Authoritarian populist demagoguery is never a controlled burn

wildfire
Photo from here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/severe-wildfires-raise-the-chance-for-future-monstrous-blazes/

As I’ve said so often that I’m certain the four people who read my blog regularly are really tired of reading, there aren’t two sides on any issue. The moment we frame an issue as a question of two choices, we have started clearing our political throat for demagoguery.

The reason I’m committed to what might be a crank theory about how to represent political commitments is that, if we realize those commitments are very specific when it comes to policy, then we have a world in which coalitions are possible. For instance, people all over the political spectrum support reform of the criminal justice system, especially bail reform. Some, but not all, conservatives support it. If we think of the issue of bail reform as a partisan issue, then, instead of being able to argue the policy merits of the policy of bail reform, voting about bail reform becomes performance of in-group loyalty.

One of many reasons I like the metaphor of political affiliation being a color spectrum (rather than, for instance, a continuum or matrix) is that it raises the possibility of talking about intensity. One of many fallacies of the left/right continuum model is that it suggests that centrists aren’t irrationally passionate—only the people at the extremes are. I’ve known some people who are extremist about the need for everyone to have “centrist” policies, and people who are mildly committed to policies labelled “far left” or “far right.” And the “extremes” get muddled—where on that continuum do we put people who are extremely committed to libertarianism, pacifism, whatever the GOP or Dems are promoting now, a strong safety net and humanitarian intervention, a strong social safety net and homophobic legislation, a strong social safety net but only for white people?

I think, from the perspective of rhetoric and persuasion, that the degree of commitment is among the most important variables. It’s far more important than where a person fits on some false continuum.

And I say this because of years of arguing with people all over the political spectrum, and also the non-political spectrum, and finding people who, whether it’s about raw dog food, immigration, if something can’t be called hummus if it has sugar, Santana’s guitar playing, Trump, whether Tolkien is racist, single-payer healthcare, and, basically, every issue:

1) insist that their advocated course of action is so right that anyone who disagrees with them is corrupt, stupid, or evil;
2) and they therefore frame the issue as a binary between their specific policy agenda (right) and anyone else (wrong);
3) since everyone who disagrees with them is wrong for disagreeing, they refuse to look at any sources, sites, or data that say they might be wrong, and they only rely on in-group representations of that evil group
4) and they have a monocausal narrative about the problem they are solving.

In my experience, there is no position on any issue–“political” or not–that doesn’t have someone who argues this way. So, this isn’t about political affiliation (left or right)–it’s about how people think about beliefs. I think that people who fit the criteria above are extremists, whether the argument is about the virtues of Ezra Pound’s poetry or the Kyoto Protocols.

Using terms like “evil” doesn’t necessarily mean that one is making an extreme argument. Condemning slavery as an evil and condemning anyone who advocates slavery as evil isn’t necessarily an extremist position. Condemning Nazism as evil isn’t an extremist position.

But saying that the only way to end slavery or Nazism is [X], and that anyone who doesn’t support [X] is just as bad as slavers or Nazis, that’s extremism.

And here’s the point I really wanted to get to: in my experience, people drawn to extremism propose monocausal narratives. I don’t know why, and I have no studies to support my claim. This is just my experience.

It doesn’t matter if they’re talking about dog training methods, immigration, hummus, riots, World War I, the Paleo diet, or whatever. Extremists say that immigration causes all problems, only the presence of tahini causes something to be hummus, since the British failure to signal clearly that they would go to war made the Germans feel confident in their war plans then the British caused the war, and so on.

But nothing is monocausal.

Kristallnacht was signalled and spontaneous at the same time. Goebbels announced that “the Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.” Thus, Hitler didn’t specifically call for that action at that moment, but his years of rhetoric of Jews as an existential threat made people feel that he wanted the violence to happen, that he approved of it. And he did. People were, in Ian Kershaw’s words, “working toward the Fuhrer” by making it happen. And, of course, there were people involved in it who were formally Nazis. So, is Hitler responsible for Kristallnacht? Yes. No historian doubts it. No Hitler, no Kristallnacht. But, can historians find a direct order from him? No.

Imagine that Y happened (a driver hit a cyclist), and we all agree it was a bad thing. What caused it to happen? Imagine that the driver was speeding, texting, and drifted into the bike lane, and the cyclist was listening to a podcast and so didn’t notice the car coming into the bike lane. Extremists, in my experience, find ways to make the in-group not responsible because there were other contributing factors. So, anti-cyclists extremists (and there a lot of them) will say that, since the cyclist could have prevented the accident by seeing that the driver was in the bike lane, the driver wasn’t at fault. The driver wasn’t the only cause of the accident, and therefore not the cause at all.

That’s the argument extremist Trump supporters are making about the attempted insurrection.

Trump extremists are trying to claim that since his January 6 speech wasn’t the only cause of the riots, he didn’t incite them. But, as even the Wall Street Journal says, the problem is his and his supporters’ “war rhetoric.” And that is the most important cause of the attempted insurrection—you can’t keep using war rhetoric, that liberals are out to destroy us and everything we value that there has never been a worse situation, and then not expect them to get violent. Either Trump has been deliberately inciting violence or he’s an irresponsible idiot.

Hitler set the stage for Kristallnacht, and he left himself plausible deniability if public reaction was bad. When it didn’t get the reaction he wanted, the official Nazi line was that it had been spontaneous. So, someone saying that there is no monocausal narrative of Trump having incited the January 6th failed insurrection is someone who would hold Hitler faultless for Kristallnacht.

They are reasoning badly.

Trump has been supporting the notion of violent insurrection for along time. If what happened wasn’t what he wanted to happen, he would have instantly condemned it and stopped it, and he didn’t. Because it was the desired end of his rhetoric.[1]

Trump could have stopped the attempted insurrection that he inspired and incited through his speeches (and he even named the date that he wanted it to happen), but he didn’t, and he didn’t do what a responsible person would have done to make it stop, such as answering Pence’s calls and sending in the National Guard. He didn’t.

Either he’s irresponsibly incompetent, or he didn’t have a problem with what was happening.

By his defenders’ argument, Trump engaged in rhetoric that—as experts on rhetoric said it would–persuaded people that he wanted a violent incursion and insurrection on January 6, and he didn’t stop it once it started, and only denounced it when he was facing impeachment. Thus, by his defenders’ case, Trump either wanted that insurrection, or he’s so irresponsible and incompetent that he unintentionally caused an insurrection he didn’t know how to stop.

Either option is impeachable.

But, more important, Trump really wasn’t the only cause of the attempted insurrection. He’s responsible, and he should be held responsible, and he isn’t the only one that should be held responsible.

People who tried to storm the capital in order to stop the Constitution from being enacted as it is supposed to weren’t people who, until 2016, had accurate and informed understandings of politics, who appreciated democracy as a pluralistic governmental system, and who saw difference of opinion as legitimate. They were authoritarian populists, and that’s why they supported Trump. Trump didn’t cause authoritarian populism—he just rode the wave that others’ rhetoric had created.

For years, talk radio and Fox have been promoting authoritarian populist demagoguery. It’s demagoguery in that they reduce every issue to us v. them, with “us” very narrowly defined, and “them” being everyone else who are lumped into the most extreme “them.” So, if you didn’t (don’t) support the political figure or agenda that they supported at that moment, you were (are) a communist or socialist. Limbaugh, Fox, etc., advocate populism in that what they say perfectly fits what Jan-Werner Muller defines as what populists do:

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

Work like Muller’s shows why the left/right binary (or continuum) is proto-demagogic at least and irrelevant at best. If we’re going to try to shove figures into the left/right binary (which makes as much sense as shoving all religions into Catholic or Protestant), then there are “left-wing” populists like Chavez and “right-wing” populists like Trump, who have the same rhetoric. Whether they’re claiming to be conservative or socialist doesn’t matter—they’re neither. What matters is that they’re populist in a very damaging way.

