authoritarianism Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

What do we do now?

2009 Irish tug of war team — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tug_of_war#/media/File:Irish_600kg_euro_chap_2009_(cropped).JPG

I’ve spent thirty years worried that our media environment would either create a civil war or a fascist overthrow of democracy. In the midst of the pro-Iraq invasion demagoguery I was researching pro-slavery demagoguery, and I realized in both cases, the problem wasn’t demagogues. The problem was a culture of demagoguery.

In both cases, complicated policy options were reduced to a single-axis binary or continuum of identity (a person is pro- or anti-slavery, or pro- or anti-invasion). So, the frame for politics was identitarian.

In both cases, that was a completely false way of representing the policy options. In both cases, it was a way of framing the conflict that benefitted the authoritarians. The very complicated set of policy options that the United States had in regard to slavery were reduced to a binary of identity: pro- or anti-slavery. That helped slavers (there is no distinction between slaveholders and slavers—the institution of slavery was profitable because “slaveholders” bought and sold slaves; they were all slavers). It helped slavers because the “anti-slavery” position could be fallaciously equated with advocating slave rebellion.

It’s the genus-species fallacy. Since some people who are anti-slavery advocate slave resistance (e.g., David Walker), and slave resistance is the same as slave rebellion (as a famous court decision concluded), then anyone who criticizes slavery is advocating slave rebellion. (That’s the summary of actual arguments made by people who were taken seriously.)

It was the same fallacy that showed up in regard to Iraq—terrorists oppose the war (actually, they didn’t), therefore people who oppose the war are terrorists. The genus-species fallacy is repeated thrice over in the claim that “anyone who says racism is systemic is advocating CRT because that’s what CRT says and CRT is Marxist, so they’re Marxist.”

The genus-species fallacy is built in to any identitarian model of politics. Identitarian models of politics say that the world of policy disagreements isn’t actually about individual (or small group) concerns, needs, problems, goals and therefore different policy commitments (e.g., an anti-choice soybean farmer) . It says that our policy world is really a zero-sum tug-of war of people along a single axis, or even a binary (that soybean farmer is far right).

Just to be clear: we all are members of many social groups, some of which are important to our sense of identity. Chester might be a Lutheran, 49ers fan, parrot owner, parcheesi fanatic. Those are Chester’s “in-groups” if they are how he defines himself. We also all have a lot of groups we are in that aren’t important to our sense of identity—the way you can tell whether your group identification is in-group is if you get defensive if someone criticizes that group. So, if someone said parcheesi sucks, and they prefer chess, Chester would only care if his sense of himself as a parcheesi player was important to him.

In-groups always have out-groups. In fact, in-groups are generally defined by their not being out-group. Unhappily, self-worth tends to be comparative. We can think of ourselves as good, or justified, or successful, or whatever, if we can compare ourselves to others around us and say we’re better. (“Maybe parcheesi players do yell at kittens, but that’s nowhere as bad as what chess players do, so I’m not going to feel bad about it.”) So, out-groups help us feel good about ourselves because they’re so much worse than we are.

Because people have a lot of in-groups, there are a lot of ways that we can be called on to identify ourselves, and a lot of policy commitments we might have. Media that promote the identitarian model evade discussions of the various policy options, instead narrating the zero-sum conflict along that continuum of identity (this is also called the “horse race” frame).

In all my research of train wrecks in public deliberation—from the Sicilian Expedition to Bush’s failure to plan for an occupation—a major factor is identitarian politics. Identitarian politics makes disagreement about policies seem pointless, trivial, or even distracting. It thereby fosters authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is a model of society, culture, and government that assumes that politics is a question of identity, with one identity entitled to dominate the others.

All authoritarian politics are identitarian. All ethnic cleansings are identitarian. All train wrecks in public deliberation are identitarian.

We are in what might be end times for democracy. The way we should respond to this crisis is NOT to engage in purity wars, although that’s the impulse. We don’t stop authoritarianism by being more authoritarian about our allies (i.e., condemning people who haven’t take a strong enough stance), or purifying the in-group and insisted that everyone “get on the same page;” we stop it by forming alliances. There has never been a time when opponents of authoritarianism successfully prevented an authoritarian takeover by fighting among ourselves.

