Tag: demagoguery

Strategically Ambiguous Hyperbole

train wreck


On December 3, 2020, the Missouri Gateway Pundit promoted the conspiracy theory that originated with Trump’s legal team: that there was had video showing two Georgia election workers “secretly inject tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots into the vote count and process the fraudulent ballots for counting multiple times without detection, despite several machine hand recounts” (“First Amended” 51). Later that same day, Gateway Pundit named one of the workers, Ruby Freeman, and would later also name and give identifying information about her mother, Wandrea Moss. Despite the immediate debunking of the conspiracy, Gateway Pundit continued to promote the lie (and they’ve never retracted it). In December of 2021, Freeman and Moss sued the owners of the site—two brothers named James and Joseph Hoft, and in January of 2022 the Hofts replied. The goal of that response was to avoid accountability for what they did and are still doing, and what I want to explore in this talk is the role that the “it’s just rhetoric” strategy plays in that evasion.

The Hofts made six major “affirmative” arguments:
• The statements they made are true. “Defendants aver that all statements allegedly made by Defendants complained of by Plaintiffs are true […] Any complained-of statements allegedly made by Defendants that may happen to lack 100% factual veracity are substantially true, and thus treated as true as a matter of law. ( 18)
• The gist of the statements is true. “Any statements made by Defendants complained of by Plaintiffs that are not literally true are substantially true, in that the “gist” or “sting” of the statements is true” (18)
• The statements aren’t literally true, but are opinion or rhetorical hyperbole (i.e., “just rhetoric”). “The statements at issue in the First Amended Complaint are either statements of opinion based on disclosed facts or statements of rhetorical hyperbole that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.” (19)
• Moss and Freeman are public figures, so it doesn’t matter if the statements are true. “Due to the media scrutiny they received in connection with the 2020 presidential election, Plaintiffs are limited purpose public figures.” (19)
• Truth doesn’t matter because they were just repeating what reliable sources said. “Defendants’ statements were published in reliance on statements published by credible sources, including President Donald J. Trump and his campaign.” (19)
• Everybody was saying it. (“Incremental Harm”) “Defendants are far from the only persons to publish statements regarding Plaintiffs.” (20)

What’s striking about this set of arguments is the degree to which they contradict one another. Put simply, the Hofts are claiming that what they said is and is not true, and they did and did not believe it to be true, they did and did not want or expect their readers to take the statements literally. If what they said was literally true, and they believed it to be such, and they expected their audience to understand it as true, then it wasn’t hyperbole. The Hofts’ are using what I’m arguing should be called “strategically ambiguous hyperbole.”

Affirmative defenses are often contradictory because it’s legally acceptable to engage in “arguing in the alternative”—more or less a series of arguendo claims. Also known as throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. To claim that all of their statements were hyperbole is to say that they not only didn’t believe them, but didn’t think their audience would. Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones each tried this defense, and bungled it, Tucker Carlson tried it and succeeded. I want to talk briefly about the Carlson case, because it’s significant.

Carlson and his guest Alan Dershowitz had agreed that a woman who got hush money from Trump had committed “textbook extortion”—that is, a crime. She sued for defamation. Fox argued that the “extortion” accusation was hyperbole, and a judge agreed, saying that the “general tenor” (Memorandum 11, 17) and “context surrounding the statement” (14) would make it clear to any “reasonable” viewer that Carlson was not reporting facts, but engaged in opinion. Carlson’s “accusations of extortion are a familiar rhetorical device” of hyperbole (13). The judge said “that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes” (12), and “Carlson’s ‘dialogue was taking place on an animated, non-literal plane’” (16). The judge said that it didn’t matter whether some viewers took the statement as literally true; what matters is what a “reasonable” person would do, and that’s a common standard in law.

Common definitions of hyperbole emphasize that it is an “obvious and intentional exaggeration” (dictionary.com), “a rhetorical trope by means of which statements are made that are obviously exaggerated and thus untrue or unwarranted” (Snoeck Henkemans 269) That is, a hyperbolic statement is obviously not true, and not meant to be taken as true. But that isn’t true, as one can see in the Hofts’ brief—it isn’t obvious at all whether they believe their claims to be literally true. They are ambiguous on that point.

This ambiguity has consequences for our ability to make policy decisions. If someone uses a textbook example of hyperbole—“my suitcase weighs a ton”—and a listener refutes it by weighing the suitcase and showing that it only weighs forty pounds, the critic just looks like a humorless jerk. There’s no point in refuting a textbook case of hyperbole. But the Hofts’ claims were ambiguously hyperbolic—they were absurd, and they were false, and they were and are obviously false to any reasonable person, but they were and are not obviously false to someone who lives in a world of hyperbolic claims about the villainy of Democrats. Large numbers of Gateway Pundit readers didn’t understand those claims to be hyperbolic—they thought they were factually accurate–which is why the women got death threats. Those supporters may not be reasonable people, but that’s a legal and not rhetorical standard.

Thus, the exaggerated and fabricated claims of voting fraud enable Trump supporters to persuade their base that violence, negating election results, and various other authoritarian and extreme responses are justified self-defense, while evading accountability for the consequences of their persuasion. The absurdity of the claims also enables potential Trump voters who might “dislike Trump’s rhetoric,” but like his policies to deflect criticism for what they are supporting. They see his inciting violence and calling for authoritarian policies as “just rhetoric.” The same claims are hyperbole when strategically useful to call them that, and true or substantially true when that’s the useful strategy. And that’s what I mean by strategically ambiguous hyperbole.

