Tag: demagoguery

Avocado toast, Orwell, homelessness, and prosperity gospel

When I was teaching first year courses in argumentation, one of my favorite texts for sparking interesting arguments about poverty, homelessness, and working conditions was George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. His description of poverty usefully vexed a tendency to approach the issues in “liberal v. conservative” ways, and helped students move beyond thinking about an economic issue in terms of feeling or not feeling “sorry” for the homeless, let alone overworked and underpaid dishwashers. The book shifted the argument from whether the homeless are or are not “bringing it on themselves” (that is, whether their identity is villain or victim) to policy arguments about strategies. On the whole, the self-identified Christians in the classes at Berkeley tended to argue for some kind of intervention, with disagreements (even among themselves) as to what it should be. I liked that. I don’t like binaries.

I moved to a much more conservative region, and discovered the book didn’t thwart the “they brought it on themselves and therefore don’t deserve help” argument, for some self-identified Christian students. The first time it happened, the student (call zir Chester) was really angry with Orwell. Chester said something like, “Well, of course he’s homeless; he’s wasting money.” My response was, “How so?” Chester answered, “He talks about smoking, so clearly he’s spending money on cigarettes.” Other students pointed out that Orwell very clearly said he (and other “tramps” as he called them) were picking up discarded cigarette butts, and smoking them, or picking out the last bits of tobacco and re-rolling them. There was no evidence he was spending money.

Chester argued that meant that Orwell and the tramps must have been spending money on rolling paper. Some students argued that we don’t know that, but one student (call zir Hubert) said, “Even if he was, that would have been a few pennies.” Chester said, “He should have saved those pennies.” I liked Chester a lot, but at this point even I was confused—“And done what with them?” Chester said, “Save them.” Hubert asked how—Orwell couldn’t open an account with a few pennies, and it wasn’t as though he could buy stock (or whether buying stock at that point was even a smart investment—this was the 30s). Chester brushed off any of those questions about how, practically, Orwell could have taken the few pennies he might (or might not) have spent on rolling paper (or perhaps even tobacco) and invested it for financial security.

That was my first exposure to prosperity gospel.

Orwell’s situation wasn’t some consequence of his personal failings or lack of work ethic; it was the consequence of a world economic situation, and the ways his government was (or was not) responding to them. Hubert didn’t see how Orwell’s refusing to smoke would change the worldwide and systemic factors that caused homelessness and poverty—Hubert wanted to know what to do with the pennies.

The Huberts of the world now post on Facebook and tweet about how bizarre it is that some political figure argues that “millennials” or “urban poor” (do I hear whistling?) or “that person using WIC” (that whistling is really loud) or “immigrants” (why are my dogs barking?) aren’t really poor because they eat avocado toast, have nice shoes, bought chips, have i-phones.

The Huberts of the world point out that there is no practical action a person could take that would mean forgoing avocado toast, chips, i-phones, or nice shoes would enable that person to gain financial security.

But for the Chesters of the world, getting economic security isn’t an pragmatic (and economic) system of taking money from one place and investing it; it’s a spiritual system (an issue of “character” or “will”). Orwell’s mistake, for Chester, wasn’t spending money on smoking—it was smoking. Smoking is an indulgence.

In this world, smoking, avocado toast, nice shoes, chips, i-phones are all indulgences. If you are the sort of person who engages in indulgences, you will never be rewarded with wealth. Had Orwell refused to smoke, he would have … I don’t know, something. This whole way of thinking seems to be so blazingly irrational, and theologically indefensible, that I’m still unclear on the relationship of claims.

This notion that being a person who resists smoking (but doesn’t always resist sexual assault) also has to do with the current fundagelical obsession with control (largely Strict Father Morality). In this world, good people, especially good men, control their desire for indulgence (they also control others, but that’s a different post). If they are in control, they are rewarded with wealth (which, oddly enough, enables them to have all the avocado toast they want, but no one claims this ideology is internally consistent). The assumption is that being a rigid person who believes in God and engages in strict self-control means you will prosper.

So, it isn’t about what you would do with the money you saved by not smoking or not eating avocado toast. It’s about being the sort of person who doesn’t indulge in smoking or avocado toast. We don’t need an argument about avocado toast; we need an argument about prosperity gospel.

Conservative Christians’ support for Trump isn’t hypocrisy

[Image from here]

Many people are dismayed and shocked at how self-described conservative Christians are justifying our government’s heartless treatment of immigrant children. Since most (perhaps all) of these “Christians” are descendants of people who made exactly the same decision they are now characterizing as “irresponsible parenting,” it’s tempting to call their stance hypocritical.

It isn’t. There is no conflict between American conservative evangelical Christians’ support for an authoritarian, anti-democratic, corrupt, bigot and their fundamental values. Those are their values. They’ve always supported bigoted authoritarianism. They always do.

Self-identified conservatives are, as Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s research shows, if they consider themselves patriotic, “more likely to set stricter boundaries on who counts as American and therefore  to limit who should receive the benefits of group membership.” (98) What Theiss-Morse calls “strong identifiers” (that is, people who identify strongly with their in-group)  tend to rely heavily on stereotypes about groups. So, people who self-identify as conservative evangelical Christians are more likely to believe stereotypes about out-groups (immigrants, poor people, non-whites, non-conservatives) as lazy, indulgent, weak, and therefore not deserving of support.

Self-identified conservative Christians read Scripture as advocating an us v. them attitude that calls on Christians to protect “us.” And they define “us” by political, not Scriptural, agenda. And certainly not by what Christ emphasized.

Look, for instance, at a defense  of how “evangelicals” are supporting Trump . And notice, first, that the author assumes that all evangelicals are white, and politically conservative. In other words, as I said, Brown’s sense of “us” (which he falsely identifies as evangelicals) is actually his very narrow sense of who is truly “us.” The no true Scotsman fallacy.

Brown’s argument is fallacious and authoritarian to the core. It’s also a rejection of Jesus.

Brown doesn’t think self-identifying evangelical Christians count if they don’t share his very narrow political agenda. They aren’t even in his world. He only thinks in terms of his in-group’s self-identification: as “evangelicals” who have a very specific (and very new) political agenda.

Brown admits that politically conservative white evangelicals “made a gross miscalculation” to think Trump would “change the moral fabric of the nation,” and defending Trump’s treatment toward others has “compromised [their] moral authority]”.

But, he says, ignore all that because Hillary Clinton would have made things much worse because “she would be a staunch opponent of our religious liberties, a zealous advocate for abortion, and a supporter of radical LGBT activism.”

Let’s be clear: Brown is not an advocate of religious liberty on principle. He is, as he says, concerned about “our” religious liberties (meaning his). He isn’t concerned about the religious liberties of evangelical Christians who disagree with him about politics, let alone about the religious liberties of non-Christians. Trump’s judicial appointments are doing extraordinary damage to the principle of religious liberty. But, he’s doing great for people who want the liberty to treat other religions in a way they wouldn’t want to be treated. Brown likes that.

Brown is only concerned about the very narrow “us” and he wants that “us” to be treated differently from how other groups are treated.

HRC wasn’t an advocate for abortion, and he isn’t supporting a policy agenda that would reduce abortion. Radical LGBT activism is simply his term for queer people asking that they be treated as Brown wants to be treated, that they have the same rights he does. Brown doesn’t like the idea that the government would treat others as he wants to be treated.

Jesus never mentioned abortion or homosexuality, and, as many people have shown, Scripture is more oriented toward issues of our treatment of the poor than it is about abortion or homosexuality.  As has been shown over and over, bigoted readings of clobber verses about homosexuality are incoherent.  Yet Brown never mentions anything about the poor, about a Christian attitude toward immigration, about opposition to violence and war.

Brown thinks, correctly, that Trump is promoting Brown’s very limited political agenda. Brown thinks his political agenda is evangelical Christian. That’s where he’s wrong. What Brown wants the government to do is a violation of how Jesus says we should behave.

Brown might be able to cherry-pick Scripture to argue that his political agenda is Scriptural, but he can’t cherry pick what Jesus said—he wants a government that enables him to do unto others as he would not have done unto him.

Brown’s “Christianity” is religious demagoguery. He is arguing for a government grounded in an “us” (people who think the way he does) who are privileged in every aspect and a “them” (people who disagree with him) who should be punished, marginalized, and treated differently.

