According to the Greek historian Thucydides, during the “Debate at Sparta” (431 BCE), an un-named Corinthian tried to persuade the city-state of Sparta to get involved in a fight Corinth was having with another city-state, Corcyra.
Why?
Corinth was fighting with Corcyra about yet another city-state, Potidea. Athens and Sparta were the dominant city-states in the Hellenic region. So, both Corinth and Corcyra were trying to get one of the big players to intervene, and the “Debate at Sparta” includes a speech by a Corinthian speaker trying to get Sparta to takes its side. But, if either Sparta or Athens got involved, it would not remain a proxy war–they’d go to war with each other. That war was unnecessary and would be unpredictable–while Sparta was far superior in land troops, the troops couldn’t be gone too long (they feared a slave rebellion), and they were far inferior in terms of naval strength.
The Corinthian speech is important for people now because it exemplifies how a rhetor can use demagoguery to persuade a community to opt for an unnecessary and highly destructive war.
We are in a culture of demagoguery, when normal policy disagreements are treated as battles in an existential war, and we’re in that situation because it’s profitable for media to give rhetors like the Corinthian air time. And ambitious rhetors can get air time by using that kind of demagoguery.
But, back to the debate.
Presumably, here’s the plan: If the Corinthian could get Sparta and Athens to go to war, then Athens would be too busy to take Corcyra’s side (which Athens was seriously considering) if Corinth and Corcyra went to war. It’s as though I wanted to get in a fight with Chester, but I’m afraid that you’ll take Chester’s side and the two of you will kick my ass. If I could get Hubert to start a fight with you, then you won’t be able to get involved in my fight with Chester.
But, here’s the Corinthian’s rhetorical problem. He has a really weak case, so weak that the standard moves of policy argument (what Aristotle would later call “deliberative” rhetoric) wouldn’t work. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is largely a book about rhetoric and decision-making. And the admirable leaders, generals, and rhetors in the book all make a similar argument about argument: when we are arguing about policy, we shouldn’t make the issue about the character of our opponent (what Aristotle calls “epideictic”), or the justice or injustice of the situation (appropriate for a courtroom).[1] Deliberation should be about expediency—what are our goals, and what policy(ies) are most likely to enable success?
Here I’m going to get into the weeds a bit, but the important point is that the Corinthian can’t make a reasonable argument claiming that Sparta is faced with an imminent threat from Corcyra, Athens, or Corinth losing its conflict with Corcyra.
Here’s the weeds. It isn’t expedient for Sparta to take Corinth’s side. There’s no particular gain for Sparta, and neither Corcyra nor Athens present an imminent threat to Sparta. Corcyra could win the conflict with Corinth, and it would make no difference for Spartan security. Athens is quite some distance away, not threatening to invade Sparta (which would be improbable). The two were useful allies during the most recent Persian invasion, and they’re oddly balanced—Sparta has a better infantry, and Athens has a better navy. Most important, the Hellenes (what we call the Greeks) only repelled Persia because Athens and Sparta allied against them. Were Athens and Sparta to go to war, Persia would benefit, as it would improve the likelihood that Persia would succeed with its next invasion.
So, since the Corinthian can’t make the argument in reasonable policy terms, he shifts the stasis[2]—that is, he tries to reframe the issue in a way that might enable him to persuade Sparta to make a decision both unnecessary and very risky. What the Corinthian does is make it an issue of implacably opposed identities, an existential battle, rather than a pragmatic question about savvy policy.
He says that the real conflict is not Corinth’s entirely self-serving goal of getting Sparta and Athens to go to war so Corinth can beat Corcyra, but a grand, existential, and inevitable battle between Sparta and Athens. He doesn’t argue that Athens’ actions present an imminent threat (he couldn’t, since they didn’t), but that its identity does. He doesn’t argue that Athens’ policy of expanding threatens Sparta (since it didn’t), but that Athens’ identity as an expansionist city-state did. So, in both cases, he shifts the stasis from actions to identity.
This shift from actions (expanding) to identity (expansionist) is a relatively common rhetorical strategy. It’s a particularly common move when rhetors would have trouble persuading an audience of their case through deliberation. We can deliberate about actions, since we can have evidence about what someone did or didn’t do, and we can use those actions as evidence about what they might do in the future. We can talk usefully about goals (especially if a person or party has said what they are), since stated goals are evidence about what someone will do.
But neither previous actions nor stated goals are proof of what someone or some group will do. People and groups don’t always behave in the same way, and so we often have to figure out which of the past actions and statements are relevant to what they will do now. There are a lot of ways that people try to make that determination, and I’ll mention two.
One is what my father (an expert on arteriosclerosis) called “hardening of the categories.” By that, he meant people who believed that every aspect of the world can be put into a Linneaus-like (or Ramistic, if you know your rhetoric) tree of discrete and binary categories. A person (or group, or nation) is either pacific or aggressive, rational or irrational. If you think of individuals or groups this way, then you look at what they’ve done and try to put them into the pacific or aggressive box, and then make your policy decisions. You’ve decided that they’re really aggressive or passive or whatever, and all the disconfirming data can be dismissed. This strategy of prediction doesn’t make the situation any less uncertain, but it can give people the feeling of certainty because it makes the situation more stark. It deflects or hides the inherent uncertainty to any political act.
The other method I want to mention says that people have tendencies, but context matters. They tend to be aggressive under these circumstances, not under those. This way of predicting behavior is more complicated than the first, and it includes rather than deflects uncertainty–that the relationship between Athens and Sparta is a conflict of essential identity.
The Corinthian makes the first kind of argument. The Athenians are, he says, aggressive, brave, risk-takers. Like many demagogues, he includes a little shaming. Spartans have declined to get involved in Hellenic issues (probably because of the problem their version of slavery brought them), and he says they procrastinate. It’s a politics of identity, in which city-states make decisions not because of advantages, disadvantages, policy options, contextual constraints, compromises, but because behavior is determined by identity.
If you know anything about policy argumentation, then you know that rational policy argumentation first means identifying the “ill.” What is the problem we’re trying to solve? So, what is the problem for the Corinthian?
It’s the war with Corcyra. That isn’t a compelling problem for Sparta, so the shift to identity enables the Corinthian to redefine the problem. It also redefines the solution. If the problem is the identity of the Athenians, and it’s their essential identity, then the Corinthian is advocating a war of extermination.
This is a politics of identity. This is always a politics of extermination.
[1] This point is a major part of the speech Diodotus gives in a debate about genocide. Diodotus is almost certainly a fabrication of Thucydides.
