demagoguery 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.]

Demagoguery and Emotions

Demagogic books from various perspectives

I’ve been writing about demagoguery for twenty years, and I think just today I’ve figured out how to explain something that has long bothered me about the “demagoguery is an appeal to emotions” notion. In addition to the problems I’ve mentioned before—that assumes it’s possible to have a stance on politics that is devoid of emotion (a person who didn’t care about anything would have no basis for preferring one outcome over another and hence no policy preferences), the rational-irrational binary is itself irrational, people should be emotional about politics—there is a performative contradiction in saying that demagoguery is bad and demagoguery is emotional.

Many of the condemnations of demagoguery that assume the problem is that it’s an emotional appeal talk about the dangers, immorality, damage, and threats that a specific demagogue presents—they appeal to fear. And many of them are pretty dang emotional in doing so. Often by “emotional rhetoric” people mean style or tone (e.g., highly figurative language, especially such figures as hyperbole, superlatives, binaries). But, it’s quite possible (and often very moving) to make a fear-mongering irrational argument in plain style and an “unemotional” tone.

More important, the identification of someone as a demagogue tends to be grounded in emotion; that is, whether they like or dislike the rhetor and/or the rhetor’s agenda. Only out-group rhetors are demagogues.

So, if emotions are bad in public discourse, and appeals to emotion are demagogic, then it’s always demagogic to call someone a demagogue.

And that’s why I think we should focus on demagoguery rather than demagogues, and why I have a chapter in the book on demagoguery about Earl Warren’s very unemotional tone.

What should opponents of authoritarianism do?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

[I posted this on FB, but I should have posted it here also.]

People keep asking me what opponents of our authoritarian administation should be doing, and it’s pretty straightforward in the abstract but very much up for argument in the specific:

DO WHAT HAS WORKED IN THE PAST, AND DON’T DO WHAT HAS NEVER WORKED.

Things that, as far as I know, have worked in the past under similar circumstances:
-have a big tent, make alliances, work together on the shared goal of saving democracy, make some compromises if necessary.
-try to crack the hardshell of the informational bubble that Trump supporters are in. Just try getting the information in front of them. If you have Trump supporters in your social media, post double-checked facts about Trump, ICE, and so on.
-make it personal; show how they’re supporting someone who is hurting people they love.
-you can try to point out that they’re rejecting Jesus, that they hold out-groups to much, much higher standards than they hold themselves or in-group members. (They know, and don’t care, but you can try.)
-you can try pointing out that they don’t really know what’s going on because they get their information from sources that misrepresent the situation. If you tell them something that they don’t want to hear, and they say it’s “fake news,” you can ask them if they get their information from a source that would tell them if it was true.
-support the groups who are filing the lawsuits.
-block walk, make phone calls, put up signs, subscribe to, and otherwise personally help opposition organizations and individuals, even if you disagree with them on many things.
If there are other things that you are aware have worked, do them (and tell others about them).

Here’s what, as far as I know, has never worked under these circumstances:
-violent protests;
-various versions of purifying the in-group (refusing to compromise, insisting on univocality or unanimity in terms of ideology, strategy, or policy), refusing to support anyone who isn’t fully in line with our policy agenda/rhetoric
-talking and thinking about policy disagreements in the pro-authoritarian “right/center/left” binary or continuum (a single axis)
-giving up

I’m open to persuasion about the specifics. But I’ll point out, if your response is that this post shows I’m a centrist/librul/whatev for making this argument, look again at the “what hasn’t worked” list.

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.

Demagoguery, Algae, and BSAB (again)

Recently, yet another scholar used me as an example of someone who says that demagoguery is always bad, while acknowledging that I explicitly say it isn’t. Today, a friend asked me whether Mamdani’s speech was demagoguery, since there does seem to be an us v. them. So, she asked, is demagoguery sometimes necessary for in response to demagoguery?

At base, there is the same question: is demagoguery always bad? And, as I’ve often said, the answer is no. What I say is:

Demagoguery isn’t a disease or infection; it’s more like algae in a pond. Algae can be benign—in small amounts, even helpful. But if the conditions of the pond are such that the algae begins to crowd out other kinds of pond life and ecological processes, then it creates an environment in which nothing but algae can thrive, and so more algae leads to yet more. (79)

(Also, a pet peeve is that scholars, in scholarly articles, don’t look at my scholarly version of the argument. Sheesh.) Granted, I assumed too much as to what folks knew about algae—it is necessary in a pond. So, the answer is right there: demagoguery is not always bad; it can be good, and it can be benign.