Unhappily, Brown is not unusual for conservative Christianity. It’s worth remembering that conservative Christianity was on the side of slavery  segregation , and are still on the side of marital rape. Conservative Christians justified Roy Moore’s pedophilia, Trump’s sexual assaults (he bragged about watching underage girls undress), Kavanaugh’s plausible accusation of assault. They don’t really care very much about rape. They also don’t care about the poor.

Advocates of slavery and segregation, conservative Christians, sometimes (rarely) responded to progressive Christian arguments that slavery and segregation violated Christ’s “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And their argument was always some version of why that didn’t apply, why it was less important than other cherry-picked bits from Scripture. That’s why anti-slavery and anti-segregation rhetoric posed the same assertion that enraged conservative evangelicals: they said, “I am a man.” Conservative Christians rejected that claim; they rejected Jesus’ call.

Current “conservative Christians” are the same. They still can’t defend their politics in terms of what Jesus very clearly said: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Instead, they argue that we are in a battle between good and evil that means we should reject what Jesus said in order to save “us.”

American conservative Christians have always been getting their panties in a bunch about how they are being oppressed, about how they are in an existential fight against extermination, and it’s never been true, and it’s always been in service of enacting oppressive, exclusive, and bigoted policies against some other. It’s always been in service of rejecting what Jesus very clearly said.

Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you means that you, and everyone who disagrees with you, are held to the same standards. Were conservative Christians to follow Jesus’ rule (they don’t, and they never have), then they would have to say that their desire for a “conservative evangelical” to have the “religious liberty” to preach in classrooms, would mean that they’d have to be fine with a terrorist Zoroastrian doing the same.

They aren’t okay with their very narrow understanding of Christianity being treated equally with all other religious beliefs because American conservative evangelical Christianity is, and always has been, a rejection of what Jesus’ commandment that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. American conservative evangelical Christianity has always been on the wrong side of history; it has never been about caring for the marginalized, doing unto others, abjuring violence.

Progressive Christians opposed slavery; progressive Christians opposed segregation; progressive Christians advocate effective policies regarding abortion, progressive Christians advocate compassionate and non-punitive policies about the poor, immigrants, and the marginalized. American conservative evangelical Christianity is, and always has been, about rejecting Jesus’ commandment that we do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Progressive Christians are the ones who’ve taken that seriously.

So, no, conservative evangelical “Christians”’ heartlessness about children being separated from parents isn’t hypocrisy—it isn’t a violation of their core beliefs; it’s perfectly consistent with the values they have and have always had.

ASHR talk: “Lay rhetorical theory and argumentum ad hitlerum”

[Image from here.]

Although Adolf Hitler and rhetoric are deeply entangled in popular culture, and argumentum ad hitlerum a pervasive fallacy in public discourse, there is very little recent scholarship in rhetoric about Hitler. While the reasons for avoiding Hitler are both varied and valid, in this paper I want to argue that those are also the very reasons we should be teaching, writing, and talking more about Hitler, his rhetoric, and the conditions of persuasion.

Briefly, the case of Hitler appears simultaneously too obvious and too complicated for scholars and teachers of rhetoric to pay much scholarly or pedagogical attention to him or his rhetoric. Hitler appears to be the example of the powers of bad rhetoric, a man who, in Kenneth Burke’s words, “swung a great people into his wake” (164); that is, the story of Hitler appears to confirm lay rhetorical theory’s monocausal narrative of rhetoric being a powerful rhetor whose discursive skill transforms the irrational masses into unthinking tools.

This narrative of Hitler and his rhetoric seems to confirm lay rhetorical models of persuasion, a model encapsulated in the notion of a purely agentic speaker who shoots an arrow (the message) into the head of the target audience. This model assumes an asymmetric relationship between rhetor and audience (the rhetor has the power and the audience is a passive recipient, or not, of information). This model also assumes that an “engaged” audience is not purely passive in reception, but engages critical thinking as a kind of “filter” (the metaphor often invoked) of the rhetor’s message. The role of the audience is to judge the message. That is, the dominant popular way of describing and imagining participants in public deliberation is as consumers of a product—they can be savvy consumers, who think carefully about whether it really is a good product, or they can be loyal consumers, who always stick to one brand, or they can be suckers, easily duped by inferior products (and so on).

This isn’t how communication works, as both theoretical arguments (e.g., Biesecker’s 1989 “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation”) and empirical work (especially work on confirmation bias) clearly show, but that isn’t my point. Regardless of how scholars model the complicated relationship among audiences, context, texts, and intentions, in popular culture, there is still the tendency to describe audiences using a consumer/marketing model.

Popular conceptions of Hitler fit neatly with that model—he was a witch doctor, in Burke’s terms, who sold snake oil (ignore the mixed metaphors) to a gullible and desperate audience. This (false) narrative of what went wrong in Weimar Germany ensures that people will not recognize when we are making the mistakes that Hitler’s backers made—because 1) we have defined Hitler’s supporters as hopelessly other (no one sees themselves as a potential mark), and 2) we’ve misdefined the mistakes.

argumentum ad Hiterlum is the consequence of that othering—we accuse any effective rhetor who is popular with an out-group of being Hitler. In addition, there is a kind of timelessness of judgment, and we tend to see our perceptions acontextually—we assume that we would have looked at Hitler then as we look at him now—knowing what we know now. But Hitler didn’t look like Hitler—while there was always evidence that he had genocidal, expansionist, and militaristic aims—but that rhetoric could be (and were) dismissed as mere metaphor not to be taken literally. That his arguments were, to the elite, clearly nonsensical and profoundly dishonest (perhaps delusional) meant they thought he could be easily outmaneuvered. That his arguments were, to many people (elite and non-elite), common and familar (racism, German exceptionalism, social conservatism, vague anti-elitism) meant that they thought he could be trusted to understand how common people think.

He had many arguments and qualities that made some groups uncomfortable—Nazis’ (deserved) reputation for hostility to Christianity, and Hitler’s own intermittent claims of being Christian, concerned many conservative Christians, both Lutheran and Catholic. That he would later work to reduce their power, and had plans for marginalizing the established churches entirely, makes many Christians believe they would not have supported him (there is even the blazingly counter-factual claim that Hitler did not have the support of Christians, as well as the hyperbolic claim that he “persecuted” Christians). The fact is that Christians’ support of Hitler was crucial—the Catholic Party supported “The Enabling Act” (the act that made him dictator) unanimously. (Only the Communists and Social Democrats voted against it.)

Later harassment of Christian churches made some Christians regret their support (such as Niemoller), but many found ways to dissociate the Nazi attacks on church power from Hitler himself, insisting that it must be happening without his knowledge. Christians supported Hitler; they shouldn’t have, but they did. And even those who regretted supporting him did so because of Nazi weakening of Christian power structures, not out of a principled opposition to his treatment of Jews, his authoritarian government, the abrogation of human rights, the factionalizing of the judiciary, or the expansionist and inherently genocidal war. Those who stopped supporting him did so when, as Niemoller famously said, they came for him.

Understanding why so many people supported Hitler means, not seeing his supporters as dupes blind to his obviously evil character, but understanding why people across social and educational groups very much like us thought it made sense to support him, why his rabid antisemitism, militarism, rhetoric of victimization, and history of inciting and rationalizing violence against his critics was either attractive or dismissible.

And that means understanding that Hitler didn’t rise to power primarily because of his rhetoric.