[2] “Stasis” means place or hinge. What some people now call “stasis theory” is a modification of something Cicero said, and it’s one way to categorize stases. It’s much less useful and accurate than it might appear. It isn’t what I mean.
from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToLdVCb1ezI
The GOP has been setting fire to democratic norms since the 80s. That isn’t a hyperbolic insult I’m throwing at them. It’s what Gingrich said he wanted to do. He said, quite openly (and still says), that he wanted to make government dysfunctional so that people would vote for the anti-government party, which would be the GOP. The GOP persuaded its base that they should abandon democratic norms and treat politics as war.
Let’s stop there for a second.
In the 80s, there was an internal GOP conflict among three kinds of elites. There were (and still are a few) Eisenhower-style conservatives who wanted a prosperous and stable nation, containment as a foreign policy, a moderate social safety net, and a reasonably protected working class (essentially the 1956 GOP platform), an end to de jure segregation. Then there was the group that had long dragged the Democratic party into the muck: a kind of toxic white evangelical populism that was rabidly racist, in favor of a social safety net only as long as didn’t threaten segregation, and committed to theocracy (that is, they believed that the government should promote and fund their very narrow notion of “Christianity”). The third group was neoliberal, Randroid, and selectively libertarian.
Two of those groups were Machiavellian.
Machiavellianism is often misunderstood. Psychologists use it to mean what used to be called sociopaths—that is, people who have no empathy, are amoral, and only look out for themselves—but that isn’t what Machiavelli advocated. He didn’t advocate a world free of ethical considerations, or amorality. He was deeply concerned with moral leadership, but morality, he and others argued, has two parts. There are means and ends. It is moral, he argued, to engage in actions we would normally consider immoral if those actions enable us to achieve a moral end.
He argued that the ends justify the means. That is, if you’re trying to do a right thing, there are no constraints on how you get there. (In other words, an important plot point of every action movie.) Thus, the only ethical consideration is whether your “ends” (your intention) are good. You can still think of yourself as an ethical person, even if you do or endorse actions that violate the ethical norms you claim to value, because you’re doing so for a good cause.
The easiest way to get people to behave like Machiavellians is to persuade them that they are threatened with extinction—there is an Out-Group that is trying to destroy Us. Then, they (we) will give ourselves moral license all the time feeling that we are the moral ones.
And that is the turn that pro-GOP rhetoric and pro-GOP demagogues (like Rush Limbaugh) took in the 80s. They weren’t the only rhetors who made that rhetorical choice. The claim that there is some “they” who is at war with “us” is a tiresomely popular rhetorical move. The argument that we must now abandon rhetorical, legal, ethical, and constitutional norms because we are faced with Evil is always present, and it’s always a bad argument.
And what’s happening with the GOP speakership shows why.
The choice that many pro-GOP politicians made in the 80s—and again, Gingrich is open about this—is that government itself was the Evil. So, the GOP made the government dysfunctional because they believed that it would gain power for them. I can’t say they’re wrong. It’s long been amazing to me how many GOP voters I’ve known who say, “Why should I pay taxes? There’s a pothole on my commute. We should cut taxes even more.”
In other words, cut resources to something (such as public schools or infrastructure), then, when those schools and infrastructure are crappier, mobilize the anger that people feel about the now crappier schools or infrastructure to argue for cutting taxes even more—because, clearly, the government can’t do a good job.
In the 80s and 90s, the GOP discovered that demagoguery worked to mobilize voters and support. As I’ve argued elsewhere, demagoguery isn’t specific to any place on the political spectrum, but it isn’t equally distributed. Demagoguery depends on the actively false notion that our complicated, nuanced, contextual, and uncertain realm of policy options can be reduced to a binary (or continuum) of two groups.
When a group (it’s never just an individual) decides that they will engage in demagoguery to gain or maintain power, they always do so by imagining an in-group, and then declaring that that in-group is already at war. This war is one already declared by The Out-Group (which is a fantastical nut-picked monstrosity of a villainous straw man) , and if you don’t realize it, you’re not really in-group.
Because The Out-Group is determined on our destruction, we are justified in anything we do, and breaking any norms. We can do the things we condemn The Out-Group for doing, while still claiming the moral high ground, because we have good intentions. We become Machiavellian.
Here’s one rhetorical problem. Imagine that you’re a media personality, ambitious political figure, Machiavellian with a lot of money, or person or industry that wants a specific policy. If you know that you couldn’t possibly succeed at getting your policy passed if you had to advocate in a realm of reasonable disagreement, then what you would do would be to demonize reasonable disagreement. You would say, “THEY are at war with us, so you should stop asking for reasonable disagreement and instead commit yourself to the policies that purify our community of Them.”
That’s what authoritarians do.
That’s what authoritarians with shitty policies do.
Deflecting the question of whether this policy is a good one (does it solve the need as reasonably narrated, is it the most reasonable in light of other options) to whether it means a win or loss for The Out-Group is always authoritarian.
If “conservatives” (who claim to be the “real Americans”) are threatened with extinction—the narrative of the GOP for forty years—then the correct response is to stand firm and reject all the democratic norms. That’s been the GOP rhetoric for forty years. The problem they’re now facing is that their rhetoric was persuasive. In other words, the GOP is now facing the logical and rhetorical consequences of its own rhetoric.
What is happening with the election of the Speaker of the House is a fight about exactly how to abandon democracy. And the fight is between two ways of thinking about authoritarianism: competitive authoritarianism (what McCarthy advocates) or a sloppy out-right authoritarianism (what Boebert advocates).
GOP candidates and pro-GOP media have spent years saying that Democrats/liberals/socialists (aka, anyone not purely committed to whatever the GOP happens to be advocating at that moment) are determined on the extermination of the in-group. Therefore, there is no such thing as a legitimate policy disagreement—every question, from whether you wear a mask to whether you are opposed to Russian hegemony of Europe, is not a policy question, open to policy argumentation, but an opportunity to demonstrate your determination to exterminate the “liberals” who want to exterminate Us.
As much as it may be pleasurable to watch Republicans in disarray, this is not a good situation. This is various levels of terrible. They are in disarray only because they disagree about what, exactly, constitutes the people of purity, and what, exactly, they should do to exterminate the unpure—that is, anyone who disagrees, in or out of the party.
Various powerful people in various times have thrown fuel onto the fire of a demagoguery they thought would benefit them.
That kind of demagoguery is never a controlled burn.
