demagoguery Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Demagoguery (again)

demagogic books of various kinds and perspectives

Many years ago, when I was first teaching about demagoguery, a high school friend got in touch with me. He was angry that one of my course documents said that a politician he admired had engaged in demagoguery at some point. The friend said that was “unfair,” without giving any evidence that my clear definition of demagoguery did not apply to his hero. Even defenders of this politician characterize his early rhetoric as demagoguery.

But my high school friend’s reaction seems reasonable from within a popular understanding of demagoguery. The most common way to think about demagoguery is that it is something that demagogues do. It’s an identity issue: a political figure is, or is not a demagogue. And demagogues are bad people with bad motives who use bad rhetoric to persuade the gullible masses to support bad policies.

That’s a bad way to think about demagoguery. For one thing, it’s rabidly self-serving. If demagogues are bad people, and their followers are gullible, then we are never going to identify beloved in-group rhetors as demagogues.

They (out-groups) have demagogues; We (our in-groups) have excellent communicators.

I’ve described elsewhere how I ended up on demagoguery, and why I’m more interested in cultures of demagoguery than individual demagogues.

My argument is that there are always individuals engaged in demagoguery; when demagoguery is likely to lead to authoritarian figures or disastrous policies is when there is a culture of demagoguery—when it’s common for major sources of information to frame policy disagreements as really a zero-sum existential, even apocalyptic, battle between Us and Them, when inclusive deliberation is treated as a trap set by villains, a weakness, a step down the slippery slope to [dogs lying with cats! Tattoos being legally required! The in-group being forced into FEMA camps!].

The important point about a culture of demagoguery, whether it’s how a neighborhood mailing list treats issues, or a nation faced with thinking about going to war, is that such a culture prohibits reasonable policy deliberation in favor of mobilizing a base to hate some hobgoblin. That mobilizing consists of rhetoric that says that:
1) the situation is simultaneously dire and simple; the urgency of the situation means that we should not deliberate.
2) our situation is not a complicated one in which there are various options we should consider, but a simple and urgent situation in which the right course of action is obvious to every and any reasonable and good person.
3) therefore, every manly, faithful, and reasonable person knows what the right course of action (i.e., policy) is.
4) because “the ill” or “need” is so obvious, anyone asking that we engage in deliberation about the proposed plan (in terms of feasibility, solvency, unintended consequences, costs) is a weak, overly-intellectual, effeminate, indecisive, cowardly villain or dupe who isn’t taking the “ill” seriously.
5) Therefore, when They argue plan, We argue need. Over and over, exaggerating or fabricating the threat if necessary.
6) And,because the situation is dire, and there are villains out there trying to seduce you into believing their lies, you should only get your information from in-group sources. Any rhetor, source, or information that complicates or contradicts what in-group media is saying is “biased.”

Because what matters is the culture of demagoguery, the solution is not deeper commitment to a purer and more fanatical in-group and its preferred policy, relying even more on in-group sources, or getting defensive about political figures we like, but doing the work necessary to have a broader understanding of policy options. We respond to demagoguery by getting out of demagogic cultures.

How I ended up defining demagoguery as I do

train wreck — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montparnasse_derailment

Why does demagoguery matter? And why does it matter how we define it?

Those two questions are actually in reverse order of importance. People sometimes seem to think that the meaning of a word was baked into the physical matter of the universe, and so has One Meaning To Rule Them All. But, very few terms have only one meaning, and concepts often have disputed meanings. So, what are we trying to do by defining a term.. Often, it’s just so we can agree on referents and thereby communicate more clearly.

If we share a definition of cats that makes them different from dogs, then your story about a “cat” climbing a tree is plausible and maybe even boring. If I think the word “cat” refers to dogs, I might find your story unbelievable and shocking. I would also be dubious about your story if I thought you were referring to a “Cat”—that is, a Caterpillar tractor.

There are consequences of definitions. How terms like “citizen,” “murder,” “minor,” “disabled” are defined can have life-changing consequences.

So, what are we doing when we try to define demagoguery?

For many people who write about demagoguery, it’s about trying to understand how a bad person came to power, mobilize a base, and overthrew democratic norms. So, they look back through history at individuals of whom they disapprove who did those things (or nearly did), and try to see what they had in common. They start with the individuals already on their list of “bad people who did bad things” and then look at the rhetoric. (This is also true of a lot of the political scientists who write about populism.)

I came around to demagoguery via a different route.