Scholars of Hitler and Nazis, while acknowledging that Hitler was an impressive public speaker, emphasize other factors as more important than his personal ability to give a great speech. These include:

    • the important role of calculated and elite support for Hitler, essentially strategic politics. von Papen and Hindenberg weren’t persuaded by Hitler’s rhetoric—they thought he was a putz who could be played;
    • the role of Nazi, rather than Hitler’s, rhetoric. Memoirs, autobiographies, and various comments—even from before backing Hitler started to look like a mistake—show that many people came to Nazism via speakers other than Hitler, or not through speeches at all (such as via newspapers and magazines, or even through a desire to participate in the violence of the Freikorps). After the Nazi takeover in 1933, much of the rhetoric that would have persuaded people originated with Streicher, Goebbels, or the army of speakers and writers—most of whom were following Goebbels’ direction, and not Hitler’s.
      Even when it was Hitler’s direction, he was persuasive, as even he acknowledged, because he could count on his base only hearing (and only listening to) his version of events. After years of presenting the Soviet Union as the materialization of the Jewish-Bolshevik threat against which Germany and Germans must be implacably opposed, in 1939, Hitler announced that the USSR was a valuable ally and trusted friend. In 1941, he insisted on an about-face from Germans once again when the USSR reverted back to the nation with whom Germany was in an apocalyptic battle. Hitler attributed his success on that (and other instances in which public opinion had to be changed quickly) to complete control of media: “We have frequently found ourselves compelled to reverse the engine and to change, in the course of a couple of days, the whole trend of imparted news, sometimes with a complete volte face. Such agility would have been quite impossible, if we had not had firmly in our grasp that extraordinary instrument of power we call the press—and known how to make use of it” (Table Talk 480-1; see also 525).
    • that much of the conversion that happened during the Nazi regime was some version of strategic acquiescence. Historians emphasize that groups like the military chose to support Hitler despite misgivings because they believed, correctly, he would build up the military and fulfill the dream of German hegemony of Europe, finally achieving what had been the territorial goals of the Great War. There remains considerable debate as to exactly how much popular backing Hitler really had, since expressing criticism was so dangerous, with scholars like Gellately arguing it was considerable and others like Kershaw arguing that coercion played an important role. But all of them agree that much of the compliance was the consequence of changes to material conditions—the (apparently) improved economy, lower unemployment, a reduction of street violence, a conservative social agenda, a more reactionary judiciary less worried about the rights of the accused, recriminalizing of abortion, homosexuality, and birth control, and just the sense that Germany was again a respected and feared power. That is, much of Hitler’s support wasn’t because of his rhetoric, but his policies. His successful acquisition of territory without provoking war was the cause of his greatest popularity (in 1939, although some put the height in 1941, when the western Blitzkrieg had done so well)—in other words, propaganda of the deed.

I’m not, like some scholars in the 80s, rejecting Hitler as a factor at all, but simply pointing out that the situation isn’t accurately described by the monocausal narrative promoted by lay rhetorical theories.

People in Germany did change their minds—it’s generally agreed that large numbers of Germans came to new positions on such questions as whether they would participate personally in genocide (Ordinary Men), the ideal relationship with the USSR, the plausibility of a two-front war, and various other points. But they didn’t do so because, believing one thing they listened to a Hitler speech and suddenly believed something else entirely. Hitler’s rhetoric was effective because (and when) it fit with things his audience already believed, needed to believe, or needed to legitimate. His rhetoric was effective because (and when) it was not unique, and he alone was not creating the wake into which Germans would be drawn.

My point is that the popular fascination with Hitler gives scholars of rhetoric the opportunity to promote, not just better understandings of Hitler, but more nuanced understandings of the complicated ways and forces that cultures change beliefs.

Why y’all should read Lilliana Mason’s _Uncivil Agreements_

The book has a lot that is of interest only to scholars, and much that is of interest only to scholars in her field, but there is a lot that is useful to everyone. I think lefties can particularly benefit because she provides empirical research to show that a lot things we tend to do will not actually help (she isn’t alone in her claims about that–she pulls together a lot of research).

The empirical research, like hers, is clear that Americans agree on policy, especially policies that would imply higher taxes for the wealthy, reasonable gun control, government-funded healthcare, and various other progressive policies. But running candidates who advocate those policies won’t work because people (including a lot of lefties) vote on the basis of partisan identification.

They cheerfully (sometimes without knowing, sometimes completely aware) vote for political figures who will enact policies they don’t want, but they do it because their side winning is more important than any policy issue.

The more people identify with a political group–the more all their various group identifications align with a political party–the more they engage in motivated reasoning. People with cross-cutting identities are more likely to engage in empathy with other groups, advocate tolerance, and be willing to argue about policy.

This is a complicated point I won’t make here, but I think her book helped me understand the very specific ways that GOP trolls and clickbait fractured the left (and are already doing so today, especially in regard to AOC). Here are some of my favorite passages.

I read Goebbels’ 1945 diary entries so you don’t have to.

[Image from here]

The 1978 edition (ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper) of Goebbels’ Final Entries begins in late February 1945. By that time, the Battle of the Bulge was over, and it had failed. At this point, Germans have lost Budapest, Breslau is encircled, they’re calling up women, Dresden has been firebombed, bombings of major German cities are a nightly event, American troops have reached the Rhine. It goes downhill from there.

28 February. Goebbels’ reading of the situation is that Western countries are facing a “profound political crisis” with strikes “the order of the day”–so, any minute now, the Allies will collapse.[1] That same day he expresses outrage at “bolshevist atrocities” and, after a conversation with General Vlasov about the USSR in 1941, concludes, “The Soviet Union has had to weather precisely the same crises as we are now facing and that there is always a way out of these crises if one is determined not to knuckle under them.” [Thereby ignoring that USSR got through 1941 by having moved factories, still having access to resources, getting help from the US, and having a much larger potential military force. It was not just the will.]

2 March. “We can count on major operations in the east German area being possible by the end of March” and “if all goes well we can anticipate enormous success” [which is a nice example of a tautology, and summarizes Nazi strategic thinking at this point]. Also, the situation “is not reassuring” and “In the East too operations have not gone through as we expected.” But, meanwhile, he got a lot of letters telling him he made a great speech. Oh, and he condemns Roosevelt for megalomania.

3 March. Anglo-American troops are making progress. “We had never really visualized such a course of events.” [He did another speech that went over well, though.]

4 March. The population in the West is welcoming the Anglo-American troops. “This I had really not expected.” [Later he would—in many entries– blame this problem on the Nazi leadership rejecting his argument that they should openly abrogate the Geneva Convention.] He’s reading Carlyle on Frederick the Great, and that proves it will all be fine. Oh, and a lot of people thought “four weeks ago the situation was such that the majority of military experts had given us up for lost” but Hitler sure showed them! Hitler has a bullet-proof plan: “we must somehow succeed in holding firm in the West and the East.” Hitler also hopes to open talks with some one of the Allies, but, before they could start talks, “it is essential that we score some military success.” So, it’s a clear plan: hold the line everywhere, have some major military successes, and then open talks with one of the Allies. That’ll work.

7 March. [And a lot of other entries.] Goebbels is puzzled that publicizing Soviet atrocities isn’t turning world opinion in favor of the Nazis. [This is a common plaint: why can’t people see that Nazis are the real victims here?] He’s also grumpy that a lot of the “Germans” coming in from the East don’t really look German to him. At this point, he begins to blame Goering for all of the Nazis’ problems [a nice instance of projection—yes, it’s true that Goering screwed up, but Goebbels has screwed up just as much if not more].

8 March. Goebbels makes fun of Churchill for saying the war would end in two months. [VE-Day was 8 May.] “Our sole great hope at present lies in the U-boat war.” And “Rendulic has now put things in order in East Prussia.” So, really, everything is fine.

13 March. Hitler says there are new airplanes, so it’s all good (and, besides, Hitler had been right all along about what kind of aircraft Germany should have been producing) [This topos–what really matters here is who was right–runs throughout Hitler’s deliberations with his generals, and, less so, through Goebbels’ diaries. That’s interesting.][2]

14 March. “I refuse to be deterred by reports of so-called eyewitnesses.” [Germans in the west are cheerfully welcoming Anglo-American troops.]

21 March. He and Hitler have a long talk and agree “that we must hold firm at the front and if possible score a victory in order to start talking to the enemy.” Well, as long as he and Hitler have decided that the people at the front should hold firm, it’s all good. [It’s fascinating how often Goebbels and Hitler decide that the problem can be solved by telling people to be more steadfast. Sometimes they take a lot of time to yell at people to be more steadfast. ]

22 March. “The military situation both in East and West has become extraordinarily critical; during the course of the 24 hours it has changed noticeably to our disadvantage.” [Because up to that point it was pretty good?]

23 March. “I think that my work too is no longer being totally effective today.” He was getting a lot of reports of people surrendering instead of fighting to the death for Hitler. This might cause some people to think that perhaps things were getting a little bleak for Germany. But, no, his reading of Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great shows that, although Frederick “too [who else is feeling this? Goebbels or Hitler?] sometimes felt that he must doubt his lucky star, but, as generally happens in history, at the darkest hour a bright star arose and Prussia was saved when he had almost given up all hope. Why should not we also hope for a similar wonderful turn of fortune!” So, the fact that things were going badly was proof that things would be fine! As long as you continue to beleeeeeve.

30 March. “This is the beginning of the catastrophe in the West.” He and Hitler agree on the military strategy: “we must now make every effort to re-establish a fresh front.”

31 March. He’s getting letters that are a little “despairing.” Some of them even suggest Hitler might be at fault. He blames it on Goering.