As many folks know, I often say that I have spent a non-trivial amount of time drifting around the internet (and before that, Usenet) arguing with assholes. An editor said that would be a good title for a book, and I’ve often tried to write that book. But I can’t, because that title exemplifies what I keep saying is wrong with how we approach politics–that we make issues about who people are, rather than what or how they’re arguing. So, it isn’t that they’re an asshole (we’re all assholes to various degrees under various conditions), but that they’re arguing like one.
The second problem is that I think maybe writing about arguing like an asshole is better as an intermittent topic in blog posts rather than a book. So, here’s one of those posts. This one talks about two related mistakes that people make in argument: thinking that having data means one’s claims are true (that data is proof), and that confirmation bias means we treat the same data differently by attributing motives to actors in non-falsifiable ways.
I often taught Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, including in first-year composition classes. It’s a really good book for that course because my goal was to get students to understand what it means to do research in service of testing a hypothesis (which is very different from finding evidence to support an argument–their normal experience). The book lays out the various filters in such specificity that their argument can be falsified. I asked that students look at media coverage of various events—ones I picked. I gave students a list of topics to choose from that included political and cultural events, ones that a student could write about without divulging their political commitments. I also picked ones that I knew had been covered in media to which students had access, and which would oblige students to look at media from a relatively short period of time (a few days at most). Finally, I wanted ones that were open to interpretation—an ‘A’ paper could argue that the media coverage confirmed, contradicted, or complicated Chomsky and Herman’s hypothesis. There was no right answer.[1]
Chomsky, as everyone knows, has gone on to make claims about foreign policy, and he has his followers. He can support his claims. He can make a claim, and make other claims (many of which have data) that can be taken as confirming his argument. Just to be clear: Chomsky isn’t an asshole, and he doesn’t always argue like one, but he has his moments. He has been, for some time, arguing that American foreign policy caused/forced Putin to invade Ukraine because the prospect of expanding NATO threatened Putin. This is an argument about motive—Putin was motivated by the behavior of the US.
But, of course, Manufacturing Consent has a chapter arguing that reports of Cambodian genocide were fabricated, and he had data to support that argument. Providing supporting data is not the same as proving that your argument is true. (Even argument textbooks make this mistake.)
People who make the mistake of thinking data is proof get suckered all the time. There was a genocide–probably around 1.7 million people (about 20% of the population), and there were credible reports of it almost immediately. Chomsky dismissed the reports because he decided that the sources were biased–in fact, that’s the whole point of the chapter, that reports should be dismissed as biased.
Noting that people have motives, and that motives cause people to filter information is sensible. That observation is precisely what makes Manufacturing Consent such a useful book to use.
But, ironically enough, Chomsky’s dismissal of the Cambodian genocide shows just how prevalent those filters are. With his dismissal of Cambodian genocide, Chomsky proved himself prey to the error he condemns in others—that we filter information through ideological frames. Chomsky dismissed disconfirming evidence because, like the anti-communists he accurately criticizes, his position was non-falsifiable.
But, his data wasn’t proof.
Ironically enough, his defenders rarely mention Manufacturing Consent. They instead engage After the Cataclysm, which is itself problematic, and even their defenses argue that Chomsky dismissed the witnesses to atrocity (what his defenders call “atrocity stories”) because he believed they had bad motives–in other words, their defense admits that the problem is that Chomsky, too, is susceptible to filtering out information that disconfirms his beliefs, and that he does so through attributing bad motives to people who provide the disconfirming information. His defenders try to find all sorts of reasons that wasn’t a bad thing for him to do, and that argument too comes down to motive (but, in this case, good ones).
Having data to support a claim doesn’t mean the argument is logical, rational, or true, especially if the data is as vexed (and generally non-falsifiable) as assertions of motive. Chomsky’s argument about Cambodia was not logical, rational, or true.
Nor is his argument about Russia and Ukraine.
Chomsky can argue that Putin was motivated by the expansion of NATO, and he can give data to support it, mostly claims about motive. His argument isn’t falsifiable, and neither he nor his supporters are willing to acknowledge their own motives and biases. They seem to think that only other people have biases.
Acknowledging motives, like acknowledging other cognitive biases, doesn’t mean we’re landed in a morass of random attachments to beliefs.
It also doesn’t mean that we ask ourselves whether our perception is filtered by our motives (we never think it is), nor that we try to find some source of information who seems motive-free. That isn’t possible. Motives are the consequence of attachments, goals, aspirations, values. We all have motives. We all have biases. But we aren’t hopelessly trapped by them.
Chomsky says that Putin invaded Ukraine because of something Clinton did. Okay. There are two ways to think about this: Are people who make that argument making a falsifiable (aka “rational”) claim? What evidence would prove them wrong? And I think the answer is: nothing.
Second, so fucking what? If Clinton screwed up (and I loathe the man, so I’m willing to say he screwed up a lot), does that mean that Putin was right to invade Ukraine? Are we supposed to say, “Oh well, this is all our fault, so we’ll stand by and weep”? It’s plausible that the Khmer Rouge benefitted from the US bombing of Cambodia, but that doesn’t make what they did right. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong, that it’s being conducted through torture, kidnapping, mass killings just makes it worse.
Motivism is a fallacy that depoliticizes political issues. It takes problems out of the realm of “what policy should we follow” into questions about the relative morality of political actors. Whether Putin has good or bad motives, or was motivated by what Clinton did, doesn’t change that Russia is engaged, as was Cambodia, in mass killing. And that’s bad, no matter who does it. Chomsky bungled this kind of issue once; he’s bungling it again.
[1] This confused some students, who’d say, “but this paper that you’re showing us is really good is making the same argument I did, and I didn’t get a good grade.” That led to a really useful conversation.
(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids
I’ve been worried about another civil war since 2003. I now believe that the GOP is dominated by people who actively want one, because they think they’ll win.
That probably sounds hyperbolic to people, so I’ll go through the longer version of how I got here.
The process of publishing a scholarly book in the humanities is (unnecessarily) slow. In 2003, I finished the book that would be published as Deliberate Conflict. It took another two years for the book to come out because of how slow academic publishing is, and it sat, finished, for quite a while. That book argues for the value of agonism, and I implicitly endorsed the narrative that the teaching of rhetoric made a bad shift when it went from being about debate to belletristic appreciation and/or expressive writing. Like a lot of others, I believed it led to problems in public discourse. In 2003 or so, iirc, a graduate student in a seminar asked, “Well, if things were so much better when the teaching of rhetoric was about debate, what about the controversy over slavery?”