They’re authoritarian in that they’re saying that the real people are so threatened with extinction by a system run by elites (Them—the elite is entirely composed of out-group members, which is kind of hilarious if you think about it) that we cannot hold ourselves to normal standards. This is war.

Authoritarian populist demagoguery is profitable for a media outlet. It’s stimulating, like a Two-Minutes Hate, but more like the 24/7 Hate. It is guaranteed to generate an audience who will refuse to look at other information (which advertisers love); since it is all about generating in-group loyalty, then advertisers also benefit simply from having ads in that outlet—they look like they’re supporting the in-group.

Authoritarian populist demagoguery is a powerful fuel for setting an audience on fire.

And it’s never a controlled burn.

[1] One of many things incredibly creepy for me is how defenses of Trump are exactly the same arguments that Nazis make to defend Hitler.




On not really objecting to Nazis

Hitler building a road
From the Berlin exhibit about Nazi rhetoric

In January of 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. On March 23, 1933, Germany voted to abandon democracy in favor of a Nazi dictatorship. In April of 1933, the out-going British ambassador to Germany, Horace Rumbold, wrote a five-thousand word telegram concerning what he believed to be Hitler’s goals and the German situation. There is something very disconcerting, if not actually enraging, about reading it, since it is so prescient.

Rumbold points out that, within a few months of attaining power, Hitler and the Nazis had criminalized dissent, brutally silenced all critics, and created an extraordinary propaganda system. Rumbold summarizes Hitler’s plans were openly stated in Mein Kampf and various speeches of his and other high-ranking Nazi officials. That plan was to claim to want peace all the while engaging in the complete ideological and practical militarization of Germany in order to start a war that will enable Germany to incorporate all parts of Europe that have German speakers, and expand into Russia and the Baltic States. Hitler is determined to get war, not just because of what it will gain Germany, but because of his commitment to seeing a nation as an organism which must fight for its existence or be “doomed to extinction” (5).

And, as early as April of 1933, Rumbold recognized that central to Hitler’s understanding of militarism and nationalism was the goal of a Germany without Jews, and that Hitler was rigidly committed to “the campaign against the Jews” (6). Rumbold summarizes Hitler’s plan for the immediate future: “Germany needs peace until she has recovered such strength that no country can challenge her without serious and irksome preparations [….] The aim of [Hitler’s] policy is to bring Germany to a point of preparation, a jumping-off point from which she can reach solid ground before her adversaries can interfere” (8). Elsewhere I (and lots of other people) have argued that anything other than appeasement was so politically and rhetorically unpopular that to advocate policies grounded in taking Rumbold’s prescience seriously would have been political suicide. Resisting Hitler was simply too unpopular.

While all the most effective anti-appeasement policies were unpopular, Hitler was not. On July 10, 1933 (so just two months after Rumbold’s telegram), the Viscount Rothermere (owner of The Daily Mail) published in that paper a piece praising Hitler and what he called “Naziland.” His argument is in his last paragraph (in bold and larger font):

“The world’s greatest need to-day is realism. Hitler is a realist. He has saved his country from the ineffectual leadership of hesitating, half-hearted politicians. He has infused into its national life the unconquerable spirit of triumphant youth.“

Rothermere claims to have carefully studied Germany and the Nazi movement for several years, so he would be well aware of the criticisms noted by Rumbold (and others): the abandonment of representative politics, persecution of all political opponents and even critics, openly-stated goal of eliminating Jews from the nation, and militarism. The assumption that many people make is that people in the UK who thought Hitler wasn’t that bad didn’t recognize him for what he was. Rothermere did. He liked it.

Rothermere liked fascism. He praised Mussolini and his “collaborators” because “Together they have made their country to best-governed State in Europe.” He says that “foremost” of Hitler’s accomplishments is “the liberation of [Germany] from the rule of the frowsy, down-at-hell German Republic, which was totally lacking in prestige, self-confidence, and even self-respect.” He acknowledges that there has been some criticism of how the Nazis have treated their opponents, but dismisses it as coming only from communist admirers of Stalin: “The plain, blunt patriotism of Hitler and his followers is highly alarming to our parlour-Bolsheviks and cultured Communists.”

In a section titled “Misplaced Horror,” he says that these communists
“Have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call “Nazi atrocities,” which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for himself, consist merely of a few isolated acts of violence such as are inevitable among a nation half as big again as ours, but which have been generalized, multiplied, and exaggerated to give the impression that Nazi rule is a bloodthirsty tyranny.”

Rothermere goes on to say that “the old women of both sexes” denounced Italian fascists’ “outrages” (which he has in scare quotes) when those actions consisted of nothing more than “the administration of a few doses of castor-oil to Communists” and, just as “the incidental extravagances of the early days of Fascism are forgotten,” “the minor misdeeds of individual Nazis will be submerged by the immense benefits that the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany.”

Italian fascists weren’t as obsessed with (or oppressive of) Jews as Nazis were and always had been, so someone might point out that the persecution of Jews (as Rumbold noted, one aspect of the Nazi platform to which Hitler was obstinately committed) meant the outrages were not the misdeeds of a few individuals, but an important point in the Nazi political agenda. It was, after all, in the open. And something that is tremendously important to understand is that the people who argued that Hitler wasn’t so bad, and, in any case, he was better than Stalin, didn’t object to his anti-Semitism. Like Rothermere, they endorsed it. In a section sub-titled “Alien Elements” Rothermere says,
“The German nation, moreoever, was rapidly falling under the control of its alien elements. In the last days of the pre-Hitler regime there were twenty times as many Jewish Government officials in Germany as had existed before the war. Israelites of international attachments were insinuating themselves into key positions in the German administrative machine. Three German Ministries only had direct relations with the Press, but in each case the official responsible for conveying news and interpreting policy to the public was a Jew.”
In other words, Rothermere supported and celebrated Hitler because he liked everything about Nazism. He was a Nazi.

On Republicans saying Trump went too far

Scene from Casablanca in which Renault pretends he didn’t know there was gambling


There are a lot of editorials from conservative sites admitting that Trump deliberately incited violence in the hopes that Pence would do something unconstitutional. And that is what Trump did. And it’s what Trump critics have been warning he would do since he was elected.

Even the Wall Street Journal has, in both its news and editorial positions, said that Trump instigated the violence at the capital on January 6, and did so deliberately. Since last spring, people had been saying that Trump would dispute the legitimacy of the election if he lost (and both he and the GOP thought he’d lose—that’s why they rushed through the appointment of Barrett, thereby violating the principles they said had made them refuse to certify Garland). Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention to Trump’s tweets or his supporters knew that they were planning violence on January 6 (and they are for January 20—I’m seeing some stuff about January 17 and I don’t know why).

Various pro-Trump media are expressing shock at what he did on January 6—that is, incite violence. They’re either idiots, in which case, they should resign, or they knew he would. I think it was the second. I think everyone at Wall Street Journal now busy clutching their pearls, every GOP politico now saying he went too far, every FB friend saying it was antifa–they all knew that Trump would do exactly what he did and what he’s still doing. He’s trying to violate the Constitution in order to stay in power. It’s perfectly in line with what he’s always done. He doesn’t think it’s right for him to be constrained or accountable in anyway—by laws, morals, or conventions.

That’s who he is, and who he has always been, and anyone who knows anything about his time in New York knows that. His tax returns show that he was never successful at anything other than Celebrity Apprentice. Otherwise he had terrible judgment.

I’m working on a chapter about the appeasement of Hitler, specifically about why major political figures (like Chamberlain and Baldwin) kept giving Hitler what he wanted, as though that would avert war, and as though he wasn’t someone who had always said that he intended to engage in a war of conquest and extermination. There are lots of arguments as to why Chamberlain’s government engaged in appeasement, but I think it’s pretty clear: they did so because anything other than appeasement was rhetorically impossible given the beliefs of their base.

Once Trump became the GOP nominee, then criticizing him was rhetorically impossible because of the beliefs of their base—the beliefs the GOP had been drumming for years. Specifically, the pro-GOP media for years had been saying that only the GOP was right because Dems were so awful. Because Dems were/are so awful because SOCIALISM and ABORTION (and on neither point does the pro-GOP media have a rational argument), then the GOP is justified in anything it does.