I mentioned earlier that hyperbole isn’t always oriented toward rousing an audience. Sometimes it’s a strategy of deflection, by shifting the stasis. When Trump characterizes immigration as an “invasion,” that strategically ambiguous hyperbole means we’re now arguing about just how dangerous or criminal immigrants are. We are arguing about whether Moss and Freeman introduced tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots—that is, just how big the fraud was. That immigrants are dangerous, and that the election was stolen, are part of the frame, not part of the argument. And so we don’t talk about whether Trump tried to incite a riot that would steal the election—even if he did, it seems justified by the fraud that never happened.

Strategically ambiguous hyperbole also aids in the deflection of responsibility on the part of voters who intend to support Trump even if they don’t “like his rhetoric.” A common way of deflecting reasonable discussion of Trump’s corruption, fraud, and lying is to respond with, “All politicians lie”—a hyperbolic statement not intended to rouse but deflect. “All politicians lie” is simultaneously true and false. All politicians do lie—all humans lie—but that statement is used, implicitly, to dismiss the degree and kind of lies that Trump tells. It’s hyperbolic in its implications.

In addition to evading accountability, this flipping in and out of defending their rhetoric as hyperbole enables them to forestall refutation. To be effective at rousing an audience (and hyperbole can have other functions), a hyperbolic statement has to resonate as “true” in at least two ways: plausibility of the overall thrust of the argument, and sincerity of the rhetor.

In this case, the base believed/s that Democrats can only win elections by cheating; even if Democrats didn’t cheat exactly as much as the Hofts said, or in the specific ways they said. Claudia Claridge calls this kind of hyperbole “emotional truth” versus “factual truth” (18), but I don’t think invoking the rational/irrational split is either accurate or useful here. The people who find this kind of hyperbole powerful think they’re relying on factually and literally true assertions about reality. They consider it a fact that the election was stolen; the details don’t matter. The data presented as proof (analysis of the video, claims about a fake flooding) don’t have a particularly important relationship to the conclusion, so it doesn’t matter if they turn out to be false (Jenny Rice’s book on conspiracy thinking describes this process elegantly). I want to emphasize this point—that there is no expectation of a logical relationship between major claims and supposedly supporting evidence means that the argument cannot be refuted. If it can’t be refuted, it can’t be deliberated.

The Hofts, like Alex Jones, Giuliani, and Trump, openly violate the norms, even of a legal case, as it is going on, and as they claim they are honoring them. Alex Jones continued promoting on his radio show the very conspiracy theories and false claims he was in the midst of a lawsuit about, during which he testified under oath that he had stopped making those claims, and for which he had apologized enough already. He has testified in court to facts about his wealth, mental health, and intentions that he promptly and deliberately contradicted on his radio show; Giuliani signed and contradicted an admission of lying. The Hofts, in a legal document, said their claims were true and untrue. The incoherence is the point.

In addition, for some people, wild exaggeration adds credibility to an argument because it shows the passionate and sincere commitment of the rhetor to the in-group. It is a kind of performative appeal to authority—you should trust me because my commitment to the in-group is unconstrained, as shown by my being rhetorically unconstrained–and that appeal to authority works in several ways. It shows passionate commitment to the in-group (“the power of the irrational rhetor”), as well as an authoritarian understanding of truth (the argument made by Robert Paxton). The “truth” of the statement might be the sincerity of the rhetor. It can be an instance of what Ryan Skinnell calls “deceiving sincerely,” a characteristic Skinnell (and others, like Paxton) have argued is present in fascism (Rhetoric of Fascism). The truth of the statement is that the speaker is truly committed to dominating, exterminating, or expelling the out-groups. And that makes everything they say, even if false, true because the “gist” (Democrats stole the election) is true.

Brad Serber has argued that Trump and his supporters don’t engage in “dog whistles,” but “howling.” Serber says, “Dog Whistling carefully avoids the direct use of epithets, calls for violence, and other more overt kinds of hate speech, [but] Howling drops all pretense of civility and political correctness” (194). The rhetor is willing to violate rhetorical norms, and so will be willing to violate other norms as well to get the policies the in-group wants. What Trump models and offers to his followers is the opportunity to participate, via agency by proxy, in grandiose violation of legal, moral, and rhetorical norms without accountability.

Finally, it isn’t just rhetoric. The strategically ambiguous hyperbole is in service of policies that cannot be deliberated because the affirmative case is made up of claims that cannot be refuted. Both the rhetors and the policies they advocate are rhetorically, ethically, and politically unmoored. As Mary Stuckey has shown, hyperbole tends to correlate to times of increased incivility—that is, violations of discursive norms, “a certain vagueness regarding means and ends” (that is, what I’ve called a depoliticized public sphere), “and a reliance on hope and nostalgia” (676). If being irrational and extreme becomes the criterion for having credibility, then deliberation, nuance, complexity, uncertainty, reciprocity, inclusion, are all deflected if not demonized. The point of strategically ambiguous hyperbole is to evade the responsibilities of rhetoric, and the requirements of democratic deliberation. When Trump says that, on his first day in office, “we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” it is tempting for people who like certain policies of Trump’s (overheating the economy, reducing environmental protection, ending gay marriage) to dismiss the anti-democratic and authoritarian policy agenda as hyperbole. That’s a mistake. It isn’t just rhetoric.




