch lists, and people on no-fly lists from buying guns. Only 33% of gun owners endorsed permit-less concealed carry. Michael Siegel and Claire Boine’s The Meaning of Guns to Gun Owners in the US (2020) shows similar levels of support for restricting gun ownership for the mentally ill, as well as for people at risk for suicide, or with certain kinds of criminal records; A majority support “red flag” laws, and background checks. As Boines and Siegel say, “The majority of gun owners supported every policy for which they primary aim was to keep firearms out of the hands of people at high risk for violence.”

In other words, most “gun owners” are “gun control advocates.” It isn’t a binary.

The second point follows from the first. The NRA’s policy agenda of responding to gun violence by getting more people to buy more guns does not represent the views of gun owners. Gun owners and the NRA are not a homogeneous group, despite what it (and too many of its critics) say. The binary of irrational gun owners who want all the guns for all the people in all the places versus sensible people who want some restrictions is also a false binary.

If most gun owners are gun control advocates, why don’t we have the policies about which there is so much disagreement? And the answer is demagoguery.
While the majority of gun owners reject the NRA’s policy agenda, they believe its representation of the Other.

According to Boines and Siegel, “the majority of gun owners have accepted the NRA’s rhetoric that the ultimate aim of firearm violence prevention advocates is to take away their guns and eliminate the Second Amendment.” If gun owners believe that there are only “two sides” on “the” issue of gun violence, then they are unlikely to advocate the policies they actually want, since those policies would seem to be letting anti-gun extremists win a skirmish. And, to the extent that advocates of restrictions on gun ownership accept the false binary of identity, the fears of gun owners are confirmed.

We don’t step out of this trap by trying to understand the Other side better, or attributing better motives to Them, or any other approach that assumes the problem is hostility and misunderstanding between two groups of people. We stay out of the trap by understanding that reducing gun violence means enacting policies and funding programs about which we can agree.

[There’s a longer, and more sourced, version of this argument in Rhetoric and Guns.]

Gun deaths and deliberative cowardice

books

Imagine that, despite your spouse’s resistance, you took a big risk, and moved cross-country to take a relatively specialized job with a high salary, pressuring your spouse to give up a good job they can’t get back. You spent everything on buying a house at a price you later realized was inflated, and then you discover it’s a toxic af workplace, and staying there will probably kill you.

You might try to talk to someone at work, but in a toxic workplace, that might cost you your job. It’s the kind of place that fires people who are looking for other jobs, so if you look for another job you might get fired. If you quit or get fired you might be able to find another job, but definitely not one that pays as much, so you’ll have to sell the house. You can, at best, sell the house for what you paid, so it will cost you money to sell the house, money you don’t have.

You can keep adding details–my point is simply to imagine (or remember) being in a bad situation that has a lot of possible solutions, and all of the possible solutions have high costs. What we tend to do in that situation is: nothing.

If we’re facing a problem, and we don’t like any of our available options for solving it, then we find ways to deflect thinking about it pragmatically. We don’t want to think about it at all. It’s as though we’re swatting away even considering that it’s a big problem about which we have to make some uncomfortable decisions. And that’s our situation with gun violence.

We know how mass murders happen. Troubled men (not necessarily ones who were bullied, by the way) get access to fast-firing and powerful weapons, and get access to a community that valorizes mass murderers. They believe that engaging in mass murder will gain them fame and admiration. Sometimes a person with violent tendencies is threatened with losing everything and decides to harm the people or person whom they irrationally blame (the situation in many workplace or domestic violence shootings). Sometimes the guns are illegally obtained or modified, but not always. Sometimes they’re weapons that used to be illegal (e.g., assault weapons), but not always.

Given that the situations are very different, there is no one solution that will solve all of them. Deliberative cowards say, “Welp, nothing we can do then.” But they don’t say that about other social problems, and that’s how all political problems work—there are always multiple contributing factors. Fatal car accidents have a lot of causes, and we haven’t chosen, as a culture, to say, “Welp, nothing we can do then”.

We identify the various causes (unsafe drivers, roads, and cars), and pass laws that regulate the drivers, roads, and cars. And we provide the resources necessary to enforce those regulations. There are still fatal car accidents, but far fewer than if we didn’t try to do anything.

Similarly, sometimes people say that the real issue is that the murderers are mentally ill, or that they were bullied. Were the people saying this genuinely concerned about mass murders, then they’d promptly advocate significant changes to our mental health policies, or how we handle bullying in schools. But they don’t. They don’t because both of those options would cost a considerable amount of money. Advocating the necessary expenditure would alienate the “starve the government” bloc of the GOP, as well as the people opposed to delinking health care from having a job (since people who are seriously mentally ill tend not to be able to keep a job). It would mean advocating a massive social safety net, which is about as popular with GOP voters as an abortionplex.

Sometimes people say that we have mass murders because our culture has turned from God, and they cite something they don’t like (tolerance of homosexuality, respecting the First Amendment) as an example of our cultural sinfulness. So, they wash their hands of the deaths of children when it comes to shooting. But they don’t say, “Oh, welp, abortion is just a consequence of our declining morals.” They haven’t spent the last fifty years just sending thoughts and prayers about abortion. They passed laws, violated democratic norms to get a favorable SCOTUS, and voted. They acted strategically to get abortion criminalized. If they really cared about mass murders they could act strategically to end them.

There are some fairly straightforward policies that we could deliberate. We could discuss spending the money necessary to enforce existing laws, restricting access to or banning weapons that are useful for mass murders, criminalizing the irresponsible storage of weapons, reducing bullying, requiring background checks, spending the money that would ensure people with serious mental health issues can get help. Any GOP politician who even talked about considering any of those policies would be making a career-ending move.

GOP politicians aren’t willing to be rational or principled when it comes to gun violence because they don’t really care enough about mass murders of children to take the electoral and media hit that would be the consequence of their being principled.

They’re more afraid of deliberation than they are of children being shot.

Authoritarian Libertarianism and the Freedom to do what I say

face mask

[The third RSA paper]


It wasn’t particularly hard to predict that mask-wearing would become a point of contention—considering that our culture of demagoguery weaponizes choices as small as the color of a tie, and that Trump was insistent on associating mask-wearing with weakness. What was somewhat surprising was that the issue wasn’t completely factionalized—that is, mask-wearing became a controversy in communities we don’t necessarily associate with Trump or the Republican Party, such as the wellness community.

In the abstract for this talk, I said that mask wearing was politicized, but that’s wrong—it was depoliticized, in the sense that it was removed from the realm of policy deliberation, and became a performance of in-group identity. There were a lot of factors that contributed to that outcome, but one especially popular explanation is that too many people rejected the advice of experts, instead relying on media pundits, youtube celebrities, or their own strong convictions. I think that explanation is inaccurate and unhelpful; in fact, I’m going to argue that it’s grounded in a way of thinking about knowledge, discourse, and authority that is the source of the problem.

On the contrary, I think the problem was too many people—not necessarily from just one place on the political spectrum—approached the issue from the perspective of what I’ve awkwardly termed “authoritarian libertarianism.” I’m not wed to the term, but also not wild about some of the other available terms.