So, I started looking into it. At that time, I had a smart, accomplished, rhetoric friend who got all their information from Rush Limbaugh, and it was odd to me that this really smart and very good person could be so wrong about basic facts. One of our first interactions was his claiming as a fact something about power plants in California that was simply wrong; since The Economist had recently had an article about the issue, I pointed out that he was wrong. He said, “Where did you get that? From [some lefty demagogue]?” I said, “The Economist.” He said, “The London Economist?” emphasizing London. He was shocked that I would read something non-lefty. (It’s liberal in the British sense, not American.) Clearly, he couldn’t imagine that anyone would read things with which they disgreed. He just relied on Limbaugh.
We had a lot of interactions like that. He’d repeat as a fact something he’d heard from Limbaugh that was completely false. I’d email him the actual clip from a speech, or studies from “conservative” sites, showing he was wrong. He’d admit he was wrong on that point, sometimes, but never stop relying on Limbaugh. The most striking was when he said that Obama claimed to have solved global warming, and I sent him the clip showing that Obama hadn’t said that at all. He emailed back, “Well, he’s still arrogant.”
This is a man who voted for George Bush, probably the most arrogant President until Trump.
This colleague was (and is) a good and smart person. He really tried to be fair in his dealings with colleagues and with the department; he worked to make the faculty more diverse; he gave good grades to students with whom he disagreed politically. But, when it came to his thinking about politics, it’s as though a switch flipped, and he became a person who was more engaged in believing than thinking. He believed what Limbaugh told him no matter how many times people like me (and I know there were several) pointed out to him that Limbaugh was lying.
2003 was a moment when the most arrogant President until Trump was deliberately lying to the US about Iraq. Even The Economist (which supported invasion of Iraq) said that the best case the Bush Administration could make—Powell’s speech to the UN—had some weak points. In fact, it was a very weak case, as could be seen at the time. But media, including mainstream media, presented Powell’s speech as though he had made his case. Instead of saying “Powell said” or “Powell claimed,” they’d say, “Powell showed.” Verbs matter.
There were so many problems with the case for invasion, but advocates of invasion didn’t see them because people lived in informational enclaves. People who relied on Fox, Limbaugh, and various other sources literally never saw anything that even mentioned the weaknesses in the Bush Administration case. Many people lived in a world of shared emails that referred authoritatively to events that never happened, and urban legends about events that were about to happen that never did. They thought they were getting “objective” information, but they were in a partisan bubble. I found it impossible to argue with them because their whole case was grounded in claims and data they thought were true only because they’d been repeated so much. So, their beliefs weren’t grounded in anything open to disagreement.
Around that same time, I had to come up with a lower-division seminar writing course, and, given how things were, I decided to teach a course on demagoguery.
Back to the graduate student’s question. Because of that question, I had begun reading about the slavery debate, and pretty quickly what I found was that the dominant narrative—the Civil War happened because of fanaticism on both sides—was indefensible.
And they were able to do so because various shifts meant that people were living in partisan informational enclaves (specifically cheap printing and improved mail service). Media repeated and promoted reports of events that never actually happened—the AAS pamphlet mailing, the Murrell plot, poisonings, abolitionist conspiracies, and so many other urban legends.
Since I was teaching a course on demagoguery, and I was drifting around the internet (as I intermittently have for years), as well as reading pro-GOP sources, I got worried.[1] Our current media culture looked a lot like the antebellum media culture—one in which deliberation was actively dismissed as unnecessary and often actively demonized. People could inhabit a media enclave and never see any of the information that might complicate what they were being told.
In the 1830s, the slaver states and politicians declared that the situation was one of existential threat—the vast conspiracy of abolitionists were determined to destroy Southern (aka, slaver) civilization. The demagoguery of pro-slavery media insisted that, if any President were elected who was not actively pro-slavery, the Federal Government would abolish slavery. Pro-slavery political figures enacted a gag rule in Congress–silencing any criticism of slavery–and many started advocating secession. Like the Iraq invasion, this was was advocated as preemptive when it was actually preventive (that matters, and I’ll come back to it). When Lincoln was elected, the demagoguery was comparable to what happened when Obama was elected. The difference was that, when Lincoln was elected, slaver states began seceding.
Buchanan tried to negotiate with them, as did Lincoln. But the slaver states wanted war, and nothing could have stopped them from getting their war. That’s important.You can’t appease people who are determined on war.
From the 1830s on, there were a lot of people in and out of the slaver states that were engaged in what scholars in International Relations call “defensive avoidance“–they didn’t like any of their options, so they did nothing, and hoped it would solve itself. There were people who didn’t own slaves, objected to slavery in their area (often for racist reasons), but who didn’t really care about what “the South” did, since they thought it didn’t affect them, and so didn’t want to do anything to “provoke” slavers. Some people really objected to slavery, and especially the “Slave Power”—the way that slavers, although a numerical minority, could silence criticism of slavery, force “free” states to institute proslavery “black codes,” and enable the enslavement of free people through the Fugitive Slave Law. But even some of people who resented the Slave Power were hesitant to “provoke” slavers.
And that’s interesting. There were violent anti-slavery actions, ranging from Bloody Kansas to John Brown’s raid, but there was no public discussion about the need to keep from provoking abolitionists. And, really, that’s how concern about “provoking” violence works–people worry about “provoking” authoritarians, but no one worries about policies that might “provoke” other groups. Violent protests help authoritarians, whether the protests are pro- or anti-authoritarian.
Another form of defensive avoidance was to declare that “both sides are just as bad.” People who just wanted to avoid war thereby enabled and ensured one. Again: it is pointless to try to placate people who are determined to use violence to get what they want. You aren’t preventing violence, but just delaying it.
The slaver states always had the pretense of being democratic, as did the segregationist states (which weren’t just in the “South”), but it was a democracy of the faithful. Like the USSR or GDR, which also claimed to be democracies, it was a democracy of people who remained within a limited realm of disagreement. It was “law and order” only insofar as the law wasn’t applied equally. It was the notion of justice that Plato famously criticized: justice is helping my friends and hurting my enemies. Jesus also criticized that notion of justice, but neither slavers nor segregationists cared very much about Jesus.
Nor does the current GOP. The GOP has gone full authoritarian and anti-democratic; “law and order” doesn’t mean holding everyone equally to the law (why did Clinton have to testify before Congress, but not any of Trump’s appointees?), but of using the power of the law to protect the in-group and punish everyone else. And they’re justifying their exempting themselves from following democratic norms and the law on the grounds that this is war–so, like Bush, and like the slavers, they’re engaged in preventive war (trying to keep Democrats from gaining power) while claiming it’s a preemptive (Democrats are about to kick down your doors and take your guns).