Works Cited

Claridge, Claudia. Hyperbole in English: A corpus-based study of exaggeration. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
“Defendants’ Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Petition and Counterclaims.” https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2023.01.16-Defs-Answer-to-Pltffs-2nd-Amended-Petition-Counterclaims.pdf
Fioroni, Sarah. “Following Public Individuals for News in 7 Charts.” Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/506084/following-public-individuals-news-charts.aspx
“First Amended Complaint.” Case: 4:21-cv-01424-HEA Doc. #: 33 Filed: 01/14/22. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21315827-tgp_amendedcomplaint
Gerstein, Josh and Kyle Cheney. “‘He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob’” Politico 12/14/2023 01:03 PM EST https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/14/rudy-giuliani-jury-georgia-election-00131796 Updated: 12/14/2023 05:06 PM EST
(Giuliani) Nolo Contendre [sic] Stipulation. Case No. 1:21-cv-03354 (BAH). https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Defendant-Giulianis-Superseding-Nolo-Contendre-Stipulation-Conceding-to-Default-Liability.pdf
Henkemans, A. Francisca Snoeck. “Strategic manoeuvring with hyperbole in political debate.” Contextualizing pragma-dialectics 12 (2017): 269-280.
“Hyperbole.” Dictonary.com https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hyperbole
Kreider, A. J. “Argumentative Hyperbole as Fallacy.” Informal Logic 42.2 (2022): 417-437.
Levine, Sam. “Jury in Rudy Giuliani Defamation Trial Urged to Send Message: ‘Don’t Do It’” Thu 14 Dec 2023 15.05 EST https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/14/rudy-giuliani-testimony-federal-defamation-case-atlanta-election-workers
Memorandum in Support of Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss. McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC, No. 1:2019cv11161 – Document 39 (S.D.N.Y. 2020). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/
McFadden, K. “Hyperbole.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, 4th ed., Princeton UP, 2012, p. 648. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2388000525/GVRL?u=txshracd2598&sid=bookmarkGVRL&xid=776ca8ac.
Memorandum in Support of Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss. McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC, No. 1:2019cv11161 – Document 39 (S.D.N.Y. 2020). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/
Paxton, Robert O. The anatomy of fascism. Vintage, 2005.
Rice, Jenny. Awful archives: Conspiracy theory, rhetoric, and acts of evidence. The Ohio State University Press, 2020.
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Fanatical schemes: Proslavery rhetoric and the tragedy of consensus. University of Alabama Press, 2010.
Skinnell, Ryan. “Deceiving Sincerely: The Embrace of Sincerity-as-Truth in Fascist Rhetoric.” Rhetoric of Fascism. Ed. Nathan Crick. 2022.
Stuckey, Mary E. “American elections and the rhetoric of political change: Hyperbole, anger, and hope in US politics.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs. (2017): 667-694.
Trump, Donald. ”We Will Begin.” Right Side Broadcasting Network https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GF_SRHFlmc

Primary v. Secondary Sources

image of down escalator with "Deliberating War" Patricia Roberts-Miller

Early in my career as a writing teacher, I had a confusing conversation with a student about sources—it taught me a lot about how people think about evidence and fairness. Imagine that the student was writing about whether little dogs are involved in squirrel conspiracy to get the red ball. This situation was a hypothetical example I used in order to help students think about structure, logic, and argumentation without triggering hot cognition by using a more controversial issue. The basic premise was that the squirrels were conspiring to get to my dogs’ red ball, something on which my two Great Danes agreed, but they disagreed as to whether little dogs were involved in the conspiracy (one of my dogs loved little dogs, and the other was afraid of them—which is pretty hilarious for a Great Dane).[1] So, call one group Hubertians and the other Chesterians.

The student was making an argument about what Hubert supporters believed, and cited a rabidly (so to speak) pro-Chester source. I was trying to explain that the assignment required that students use primary sources—if he wanted to make an argument about what Hubert supporters believed, he needed to cite a pro-Hubert source. He kept saying he was, because the article by a rabidly pro-Chester author in a rabidly pro-pro-Chester media outlet had a direct quote. Why would he need any other source? It was a quote, he kept saying.

It took me a long time to understand the misunderstanding. It’s a complicated one, on both our parts, and has a lot to do with how people think about evidence and proof. But here I want to pursue one part of the misunderstanding—about fairness.

Even if there is a quote, it isn’t necessarily what Hubert said, let alone meant. And here’s it’s necessary to say something about partisan sources.

As I’ve said many times, and in many places, the tendency to take our rich and nuanced world of policy options and divide them into a binary (or continuum) of identities is false, fallacious, proto-demagogic, and guarantees we can’t discuss policies reasonably. There are self-identified “conservative” Christians who object to the death penalty and abortion, self-identified “conservative” Christians who object to one but not the other, self-identified “progressive” Christians who object to both, others who object to one but not the other. Thinking in terms of identity means we end up arguing about who is really Christian, or really conservative, or really whatever. Thinking in terms of policy raises the possibility of a coalition on one issue even though we disagree about others. And that doesn’t require anyone converting to a new identity.