This paper has two parts—for most of it, I’ll explain what I mean by authoritarian libertarianism, and then I’ll explain why I don’t think it’s usefully characterized as either anti-intellectualism or a kind of populism.

Authoritarian libertarianism uses a rhetoric of freedom and liberty to advocate and enforce policies of control, forcing everyone to abide by what in-group authorities determine is correct behavior and belief. I don’t think the rhetoric is necessarily insincere. My favorite example of authoritarian libertarianism is how the Massachusetts Bay Colony defended its practice of punishing, expelling, and sometimes hanging dissenters as consistent with the “freedom of conscience” guaranteed in its charter. John Cotton’s 300-page The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe (1647), for instance, argued that forcing a person to do what Cotton believed right was not a violation of their conscience, but was allowing them to follow their conscience.

The assumption that he and others made is that there is not really any disagreement about what is right or wrong—a person might be momentarily mistaken (“in error” he says) but will recognize their belief as wrong as soon as they are told so by an authority. If they “persist” in error, they are persisting in doing something even they know to be wrong. (1 Timothy 5:20 is usually the proof-text cited: “As for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear.”) As long as someone persists in error, they can be forcibly silenced. Freedom of conscience, for Massachusetts Bay authorities like Cotton, was the freedom to submit to their authority.

This isn’t a disagreement about freedom, but about knowledge—authoritarian libertarianism presumes that determining what’s right is straightforward. And here we get entangled in popular understandings of authority and expertise. As Johanna Hartelius has shown, the expert/expertise connection is complicated and varied, and shouldn’t be seen as question of identity, but of relation. Expertise is not an object or epistemic quality experts autonomously posess, but, as she says, “a social and symbolic process, a relational logic at once real and imagined, theoretical and pragmatic” (164). If you accept her argument, and I think it’s a good one, then being an expert and being right are not synonymous—people, including experts, might be mistaken. If, however, you listen to a lot of popular discourse, the assumption for many—not everyone—is that an expert is right, and the right person is the expert. The term “expert” isn’t always used; sometime “authority” or “prophet” might be the preferred term.

Many people explain the controversy over masks in a simple binary of right and wrong—people refused to listen to what authorities said, and instead relied on amateurs. This explanation is often associated with the narrative of fall—there was a time when people listened to authorities and we no longer do. I think this is wrong on both counts. People who refused to wear masks did listen to authorities—they assessed authority differently. To give just one example: some people believe that God is a micromanager, and so that every thing that happens is because he is willing it in that moment. For them, covid is a religious—not medical—issue. So, for them, the relevant expertise is not epidemiology but prophecy.

I’m not saying looking at covid that way is just as valid as seeing it as a public health issue (it isn’t), but I am saying that telling them to listen to experts isn’t an effective rhetorical or deliberative strategy. They believe they are.

And, really, expert discourse doesn’t have an unblemished history when it comes to decision making. Eugenics was the mainstream discourse of experts who had all the right degrees, and it legitimated forced sterilization, segregation, racist immigration policies, criminalizing inter-racial marriage (Jackson). When I point that out to people who tell me that the problem is that people no longer defer to authorities, they say that the people advocating racialist science weren’t real authorities because they were wrong (i.e., no true Scotsman).

The notion that we should simply do what experts say—Cotton’s argument—denies that experts disagree, and that any major policy decision requires people with wildly different areas of expertise (in the case of masks, constitutional law specialists, epidemiologists, historians, communication scholars, public health scholars). It also denies that coming to the optimal policy doesn’t mean doing The Right Thing, but deliberating about options. And there were and are rarely two.

The fantasy that many people have is that reliable expertise is an identity issue—the “autonomous” model of authority (Hartelius). People believe that we can assess reliability instantly, or with some quick checks of credentials. The Stanford Project on “Evaluating Information” shows that students, even with good instructions to do otherwise, try to assess the credibility of an argument without going “beyond the site itself” (Wineburg et al. 5). Students believe they can assess the reliability of an argument on the basis of whether it looks true, is easy to understand, has statistics (McGrew et al. 4-5).

Checklists—much like the ones we give students in classes—may make the situation worse, because they encourage students to try to assess an argument autonomously. I don’t mean that in the way that Hartelius uses the term, but in the sense used by advocates of New Criticism; that is, treating a text as an autonomous mobile floating in space. McGrew et al. show that, not only is this how many students assess credibility, because it’s what checklists advocate, but so do many professors:
“College students and even professors approached websites using checklist-like behaviors: they scanned up and down pages, they commented on site design and fancy logos, they noted “.org” domain names, and they examined references at the bottom of a web article. They often spent a great deal of time reading the article, evaluating the information presented, checking its internal logic, or comparing what they read to what they already knew. But the “close reading” of a digital source, the slow, careful, methodical review of text online—when one doesn’t even know if the source can be trusted (or is what it says it is)—proves to be a colossal waste of time.” (8)
Achen and Bartels’ research similarly shows that beliefs are partisan, and that we tend to assess information through partisan lenses—regardless of how well-educated we are, or how much we think we are logical—in conditions when asked to treat an argument autonomously. The subjects for their studies included faculty—this is not something only They do. Ryan Skinnell, using a more nuanced reading of “logos” than is in many textbooks (it is not the same as what we call “logic”), points out that an argument can seem perfectly “logical” simply because we agree with the major and minor premises:
“If you accept the stated premise (children are being held as sex slaves in the basement of a pizza parlor), as well as an unstated premise (it is reasonable for an individual to take up arms to confront what they believe is injustice), then the logic of the argument is perfectly reasonable—even eminently moral.” (561)
Assessing arguments as though they were autonomous mobiles in space, and as though expertise is autonomously determined, keeps us free to believe what we already believe.

I’m not using the term “authoritarian” in the sense that Bob Altemyer or the Frankfurt School use it—as an ideology—nor to refer to a kind of regime (as political scientists sometimes use the term). I mean authoritarian as a model of public discourse. Experts—real experts—speak the truth; and normal people (those whose perception isn’t blinded by bias) recognize what they’re saying as true. Thus, credible authorities are always in-group, and always confirming and conforming to in-group beliefs. People who rejected the expertise of epidemiologists believed that scholars with degrees from impressive places who were repeating the major scholarly consenses were only really experts if they were in-group.

This way of thinking about truth, authority, and public discourse isn’t circular as much as a Mobius strip. We should do what authorities say because they speak the Truth; we know they’re speaking the Truth because they’re authorities, and we know they’re authorities because what they’re saying is True. True statements about the world are true on their face, and while the explanation for why they’re true might be complicated (as in some conspiracy theories) there is still the instant resonance that signals Truth. Thus, deliberation is not only unnecessary, but actively dangerous because it’s likely to confuse issues. The more voices there are in the argument, the more likely people will fall for false prophets.

Cotton exemplifies this authoritarian model of public discourse, but this view is not necessarily religious. Secular figures like Richard Dawkins or Donald Trump appeal to it; it’s popular in management literature obsessed with “decisiveness” and charismatic leadership; of course it’s part of cults, and cult-like organizations. Just as it isn’t necessarily religious, it isn’t necessarily political. At least as described in Bad Blood, Theranos was a highly authoritarian organization that described itself as a place of creativity and innovation—that is, freedom. To the extent that it’s a model of political authority and discourse, it isn’t restricted to one place on the political spectrum, nor is it evenly distributed.