But that leads to the question: when is it benign, and when is it good?

Before I go there, though, I should first point out that it’s easy to over-identify demagoguery. What’s important about the various characteristics I’ve argued constitute demagoguery is that they’re each necessary but not sufficient. (I really wish we explicitly taught that concept—if people were more familiar with that concept, so many bad arguments would evaporate rather than persuade.) So, for instance, someone talking about Us, or Them, isn’t necessarily demagogic/demagoguery. The us v. them of demagoguery is a binary that claims to capture all possible identities into a homogeneous Us and an equally homogeneous and essentially hostile group (Them) determined on the political, civil, or physical extermination of Us.

These two groups are defined by double negation. The “Us” is the group of people hostile to Them, and Them is the group of people not Us.

That’s a confusing sentence (because I’m trying to describe a way that people are confused about politics). Imagine that Chester believes that there are two kinds of dogs: Us (dogs who hate squirrels) and Them (who are allies of squirrels). What is the proof that some dog is “Them”? That the dog is not fanatically opposed to squirrels and to anyone who doesn’t hate squirrels.

In the most worrisome form, the “us” is a group fanatically determined on the political, civil, or physical extermination of Them because They are already essentially and implacably determined on our extermination. So, any action, including preventive war, violating all the principles we claim to hold, or whatever, are justified “self-defense” based on nutpicking (using the most extreme or fringe members/statements to characterize the whole group), and/or hypotheticals (what They will do if they get the chance), projection and/or scapegoating.

So, condemning a politician (Snorg) for advocating Soviet-style communism, and saying that person is so dangerous that no one should vote for them, is not demagoguery iff Snorg really is advocating Soviet-style communism, and not some sloppy guilt by association smearing of categories. If Snorg’s policies fit the criteria set by the majority of scholars of Soviet-style communism, then, as much as that characterization might hurt the feelings of Snorg’s followers, or feel like an insult, it isn’t demagoguery.

Further, it isn’t demagoguery for critics of Snorg to condemn Snorg’s supporters for being Soviet-style communists. It isn’t demagoguery to criticize people—even vehemently—for supporting policies they actually support. If, however, Snorg’s major opponent, Flurb, characterizes the political situation as either pro-Flurb or Soviet-style communism, there are potentially problems—that is, a rhetoric of “you’re either fanatically committed to me, or you’re a Soviet-style communist.” That’s almost certainly a false binary; hence, probably demagogic.

FDR’s speech calling for war against Japan, which had already declared war on the US, was not demagoguery. It wasn’t rational-critical argumentation either, but that genre never is, and doesn’t need to be. Similarly, Churchill’s WWII speeches weren’t demagoguery (at least not the ones I’ve read) for two main reasons. First, neither Churchill nor FDR engaged in projection or scapegoating. They were condemning the self-declared enemy for what the enemy had done or was doing. Second, they were accurate in their attribution of responsibility. They talked about Hitler, the Nazis, Japan, Germany.

For instance, when FDR referred to “the Japanese” he didn’t mean some vague out-group; he meant, and said, Japanese troops, representatives, forces, political figures—people who were knowingly acting on behalf of the nation-state of Japan. When Earl Warren talked about “the Japanese,” he meant an undefined and villainous out-group, scapegoated for Pearl Harbor, and on whom all sorts of evil traits could be projected. It was demagoguery. What’s important about that distinction is that with the way FDR was using the term, whatever claim he was making could be falsified (the Japanese representative didn’t say that; Japanese troops didn’t do that). Warren’s claims about the danger of “the Japanese” in the US couldn’t be falsified because it wasn’t even clear to whom they applied.

There are lots of circumstances in which demagoguery is benign—in the book I mention Muir’s demagoguery during the Hetch Hetchy debate. As far as it being actively good, I also elsewhere mention one group engaging in demagoguery about another in service of a charity (“Let’s raise more money than those losers at Michigan!”), but also when trying to mobilize a disenfranchised and dispirited group. I don’t think that good intentions necessarily justify demagoguery—everyone thinks they’re justified. (That horrifies people when I say it, but, seriously, Hitler thought he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t, but he’s proof that thinking you’re on the side of good doesn’t mean you are.) And, mostly what I’m concerned with aren’t the individual acts of demagoguery, but what happens in a culture of demagoguery.