So, thinking about politics this way means trying to find different points of view on policies in order to understand the arguments. This is a long way of saying that looking at politics as policies means trying to get information from a variety of perspectives on a policy disagreement, not just two.[2]

And what I learned by doing that myself was that Hubert might or might not have actually said what the pro-Chester article quoted. If you read sources from multiple perspectives, you learn that misrepresenting the out-group happens in all sorts of ways in all sorts of sources.

Imagine that the quote in question is, “Bunnies are fluffy.” Hubert might not have said anything like that—it might have been something a pro-Hubert pundit said, or something a pro-Chester pundit simply invented. Hubert might have said, “Bunnies are not fluffy,” and the article edited the quote without even showing ellipses. Hubert might have said, “Bunnies have fur” which someone badly paraphrased, and that paraphrase got turned into a quote. Hubert might himself have been quoting someone before he went on to show he didn’t agree with it. He might have been engaged in a “some say” argument. He might have said it sarcastically. In context, it might have meant something completely different from what the pro-Chester article was representing. He might have said it when he was a puppy, and he’s since retracted it and advocated a different position.

In-group rhetors often misrepresent what out-group members have said, and what out-group members believe.[3] They don’t necessarily intend to do so—sometimes it’s just that they’re writing in a rush, and sometimes they themselves didn’t read the whole article, and sometimes they think it’s “more or less true.”

It isn’t just related to politics. I’ve seen article on non-political technical issues that made the same mistake—I’ve seen scholarly articles that misrepresent an argument I’ve made by taking it out of context; I’ve later discovered I did it to others.

And all of us have had it happen in personal situations—people take something we’ve said out of context, and thereby mislead others about us. And we don’t like it when it happens to us.

We’d like people to represent what we’ve said accurately, and we’d like others to check with us about what we’ve said or believed.

So, it’s a question of fairness. If we’d like others to ensure that we and our in-group are being accurately quoted, then we should make sure we’re doing that to others. It’s useful if we try to get outside of our informational bubble.


[1] The student wasn’t actually writing about this topic, but I think it’s useful for purposes of my argument here to stay away from hot cognition topics.

[2] Which is a basic flaw in my basic hypothetical scenario, but we tended to complicate it as time went on.

[3] “In-group” is not the group “in” power; it’s the group we’re in. So, for Chester supporters, Chesterians are the “in-group” and Hubertians are the “out-group.” “Hubertians” are the in-group for Hubert supporters, and Chesterians

What’s wrong with calls for “civility”

A dozen or so 19th century books on etiquette

Our current political and public discourse is in a bad way, and a lot of people are proposing that the solution is a re-embrace of “civility” as a cultural norm. The problem with these arguments is that its advocates use civility as a “God” term—meaning it isn’t very precisely defined, but is always good. That vague understanding combined with a passionate commitment means we can’t talk usefully about the times that civility was used to exclude, dismiss, and even criminalize valid criticism of people and institutions.

Civility, like its evil twin demagoguery, is sometimes defined in terms of intention, sometimes word choice, the feelings of the critic, the feelings of the rhetor, imagined norms, or whatever happens to be useful to condemn out-group rhetoric and praise in-group rhetoric. The shifting definition means that there is no such thing as out-group civility or in-group incivility (or if in-group incivility is admitted, it’s justified in some way).

I’m really tired of well-intentioned calls for “civility” that are most likely to have no impact other than increasing in-group self-righteousness.

Too many calls for civility don’t actually define civility (or they define it through a double negative—it’s not incivility); they never give examples of a civil argument with which they disagree, so “civility” and “incivility” are just terms to describe in- v. out-group rhetoric; their narratives of when politics became uncivil are unintentional exposures that they don’t really know much about the history of rhetoric or public discourse; they don’t acknowledge that a speech they insist was civil was, in its reception, seen as incivil; their notion of civility muddles reception (incivility hurts feelings), word choice (incivil rhetoric uses prohibited words, boosters), and argumentation (incivility misrepresents the situation, relies heavily on fallacies of relevance and deflection).

If you have an incoherent description of the ill, then it’s unlikely you’re going to find a good plan to solve that ill. If central to both your ill and your plan is a term you can’t define, you’re gerfucked.

Slavers whined about the incivility of their critics, and, in fact, passed a gag rule in an attempt to silence criticism of slavery in Congress. Critics of slavery in many states might be expelled, lynched, fined, their businesses ruined–southern civility did not extend to allowing criticism of slavery. As William Chafe long ago showed, civility worked against civil rights and in favor of segregation. When people argue for censoring textbooks, prohibiting discussions of genocide, slavery, segregation, and racism, they do so on the grounds of “civility.” We have to decide what we want to civility to do—strengthen or undermine current hierarchies? Enable genuine disagreement or make it more difficult?

There are a lot of ways of thinking about civility. Two are particularly important for our current situation: civility as rules of deference that vary depending on where the rhetor is in a hierarchy; or, civility as equal treatment regardless of any hierarchy of power or position. The hierarchical way of thinking about civility assumes that civility is deference (especially verbal), and that the civility rules should always be stricter for the person/group lower in the hierarchy. A professor calls students by their first name, but the students use title and last name for the professor. A boss can shout at an employee, but the employee can’t shout at the boss. There are rules of civility for the person higher in the hierarchy, but there are fewer of them, and the penalties are minor if they are violated.

Another way of thinking about civility is egalitarian. The rules of civility apply equally to all—it is just as much a violation of civility for a manager to shout at an employee as vice versa. Whatever exceptions are made for rules about shouting apply to all equally.