Slaver states were determined to get a war in order to have a nation purely and completely committed to slavery. After about 1850, there was probably no way to stop them from starting that war. What could have been different, and what might have prevented a Civil War was if the various people who didn’t support slavery, and didn’t want a war for it, had been more openly committed in their opposition to slavery. There was no way to placate slavers. In the antebellum period, there were a lot of political figures whom the proslavery media and rhetors called “doughfaces.” They were political figures whom the proslavery media and rhetors could force to say anything they wanted.
The doughfaces were mostly out for their own political careers, but, like all careerists, they might have told themselves it was for the greater good. They could have prevented the war. They didn’t. The current doughfaces, who are going along with what they know to be lies about the 2020 election, need to stop thinking about their careers and think about democracy.
We are in a situation in which Trump has already once tried to incite his base to violence in order to force a coup. He almost succeeded. The GOP has decided to back his play, but in ways that aren’t quite as crude—they’re moving to allow state legislatures to assign electoral candidates different from how the popular vote would suggest, for instance, or find ways to inhibit or disempower non-GOP voters. People who care about democracy need to stop that–regardless of your political party.
There is nothing that will stop Trump or his supporters from violence. Nothing. That’s their plan. So, there is no reason to keep from doing the right thing because it might provoke them.
As I hope is clear from this post, I’m interested in how various rhetorical practices have worked out historically[2]. And I can say that reasoning deductively (this practice will work because it should work) is exactly the wrong choice. We need to look at what has worked in the past.
There are actions that might alienate the hand-wringing people engaged in deflective avoidance. There are people who don’t like Trump, but don’t like the Dems, or who don’t like Trump but like tax breaks, or who think politics doesn’t matter. Violent protest alienate them. And, to be honest, violent protest helps the “law and order” crowd. It shouldn’t but it does. It doesn’t mobilize allies, and it alienates potential allies. (That’s a historical claim—if anyone wants to show times that, in the US, violent protests have helped non-authoritarian policies, I’m open to it.)
We can’t find a rhetoric that will persuade his fanatical supporters that they’re wrong. There is none. They’re in a cult. But, there are actions that have worked in the past to topple dictators, and that’s what we should be engaged in now: holding him and his supporters (whether our state rep or our drunk uncle) accountable, non-violent protesting, making common cause with other opponents, voting, giving money and time to his opponents, boycotting his supporters, being willing to violate norms of politeness with his supporters, telling stories that complicate what he’s saying.
Trump and the GOP fully intend to use the police, mobs, a GOP Congress, and GOP-dominated state legislatures to force him into the Presidency. We need to stop that.
[1] In 2003, I started writing a book about demagoguery; since the proslavery book was my first concern, the ms. wasn’t done until 2013. It was rejected by the press. (One reviewer said it was a dead issue.) But, Martin Medhurst had published an article of mine about demagoguery, although the readers were unanimous it should not be published. He published it, and their responses in 2004 or so.
In 2016, when people were interested in demagoguery, that article was one of few things out there, and so I was asked to write a short book about it. I did. That generated interest, and so the rejected ms. was accepted by SIUP and published in 2017.
I mention all this simply because I think it’s a cautionary tale about how the unnecessary delays in scholarly publishing virtually ensure the irrelevance of our work. We should be faster. No one actually takes six months to read an ms.
[2] Every once in a while, I run across someone who says I can’t be an authority on history because I don’t have a degree in history. Meanwhile, they make claims about rhetoric, without any degrees in rhetoric. As it happens, I took two classes as an undergrad and two as a graduate student on the rhetoric of history (not offered by the history department at Berkeley). Two of my committee members had degrees in history, another had a degree in American Studies (from Yale), and my director was a student of Kuhn’s. The other member was a Romanticist, which mattered since I was writing about John Muir.
It’s common for people to talk about how, in our polarized world, everything gets politicized—whether you wear a mask, a red hat, if you have “impossible” burgers in your buffet. But that’s actually wrong. What’s wrong with our world right now is that everything gets depoliticized.
Instead of deliberating, arguing, negotiating, and so on about what policies we should adopt, in a culture of demagoguery, everything is about being loyal to Us and hating on Them. Demagoguery looks like political discourse—it’s about “political parties” and their candidates, after all—but it isn’t. The wide array of policy options is reduced to what the demagogue advocates and the stupid shit The Other proposes (or is doing). And the demagogue’s proposal isn’t argued at any length; it’s hyperbolically asserted to be obviously right, just as the demagogue’s own personal history is hyperbolically asserted as a long string of almost magically effective and decisive actions. The hyperbole is rhetorically important, since it gives the demagogue and their supporters the ability to deflect criticism.
When a rhetor speaks hyperbolically, they are shifting away from the issue to the rhetor’s own passionate commitment. The “issue” is no longer about the policies that might solve the problem, but the conviction of the rhetor, their complete (even irrational) loyalty to the in-group. Hyperbole is about belief, not facts. Thus, hyperbole enables the deflection of policy discourse practices—it depoliticizes political issues.
Demagoguery is all about deflection. It’s especially about deflecting rhetorical responsibilities (especially of accuracy, consistency, and fairness), and accountability (for past and future errors, failures, lies, incompetence, corruption). Hyperbole enables deflection because it is a figure of speech, much like metaphor or simile. If I say, “He got so mad he just charged in there like a tiger,” it would be weird for you to say, “He isn’t a tiger; he’s human.” You would be showing that you don’t understand how simile works.
Hyperbole enables the demagogue to make outrageous and mobilizing claims without having to provide evidence for them—in fact, if someone asks for evidence, or points out that the claims are false, that person looks petty. Hyperbole enables someone to lie without being seen as a liar. It also enables a rhetor to announce or advance extraordinary policies that are beyond criticism, because criticizing the policies would require taking them literally, and that would come across as a kind of humorless nitpicking. The demagogue offers a world of passionate commitment, clarity, triumph, and the pleasures of membership in a unified group.
To criticize the rhetor who has created that sense of immersion is to try to pull the discourse back to the uncertainty and frustration of policy argumentation, and so it’s enraging to people who enjoy the depoliticized world of politics as pep rallies.