One last caveat: because of in-group favoritism, we tend to minimize or dismiss in-group demagoguery, saying that it was a joke, or just rhetoric, or it was justified by out-group demagoguery. We engage in a kind of bad math—as though anything even mildly demagogic by an out-group member (no matter how marginal) cancels out anything demagogic (even extremely demagogic) by an in-group member (no matter how central and powerful).

What I’m saying then is that we have to hold everyone to the same standards, but among those standards is: how much impact does this demagoguery have? How much power does this rhetor have?

If Snorg and Flurb are both Presidents or Presidential candidates, or leaders of their respective parties, then they should be held to exactly the same standards, and both should be condemned. If Snorg is a President or Presidential candidate, and Flurb is the Assistant to the Assistant Dog-Catcher in Northnorthwest Nowhere, then whatever Flurb said doesn’t mean “both sides are bad,” let alone that Snorg’s demagoguery is cancelled out. Snorg matters.

BSAB: “Both sides” and the slavery debate

cover of book on the slavery debate — https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817381257/fanatical-schemes/

As I’ve said many times, as soon as a public, media, or person frames our complicated world of policy options as either a binary or continuum of two sides, then it’s all about in- and out-groups, and our shared world of policy disagreements isn’t the kind of disagreement that can help communities come to pragmatic solutions. It’s some degree of demagoguery. Maybe it’s a horse race, maybe it’s a full-throated call for political or physical extermination. But it’s never useful for effective deliberation, about anything. Because there are never just two sides about any policy. And while one can describe our political situation as a binary or continuum, one can also rate all political figures on the basis of whether they agree with your narrow policy agenda. One can also arrange all candidates on the basis of how much they use the letter ‘E’ in their messaging. One can find a lot of ways of categorizing political figures and group commitments—that doesn’t mean those categories are useful ways to think about what policies are best for our shared world.

What framing our complicated world of policy options as a binary or continuum does is to fame is it as us v. them. And so we engage in motivism, the genus-species fallacy, and various forms of ad hominem.

Once political disagreements are framed as conflicts among various identities (either a binary or continuum), then we don’t deliberate together, and that is what is supposed to happen in a democracy. Democracy thrives for everyone when people try to work together to solve problems. They can argue, vehemently, petulantly, emotionally, but with each other.

And, really, this is something we all know to be true. The moment that a conflict in your church, family, workplace, garden club, D&D game, neighborhood mailing list, or whatever is framed as a conflict of two sides is the moment that people stop deliberating and start taking sides. They might still debate, but they aren’t deliberating. And the train is wobbling on the tracks.

Here’s an example of a time that binary/continuum was (and is) both false and poisonous: antebellum debates about slavery, and postbellum narratives about what happened. [If you want me to cite sources for everything I’m saying, go here. ]

There weren’t two sides to the debate about slavery, yet that’s how the issue is described, in everything from textbooks to popular understandings.

There were at least eleven.

1) Slavery should be expanded to all states, so that there should be no such thing as a non-slave state. In other words, they didn’t believe in states’ rights.

2) If you enslaved someone in a pro-slavery state, you should be able to take them into any state, and ignore whatever laws that state had about slavery. Again, a stance that made clear that it wasn’t about states’ rights.

[So, let’s stop pretending that slavers were pro- states’ rights. They didn’t recognize the right of a state to ban slavery. If you think I’m wrong, cite sources that show that pro-slavery rhetors thought states had the right to ban slavery. Good luck with that. Also Dred Scott. Also you’re saying that the people who called for secession were liars, since they said it was about slavery.]

3) Slavery should be allowed in current slaver states, and every additional state should be balanced in terms of slaver or not, so that anti-slavery states couldn’t have more than 50% of the Senate. (The 3/5th clause pretty much guaranteed them the House.) The electoral college also did (again, 3/5th clause), so this was not a compromise, but a pro-slavery policy, and a violation of states’ rights.

4) We should restrict slavery to current slaver states, and not let it expand.

5) Slavery will die out for economic reasons, and so there’s no reason to try to resist slavers’ actions.

6) Slavery will die out, and result in large numbers of ex-slaves, so we should “re-colonize” freed slaves (this persisted until the 20th century, since it’s essentially Theodore Bilbo’s argument).

7) We should institute a slow ban on slavery, giving slavers the opportunity to sell their enslaved people to areas where slavery was still legal. (This was done in many states).

8) We should ban slavery, and recompense slavers.