But, there do tend to be political implications. Authoritarian libertarianism says that, because we can cite true authorities to support our position, we don’t have to engage in argumentation; we don’t have to deliberate with people who disagree. At its best, it says that we have moral license to disenfranchise some groups; at its worst, it says we have a moral obligation to silence them. So, as with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, communities in which authoritarian libertarianism is dominant often end up with frequent expulsions and witch hunts.

I’ve used the term “expert,” but that isn’t always the term that is used. In fact, many authoritarian libertarians believe that experts—that is, scholars whose expertise comes from deep learning and who present themselves as advocating a scholarly consensus—are blinded or confused by too much learning. For that reason, this way of thinking about discourse and decision-making is sometimes called anti-intellectualism. I’m dubious about that term, though, because many of the people who advocate authoritarian libertarianism present themselves as intellectual, and are proud of their learning. David Duke still brags about his PhD., and as Kiara Walker points out in her dissertation, Richard Spencer bragged during testimony in his recent civil trial that he’d read “quite a bit of Jacques Barzun” and “so much philosophy” (22).

This model is also sometimes called populism because the distinction between those who should be followed and those who should be rejected is so often associated with imagining that the world is broken into a hostile binary of authentic (i.e., directly connected to truth) and corrupt (both dishonest and misled). Cass Mudde defines populism as
“an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde 2004, 543, qtd. in Handbook 29).
In populism, the people v. elite is not necessarily a distinction of class or education. What distinguishes the two groups, according to Mudde, is morality. Someone might be tremendously wealthy or well-educated, and still be “of the people” because they are simply authentic people who got rich or went to school:
“The essence of the people is their purity, in the sense that they are ‘authentic,’ while the elite are corrupt, because they are not authentic. Purity and authenticity are not defined in (essentially) ethnic or racial terms, but in moral terms. It is about ‘doing the right thing,’ which means doing what is right for all the people.” (Handbook 31)
“All the people” is not an empirical claim, but a circular and essentialist one—“the people” being in-group (since they are the only people that really count).

Paul Johnson’s recent and wonderful book I the People makes an elegant case for what he calls “conservative populism,” an ideology that is similarly muckled in terms of domination, submission, and freedom. So, populism might be a better term than authoritarian libertarianism, but I’m not sure. Johnson’s book ties the authoritarianism he’s describing to conservative ideology, and what I’m awkwardly calling authoritarian libertarianism is all over the political spectrum, and often used in non-political situations.

In addition, some of the people who use this approach are openly elite, such as John Cotton or Richard Dawkins, who have fairly nasty things to say about the masses. Cults and authoritarian religions sometimes have a rhetoric of an elect, and various kinds of paternalistic organization or political structures assume an authoritarian system that frees others through control (I’m thinking of Erich Fromm’s argument in Escape from Freedom). I think we should be careful about overextending the concept of populism because it is such a useful one—if every movement is populism, then the term loses its explanatory force.

Although I think it matters what we call it, as I said, I’m not wed to the term. What seems important to me is that we recognize that there is an approach to authority and discourse that is damaging to deliberation, and to which we are all prone. (I cringe to think about how often I probably posted or shared something about what idiots people were for rejecting expertise.) Any term that invites us to see this as something They do is just repeating the same mistake.

I’m also not saying that all experts are equally reliable, and that everyone “has a right” to their own authorities. I mean we do have a right to our own authorities—what would it mean not to have a “right” to an authority?—I’m not talking about rights. I’m making a very pragmatic argument about rhetoric.

It doesn’t work to tell people that they’re wrong to ignore authorities when they think they’re paying attention to true authorities. If we describe the problem with any public policy as a binary of people who did or didn’t submitting to authority, we have a damaging model of authority. What I want to emphasize is that the whole issue of mask wearing got caught in machinery of a system that expels disagreement and deliberation in favor of a binary of us and them. And so we spent and spend a lot of time arguing about whose authorities were or are really authoritative, by which we mean who is in-group and who is out-group—to whom should we submit. And I think that was a mistake. I think that’s the wrong argument.


Achen, Christopher H. and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Print.

Cotton, John, and Roger Williams. The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe … Wherein the Great Questions of This Present Time Are Handled, Viz. How Farre Liberty of Conscience Ought to Be Given to Those That Truly Feare God? And How Farre Restrained to Turbulen by John Cotton … London: Printed by Matthew Symmons for Hannah Allen …, 1647. Web. Accessed May 16, 2022..

Hartelius, Johnann. Rhetoric of Expertise. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022, Print.

Jackson, John P. Science for Segregation : Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown V. Board of Education. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Print.

Johnson, Paul Elliott. I the People : The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States. 1st ed. University of Alabama Press, 2022. Print.

Mcgrew, Sarah et al. “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment.” American educator 41.3 (2017): 4–. Print.

Mudde, Cass. “Population: An Ideational Approach.” The Oxford Handbook of Populism / Edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017. Print. 27-47.

Richard Spencer testimony. Sines, et al. v. Kessler, et al., 3:17CV72, 11/5/2021 https://files.integrityfirstforamerica.org/14228/1639753607-2021-nov-5-moon-sines-v-kessler-317cv72-cvl-jt-day10-final.pdf

Skinnell, Ryan. “Teaching Writing in the (New) Era of Fake News.” College composition and communication 72.4 (2021): 546–569. Print.

Wineburg, Sam, et al. Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Online Civic
Literacy: Executive Summary. Stanford History Education Group, 2016.

How the pro-GOP media is using a rhetoric of war to radicalize its base

Bill O'Reilly claiming there is a war on Christmas
from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToLdVCb1ezI

[Another paper from the Rhetoric Society of America conference. For the conference, the paper is titled : “The ‘War on Christians’ and Preventive War.”]

This panel came about because of our shared interest in the paradox that advocates of reactionary ideologies often use a rhetoric of return in service of radically new policies and practices. Sometimes they’re claiming to return to older practices that either never existed or that are not the same as what is now being advocated, and sometimes they’re claiming that their new policies are a continuation of current practice when they aren’t. It’s not a paradox that reactionary pundits and politicians would use appeals to the past in order to argue for a reactionary agenda—in fact, pundits and politicians all over the political spectrum use a mythical past to argue for policies, and, if anything, it makes more sense for reactionaries to do it than progressives—the tension comes from appealing to a false past as though it were all the proof one needs to justify unprecedented policies.

The false past is somewhat puzzling in various ways. It’s sometimes about apparently trivial points, such as the myth that everyone used to say “Merry Christmas!” It’s frequently appealing to a strange sense of timelessness, in which words like “Christian” or “white” have always had exactly the same meaning that they do now. It’s sometimes self-serving to the point of silliness– the plaint that “kids these days” are worlds worse than any previous generation. The evidence for these claims is often nothing more than hazy nostalgia for the simple world of one’s youth, so that the fact that as children we were unaware of crime and adultery is taken as proof that they didn’t happen in those days.