1 April. People in France, he says, must really be regretting the Allies’ success because they are facing a serious food shortage. [Did he really not know that Nazis had always been starving occupied countries? He mentions, approvingly, Hitler’s decision not to try to feed POW. He has several entries where he says that the liberated peoples must be miserable now, so maybe he really didn’t? On the other hand, he knew about Nazi extermination policies, and the extraordinary atrocities, and yet he expresses outrage at Soviet atrocities, so is all just in- v out-group?]

4 April. “We must act at once if it is not to be too late.”

It was too late in November 1941.

In other words, this is how an administration steeped in charismatic leadership and blind loyalty who believes it’s all about marketing responds to failure. They never learn. They never start behaving rationally.

Never. They will take everyone down with them.

[1] Editors of Goebbels’ diaries always have to decide what to do about the fact that he is writing the next day about what happened the previous. So, on February 28, he wrote about what happened on the 27th (“yesterday” in Goebbels’ words). Some editors (e.g., Fred Taylor, who edited Goebbels’ 1939-41 entries) keep Goebbels’ dates, but Trevor-Roper doesn’t. I’ve used Trevor-Roper’s dates.

[2] This is also the entry where Goebbels makes clear that it was genocide, and he knew it, and he was happy about it: “Anyone in a position to do so should kill the Jews off like rats. In Germany, thank God, we have already done a fairly complete job. I trust that the world will take its cue from this.”

Trump and the long con

One of the paradoxes of con artists is that cons always depend on appealing to the mark’s desire for a quick and easy solution but the most profitable cons last a long time. How do you keep people engaged in the scam if you’re siphoning off their money?  

There are several ways, but one of the most common is to ensure that they’re getting a quick outcome that they like. They’ll often wine and dine their marks, thereby coming across as too successful to need the mark’s money, and also increasing the mark’s confidence (and attachment). They might be supporting that high living through bad checks, but more often with credit cards and money from previous marks, or by getting the mark to pay for the high living without knowing. One serial confidence artist who specialized in picking up divorced middle-aged women on the Internet was particularly adept at stealing a rarely-used credit card from the women while they were showering. He then simply hid the bills when they arrived.

Because he seemed to have so much money, the women assumed he wouldn’t be scamming them, and would then hand over their life’s savings for him to invest.

They do this despite there being all sorts of good signs that the guy is a con artist–his life story seems a little odd, he doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends who’ve known him very long, there’s always some reason he can’t write checks (or own a home or sign a loan). There are three reasons that the con works, and that people ignore the counter-evidence.

First, cons flatter their marks, arguing that the marks deserve so much more than they’re getting, and persuade the marks to have confidence in them. They will tell the marks that those people (the ones who are pointing to the disconfirming data) look down on them, think they’re stupid, and think they know better. The con thereby gets the mark’s ego associated with his being a good person and not a con artist—admitting that he is a con means the mark will have to admit that those people were right.[1] The con artist will spin the evidence in ways that show he’s willing to admit to some minor flaws, ones that make the mark feel that she can really see through him. She knows him.[2]

Second, the con works because we don’t like ambiguity, and we tend to privilege direct experience and our own perception. The reasons to wonder about whether a man really is that wealthy are ambiguous, and it’s second order thinking (thinking about what isn’t there, about the absence of friends, family, connections, bank statements). That ambiguous data will seem less vivid, less salient, less compelling than the direct experience we have of his buying us expensive gifts. The family thing is vague and complicated; the jewelry is something we can touch.

Third, people who dislike complexity, who believe that most things have simple solutions, and that they are good at seeing those simple solutions are easy marks because those are precisely the beliefs to which cons appeal. Admitting that the guy is a con artist means admitting that the mark’s whole view of life—that the world has simple solutions, that people are what they seem to be, that you can trust your gut about whether someone is good or bad, that things you can touch (like jewelry) matter.

And it works because the marks don’t realize that they are the ones who’ve actually paid for that jewelry.

There are all the signs of his being a con artist—all the lawsuits, all the lies, the lack of transparency about his actual wealth, the reports that show a long history of dodgy (if not actively criminal) tax practices, the evidence that shows his wealth was inherited and not earned—but those are complicated to think about. Trump tells people that he cares about them; he (and his supportive media) tell their marks that all the substantive criticism is made by libruls who look down on them, who think they know better. The media admits to a few flaws, and spins them as minor.

Trump is a con artist, and his election was part of a con game about improving his brand. But, once he won the election, he had to shift to a different con game, one that involved getting as much money for him and his corporations as possible, reducing accountability for con artists, holding off investigations into his financial and campaign dealings, and skimming.

 And Trump gives his marks jewelry. If you have Trump supporters in your informational world, then you know that they respond to any criticism of Trump with, “I don’t care about collusion; I care about my lower taxes.” (Or “I care about the economy” or “I care that someone is finally doing something about illegal immigrants.”) They have been primed to frame concerns about Trump as complicated, ambiguous, and more or less personal opinion, but the benefit of Trump (to them) as clear, unambiguous, and tangible.

 They can touch the jewelry.

And they don’t realize that he isn’t paying for it; he never paid for it, and he never will. They’re paying for it. They bought themselves that jewelry.

There are, loosely, three ways to try to get people to see the con. First, I think it’s useful not to come across as saying that people are stupid for falling for Trump’s cons (although it can be useful to point out that current defenses of Trump are that he’s too stupid to have violated the law). It can be helpful to say that you understand why he and his policies would seem so attractive, but point out that he’s greatly increased the deficit (that his kind of tax cuts always increase the deficit). It’s helpful to have on hand the data about how much “entitlement”programs cost. Point out that they will be paying for his tax cuts for a long, long time.

Another strategy is to refuse to engage and just keep piling on the evidence. People get persuaded that they’ve been taken in by a con artist incident by incident. It isn’t any particular one, but that there are so many, and they reject each one as it comes along. So, I think that sharing story after story about how corrupt Trump is, how bad his policies are,and what damage he is doing—even if (especially if) people complain about your doing so—is effective in the long run.

Third, when people object or defend Trump, ask them if they’re getting their information from sources that would tell them if Trump were a con artist. They’ll respond with, “Oh, so I should watch MSNBC” (or something along those lines) and the answer is: “Yes, you should watch that too.” Or, “No, you shouldn’t get your news from TV.” Or a variety of other answers, but the point is that you aren’t telling them to switch to “librul” sources as much as getting more varied information. 

Con artists create a bond with their marks—their stock in trade is creating confidence. They lose power when their marks lose confidence, and that happens bit by bit. And sometimes it happens when people notice the jewelry is pretty shitty, actually.

[1]This is why it’s so common for marks to start covering for the con when the con gets exposed. They fear the “I told you so” more than the consequences of getting conned.

[2] In other words, con artists try to separate people from the sources of information that would undermine the confidence the mark has in the con.

Democracy and the Rhetoric of Demagoguery (ODU talk, hosted by RSA)

Thank-you so much for having me; I’ve been obsessed with the issue of a culture of demagoguery for at least fifteen years, and I’m always glad to talk about it with people who care.

My basic argument is that demagoguery is a way of shifting disagreements from policy argumentation to questions of group identity and loyalty.

People go along with that shift because policy argumentation is complicated, uncertain, and risky, and demagoguery promises to reduce its complexity, uncertainty, and risk.

As Hannah Arendt so elegantly argues in The Human Condition, participation in politics requires a certain amount of faith in our own agency, while it simultaneously so very clearly demonstrates the limits of human agency. Argumentation about politics requires that we make claims about the consequences of policies, all the while knowing that many—and perhaps all—of those claims will be wrong. Political decision-making is riddled with uncertainty. We might feel certain about a decision, but we can’t be certain about all of its consequences. Advocating a political argument is and should be a transcendental leap into the unknown. All the while, with data and reason to support that leap. And the profound uncertainty, and the deep argumentative support, are both part of that leap, when people are engaged in responsible argumentation.

Demagoguery is about dodging the responsibility, the argumentation, and the uncertainty by focusing instead on how much we all hate an out-group.

That simple fact about the uncertainty of decision making is a reminder the world is not fully constituted by how it looks to us—our viewpoint is not all there is.

What’s even more concerning is that it is possible to consider a policy with due diligence, to do one’s best to investigate it from various angles, and with all the best data available, to enact it, and then for our policy to cause tremendous harm. It’s probably impossible to find a policy that doesn’t hurt some innocent being, and some well-intentioned policies hurt a lot. A thorough process doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, even if the people involved have good intentions. Meaning well doesn’t guarantee that we will do the right thing.