The speech is a great example of toxic populism, appealing to what the scholar of populism Paul Taggart calls “unpolitics,” and the political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse call “stealth democracy.” Taggart defines “unpolitics” as “the repudiation of politics as the process for resolving conflict” (81). Like Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, Taggart points out that many people believe that politics—that is, arguing and bargaining with people who disagree—is unnecessary. Those people (call them toxic populists) believe that there is no such thing as legitimate disagreement; for every problem there is a straightforward solution obvious to regular people. We are prevented from enacting that obvious solution by an “elite” who deliberately slow things down and obstruct problem solving in order to protect their own jobs, line their pockets, follow pointless rules, and get lost in overthinking and details. Toxic populists can be all over the political spectrum, and people can be toxic populists about non “political” problems (health, business, personal finance, institutional practices)—what’s shared is their perception that we should just stop arguing and act. We should put in place someone who will cut through the crap and get ‘er done.
In other words, we should put in place someone who will violate all the norms, the checks and balances, the restrictions; we need someone who will not listen to what anyone else has to say.
And people think that will work out well. It never has. The checks and balances are there for a reason.
But, back to the speech. Trump lies a lot in it, as he generally does, but they’re the kind of lies that his base likes. He says, for instance, that in 2020, “we had a booming economic recovery like nobody’s seen before, the strongest and most secure border in US’s history, energy independence, and even energy dominance, historically low gas prices, as you know, no inflation, a fully rebuilt military and a country that was highly respected all over the world by other leaders, by other countries, highly respected.” He doesn’t even try to give the numbers that would support any of his claims, probably because there aren’t any. Every single claim is untrue. But it would look like humorless nitpicking to point out what’s wrong with each one, and involve explanations and require thinking. I’ll point out just one. In 2020, the pro-Trump media was engaging in alarmism about the southern border of the US, using “invasion” rhetoric (they’ve been doing this every election year for some time). Here’s one example. So, either Trump was lying in 2022, or he and supporting media were lying in 2020.
When it’s pointed out to Trump supporters that he lies, they tend to respond in one of two ways. The most common is, “All politicians lie; I just care about whether they get things done.” The second most common, in my experience, is, “Well, here’s a lie that Biden said.” The second is just deflection, but the first is more interesting. It looks pragmatic and reasonable, but it’s neither. If Trump lies about everything, and his media repeats his lies, how do you know whether he’s really getting things done? The only way to know is to step out of the pro-Trump bubble, and check the numbers, but I have yet to meet a Trump supporter who will even look at any information from sources anything less than fanatically supportive of him.
So, what they’re actually saying is, “I like Trump lies.” As I said, that’s neither pragmatic nor reasonable.
The most concerning aspect of toxic populism—regardless of where on the political spectrum it is—is the always implicit and sometimes explicit authoritarianism. “Authoritarian” is one of those words that people use to mean nothing more than “someone who is trying to make me do something I don’t want to do.” It’s always solipsistic; there are no in-group authoritarians—our leaders are decisive, but theirs are authoritarian. That’s a useless way to think about authoritarianism.
Authoritarian regimes are ones in which “no channels exist for opposition to contest legally for executive power” (Levitsky et al. 7); and there’s reason to believe that Trump is openly advocating a version of it: “competitive authoritarianism.” But I’m more interested in authoritarianism as an ideology. Authoritarian ideology is best understood as at one end of a continuum with pluralism on the other side. Imagine a person who is a dog lover—the more authoritarian they are, the more they will believe that everyone should be forced to love dogs, and that people who don’t love dogs should be exterminated or at least expelled. The more pluralist they are, the more they will believe that not loving dogs is also a legitimate position, and that it’s actively good to have people who disagree about dogs.
The more authoritarian someone is, the harder it is for them to understand what it means not to be authoritarian. They can’t imagine having a belief or behaving a particular way without forcing others to share that belief and behave that way—they think that’s how everyone thinks. For instance, authoritarian “complementarians” understand allowing “gay marriage” to be forcing people into such marriages—that they don’t want such a marriage must mean not letting anyone have it. A pluralist complementarian would believe that their marriage is complementary, but not everyone wants that kind of marriage or should be forced into it.
Authoritarians never see themselves as authoritarian, because they think they’re forcing people to do what’s right, and authoritarianism is forcing people to do what’s wrong. So, when it comes to political authoritarianism, they think that bypassing all the constitutional checks and balances in favor of an authority forcing his (it’s almost always “his”) will on everyone is a great idea.
And that’s what Trump is advocating—no constraints, on police officers (13-19), prosecutors, and, most of all, on himself: “To drain the swamp and root out the deep state, we need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy, or at a minimum just want to keep their jobs. They want to hold onto their jobs. (01:09:28) Congress should pass historic reforms, empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent, or unnecessary for the job can be told, did you ever hear this? You’re fired? Get out. You’re fired. Have to do it. [inaudible 01:09:49]. Washington will be an entirely different place.“ What he wants, and what a GOP Congress will give him, is the power to fire any person in government who tries to hold him accountable.
Genesis Apologetics (GA) is a group that advocates what’s called “Young Earth Creation.” That is, they argue that the earth was created thousands of years ago, and that a correct reading of Scripture requires that we believe that: “The genealogies in Genesis clearly map to Adam who was created by God out of dust just thousands of years ago, and they are even affirmed by the New Testament writers.”
They posted something called the “Seven Myths” , and, as you can see above, I objected. (They’ve since deleted the whole thread for that posting, but they’ve reposted the link.) They recommended another page, one which claims that “Over 50 scientific, peer-reviewed journal articles described 14 bio-organic materials in dinosaur bones that simply should not exist if the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.”
They don’t cite any articles that show bio-organic materials that shouldn’t exist. They cite, as far as can tell, about five scientific studies, most of which are authored by Mary Schweitzer. And she says they misrepresent her work.
“Young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.”
This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.””
In other words, her work does not support their claim. They’re being dishonest by suggesting it does.
Just to be clear: however you read Scripture is between you and God. You can, as does GA, jump among translations to get the reading that supports what you want to believe about Scripture, ignore all the passages that say you’re wrong (Paul said Scripture should be read allegorically), ignore all the many major figures in Christianity who didn’t and don’t read Scripture as does GA. You be you. But, if you want to impose this marginal reading of Scripture on students in schools by claiming it’s science, then suddenly the lies about the research (and Scripture) matter.
When I say this to individuals, they say, “They can’t be lying because they’re good people.” What that means is that they can’t be lying because I trust them. That’s how lying works. The most appalling, and un-Christian, lie is implicit—that their (incredibly cherry-picked and inconsistent) claims are things about which Scripture is “clear” (below I’ll mention the “great beasts” problem) . So, people feel that either they must believe what GA says, or they must reject Scripture as an authority.