At first, when I started running across this odd strategy, I thought the rhetoric of return was essentially a kind of rhetorical diversionary tactic, born of necessity. People are naturally resistant to new policies, especially people likely to be attracted to reactionary ideologies, and engaging in reasonable policy argumentation is hard, especially if you don’t have a very good policy. People rarely demand that a policy be defended through argumentation if it’s the status quo, or a return to past successful policy, and that kind of makes sense. What that audience tendency means is that a rhetor who wants to evade the responsibilities and accountability of policy argumentation can try to frame their new policy as a return to a previously successful one or a continuation of the status quo. This is nostalgia as a diversion from deliberation and argumentative accountability.

But I now think that’s only part of it.

I think it’s a rhetorical strategy oriented toward radicalizing an audience in order to persuade them to engage in a preventive and absolute war, thereby granting in-group rhetors complete moral and rhetorical license. I’m arguing that there is a political strategy with four parts. Reactionary rhetors strategically falsify the past and/or present such that some practice (e.g., celebrating Christmas as we do now) is narrated as something all Americans have always done, and therefore as constituting America. Another strategy is to insist that “liberals” are at war with “America,” as evidenced by their determination to exterminate those mythically foundational practices (such as celebrating Christmas). Because liberals are trying to exterminate America, the GOP should respond with preventive and absolute war—normal political disagreement is renarrated as a zero-sum war in which one or the other group must be exterminated. The goal of those three strategies is to gain the moral and rhetorical license afforded by persuading a base that they are existentially threatened.

I. Strategic Nostalgia

Take, for instance, abortion. The GOP is not proposing returning to the world pre- Roe v. Wade; they are advocating a radically new set of policies, much more extreme than were in place in 1972. In 1972, thirteen states allowed abortion “if the pregnant woman’s life or physical or mental health were endangered, if the fetus would be born with a severe physical or mental defect, or if the pregnancy had resulted from rape or incest” (Guttmacher). Abortion was outright legal in four states. And while it was a hardship, it was at least possible for women to travel to those states and get a legal abortion.

GOP state legislatures are not only criminalizing abortion in all circumstances, even if forcing a woman to continue with a nonviable pregnancy is likely to kill her, but criminalizing miscarriage, criminalizing (or setting bounties for) getting medical treatment (or certain forms of birth control) anywhere, even where it’s legal. And it’s clear that a GOP Congress will pass a Federal law prohibiting abortion under all circumstances, as well as many forms of birth control, in all states. They are not proposing a return.

Or, take another example. In 2003, the Bush Administration proposed a radically new approach in international relations—at least for the post-war US—preventive war. But, as exemplified in Colin Powell’s highly influential speech to the UN (Oddo), this new approach was presented as another instance of preemptive war (the basis of Cold War policy).

II. Preventive War

To explain that point, I need to talk about kinds of war. When rhetors are advocating war, they generally claim it’s one of four kinds: self-defense, preemptive, preventive, and conquest. Self-defense, when another nation has already declared war and is invading, is a war of necessity. The other three are all wars of choice, albeit with different degrees of choice. A preemptive war is when one nation is about to be attacked and so strikes first—it’s preemptive self-defense against imminent aggression. A preventive war “is a strategy designed to forestall an adverse shift in the balance of power and driven by better-now-than-later logic” (Levy 1). Preventive war is about preserving hegemony, in both senses of that word.

Nations or groups engage in preventive war when they believe that their current geopolitical, economic, or ideological hegemony is threatened by an up-and-coming power. And I would note that white evangelicals started pushing a rhetoric of war when their political hegemony in the South was threatened by desegregation and internal migration (Jones); the GOP increasingly appealed to various wars as data came out showing that its base was not far from national minority status (FiveThirtyEight).

While wars of conquest are common, and the US has engaged in a lot, it’s rare to find major political figures willing to admit that they were or are advocating a war of conquest. The only example I’ve found is Alexander the Great at the river Beas, and our only source for that speech was written two hundred years later, so who knows what he said. Even Hitler claimed (and perhaps believed) that his war of conquest was self-defense. Wars of conquest—ones in which the goal is to exterminate or completely disempower another group simply because they have things we want or they’re in our way—are rhetorically a bit of a challenge. So, pundits and politicians advocating wars of conquest avoid the challenge. They claim it’s not a war of choice, but one forced on us by a villainous enemy, and thus either self-defense or preemptive.

Wars of conquest are generally what the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called “absolute” war,; that is, one in which we are trying to “destroy the adversary, to eliminate his existence as a State” (qtd in Howard 17). Absolute war is not necessarily genocide; but it is oriented toward making the opponent defenseless (77), so that they must do our will. Most wars, according to Clausewitz, can end far short of absolute war because there are other goals, such as gaining territory, access to a resource, and so on, what he calls political ends.

What I am arguing is that the US reactionary right is using strategic nostalgia to mobilize its base to support and engage in an absolute war against “liberals” (that is, any opposition party or dissenters), by claiming “liberals” have already declared such a war on America. Thus, it’s preventive war, but defended by a rhetoric of self-defense.

As Rush Limbaugh said, “And what we are in the middle of now, folks, is a Cold Civil War. It has begun” (“There is no”) and “I think we are facing a World War II-like circumstance in the sense that, as then, it is today: Western Civilization is at stake” (“The World War II”; see also “There is No Whistleblower”). And it is the Democrats who started the war (“What Happened”), actually, a lot of wars, including a race war. Again, quoting Limbaugh, “I believe the Democrat Party, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, whoever, I think they are attempting, and have been for a while, to literally foment a race war. I think that has been the objective” (“Trump’s Running”).

If “conservatives” are at war with “liberals,” then what kind of war? If politics is war, what kind is it? The GOP is not talking about Clausewitz’s normal war, that is of limited time and proximate successes, but complete subjugation.

The agenda of completely (and permanently) subjugating their internal and external opponents is fairly open, as Katherine Stewart has shown in regard to conservative white evangelicals (The Power Worshippers). Dinesh D’Souza, in his ironically-titled The Big Lie, is clear that the goal of Republican action is making and keeping Democrats a minority power, unable to get any policies passed (see especially 236-243).

It is, in other words, a rejection of the premise of democracy.

III. Moral and rhetorical license

The conservative Matthew Continetti concludes his narrative of “the hundred year war for American conservatism” saying:

What began in the twentieth century as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes. Many on the right embraced a cult of personality and illiberal tropes. The danger was that the alienation from and antagonism toward American culture and society expressed by many on the right could turn into a general opposition to the constitutional order. (411)

(Paul Johnson makes a similar argument in his extraordinary book.) The explicit goal of disenfranchising any political opposition, the valorizing of the attempted insurrection, new processes for confirming SCOTUS nominees, voter suppression—these are a general opposition to the constitutional order. It is clear that many GOP-dominated state legislatures intend to overturn—violently if necessary—any election Democrats win. Georgia’s recent legislation, for instance, “gives Georgia’s Republican-controlled General Assembly effective control over the State Board of Elections and empowers the state board to take over local county boards — functionally allowing Republicans to handpick the people in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning places like Atlanta” (Beauchamp).

GOP pundits and politicians can be open in their attacks on other Americans, American culture, and American society by using strategic nostalgia to renarrate what is American, and thereby gain moral and political license. That is, radicalize their base.