We shouldn’t spend our time (and social media) mobilizing resentment about potential allies. If your impulse is to respond to what I’m saying is that I’m telling you that you can’t criticize Dems, then you’re completely misunderstanding. Absolutely criticize the Dems. But do so in a way that is likely to have impact without mobilizing resentment. Email the DNC. Email the Dem politicians who are taking stands you think are wrong.

The DNC and Dem politicians care about what email they get. They don’t know, and therefore don’t care, about what you or I post on FB. But posting about how the Dems suck (especially when it’s reposting something that is just wrong about how Congressional practices work) helps authoritarians.

Keep in mind that it’s documented that Russian trolls spent much of their effort, not promoting Trump, but mobilizing resentment about “liberals” and the Dems. So, just to be clear: criticize the Dems, but do so in ways that are likely to get the Dems to change, and not in ways that help authoritarians.

My final point is: don’t try to create alliances of identity, but of policy.

I often attend the Texas TribFest, and it’s where policy wonks wonk together. They make an effort to bring in people with different points of view. And one of the most moving panels I saw was two Texas state legislators who both self-identify as Christian, and one is a Dem and the other GOP. And they talked about their going together to Death Row, and praying with the people there, their working together on abolishing the Death Penalty, and their failure to get any pro-Death Penalty legislators to come with them. They said they disagree vehemently with one another about all sorts of issues, but they agree on this. Alliances can be policy specific, and yet effective and important.

[A friend sent along this vid, which makes a similar argument.]

Why people who oppose Trump should stop saying “the Dems caved”

I had a busy day, and will be minimally (maybe not at all) on social media for the next few days. My taking the stance that people who oppose Trump should stop saying “the Dems caved” got enough disagreement from various people that I thought I should explain it more. I haven’t had time to write it out thoroughly, and I’m not going to be able to explain it very well, but I thought I should try. So, here’s the short version (without links–sorry).

“The Dems caved” is a statement involving two rhetorical figures, an assumed counterfactual, and two frames for thinking about politics that I think favor authoritarianism.

“Caved” is hyperbole. People who “cave” in a bargaining situation completely give in, and give the interlocutor everything that person wants. As many, many others have pointed out, Trump didn’t get everything he wanted, and he got a bunch he didn’t want (such as a vote on the ACA).

I’m all for hyperbole (note that I just used the rhetorical figure of hyperbole), but, like all rhetorical figures, it’s worth thinking about what the figure does in this situation—who does it help? I’m saying it helps Trump.

“The Dems” is a synecdoche. The claim that “the Dems caved” takes the behavior of eight Senators as “the Dems.” (A part stands for the whole.) As with many figures, if you look at them logically, it’s fallacious. Eight democrats is not “the Democratic Party.” Lots of Dem Senators didn’t cave; I vote Dem, and I didn’t cave. So, it’s a rhetorical figure, and using it is a rhetorical choice. And, as with most rhetorical choices, the important question is: what does it do? Who does it help to say that “the Dems” did something bad? Trump.

(Does that mean that we can never criticize the DNC, any Democratic political figures, or how Democrats vote? Posing that question is another use of hyperbole, and another one that helps Trump. We can and should criticize the DNC [of whom I am not a fan], various Dem political figures [such as the eight], Dem voters…we should talk about groups and people who actually exist rather than hobgoblins defined by othering. “Dems” are not a monolithic and univocal group.)

The assumed counterfactual is that “the Dems” could have gotten a better deal by continuing to enable Trump’s denial of SNAP and the shutdown in general. I have to admit that, while I’ve read a lot of things saying that the Dems caved, I’ve not read any that gave a plausible narrative for how continuing to hold out would have so guaranteed a better deal that it was worth letting Trump shoot the hostages. If there are good arguments that I’m wrong, and that holding out would have gotten a better deal, I’d love to see them.

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading and thinking about the role of counterfactuals in train wrecks in public deliberation. One of the persistent counterfactuals is: if the in-group had simply responded with more will, more aggression, more unity, and a refusal to compromise, it would have won (it was very popular among Germans after WWI, it’s regularly invoked in regard to inter-war negotiations with Hitler, and therefore used to argue for military intervention in almost every US military conflict since, it’s still used about what Truman should have done about Mao, and, well, too many to list them all). That’s an enthymeme with a very weak major premise. Plenty of groups, individuals, nations, parties have refused to compromise and lost.

