Tag: demagoguery

Recurrent terms in my posts

Books about demagoguery



Authoritarianism. There’s a lot of scholarly debate about how to define authoritarianism, and it has to do with some scholars wanting to have a definition that includes ideology, epistemology, government, psychology, even parenting sometimes. And so there are different definitions because people are trying to do different things with those definition—nothing wrong with that. For purposes of thinking about rhetoric and train wrecks, I have found the most productive way to think about authoritarianism is as in-group favoritism on steroids, coupled with a sense that stability is the ideal and that only rigid hierarchies of dominance/submission provide stability.

Briefly, I use the term “authoritarians” for people who believe that societies should be controlled by people at the top of a pyramidal hierarchy (with, obviously, the person or the group at the top the purest in-group), with power and accountability flowing down. That is, people are only accountable to people above them in the hierarchy, and not to anyone below. An authoritarian system doesn’t imagine “justice” as something that should be applied to everyone the same way, nor that “fairness” is treating everyone equally. “Justice” is a system in which everyone “gets what they deserve,” meaning in-group members get more, and out-groups get less (if anything).

Therefore, people at different places in the hierarchy are treated differently. It’s kiss-up and kick-down. Subordinates are responsible for managing the feelings of superiors. Thus, “self-control” is equated with dominating those below; so, paradoxically, people at the top of the hierarchy are allowed to throw temper tantrums (that is, lose control) as long as the tantrums are directed downwards. Authoritarian systems put a lot of emphasis on control through fear.

Authoritarianism constrains public deliberation in several ways. Only in-group members are allowed to participate in deliberation, and even then only those toward the top. They might deliberate with each other in order to make decisions that are announced to those below them, who can only deliberate with others of a similar level about how to enact the dicta; they then tell those below what to do. In addition, authoritarianism tends to presume that there is an obviously correct answer to every problem; dissent and diversity of perspective/opinion are seen as destabilizing, as creating fractures in the stable hierarchy. Authoritarians therefore almost always emphasize the objective of education as instilling obedience, and that means they believe that education should never involve any criticism of the in-group (including facts about past in-group failures or unethical behavior). Authoritarians tend to think in binaries, and an important binary is shame v. honor. Criticism is always shame, and shame undermines obedience, so the “higher Truth” is always a version of events favorable to the in-group.

Authoritarianism isn’t particular to politics (cults are authoritarian), or necessarily connected to one specific policy agenda.

And here we have a moment of Trish Crank Theory time. I’ve read all sorts of authoritarians–from Alkibiades to the Weathermen (that’s alphabetical, rather than historical)–and what’s consistent is that they reason deductively from major premises about groups. That’s interesting.

Demagoguery. In Demagoguery and Democracy and Rhetoric and Demagoguery I define demagoguery as “discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric by framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and the means by which (not whether) the out-group should be scapegoated for the current problems of the in-group. Public disagreement largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the in-group, what signifies out-group membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the in-group); need (the terrible things the out-group is doing to us, and/or their very presence); and what level of punishment to enact against the out-group (ranging from the restriction of the out-group’s rights to the extermination of the out-group).”

Escape from freedom. Erich Fromm argued that freedom requires choice and responsibility, and inherently means making mistakes. For many people, that level of freedom (the freedom to) is terrifying, and so they escape from the responsibilities of freedom by becoming part of a kiss-up/kick-down hierarchy. They want a system in which they’re told what to do, so that they’re never responsible for bad outcomes. Being part of that hierarchy means they get the pleasure of ordering others around, while escaping the anxiety that comes from making decisions, and the accountability for any outcome.

In-group favoritism. We have a tendency to favor an in-group in various ways, most of which mean holding the in-group (and especially in-group leaders) to lower standards than out-groups (especially the Out-group) while claiming the moral highground. Because we believe that the in-group is essentially good, then we find ways to justify/rationalize anything in-group members do. For instance, we attribute good motives to in-group members and bad motives to out-group members for exactly the same behaviors. We explain the same behaviors differently:

people explain away good behavior on the part of the out-group and bad behavior on the part of the in-group

In-group favoritism always involve various kinds of bad math. An in-group political figure (Chester) might be caught having kicked twenty puppies, and an out-group political figure (Hubert) might be caught having kicked one puppy. Pro-Chester media and Chester’s supporter will treat Hubert’s one puppy-kicking incident as worse than Chester’s (despite the numerical difference) or use it to deflect discussing Chester’s puppy kicking. The one incident erases the twenty.

Similarly, one example of bad behavior on the part of an out-group member is proof about the essence of the out-group, who they really are, but the same is not true of in-group members. The bad behavior or bad in-group member is an exception (or not really in-group).

That’s bad math. One is not the same as twenty.

In-group/out-group. The “in-group” is a group we’re in (not necessarily the group in power). We have a lot of in-groups, some of which are tremendously important to our sense of self (e.g., Christian, American) and some that only intermittently become salient (e.g., rhetoric scholars, Austin resident). There are groups that are not in-group, but not particularly important to our identity (I tend to refer to them as non in-groups), but there are groups against whom we identify ourselves. That opposition is crucial to our sense of what it means to be “American” or “Christian.” It’s almost as though we couldn’t have a sense of what it means to be “American” unless we had the concept of “foreigner” (out-group). We take pride in who we are because we are not Them. Sometimes there is an Out-group (an Other) who is, more or less, the evil twin of our in-group. For many evangelicals Christians, Muslims are the Other; for much of Christianity, it was Jews. That Other often has little or nothing to do with how members of that group actually are. Often, the Other is a hobgoblin—an imagined and non-falsifiable stereotype.

Just World Fallacy (aka “just world model”). The just world fallacy/model assumes and asserts that people get what they deserve, and people deserve what they get. If bad things happen to a person, they did something that caused it to happen. This cognitive bias is tremendously comforting and non-falsifiable. It’s also always ableist and victim blaming.

Motivism/motivistic (aka “appeal to motive fallacy”). We’re engaged in motivism when we refuse to engage a reasonable argument on the grounds that the person making the argument has bad motives. People only do this with opposition arguments (I don’t think I’ve ever run across a person dismissing an in-group argument on the grounds that the person making it has bad motives). It’s important to note that this is a fallacy when the interlocutor whom we’re dismissing has made a reasonable argument. I often give the advice that you don’t have to engage with someone whose position on the issue is non-falsifiable, who is not engaged in good faith argumentation. You can if you like rattling chains or poking fire ants’ nests, but it’s generally a waste of time. This fallacy is sometimes categorized as a kind of ad hominem (a fallacy of relevance).

So, for instance, if you’ve rejected everything I’ve said in this post on the basis that I’m an out-group member, then your position is fallacious. If I’m wrong, show I’m wrong through reasonable argument instead of flicking this away like something that scares you too much to engage.

PFunk fallacy. This is sort of unfair to PFunk, but I like the quote: “If you free your mind, your ass will follow.” People often seem to assume that things have gone wrong because we didn’t approach with the right theory. If we get our theory (or beliefs) right, then good actions will necessarily follow, and so they spend a lot of time trying to get everyone to agree on the principles. (It’s like a bad Platonic dialogue.) There’s nothing wrong with trying to make sure a group is oriented toward the same goals, at least in the abstract—to be able to answer the question, “What the hell are we trying to do here?” And it’s useful to try to figure out what caused a problem that we’re trying to solve. The problematic hidden assumption is that there is such a thing as getting the theory right (there is One Right Theory). There is one real cause for any problem (what’s usefully called “a monocausal narrative”). Such a claim is often in service of denying legitimate disagreement by saying that we can derive from the One Right Theory (or the One Right Narrative) the One Right Policy.

There was a time when people seemed to describe every bad incident as “a perfect storm,” and I realize that got tedious, perhaps because it’s almost always true that the big failures and disasters are multicausal. Were I Queen of the Universe, you couldn’t graduate from high school without understanding the concept of “necessary but not sufficient.” Widespread and deep hostility to Jews was necessary for the Holocaust but not sufficient. As Ian Kershaw said, “No Hitler, no Holocaust.” But, were it not for that deep and wide hostility, Hitler wouldn’t have risen to power.