By “radicalize,” I mean the process described by scholars of radicalization like Willem Koomen, Arie Kruglanski, or Marc Sageman, that enable people to believe they are justified in escalating their behavior to degrees of extremism and coercion that they would condemn in an outgroup, and that they would at some point in the past have seen as too much.

Koomen et al. say that “perceived threat is possibly the most significant precondition for polarization [and] radicalization” (161). That a group is threatened means that cultural or even legal norms in favor of fairness and against coercion no longer apply to the ingroup. There are three elements that can serve “both to arouse a (misplaced) sense of ingroup superiority and to legitimize violence”:
“The first is the insistence that the[ir] faith represents the sole absolute truth, the second is the tenet that its believers have been ‘chosen’ by a supreme being and the third is the conviction that divinely inspired religious law outranks secular law” (Koomen et al. 160).
Since they (or we) are a group entitled by a supreme being to dominate, then any system or set of norms that denies us domination is not legitimate, and can overthrown by violence, intimidation, or behaviors that we would condemn as immoral if done by any other group. We have moral license.

One particularly important threat is humiliation, including humiliation by proxy. That’s how the anti-CRT and anti-woke rhetoric functions. If you pay any attention to reactionary pundits and media, you know that they spend a tremendous amount of time talking about how the “woke mob” wants white people to feel shame; they frame discussions about racism (especially systemic racism) as deliberate attempts to humiliate white Christians. This strategy is, I’m arguing, a deliberate attempt to foment moral outrage—what Marc Sageman (a scholar of religious terrorism) says is the first step in radicalizing. He lists three other steps: persuading the base that there is already a war on their religion, ensuring a resonance between events in one’s personal life and that larger apocalyptic narrative, and boost that sense of threat through interpersonal and online networks.

The rhetoric of war, at some point, stops being rhetoric.

And that’s what we’re seeing. 70% of American adults identify as Christian (Pew); it’s virtually impossible for an atheist to get elected to major office; Christian holidays are national holidays. There’s no war on Christians in the US. And the Puritans—the people Christians like to claim as the first founders of the US—prohibited the celebration of Christmas. But the pro-GOP media not only claims there is a war on Christians, but that its base can see signs of this war in their personal life, as when a clerk says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” And pro-GOP media continually boosts that sense of threat through networks that prohibit serious discussion of policy, different points of view, or lateral reading.

What all this does is make “conservatives” feel that war-like aggression against “liberals” is justified because it is self-defense.

According to this narrative, the GOP has been unwillingly forced into an absolute war of self-defense. This posture of being forced into an existential war with a demonic foe gives the reactionary right complete moral license. To the extent that they can get their base to believe that they are facing extermination of themselves or “liberals,” there are no legal or moral constraints on them.

And that’s what the myths do. The myths take the very particular and often new categories, practices, beliefs, policies, and project them back through time to origin narratives, so that pundits and politicians can make their base feel existentially threatened every time someone says, “Happy Holidays.”




Beauchamp, Zach. “Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad.” Vox Apr 6, 2021, 1:30pm EDT (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22368044/georgia-sb202-voter-suppression-democracy-big-lie

von Clausewitz, Carl et al. On War. Eds. And Trans. Michael Eliot Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Print.

Continetti, Matthew. The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. New York: Basic Books. 2022. Print.

D’Souza, Dinesh. The Big Lie : Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, a division of Salem Media Group, 2017. Print.

FiveThirtyEight. “Advantage, GOP.” https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/ Accessed May 24, 2022.

Howard, Michael. Clausewitz : a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

Johnson, Paul Elliott. I the People : The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States. 1st ed. University of Alabama Press, 2022. Print.

Jones, Robert P. (Robert Patrick). White Too Long : the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020. Print.


Koomen, Wim., J. van der Pligt, and J. van der (Joop) Pligt. The Psychology of Radicalization and Terrorism. London ;: Routledge, 2016. Print.

Kruglanski, Arie W., Jocelyn J. Bélanger, and Rohan Gunaratna. The Three Pillars of Radicalization : Needs, Narratives, and Networks. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019. Print.

“Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?” The Guttmacher Policy Review, 6:1, March 1, 2003. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2003/03/lessons-roe-will-past-be-prologue

Levy, Jack S. “Preventive War and Democratic Politics.” International studies quarterly 52.1 (2008): 1–24. Web.

Limbaugh, Rush. “Biden Will Renew Obama’s War on Suburban Property Values.” October 26, 2020. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/10/26/biden-will-renew-obamas-war-on-suburban-property-values/

“Rush to the Democrats: Stop the War on Police.” May 4, 2021. (Accessed May 16, 2022)https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/05/04/rush-to-the-democrats-stop-the-war-on-police/

“Rush Sounds the Alarm on the Democrat War on Policing.” April 26, 2021. (Accessed May 16, 2022) https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/04/26/rush-sounds-the-alarm-on-the-democrat-war-on-policing/

“The World War II Challenge We Face.” June 6, 2019. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2019/06/06/our-world-war-ii-challenge/

“There is No Whistleblower, Just a Leaker! We’re in the Midst of a Cold Civil War.” September 27, 2019. (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2019/09/27/were-in-the-midst-of-a-cold-civil-war/

“Trump’s Running to Save Us from a Race War Fomented by Democrats.” August 31, 2020. (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/08/31/trumps-running-to-save-us-from-the-race-war-that-democrats-are-fomenting/

“War on Women! Dems Sponsoring Sex-Trafficking at the Border.” May 26, 2021. (Accessed May 17, 2022) https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/05/26/war-on-women-dems-sponsoring-sex-trafficking-at-the-border/

“What Happened Since I Was Last Here: The Left Sparks a Civil War.” (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2018/06/25/what-happened-since-i-was-last-here-left-sparks-civil-war/

Oddo, John. Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle : a Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell’s U.N. Address. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2014. Print.

Pew Research Center. “Religious Landscape Study.” https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/ Accessed May 24, 2022.

Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers : Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Print.




Human Rights Rhetoric

Eleanor Roosevelt holding a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
from https://www.flickr.com/photos/fdrlibrary/27758131387/

For a supersession on human rights rhetoric.

Arguments about rhetoric and human right tends to focus on the term “rights” and the ethical problems and contradictions inevitably involved in imposing particular Western post-Enlightenment conceptions of universal rights on all other cultures.

The tension arises because so much rhetoric about humans rights has been grounded in Liberalism, with its emphasis on atomistic models of individuality and self-determination. Western Liberalism is not the only possible source for rhetorics of human rights, as much award-winning RSA scholarship has shown, but it does tend to be both foundational and constraining when the issue of human rights comes up in both foreign and domestic policy. Specifically, the problem I want to pursue is that US liberalism frames human rights as a commodity that the US has and has always had in such abundance that the only policy issues are: 1) how much of it to export and to whom, and 2) to what extent do we force others to open their market to our commodity.

In this brief talk, I want to focus on that notion of rights as a commodity because I think it ends up disturbingly redefining human in US political rhetoric

It’s absurd to think that the US has an excessive crop of human rights, or that it ever has. Yet, that notion of the US serving as the model for how to do liberty has been part of American foreign policy and domestic rhetoric at least as far back as US adventures in imperialism in the late 19th century. Woodrow Wilson was far from the first President to advocate foreign military ventures on humanitarian grounds. Similarly, the notion that liberty and property have a causal relationship was the basis of policies as varied as the Dred Scott decision, voting rights, distribution of public lands, forced privatization of tribal lands, and many others.