So, how should we define civility? I’d suggest it’s useful to think of civility as “politeness rules about who can say what to whom in what circumstances.” If we define it that way, then it isn’t necessarily good. It can be used for silencing dissent, justifying injustice, enabling violence. If we think of it that way, then it isn’t even something absent from our current situation. The problem isn’t that civility is absent; the problem is the implicit model of civility people are using: doubly hierarchical.

What we’re experiencing right now is a doubly hierarchical model of civility. In-group rules of civility are weaker than they used to be, but there are still hierarchies (and the more SDO a group is, the more the group has an internal hierarchical approach to civility). But the main hierarchy is in- v. out-group. The out-group is held to higher standards of civility than the in-group. Rhetoric with which we agree is held to lower standards of civility than rhetoric with which we disagree.

In a demagogic culture, standards of “civility” are determined by in- or out-group membership. Anything any in-group rhetor or group does is civil, and exactly the same rhetoric on the part of out-group rhetors is incivil. Rarely is that disparate standard acknowledged. When it is, people try to justify it on the grounds that we are in an existential war, a way of framing policy disagreements that is disastrous for democracy (the argument made here: the only book of which I am unashamably proud).

Unless we can separate standards of civility from in-group membership, then even if we do somehow manage to increase “civility,” it will simply make our current situation worse.









Mission Statements and War

red scare ad for Dewey

I’m reading Donald Stoker’s hilariously (and justifiably) grumpy Why America Loses Wars (2019). One of the points he makes is that American politicians and pundits have been enamored with “limited war” since Korea, without any precise definition of that term (or even of war more generally). He argues that “limited war” is defined (to the extent that it’s defined at all) by military means rather than political objective. Political objectives enable the determination of “win” conditions (e.g., we are fighting in order to gain control of this territory), whereas defining a war by military means (e.g., we will rely purely on bombing) doesn’t.

He says that no President since FDR who has advocated going to war has laid out clear “win” conditions, and that, without those conditions (without knowing the political objective), the military can’t determine effective strategies.

That’s an argument similar to one I make in Deliberating War—that the rhetoric for the war matters, since a necessary war should be rhetorically defensible, as far as need and objectives. If political figures and pundits can’t name a specific political objective, then they’re effectively advocating endless war. My interest is in public deliberation about policy, whereas Stoker’s is military deliberation about strategies, tactics, logistics, operations, and so on. But, what’s shared is the argument that vague objectives (or, more precisely, vague rhetoric about objectives) constrain deliberation.

Stoker argues that political figures from Truman to Obama have advocated war (which Stoker defines as combatants using violence to achieve a political aim, 15) while denying that it’s war and describing the objectives in vague terms or not describing them at all.

Stoker is arguing against the post-war fascination with “limited war”—a fascination that continues to trouble public discourse about military actions.

To be fair, LBJ was clear that the goal was a non-communist South Vietnam, and Truman was clear that the goal was getting North Korean troops out of the area below the 38th parallel. Granted, those are negative goals, and it took Truman a minute to decide that was the goal, but the pro-war rhetoric of Truman and LBJ doesn’t seem to me much vaguer than what Wilson set out as goals for WWI. So, I’m not convinced that the problem Stoker identifies is entirely new. But, I agree it’s a problem, and I agree it’s now the norm. With the exception of the First Iraq War (the Persian Gulf War), military actions have been advocated with arguments no more complicated than what can be a slogan on a bumper sticker. FDR had a lot of bumper sticker moments, but he also had specific goals—there were win identifiable conditions.[1] But, what is victory in a “war on terror”? What does it mean to “destroy” a non-state entity like IS? How do you know you’ve won? How do you know whether you’re winning?

So, here’s something I’ve been wondering about: Stoker’s quotes from various Presidents and what they’ve said in favor of war sound like mission statements. I’m not opposed to mission statements on principle (it isn’t my mission to reject mission statements) but they’re often sententious platitudes oriented toward signalling in-group loyalty. For years, there have been sites that generate a mission statements, and they don’t seem that different from the ones for which institutions paid consulting firms millions.[2] So, I’m not convinced that mission statements do much of anything. The process of deliberating a mission statement can be, but, since mission statements are often determined by websites or consulting firms, I’m not sure what they do other than signal. They don’t imply objectives (which are often equally vague and sententious), let alone policies.

But they have a rhetorical impact. In addition to signalling in-group loyalty, they’re just vague enough that it’s difficult to disagree with them. And, really, that’s how so many wars in the 21st century have been advocated. If a war is for “freedom,” how can you be against it? If it’s a war on drugs, how can you be in favor of drugs?

I found myself wondering: is there a relationship between the obsession with sententious mission statements and wars advocated via sententious mission statements?

I know there is no monocausal narrative that would be accurate, so I’m not wondering if the tendency toward mission statements is the cause for vague and vapid military mission statements. But I’m wondering if there’s something that has created a trend for sententious mission statements, and it’s affected all institutions equally (business, non-profits, academia, politics), or if there is some complicated causal relationship?

[1] I’m not certain this vagueness about win conditions is entirely new, but I can’t think of a war when they were as vague as they were with the Second or Third Iraq War, the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, or the “wars” that Trump has asserted are already declared on the US, such as the trade war with China.