I’m making two points. First, the solution to our problems is not to get everyone to agree on The One Right Theory—univocality can itself be a problem, and it’s unlikely that there is One Right Theory that gets it all exactly right. Second, what is probably more useful to talk about is what are the several necessary but not sufficient conditions or factors that led to this problem. Such a way of approaching problems implies that there is also a variety of possible policy responses to any situation—not that all are equally good, but that deductively determining The Right Policy from The Right Theory is both fallacious and harmful.

Politicide. The sociologist Michael Mann has an extraordinary, albeit depressing, book about mass killing (that is, mass killing based on group identity). One part of his argument is that, unhappily, people who are trying to create a new nation-state with an ethos choose to equate the national ethos with an ethnos. And that necessarily means purifying the new state of the people not in that ethnos. The non in-groups.

So, as both Kenneth Burke (in “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”) and the Wizard of Oz (in Wicked) point out, one very straightforward way of unifying a disparate group is to find a common enemy.[1] Mann notes that it isn’t always an ethnic group. Mass killing might happen to a religious minority (religicide, as in the Spanish Inquisition), an economic or social class (classicide, Khmer Rouge in Cambodia), or political group, politicide (mass killing of people whose politics present a threat, as in Argentina and Chile).

Power of belieeeeeving. This is the one that makes people way mad at me when I mention it. It’s a kind of magical thinking, and maybe a subset of the just world model. It’s also complicated because there’s a bit of truth to it (the more that a person thinks in binaries, the more truth there seems to be). It’s promoted in a lot of dodgy self-help rhetoric (not all self-help rhetoric is dodgy–I’ve found a lot of it tremendously helpful), scams, heartless policies. It says that you can succeed at anything if you just belieeeeeeve enough.

The sensible version is that you should adopt policies you believe can work–whether it’s about personal change, military action, policies–but having faith doesn’t exempt you from taking practical action to achieve your ends: “Trust in God but keep your powder dry.”

There’s a kind of narcissism in thinking that God will rearrange the world because of your faith, as though the people opposing you don’t also have faith. I’m not against praying (I do it every day), but history shows that radical and fanatical faith is not a guarantee of success. Hitler was wrong when he said, “Where there’s a will there’s a ferry.” He was wrong to think that sheer will could enable the soldiers to withstand Russian winters.

Social Dominance Orientation. This is a way of describing the preference that some people have for hierarchical systems. People with a social dominance orientation tend to be Social Darwinists (which is neither Darwinian nor social).

[1] I’d like to believe that this is not the first time that Kenneth Burke and a musical have been cited together.

Consumerism and Democracy

Marjorie Taylor Greene saying she voted for a bill she neither read nor understood



At various moments in my career, I was the Director of the first-year composition program, and so dealt with grade complaints. My sense was that about 1/3 of the complaints were misunderstandings; in about 1/3 the instructor had really screwed up. For both of those, I was grateful that a student (or several) had complained, since it was an issue that needed to be resolved at the institutional level.

But the other third was … something. There were all sorts of odd things. But MTG’s defense of her failure to do her job competently reminds me of something I ran across when responding to some students in that other third. More than once, I found myself talking to a student who had not read the assignment sheet (let’s forget reading the syllabus) or paid attention in class, and who therefore failed to meet the assignment criteria. They were complaining to me because they sincerely believed that their not having met the assignment criteria was the fault of the teacher. They didn’t dispute that the information was in writing that they had been given and told to read, nor that other students understood the assignment just fine. In other words, there was never any claim that the information (about due dates, grading criteria, and so on) hadn’t been communicated. They admitted that they hadn’t read/listened. But, their argument was that the instructor was at fault for the student having ignored the information they’d been given, because the instructor’s rhetoric wasn’t good enough.

That narrative of causality–the student failed to meet the criteria of the assignment because the teacher/rhetor wasn’t persuasive enough–is an instance of the transmission model of communication (a good rhetor transmits the message effectively to a passive recipient). It’s also a consumerist model of education: students are consumers, passively waiting to be sold a product. The teacher’s job is to sell the product effectively.

But students aren’t consumers, and teachers aren’t selling a product. You can talk and think about education this way, but that doesn’t make it good.

I used to use this analogy with my students. Imagine that you’re a server in a restaurant, and your boss says, “Those people over there need water.” And you aren’t clear what table your boss means. If, later, your boss asked whether you’d given that table water, and you said that you weren’t sure what table, so you didn’t do anything, what do you think would happen? And they said, “I’d get fired.”

Learning something–anything–doesn’t mean being a passive container into which information is poured; it’s an action that requires agency.

This way of thinking is often applied to politics, both the consumerist model of relationships and the transmission model of communication.[1] It’s a train wreck way of thinking about communication of any sort, but especially politics.

The consumerist model of going to a restaurant does apply to the actual customers—the consumers of what the restaurant offers. They can choose to come back to that restaurant or not on the basis of whether that restaurant gives them what they want. If you choose not to buy a car because the advertising doesn’t really speak to you, or you choose to buy a car because you love the rhetoric about that car, well, you do you. You can buy (consume) whatever car you choose on whatever bases you choose.

Currently, the dominant model for thinking about politics is that voters are consumers. This is a recent model, from the mid twentieth century, as far as I can tell. [2] The argument is that if voters like the “message” a party portrays, then they should vote for that party. It’s up to the party and political figures to provide an appealing product (policies, rhetoric). Voters are passively sitting at the table waiting to be sold a product. Like the student who doesn’t feel obligated to read the syllabus or assignment sheet, voters aren’t seen as responsible for educating themselves about the issues.

In a democracy, voters aren’t sitting at a table wanting to be given the most pleasing product in the most timely manner.

Voters are the servers.

[1] One of my many crank theories is that the transmission model of communication is necessarily tied to consumerist models of interactions, but I’m not sure why that is the case.
[2] Prior to that, voters were described as needing to be able to deliberate—you can see that in The Federalist Papers, for instance. The reasoning behind the electoral college, and indirect election of Senators, was that voters didn’t have enough information to deliberate about the competence of people they didn’t know.)


Make politics about policies, not high stakes tug-of-war

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

Pro-GOP media and supporters have long committed themselves to a view of politics as a zero-sum battle between the fantasy of an “Us” and a hobgoblin of “Them.” This rhetorical strategy goes at least as far back as McCarthyism, but Limbaugh was relentlessly attached to it, as is Fox News. They aren’t alone in this (I first became familiar with this way of thinking about politics when arguing with Stalinists, Libertarians, and pro-PETA folks many, many years ago). It’s working better for the GOP than it is for critics of the GOP, or Dems, or various groups for various reasons.

1) Demagoguery posits an Us (Good Persons) and a Them (Bad People With Bad Motives), and says that the correct course of action is obvious to every and any Good Person. While there are rhetors all over the political spectrum (it’s a spectrum, not a binary or continuum) who appeal to the false Us v. Them, the most anti-democratic and dangerous demagoguery relies on there being a third group—one that is unhuman (associated with terms and metaphors of animals or diseases)—and one of the things that characterizes Them is that They don’t recognize the danger of the animalistic group.

For Nazis, Romas and Jews were the dehumanized group, and liberals and socialists were the Them that didn’t recognize the danger. For proslavery rhetors, enslaved people and freed African Americans were the dehumanized group, and abolitionists and critics of slavery were the Them that didn’t recognize the danger. PETA used to dehumanize farmers and ranchers, and the Them was people who continued to buy animal products.[1]

Regardless of who does it–whether in- or out-group–, we need to object when rhetors dehumanize humans.

2) The media has long promoted a (false, incoherent, but easy and profitable) framing of policy questions as a horse race or tug-of-war between two groups. The “continuum” model is just as inaccurate, and just as incoherent. When I point out that it’s false, I’m told, “But everyone uses it.” That’s a great example of the “bandwagon” fallacy. “Everyone” used the substance v. essence distinction for hundreds of years. “Everyone” bled people to cure diseases for over a thousand years.

Our world is not actually two groups; our world is a world of people with different values, needs, and policy agenda. Media treating policy disagreements as a fight between two groups is a self-fulfilling description insofar as it teaches people to treat policy options as signals of in-group commitment rather than …well…policy options.

A person might be genuinely committed to reducing crime in an area. That commitment doesn’t necessarily mean they should be opposed to or in favor of more reliance on “Own Recognizance” rather than bail, or decriminalizing various activities, increasing infrastructure expenditure in that area, increasing punishment, privatizing prisons, applying the death penalty more often. The relationship between and among those policies is complicated in all sorts of ways, and data as to which policy strategy is most likely reduce crime is also complicated. Each of those topics is a policy issue that is complicated, nuanced, and uncertain, and something that should be argued as a complicated, nuanced, and uncertain issue and not a tug-of-war between good and evil.