I was the kind of kid who turned over rocks to see what was there. My father was a pathologist, and sometimes took me to his lab that had various samples in jars of problematic specimens. I think he was trying to persuade me to become a doctor, but he unintentionally persuaded me that looking at how things go wrong is necessary for understanding what it might mean for things to go right.

I’ve said this elsewhere, but, when I was a graduate student in rhetoric (I have four degrees in it), most scholars seemed to be focused on times that rhetors changed history in positive ways. I unintentionally followed the footsteps of my father, and looked at a debate that should have been a clear win for the group that lost. The decision to dam and flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley was a bad decision; it violated the principles of a national park; it was the most expensive option; the arguments for why it was good not only involved lying about the costs of the various options, but imagined physically impossible improvements. They weren’t bad people, but those were bad arguments.

It was a moment of a complete failure in public deliberation. It was a train wreck because the frame for policy deliberation at the time (efficiency) didn’t allow for the kind of argument that John Muir was trying to make. His arguments about the sacrality of some spaces, the importance of spaces of renewal, the notion that beauty was itself a public good, and even a different sense of who should benefit and how from publics lands were just dismissed, often on the grounds of the kind of person he was.

And the disagreement was much more complicated than either he or the major advocates of the dam acknowledged. It wasn’t two sides. It could look like it was two sides, since it was, ultimately, whether San Francisco should be allowed to dam and flood the valley or not, but it was actually a lot of groups (a corrupt water company, Progressives who hoped to make a point about public ownership of basic needs, a fairly loony and thoroughly dishonest [or maybe incompetent] engineer tasked with providing numbers that no one checked, boosters who wanted a splashy exposition, conservationists v. preservationists).

When I was writing my dissertation about John Muir and the Hetch Hetchy Valley debate, the dominant narrative about American policies in regard to nature was by a really, really sloppy scholar who had a binary narrative in which Christians and Christianity were the cause of American exploitation of nature. So, since I didn’t have great mentors at that time, I decided that my first book would be a refutation of his argument by writing a history of American attitudes toward nature, showing that it wasn’t a binary, let alone that Christians and Christianity were the villains.

I started with the 17th century American Puritans (where he started), and it turned out that not only was their attitude toward nature pretty complicated, but that they wrecked a lot of trains.

I’ll spare you the whole narrative, but what it comes down to is that my area of expertise ended up being times when communities had all the information they needed in order to make good decisions, and they didn’t. They wrecked the train.

It was never the case of a spell-binding individual who hypnotized a passive public into supporting policies they would never otherwise have supported. It was never about a rhetor who swept a people in his wake.

While there often were powerful people who did mobilize a base, they were just the scum on the top of a wave that wasn’t caused by any single individual. In many cases (e.g., eugenics, anti-immigration legislation, slavery, segregation, Japanese internment, various unnecessary wars), there wasn’t an individual primarily responsible for the bad decisions. The go-to example of a demagogue (Hitler) was notoriously uninventive in the claims he was making about Jews, WWI, and so on. These disastrous decisions weren’t one forced by the masses over the objections and resistance of the elite or experts. In the cases when individuals did end up front and center (when the culture of demagoguery enabled a charismatic leadership situation, as in the case of Hitler), that leader rose because they had elite support. They also always had experts on their side.

So what struck me in the various cases was that, while they didn’t have in common some individual rhetor who transmogrified a public, they did have a similar rhetorical culture—they had similar ways of framing deliberation (sometimes in general and sometimes just about one topic). There was no such thing as a complicated problem. The conflict was between good people who saw what the obvious right answer was and people who were stupid, corrupt, duped, or just plain spit from the bowels of Satan. Much of the rhetoric was about decision-making—that what was needed was not some kind of careful review of the information, inclusive deliberation, consideration of long-term consequences but strength of will, fanatical loyalty to the in-group and in-group representatives, silencing or expelling/exterminating) the Out-group and its stooges, mobilizing (or silencing) any non in-group members, and full commitment to whatever policies seemed to most oriented toward domination and extermination. These communities emphasized believing rather than thinking, let alone listening. They were also communities in which it was easy to remain in a monologic informational world—so, even if there were diverse media options (that is, not all media advocated the same message), it was difficult and sometimes nearly impossible for an individual to hear them all. People were in informational enclaves, perhaps by choice, and perhaps because of region or access or something else.