[2] I’m not dismissing or even criticizing the practice that Covey advocated—of taking some time every once in a while to ask yourself questions like: “WTF am I trying to do?” “What do I want to achieve?” I think that some corporate mission statements are meaningful, and the process of developing one can be useful.

People need to stop worrying about cursive

handwritten notes in cursive

When we have taken time and trouble to learn something, we tend to value it—simply because it was a PITA to learn. So, when something gets taken out of the K-12 curriculum, people of a certain generation can have a gleeful “kids these days” moment. When I was young, memorizing the state capitols was dropped from the curriculum in a lot of places, and I remember hearing people bemoan the debacle that had come to be known as education. As it happens, when I’m bored, I will sometimes try to write the states in alphabetical order. If I’m really bored, I’ll then try to identify each state’s capitol. I usually fail. My life would be no worse had I not been taught to memorize the capitols.

[ETA, since, apparently, I was unclear on this point: I don’t remember the state capitols because, between fourth grade and until I was an adult in boring meetings, it was never a skill I needed. Something that you’re forced to learn that you then never or rarely learn is something you forget. That some people in some very specific fields might find that knowledge useful doesn’t mean that it should be a required part of K-12 curriculum.]

As it happens, I write in cursive a lot. It is useful for taking notes quickly, although nowhere near as useful as shorthand—which I was never taught. If we’re concerned about people being able to write quickly, then we should teach shorthand.

When I was teaching, I had some students who wrote exams in cursive, but very few It’s faster to write an exam in cursive, but not necessarily a good choice. Even I think cursive is harder to read, and rhetorically it’s a poor choice to irritate a grader by writing in a way that takes extra time to decipher.

A lot of students wrote in what amounts to italics, and that made a lot of sense (sloped and somewhat looped, but without special characters for letters like capital Q). It’s as fast as cursive, but doesn’t take any particular training to write or read.

The other argument I hear for taking class time to teach cursive is that people won’t be able to read historical documents. This argument puzzles me. Printed documents tended to be in block letters from the beginning of the 19th century. Books were in block letters long before that. Some documents are in cursive (especially proclamations), but not always the same cursive.

I read a fair number of historical documents, and I do get a thrill when I’m looking at an original version of something like the Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence. But it’s that it’s the thing, not that it’s in cursive. I’m not sure that a person understands the document any better if they read it in cursive rather than block letters.

And, in fact, what makes reading those documents difficult isn’t the cursive, but first and foremost the content. The historical context, references, genre. The language is often archaic, and usually invokes legal or philosophical concepts that are unfamiliar. To the extent that deciphering them is hard, it isn’t because they’re in cursive, but usually that the font is serif, and the kerning is confusing. And they aren’t always in cursive. For instance, knowing cursive doesn’t help someone read the Rhode Island charter.

Rhode Island Charter in very difficult font
The Rhode Island Royal Charter



So, really, people need to stop worrying about not teaching cursive. What we should really be getting upset about is that students aren’t being taught geology, sex ed, history, argumentation. I don’t care if it’s in cursive or not.

Deliberating War is published!

image of down escalator with "Deliberating War" Patricia Roberts-Miller

The e-book version of Deliberating War is available from Springer!

“Drawing on a rich collection of examples from ancient Greece to the present day, Patricia Roberts-Miller ably demonstrates the failure of political leaders to engage in deliberation when choosing to undertake, continue, or escalate war. Instead, they reframe the situation, deflect the real issues, demonize the enemy, and make themselves the victim, all to convince themselves that war already has been forced upon them and they have no choice. Sometimes wars are justified, but political leaders, specialists, and citizens will all benefit from this accessible work that shows what can happen when deliberation is an essential feature of the rhetoric of war.” (David Zarefsky, Northwestern University, Author of “Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam, and the Presidency: The Speech of March 31, 1968”)

“Deliberating War is a thorough, insightful, and well-written discussion of how people in the Western tradition deliberate about war and treat deliberation as war. In discussing various kinds of war, and various kinds of deliberating about war, Roberts-Miller illuminates how and why some of these are more dangerous than others. This book is a must-read for scholars in history, political science, and communication who care about war, democracy, and the relationships between them.” (Mary E. Stuckey, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State University)

“Deliberating War takes rhetoric’s relationship to war out of the realm of meaningless metaphor and into the realm of real, critical, potentially cataclysmic importance. For millennia, debates about war have translated to the battlefield and events on the battlefield have translated into debates about who we are, what we value, and how we should act towards one another. Given how high the stakes are, Roberts-Miller demands that readers grapple with how politicians use rhetoric to drag people to war. But politicians don’t act alone, so she also demands that everyone learn to choose their words more wisely in matters of war, politics, and life.” (Ryan Skinnell, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, San José State University)

“Patricia Roberts-Miller’s Deliberating War is a probing study of the rhetorical dynamics that feed on political factionalism to displace deliberation and transform the trope of “politics as war” into real war. It is a sustained and close study of multiple cases of armed conflict that cross historical periods and involve an assortment of adversaries. Various rhetorical practices are insightfully analyzed for how they obstruct democratic deliberation, including how the call to arms is strategically framed, which fallacies typically are deployed, which issues are obscured and left unaddressed, and how the dynamics of the discourse can even carry adversaries into a war they wanted to avoid. Her critique of appeasement rhetoric is particularly acute, as is the point she makes about the militarization of politics in general, which reduces the spectrum of normal policy disagreements to political combat. This is an important work of scholarship on the consequences of literalizing the metaphor of war.” (Robert L. Ivie, Professor Emeritus in English (Rhetoric) & American Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington)