I am really troubled by how many people I meet who were told, over and over, and so they believe that being Christian means believing, as GA says, that being a Christian requires that they believe their marginal, rigid, internally contradictory, ideologically driven cherry picking, and hermeneutically indefensible reading of Scripture. So, when they realize that much of what they have been told ranges from misleading to false, they think they can’t be Christian.
Honestly, I think that groups like GA create more atheists than Richard Dawkins ever could in his wildest dreams.
They create a falsely stark world of people who believe that Scripture is God’s Truth and Darwinists. There are three problems with that false binary. First, most people who believe that Scripture is God’s Truth don’t believe the claims that GA makes. Second, if what you’re saying is God’s Truth, you don’t have to be deceptive about what’s in Scripture (e.g., dinosaurs and “great beasts”—I’ll get to that). Third, Darwin didn’t invent evolution, but he proposed an explanation that made sense of what people were already observing. Evolutionary biology has evolved far beyond Darwin. Calling evolutionary biology Darwinism would be like calling Christianity “Origenism.”
As Christians, we would resent being characterized by what Origen said. He didn’t invent Christianity, and not all Christians believe everything he said. Origin of Species is not the Bible of evolutionary thinking. Scientists don’t have originary documents to which they refer deferentially.
I’m talking about Origen in order to make two points: there is not a world in which you are either a Christian or a Darwinist; when Christians characterize all believers in evolution as Darwinists we are doing something we would not want done unto us—that is, attributing to them beliefs they don’t have.
Here’s the bigger problem. GA claims that their claims are scientific, and supported by scientific studies. And, as indicated in the Schweitzer quote above, their position is not scientific and not supported by the five studies they cite, let alone the fifty the claim. I’ll just talk about the first three paragraphs of one page because otherwise this post would be way too long (these paragraphs are pretty indicative of how the whole post runs):
I’m not going to spend much time on their problematic Scriptural exegesis, but it’s worth considering. They claim that the Bible is “clear” except they jump around translations to get the reading they need. So “the Bible” isn’t “clear.”
But, unlike Genesis Apologetics, I’m open to correction on this. If they don’t correct me, then, as I suspect, they’re lying about Scripture. But, let’s go back to the third paragraph quoted above.
The most important claim has three parts: first, that there are bio-organic materials in dinosaur, and second, that these bio-organic materials should not exist, and that there are studies to support these two claims.
For the Genesis Apologetics argument to be true, all three claims have to be responsibly supported—that there are these materials, and that they shouldn’t exist, and that there are fifty peer-reviewed citations that support both of the previous claims. Just to drive home the point of how irresponsible their argument is, their claim is supported by “science” because “some studies” and “other studies” support [something? maybe the argument they’re making? maybe some part of it?]. That isn’t exactly support. That’s how some jerk next to you on an airplane argues. That’s a flunk first-year composition level of citation.
And they cite no studies that say what Schweitzer has found are proof that the standard narrative about evolution is wrong.
If you want to read Scripture in a way that can only be achieved by jumping around among translations, being dodgy about references, and deciding to ignore theologians whose Greek and Hebrew is probably better than yours, you be you.
Here’s the problem. If you take your personal and minority interpretation–even among Christians–reading, and try to make it the basis for public policy (what is taught in schools, what laws we as a public have), then, as someone claiming to be Christian, you should meet two standards. First, you should do unto others as you would do unto them. That is, you should enter the realm of policy argumentation, holding your opponents to the same standards of proof, rationality, civility, and so on as you hold yourself.
If you do that, which GA doesn’t, then this whole reading collapses. GA does not hold itself to the same standards of proof as it holds advocates of evolution. It does not treat them as it wants to be treated.
If you decide that it’s okay to hold your beliefs to different standards of proof than you hold believers in evolution (as GA does), then, someday, you’re going to have to look Jesus straight in the face and tell him that you decided what he very clearly told us to do didn’t apply to you. Good luck with that.
Second, let your yea be yea and your nay be nay. Christians should not be Machiavellians, deciding that dishonesty is okay if we do it because we have a higher truth, or we have a good cause.
The SCUM Manifesto was written by Valerie Solanas in 1967. The first sentence pretty much sums up the whole piece, in terms of argument, argumentation, genre, and audience:
“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.“
At least as “argument” is taught in first year composition classes, that’s an argument. It isn’t argumentation, but a manifesto (which are rarely argumentation), oriented toward an audience open to considering men an out-group. She’s notorious for advocating violence against men, but that part of her manifesto is minimal. Most of it consists of a hyperbolic list of what’s wrong with men, much of which is simply flipping the tired accusations about women of that time, arguing they’re true of men (which is one reason some people find it funny). For instance, she insists that men are eaten up with guilt, shame, and fear about sex, jealous of women, and hating themselves. She goes on to argue that this jealousy and self-loathing lead to what we would now call “toxic masculinity.”
Solanas has two proposals. First is that women step out of the work force, off “the money system,” and leave men (62-3). These actions would to an immediate economic collapse. She admits that many women won’t take those actions (“nice, passive, accepting ‘cultivated,’ polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy’s Girls” 64). So, her second proposal is that SCUM (“dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant” 64) become an “unwork” force–taking jobs, and doing them badly–engage in disruptive anarchy and destruction, take over all radio and TV, “bust up” het couples (65-6). SCUM will also “kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM” (66). So, she isn’t in favor of killing all men (#notallmen). At moments, she seems to suggest a world without any men, in which all babies are female, and produced in laboratories.
So, despite being famous for advocating violence against men, even killing, that’s a minor part of the manifesto. Most of it is about what’s wrong with men, and most of her calls for action involve “the money system.” But, the call for violence is there, albeit in somewhat disconnected ways. But, is violence against men really what this text advocates? Is this text really an argument for violence against men? Is it hate speech?
It’s important to try to figure out if a text is likely to incite violence against some group, and so we often have that argument, but we tend to try to answer that question by deflecting from questions about the text and its impact to the author and their group identity (that is, in- or out-group). And that’s what’s wrong with so much current political discourse. It’s a mistake because it tends to makes texts nothing more than Rorschach tests–telling us more about the interpreter than it does about the text.
Some people take the manifesto at face value, and they see it as a man-hating, het-phobic call for violence against men; some people say this manifesto epitomizes feminism. Some people interpret it is a kind of literal hyperbole. What I mean is that they read it as hyperbolic (exaggerated) but also an accurate expression of Solanas’ personal and understandable (given her life experiences) rage, or perhaps hers and all women’s intermittent rage about sexism, and how sexism is systemic, pernicious, and persistent. Some people read it as satire, in the same tradition as Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which has serious criticisms in its discussion, as does SCUM, but the call for eating babies is intended to shock people into more reasonable solutions. So, calling for hurting men is in the same category as eating Irish babies–not her real argument. Some people think it’s hilarious, and just a Lenny Bruce-kind of humor. It’s supposed to shock us into thinking about our tendency toward false essentializing of men and women. And some people think of it as a perhaps unintentionally genius satire on the genre of manifesto.