All of these characteristics inherent, as Arendt would say, to the human condition mean that it is difficult for us to be honest with ourselves about our limitations and yet think of ourselves as good people with good judgment.

We want to think of ourselves as good people with good judgment and good intentions, and we want policy decisions that benefit us, but, if we support policy decisions that benefit us at the expense of others that is dissonant with our desires to think well of ourselves.

What I’m saying that participation in policy disagreements creates cognitive dissonance between who we want to think we are, what we think we’re capable of, how much control we like to think we have, and what we can see happen time after time—votes don’t turn out the way we want, they do and we still don’t get what we want, despite tremendous work problems still remain.

Because the stakes are so high in politics, we want certainty—we want there to be guarantees, necessary consequences, and promises that if you do this or believe that, things will get better. We all want a pony. But we want more than just certain policy outcomes—we want more than a pony—we want to feel that what we’re doing is good and right.

Demagoguery helps silence the cognitive dissonance by saying that there are certainties, and the main certainty is that the in-group is good and just and smart. Demagoguery says, “Politics is very simple, and the answers are obvious to people of intelligence and goodwill.” If policies promised by in-group politicians and pundits don’t play out the way they were supposed to, it’s the fault of an out-group. Were it not for that out-group, the policies that seem obviously right to us would be enacted and would make everything better.

Demagoguery says everything can be divided into binaries, with us v. them being the Ur binary. It isn’t always emotional; it isn’t always populist; but it does always make some version of the move of taking a very complicated situation and breaking it into two sides. Once that move is made, once we’re talking about “both sides” or “two sides,” we’re strengthening one of the foundational pillars of demagoguery.

So, the apparently “fair” claim that “both sides are just as bad” is actually demagogic. That isn’t to say that “both sides” aren’t just as bad—it’s saying that the second you move to “two sides” regarding political deliberation you’re in a realm of imagined identities and not policy argumentation. Not only is it reinforcing the fallacy of the false dilemma but it’s strengthening yet another foundational pillar of demagoguery—that all political questions should be cast in terms of group identity, that to raise a question about political deliberation is always really a question about which group is better.

A persistent hope of humans is that if you free your mind, your ass will follow—that, if you get your theory right, or your intentions right, then your actions will be right.

And that’s a third foundational pillar of demagoguery—that bad things in human history are the consequence of groups with bad motives. That’s a non-falsifiable claim, since no group has entirely good people, and no human has entirely good motives. We’d like to believe that people engaged in genocide know that what they’re doing is murder, but they actually believe that what they’re doing is right. They thought they were on the side of right, and they thought they had good motives.

Right now, you’re probably feeling kind of discouraged—because I’m saying there is no perfect policy solution, that you shouldn’t be certain that your political agenda is right, and that, regardless of your motives, you’re going to make decisions that hurt people.

And demagoguery responds to that feeling of being discouraged by saying, “Don’t listen to her. It might seem complicated and imperfect, but with this one simple trick…” (Which is intriguing—demagoguery often relies on the same moves as self-help rhetoric. That isn’t to say that all self-help rhetoric is demagogic, although some is [such as PUA, get rich quick, and some MLM]) In this case, the simple trick is to stop thinking and settle for believing. It doesn’t frame the choice quite that way—it says, everything you believe is right, the answers to apparently complicated problems are actually simple and obvious to people like you, so you should invest all the power in people who think like you. Because the answers are simple and clear, anyone who says they aren’t, or who has answers different from you is evil, stupid, and/or biased. Any source that provides information different from what we tell you is “biased.”

In other words, demagoguery isn’t just a way of arguing; it’s a way of thinking about public discourse. Demagoguery is epistemic.

Demagoguery invites people into a world but it doesn’t reduce agency or responsibility of the people who accept that invitation. Increasingly, I’m coming to think that demagoguery works primarily by making people feel better about a choice they would already have made, and once they’ve made the initial choice to join a world of demagoguery, it’s easier to get them to commit more—it’s the Spanish Prisoner con of discourse. So, the media isn’t responsible for demagoguery; consumers of demagoguery are responsible for making it profitable.

Demagoguery doesn’t reduce agency or responsibility, but, when it’s a world of demagoguery, it can make people feel as though have more agency and less responsibility. It gives people agency by proxy (when members of their in-group triumph over an out-group, they feel powerful, and as though that was their agency) while always providing plausible deniability for responsibility. There are lots of ways that they have plausible deniability—the fallacy of false equivalence, claims of pre-emptive self-defense, projection of violent intention onto the out-group(s), holding the out-group responsible for their own reaction (what’s called complementary projection—if I feel angry toward you, you must be hostile)—but the one I want to pursue here is just not thinking about it.

If all of your policies would have worked if not for the mendacious and corrupt out-group, then you don’t really have to think about whether they failed for good reason. If every good person agrees with you, then you don’t have to think about the problems others point out with your beliefs, politicians, or policies. That doesn’t make you a mindless person, nor does it make you a person who can’t support their beliefs.

Here, again, I’m following Arendt. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem has been persistently misread in two important ways. First, an argument that the prosecutor made and that she reported (that Jewish Councils helped the Nazis) was attributed to her; second, her subtle argument about Eichmann was turned into a simplistic one, and then she was criticized for making a simplistic argument. She never claimed he was mindless, or an automaton, nor that he had no antisemitism. She argued inductively, and seems to have expected that people would understand her conclusion (an interesting pragmatic contradiction, as Deborah Lipstadt notes). In her last book, Life of the Mind, she explains how the Eichmann trial got her thinking about thinking. Since what Eichmann had done was so deeply evil, she (and many others) expected a Satanic figure who would glory in what he did—Milton’s Satan or Shakespeare’s Iago. So, she went to the trial expecting someone like that, someone like Goring, perhaps.

However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity, but thoughtlessness. (4)

Arendt doesn’t mean he was mindless; she meant he didn’t think. That understudied and underappreciated book is about arguing for her version of what thinking should be, and she doesn’t mean some reductive positivism. She never accepts the emotion/reason dichotomy, and she is interested in the role of language, of what we would now call talking points.

She was fascinated with how animated Eichmann became when he repeated various Nazi talking points, “but, when confronted with situations for which such [Nazi] routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless” (4). He had beliefs, about Jews, about Nazis, and, most of all, about his career, and he had been given a language that made him feel comfortable about those beliefs. But, when confronted with people who didn’t agree, he didn’t know what to say, and often said bizarre things (such as whingeing to his Jewish guards that he hadn’t advanced as much in the Nazi regime as he wanted).

And, like Orwell, Arendt noted the relationship of “winged words” (again, talking points) and Eichmann’s ability to not think about what he was doing.

Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. (4)

Arendt goes on to say, in one of those moments that explain why I admire her so much, “If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all” (4).

Eichmann was rabidly antisemitic, but, when he was faced with the reality of what he was doing, he threw up. (Supposedly, so did Himmler.) He could follow a policy as long as he didn’t think about what the policy really meant. After throwing up, he went back to his office and kept doing the thing that resulted in a situation that made him throw up because, as he said to anyone who would listen, he wasn’t killing anyone; he was just making sure they got on trains. The rhetoric of the danger of Jews, the rhetoric about a Jewish conspiracy, the rhetoric about being loyal to Germany—the rhetoric didn’t persuade him to do what he was doing (careerism did that), but it made him feel better about what he wanted to do (that is, get advancement and kill a lot of Jews).

When he was confronted with what his desires really meant, he was appalled, so he tried not to think about it. And he succeeded, because the whole function of Nazi propaganda was why you shouldn’t think about what it might be like to be a Jew. And that is Arendt’s whole point: what she means by “thinking” isn’t some positivist exclusion of feeling; it’s about stepping above your position to consider the situation from various positions. For Arendt, thinking is imagining.

It’s imagining being someone else.

Imagining being someone else and having compassion for them are two very different things. I spend a lot of time trying to understand the worldviews of people I think are engaged in inexcusably harmful actions. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, I don’t have to like them, even if my religion says I should love them. I’m not sure how the conversion of white supremacists works, since all the data is anecdotal, and I think, from that kind of research, that sometimes compassion works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes shaming does, and sometimes just ignoring them works. But I think worrying about white supremacists might be the wrong concern.

I think there are two different ways that demagoguery can be hopelessly damaging. One is when a culture is dominated by demagoguery as the only form of public reasoning. In that case, a demagogic post on a cooking blog is harmful, insofar as it confirms that this is how we manage disagreement. But, if the culture isn’t demagogic, there’s no real harm.