Not everyone who believes that abortion should be criminalized also believes that our death penalty system is just, for instance. Despite how many media portray issues, neither of the major parties has a consistent policy agenda from one year to the next—keep in mind that as recently as the overturning of Roe v. Wade major figures in the GOP said there would not be a federal ban on abortion. They were not speaking for every member of their party, as was immediately made clear. Republicans disagree with each other about whether bi-partisanship is a virtue, gay rights, tariffs. Dems disagree with each other about universal health care, the death penalty, how to respond to climate change. As they should.

Talking about politics in terms of a contest between two groups means we don’t argue policies. Policies matter.

Most important, a person persuaded that the death penalty should be applied more often, but who believes that people who disagree have a legitimate point of view—a pluralist (which is different from a relativist)—enhances democracy, whereas a person who believes that every and anyone who disagrees with them is spit from the bowels of Satan is an authoritarian, regardless of whether they’re pro- or anti-death penalty.

Democracy depends upon values like pluralism, fairness, equality before the law. Media needs to talk about extremism in regard to those values, not one’s stance on a policy. The continuum model falsely conflates the two–a person who believes in universal health care is not more “extreme” in terms of their commitment to democracy than someone who believes that anyone who wants a change to our system is a dangerous radical who should be silenced, if not deported. The media would call that latter person a centrist. They aren’t.

Treating politics as a conflict between identities mobilizes an audience, and is therefore more profitable, but it is, at least, proto-demagogic, and it inhibits (and often prohibits) reasonable deliberations about our complicated policy options.

(And, just to be clear, so does a “let’s all just get along” way of approaching politics—if we think that “civility” is being nice to each other, and refraining from saying anything that hurts the feelings of anyone else, then we’re still avoiding the hard work of reasonably, and passionately, arguing about policy.)

So, if we want less demagoguery, we need to abandon a demagogic way of talking about politics. Stop talking about two sides. Talk about policies.

3) Mean girl rhetoric. A junior high mean girl (Regina) who wants to be friends with Jane is likely to do it in three steps. First, she tells Jane that Sally says terrible things about Jane. She’ll pick things about which Jane is at least a little insecure. “Jane keeps making fun of your acne.” “Jane says you’re fat.” Then she’ll badmouth Sally, thereby creating a bond between herself and Jane—they are unified against the common enemy (Sally). Sally may or may not have said those things—Regina might have entirely lied, taken something out of context, or even been the one to say the crappy things to Sally. Regina will continue to strengthen the bond with Jane by continually telling her about crap Sally is supposed to have said. Regina thereby creates resentment against Sally—“who is she to say I’m fat?”

The insecurity is necessary for the bonding, so, oddly enough, it’s Mean Girl who has to keep making Jane insecure by repeating what Sally may or may not have said. She has to keep fuelling that resentment.

If you pay attention to demagogic media, they spend a lot of time talking about the terrible things They say about Us. Sometimes someone in the out-group did say it, but often it’s a misrepresentation. Most often it’s cherry-picking. We tend to see the in-group as heterogeneous, but out-groups as homogeneous. So, while We are all individuals, any member of the out-group can stand for all of Them. That means demagogic media can find some minor out-group figure and use it to foment resentment against the out-group in general.

Find the best opposition arguments on policy issues before dismissing the Other as blazing idiots. Don’t rely on entirely in-group sources.

4) Demagogic media holds the in- and out-group to different standards. In fact, it holds the in-group to no standards at all other than fanatical commitment to the in-group.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine that we’re in a world that is polarized between Chesterians and Hubertians, and we’re Hubertians. Hubertian media finds some Assistant to the Assistant Dog Catcher in North Northwest Small Town who has said something terrible about Hubertians, perhaps called for violence against us. If our media is going to use that as proof that Hubertians are out to exterminate us, then if there is any Hubertian who has ever called for exterminating Chesterians, we are (if we have a reasonable argument), then we have to admit that we are out toe exterminate Chesterians.

If one what one member of the non in-group can be used to characterize what everyone other than the in-group says—if that’s a reasonable way to think about political discourse—then it’s reasonable for Them to characterize Us on the basis of what any in-group member says, no matter how marginalized.

If we don’t hold the in- and out-group to the same standards, then our position is unreasonable. We’re also rejecting Jesus, but that doesn’t generally matter to followers of demagogic media.

Hold in- and out-group media, rhetors, and political figures to the same standards: of argument, ethics, legality, accountability. If you won’t, then you’re an authoritarian.

Pro-GOP media isn’t the only media doing these things. (I’ve seen exactly this rhetoric in regard to raw food for dogs.) But if someone replies to this post by telling me that “Both Sides Are Bad,” I will point out that they have completely misread my argument. They are applying the false model of two sides that enables and fuels demagoguery. Saying “both sides are bad” is almost always in service of deflecting criticism of in-group demagoguery and is thereby participating in demagoguery.

If you don’t like demagoguery, stop engaging in it. That means stop talking about our political situation as a tug-of-war between two sides. Argue policies, acknowledge diversity and complexity, and seek out the smartest opposition arguments.

[1] There are various anti-GOP rhetors whom I cannot watch now that I’ve retired (studying demagoguery is my job, not something I do for fun), and I used them in classes as examples of demagoguery, but even I will admit that they don’t openly dehumanize some group the way that many pro-GOP rhetors dehumanize immigrants. They irrationalize “conservatives” and engage in a lot of motivism, but don’t equate “conservatives” with animals, viruses, and so on to the same extent. I’ve been told that dehumanizing metaphors don’t play as well with people who self-identify as “conservative,”and that’s why such rhetors avoid them, but I don’t know.






Progressives are children of the Enlightenment

bee on a flower

I loathe putting my thesis first (the thesis-first tradition is directly descended from people who didn’t actually believe that persuasion is possible), but here I will. The way that a lot of liberals, progressives, and pro-democracy people are talking about GOP support for authoritarianism is neither helpful nor accurate. Both the narrative about how we got here and the policy agenda for what we should do now are grounded in assumptions about rhetoric that are wrong. And they’re narratives and assumptions that come from the Enlightenment.

I rather like the Enlightenment—an unpopular position, even among people who, I think, are direct descendants of it. But, I’ll admit that it has several bad seeds. One is a weirdly Aristotelian approach of valuing deductive reasoning.

In an early version of this post, I wrote a long explanation about how weird it is that Enlightenment philosophers all rejected Aristotle but they actually ended up reasoning like he did—collecting data in service of finding universally valid premises. I deleted it. It wouldn’t have made my argument any clearer or more effective. I too am a child of the Enlightenment. I want to go back to sources.

Here’s what matters: syllogistic reasoning starts with a universally valid premise and then makes a claim about a specific case. “All men are mortal, and Socrates is mortal, so Socrates must be mortal.” Inductive reasoning starts with the specific cases (“Socrates died; so did Aristotle; so did Plato”) in order to make a more general claim (“therefore, all Greek philosophers died”). For reasons too complicated to explain, Aristotle was associated with the first, although he was actually very interested in the second.

Enlightenment philosophers, despite claiming to reject Aristotle, had a tendency to declare something to be true (“All men are created equal”) and then reason, very selectively, from that premise. (It only applied to some men.) That tendency to want to reason from universally valid principles turned out to be something that was both liberating and authoritarian. Another bad seed was the premise that all problems, no matter how complicated, have a policy solution. There are two parts to this premise: first, that all problems can be solved, and second, that there is one solution. The Enlightenment valued free speech and reasonable deliberation (something I like about it), but in service of finding that one solution, and that’s a problem.[1]

The assumption was that enlightened people would throw off the blinders created by “superstition” and see the truth. So, like the authorities against whom they were arguing, they assumed that there was a truth. For many Enlightenment philosophers, the premise was that free and reasonable speech among reasonable people would enable them to find that one solution. The unhappy consequence was to try to gatekeep who participated in that speech, and to condemn everyone who disagreed—this move still happens in public discourse. People who agree with Us see the Truth, but people who don’t are “biased.”