What, exactly, is the evidence that refusing to compromise would have led to a better outcome? Right now I’m deep in the way that the very problematic counterfactual that responding to his remilitarizing the Rhineland with military force would have prevented WWII. That claim is regularly asserted, but not argued, because the narratives that tell how that would have prevented the war assume that a military response would not have increased the pacifist sentiment in France, the UK, and the US, so that the military buildup would have happened even later than it did, or not at all. There are other problematic assumptions in that narrative, and yet, the counterfactual of more aggression just seems to stop deliberation. So I’m twitchy about anyone invoking a counterfactual narrative without actually having to argue for why it’s the most plausible narrative.

So, I think the counterfactual that holding out would have been a better choice assumes a narrative I haven’t seen anyone reasonably explain (although, like the Munich counterfactual, I’ve seen people either assert or assume it).

Here’s the point about counterfactuals—we resort to them as a way of dragging events back into the controllable. Counterfactuals (if only I hadn’t left early from work) are especially attractive when there is a situation that threatens our sense that we can prevent bad things (the just world model). The example regularly used in studies about counterfactual thinking is that Joe leaves work, and gets killed in an accident caused by a drunk driver. The tendency is for people to imagine preventing the accident by counterfactuals involving Joe making a different decision, as though he’s the only one with agency. Why not the drunk driver? Because we don’t identify with the drunk driver (he is out-group), but we do identify with Joe.

We want to find narratives that enable us to believe that we could have stopped the accident from happening to us. We grasp at counterfactual about what the in-group could have done to prevent this–we try to imagine that we wouldn’t have made the choices Joe did. That makes us agents, rather than victims.

But Joe isn’t to blame for the situation. The drunk driver was. Stop beating up on Joe, and blame the drunk driver.

The synecdoche is, I think, not recognized as a rhetorical figure by many of the people who invoke it. We need to stop thinking about politics as a tug-of-war between the Dems (or “liberals”) and GOP (or “conservatives”). I’ve written books about how this frame for politics is both inaccurate and proto-authoritarian. I’ve never had anyone engage the argument that it’s inaccurate—instead, people say, “but that’s what everyone says.” Yeah, well, everyone said educating women would make their uteruses dry up, and everyone said that racial categories are ontological.

The frame for politics as a zero-sum conflict between two sides (rather than a world of deliberation and disagreement among many different people with many different perspectives) endorses the toxic and proto-authoritarian frame for politics as a zero-sum conflict between two sides.

Authoritarianism is an ideology that assumes that the ideal system is a hierarchy of domination and submission. There are a lot of reasons that various people support Trump. One of the most important—one that ensures he is free of accountability—is that he endorses an authoritarian model of government. Way too many people, not on some binary or continuum of “left v. right,” think that an “authoritarian” is someone who makes them do something they don’t want to do. So, for people like that, there are only out-group authoritarians. That’s not a useful way to think about authoritarianism. (The assumption is that when people force others to behave as you think they should, it’s fine, but when people with whom you disagree try to force you to behave as you think they should, it’s authoritariansm. That isn’t a helpful way to think about authoritaerianism.)

Authoritarianism is better understood as a system of in-group domination–it’s a system in which the in-group and out-group are not held to the same standards of accountability, ethics, law, intelligence. It’s one in which the in-group is held to lower standards (or no standards at all) because it is entitled to dominate out-groups. The law exists to protect and reward the in-group and control/punish out-groups.

Many of Trump supporters love him because they see him as dominating the people by whom they’ve felt dominated for years. Some of them are people who are mad that they can’t say racist, sexist, homophobic things or enact racist, sexist, homophobic policies. But, I think (being a person who intermittently drifts into those media worlds), many of them are worked up about some hobgoblin created by various media intends to dominate them—a hobgoblin “librul” who wants to force everyone into gay marriage, abort white babies, send Christians into camps (much like Alligator Alcatraz), and, well, so on. They, people who are Obviously Right, sincerely feel threatened by “libruls” (who are Obviously Wrong), and therefore support someone who is doing everything to dominate “libruls.”

For people who think about politics not as a world of complicated and difficult deliberation but a zero-sum battle between the Obviously Right and the Obviously Wrong (and, believe me, thinking about policy disagreements that way is not restricted to one place on the fantastical continuum or binary of political affiliation), then every policy disagreement is really about domination. That is a profoundly anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian ways of thinking about politics.