9) We should institute a slow ban slavery, recompense slavers, and return all freed slaves to Africa (not a party they were from; sometimes this proposal included second or third generation Americans).

10) We should ban slavery and not recompense slavers.

11) We should ban slavery, and fully integrate African Americans as we have other ethnicities.

Notice that five and six are not anti-slavery, but also not pro-slavery. I have trouble characterizing three or four as anti-slavery, since they were allowing slavery to continue. Pro-slavery rhetors treated those polices as anti-slavery because slavery as an economy was about buying and selling the enslaved people, so, i slavery didn’t expand, then there wouldn’t be a market, and then slavery wouldn’t be profitable. (If you want the chapter and verse on that argument, it’s here.)

Even the positions that could be characterized as anti-slavery (8-11) or pro-slavery (1-3) were substantially different from one another in important ways.

This isn’t a case where, sure, there were subtle distinctions within each of the “two sides,” but there were basically two positions. There weren’t. And, oddly enough, had the pro-slavery rhetors been willing to think and argue pragmatically about the long-term ethical and economic consequences of slavery, they wouldn’t have started an unnecessary war. (Had slaver states taken the most expensive option—free and colonize the enslaved people and be recompensed—it would have cost them less than the war they started.)

And, if at this point, you decide I’m wrong and won’t check my sources because you’ve decided I’m out-group, then you’re making the same mistake that pro-slavery rhetors did.

Because pro-slavery rhetors decided that the complicated world of possible policy options about slavery was actually a binary, they murdered people who criticized slavery, instituted a gag rule in Congress, criminalized criticism of slavery, and started a war they lost.

Pro-slavery rhetors should have taken seriously the criticisms of their position. They should have been open to pragmatic discussions about policies, instead of turning a complicated situation into a binary of identities.

What does all this have to do with the BSAB (Both Sides Are Bad) position? I’ll get to that in the next post.

Arguing like an asshole: obvious problems, and obvious solutions

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in front of a map of VN — Photo from here: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with assholes. Because I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with all sorts of people.

I was at Berkeley for many years, and argued with all sorts of people–anarchists, Democrats, environmentalists, evangelicals, feminists, Libertarians, Maoists, Moonies (they were terrible-car–crash-can’t-look-away bad at arguing), Republicans, Stalinists, Trotskyites, vegetarians. If you’re paying attention, then you’ve noticed I argued with everyone, including people with whom I agreed, but I disagreed with them on some point that seemed important to me. And some of them, even people with whom I agreed, argued in a way that I’ve come to call “arguing like an asshole.” By the way, so did I from time to time (and not everyone with whom I disagreed argued like an asshole).

Then I got on Usenet, and got to argue with (or watch arguments among) all sorts of people about all sorts of issues, from fairly trivial things (arguments about cooking methods, or dog training) to scammy (get laid fast, make money fast) to the biggest (genocide deniers or defenders). And then I drifted into other social media sites, and I took to arguing with all sorts of people with various alts. And I learned a lot about argument by doing that (also about how algorithms work, and many scams).

One of the things I learned is that, while there are some arguments that are never argued reasonably (e.g., make money fast, or get laid fast), there are assholes everywhere, albeit not evenly distributed. And that is the important point. Arguing like an asshole isn’t about what position you hold, but how you argue.

During all this time, for complicated reasons having to do with a Great Blue Heron, I was becoming a scholar of bad arguments, or, as I like to say, a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation. And by train wrecks, I don’t mean that people made decisions that turned out disastrously because they didn’t have the information they needed (e.g., they didn’t know how cholera works), but when they had enough information to make a good decision, and they rejected it. What made (and makes) them assholes is how they rejected that information they could and should have considered.

It wasn’t necessarily because they were stupid, or corrupt, or villainous. Often they were very smart and good people who were sincerely trying to do what they believed to be the right thing.

And it was interesting to me that the train wrecks involved the same ways of disagreeing that assholes at Berkeley or in social media argued.

If, at this point, you want me to tell you the simple solution to the problem of how people (often very good people, and people whom we should admire) made disastrously bad decisions, and you want me to put it into 25 words or less, you can skip to the end. If you skip to the end and decide I’m wrong because you don’t agree with my conclusions, then you win the first gold star of assholery. Let’s call it the McNamara medal.