The Enlightenment assumed a universality of human experience—that all people are basically the same—an assumption that directly led to the abolition of slavery, the extension of voting rights, public education. It also led to a vexed understanding of what deliberative bodies were supposed to do: 1) find the right answer, or 2) find a good enough policy. It’s interesting that the Federalist Papers vary among those two ways of thinking about deliberation.

The first is inherently authoritarian, since it assumes that people who have the wrong answer are stupid, have bad motives, are dupes, and should therefore be dismissed, shouted down, expelled. This way of thinking about politics leads to a cycle of purification (both Danton and Robespierre ended up guillotined).[2] I’m open to persuasion on this issue, but, as far as I know, any community that begins with the premise that there is a correct answer, and it’s obvious to good people, ends up in a cycle of purification. I’d love to hear about any counter-examples.

The second is one that makes some children of the Enlightenment stabby. It seems to them to mean that we are watering down an obviously good policy (the one that looks good to them) in order to appease people who are wrong. What’s weird about a lot of self-identified leftists is that we claim to value difference while actually denying that it should be valued when it comes to policy disagreements.

We’re still children of Enlightenment philosophers who assumed that there is a right policy, and that anyone who disagrees with us is a benighted fool.

Another weird aspect of Enlightenment philosophers was that they accepted a very old model of communication—the notion that if you tell people the truth they will comprehend it (unless they’re bad people). This is the transmission model of communication. Enlightenment philosophers, bless their pointed little heads, often seemed to assume that enlightening others simply involved getting the message right. (I think JQA’s rhetoric lectures are a great example of that model.)

I think that what people who support democracy, fairness, compassion, and accountability are now facing is a situation that has been brewing since the 1990s—a media committed to demonizing democracy, fairness, compassion, and in-group accountability. It’s a media that has inoculated its audience against any criticism of the GOP.

And far too many people are responding in an Enlightenment fashion—that the problem is that the Democratic Party didn’t get its rhetoric right. As though, had the Democratic Party transmitted the right message, people who reject on sight anything even remotely critical of the GOP would have chosen to vote Dem. Ted Cruz won reelection because he had ads about transgender kids playing girls’ sports. That wasn’t about rhetoric, but about policy.

We aren’t here because Harris’ didn’t get her rhetoric right. Republicans have a majority of state legislatures and governorships. This isn’t about Harris or the Dem party; this is about Republican voters. To imagine that Harris’ or the Dems’ rhetoric is to blame is to scapegoat. Blame Republican voters.

We are in a complicated time without a simple solution. Here is the complicated solution: Republicans have to reject what Trump is doing.

I think that people who oppose Trump and what he’s doing need to brainstorm ways to get Republican voters to reject their pro-Trump media and their kowtowing representatives.

I think that is a strategy necessary for our getting this train to stop wrecking, and I think it’s complicated and probably involves a lot of different strategies. And I think we shouldn’t define that strategy by deductive reasoning—I think this is a time when inductive reasoning is our friend. If there is a strategy that will work now, it’s worked in the past. So, what’s likely to work?





[1] The British Enlightenment didn’t make the rational/irrational split in the same way that the Cartesian tradition did. For the British philosophers, there wasn’t a binary between logic and feelings; for them, sentiments enhance reasonable deliberation, but the passions inhibit it.

[2] There’s some research out there that suggests that failure causes people to want to purify the in-group. My crank theory is that it depends on the extent to which people are pluralist.

Demagoguery and Disruption

various books that are or are about demagoguery

I’ve been asked why demagoguery rises and falls, more than once by people who like the “disruption” theory—that demagoguery is the consequence of major social disruption. The short version is that events create a set and severity of crises that “normal” politics and “normal” political discourse seem completely incapable of ameliorating, let alone solving. People feel themselves to be in a “state of exception” when things they would normally condemn seem attractive—anti-democratic practices, purifying of a community through ethnic/political cleansing, authoritarianism, open violation of constitutional protections.

When I first started working on demagoguery, I assumed that was the case. It makes sense, after all. And, certainly, in the instances that most easily come to mind when we think about demagoguery, there was major social disruption. Hitler rose to power in the midst of major social disruption: humiliation (the Great War and subsequent Versailles Treaty), economic instability (including intermittent hyperinflation), mass immigration from Central and Eastern Europe, an unstable government system.

And you can look at other famous instances of demagoguery and see social disruption: McCarthyism and the Cold War (specifically the loss of China), Charles Coughlin and the Great Depression, Athenian demagogues like Cleon and the Peloponnesian War, Jacobins and failed harvests. But, the more I looked at various cases, the weirder it got.

Take, for instance, McCarthyism and China. There are two questions never answered by people who blame(d) “the Democrats” for “losing” China is: what plan would have worked to prevent that victory? Did Republicans advocate that plan (so, would they have enacted it if in power)? McCarthy’s incoherent narrative was that spies in the State Department were [waves hands vaguely] somehow responsible for the loss of China. Were losing China a major social disruption, then it would have until that moment been seen as an important power by the people who framed its “loss” as a major international threat—American Republicans. But, prior to Mao’s 1949 victory in China, American Republicans were not particularly interested in China. In fact, FDR had to maneuver around various neutrality laws passed by Republicans in order to provide support for Chiang Kai Shek at all. After WWII, Republicans were still not very interested in intervening in China—they weren’t interested in China till Mao’s victory. So, why did it suddenly become a major disruption?

One possibility is that Mao’s victory afforded the rhetorical opportunity of having a stick with which to beat the tremendously successful Democrats (that’s Halberstam’s argument). If Halberstam is right, then demagoguery about China, communism, and communist spies was the cause, not the consequence, of social disruption. Another equally plausible possibility is that China becoming communist, and an ally of the USSR, took on much more significance in light of Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons. So, the disruption led to demagoguery.

In other words, McCarthyism turned out not to be quite as clean a case as I initially assumed, although far from a counter-example.

Another problematic case was post-WWI demagoguery about segregation. In many ways, that demagoguery was simply a continuation of antebellum pro-slavery demagoguery, with added bits from whatever new “scientific” or philosophical movement might seem useful (e.g., eugenics, anti-communism). It wasn’t always at the same level, but tended to wax and wane. I couldn’t seem to correlate the waxing and waning to any economic, political, or social event, or even kind of event. What it seemed like was that it correlated more to specific political figures deciding to amp up the demagoguery for short-term gain (see especially Chapter Three).

Similarly, ante-bellum pro-slavery demagoguery didn’t consistently correlate to major disruptions; if anything, it often seemed to create them, or create a reframing of conflicts (such as with indigenous peoples). But, the main problem with the disruption narrative of causality is that I couldn’t control the variables—it’s extremely difficult to find a period of time when there wasn’t something going on that can be accurately described as a major disruption. Even if we look only at financial crises considered major (there was a major downturn in the economy that lasted for years), there were eight in the US in the 19th century: 1819, 1837, 1839, 1857, 1873, 1884, 1893, and 1896. Since several of these crises lasted for years, as much as half of the 19th century was spent in a major financial crisis.

And then there are other major disruptions. There were riots or uprisings related to slavery and race in almost every year of the 19th century. The Great Hunger in Ireland (1845-1852) and later recurrence (1879), 1848 revolutions in Western Europe, and various other events led to mass migrations of people whose ethnicity or religion was unwelcome enough to create major conflicts. And this is all just the 19th century only in the US.

Were demagoguery caused by crises, then it would always be full-throated, since there are always major crises of some kind. But it waxes and wanes, often to varying degrees in various regions, or among various groups, sometimes without the material conditions changing. Pro-slavery demagoguery varied in terms of themes, severity, popularity, but not in any way that I could determine correlated to the economic viability or political security of the system.

Anti-Japanese demagoguery was constant on the West Coast of the US from the late 19th century through at least the mass imprisonment in the 40s, but not as consequential or extreme elsewhere. One might be tempted to explain that discrepancy by population density, but there was not mass imprisonment in Hawaii, which had a large population of Japanese Americans. Anti-Judaism has never particularly correlated to the size (or even existence) of a local Jewish population; it’s not uncommonly the most extreme in situations almost entirely absent of Jews. And sometimes it’s impossible to separate the crisis from the demagoguery—as in the cases of demagoguery about fabricated threats, such as Satanic panics, stranger danger demagoguery, wild and entirely fabricated reports of massive abolitionist conspiracies, intermittent panics about Halloween candy.