“The Dems caved” endorses that way of framing politics, and ensures that Trump supporters continue to believe that Trump is doing a great job.

I’m saying the “The Dems caved” is not accurate, and that it’s a statement that involves a set of rhetorical choices that doesn’t help deliberation, but does help Trump specifically, and damaging frames more generally.

Anytime you find yourself making a series of rhetorical choices such that you’re making the same ones Fox News is, you’re helping Trump. There are other choices. It’s possible to disagree with what the eight Senators did and condemn them specifically. It’s possible to emphasize that Trump didn’t get what he wanted, and say he’s caving if he signs off on this deal. It’s possible to condemn Trump and his supporters for making hostages of people on SNAP. There are so many ways to frame what happens. We have choices.

I think we shouldn’t make the rhetorical choices that help Trump. Blame the drunk driver.

A more useful way to think about authoritarianism

train wreck — image from https://middleburgeccentric.com/2016/10/editorial-the-train-wreck-red/

When I found myself as the Director of the First Year Composition program, I also found myself in the same odd conversation more than once. A student would come to me outraged that they were being held to the same standards as the other students. At first I thought I was misunderstanding, but they meant it. They sincerely believed that, for reasons, it was “unfair” (that was the term they used) for them held to the same standards as other students. They weren’t claiming any kind of disability, but just … well…privilege.

I came across a similar argument when reading arguments for slavery, on the part of people who claimed to be Christian. They openly rejected “Do unto others as you have done unto you”—a way of behaving that would have made slavery impossible–in favor of some really vexed readings of Scripture. They rejected a law Jesus very clearly said in favor of problematic translations and comparisons. (In other words, they were antinomian when it came to Jesus’ laws.) For them, hierarchy was important, and the ideal hierarchy was rigid, with one’s place on the hierarchy determined by various criteria that were often regional (race, gender, wealth, source of wealth, religion, family standing, occupation, place of origin, political affiliation, and so on).

That’s how authoritarianism works. It’s a way of thinking about politics, organizations, families, and/or communities that says the ideal system is a rigid hierarchy of power (people have the “right” to dominate the people or groups below them) and privilege (people on a hierarchy should submit to those above them,). That hierarchy of domination and submission means that people should not do unto others, and should not be held to the same standards. The paradox is that people who claim to be higher on the hierarchy because they are better people hold themselves and others like them to lower standards than people below them.

There are a few other interesting points about that hierarchy. People believed that the categories that justified the hierarchy were Real, created by some kind of higher power (Nature, Biology, God), and therefore Eternal.

That belief that the categories were Eternal meant that they took what were actually very recent practices and projected them back through history. For instance, pro-slavery rhetors could thereby ignore that the kind of slavery practiced in the US in the 19th century was relatively recent in almost every way, and not how slavery operated in Jesus’ time or before (the closest would be the Helots).

Another confusing paradox is that people who believe in a stable and Real hierarchy are saying, quite clearly, that they are born with certain privileges by virtue of family and so on—they will insist that they are entitled to getting better treatment and being held to lower standards—but they get very, very mad if you point out that they have privilege, so they are asserting and denying they have privilege.

At the end of this, I’ll explain my crank theory as to what’s going on with that asserting and denying of privilege, but I want to make a few other points about that hierarchy of submission and domination first. It’s very common, across various cultures, religions, organizations, businesses, but it isn’t universal. Many years ago, Arthur Lovejoy pointed out that what he called “The Great Chain of Being” has a long tradition in Western theology and philosophy. Although the term is medieval, the concept of all creation consisting of a hierarchy goes at least as far back as Plato’s Timaeus. Eighteenth century natural philosophy began the long and tragic tendency to insist on a “natural” hierarchy of ethnicities. Although Darwin was explicit that evolution was not necessarily progressive, and rejected the hierarchy of species, it was so ingrained after Linnaeus that he was largely ignored. “Darwinism” was weaponized to support a stable hierarchy of beings that was not at all what he meant.

The narrative that the hierarchy was ontologically grounded (that is Real) meant that any disruption in the hierarchy was “unnatural”—that is, a violation of nature. That claim has/had two odd consequences. It meant asserting that hierarchical systems are more stable, and less prone to conflict, which led to another backward projection: that there used to be a time of stable hierarchy, and it didn’t have social disruption.