At the same time, however, there was a rhetoric of human rights, more fundamental and essential than the rights gained by legal citizenship or owning property. What happened with the rise of Social Darwinism and its conflation with “the market” is that we increasingly came to see all human interactions as competitive and individualistic market interactions. As many others have pointed out, the natural consequence of the tendency to see all human interactions as essentially market interactions is to make everything a commodity. As such, everything has a price, and everything can be sold. Since the market is competitive, it’s possible for some people to have none of a good and others to have cornered the market on it.

If human rights are a commodity traded in a free market, then not everyone can afford them, and so some people aren’t human.

This tendency to assume that a “free” market version of capitalism and democracy are necessarily connected became almost hegemonic during the Cold War, during which time we were perfectly willing to ally ourselves with anti-democratic governments, as long as they were open to American capitalism; we were (with a few exceptions such as Israel and some Scandinavian countries) completely unwilling to ally ourselves with even mildly socialist governments, even if they were anti-USSR. Capitalism was more important than democracy.

This was the assumption that meant we rationalize authoritarian governments as “democracies in transition.” It’s also why, with the breakup of the USSR and Soviet bloc, the US was more interested in privatizing everything, even if that immediately led to extreme income inequality and the attendant violations of human rights, than we were in establishing democratic norms and protecting human rights.

One other factor that’s important for thinking about the current US failure to protect the human rights of its own inhabitants is the just world model, and its manifestation in toxic populism and prosperity gospel.

I’ll start with the second. The just world model is a cognitive bias that says that people get what we deserve in this world—that bad things only happen to bad people, who have brought it on somehow, and good things happen to good people. Prosperity gospel is one form of this fantasy, saying that God rewards people of sufficient faith with wealth and good health. Thus, wealth and good health are signs that a person is blessed and honored by God.

Crucial to toxic populism is an imagined binary of people: authentic v. fake. Toxic populism takes the liberal notion of universality of experience and turns it into a singularity of validity. While acknowledging difference, it posits that only the position, values, beliefs, experiences, policy agenda, and so on of one group (the “people”) are “real,” and, as I argued in a different paper yesterday, the fundamental human right is to be a member of that group, with that ideology.

Out-groups don’t have human rights because they aren’t really human. Difference is dehumanizing.

Further, since rights are a commodity, and wealthy people are blessed and honored by God, then wealth should give a person access to more rights; they should be able to have greater buying power in the rights market.

What all this means is that people are willing to tolerate extraordinary injustice because they see it as a kind of justice. They don’t see disparate treatment by police, or deliberately discriminatory voting or housing policies as violating rights, because they don’t think poor people, political opponents, or any other out-groups have rights.

So, what I’m arguing is that we disagree about what specific public policies do in terms of rights because we disagree about who counts as a human deserving of rights. Doug Cloud has argued for shifting our attention to the term “rhetoric” in the phrase human rights rhetoric, and I think that’s astute.

Trying to argue with people assuming that they share our understanding of the distinction between rights and privileges, or they understand humans in the same we do, guarantees that we’ll get nowhere. I’m not certain that having the arguments we need to have will get us very far very fast, but it’s worth a try.

Is Biden responsible for high gas prices? The smartest non-“liberal” sources on the issue


As I’ve said elsewhere, demagoguery breaks a complicated issue with an array of policy options and explanations into two: one is narrowly defined, and everything else is the other. So, for the pro-GOP demagogic sphere, if you don’t support the current GOP, then you’re “liberal” which is, incoherently enough, the same as communist. (When I’m grumpy, I try to get the people who think democratic socialist, progressive, communist, and liberal are the same to explain Weimar Germany. They never do.) There are other demagogic enclaves out there, in which people insist you either completely endorse their agenda or you’re [whatever the extreme Other is], and they irritate me just as much, but they aren’t relevant to this post. So, I’ll stick with listing articles from non-“liberal” sources on the issue of Biden’s responsibility.

I have to admit that I didn’t find a smart, sourced argument that it’s all Biden’s fault. The best argument I found for blaming Biden was neither smart nor sourced, but it was better than a lot of others that were just argle bargle. And, really, that would be a hard argument to make. It’s useful to point out that gas prices have risen worldwide, and Biden is not actually President of the world. So, there’s no reasonable narrative that says it’s him alone. How would he make prices rise in Europe? There must be something else…it’ll come to me. Starts with a U, maybe, or supply issues?

Anyway, I’ve put these together so that, if you find yourself arguing with someone who says it’s all Biden, you can provide sources they’ll have a harder time deflecting.

So, let’s start with the notoriously liberal Journal of Petroleum Technology. It’s a complicated argument, and it’s really about natural gas. I will quote this (it’s important for something later): “A year ago, President Joe Biden and others were focused on priorities such as ending drilling on federally owned land. Now, the federal government is planning a lease sale for onshore drilling rights.”

There are several in Wall Street Journal. “Energy markets were already tight as the global economy rebounded from the pandemic, and gasoline prices have climbed recently as traders, shippers and financiers have shunned supplies of oil from Russia, which is the world’s second-largest exporter of crude oil after Saudi Arabia, according to the International Energy Agency.” There’s also this article of theirs (well worth a read) :
Pull quotes:

“Oil prices, already turbocharged by a rebounding economy after a pandemic-induced slowdown, were pushed even higher when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pulled some three million barrels of Russian oil a day from global supplies.”
“Gasoline prices have hit records as petroleum refiners that had cut back output as the economy slowed still haven’t ramped back up to pre-pandemic levels. The market has lost about one million barrels of daily petroleum-refining capacity since early 2020, when the U.S. was producing about 19 million barrels of refined petroleum a day.
Events in Ukraine caused oil prices to skyrocket, pouring gasoline on what was already a smoldering fire. Brent crude topped $130 a barrel in early March, and gasoline prices recently hit a record $4.331 a gallon, putting them up more than 15% from where they stood a month earlier, according to AAA. Prices have fallen slightly from that record, hitting $4.215 a gallon on Friday, despite the continuing loss of Russian oil.”

And what has Biden done? According to the notoriously liberal WSJ:

“President Biden has said his administration would release millions of barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has a capacity of 727 million barrels. However, experts say that is unlikely to move the needle very much on the price of gasoline.
Some state and federal officials are also weighing state and federal gas-tax decreases to ease consumers’ pain at the pump. Business groups are pushing back on such moves, saying they could jeopardize infrastructure improvements.
The Biden administration also has held talks, or said it plans to do so, with major oil producing countries about potentially boosting production. Talks with Venezuela, the oil industry of which the U.S. sanctioned in 2019, met opposition from Republicans, as well as some Democrats.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, are pushing to suspend the federal gasoline tax, which amounts to 18 cents a gallon, for the rest of 2022.”

The free-market Economist doesn’t mention Biden. There’s one article from September that predicts problems, even without the war. More recent articles focus on Russia, such as this one.