I’ve come to think it has to do with two other factors: strategic threat inflation on the part of rhetors with a sufficiently large megaphone, and informational enclaves (and these two factors are mutually reinforcing). I’ve argued elsewhere that the sudden uptick in anti-abolitionist was fueled by Presidential aspirations; Truman strategically engaged in threat inflation regarding Soviet intentions in his speech “The Truman Doctrine;” the FBI has repeatedly exaggerated various threats in order to get resources; General DeWitt fabricated evidence to support race-based imprisonment of Japanese Americans. These rhetors weren’t entirely cynical; I think they felt sincerely justified in their threat inflation, but they knew that they were exaggerating.

And threat inflation only turns into demagoguery when it’s picked up by important rhetors. Japanese Americans were not imprisoned in Hawaii, perhaps because DeWitt didn’t have as much power there, and there wasn’t a rhetor as important as California Attorney General Earl Warren supporting it.

In 1835, there was a panic about the AAS “flooding” the South with anti-slavery pamphlets that advocated sedition. They didn’t flood the South; they sent the pamphlets, which didn’t advocate sedition, to Charleston, where they were burned. But, the myth of a flooded South was promoted by people so powerful that it was referred to in Congress as though it had happened, and is still referred to by historians who didn’t check the veracity of the story.

And that brings up the second quality: informational enclaves. Demagoguery depends on people either not being aware of or not believing disconfirming information. The myth of Procter and Gamble being owned by a Satan worshipper (who was supposed to have gone on either Phil Donahue or Oprah Winfrey and announced that commitment) was spread for almost 20 years despite it being quite easy to check and see if any recording of such a show existed. The people I knew who believed it didn’t bother even trying to check. Advocates of the AAS mass-mailing demagoguery (or other fabricated conspiracy stories) only credited information and sources that promoted the demagoguery.

Once the Nazis or Stalinists had control of the media in their countries, the culture of demagoguery escalated. But, even prior to the Nazi silencing of dissent, Germany was in a culture of demagoguery—because people could choose to get all their information from reinforcing media, and many made that choice. Antebellum media was diverse—it was far from univocal—but people could choose to get all their information from one source. They could choose to live in an informational enclave. Many made that choice.

It didn’t end well.

“Defeats will be defeats.”

copy of book--Foreign Relations of the US, Vietnam, 1964

“Defeats will be defeats and lassitude will be lassitude. But we can improve our propaganda.” (Carl Rowan, Director of the US Information Agency, June 1964, FRUS #189 I: 429).

In early June of 1964, major LBJ policy-makers met in Honolulu to discuss the bad and deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. SVN was on its third government in ten months (there had been a coup in November of 1963 and another in January of 1964), and advisors had spent the spring talking about how bad the situation was. In a March 1964 memo to LBJ, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reported that “the situation has unquestionably been growing worse” (FRUS #84). “Large groups of the population are now showing signs of apathy and indifference [….] Draft dodging is high while the Viet Cong are recruiting energetically and effectively [….] The political control structure extending from Saigon down into the hamlets disappeared following the November coup.” A CIA memo from May has this as the summary:

“The over-all situation in South Vietnam remains extremely fragile. Although there has been some improvement in GVN/ARVN performance, sustained Viet Cong pressure continues to erode GVN authority throughout the country, undercut US/GVN programs and depress South Vietnamese morale. We do not see any signs that these trends are yet ‘bottoming out.’ During the next several months there will be increasing danger than an assassination of Khanh, a successful coup, a grave military reverse, or a succession of military setbacks could have a critical psychological impact in South Vietnam. In any case, if the tide of deterioration has not been arrested by the end of the year, the anti-Communist position is likely to become untenable.” (FRUS #159)

At that June meeting, Carl Rowan presented a report as to what should be done, and he summarized it as: “Defeats will be defeats and lassitude will be lassitude. But we can improve our propaganda.” (FRUS #189). This is a recurrent theme in documents from that era, including military ones—the claim that effective messaging could solve what were structural problems. They didn’t. They couldn’t.

I was briefly involved in MLA, and I spent far too much time at meetings listening to people say that declining enrollments in the humanities could be solved by better messaging about the values of a humanistic education; I heard the same thing in far too many English Department meetings.

Just to be clear (and to try to head off people telling me that a humanistic education is valuable), I do not disagree with the message. I disagree that the problem can be solved by getting the message right, or getting the message out there. I’m saying that the rhetoric isn’t enough.

I am certain that there are tremendous benefits, both to an individual and to a culture, in a humanistic education, especially studying literature and language(s). That’s why I spent a career as a scholar and teacher in the humanities. But, enrollments weren’t (and aren’t) declining just because people haven’t gotten the message. There were, and are, declining enrollments for a variety of structural reasons, most of which are related to issues of funding for university educations. The fact is that the more that college costs, and the more that those costs are borne by students taking on crippling debt, the more that students want a degree that lands them a job right out of college.

Once again, I am not arguing that’s a good way for people to think about college; I am saying that the reason for declining enrollments isn’t something we can solve by better messaging about the values of a liberal arts education. For the rhetorical approach to be effective (and ethical) it has to be in conjunction with solving the structural problems. Any solution has to involve a more equitable system of funding higher education.

I am tired of people blaming the Dems’ “messaging” for the GOP’s success. I thought that Dem messaging was savvy and impressive. They couldn’t get it to enough people because people live in media enclaves. If you know any pro-GOP voters, then you know that they get all their information from media that won’t let one word of that message reach them, and that those voters choose to remain in enclaves. How, exactly, were the Dems supposed to reach your high school friend who rejects as “librul bullshit” anything that contradicts or complicates what their favorite pundit, youtuber, or podcaster tells them? What messaging would have worked?

The GOP is successful because enough people vote for the GOP and not enough vote against them. Voter suppression helps, but what most helps is anti-Dem rhetoric.

Several times I had the opportunity to hear Colin Allred speak, and his rhetoric was genius. It was perfect. Cruz didn’t try to refute Allred’s rhetoric; all Ted Cruz had to do was say, over and over (and he did), that Allred supported transgender rights.

From the Texas Observer: “Cruz and his allied political groups blitzed the airwaves with ads highlighting that vote and Allred’s other stances in favor of transgender rights. The ads, often featuring imagery of boys competing against girls in sports, reflected what Cruz’s team had found from focus groups and polling: Among the few million voters they’d identified who were truly on the fence, the transgender sports topic was most effective in driving support to Cruz, said Sam Cooper, a strategist for Cruz’s campaign.”

Transphobia is not a rhetorical problem that can be ended by the Dems getting the message right. Bigotry is systemic. Any solution will involve rhetoric, and rhetoric is important. But it isn’t enough.

Is Satire a Useful/Effective Strategy with Trump Supporters?

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

I’m often asked this question, and the answer is: it depends on the nature of their support, what we mean by “useful/effective,” and what we mean by “satire.”

1) Why do people support Trump?

There are, obviously, many reasons, and sometimes it’s a combination. But, for purposes of talking about satire’s effect, I’ll mention five:

A) Political Sociopathy (some people call it “political narcissism”). These are people who support Trump because they believe he will pass policies that will benefit them in the short run—lower taxes, eliminate environmental and employment protections, protect the wealthy from accountability, privatize public goods, and so on. They don’t care what the consequences will be for others, or what the long-term consequences might be—they only care that it will benefit them (they believe). Hence sociopathy.

B) Eschatalogical Understanding of Politics. This way of thinking isn’t necessarily explicitly religious—a certain kind of American Exceptionalism as well as Hegelian readings of history are also in this category, even if apparently secular. It reads history as inevitably headed toward [something]. That “something” might be: American hegemony, world capitalism, the return of Jesus, Armageddon, racial/ethnic domination, fascism, a people’s revolution, in-group dominance. People with this understanding don’t care about politics in terms of reasonable disagreements about policy, or even about specifics, but in terms of the apocalyptic battle or necessary triumph.

C) Resentment of Libs. (Stiiginit to the libs) These are people who support anything—regardless of its consequences even for them—that they believe pisses off “liberals.” That “liberals” are a hobgoblin, and that this orientation leads to “Vladimir’s Choice” doesn’t much matter.