The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages is sometimes cited as an example of such a stable hierarchy that was associated with a lack of rebellion—people will sometimes claim was stable and peaceable (Chesterton, for instance). In actuality, it was neither. While peasant revolts were fairly unusual until the 14th century, there was constant conflict in Europe, with various political and religious leaders disagreeing (quite violently) about just what the hierarchy was, all the time asserting that there was a Real and natural hierarchy, and claiming that they were enacting that Real one. And, keep in mind, these were Catholics killing other Catholics, or Christians killing other Christians. Sometimes they were major wars over religious issues (e.g., the 13th century Albigensian Crusade), sometimes executions and persecutions of heretical sects (e.g., various forms of Gnosticism), and sometimes they were political in nature. Christian troops sacked both Constantinople and Rome, after all.

Neither the political nor religious hierarchies were actually all that stable or peaceful. There were constantly heretical sects, internal conflicts—if the Catholic hierarchy created peace and order, why did the Pope have an army that was used against other Catholics?

The fantasy that there is no conflict in a rigid hierarchical structure is just that—a fantasy.

So, why do people simultaneously claim and deny that they have privilege? I think for similar reasons that people claim that there were long periods in history with no conflict. They need to believe (and claim) that hierarchy provides stability in order to feel better about their status and authoritarian politics. It’s about feelings.

The notion of a hierarchy of privilege makes people really comfortable (“I’m owed this”) and uncomfortable (because it isn’t something they did other than be born). They want to believe that they have privilege because they have earned it. But, oddly enough, they earned it by being born to their family. When they’re arguing for things to which they feel entitled because of privilege, then privilege is a useful concept, and they invoke it. But, when others point out that they might have privilege because of to whom they were born, they feel that they’re being accused of never having to work at all, and so they get mad.

But notice that I’m not saying that authoritarianism is far left, far right, or both. In fact, it’s the whole problem of authoritarianism that should make people stop trying to make politics a binary or continuum. At the very least, there are two axes—one about degree of governmental support for a social safety net (if we’re talking about domestic policy), and another one for commitment to authoritarianism. To what extent do we think people who disagree with us should be treated as we want to be treated. And it’s that second axis that is predictor of democracy ending.

[RSA talk III] Under which conditions is democratic speech (im)possible?

We were asked to do an epideictic speech, and one kind of epideictic is psogos: the blaming or condemnatory speech. And I want to condemn the biased/objective binary on the grounds it is necessarily and inherently authoritarian, and thereby makes democratic speech impossible.

The term “authoritarian” is vexed, so I’m going to use an old-school definition: an authoritarian system aspires to univocality, uniformity, asymmetric communication, and reified social policies, values, and relations. It assumes that the nation as a whole should be a rigid and ontologically grounded hierarchy of power and privilege, in which the people at the top decide for those below them; and all institutions within that nation are similarly constructed—the police, families, governments.

Authoritarianism presumes that the hierarchy is legitimate if and only if the people in positions of power are ones who either have direct and unmediated access to the truth (i.e., they are not “biased”), or who are following the dicta of those who do. Because of that direct access, good leaders can invent or enact the correct policy agenda in all realms. So, hidden is the presumption that there is no such thing as significant legitimate disagreement, and that, in every disagreement, there is a single “right” answer that good people can perceive.

A hierarchy’s use of violence, coercion, propaganda, exclusion, and extermination is seen as legitimate as long those actions are in service of preserving the purity of the community, rewarding and empowering good people (i.e., in-group), coercion or extermination of bad people (i.e., out-group); and all in service of forcing people to do and believe the narrow range of actions and beliefs that are “right.”

And it’s that phrase—narrow range of actions and beliefs that are right–that makes it clear how this hierarchy is not just one of power; it is epistemological, and the solution to every problem is to give unlimited power to who know what is “right”—that is, those who are not biased.

“Biased” sources and people are presumed to be ones that view the world from a narrow perspective; so, necessarily associated with the biased/objective false binary is the equally false binary of particular/universal.

As many others have pointed out, we don’t undermine authoritarianism by saying that we’re all biased, since that doesn’t end the hierarchy; it just makes it one of open and unconstrained violence. We end up with some version of Social Darwinism. The mistake is the term “biased.” It’s more useful to think in terms of “biases” (that is, cognitive biases) and perspectives, and to try to correct for the former and celebrate the latter.