The only one that tried to argue it is Biden is Heritage , which, seriously, has gone downhill. Not because I disagree with them (I disagree with all the sources I list) but because they stopped providing sources, and are dipping deep into just lying. This page, for instance, doesn’t cite any source for its claim. Its argument is that Biden is responsible for the high prices because he won’t “use all the energy sources we have”—in other words, there are high prices that even they say aren’t his fault. He’s to blame because he isn’t doing what would lower the prices he didn’t cause.

What should he do? Something that won’t immediately lower prices, and is unwise on other grounds.

This is argument by counter-factual, not necessarily a bad argument. But in this case, it is a bad argument, but bad faith. It engages in straw man, motivism, binary thinking, and non sequitur. The argument is: “Even now, with Americans struggling, they want to make it more expensive and difficult to explore for and produce oil, construct and operate pipelines, and access financing and investment. And that means they have to manipulate customer demand by discouraging gasoline use in the long run.”

For one thing, as mentioned above, Biden has eased up on drilling on public lands. What Biden has done is clearly explained in the WSJ article linked above and here. More important, allowing the exploration and production of oil on public lands, forcing people to accept pipelines, and…I don’t even know what the financing argument is—the article doesn’t say…will not result in an increase in oil for several years. So, this isn’t a solution for gas prices now. The whole drill now, drill everywhere argument is the equivalent of saying that we should spend every penny we have if someone in the family loses a job, which is risky at best. In any case, the point is that even the most anti-Biden argument implicitly admits it isn’t Biden, and he can’t solve it immediately. And that’s the best they’ve got. [1]






[1] They also like a heavily-edited Fox interview. Since they cut off what Granholm thinks is hilarious, I’m going to go with she made a reasonable argument.


Preface to Deliberating War

Army Air Corps in front of a plane

This is the latest version of the preface to the book I’m working on.

One semester, I was teaching Abrams v. US and Schenck v. US—two famous cases about criminalizing dissent in wartime—and I had a couple of students absolutely insistent that people should not be allowed to criticize a war “once boots hit the ground.” I pointed out that refusing to deliberate about a war we were in would mean we were guaranteed to have wars last longer than they needed, and therefore have troops die unnecessarily. They said it didn’t matter—what mattered that you could not criticize a war once people were risking their lives for it. To do so would be to dishonor them and their sacrifice.

My uncle was killed in the 1943 North Africa campaign. He successfully bombed a Nazi supply train, but his plane was downed in the resulting explosion–perhaps because he hadn’t been informed the train had munitions, perhaps because he was unable to pull the plane up fast enough since he’d been injured in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. He was a hero to me.

Since the speculation was that a contributing factor to his death was an injury he’d gotten during the Kasserine Pass battle, at some point, I looked into it. Anyone familiar with the action knows what I found: “America’s first major battle against the Germans in World War Two would end in shame, disgrace and defeat—and Major-General Lloyd R. Fredendall would bear a great deal of the responsibility for that defeat” (Whiting 114). Histories of the battle have little or nothing good to say about Fredendall. He was “an appallingly inept commander” (Carr 28), whose leadership was “a tangled skein of misunderstanding, duplication of effort, overlapping responsibility, and consequential muddle” (Dear, Oxford Companion 644). His communications were often “incomprehensible,” and he became angry if asked to clarify (Blumenson 85). He “was utterly out of touch with his command […] feuded constantly with his subordinate commanders, and generally broke every known principle of leadership in the employment of his corps” (D’Este 24). He was “ill-informed and far from the scene” (Rutherford 121). Whiting says, “Critical of his superiors, Fredendall was outspoken about the defects of his subordinates, ponderous in action, overbearing in attitude and with a tendency to jump to conclusions—probably more often than not, the wrong ones.” (113) Major General Ernest N. Harmon, tasked by Eisenhower with assessing what went wrong in the battle, reported that Fredendall was “a physical and moral coward” (qtd. Atkinson 400). The book I read particularly noted his poor handling of the Army Air Corps, putting them in considerable and unnecessary danger (including getting fired on by American troops, Blumenson 81-2).

I was enraged.

At the author.

Not because I knew enough about the event to think that what the author was saying was untrue, but because I felt it shouldn’t be said.

I was immediately puzzled by my own rage. It would make sense for me to be outraged that Fredendall might have been an over-promoted coward whose incompetence may have contributed to my uncle’s death. It would make sense for me to be outraged if I believed that the author was being inaccurate or unfair to Fredendall. But, to be honest, neither of those was my first (or even third) reaction. I was outraged because someone was suggesting that my uncle’s death was the consequence of someone’s incompetence. And I felt strongly that that was not something that should be said. It took me a while to understand why I was more angry at someone arguing (even correctly) that his death might have been the consequence of military incompetence than I was at the incompetent who might have caused his death. I was having the same reaction as the students. My almost visceral response was that criticizing how the action was conducted dishonored my uncle because it seemed to say that his death was unnecessary, and therefore meaningless.

What I learned from my rage about the criticism of the Kasserine Pass action is that it is tremendously difficult to consider seriously that someone we love and admire might have died unnecessarily, as a consequence of bad decisions, bad leadership, or even for bad reasons. Yet, as I said to the student, if we can’t admit the bad decisions, bad leadership, or bad reasons, more people will die unnecessarily.

Eventually, of course, I worked around to realizing that some people are incompetent, some decisions are unforced errors, some wars are the consequence of political figures bungling or blustering or trying to stabilize a wobbly base or just having painted themselves into a corner, an irresponsible media, an easily-mobilized or distracted public, a culture of demagoguery, or various other not especially noble factors. Even in a just war (and I do think American intervention in WWII was just) there are unjust actions, bad decisions, incompetence, and failures of leadership, and, if we are to make the conduct of war more just and competent, we have to acknowledge the errors. But that my uncle’s death might have been the consequence of incompetence still hurts.

What I learned from my own reaction is that deliberation about a war is constrained by considerations of honor. I want my uncle honored. And it was hard for me to understand that honoring him is compatible with being willing to be critical about the conditions under which he died. We want our ancestors honored. That we want them honored shouldn’t make us unwilling to think carefully and honestly about how, why, or what for they died. The more we refuse to consider past deliberations critically the more we poison our ability to deliberate about the present, and the more likely it is that others will die.

My uncle was a hero. Fredendall bungled the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, in ways that might have contributed to my uncle’s death. Both of those things can be true at the same time. We have to live in a world in which we honor the military dead without thinking we are prohibited from being critical of the cause for which they fought, the people who led them, or the political discourse that caused them to go to war. Learning from mistakes gives those mistakes meaning.

This isn’t a book about military strategy, or military history; it’s about rhetoric. More specifically, this book is about the vexed relationship of political disagreement, deliberation, demagoguery, and war. And I don’t think we can figure out the right relationship without being willing to admit we’ve sometimes gotten it wrong.

We’re primed to reason badly when it comes to questions about war because the prospect of fighting activates so many cognitive biases, especially binary thinking. Under those circumstances, deliberation can easily be framed as opting for cowardly flight instead of courageous fight, as unnecessary at best and treasonous at worst. It’s precisely because disagreements about war are so triggering, so to speak, that we need to be deliberately deliberative. To say that we should deliberate reasonably before going to war is banal in the abstract, but oddly fraught in the moment, and this book uses several cases to explore why it is that we often evade deliberation even (or especially?) when the stakes are so high.