D) Charismatic Leadership. This is a relationship that people have with a leader (sometimes several leaders). They believe that the leader is a kind of savior (the sacralized language is often striking), an embodiment of the in-group, who should be given unlimited power and held unaccountable so that they can “fight” on behalf of real people like them. (Charismatic leadership is often some kind of authoritarian populism—maybe always.

E) Purity politics. This group includes people who are radically committed to banning abortion—although there are policies that demonstrably reduce abortion, these people refuse to support them because they believe those policies (e.g., accurate sex education, access to effective birth control) are also sinful. Supporting birth control isn’t radially pure enough for them—that their policy will result in deaths in the short term doesn’t matter to them. They refuse to be pragmatic about short-term improvements or short-term devastation. People who refuse to vote for opposition candidates because that party or candidate isn’t radical enough are also in the category.

One characteristic shared among all of these kinds of supporters–in my experience is a tragic informational cycle—they refuse to look at anything that contradicts or complicates what they believe about Trump. They only pay attention to pro-Trump demagoguery because they believe that the entire complicated world of policy options and disagreements is really a tug-of-war between two groups. (A lot of people who aren’t Trump supporters think about politics that way–it isn’t helpful.)

2) Useful/Effective at what?

A) Persuading the interlocutor. People often assume that the point in engaging someone with whom we disagree is to get them to adopt our point of view.

B) Persuading bystanders. Sometimes, however, we aren’t trying to persuade the person with whom we’re disagreeing, but others who might be watching the disagreement.

C) Getting the topic off of Trump. Often, we’re just trying to get them to drop the subject, to let us enjoy dinner, a holiday, a coffee break, or whatever without talking about Trump, or taking swipes at the hobgoblin of “libs.” In other words, just get them to STFU about that topic.

D) Undermine the in- and out-group binary. We might want them to recognize the harm of their support for Trump and/or his policies—that is, to persuade them to empathize with an out-group.

3) What do we mean by “satire”?
The loose category of satire can mean: stable irony (a statement with a clear meaning that is not the literal statement—saying, “Great weather” in the midst of a nasty storm); unstable irony (the rhetor clearly doesn’t mean the literal statement, but it isn’t clear what they do mean), parody (which might be loving, as in the case of Best in Show, or critical, as in the case of much Saturday Night Live sketches about politics), or Juvenalian satire (scathing and often scatological). (Wikipedia has a useful entry on satire.)

So, the short answer to the question about effectiveness of satire on Trump supporters is: it depends on the kind of supporter, what effect we’re trying to have, and what kind of satire we use.

Many people object to satire because they assume that it’s insulting, and believe we should always rely on kindness and reason. But, as Jonathan Swift famously said: “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.” (For more on this quote and various versions, see this.) This is not always true, but it is true that a person has to be open to changing their mind for a reasoned argument to work. And not everyone is. So, if we’re talking to a Trump supporter who is open to changing their mind—that is, whose beliefs about Trump and Trump’s policies are falsifiable–then satire might not be the best strategy. But, to be blunt, I haven’t run across a Trump supporter whose beliefs can be falsified through reasoned argument in a long time.

The first category—the person who is in it for their own short term gain, and who might actually hate Trump—can seem to be “rational” insofar as they’re engaged in an apparently amoral calculation of costs and benefits (in my experience) is generally grounded in some version of the “just world model.” (That people who are wealthy/powerful/dominant deserve to be wealthy/powerful/dominant.) So, their reason for supporting policies that benefit them in the short-term isn’t falsifiable. They can be persuaded, sometimes, on very specific points about specific policies. Sometimes. Satire certainly doesn’t alienate them (although it might piss them off); it neither strengthens nor weakens their support.

Similarly, people whose support comes from an eschatological view of history/politics have a non-falsifiable narrative (they’re very prone to conspiracy theories), and, in my experience, have long since dug in. So, similarly, satire neither strengthens nor weakens their support.

The “stigginit to the libs” type person sometimes change their mind about Trump when they or someone they love gets harmed by Trump’s policies, so—sometimes—their support can be falsified by personal experience. But reasonable argumentation is right off the table—they like that Trump critics get frustrated with how unreasonable they are. (And, often, they have an unreasonable understanding of reasonable argumentation.)

Satire can increase their resentment of “libs,” especially if it hits close to home, but it isn’t as though some other rhetorical strategy would work. In theory, what should work would be some strategy of rejiggering their sense of in- and out-groups, or that creates empathy for an out-group, but I’m not sure I’ve seen that happen short of direct personal experience.

Satire, including the Juvenalian, can shame some people into shutting up, or allowing a change of subject, but I think other strategies are more effective (like refusing to engage). It can also have an impact on observers, but whether satire will cause them to feel sorry for the Trump supporters, get mad at libs, or distance themselves from Trump support/ers varies from person to person.

Satire can be very effective for people in a charismatic leadership relationship because it emphasizes that they look foolish. Their fanatical commitment is not, as they want to see it, a deeply personal and reciprocated loyalty, but gullibility. They’ll deflect by projecting their own fanatical commitment onto “libs,” and so it can be useful to insist that it stay on the stasis of their commitment. After all, it doesn’t matter if there are people equally fanatically committed to Biden or whoever—two wrongs don’t make a right. Biden supporters might howl at the moon and eat broken glass; that doesn’t mean that fanatical support of Trump is reasonable.

That Biden supporters might be wrong about something doesn’t mean Trump supporters are right. (And vice versa. Our political world is not, actually, a tug-of-war between two groups.)

And that points to one problem with satire of a group—what’s wrong with our political discourse is the fundamental premise that politics is a zero-sum battle between two groups. So, any satire that confirms that premise is, I think, problematic, and much of it does.

The final group is the purity politics folks. For those people, politics is a performance of purity; there’s a kind of narcissism to it. I don’t know whether satire would do much either to shame or persuade them—personally, I’ve never found that kind of person open to persuasion (regardless of where they are on the political spectrum).

So, to answer the original question: it depends.


Why Was Hitler Elected?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"


Despite the fact that invoking Hitler in arguments is so kneejerk that there’s even a meme about it, a surprising number of people misunderstand the situation. They misunderstand, for instance, that he was elected; he was even voted into dictatorship. So, why was he elected?

I want to focus on four factors that are commonly noted in scholarship but often absent from or misrepresented in popular invocations of Hitler: widespread resentment effectively mobilized by pro-Nazi rhetoric, an enclave-based media environment, authoritarian populism, agency by proxy/charismatic leadership.

I. Resentment

Resentment is often defined as a sense of grievance against a person, but grievances can be of various kinds, including motivating positive personal change or political action. Resentment is grievance drunk on jealousy. It’s common to distinguish jealousy from envy on the grounds that, while both involve being unhappy that someone has something we don’t, jealousy means wanting it taken from the other. If I envy someone’s nice shirt, I can solve that problem by buying one for myself; jealousy can only be satisfied if they lose that shirt, they are harmed for having the shirt, or the shirt is damaged. My jealousy can even be satisfied without my getting a shirt—as long as they lose theirs. Jealousy is zero-sum, but envy is not.

Resentment is a zero-sum hostility toward others whom I think look down on me. Although I feel victimized that they have something I don’t, I don’t necessarily want what they have. I do, however, want them to lose it; I want them crushed and humiliated for even having it. Resentment relies on a sense that others have things to which I am entitled, and they are not. In addition, resentment always has a little bit of unacknowledged shame.

Many Germans (most? all?) resented the Versailles Treaty, and they resented losing the Great War. They resented the accusation that they were responsible for the war, they resented that they lost a war they believed they were entitled to win, and they resented a treaty as punitive as the kind they were accustomed to impose on others.

Certainly, the Versailles Treaty was excessively punitive, but it was, oddly enough, fair—at least in the sense that it was an eye for an eye. Germans didn’t condemn equally punitive treaties they had imposed on others (e.g., the Treaty of Frankfurt or the 1918 Brest-Litvosk Treaty. They resented being treated as they felt entitled to treat others.

The war guilt clause was a particular point of resentment, and yet it was partially true. The notion that one nation and one nation only can cause a world war is implausible—few wars are monocausal—but certainly Germany held a large part of the responsibility. Yet Germans liked to see themselves as forced into a war they didn’t want—they were the real victims and completely blameless. Were the Germans actually truly blameless, I don’t think the Treaty of Versailles would have been as useful a tool for mobilizing resentment.