For instance, the claim that there was massive voter fraud is not only irrational, but a great example of how people can mistakenly think that “I have seen the evidence for myself” is a rational way to assess an argument. Whether you can find data to support your claim doesn’t make your argument rational. There are three tests for a rational argument:

  1. Can you identify the evidence that would cause you to admit that you’re wrong? In other words, is your argument falsifiable?
  2. Do your arguments consistently appeal to the same major premises? This one is complicated, and I really wish that people taught syllogisms in argumentation classes. The short version is that if you say, “There was voter fraud because there were bunnies near the polling places” and “There was voter fraud because there were no bunnies near the polling places” then you don’t have a rational argument.
  3. Would you consider the way you are arguing a good argument if made in support of positions with which you disagree? Again, complicated because of how badly we teach argumentation, but a rational argument has a form that we would consider a good form regardless of the content.

No argument for massive voter fraud can withstand that test. As an aside, I have to say that I’d love were the results in Texas subjected to the level of scrutiny that Republicans want for Pennsylvania. Were the GOP pearl-clutching about Pennsylvania sincerely about the principle of voter fraud and not just another instance of not believing that people who vote against them should have their votes count, then the pearl-clutchers would welcome scrutiny about Texas.

Yeah, that won’t happen.

We are in a cultural moment that, for various reasons, assesses things (a CEO, product, political figure, athlete, diet, policy, movie) in terms of immediate outcome. If the CEO is getting great press, then they must be good, so we give them more good press, which proves they’re good. Since great press increases the stock value, then the great press is seen as great judgment.

It’s as though someone jumped off a cliff, and all the press was about how great they were for flying. They’re a great success, and should be admired. And then the hitting the ground is treated as an unfortunate outcome, as opposed to what was always going to happen.

That’s the issue with pro-GOP media that advocated a scorched earth demagoguery regarding Dems long before Trump started running for President. Rhetoric isn’t mere rhetoric. It has consequences. The pro-GOP media persuaded people to jump off the cliff.

What happened on January 6th (and what Trump was still hoping for on January 16th and 17th and maybe the 20th) was just one more instance of how Trump has always been. Trump has always lied. About everything.

Take, for instance, the argument that you have to be GOP if you think abortion is wrong. The Dems aren’t pro-abortion (no one is) but want to reduce abortion through the policies that are demonstrably effective at reducing abortion. The GOP has no response to that argument.

Instead, it falsely presents the Dems as pro-abortion. And here I’ll just say that, if you have to lie about what your opponent believes, then maybe you aren’t promoting democracy? But anyway, even assuming that the Dem plan for reducing abortion is bad, it doesn’t mean that the GOP is right. Both parties might be wrong. The GOP rhetoric about abortion is just demagoguery. It’s a false reduction of a complicated issue to us v. them, necessitating straw man representations of the opposition.

Trump engages in race-based demagoguery, and he always has, as far back as his advocating killing innocent men because they were Black. Trump’s rhetoric is:

  1. he is entitled to everything because he is a person above accountability, above rules, above norms;
  2. therefore, he is entitled to use any and all means to enhance his power, financially profit, and triumph over people who don’t support him;
  3. he will reward people who support him by enabling them to stand above accountability, rules, and norms;
  4. and he will punish anyone who doesn’t support him in every way he can.

That’s his rhetoric. That’s what his rhetoric has always been. It’s also what his policies have been since he’s been in office. These aren’t just rhetorical topoi he’s used, but the arguments he’s used for policies grounded in those beliefs.

That’s also the rhetoric of pro-GOP pundits, and has been ever since Rush Limbaugh started broadcasting. The only difference is that they begin with a different premise from Trump. Trump says (and probably believes) that he is entitled to those things and practices because of who he is, whereas pro-GOP rhetoric, since the 1990s, has been that the GOP (and whatever policies its advocating at this moment regardless of what it previously advocated) are entitled to those things because of how evil the Dems are.

So, just to be clear, pro-GOP rhetoric has, since the 1990s, been that we should abandon the rhetoric and practices inherent to democracy—that is, we should abandon democracy—because of how evil the Dems are. What we saw on January 6th was not just the consequence of Trump’s rhetoric, but the consequence of what Rush Limbaugh has been saying his entire career, what pro-GOP pundits have been saying for thirty years: that Dems are so bad that there are no restraints or constraints on what the GOP should do to win.

So, to those people who are now outraged about what happened on January 6th, I’d love to see them explain how what he did is not just one more instance of those four topoi, and how those topoi are not the logical consequence what pro-GOP media has been saying for over twenty years.

What we saw on January 6th was the direct consequence of what Trump said, and Trump is the direct consequence of what pro-GOP media has been saying for over twenty years.

Rejecting Trump, without rejecting that anti-democratic rhetoric and policy agenda, is just wishing the coup had been better managed.

The Enabling Act and the current coup attempt

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

On March 23, 1933, Adolf Hitler argued that what “the left” had done was so outrageous that Germany should abandon democracy and make him dictator. The elected officials did.

He was supported by the Catholic Party, all conservative parties, and the majority of Protestants. The only parties to oppose him were the Democratic Socialists and the Communists.

Since everyone other than socialists and communists supported Hitler, why is it a talking point among pro-Trump groups that Hitler was a socialist, and therefore a leftist? Because they want to rationalize engaging in exactly the same kind of coup that Hitler managed—we have to abandon democratic practices because “the left” is so bad—while pretending they aren’t doing exactly what Hitler did.

A lot of people reason by identity rather than politics. That is, they engage in the fantasy that good people, and only good people, will enact good policies. So, when trying to decide how to vote, just look for someone for someone who understands you, who is like you. That’s called “identification.” There’s a kind of narcissism in it—or maybe political solipsism is a better word. You just look out for yourself, and vote for someone who will look out for you, and….what, exactly, is supposed to happen? There can’t be a one-to-one relationship of identities (young, old, middle-aged, no kids, lots of kids, a disabled kid) between voters and political figures because there aren’t that many people in Congress (and voting on this basis always hurts the smaller groups). In addition, what are called social groups (not social in the sense of being about socializing, but group memberships that are important for a sense of self, such as having a child who gets accommodations in schools, having a a dog, or being evangelical Christian) don’t necessarily lead to policy affiliation. Not everyone with a dog wants off-leash dog parks, after all.

Good political figures should be able to look out for lots of different kinds of people; that’s what democracy requires. Diversity is a fact.

But a politics of identification assumes that identity is stable and monocausally determines policy affiliation. With unintentional irony, self-described “right wing” media figures throw themselves around about “the left” engaging in “identity politics,” yet that’s what they offer to their audience: the assumption that their identity (being “conservative”) necessarily leads to one political agenda (that is never clearly stated in the affirmative). It’s generally what’s called a “negative identity”—people are “conservative” just because they aren’t “liberal” (and vice versa).

What people call “right-wing” politics should be called reactionary toxic populist nationalism. It isn’t conservative. Conservativism is a political ideology that, although I disagree with it, even I will say is generally internally coherent and principled. Pro-Trump politics isn’t internally coherent or principled—it’s irrational factionalism. Using a private server is terrible, unless it’s a Trump family member. Pornography is terrible, unless it’s a Trump family member. A problematic charity is terrible, unless it’s Trump’s. There are no principles that are applied consistently across groups.

Supporting Trump comes from two sources. First, there’s charismatic leadership. He’s decisive and confident and (they think) successful. People drawn to Trump for this reason believe that politics isn’t complicated, that the right solution is obvious, and that politicians make things unnecessarily complicated because they’re doofuses. They believe that “regular people” (like them) are screwed over by our current political system, and that Trump understands them, and is looking out for them. They know he isn’t a doofus because he says things are simple, he’s confident he can solve them, and they saw him be decisive on a (scripted) TV show. He feels transparent to them.