Many people believe it is counter-productive to deliberate about war before it starts, since they think deliberation might cause us to delay in an urgent situation, will weaken our will, enable cowardice to sneak in the door. But, like my students, many people believe we shouldn’t deliberate about war once it’s started because we shouldn’t have sent people to risk their lives if we’re uncertain that the risk is necessary—we owe them our full commitment, since that’s what they’re giving. My own experience shows the deep aversion to deliberating about a war even long after it’s over, since a critical assessment suggests that lives were wasted. In other words, we are averse to deliberating about war, ever.

But, if war and deliberation are incompatible, then war and democracy are incompatible, because democracy thrives on deliberation. This isn’t to say that every decision about a conflict should be thoroughly deliberated—that would be impossible and unwise—but that deliberation doesn’t weaken the will for war if there is a strong case to be made for that war. If advocates of war can’t make their case through reasonable policy argumentation, then they probably have a bad case, and it’s likely an unnecessary war. War triggers cognitive biases, and so deliberation is necessary to counter the effects of those biases—contrary to popular belief, we can’t simply will ourselves not to rely on biases; deliberating with people who disagree can, however, do some work in reducing the power of the biases. But, not all rhetors want us to reduce the power of cognitive biases. Because we are averse to deliberating about or during war, rhetors engaged in normal political disagreements who are unable or unwilling to advocate a policy rationally are tempted to claim that this isn’t normal politics; it’s war. If they can persuade their base that this situation is war, then they won’t be expected to deliberate. The cognitive biases triggered by war will motivate the audience to believe beyond and without reason, and some political leaders and media pundits want exactly that.

Rhetoric and war have a counterintuitively complicated relationship; after all, we don’t go to war because of what the situation is, but because of what we believe the situation to be—that is, the rhetoric about our situation. Being at war (or even believing ourselves to be at war), as I’ll emphasize in this book, often causes us to think differently about things; it persuades us. It also constrains our rhetoric in ways, such as how much we can be critical of the war or its conduct once boots are on the ground. Invoking war or its prospect can change how we argue, and rhetoric can be treated as a kind of war.
In this book, I’ll argue that the way we argue for a war (that is, the rhetoric) implies the conditions under which we can end it, how it will be conducted, what kind of war it will be, what kind of sacrifices (lives, resources, rights) will be expected on the home front, who and what our enemy is. The rhetoric we use might alienate, neutralize, or mobilize potential allies, gain sympathy and assistance from third parties, generate sympathy and assistance for our antagonist(s), or persuade third parties to remain neutral. It might unify a nation, thereby increasing support and morale, or frame the question in partisan terms, thereby ensuring divided support; it can enable us to deliberate our options, including long-term plans. It might make the military action to be diversionary, an attempt to deflect attention from a regime’s scandals or failures, thereby rousing cynicism rather than enthusiasm.

And war affects rhetoric. As mentioned above, when we’re seriously considering war, it’s easier to persuade people to imagine our complicated situation in binaries—pro-/anti-war, patriotic/traitorous, brave/cowardly, action/talk, confident/defeatist. And we can, I will argue, get into a cycle. Believing we are in danger of being attacked (or are already being attacked) increases in-group loyalty and extremism (see, for instance, Hoag et al.), and so we are less open to hearing nuanced explanations of our situation, holding in- and out-groups to the same standards, realizing that the world does not consist of an in-group and an out-group, or even paying attention to non in-group sources of information. If we imagine there are only two positions (pro- or anti-war) then we are likely to hear any criticism of our war plan—or even calls for deliberation–as “anti-war.” Thus, in the process of talking ourselves into a war, we can talk ourselves out of deliberating about that war, and out of deliberation at all. And then we have more war, less deliberately.

What a speed freak taught me about argument v. argumentation

What I learned from someone who said Stephen King and Richard Nixon conspired to kill John Lennon

Berkeley had a Department of Rhetoric, and I was a rhetoric major. So, I took a lot of classes in which we thought carefully about argument (the enthymeme was the dominant model). At some point, I became aware of someone who had sandwich boards about how Richard Nixon and Stephen King conspired to kill John Lennon.

He had a ton of data. He reminded me of Gene Scott, a guy on TV in CA who would sit in a butterfly chair and give all sorts of data supposedly proving something or other. The data was true. Deuteronomy really did specify the cubits of something, and those cubits, if added to the number of Ts in Judges really did add up to something. But the conclusions were nonsense (iirc, he made various predictions that turned out to be false).

Conspiracy Guy (CG) had two sandwich boards, one with the cover of a major publication, and the other with another (maybe Newsweek and Time?). One had Nixon on the cover, and the other had Stephen King. And CG did an impressive close analysis of the two covers. What did it mean that there was a bit of yellow here? It must mean something—it must be conveying an intention. And he could find a way that it was expressing the desire to kill John Lennon.

Since I was trained by New Critics, I was familiar with essays about “what does purple mean in Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Grey?” I even helped students write those essays. The assumption was that every authorial choice means something—it is conveying a message to the enlightened reader. (Btw, purple means nothing Portrait.) Being a good reader means being the person who catches those references that seem meaningless to the unenlightened.
Nah, it doesn’t. It means you’re over-reading. I realized this when I was watching this guy on the street make an argument for why Stephen King and Richard Nixon had conspired to kill John Lennon on the basis of his close reading of the two magazine covers.

He had a ton of data, and all of it was true. There was yellow, the people were looking a particular way; if you squinted you could see this or that, and so on. He also had good sources, Time and Newsweek. So, if we think of having a good argument as having claims that are supported with a lot of data from reliable sources, he had a good argument. But it wasn’t a good argument. It was nonsense.

What he taught me is the difference between data and evidence. What he also taught me is that people mistake quantity of data for quality of argument, and that some people (especially paranoid people) reason from signs rather than evidence. What I mean is that he had a conclusion, and he looked for signs that his conclusion was right. We can always find signs that we’re right, but signs aren’t evidence.

His argument was nonsense. Were Stephen King and Richard Nixon involved in a conspiracy to kill John Lennon, there’s no reason they would have signalled that intention via magazine covers determined independently and some time in advance. CG was mistaking his interpretation for others’ intention–a mistake we all make. It’s hard to remember that something seeming significant to us doesn’t mean someone else was signifying a semi-secret message.Were CG making a rational argument, then his way of arguing (who is on the cover of the two magazines) would always be proof of a conspiracy. But it isn’t. Or else every week there are some really weird conspiracies going on. It’s only “proof” when it supports his claim. That’s what I mean by someone reasoning by “signs.” The notion is that there is a truth (what we already believe) and data that supports what we believe are signs that we’re right.

People who believe in “signs” rather than evidence believe that the data that we’re right (“Nixon’s left eyebrow is raised”) is a sign and data that we’re wrong (the argument makes no sense) should be ignored. So, it’s always a circular argument.

In other words, data is right if and only if it confirms what we already believe, and it’s irrelevant if it doesn’t. If we think about our world that way—what we believe is true if we can find data to support it, and we can dismiss all data that complicates or contradicts our beliefs—then our beliefs are no more rational than a speed freak on a street in Berkeley going on about Stephen King and Richard Nixon. He was wrong. If we argue like he did, we’re just as wrong.