There are two parts to this error. First is believing that all complicated problems can be cogently and clearly summarized, and then persuasively communicated to any person, without having to go through the data; and that good and smart people can instantly recognize whether an argument is true without having to work through the reasoning. (In other words, that no situation is so complex that it can’t be easily and quickly communicated to smart people.)

Second, and related, is that the cogent and accurate summary of a problem necessarily leads to an equally cogent and easily communicable solution. The correct solution to any problem—no matter how apparently complicated—is obvious to smart and good people.

This is one of the most popular ways that countries, political leaders, business leaders, and others wreck a train: assume that every problem has a straightforward solution that is obvious to reasonable people (i.e., them). The problem is exactly as it looks to them, and the solution is the one that seems obvious to them. And if you can’t articulate the problem and solution in such a way that it’s obvious to any and everyone, then you have no clue what you’re doing. If the McNamaras of the world get pushback, oppositions, or counterarguments, they conclude that their opponents/critics are too stupid to understand an obviously true argument or too corrupt to accept it. Or both.

Assholes, regardless of the political, religious, or whatever affiliation, decide that an argument is right or wrong on the basis of whether it confirms what they already believe. Their beliefs are non-falsifiable, not in the sense that they’re so true that no one can prove them false, but in the sense that their attachment to those beliefs is not up for reconsideration. (What’s funny is that they do actually change their minds, as well as have a lot of contradictory beliefs, as well as beliefs they believe they have, but that have no influence on their behavior—we all have some of those–but I’ll get to that much later.)

There’s still debate as to whether the US could have won in Vietnam without paying an unacceptable moral, political, and economic cost, but there isn’t debate about whether McNamara’s strategy of limited war with limited means for a limited time could have worked. It didn’t. It couldn’t. Even he later admitted that. But, when he did, he failed to mention that he was told so at the time, and given all the evidence necessary to come to that conclusion as early as January of 1963.

McNamara wasn’t particularly vehement in his arguing, and he always had lots of data, but he argued like an asshole.

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.

Arminianism, Antinomianism, and American Politics

My first introduction to American religious debates was a course taught by a prof who came from Yale’s American Studies program (I ended up taking several courses from him), and, as is oddly appropriate for someone from Yale, he was deep into the theological disputes of the 17th century—Yale was founded because of those disputes.

I’ll mention it was a great class. It changed my life, actually. We read nothing but histories of the Plymouth Plantation, beginning with Bradford, and ending with Perry Miller. It was a rhetoric of history class—this was 1978 or so (maybe 1980?), so pretty early for historiography classes for undergrads.

He emphasized that the major theological/political/eschatological debates of the 17th and early 18th centuries were both very serious and oddly binary. They were serious in that there were serious punishments for being in the wrong group (up to hanging), and yet, the criteria for heresy were incoherent. Later, when I learned more about demagoguery, I realized that the New England authorities like Winthrop or Cotton Mather engaged in pretty bog standard demagogic practices. I wrote a fairly boring (aka, very scholarly) book about it, and it shows up again in the introduction to a more recent (and less boring) book, but the short version is that authorities were committed to a theory of Biblical interpretation: Scripture is not ambiguous; it has a clear meaning that any reasonable person can understand; if there is disagreement, then it means that someone is wrong (and possibly in league with the devil), so expel or hang them.

It’s common among a lot of Christians to say that Scripture is absolutely clear, and their interpretation is indisputable. But, if that’s the case, why are there so many major disagreements and different interpretations on major issues? Paul, pseudo-Paul, Augustine, various church fathers, Luther, Calvin, and so many other major figures in Christianity disagree about central questions—such as whether to read Genesis literally, what the most important rules are, the role of grace.

So, what people are saying by asserting that their interpretation of Scripture is undeniable and obvious to any good Christian is that they’re a better Christian than Paul, and so on. If I’m particularly grumpy, I ask how good their Hebrew or Aramaic is.

I only once got a response. The person said that those people didn’t have the benefits of science we now have. Since that person’s whole position was about rejecting current science, I still have no clue what they meant. My drifting around in weird parts of the internet has a lot of interactions like that.