They believe that because everything he says, and even the way he stands, shows that he is clearly a successful guy who gets them and who knows what needs to be done. And he’ll cut through the bullshit and get it done.

And they only pay attention to information that says that what they believe about Trump is true. They reject any criticism of Trump on the grounds that it is criticism. They believe what they believe is true because it’s what they believe, and anything that says what they believe is false must be false because it contradicts what they believe.

These are people, in my experience, who make the same mistake over and over, and who get scammed. A lot. They’re people who are often good and kind, and who believe that Scripture means what it seems to mean to them, and that people are who they say they are. That’s why they get scammed. They believe that the world is not complicated, but that bad people make it seem complicated, and so they like people who are decisive and confident. Con artists are always decisive and confident (so are a lot of badly informed people).

I have to digress and say that, since I’ve spent a lot of my life arguing with all sorts of people, this way of thinking about the world (it’s all really simple, and people just try to make it complicated, and we can solve this problem that no one else has solved by being thoroughly commitment to this simple solution that, for inexplicable reasons, no one else has ever adopted) is all over the political spectrum. It isn’t just Trump supporters (here, for instance, is a nice discussion of how it’s playing out right now among democratic socialists).

Second, many people support Trump in a purely reactionary way—he is NOT “libruls” (whom they believe to be the cause of all problems in the world. He will (and does) crush them, and, since they think libruls cause all the problems, crushing them will solve all the problems. It’s still toxic populism, in that it’s saying that there are some Americans who aren’t really American, whose views shouldn’t be represented (or even discussed), and who should be excluded from power.

Those two kinds of support—here is a strong, decisive person with excellent judgment who will cut through all the bullshit, and here is someone who will purge our government and culture of liberals and their influence—are the two kinds of support for Hitler.

Am I saying that Trump is Hitler? No.

Am I saying that the people who are supporting Trump would have supported Hitler? That is exactly what I’m saying.


The true spirit of Christmas

clay last supper

If you pay attention to scholars of Scripture, then you know that just about everything you thought you knew about Christmas is not in Scripture. It might not have been an inn, there was no taxation requirement that made everyone come back to their home town, there’s no reason to think that there were three magi, and the magi story and shepherd story don’t match up, it might not have been December 25, there almost certainly wasn’t snow, and “virgin” didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t had sex.

But I have a lot of tolerance for people with various understandings of what Christmas means. In the early 80s, I was in a store in Baja California, and I fell in love with a representation of the Last Supper. In it, Jesus (on the cross) is at a table with people eating lobster, bananas, watermelon, and tortillas. Of course, Jesus didn’t eat tortillas and lobster at the actual Passover meal he had with his disciples, and he wasn’t on a cross at that dinner, and his cross wasn’t in cactus, but I love(d) that it was an understanding of Jesus in terms of their own lives.

I love the Staples Singers’ version of “No Room at the Inn,” which is about imagining Jesus’ birth in a segregated hotel, in which the bellboy, waitress, maid, and porter would have been welcome at his birth. That isn’t historically accurate, but it’s true to Jesus’ message of inclusion.

I love Auden’s Christmas “Oratorio,” which is factually wrong in so many ways, but, again, wonderfully true in many.

I think it’s important to understand that cultural variations and interpretations of the Jesus story are exactly that—interpretations. Many years ago, Sallie McFague said that the metaphors and parables of Scripture are like the green glasses that people wear in Oz. After a while, people become so comfortable with the glasses that they think Oz really is green, as opposed to looking green through those lenses. Jesus eating lobster while on a cactus cross is a lens; his being born in an inn staffed by African Americans is a lens. Representing Jesus as white-skinned and fair-haired is a lens.

One of many reasons that the “war of Christmas” is deliberate hokum is that it isn’t a “war” at all, and it isn’t even an implicit attack on what Scripture says about Jesus and his birth. Acknowledging that not everyone celebrates Christmas, let alone in a way that is very recent, and very culturally specific, isn’t an attack on anyone or anything. Feeling threatened by that acknowledging is taking difference as aggression. Scripture doesn’t give us the right to deny that we have a lens. But we can celebrate the many ways that people understand the story of hope and birth.

So, happy holidays!

“Support the police” and lay Calvinism

Calvin's commentaries on the Bible

A lot of American conservative Christianity is affected by Calvinism, not necessarily the most complicated aspects of John Calvin’s beliefs, nor even all of what he said, but what might be called a popular (or lay) version of Calvinism.

(As an aside, I’ll mention that’s pretty common—what actual people in the congregation believe is not necessarily what their sect is supposed to hold dear. I know a lot of Catholics who don’t believe that the host is literally Christ’s body, Lutherans who believe in “decision theology,” people who say the Nicean Creed on a regular basis but who don’t actually believe in the physical resurrection of the body, so that people would have a modified version of Calvinism isn’t a criticism. It’s just a fact.)

There are several ways in which lay Calvinism comes up, but here are the ones that are important for the question of what we should do (or not) about police violence:
• that humans are so corrupted by original sin as to be in constant danger of slipping into sin.
• that everyone knows what is and isn’t sin (right and wrong are not only in a zero-sum relationship, but, at any given moment, what’s right or wrong is absolutely clear).
• that sin is the consequence of giving in to sinful impulses (that we know to be sinful in the moment); that is, a lack of control. Therefore, only very controlling people can do the right thing, and only a culture of control can get people to behave well.
• that the world is divided into saints and sinners, and that saints are the ones capable of self-control.
• the only way to get sinners to behave is to punish them; if you punish them enough, they will behave well;
• that immorality and crime are (or should be) the same, because otherwise immoral people will not be punished and they will create a culture of immorality. Since immorality = crime, this failure to control the sinners will mean that everyone—including the faithful—will be punished with a high crime rate. A nation that is not following God’s obvious rules will be punished by losing its dominance. [1]

If you accept all these premises, and I think they’re a fair summary of what a lot of self-identified conservative Christians believe, then, it follows that we have to have a culture with a lot of punishment. Since immorality and crime are the same (people who are immoral will commit all the sins), then a culture that tolerates immorality will be a culture with a lot of crime. [2]

So, what many conservative Christians believe is that, if we want to have a culture that is moral (and with less crime), we must have mechanisms of social control because, if people are not threatened with punishment, they will fall into sin. People—all people–who are not threatened with punishment will sin. Therefore, we have to have a police force that can punish people—that’s the only way to have a culture without a lot of crime (other than massive salvation to their specific sect, but the Calvinist notion that the elect are few makes that problematic).

In my experience, conservative Christians who “support the police” don’t want the police to do what is actually their job: that is, arrest, and not punish, people. They want a police force that is empowered to punish in the moment. That stance, I think, has to do with their sense that the judicial system is too concerned with process, too likely to insist on fairness, and too “liberal” (in the old sense of the word). They think a police officer should be able to decide, in the moment, that a person is good or bad (saint or sinner), and act accordingly.

If you accept all the premises of this version of Calvinism—people are basically bad, they only behave well if punished, right v. wrong is obvious to good people—then you can end up with thinking that the police should be able to punish people.

Except for one problem. Police are people.

If all people are prone to sin unless threatened with punishment, then, if we give the police the power to punish people, some of them will use that power in a sinful way. That conclusion necessarily follows from the premises of this version of Calvinism.

So, were these conservative Christians consistent in their application of Calvinism, they would be strong advocates of punitive policies in place for police forces. They would insist that police be held accountable, and punished for misbehavior. They would want to make sure that the police who abused their power—since, as their model of human behavior says, all people will behave sinfully unless threatened with punishment says—are guaranteed to be punished. They would be as committed to punishing abusive police as they are to punishing any other criminal. They would advocate strong and powerful community control of the police, and criminal charges for abusive police.

But they don’t. When it comes to the police, suddenly people don’t need accountability or punishment. How interesting.