“In this incisive and necessary book, Patricia Roberts-Miller skillfully interrogates the political factors in the decisions made by nations to go to war and the critical lack of deliberation when making those decisions. Her analysis captures the enormity and the tragedy of governments choosing war without losing the humanity of those who must carry out those decisions. In addition to political rhetoric scholars, this book should be required reading within the halls of the U.S. Congress, inside the walls of the Pentagon, and in the classrooms of military academies and war colleges.” (Derek G. Handley, Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (CDR, U.S. Navy Retired))

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

books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[RSA talk] “Obscured Ends and Amoral Means: The Flickering Moralism of Machiavellian Approaches to Rhetoric”

chart showing four RVN governments between November of 1963 and September of 1964

This paper came out of my being puzzled by a paradox I kept running across in the various deliberative train wrecks I study—the intermittent moralism of Machiavellian approaches to public policy disagreements. “Machiavellianism,” only orthogonally related to what Machiavelli actually said, claims to treat means as morally neutral, often in service of some version of power politics or neo-Social Darwinism. But this amoralizing of means is both rhetorical and flickering—American intervention in Vietnam, for instance, was advocated on the grounds of moral necessity and amoral power politics, sometimes in the same document.

What I’ll pursue in this paper are some of the somewhat paradoxical rhetorical consequences of this disingenuous framing of means as amoral.

I’ll focus on US decision-making regarding Vietnam in August of 1964. August of 1964 is one of several moments of escalation, with attention generally on LBJ’s decision to lie in order to get the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed on August 7. But I’m more interested in the chaotic debacle that was General Nguyễn Khánh’s not-quite month as Chief of State. I’ll start by discussing the objectives (ends) at the time, the necessary conditions for success, the actual conditions (as described by US decision-makers), the means they chose, and finish with how Machiavellianism played into it.

Ends In an August 10 “situation report,” Maxwell Taylor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and recently appointed US Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam said that the “Communist strategy” was not
“To attempt to defeat the superior Republic of Vietnam military forces in the field or to seize and conquer territory by military means. Instead, it is their announced intention to harass, erode and terrorize the population into a state of such demoralization that a political settlement favorable to the Communists will ensue.” (#306, 657).
Robert McNamara would later identify policies in 1964 as oriented toward “the objective of destroying Hanoi’s will to fight and its ability to continue to supply the Vietcong” (In Retrospect 152). In an important –strategy setting—document in August of 1964, McGeorge Bundy said we must “make it clear both to the Communists and to South Vietnam that military pressure will continue until we have achieved our objectives [….] leaving no doubts in South Vietnam of our resolve” (#313, 675). By persuading “the Communists” that the US would not give up Vietnam, it was hoped that “the Communists” could be persuaded that a divided Vietnam—much like Korea—was the best deal they could get, and therefore take it.

Necessary Conditions To achieve those ends—a Hanoi willing to agree to a divided Vietnam—certain conditions had to exist. RVN had to be an effective and largely victorious force, capable of exterminating the insurgency without alienating the populace. The “pacification” program was crucial for achieving several of the conditions—denying communist support for the Viet Cong, maintaining the morale of the populace, achieving military victories—and it depended on “clearing” certain areas of Viet Cong agents and supporters. South Vietnam had to have a competent, trusted, and stable government. The South Vietnamese people needed to support that government, and support the war (which could only happen were the first condition met). The US had to signal willingness to throw limitless resources at the conflict. These various conditions tended to be characterized as issues of “morale” (or its opposite—“defeatism”) in official documents, documents that admitted none of those conditions were present.

Actual Conditions In that August 10 “situation report,” Taylor acknowledged that the South Vietnamese military was weak, while trying to put a positive spin on it: “In the view of US advisors, more than 90 percent of the battalions of the army are at least marginally effective.” (#306; 661). The pacification program was “proving to be a most difficult one primarily because of the inefficiency of the ministries, their ineptitude in planning and their general lack of spirit of team play” (Taylor 659). In a memo ten days later, Taylor said, “that the present in-country pacification plan is not enough in itself to maintain national morale or to offer reasonable hope of eventual success.” But the worst was the government. The US had endorsed the November 1963 coup on the grounds that Diem was corrupt, incompetent, and tremendously unpopular. He had collaborated with the Japanese (unlike Ho Chi Minh, who fought them), was brutally persecuting Buddhists, and may have been considering a peace treaty with Ho. The hope was that replacing Diem would increase Vietnamese commitment to the war by putting in place a more popular, competent, and bellicose government. It didn’t work (as can be seen in the chart at the top.

Taylor said
The most important and most intractable internal problem of South Vietnam in meeting the Viet Cong threat is the political structure at the national level. The best thing that can be said about the present Khanh government is that it has lasted six months and has about a 50-50 chance of lasting out the year [….] It is an ineffective government beset by inexperienced ministers who are also jealous and suspicious of each other [….] However, there is no one in sight who could do better than Khanh in the face of the many difficulties which would face any head of government [….] The attitude of the people toward the Khanh government, mostly confused and apathetic since its inception, is only slightly more favorable than a few months ago. Despite considerable efforts, Khanh has not succeeded in building any substantial body of popular support. (657-658).