A particularly complicated problem in Christianity has long been the faith v. works problem. Paul and pseudo-Paul worried about it a lot; Luther worried about it more, and Calvin even more. One response is that you can get to heaven by following the laws, and faith doesn’t matter. Over time, people took to calling that Arminianism, and sometimes Judaism (Nirenberg‘s book is really good on the latter tradition). Neither Jews nor Arminius ever advocated works alone, but lots of beliefs are characterized by the name of someone who didn’t actually advocate those beliefs, and often actually condemned.[1]

Both Luther and Calvin believed that if you only behaved well because you didn’t want to go to Hell, then you were going to Hell. [If you think about that, it raises some serious questions about a lot of current proselytizing rhetoric.] I’m not sure there really have been any sects in the Judeo-Christian traditino who preached that works alone would save you–the closest I can get is the view that various theologians have criticized (behave well or you’ll go to Hell), or maybe the “fake it till you make it” argument, but the latter is a stretch.

At the other extreme is what’s usually called antinomianism (nomos is Greek for “the law”). That heresy says that it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you have faith. Your faith cleanses your actions of all sins. While it’s hard to find many people who openly advocate Arminianism, antinomianism is more common (e.g., Rasputin, various cult leaders, abusers).

The New England Puritans (who were not, by the way, the first settlers of what is now the US, nor the first Europeans to settle in the US, nor even the first British people to establish a permanent settlement in the US) struggled with the antinomian/Arminian problem. It is a complicated problem—if you do the right things only because you’re trying to get yourself to heaven, were those acts of faith? Or just ways of looking out for yourself? If you have perfect faith that you are saved, and therefore believe that you can do anything you want…that’s a problem.

Here’s the important point: the early New England colony authorities resolved that complicated problem by saying that faith was the same as behaving as church authorities thought one should behave, and having the opinions they thought one should have. I read a lot of Puritan sermons. They didn’t pay much attention to the gospels, focusing more on Jeremiah, Isaiah, Psalms, and some Paul.[2]

For complicated reasons, at one point in my life I found myself spending a fair amount of time listening to a “conservative” (they aren’t and weren’t conservative, but reactionary) “Christian” radio station. And it seemed to me a weird combination of antinomian and Arminian.

Their major message was that you needed to have complete faith that Jesus has saved you from your sins–that faith frees you from paying attention to various laws he laid down. So, that’s the antinomian part. But, getting to heaven requires that you rigidly follow various laws, most of which appear to have been selected without a clear exegetical method (unless the exegetical “method” was “what supports my policy agenda”). That’s the Arminian part.

It seemed to me both antinomian and Arminian.

Have faith in Jesus, but ignore what he clearly said. I’ll give one of the most glaring examples. Jesus said do unto others as you would have done unto you. That is very clearly a rejection of what’s called “in-group favoritism.” But, many Christians are open that there should be in-group favoritism, that people who vote like them, believe what they believe, have their background, and so on should not be treated like others; they should be held to lower standards of behavior than non in-group members. They advocate worse punishment for non in-group members for the same actions; they want basic rights to be restricted to in-group members (“freedom of religion for me but not thee”); they express outrage at non in-group behavior that they dismiss or rationalize in in-group members.

They’re antinomian when it comes to Jesus, but Arminian when it comes to their rules.

[1] The accusation that some person or belief is “Armininian” has as much to do with Jabocus Arminius as many accusations of “Marxist” have to do with Marx, or “Freudian” practices have to do with Freud. So, this isn’t about what Arminius actually said, but about the rhetoric of early American New England Puritans. This heresy was often attributed to Catholics, but, as Nirenberg shows, has most often been associated with Jews.

[2] As another aside, I have to mention that the proof texts for Puritan sermons seemed to me—when I was working on this, there wasn’t the option of just searching digital sources—rarely had anything from the Gospels as a proof text. (Tbh, I think it was never, but I avoid using that term.) Lots of Isiaih , Proverbs, Jeremiah, Deuteronomy. I think there might have been pseudo-Paul, but I’m not sure. I hope someone has since done that quantitative research—it’d be interesting to see if there’s a correlation between purist/authoritarian self-identified Christian churches and not citing Christ.

The binary/continuum of left v. right assumes what’s at stake.

It assumes that all political disagreements are really a zero-sum conflict among various kinds of people. As soon as politics is imagined that way, then we’re in a conflict about dominance—which group should be in power?

It’s also wildly ahistorical, and simultaneously false and non-falsifiable.

When I point this out to people, instead of responding to my criticisms (it’s proto-demagogic, ahistorical, false and non-falsifiable), I’m told, “Well, everyone uses it, so it must be true.” In other words, they don’t try to show it’s accurate, except to the degree that it’s self-fulfilling—if the media frames all policy disagreements as fights between two identities, people will think in those terms. That same reduction has often happened with specific policy debates—what was actually a complicated array of various possible policy options was reduced to a binary or continuum of identities (disagreements as varied as the Sicilian Expedition, antebellum slavery, or the Hetch Hetchy Debate).