In other words, and I hope it’s clear this is my main point in my whole career: there are always two arguments going on in a culture: what should we do, and how should we argue about what to do.

Demagoguery answers both questions with “be rabidly loyal to the in-group.”

In a weird way, then, this means that, when we’re arguing with someone who is deep in a culture of demagoguery, and repeating the talking points that make them feel good about their political agenda, we shouldn’t argue with them about what they believe, we should argue with them about how they believe—about whether their beliefs are falsifiable, why they’re so afraid of out-group sources of information, whether they believe their own major premises.

And so I keep ending up back on teaching. We need to teach logic (not as unemotional, and not as a list of formal fallacies, but as failures in a person’s consistency—a sign (but not a necessary one) of in-group thinking, and our intervention is to get people to move to meta-cognition.

How trolls get played

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-8-prototypes-for-trumps-border-wall-photos

There are many ways in which working class people have the same political “interests” (the term used for goals, needs, policies). Concerns like good public schools, good roads, good police protection, affordable housing, affordable access to good healthcare, and so on aren’t limited to one kind of working class group. But they are necessarily class issues in two ways: first, rich people aren’t as dependent on the government to provide various services and so, if they only think in their short-term narrow self-interest, they can think that a strong social safety net isn’t a high priority. Rich people don’t need to care whether public schools are good, since they can send their kids to private schools. They can set up gated communities with good roads and private security forces. They don’t have to care whether there is low-income housing or affordable health insurance since they can pay for the expensive versions of both. Second, if all the working class got together—regardless of their membership in various sub-groups (religion, race, region)—it’s likely that they would advocate for stronger social safety nets, and it might end up with rich people and corporations having to pay higher taxes than either do now.

So, if rich people didn’t want to have to pay money to help working class people, what they would need to do would be to persuade working class people not to band together, not to think about their issues in policy terms. They would try to persuade some large part of the working class that their interests are the same as the rich.[1]

And the easiest way to do that (and the way it’s always been done) is to create an “out-group” (Those People) and persuade some large number of the working class that, as long as they’re doing something that harms Those People, they are winning. You can also tell them that their superiority over That Group would be threatened by [a policy that would actually benefit them]. It’s awful how well that works.

What a lot of people don’t realize about how slavery worked was that it enabled rich planters to exploit poorer whites. Proslavery rhetoric identified slaveholding with “being white,” as a wonderful life possibly available to every white man. Proslavery rhetoric also told poor whites that, no matter how poor they were, they were better than the richest or most successful non-white. Proslavery rhetoric guaranteed honor to every white man.[2] Conditions were pretty bad for poor whites in the South, with less access to public education, less industry, and various other issues, than people like them in some other areas, but proslavery rhetoric thwarted poor white political action by very rich people claiming solidarity with the poor whites they were underpaying, overworking, and often screwing over.

The same thing happened in prosegregation rhetoric (as the very Southern WB Cash pointed out in the 40s): rich whites could prevent any kind of labor action by pointing out that unions allowed non-whites to join. They created a kind of “herrenvolk democracy“–a race-based democracy that, instead of material gain, gave poor whites whiteness as a prize (a prize only meaningful if denied to others).  A lot of poor (and screwed-over) whites would rather get screwed over by rich whites than admit they had common cause with African Americans (a point Cash made). Segregation (white supremacist) rhetoric said that, no matter how poor you are, you are better than the richest or most successful non-white. In other words, pro-segregation rhetoric didn’t argue the really complicated policy issues about segregation (especially the significant harms for all working class people of the rejection of unions, hostility to support for public schools, aversion to good science education, and shoddy labor laws). It got assent by redirecting policy issues to simple zero-sum Us v. Them arguments.

In other words, white supremacist rhetoric (proslavery or prosegregation) meant that people voted on issues entirely on the basis of whether they were voting for something that would preserve their racial status. And, if the policy harmed the “other” race, that was good enough. Thus, they could often get tricked into voting for something that preserved their racial status, and harmed them in every other way—poor whites supported employment laws, laws about schools, restrictive laws about literacy that hurt them because they were happy that those laws hurt non-whites more. That’s the next step in this process of getting citizens in a democracy not to argue politics—reframe all policy issues into the question of whether the policy hurts (yay!) or helps (boo!) the out-group, regardless of what it does for the in-group.

It’s a really Machiavellian way to go about getting support for a policy, and it works far too often. If you persuade your base that every political issue is us v. them, and that the world is a zero-sum of us v. them, then you can persuade your base to support policies that hurt them as long as they believe it hurts “the other group” more.

The term for this is a “wedge” issue. You get a wedge into a group that really should be allied (such as the Irish and the freed African Americans in the early 19th century), and you separate them, and race is a great way to do that (so is religion). Poor people (regardless of race or religion) generally have the same policy goals; working class people have the same political needs regardless of race. It wasn’t just the South that did this. In the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats gained the support of the poor Irish for policies that didn’t help them purely on the grounds that those policies hurt African Americans more.

Putting politics in terms of us v. them enables the screwing-over of people rests on first creating a lot of resentment of the out-group, and often scapegoating, including scapegoating the out-group for the consequences the in-group policy will have. Sources on every side of the American political spectrum agree that the American skilled working class has been hurt, and sensible sources agree that the causes are complicated. Mechanization, globalization, and union-busting have significantly hurt the skilled working class, and yet immigrants are scapegoated for unemployment (immigrants didn’t cause jobs to leave the US, and immigrants didn’t take union jobs). But, once that resentment against immigrants (or any other group) is created, and a base is persuaded to think that it’s a zero-sum between Us and Them, then all a party has to do is get its base to vote and behave in ways that hurt Them.

Under those conditions, it seems unnecessary to argue policies, and that may even be the intent. Slaveholders didn’t want slavery debated—at all. They wanted it to appear that you either fully supported slavery in every possible way or you were actively advocating race war against whites. Any restriction of slavery would hurt them after all, and any reasonable and thorough debate of the institution of slavery would lead to restriction. And so, slaveholders were so committed to prohibiting deliberation of slavery that they talked themselves into unnecessarily aggressive policies that alienated people who didn’t really care about slavery (through things like the Gag Rule, Bleeding Kansas, assaulting a Senator in the Senate, the Fugitive Slave Law, the war with Mexico, the Dred Scott decision, pushing “black codes” on “free” states, the open advocacy of forcing “free” states to allow slavery). The South would have done better to have allowed open debate about slavery. But even people who didn’t own slaves were persuaded that it was either “us” (advocating unrestricted slavery) or “them” (rabid abolitionists who wanted race war). So, any violence against “them,” any policy they hated—that was good enough.

There are lots of examples in history when communities were dominated by this kind of “as long as it makes Them unhappy, I’m good with this policy” thinking. That’s worth considering—if this is a good way for people to make decisions, we should be able to point to times it worked out well. And I yet to find an example of a time it did work well for any length of time as a way of a large group making policy decisions. I can think of lots of examples of times it was disastrous—it’s what motivated Athenians to send troops on campaigns that were guaranteed failures, or support campaigns that were failing (as in the Sicilian Expedition). The whole philosophy is captured in the saying, “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

But, in the short run, it can seem like a good idea. It’s a great way for a TV channel, organization, radio show, politician, or political party to build a base (after all, you probably said to yourself, “THEY DO IT TOO!”), and it’s more fun to engage in the two-minute hate about the other group than get into the weeds of the various political options available. In the long run, though, if you make decisions purely on the basis of whether it pisses someone you hate off, you’re making bad decisions, often ones that hurt you.

And, if all you try to do in social media is piss off the other side, you were persuaded to do that by someone who knows how useful it is for them. Trolls think they’re just doing it for the lulz. They aren’t. They think they aren’t earnest. Their refusal to think very clearly about their actions is carefully and earnestly encouraged by media, political parties, and interests that find their mindless resentment of Them very profitable. Trolls might think they’re in it for the lulz, but someone is into their activity for the bucks. Bucks the trolls aren’t getting.

Trolls think they’re playing earnest people earnestly involved in political deliberation; on the contrary, they’re getting earnestly played.