Sloppy pan-Germanism mixed with the even sloppier Social Darwinism promoted a narrative that victory always goes to the strongest, and that therefore whoever win deserved it. The German defeat in the Great War therefore was a massive blow to German ideology—if the best always win, and the winners are always the best, that loss was stuck in the craw. People who enjoyed Nazi rhetoric resented that they lost a war they felt entitled to win.

Important to Nazi mobilization of that resentment was continually reminding audiences of it—there are few (any?) Hitler speeches in which he didn’t remind his audience of the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, and of the way that other nations looked down on and victimized Germany.

Did everyone else really look down on Germany? The French probably did, but that’s just because they looked down on everyone. Some British and Americans did; some didn’t. But the Germans certainly looked down on everyone. So, like the resentment about punitive treaties, they weren’t on principle opposed to people looking down on others; they just resented when they thought they were being looked down on.

The Versailles Treaty didn’t actually end the fighting. Pogroms, forced emigration, violent clashes, and genocides raged through Eastern and Central Europe well after the war, causing a massive immigration crisis. And, as often happens, people resented the immigrants. They also resented liberals, intellectuals, Jews, and various other groups that they imagined looked down on them.

Resentment is an act of projection and imagination.

hitler smiling at a child


II. Enclave-based media environment

Weimar Germany had a lot of political parties (around forty, depending on how you count them), which can loosely be categorized as: Catholic, communist, conservative, fascist, liberal (in the European sense), and socialist. They all had their own media (mostly newspapers), and many of them were rabidly partisan in terms of coverage but without admitting to the partisan coverage. [The antebellum era in the US was much the same.]

The important consequence of this factionalized media landscape was that it was possible for a person to remain fully within an informational enclave: foundational narratives, myths, premises, and outright lies were continually repeated. Repetition is persuasive. Since factional media wouldn’t present criticism or even critics fairly (or at all), it was possible for someone to feel certain about various events and yet be completely wrong. Germany was not about to win the war when it capitulated.

Sometimes the narratives were specific (e.g.,The Protocols of the Elders of Zion documents the plot of international Jewry ), and sometimes about broader historical events, or history itself. One of the most important narratives was the shape-shifting “stab in the back” myth about the Great War. This myth said that Germany was just about to win the war, and would have, but the nation was stabbed in the back, and therefore had to accept a humiliating treaty. As Richard Evans has shown, just who stabbed the back, or when, or why, or even what back, varied considerably. Like a lot of myths, it was simultaneously detailed and inconsistent.

Another important narrative was a similarly specific and vague narrative about the course of history, as a survival of the fittest conflict undermined by liberal democracy. This narrative typically cast Jews as intractably incapable of patriotism, assimilation, or German identity. German exceptionalism denied the actual heterogeneity of

Of those six kinds of political parties, three were explicitly and actively hostile to democracy, either advocating a return to the monarchy (Catholic) or a new system entirely (fascist, communist). Some “conservatives” parties advocated a return to monarchy, some advocated some other kind of authoritarian government, and some at least seemed willing to accommodate democratic decision-making practices. Only the liberals and socialists actively supported democracy (communists wanted a Marxist-Leninist revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, whereas socialists agreed with Marxist critiques of unconstrained capitalism, but wanted reform via democratic processes; “liberals” believed in a free market and democratic processes of decision-making).

What’s important about this kind of media environment is that it undermines democratic practices because it enables the demonization or dismissal of anyone who significantly disagrees. Repetition is persuasive. If you are repeatedly told that socialists want to kick bunnies, and never hear from socialists what they actually advocate, then you’ll believe that socialists want to kick bunnies. That makes them people who shouldn’t be included in the decision-making process at all; it personalizes policy disagreements. Policy disagreements, rather than being opportunities for arguing about the ads/disads, costs, feasibility, and so on of our various policy options (even vehemently arguing) is a contest of groups.

Tl;dr If you only get your information from in-group sources, then chances are that you never hear the most reasonable arguments for out-group policies; therefore everyone who is not in-group will seem unreasonable. Not hearing the arguments leads to refusing to listen to the people.

Repetition coupled with isolation from reasonable counterarguments radicalizes.

Hitler looking at a map with generals


III. Authoritarian populism

One way to misunderstand how persuasion works is to imagine out-groups and their leaders as completely and obviously evil—by refusing to understand what some people find/found attractive about such leaders, we make ourselves feel more secure (“I would never have supported Hitler”), and thereby ignore that we might get talked into supporting someone like that.

Nazism is a kind of “authoritarian populism.” Populism is a political ideology that posits that politics is a conflict between two kinds of people: a real people whose concerns and beliefs are legitimate, moral, and true; a corrupt, out-of-touch, illegitimate elite who are parasitic on the real people. Populism is always anti-pluralist: there is only one real people, and they are in perfect agreement about everything. (Muller says populism is “a moralized form of antipluralism” 20).

Populism become authoritarian when the narrative that the real people have become so oppressed by the “elite” that they are in danger of extermination. At that point, there are no constraints on the behavior of populists or their leaders. This rejection of what are called “liberal norms” (not in the American sense of “liberal” but the political theory one) such as fairness, change from within, deliberation, transparent and consistent legal processes is the moment that a populist movement becomes authoritarian (and Machiavellian).

As Muller says, “Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people” (Muller 3). Therefore, any election that populists lose is not legitimate, any election they win is, regardless of what strategies they’ve used to win. Violence on the part of the in-group is admirable and always justified, purely on the grounds that it is in-group violence. The in-group is held to lower moral standards while claiming the moral highground.

Authoritarian populism always has an intriguing mix of victimhood, heroism, strength, and whining. Somehow whining about how oppressed “we are” and what meany-meany-bo-beanies They are is seen as strength. And that is what much of Hitler’s rhetoric was—so very, very much whining.

And that is something else that authoritarian populism promises: a promise of never being held morally accountable, as long as you are a loyal (even fanatical) member of the in-group (the real people).

In authoritarian populism, the morality comes from group membership, and the values the group claims to have—values which might have literally nothing to do with whatever policies they enact or ways they behave.


IV. Charismatic leadership/agency by proxy

Authoritarian populism needs an authority to embody the real people. It’s fine if they’re actually elite (many people were impressed by Hitler’s wealth). Kenneth Burke talked about the relationship in terms of “identification”—they saw him as their kind of guy. They imagined a seamless connection with him. In charismatic leadership relationships, the followers attribute all sorts of characteristics to their leader (which the leader may or may not actually have): extraordinary health, almost superhuman endurance, universal genius, a Midas touch, infallible and instantaneous judgment, and a perfect understanding of what “normal” people like and want.

In general, people engage in intention/motive-based explanations for good behavior on the part of the in-group and bad behavior on the part of non in-group leaders and members, and situational explanations for good behavior on the part of the non in-group and bad behavior for the in-group.

So, if Hubert (in-group) and Chester (out-group) give a cookie to a child (good behavior), then it shows that Hubert is good and generous (motive/intention), but Chester only did so because he was forced by circumstances (situational).

If Hubert (in-group) and Chester (out-group) both steal a cookie from a child (bad behavior), then it was because Hubert didn’t see the child, the child shouldn’t have been eating the cookie, he had no choice (situational explanations), but Chester stealing the cookie was deliberate and because Chester is evil.

One sign, then, of a charismatic leadership relationship is whether the follower holds a leader to the same standards of behavior as non in-group leaders, or if they flip the intention/situation explanations in order to hold on to the narrative that the in-group is essentially good.

What we get from a charismatic leadership relationship is a fairly simple way of understanding good and bad—it reduces moral complexity and uncertainty. Since our group is essentially good, we are guaranteed moral certainty simply by being a loyal member. And that is what Hitler promised.

Because Hitler is like us, and really gets us, then we are powerful—we take pride in everything he does; we have agency by proxy.

But, because we identify with him, then our attachment to him means we will not listen to criticism of him—criticism of him is an attack on our goodness. Our support becomes non-falsifiable, and therefore outside the realm of a reasonable disagreement about him, his actions, or his policies.

Charismatic leadership is authoritarian. But oh so very, very pleasurable.



Sources:

There are still lots of arguments among scholars about Hitler, the Germans, and the Nazis, but nothing I’m saying here is either particularly controversial or something I’ve come up with on my own.