[1] As another aside, this is the weakest part of the lay Calvinist argument for social control. They have a tendency to cite stories, like those about Sodom and Gommorah, that are actually about saving the righteous. While there are Hebrew Bible passages that say that God punishes communities that have fallen, there are none that say that the righteous will be punished for being in a fallen community. God always protects the righteous. It’s also impossible to make a good faith argument that the history of triumphal civilizations is one of Calvinist v. non-Calvinist, or even “follow the rules that current conservative Christians believe are absolutely clearly right v. wrong.” It’s all no-true Scotsmen. When in-groups triumph, it’s proof that God prefers them, when out-groups triumph, it isn’t proof that God prefers them.

[2] Another aside, this is sometimes a circular argument—if you criminalize normal behavior, then it can look as though immorality and criminality correlate. You can break that correlation by decriminalizing immoral behavior, of course. The more important data would be whether decriminalizing “moral” behaviors—women speaking in church, for instance—correlates to civil crimes like murder. There’s no evidence to suggest it does.




Horace Rumbold’s April 1933 memo about Hitler

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

April 26, 1933, the British Ambassador to Germany (Horace Rumbold) wrote a long (5k words) telegram about Hitler. It was not only prescient about Hitler’s plans and strategies, but smart about authoritarianism. What follows are some excerpts.

The Chancellor has been busy gathering all the strings of power into his hands, and he may now be said to be in a position of unchallenged supremacy. The parliamentary regime has been replaced by a regime of brute force, and the political parties have, with the exception of the Nazis and Nationalists, disappeared from the arena. For that matter Parliament has ceased to have any raison d’etre. The Nazi leader has only to express a wish to have it fulfilled by his followers.

Hitherto I have dealt in despatches with the internal changes and the events of the moment. Now that Hitler has acquired absolute control, at any rate till the 1st April, 1937, it may be advisable to consider the uses to which he may put his unlimited opportunities during the next four years. The prospect is disquieting, as the only programme, apart from ensuring their own stay in office, which the Government appear to possess may be described as the revival of militarism and the stamping out of pacifism. The plans of the Government are far-reaching, they will take several years to mature and they realise that it would be idle to embark on them if there were any danger of premature disturbance either abroad or at home. They may, therefore, be expected to repeat their protestations of peaceful intent from time to time and to have recourse to other measures, including propaganda, to lull the outer world into a sense of security.

The new regime is confident that it has come to stay. At the same time it realises that the economic crisis which delivered Germany into its hands is also capable of reversing the process. It is, therefore, determined, to leave no stone unturned in the effort to entrench itself in power for all time. To this end it has embarked on a programme of political propaganda on a scale for which there is no analogy in history. Hitler himself is, with good reason, a profound believer in human, and particularly German, credulity. He has unlimited faith in propaganda. In his autobiography he describes with envy and admiration the successes of the Allied Governments, achieved by the aid of war propaganda. He displays a cynical and at the same time very clear understanding of the psychology of the German masses. He knows what he has achieved with oratory and cheap sentiment during the last fourteen years by his own unaided efforts. Now that he has the resources of the State at his disposal, he has good reason to believe that he can mould public opinion to his views to an unprecedented extent.

Dr. Goebbels is engaged on a two-fold task, to uproot every political creed in Germany except Hitlerism and to prepare the soil for the revival of militarism. The press has been delivered into his hands, and he has declared that it is his intention “to play upon it as on a piano.”

The outlook for Europe is far from peaceful if the speeches of Nazi leaders, especially of the Chancellor, are borne in mind. The Chancellor’s account of his political career in Mein Kampf contains not only the principles which have guided him during the last fourteen years, but explains how he arrived at these fundamental principles. Stripped of the verbiage in which he has clothed it, Hitler’s thesis is extremely simple. He starts with the assertions that man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation is, he concludes, a fighting unit, being a community of fighters. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is, he asserts, doomed to extinction. A country or a race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the necessity for ridding it of foreign impurities. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist. Pacifism is the deadliest sin, for pacifism means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence. The first duty of every country is, therefore, to nationalise the masses: intelligence is of secondary importance in the case of the individual; will and determination are of higher importance. The individual who is born to command is more valuable than countless thousands of subordinate natures. Only brute force can ensure the survival of the race. Hence the necessity for military forms. The race must fight; a race that rests must rust and perish. The German race, had it been united in time, would now be master of the globe to-day. The new Reich must gather within its fold all the scattered German elements in Europe. A race which has suffered defeat can be rescued by restoring its self-confidence. Above all things, the army must be taught to believe in its own invincibility. To restore the German nation again ” it is only necessary to convince the people that the recovery of freedom by force of arms is a possibility.”

Intellectualism is undesirable. The ultimate aim of education is to produce a German who can be converted with the minimum of training into a soldier. The idea that there is something reprehensible in chauvinism is entirely mistaken. ” Indeed, the greatest upheavals in history would have been unthinkable had it not been for the driving force of fanatical and hysterical passions. Nothing could have been effected by the bourgeois virtues of peace and order. The world is now moving towards such an upheaval, and the new (German) State must see to it that the race is ready for the last and greatest decisions on this earth ” (p. 475, 17th edition of Mein Kampf). Again and again he proclaims that fanatical conviction and uncompromising resolution are indispensable qualities in a leader.

Foreign policy may be unscrupulous. It is not the task of diplomacy to allow a nation to founder heroically but rather to see that it can prosper and survive. There are only two possible allies for Germany—England and Italy (p. 699). No country will enter into an alliance with a cowardly pacifist State run by democrats and Marxists. So long as Germany does not fend for herself, nobody will fend for her. Germany’s lost provinces cannot be gained by solemn appeals to Heaven or by pious hopes in the League of Nations, but only by force -of arms (p. 708).

Germany must not repeat the mistake of fighting all her enemies at once. She must single out the most dangerous in. turn and attack him with all her forces ” (p. 711). “I t is the business of the Government to implant in the people feelings of manly courage and passionate hatred.” The world will only “cease to be anti-German when Germany recovers equality of rights and resumes her place in the sun.

Hitler admits that it is difficult to preach chauvinism without attracting undesirable attention, but it can be done. The intuitive insight of the subordinate leaders can be very helpful. There must be no sentimentality, he asserts, about Germany’s foreign policy. To attack France for purely sentimental reasons would be foolish. What Germany needs is an increase in territory in Europe. Hitler even argues that Germany’s pre-war colonial policy must be abandoned, and that the new Germany must look for expansion to Russia and especially to the Baltic States. He condemns the alliance with Russia because the ultimate aim of all alliances is war. To wage war with Russia against the West would be criminal, especially as the aim of the Soviets is the triumph of international Judaism.

A number of the clauses of the original twenty-five-point programme have been abandoned as Utopian or out of date, but the campaign against the Jews goes to show that Hitler will only yield to energetic opposition even on comparatively unimportant points of policy. The brutal harshness with which he has overwhelmed his opponents of the Left and the ruthlessness with which he has muzzled the press are disquieting signs.

Not only is it a crime to preach pacificism or condemn militarism but it is equally objectionable to preach international understanding, and while politicians and writers who have been guilty of the one have actually been arrested and incarcerated, those guilty of the other have at any rate been removed from public life and of course from official employment. The Government are openly hostile to Marxism on the ground that it savours of internationalism, and the Chancellor in his electoral speeches has spoken with derision of such delusive documents as peace pacts and such delusive ideas as the “spirit of Locarno.” Indeed, the foreign policy which emerges from his speeches is no less disquieting than that which emerges from his memoirs. Even when allowance is made for the exaggerations attendant upon a political campaign, enough remains to make it highly probable that rearmament and not disarmament is the aim of the new Germany.