 

 

[1] What’s interesting about the current attempt to keep working class people from seeing their concerns as shared with others in their economic system is that it’s only in the short-term narrow self-interest of corporations and rich people to thwart discussion about what would help the working class. After all, it benefits everyone in a nation if the populace is well-educated, scientifically literate, if they have access to good healthcare, a strong infrastructure, low crime, and public servants (teachers, fire fighters, police, public defenders, social workers) who are well-paid, well-trained, selectively hired, and enjoy helping the public regardless of class, race, religion, and so on. That’s a good world for everyone.

[2] Another thing a lot of people who admire the institution of slavery and the CSA don’t realize is that whiteness was actually not what we now imagine it to be—for instance, neither eastern Europeans nor Italians were considered white, and Catholics also had a shaky claim on the term.

Gun nuts and sloppy rhetoric

 

There’s a blog post that’s been going around Facebook that cites a bunch of studies in order to come to the conclusion that

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

I’m not claiming that the article is entirely wrong, nor that every claim it makes is invalidated by the “notallgunowners” objection (although I’ll make that objection below). But it really is a deeply problematic article.

Some of the studies aren’t very good (really? 20 men?), but some seem to me perfectly valid. Except for one thing—the tendency in social science research to conclude X group does Y because the studies show that 60-70% of X group does Y. That kind of conclusion assumes that the 30-40% are outliers who can be ignored, as opposed to their being a different kind of person, who should be separated out because they show that there is a significantly different causal relationship (this is one of my objections to a lot of the research on persuasion).

So, for instance, the SSQ study (linked above) that looks really good to me doesn’t show a perfect correlation between voting Republican and gun ownership (let alone gun culture). It shows that a lot of people who own guns don’t vote GOP.

That’s interesting. It seems to me that a really good study (and article) would pose the question: why don’t they?

Another of the studies linked is also really good, and it shows how symbolic racism is coded into much pro-gun rhetoric. But even that study doesn’t support the argument of the SciAm blo post. The conclusion of the study is “that racial prejudice influences white opinion regarding gun regulation in the contemporary United States” (emphasis added, 271). And they persuasively conclude:

We believe that racial prejudice colors all aspects of the debate regarding gun policy, including crime and its representations, and the role of government in society. Reshaping the gun regulation debate requires a deeper understanding of the relationships among racial prejudice, partisan politics, and the foundational but unconscious emotional role that guns play for a significant portion of the white population in America. (272)

So, racism colors the gun debate, and the study is persuasive on that point, but it doesn’t show that concern about gun control necessarily correlates to being racist. Not all gun owners, in other words. And, while that “not all” move can be irritating, sometimes it’s valid.

One of my pet peeves is when a study clearly says, “Many people in X category do Y,” and people attack the argument as though it said, “All people in X category do Y.” But, really, I think the SciAm article did move from most to all.

And here I should engage in full disclosure. Because of Texas common property laws, I’m a gun owner (I own quite a few, actually.) My father owned guns, and I’ve shot them from time to time. My son and husband shoot with some frequency, and my husband has spent a fair amount of time hunting. (Full disclosure on full disclosure: my father also hunted, but he was pretty bad at it.)

But there are reasonable arguments for gun ownership. And all of the research shows that there are different kind of gun owners. (I found that article because it was a suggested article from a study the SciAm article cited, but not mentioned in the blog post). Just as the research on persuasion shows that people react to different kinds of arguments differently–which is never represented in pop articles about “no one is persuaded by evidence” or “no one can think straight when mortality is mentioned”– so the research being cited for showing that gun owners are toothless racist rednecks who buy guns to manage the precarity of their masculinity ignores that a lot of gun owners aren’t like that at all. And here’s why that matters. For far too long, I have been really irritated by the large amount of lefty rhetoric that engages in us v. them binaries, often blazingly in opposition to actual research. We are supposed to be the people committed to evidence, to inclusion, to nuance. What the research cited in the SciAm article actually shows is that a lot of gun owners vote Dem (or can be persuaded to do so). Rural gun owners are different from urban ones.

And, really, it’s once I was spending a lot of time in a rural area that I realized why rural people carry guns. If you’ve got an active cattle ranch, you’ve got rattlesnakes and feral hogs. I don’t carry a gun when I wander around the ranch, mainly because I’m a bad shot, and I don’t take the dogs with me when I hike, but I get it. I’m not sure anyone needs an assault rifle (except to resolve the precarity of toxic masculinity), but there are lots of things people have that they don’t need. I’ve several times seen people shoot some pretty powerful guns, that weren’t even remotely necessary, and their attitude was that it was really fun.

Here’s the analogy I think fits. Think about car ownership. There are people who are opposed to governmental controls about gas consumption of vehicles because they want a Humvee, and they want that vehicle because they fantasize about end-of-world scenarios in which they’re Mad Max. There are people who are outraged about possibly not being able to buy Humvees because they have precarious masculinity, and owning a Humvee makes their tiny hands seem bigger. There are people who might need a Humvee because they have a shooting ranch, and that’s what people want to ride in, and there are people who might actually need something pretty close to a Humvee for their needs. And there are people who love cars, including ’69 Camaros, Humvees, Pintos, and Vegas. As someone who sometimes drove a Jaguar XKE and a Mustang Mach 1, I understand that impulse. I’m sure it’s fun to drive a Humvee. I’m sure it’s fun to shoot an AK-47.

Here’s the important point: the last three sorts of gun nuts (they actually need guns, they recognize that their desire to own certain guns is the collectors’ impulse, they think it’s fun to shoot) are open to reasonable restrictions about gun ownership.  

So, articles like the SciAm one are rhetorically unwise. It’s a sloppy article, in that there is an argument that would involve useful distinctions—one that would, simultaneously, point out how irrational one position is, while building bridges with reasonable people. We can and should be better in our rhetoric.

I sincerely believe that our current gun policies are irrational, and that we need ones that are more rational. And rational public policies take into consideration the needs and pleasures that citizens have, such as collecting guns in the same spirit in which one might collect first editions, cars, or dogs (all of which can be regulated). And having various guns for various purposes (perhaps even enjoyment) can be fully rational. But, just as we don’t let everyone drive any vehicle they want, we shouldn’t let everyone use any weapon they want. That’s just sensible. And the SciAm article doesn’t help us have that sensible argument.

Making sure the poor don’t get any food they don’t deserve

“But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind”

In a recent interview, Kellyanne Conway said that “able-bodied” people who will lose Medicare with the GOP health plan should “go find employment” and then get “employee-sponsored benefits.” Critics of Conway presented evidence that large numbers of adults on Medicaid do have jobs, as though that would prove her wrong. But that argument won’t work with the people who like the GOP plan because their answer is that those people should get better jobs. The current GOP plan regarding health care is based on the assumption that benefits like health care should be restricted to working people.

For many, this looks like hardheartedness toward the poor and disadvantaged—exactly the kind of people embraced and protected by Jesus, so many people on the left have been throwing out the accusation of hypocrisy. That the same people who are, in effect, denying healthcare to so many people have protected it for themselves seems, to many, to be the merciless icing on the hateful cake.

And so progressives are attacking this bill (and the many in the state legislatures that have the same intent and impact) as heartless, badly-intentioned, cynical, and cruel. And that is exactly the wrong way to go about this argument. The category often called “white evangelical” tends to be drawn to the just world hypothesis and prosperity gospel, and those two (closely intertwined) beliefs provide the basis for the belief that public goods should not be equally accessible (let alone evenly distributed) because, they believe, those goods should be distributed on the basis of who deserves (not needs) them more. And they believe that Scripture endorses that view, so they are not hypocrites—they are not pretending to have beliefs they don’t really have. This isn’t an argument about intention; this is an argument about Scriptural exegesis.

Progressives will keep losing the argument about public policy until we engage that Scriptural argument. People who argue that the jobless, underemployed, and government-dependent should lose health care will never be persuaded by being called hypocrites because they believe they are enacting Scripture better than those who argue that healthcare is a right.

1. The Just World Hypothesis and Prosperity Gospel

There are various versions of the prosperity gospel (and Kate Bowler’s Prosperity Gospel elegantly lays them out), but they are all versions of what social psychologists call “the just world hypothesis.” That hypothesis is a premise that we live in a world in which people get what they deserve within their lifetimes—people who work hard and have faith in Jesus are rewarded. In some versions, it’s well within what Jesus says, that God will give us what we need. In others, however, it’s the ghost of Puritanism (as Max Weber called it) that haunts America: that wealth and success are perfect signs of membership in the elect. And it’s that second one that matters for understanding current GOP policies.