Everyone agreed with the miasmic explanation of disease. That didn’t mean it was true. The miasma v. germ theory binary also wasn’t true, but taken as a given for years.

The fantasy that our policy disagreements are accurately described in terms of a single axis, even if we’re only thinking about domestic policies regarding a social safety net (so ignoring foreign policy, issues of civil rights, environmental protection) fallaciously conflates two very distinct axes: attitude toward pluralism and support for social safety net policies. A person who is in favor of the strongest of social safety nets is not necessarily someone who refuses to settle for anything less, or who believes that everyone who disagrees with them is spit from the bowels of Satan. A third-way neoliberal (a centrist) is not necessarily any more open to compromise and negotiation, or any less oriented toward thinking of everyone who disagrees as having been spit from the bowels of Satan.

Extremity of policy is not necessarily the same as extremity of commitment, let alone extremity of opposition to dissent.

The horse race/tug-of-war frame for policy disagreements sells papers and evades complicated questions about objectivity, so it was adopted in the 20th century by major media as an apparently “fair” way to cover politics (Jamieson and Patterson have both written about this for years). When the “fairness doctrine” was abandoned, hate-talk radio hosts and openly partisan media used the “us against them” frame to promote the GOP in a way that evaded engaging in reasonable policy deliberation. They advocated policies and candidates largely on the grounds that the hobgoblin of “libruls” hated those policies and candidates.

A person might be opposed to wars of choice for reasons, and opposed to the death penalty and abortion for similar reasons, and in favor of easy access to effective birth control and accurate sex education for the same reasons—thus, they have principles that they apply across policies, yet not in ways that put them in a neat place on a single axis of left v. right. But, were we to think about politics in terms of policies, we’d argue policies, and the GOP especially doesn’t want policy debates. Hence their reliance on a politics of negation—vote for us because we aren’t libruls.

Thinking about politics as a tug-of-war between two sides is necessarily connected to a way of thinking about policy disagreements—good people all know what the right policies are on every issue, and anyone who disagrees does so because they’re a bad person (they’re at the wrong place on the axis). Anyone who disagrees is spit from the bowels of Satan.

So, what could be reasonable and very difficult disagreements about the complicated and uncertain world of policy—what are our options, the relative ads and disads of various policy options, the potential consequences, the feasibility and likelihood of success—become accusations and counter-accusations of bad identity. And the less reasonable are our policy disagreements, the more the GOP benefits, since it ceased engaging in reasonable policy deliberation in the early 80s.

And, to be clear, by reasonable policy deliberation, I don’t mean simply being able to give reasons. Anyone can give reasons for anything. I mean putting forward internally consistent arguments that engage the smartest opposition arguments, and that meet the barest minimum of policy argumentation.

[When I say that, sometimes people think I mean a way of arguing that excludes personal experience, or necessarily marginalizes already marginalized groups. It doesn’t. On the contrary, it’s people in power who are most likely to fail to meet those standards because they don’t have to—as shown by the difference in reasonableness of advocates and critics of slavery. The latter were far more reasonable than the former; even though the former claimed to have positions grounded in logic and science. The same was true in of the advocates v. critics of segregation—the latter had the more reasonable rhetoric and position, despite the former’s ability to cite experts and authorities.]

Because the GOP is now the party of anti-libs, the more that opponents of GOP policies accept the (false) frame of policy disagreements as a continuum of left v. right, the more we empower pro-GOP rhetoric. The more that opponents of the GOP argue about our situation in terms of a conflict among identities—whether “centrists.” “leftists,” or “liberals” are more to blame, the more we help the GOP.

All the GOP has to do is foment conflict among its opponents, and I think they (and, tbh, Russian trolls) have done that quite effectively.

My reading of history says that we won’t get out of this by blaming other opponents of authoritarianism, or by trying to purify the opposition, or purify our commitment to a single policy agenda. I think we need to stop gatekeeping identity, and make a coalition of people opposed to GOP authoritarianism, and work together to save democracy. I think that’s the only thing that works in this situation. But I’m open to persuasion on that. Not by deductive arguments about what should work, nor arguments that X must work because what the “Dems” have been doing hasn’t worked (that’s the fallacy of the false dilemma), but arguments from history as to what has worked in similar situations.