Representative government has been overthrown. Parliament has to all intents and purposes been abolished. A campaign of terror instituted by the authorities has not failed to have its effect on Democrats, Socialists and Communists alike. It is doubtful whether any real resistance would now be offered to a return to conscription. Still more serious is the fact that the resumption of the manufacture of war material by the factories can be undertaken to-day with much less fear of detection or denunciation than heretofore. Owing to the abolition of the press of the Left and the exemplary punishment of traitors and informers, it will be much easier in future to observe secrecy in the factories and workshops. I cannot help thinking that many of the measures taken by the new Government of recent weeks aim at the inculcation of that silence, or “Schwiegsamkeit,” which Hitler declares in his memoirs to be an essential to military preparations. In the introduction to my annual report last year I stated (paragraph 27) that militarism in the pre-war sense, as exemplified by the Zabern incident, no longer existed in Germany. I wrote (paragraph 29) that there had been a revival of nationalism, that nationalism, was not synonymous with militarism, but I added that, ” should nationalist feeling in Germany become exacerbated, it might well lead to militarism.” The present Government have, I fear, exacerbated national feeling, with the results which I anticipated.

Indeed, the political vocabulary of national socialism is already saturated with militarist terms. There is incessant talk of onslaughts and attacks on entrenched positions, of political fortresses which have been stormed, of ruthlessness, violence and heroism. Hitler himself has proclaimed that Germany is now to enter upon a ” heroic ” age, in which the individual is to count for nothing, and the weal of the State for everything.

They [German forces] have to rearm on land, and, as Herr Hitler explains in his memoirs, they have to lull their adversaries into such a state of coma that they will allow themselves to be engaged one by one. It may seem astonishing that the Chancellor should express himself so frankly, but it must be noted that his book was written in 1925, when his prospects of reaching power were so remote that he could afford to be candid. He would probably be glad to suppress every copy extant to-day. Since he assumed office, Herr Hitler has been as cautious and discreet as he was formerly blunt and frank. He declares that he is anxious that peace should be maintained for a ten-year period. What he probably means can be more accurately expressed by the formula : Germany needs peace until she has recovered such strength that no country can challenge her without serious and irksome preparations. I fear that it would be misleading to base any hopes on a return to sanity or a serious modification of the views of the Chancellor and his entourage. Hitler’s own record goes to show that he is a man of extraordinary obstinacy. His success in fighting difficulty after difficulty during the fourteen years of his political struggle is a proof of his indomitable character.

Herr von Papen, speaking in Breslau a few weeks ago, stated that Hitlerism in its essence was a revolt against the Treaty of Versailles. The Vice-Chancellor for once spoke unvarnished truth. Hitlerism has spread with extraordinary rapidity since the 5th March, and those who witnessed the celebration of Hitler’s birthday a few days ago must have been impressed by the astonishing popularity of the new leader with the masses. So far as the ordinary German is concerned, Hitler has certainly restored something akin to self-respect, which has been lacking in Germany since November 1918. The German people to-day no longer feel humiliated or oppressed. The Hitler Government have had the courage to revolt against Versailles, to challenge France and the other signatories of the treaty without any serious consequences. For a defeated country this represents an immense moral advance. For its leader, Hitler, it represents overwhelming prestige and popularity. Someone has aptly said that nationalism is the illegitimate offspring of patriotism by inferiority complex. Germany has been suffering from such a complex for over a decade. Hitlerism has eradicated it, but only at the cost of burdening Europe with a new outbreak of nationalism.




Margaret Mead’s definition of civilization

A quote attributed to Margaret Mead is going around, which she may or may not have said. People sharing that quote have had various commenters disagree with Mead about her implicit definition of civilization—as far as I can tell, none of them cultural anthropologists or sociologists. (I’ll come back to that.)

While the quote is very badly sourced, it’s possible that she said something along the lines of the quote, since it’s in line with other things she said. And, if she said it, it was not an invitation to debate the distinction between civilized and non-civilized cultures but her attempt to show that distinction is always grounded in the wrong goals. This is, after all, among the scholars who advocated “cultural relativism.” She was never in favor of anthropology as a justification for imperialism. And it often was, and the civilized v. non-civilized binary was crucial to various projects of imperialism and extermination.

When that binary was popular, and (for complicated reasons) I happen to have read a lot of “scholars” and “experts” who endorsed that binary, none of them put their favored cultures in the “non-civilized” category. That’s one sign that a binary is part of a set of paired terms, in which everything good is associated with the in-group, and everything bad is associated with the out-group. The entry from the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences shows why it isn’t a concept much used by scholars (except for understanding rhetorics of exploitation):

“Thus, the significations accruing to civilization have been the following: European/Western; urban and urbane; secular and spiritual; law-abiding and nonviolent (i.e., limited to legalized violence, both within and between states); polished, courteous, and polite; disciplined, orderly, and productive; laissez faire, bourgeois, and comfortable; respectful of private property; fraternal and free; cultured, knowledgeable, and the master of nature. The uncivilized conversely are: non-Western; rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous, fanatical, literalist, and theocratic; unlawful and violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree; uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy. Given this stark set of binaries, it is not surprising that the civilizing mission (a related concept that emerged in the nineteenth century) has often been the ideological counterpart of projects of colonial domination and genocide, especially in the non-Western world, but also in the European hinterland and vis-à-vis European minorities and subaltern classes.” “Civilization.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 1, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 557-559. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.

As an aside, I have to note that I keep telling people that what is kind of a throwaway in Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric is actually crucial to understanding public discourse, especially as that discourse crawls up the ladder of demagoguery: the concept of paired terms. The civilized/non-civilized distinction is a great example of why the notion of paired terms is so useful. For each good term, there is a bad one, and so it reinforces the notion that there are two kinds of groups: good (in-group) and bad (out-group).

But, back to the Mead quote. The whole notion that there is some kind of line between civilized and uncivilized cultures is self-serving nonsense, and that was a point she often made. At the time that Mead was working, it would have been easy to notice that genocidal projects relied on this binary, even when it made no sense (Nazi rhetoric framed Slavs and Jews as uncivilized; genocides of indigenous peoples depended on pretending that they didn’t have organized cultures). And she noticed. There are problems with her research, and she was no saint, but, for her era, she was surprisingly aware of the political uses of cultural anthropology, and she tried to resist some of the nastiest uses.

The groups thrown into the “uncivilized” category were actually wildly different from each other. In other words, the distinction itself is demagogic—it’s saying that the complicated and nuanced world of cultures is really a binary. That binary, which was really just a strategically incoherent us v. them binary, “justified” violence against out-groups–all out-groups. Because this out-group is like that out-group, and that out-group is dangerous, all out-groups are dangerous in all the ways any individual out-group is. That’s what this binary does. The whole project of defining a culture as civilized or not is about rationalizing the exploitation, oppression, and/or extermination of some group.

There are two other points I want to make. First, if you pay attention to pro-GOP rhetoric, then you might be aware that they try to employ this same set of paired terms against “liberals.” If, like me, you pay attention to pro-GOP talking points, then you can see that they frame “liberals” (just as much a phantasmagoric construction as “Jews”) as (from the entry above): “non-Western; […] fanatical […] violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree.”

You might notice that I’ve removed “rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous” “literalist, and theocratic” “uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy.” Pro-GOP is either silent on those characteristics or actively promotes them as virtues.

And that bring me to the fourth point, and the most complicated.

Many years ago, I was talking with someone who hadn’t taken a history class since high school, but who, on the basis of a paper he wrote in high school, thought he was an expert on Hitler, whose opinion about Hitler was as valid as any actual scholar. Once, in front of a colleague who was a devotee of Limbaugh, I said, “Were I Queen of the Universe, no one could make a Hitler analogy without citing two scholars in support,” and he said, “Oh, so you think common people should be silenced.”

I was speechless. (That doesn’t often happen.) He was projecting his own tendency to think in binaries onto me—knowledge is either lay (true) or expert (head in the sky). That’s a Limbaugh talking point, but it had little to do with what I was saying. I was saying that lay claims about Hitler that were valid could be validated by appealing to experts. I didn’t (and don’t) see a binary of expert v. lay knowledge. After all, a lot of experts endorsed the notion of civilized v. non-civilized cultures. Experts aren’t always right, and they don’t always agree. If no expert supports a claim about Hitler (and there are lots of popular claims about Hitler that no expert supports, such as the notion that he was Marxist or even left-wing) then it’s probably a bad claim.