In that version, in this life, people get what they deserve, so that good people get and deserve good things, and bad people don’t deserve them—it is an abrogation of God’s intended order to allow bad people to get good things, especially if they get those good things for free. For people who believe that God perfectly and visibly rewards the truly faithful, there is a perfect match between faith and the goods such as health and wealth. People with sufficient faith are healthy and wealthy, and, because they have achieved those things by being closer to God, they deserve more of the other goods, such as access to political power. Rich people are just better, and their being rich is proof of their goodness. So, it’s a circular argument–good people get the good things, and that must mean that people with good things are good.

I would say that’s an odd reading of Scripture, but no odder than the defenses of slavery grounded in Scripture, nor of segregation, nor of homophobia. All of those defenders had their proof-texts, after all. And, in each case, the people who cited those texts and defended those practices had a conservative (sometimes reactionary) ideology. They positioned themselves as conserving a social order and set of practices they sincerely believed intended by God as against liberal, progressive, or “new” ways of reading Scripture.

[And here a brief note—they often didn’t know that their own readings were very new, but that’s a different post.]

Because they were reacting against the arguments they identified as liberal (or atheist), I’ll call them reactionary Christians for most of this post, and then in another post explain what’s wrong with that term.

In some cultures, political ideology and identity are identical, so that a person with a particular political belief automatically identifies everyone with that belief as in the category of “good person,” and anyone who doesn’t share that belief is a “bad person.” We’re in that kind of culture.

That easy equation of “believes what I do” and “good person” is enhanced by living within an informational enclave. In informational enclaves, a person only hears information that confirms their beliefs—antebellum Southern newspapers were filled with (false) reports of abolitionist plots, for instance,—so it would sincerely seem to their readers as though “everyone” agrees that abolitionists are trying to sow insurrection. In an informational enclave, “everyone” agrees that the Jews stab the host for no particular reason (the subject of the stained glass above–a consensus that resulted in massacre).

Informational enclaves are self-regulating in that anyone who tries to disrupt the consensus is shamed, expelled, perhaps even killed. By the 1830s, it was common for slave states to require the death penalty for anyone advocating abolition, and “advocating abolition” might be understood as “criticizing slavery.” American Protestant churches split so that Southern churches could guarantee they would not have a pastor that might condemn slavery (the founding of the SBC, for instance), and proslavery pastors could rain down on their congregations proof-texts to defend the actually fairly bizarre set of practices that constituted American slavery.

As Stephen Haynes has shown, the reliance of those pastors on an odd reading of Genesis IX became a Scriptural touchstone for defending segregation.

Southern newspapers were rabidly factional in the antebellum era, and (with a few exceptions) pro-segregation (or silent on segregation) in the Civil Rights eras. (This was not, by the way, “true of both sides,” in that the major abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, often published the full text of proslavery arguments.) Because those proof-texts were piled up as defenses, and reactionary Christianity was hegemonic in various areas, many people simply knew that there were three kings who visited the baby Jesus, that those three kings related to the three races, with the “black” race condemned to slavery due to Noah’s curse.

If you’d like to see how hegemonic that (problematic) reading of Scripture was, look at older nativity scenes, and you will see that there is always a white, someone vaguely semitic, and an African. Ask yourself, how many wise men visited Jesus? Try to prove that number through Scripture.

That whole history of reactionary Christianity is ignored, and even the SBC has tried to rewrite its own history, not acknowledging the role of slavery in their founding. My point is simply that, when a method of interpreting Scripture becomes ubiquitous in a community, then people don’t realize that they’re interpreting Scripture through a particular lens—they think they’re just reading what is there.

For years, the story of Sodom was taken as a condemnation of homosexuality, but there is really nothing about homosexuality in it—the Sodomites were more commonly condemned for oppressing the poor. There are rapes in it, and one of them would have been homosexual, but there is no indication that homosexuality was accepted as a natural practice in the community. Yet, for years, the story of Sodom was flipped on the podium as though it obviously condemned all same-sex relationships.

For readers of The New York Times, The Nation, or other progressive outlets, the Scriptural argument over homosexuality was under the radar, but it was crucial to how far we’ve gotten for the civil rights of people with  sexualities stigmatized by reactionary Christians. The Scriptural argument about queer sexuality was always muddled—Sodom wasn’t really about gay sex, the word “homosexuality” is nowhere in Scripture, people who cite Leviticus about men lying with each other get that sentiment tattooed on themselves while wearing mixed fibers, Paul was opposed to sex in general.

Reactionary Christians managed to promote their muddled view as long as no one raised questions about exegesis, and the Christian Left raised those questions over and over. And now even mainstream reactionary churches who argue that Scripture condemns homosexuality have abandoned the story of Sodom as a proof text. That success can be laid at the feet of progressive Christians.

One thing that turned large numbers of people, I think, was the number of bloggers, popular Christian authors, and pastors making the more sensible Scriptural argument: there isn’t a coherent method of reading Scripture that demonizes queer sexuality and allows the practices reactionary Christians want to allow (such as non-procreative sex, divorce, wildflower mixes, corduroy, oppressing the poor).

Similarly, an important realm in the Civil Rights movements was that in which progressive Christians debated the Scriptural argument. One of the more appalling “down the memory hole” moments in American history is the role of reactionary Christians in civil rights. Segregation was a religious issue, supported by Genesis IX, and various other texts (about God putting peoples where they belong, and all the texts about mixing). Even “moderate” Christians, like those who opposed King, and to whom he responded in his letter, opposed integration.

That’s important. The major white churches in the South supported segregation, and all of the reactionary ones.The opponents of segregation (like the opponents of slavery) were progressive Christians, sometimes part of organizations (like the black churches) and sometimes on the edge of getting disavowed by their organizations. And that is obscured, sometimes deliberately, as when reactionary Christians try to claim that “Christianity” was on the side of King—no, n fact, reactionary Christianity was on the side of segregation.

Right now, there is a complicated fallacy of genus-species among many reactionary Christians, in that they are trying to claim the accomplishments of people like Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael on the grounds that King was Christian, while ignoring that their churches and leaders disavowed and demonized those people (and, in the case of Jackson and Carmichael, still do).

Reactionary Christianity has two major problems: one is a historical record problem, and the second, related, is an exegesis problem. They continually deny or rewrite their own participation in oppression, and they have thereby enabled the occlusion of the problems their method of exegesis presents. If their method of reading got them to support slavery and segregation, practices they now condemn, then their method is flawed. Denying the problems with their history enables them to deny the problems with their method.

Reactionary Christianity’s method of reading of Scripture begins by assuming that the current cultural hierarchy is intended by God, that this world is just, that everything they believe is right, and then goes in support of texts that will support that premise. And there is also a hidden premise that the world is easily interpretable, that uncertainty and ambiguity are unnecessary because they are the signs of a weak faith, and that the world is divided into the good and the bad.

2. The Scriptural argument

The proof-text for the notion that poor people don’t deserve health care or other benefits is 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you: that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

Thessalonians may or may not have been written by Paul (probably not), but it certainly contradicts what both Paul and Jesus said about how to treat the poor. There are far more texts that insist on giving without question, caring for the poor, tending to people without judging, and for humans not presuming to be God (that is, we are not perfect judges of good and evil, and our fall was precisely on the grounds of thinking we should be).

That we have a large amount of public policy wavering on that single wobbly text of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 is concerning, but it isn’t new—the Scriptural arguments for slavery, segregation, and homophobia were and are similarly wobbly. Prosperity gospel has a very shaky Scriptural foundation, and the whole notion that Scripture supports an easy division into makers and takers isn’t any easier to argue than the readings that supported antebellum US practices regarding slavery.

Their reading of Scripture says that they should feel good about health insurance being restricted to people who have jobs (which is why Congress is cheerfully giving themselves benefits they’re denying to others—they see themselves as having earned those benefits by having the job of being in Congress). They can feel justified (in the religious sense) in cutting off people on Medicaid, those who are un- or underemployed, and those with pre-existing conditions because they believe that Scripture tells them that those people could simply stop being un- or underemployed, or have made different choices that wouldn’t have landed them on Medicaid, or could have prayed enough not to have those pre-existing conditions. They believe that they are, in this life, sitting by Jesus’ side and handing out judgments.

I think they’re wrong. But calling them hypocrites won’t work.

This is an argument about Scripture, and progressives need to understand that, as with other policy debates, progressive Christians will do some of the heavy lifting. And progressive Christians need to understand that it is our calling: to point, over and over, to Jesus’ passion for the poor and outcast, and to his insistence that the rewards of this world should never be taken as proof of much of anything.

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