While it is a mistake to attribute magical qualities to Hitler’s rhetoric, and to attribute the various genocides and disasters to him personally (as though his personal magnetism was destroyed agency on the part of Germans), it is also a mistake to think the rhetoric was powerless. Germans elected him because they liked what he had to say.

There was a time when scholars were insistent that Hitler’s rhetoric wasn’t that great (an argument that Ryan Skinnell’s forthcoming book will show was an accusation made at the time, one that completely misses the rhetorical force of Hitler’s strategies), but that was partially a reaction to the immediate post-war deflecting of German responsibility for the war, the Holocaust, the various genocides (the argument was that Germans were overwhelmed by Hitler’s rhetoric, or secretly hated him—neither was true).

There are many excellent biographies of Hitler, the ones written after the opening of the records captured by the Soviets are the most useful. Kershaw’s writings are especially readable, but Volker Ullrich’s and Peter Longerich’s biographies have been able to take advantage of more recent research (If I were asked to recommend just one biography, it would be Longerich’s). Richard Evans’ three-volume study of Nazism (coming to power, in power, at war) is thorough and makes clear the enthusiastic participation of various other leaders.

Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction is a compelling and detailed analysis of the economy under the Nazis, and Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War shows the considerable support Nazis had throughout the war. There are a lot of books about the media and Hitler, but I think the best place to start is Despina Stratigakos’ Hitler at Home. Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished is a powerful discussion of the aftermath of the Great War.


What’s next?

sign saying "welcome to texas"

The short version is that the federal government will operate as red states like Texas or Alabama have for some time. It will do so in terms of policy agenda (reactionary, neoliberal, evangelical moral panic) and what might be called political structures and practices (competitive authoritarianism).

For some time, the GOP has claimed to be conservative, and to have a policy agenda grounded in principles. It isn’t, and it doesn’t. It’s a coalition taped together by a strategic rhetoric of resentment, demagoguery, and in-group favoritism (e.g., if you support drones, and look forward to nuclear war in the Middle East, you are not pro-life).

So, the policy agenda will have a lot of moral panic/purity items that the “evangelicals” advocate (federal ban on abortion, probably some kind of requirement for prayer in schools, restriction of marriage rights, public funding of sectarian education, etc.). Neoliberals (really just the latest incarnation of sloppy Social Darwinists) will get draining and redirecting of public funds to private profit, policies that buttress current wealth disparities, and deflecting or demonizing of any discussion of long-term or structural issues like racism or global warming, (e.g., much of “Project 2025”). Reactionaries will get unlimited access to guns, removal of restraints on police, and generally in-group exemption from prosecution for violence, corruption, and abuse of power (e.g., Kenneth Paxton).

At the Federal level, we’ll also have the kind of “competitive authoritarianism” that states like Texas have been establishing. Political scientists (and others) have been warning about competitive authoritarianism for twenty years. From a 2002 article:

“In competitive authoritarian regimes, formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.” (52)

More recently Levitsky and Way have defined it as “in which the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions and serious incumbent abuse yields electoral competition that is real but unfair.”

It’s interesting to me that scholars rarely mention the US South, but it’s a good example of competitive authoritarianism. There was a Republican Party, and, on paper, African Americans could vote. But, in fact, various structural and interpersonal practices (from lynching to refusing to register voters) ensured that neither African Americans nor Republicans were completely excluded from power. It was herrenvolk democracy. [1]

There are two ways that this will play out in the US. In purple states, it will mean gerrymandering, disparate access to polling places, formal and informal harassment of non-GOP voters, strategic voter registration requirements, and demagoguery about voter fraud rather than voter suppression. In other words, Texas.

For the nation as a whole, it will mean “The Great Divorce.” Purple states with the GOP in the dominant position will keep from going violet by passing laws that cause potential Dem voters to congregate either in cities (that can be gerrymandered out of power) or to leave the purple states entirely. If the latter happens, then high-population states may be overwhelmingly Dem (and the US as a whole might be overwhelmingly Dem), but the GOP will hold control of the Senate and Electoral College, and hence SCOTUS and the Presidency.

Levitzky and Ziblatt laid out the plan that Trump started to follow in his first term, and he’ll complete it this time. Important to competitive authoritarianism is control of the media, so we should expect that Trump will immediately go after Bezos (assuming he hasn’t already—hence WaPo’s refusal to endorse Harris). Putin used a combination of extortion and threats of prosecution for tax fraud to get rid of critical media—that’s probably the route it will take.

Not all critical media will be silenced; competitive authoritarianism is about looking like a democracy. But, they will certainly be corralled and underfed.

Friendly media will continue to promote a narrative of existential war (demagoguery), victimized “conservatives” (in-group favoritism), snobby elitists (resentment), and aggression/corruption as justified self-defense (projection).

Welcome to Texas.

[The wikipedia article says the term was first used in 1967, but Wilbur Cash used it in his 1941 Mind of the South.]

Why can’t you get Trump supporters to engage in a reasonable conversation about Trump and his policies?

Book cover, Deliberating War, Patricia Roberts-Miller

They believe that their support of Trump is reasonable, and that it isn’t reasonable not to support him for two reasons (so to speak): 1) their media gives them “reasons” to support him; 2) their media gives them “reasons” to refuse to listen to anyone who disagrees.

And all of those “reasons” are unreasonable. The lowest bar for having a reasonable position is: you are open to persuasion on it, you’ve considered the best opposition arguments, and you hold all positions on the issue to the same standards of proof, civility, logic.

Trump supporters fail every single one of those standards. So, why don’t they notice that failure? There are several relevant factors. One is a misunderstanding about what it means to be reasonable (aka, the rational-irrational split). The second, and the point of this post, is that they’re inoculated against being reasonable about their support of Trump.

“Inoculation” is a metaphor that scholars of propaganda use for the strategy of getting people not to listen to non in-group arguments. [The in-group isn’t “the group in power” but “the group you’re in.”] If I am trying to vote for Chester, and I’m worried you might vote for Hubert, then I will—like exposing someone to cowpox so that their body rejects smallpox—try to train you to reject pro-Hubert arguments by misrepresenting them, nut-picking (equating Hubert with some unhinged or extreme critic of Chester), motivism (saying all critics of Chester are jealous, sad, or have bad motives), taking quotes out of context, or just plain lying about Hubert. If I’m successful, then, when confronted with strong arguments for Hubert and his policies, you’ll reject them without even listening.

I’ll give two examples. Trump supporters believe that the 2020 election was stolen, although the legal cases making that claim (including before Trump-appointed judges) have overwhelmingly lost, generally on the grounds that they have little to no merit or evidence. Trump supporters don’t know the outcome of these cases because their media doesn’t tell them. (Trump supporters open to a reasonable discussion about this can email me. They aren’t. They won’t.)

Second, your Trump supporting family and friends are probably completely supportive of anti-DEI policies, which they conflate with CRT. And the argument against CRT is an illogical argument by association. It runs like this: All concerns about inclusion are really CRT, and CRT can be associatively (not reasonably) related to some Marxists; therefore, if anyone indicates concerns about inclusion, they’re CRT, and, therefore, you shouldn’t listen to them—they’re Marxist.

Argument by association is unreasonable. The CRT argument has the same logic as: God is love; love is blind; Stevie Wonder is blind; therefore Stevie Wonder is God.

Or, more to the point, Nazis believed in the Great Replacement narrative; Tucker Carlson advocates the Great Replacement narrative; therefore, Tucker Carlson is a Nazi.

But Trump supporters only consider argument by association reasonable when it confirms what they believe. That isn’t reasonable. They might provide data that look like reasons, but their argument isn’t reasonable.

When inoculation works, and it often does, it means that you are trained to listen to people in terms of a binary—are they with me, or against me. If they give any sign of not being fully supportive of Chester, then they must support Hubert, and that makes them a squirrel-loving communist who probably kicks little dogs for fun. And that binary thinking goes to the very source—they only get information from sources that support Trump, so they don’t even know what the best opposition arguments are.

Trump media, pundits, and rhetors aren’t the only people to engage in inoculation. A lot of demagoguery does, all over the political and cultural spectrum.

Political parties and figures, advertisers, salespeople, even manipulative individuals engage in inoculation only because they know that they’re unlikely to persuade people if their audience gives a fair hearing to the various opposition positions and critics. Inoculation is not only unreasonable; it is a pragmatic admission that the entire case is unreasonable. If you have to lie to make your case, you have a bad case.