August 13, 1964, McGeorge Bundy presented a plan called “Next Steps in Southeast Asia, “a highly important document” (Logevall 217). McNamara would later say that “the memo and its derivatives became the focus of our attention and acrimonious debate for the next five months” (In Retrospect 151). The first sentence of the section, “Essential Elements in the Situation” is “South Vietnam is not going well” (#313, 674).

Taylor responded to Bundy’s “Next Courses of Action” (which he endorsed that one assumption behind Bundy’s proposal (which he believed to be correct) is:
The first and most important objective is to gain time for the Khanh Government to develop a certain stability and to give some firm evidence of viability [….] A second objective in this period is the maintenance of morale in South Viet Nam, particularly within the Khanh Government [….] he must stabilize his government and make some progress in cleaning up his own operational backyard. (690)

The Course of Action that Bundy’s memo advocates, and Taylor endorses, “relies heavily upon the durability of the Khanh Government. It assumes that there is little danger of its collapse without notice or of its replacement by a weaker or more unreliable successor” (692). Ten days later, worried about a coup, Khanh himself would resign and skedaddle to Dalat. He had to be coerced to come back and form a triumvirate. There were no illusions about the instability and unpopularity of the government, and yet the US was pursuing a plan that, as was repeatedly insisted, depended upon a stable and popular government, which US officials knew they didn’t have. They did, however, have one that wouldn’t negotiate with Hanoi.

The Means
One of the “means” necessary for success was preventing peace talks: “We must continue to oppose any Vietnam conference” (#313). After listing the various means the US should take, Bundy says,
These actions are not in themselves a truly coherent program of strong enough pressure either to bring Hanoi around or to sustain a pressure posture into some kind of discussion. Hence, we should continue absolutely opposed to any conference. (#313; 678).

That this was the means was not publicly admitted. But the conservative and “realist” political scientist Hans Morgenthau had figured that out, snarkily noting in an article in New Leader in June of 1964:
Our main immediate problem is apparently not to win the war against the Viet Cong but to prevent the ascendancy of an anti-war government in Saigon. What we are saying and doing must, then, have as its main purpose to prevent the collapse of the morale of General Nguyen Khanh’s government and of its military forces (44).
Thus, American Vietnam policy in 1964 was to prevent negotiations with Hanoi until the morale, bellicosity, and military effectiveness of the South Vietnamese was such that Hanoi (and China) would believe that a divided nation was the best they could possibly get: “We need to apply “a combination of military pressure and some form of communication under which Hanoi (and Peiping) eventually accept the idea of getting out” (#313). The “Next Course” also advocated dropping leaflets, increased training of RVN forces, mining of the Haiphong harbor, “tit-for-tat” actions, only acknowledging successful military actions. Taylor said, “The US Mission has recognized in its information and psychological programs the need to present the Khanh government in its most favorable light at home and abroad, particularly in the United States” (# 306 660).

What I hope is striking to you is that the means were profoundly rhetorical; they were about persuasion—persuading the North Vietnamese they couldn’t win, and the South Vietnamese that they could. South Vietnamese needed to be persuaded to support the war, and both the South Vietnamese and Americans needed to be persuaded to have faith in the Khanh government—its stability, competence, and resolve. But even the American officials themselves weren’t persuaded of any of those things. So, the Machiavellianism came to be the approach to public deliberations—critics of American policy in Vietnam had to be smeared, discredited, and deflected. Preventing reasonable discussion of Vietnam policy itself became a means necessary for the ends.

Machiavellianism
I mentioned earlier that McNamara said the US objective was destroying Hanoi’s will to fight and ability to support the Vietcong. He said, “Neither then nor later did the chiefs fully assess the probability of achieving these objectives, how long it might take, or what it would cost in lives lost, resources expended, and risks incurred” (152).

The amoralizing of means didn’t mean they were actually neutral—there is nothing morally neutral about napalm—it just meant that people could deflect or even demonize public discourse that criticized the ends or means. The ends (and therefore the morality of the means) are themselves outside the realm of argument—they’re simultaneously obscured and circular (since the postulated morality of the ends or intentions justifies being dishonest about what the ends or intentions actually are). We can’t argue reasonably about the ends—because they’re postulated as moral—and we can’t argue at all about the morality of the means. Thus, amoralizing policies (the means) necessarily results in the demoralizing and depoliticizing of public discourse. The point I’m makingis that US officials (like many others) were Machiavellian not just in terms of their use of napalm, but their approach to public discourse. And my crank theory is that one necessarily leads to the other.

Laws of history

"A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue."

A lot of people are sharing this post, and it’s wrong. Students were tremendously supportive of Nazis. (I think they were also supportive of Mussolini and Franco, but I haven’t read much about them, so I might be wrong.)

More important, this post appeals to the fantasy that complicated political situations are actually simple. It says they’re really a binary between a group with perfect insight and the right understanding, and a ruling class that is a Disney villain. That way of thinking about politics shuts down our ability to argue with one another reasonably about policy options. As it is intended to do.

There are evil groups and evil policies, but, if I were going to say that there is a good law of history it would be: no framing of any major policy conflict as binary of two groups (one right and the other evil) has ever been just, accurate, useful, or helpful.

I’m open to counter-examples, but, since thinking about this framing of politics has been something I’ve been studying for forty years, I’m pretty confident that there isn’t one.

So, if you think you know of a time when a major policy issue was a binary between two sides–of two groups (one right and the other evil) –I’d love to hear about it.