In addition, what does it mean to have lay knowledge of Hitler? This isn’t an issue for which there is direct experience v. expert (i.e., mediated) knowledge because I doubt there is anyone alive who had direct experience of Hitler. It’s all mediated. It’s all about what people have told us. All we have is what we have been told by teachers, articles we read, papers we wrote in high school. The reason this point matters is that it means that privileging lay knowledge on the grounds that it is more direct (less mediated) is nonsense.

If we acknowledge it’s mediated then we can talk about what mediates it. In other words, cite your sources, and then we can argue about your sources.

If we think about it this way—how good are your sources of information—then we can have a better argument about argument.

We aren’t in a world in which experts are right and non-experts are always wrong or vice versa. We’ve never been in that world because the whole project of responsible scholarship is not about being right, but about making the argument that looks the most right given the evidence we’ve got at this moment.

And here we’re back to people arguing that something that Mead may or may not have said is wrong because, although they aren’t cultural anthropologists, they have beliefs.

They can have those beliefs. And just because Mead has degrees they don’t doesn’t mean they’re wrong. They can engage in argumentation with Mead all they want (and there are a lot of reasons to engage in argumentation with Mead), but flicking Mead away because of something they assert to be true because it’s what they have been told without trying to understand why Mead (might have) said what she did or whether their sources were reliable is exactly what is wrong with our public discourse.

Showing that Mead is wrong in her definition of civilization requires understanding what she (might have) meant in that definition. She almost certainly meant that the civilized/non-civilized binary is nonsense, so saying her position was wrong because the civilized/non-civilized division should have been placed elsewhere doesn’t show she was wrong. It shows she was right.

“Libruls look down on you” and resentment as political rhetoric

pro-dem and pro-gop yard signs


Since I’m a policy geek, it’s long interested me that a tremendous number of people don’t care about policy at all. An awful lot of people’s political affiliations seem to me to be motivated by two things: 1) a sense that being affiliated with this party means you are this sort of person (an ethos they like); and 2) the argument that you should be angry because They are keeping you from getting the things to which you’re entitled, so you should vote against them.

Some day, I’ll write about that first motivation. It’s really weird, and it’s really just my crank theory, based on my trying to talk to people, but I think this mobilizing ideology has been used at least as far back as the eighties. It seems to me to work better for the GOP than other parties, but I have no data to support that. It’s more than just identification, and it isn’t always charismatic leadership. Here’s my crank theory. The GOP doesn’t have a coherent policy agenda, but it has a coherent ethos. It presents itself as the party of people (mostly men) who have no doubts about their position, can see clearly what the right course of action is, will refuse to compromise, and know (and will act on the knowledge) that, in every situation, it is a binary of right or wrong.

And, paradoxically, right or wrong isn’t whether what you’re doing in this moment is right or wrong, but whether you’re endorsing the group that believes right or wrong is binary. If what you’re doing is helping the group that says right or wrong is binary, then your actions are right even if they’re exactly what you condemn the out-group for doing. This is Machiavellianism, in which the ends justify the means, and the ends are just in-group successes. I’ve written about the Machiavellianism part (which is far from particular to pro-GOP rhetors), but not about the extent to which people who support the GOP do so because they see it as the party of the strong and decisive man. But, that isn’t this post.

This post is about the second puzzle for me—that pro-GOP rhetoric (Fox and Limbaugh. are good examples of this) is a rhetoric of grievance, of being wounded, including being victimized by people saying that they are racist (while projecting that living in perpetual grievance onto others, so they can still seem to be strong men, what Paul Johnson calls “masculine victimhood”).

People advocating racist policies resent being called racist. It isn’t just that they dislike it, or that they disagree, but they resent it.

They are filled with and fueled by resentment. They sincerely believe that there is an “elite” of professors and out-of-touch artists who are keeping them down. They resent the power that this “liberal elite” uses against them. Were it not for this “liberal elite” they would… and here things get vague. Deliberately so. Limbaugh et al. never say what, exactly, would happen were this “liberal elite” to lose power because that would involve creating a coherent narrative of the “ill” created by the “liberal elite.” Limbaugh et al. can’t do that, because there isn’t one. And that’s how resentment works; it isn’t an affirming passion that enables progress; it’s entirely negative, about taking power and good things away from an out-group.

I spent a lot of time deep in the arguments that people made for slavery, and it was bizarre to me the extent to which people whose financial situation was grounded in the buying and selling of other humans felt victimized. They were victimized by having to abuse other humans in order to maintain their financial and political situation and by having to hear people point out that they were engaged in abuse. They resented the criticism. Pro-slavery rhetoric was a rhetoric grounded in slavers’ resentment that they were being criticized for being slavers.

But when I looked at scholarship and theorizing of resentment, I kept ending back on Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment, and it was deeply unsatisfying because his narrative seems to me unhelpfully elitist. And yet it’s common—the notion that resentment is the feeling that inferior people feel about people they secretly believe are better. I don’t think that’s a useful way to think about resentment for several reasons. One of them is that this way of identifying resentment means we’re deep in the world of motives and secret feelings (as well as seeming to accept that some people are better than others), and I think those criteria get us into areas that make self-diagnosis impossible. I’m not saying it’s wrong—I do think the way that resentful rhetoric works is a kind of mean girl strategy. I tell you the mean thing that Heather said about you (which she may or may not have said or even thought) in order to get you to ally with me against her. I tell you that Heather looks down on you, which triggers your defensively looking down on her for looking down on you. That’s the basic plot of a large amount of Limbaugh et al.’s broadcasts. That’s the whole strategy of “libruls look down on you”—it’s oriented toward triggering a kind of polarizing resentment that strengthens in-group commitment.

But an awful lot of political activism begins by pointing out that some group looks down on us, and they think we’re going to continue to put up with their shabby treatment, but we aren’t. So, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if there is a difference in the rhetoric between the “libruls look down on you” and “this group in power is just throwing us crumbs to keep us shut up.” And I think it’s ultimately the point mentioned above—what are we supposed to do with our resentment?

The Limbaugh et al. resentment is purely reactionary and negative—taking power away from “libruls” is winning. As long as they are hurt, we win—the gain is their loss, and that’s the only gain there needs to be. Thus, you can have what is often called “Vladimir’s Choice.” “Vladimir’s Choice” is a term from a Russian tale. God comes to Vladimir and says, “I will give you anything you want, but whatever I give to you, I will give twice that to Ivan.” Vladimir thinks about it for a while, and then says, “Take one of my eyes.” Vladimir so resents Ivan that he is happy to be hurt, as long as Ivan is hurt more.[1]

If we feel that They are denying us something to which we’re entitled, we’ll settle for it being taken away from them. If we think we’re denied the vote, or good healthcare, or a decent wage, then we’ll feel that it’s a win if we deny Them the vote, good healthcare, a decent wage. That’s resentment.

But the other kind of entitlement is (or at least can be) affirming—it’s about gaining certain rights and powers. If we’re being denied the vote, then we don’t want them denied the vote; we want the rights and powers they have. They can keep their healthcare and decent wages, as long as we get those things too.

And here we come back to the point I keep making—how vague the pro-GOP rhetoric is about policies. There are a lot of statements of rigid commitment to slogans (“safe borders,” “pro-life,” “tough on crime”) but there aren’t clear statements of what policies will get us there, let alone policy argumentation to show that those policies will feasibly solve the clear problems. Affirmative entitlement arguments can (and do) make those policy arguments—“defund the police” (a slogan) was backed by detailed policy discussions and arguments. “Build the wall” wasn’t. I’m not saying that I agree with “defund the police”—in fact, there were a lot of very different policies that people meant by that same slogan. My point is that I think there is a useful distinction between affirmative entitlement arguments and resentment, and that resentment is purely reactionary and negative.