Once I started looking at it this way, it became clear that it was a question of degrees of several factors (described at the beginning of Rhetoric and Demagoguery). So, a community might drift into this kind of rhetorical culture briefly or on one issue, with no particular harm, and possibly even benefit (as John Muir did with his article on the Hetch Hetchy Valley). Demagoguery isn’t necessarily insincere (in fact, I’d guess it’s most often very sincere), and not restricted to bad people (Earl Warren did a lot of good things). Looking at demagoguery is part of what persuaded me of the fundamental toxicity of the left/right way of talking about politics. Where would one put Theodore Bilbo, Earl Warren, or LBJ on that continuum?

Because I am constitutionally averse to inventing new terms, I not tocome up with a new term for the kind of rhetoric and rhetorical culture, but instead to adopt the existing term closest to what I was describing: demagoguery. (I sometimes regret that decision.)

That’s why I’m not interested in demagogues, I don’t think people who engage in demagoguery are necessarily evil, I don’t even think demagoguery is always bad. The more that a culture is demagogic, the more that powerful rhetors engage in demagoguery, the more that there is a dominant demagoguery about a specific group, and the more that people are in informational enclaves, the more likely that train is headed to the station. And not in a good way.
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Lying about Talarico

showing full version of a Talarico quote

One of the ways it’s possible to know that a political group is frightened is when they start to lie about opponents.

As far as I can tell, a political group, media, pundit, or whatever lies about what the opponent has said when they’re very frightened that the opponent might win, and they think they will lose if they try to make their case via reasonable and ethical responses. In other words, they misrepresent (a polite word for “lie”) about the stances of their opponent because they don’t have a reasonable response. If they had a reasonable response, they wouldn’t have to lie.

I’ll say it again for the people in the back: Lying and misrepresenting is an admission that you don’t have a reasonable argument.

One way of admitting you don’t have a reasonable argument is this meme about Talarico. Much pro-GOP media misrepresented his argument. Either that media/pundit/political figure deliberately lied about what Talarico said, or they’re too stupid to understand how doors work.

So, those of you with anti-Talarico people in your world who shared that lie, here’s how I think they will respond when told, very clearly, that they believe and share information from sources that lie.

Reasonable people stop getting their information from that media/pundit. (Why I stopped getting information, or passing along links, from Mother Jones, the Heritage Foundation, or Occupy Democrats without vetting them carefully first).

If you had an uncle who lied to you about things, if you’re a reasonable person, you would stop believing him. If, on the other hand, you had some notion of fanatical loyalty to family, you might choose to keep believing him no matter how many times he lies to you. That would not be reasonable. You might choose to do so because of values like family loyalty, or he’s got a lot of money that you’re hoping to inherit. I think one of the most powerful motivations for continuing to believe your lying uncle is that you’ve repeated his stories in public, and so you’d be publicly admitting you were duped. If other people told you he was lying, and you refused to believe then, then (especially if you’re the kind of person who thinks of interpersonal interactions as domination and submission), you’d be particularly motivated to refuse to admit what you now know to be true. It might feel like submitting to the others.

We all get duped at times. A reasonable person responds to being told they’re repeating information from a lying source by saying, “Whoops!” And then they’re more careful about what they repeat from that that source.

Here’s how unreasonable people reply to having it pointed out to them that they’re sharing information from a media source that is lying/deliberately misrepresenting. (I learned this by arguing with Stalinists many years ago): “So, what, Dems do that too.” Even if every Dem source also lied and misrepresented, it still means you’re getting your information from a source that lies. Or is stupid. You don’t have to abandon that source—just keep those grains of salt nearby.

-“Well, even if this quote is misleading, he’s still a bad person.” He might still be someone for whom you don’t want to vote, but you’re still getting your information from media/pundits that lie to you.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at various definitions of a “reasonable” argument, and I’ve ended up deciding that Jesus said it best. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” So, instead of trying to justify believing sources that consistently lie and misrepresent, ask yourself? Are you okay when other people lie about or misrepresent what you’ve said? Is that how you want to be treated?

The issue is that you are getting your information from a source that will lie and try to fool you, and the various ways of swatting away that issue are unreasonable. But they’re more than that. Being okay with treating Talarico in a way you wouldn’t want you or your political figures treated means being okay with telling Jesus he got it wrong.

If Talarico is that bad, there’s no need to lie about him or deliberately misrepresent what he said. Lying and misrepresenting is a pragmatic admission that he’s pretty good.

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.