I want to end this post by pointing to two different yard signs. The one on the left lists six beliefs, with only one framed as a negative (“no human is illegal”). On the whole, it affirms positive statements. The one on the right has eight claims. It’s mildly incoherent: who doesn’t believe in legal immigration? And if violence is not the answer, isn’t that saying that the police shouldn’t be violent? Isn’t “police” a category of people? More important, notice how negative it is—five of the eight claims are explicitly negative, about what should not happen and how people should not think. It’s about how wrong They are.

pro-dem and pro-gop yard signs






[1] Some studies show that Vladimir’s Choice increases with the perception of intergroup competition and what’s called “social dominance orientation” (essentially, the notion that groups should remain in a stable hierarchy, with “better” groups dominating the “lower” groups), an orientation that correlates to self-identifying as conservative.


“Liberals look down on you” is evil genius rhetoric: on demonizing rational argumentation

In an earlier post, I said that the GOP is, like any other useful political movement, a coalition. Thus, like any other coalition, it has groups with profoundly different policy agenda. The normal way to solve that problem is through bargaining, compromise, and deliberation. But the GOP can’t openly engage in those practices because two of the major members of its coalition believe that compromise is not acceptable (the fundagelicals and neo-Social Darwinists). The GOP has to persuade people whose political agenda is toxic populism, libertarianism only when it helps the wealthy, Dominionism, racism, ethical theatre about abortion, social and cultural reactionary knee-jerking, fundagelical and often end-times politics, and the carceral industry.

So, the GOP has to look tough, rigid, and supportive of regular folks while actually passing policies that do the opposite of what they’re advertised as doing (or the opposite of what they were previously advocating as the only ethical policy), and, above all else, keeping their supporters from looking at non-partisan data about the policies, candidates, or talking points. This coalition is very fragile, and falls apart if the people in it understand the positions of others in it. The last thing the current GOP can stand is policy argumentation.

Not all conservatives, and I sincerely mean that—this isn’t a list of all the sorts of people who vote Republican, but of the ones who create the rhetorical problem solved by “liberals look down on you.” I think our political discourse benefits by having people who are skeptical of social change and ambivalent about globalization, want small government, advocate being really cautious about military intervention (the traditional conservative position, abandoned by the GOP since Vietnam). I’m not saying they’re right, but I think the ideal public sphere has a lot of positions I think are wrong, as long as we’re all abiding by the rules of argumentation. The GOP can’t allow policy argumentation. And the “liberals look down on you” enables them to avoid it completely.

Here’s what I said in the previous post. Loosely, “liberals look down on you” enables GOP loyalists to feel good about having a rationally indefensible position, encourages them to dismiss dissent or uncomfortable information through motivism, makes politics an issue of dominance/submission, encourages GOP loyalists to feel victimized if they’re proven wrong (so the issue shifts from whether they were wrong to whether they were victimized), sets supporters up to make “Vladimir’s Choice” on a regular basis, makes having an irrational commitment seem a better choice than having a rational policy, and allows blazingly partisan standards to seem justified. It is and enables shameless levels of demagoguery.

As I keep saying, the whole “left v. right” false binary enables demagoguery. It enables this demagogic (it isn’t a question of policy but us v. them) move on the part of pro-GOP media because it’s always possible to find a non-GOP (and therefore, by the bizarre logic of the left-right false dilemma “liberal”) person who, for instance, treats disagreement as victimization. So, pro-GOP pundits can say, “Who are they to look down on us when they do it too?”

Were we to have an understanding of politics (and research on political affiliation) that wasn’t begging the question (research grounded in the assumption that “liberals” and “conservatives” reason differently) we could have better discussions about politics. Of course, were I to have a unicorn in my backyard that pooped gold, I could support various causes a lot more than I do. If wishes were horses and all that.

The “liberals look down on you” topos appeals to the epistemological populism (often falsely called “anti-intellectualism”) of the US. And here we get to two problems that puzzled me for years. It’s conventional to say that demagoguery is anti-intellectual, and that it’s grounded in resentment (what Nietzsche called ressentiment) and both of those claims seemed to me true, false, and damaging. Let’s start with the first—anti-intellectualism.

It’s true that demagoguery tends to have a rejection of “eggheads,” but it almost always cites expert sources. It isn’t opposed to expertise, but to a bad kind of expertise:

“Good” expertise confirms what common people know, what you can see by just looking. It shows why what sensible people already believe is right (even if it does so through very complicated explanations—here’s where conspiracy thinking comes in). “Bad” expertise says that what “common people” (and here “common people” is conflated with “in-group”) believe is wrong, that things aren’t exactly as they appear “if you just look.”

So, here we’re back at the point I make a lot. Demagoguery can thrive if we live in a world of argument (in which you have a good point if you can find evidence to support your claim), but it dies in a world of argumentation.

We don’t have a political crisis, but an epistemological one. Pro-GOP media can cite a lot of experts to support their positions, and dismiss as eggheads all the experts who don’t because pro-GOP media appeals to naïve realism and in-group favoritism (the truth is obvious to good people and good people are the ones who recognize this truth). That way of thinking about policy issues (there is a right answer, and it’s obvious to every sensible person, and anyone who presents data it isn’t right is not someone to whom we need to listen because their disagreement is proof that they’re bad) is far from restricted to the GOP, let alone to major political issues. (Do not get me started on my neighborhood mailing list fights about graffiti, putting dog poop bags in someone’s trash can on garbage collection day, bike lanes, or the noise wall).

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with racists, and they always argue from personal experience.[1] Affirmative action is bad because they didn’t get this job, anti-racist actions in the work place are bad because they got reprimanded for being a racist, there is no racism in policing because (as a white person) they’ve never had trouble with the police. They believe that those datapoints are proof of their position, but a POC getting denied a job, a person failing to get anything useful done about racism in their workplace, a POC having trouble with the police—the same kind of evidence—none of that matters. That’s argument, but not argumentation.

Argumentation would be assessing personal experience as just another kind of data, subject to the same tests as other kinds of data—is it relevant, representative (or an outlier), reliable, and so on. As I said, the GOP can (and does) give its base arguments, but those arguments collapse like a cheap tent in a hurricane if they run into actual argumentation. So, why not give its base talking points that can withstand argumentation? It can’t, for several reasons.

It can’t have rational argumentation about abortion, for instance, because its policies aren’t supported by data. There are other issues on which the data is just plain bad (climate change) and can’t stand up to the weakest questioning. There are also issues for which the accurate and relevant data would make one member of the coalition of the happy, and another very unhappy. One group might be thrilled to find that Trump’s foreign policy has increased the chances of nuclear war in the Middle East, while that would sow doubt in the minds of other members of the coalition.

The GOP can’t actually give its base rational talking points that will serve its base well if they get into it with someone skilled in argumentation. All it’s got is ad hominem, whaddaboutism, and a kind of driveby shooting of data because that’s all it can have. So, what the GOP has to do is make a virtue of its greatest vice—make the ability to defend or attack policy claims through argumentation (what its critics can do and they can’t) a bad thing. Instead of acknowledging that being able to defend your positions through rational argumentation might be a good thing, they characterize it as what libs do. “Liberals look down on you” (for being unable to defend your position through argumentation) makes the inability to engage in rational argumentation a sign of in-group loyalty and a performance of in-group identity.

Just to be clear, I think that lots of “conservative” positions can be supported through rational argumentation. (That an argument can be supported through rational argumentation doesn’t mean it’s true—it just meets a certain standard.) The GOP can’t support its policy agenda through rational argumentation because it has wed itself to an identity of people who refuse to compromise, bargain, or deliberate and it’s a coalition. A coalition has to unify disparate groups with disparate needs and goals. It can do so through openly admitting that there are compromises that need to get made for strategic purposes that will, on the whole, benefit the coalition. There’s another strategy.

In 1939, Kenneth Burke, when talking about Hitler’s strategy in unifying the very disparate group that was the recently-created identity of “German,” said that unification through a common enemy is the easiest strategy with a disparate group. In the case of the GOP, the common enemy is rational argumentation.







[1] They also argue from data that doesn’t actually prove their point. For instance, in order to prove that policing isn’t racist they show data that African Americans are arrested more than white people. Logic isn’t their long suit. That’s why they need to make being bad at logic a good thing.