Every one of those interpretations is defensible, in the sense that it’s possible to find evidence to support the claims–not necessarily good evidence, and not necessarily logically connected, but evidence. The claim that it epitomizes feminism and the one that it was intended as satire are pretty much impossible to defend reasonably in light of intelligent opposition arguments, but they’re often directed at “in” audiences who don’t particularly want a reasonable argument (which means they’re much like the manifesto itself). All of the interpretations are, ultimately, about a moral (and important) question: is this an unethical, unreasonable, and harmful argument? Is this a responsible way for someone to argue in public?[1]
And we should ask that question about every major public statement. We should ask that about what politicians, pundits, influencers, and we say in the “public sphere,” ranging from what the President tweets to what we say on Instagram.[2]
Here’s what I want to argue in this post: the answer might be complicated. And it’s the word “harmful” that makes it complicated–because, I’ll argue, we don’t focus on “harmful” in terms of consequences; instead, we do so in terms of group membership, and that gets us into a mess. We should focus on harm, rather than whether we think they’re on our team.
Let’s go back to SCUM.
Obviously, the various interpretations mentioned above are incompatible, especially in terms of policy consequences—if it’s seriously calling for killing men, it’s hate speech; if it’s all a joke, then treating it as hate speech is singularly humorless, and Swift was engaged in hate speech (so satire is dead). So, how do we determine whether SCUM is actually, and not just hyperbolically, inciting violence against men? In other words, how do we determine the moral impact of texts? Note that I didn’t say the “morality of texts,” but the “moral impact”–they’re different. (I’ll get back to that.)
Here’s the problem. If we’re sympathetic to feminism, we’re likely to explain Solanas’ rhetoric as hyperbole or satire, and therefore not having a harmful impact at all. The less sympathetic we are to feminism, and the more that we think feminism is necessarily hostility to men, the more likely we are to interpret the text as a sincere call for violence against men and hate speech.
So, our interpretation of whether the text is hate speech or humor is likely (but not necessarily—I’ll get to that) strongly influenced by whether we empathize more with her as a woman and feminist (she’s in-group) or with the group she attacks (men, out-group).
Here I have to engage in what-is-not-actually-a-digression into the question of methods of interpretation. We often think of the “meaning” of the text as the message the author intends to send to an audience, and we think a good reader is one who correctly decodes that message. It’s the transmission model of communication. And, really, that’s a perfectly fine way to think about some parts of communication—we should try to figure out what someone is telling us.
It gets vexed, however, when we are thinking about the moral impact of a text, and that’s what the question of whether Solanas is inciting violence is all about. The problem is that, if we try to determine the impact of the text by decoding the author’s intention, we haven’t necessarily determined its impact (texts often have an impact not intended by the author). Instead, we’re likely to assess the moral impact of the text on the basis of whether we agree or disagree with the author. And that method will tempt us into being sloppy Machiavellians.
By sloppy Machiavellian, I mean the notion that the morality of an act or text is determined by intention–all means are morally neutral. We think that, if the author has moral intentions, it’s a moral text, and if they don’t, then it isn’t. Except, we don’t really think that. We don’t care whether the author meant well by their own lights, but by ours. Too often, what we mean when we say that the morality of a text is determined by the morality of the author’s intention is that in-group members (people who want what we want) write moral texts, and no one else does.
We do this equation of morality and intention because we tend to think about morality through the lens of Christian notions of sin. Christian notions of sin emphasize intention (legitimately, I think)–a person sins by doing something they know to be wrong, or by failing to do something they know they should have done. Sin is always within our ken.
Not all bad things, morally harmful things even, are usefully framed as sin, especially if we’re thinking about public policy and discourse. If we separate harm from sin, then we can think about times and ways that someone might do something harmful and/or immoral all the while thinking they were doing the right thing. They meant well. Meaning well and doing harm can take several forms, from doing something to a person they don’t want done but we think they want (or should want) to granting ourselves moral license because we’re on the side of good. We might make harmful mistakes, or have good intentions but bad information. Harm and sin aren’t identical.
If we separate sin from harm, we can talk and think more clearly and honestly about how people–including Christians who “meant well”– have so often ended up on the wrong side of right and wrong.
When you do the kind of research I do—what rhetoric people used to justify hanging Quakers, banning anyone who disagreed on fine points of Calvinist theology, engaging in massacres of Native Americans, prohibiting the freeing of enslaved people, supporting lynching, silencing legitimate dissent, appeasing or actively supporting Hitler, being Hitler, advocating race-based mass imprisonment—what you learn, very quickly, is that everyone thinks they’re justified in what they do. Everyone, including Hitler, believes they have good intentions. That we believe we are on the side of good doesn’t necessarily mean we are.
Reducing all questions of impact and morality to whether the actor had moral motives has the odd consequence that we explain exactly the same behavior (chasing a squirrel) as moral or immoral on the grounds of what motives we attribute to them. Chester chased the squirrel because he’s aggressive; Hubert chased the squirrel to protect his family. And, typically, we attribute good motives to in-group members (people we think of as “us”) and bad motives to out-group members (them). Solanas was engaged in hyperbole; Solanas wanted men killed. Our politicians are mistaken; their politicians lie (or, “our politicians lie because they have/they’re trying to get good things done” and “their politicians lie because they’re dishonest/greedy/corrupt”).
So, deciding that a text is moral to the extent that the author has good morals often gets us into a circular argument: that person is doing a good thing because they have good motives; I know they have good motives because they are one of us, and people like us have good motives; we have good motives because people like us are good, and good people have good motives.
I’m not saying we should ignore intention altogether; I’m saying that it shouldn’t be the criterion we use for thinking about the impact of public discourse. It might be tremendously important for determining whether someone has sinned, but that determination doesn’t happen to be on my list of job duties. It can also be important in personal relationships for thinking about what happens next. [3] But, if a public figure keeps meaning well and doing harm, that’s a problem regardless of their intentions.
If we think about impact, then we can look at what a text does, or can be plausibly read as likely to do to a majority of audience members. As it happens, those criteria can be assessed straightforwardly when it comes to SCUM: there has never been an incident when a few thousand women committed violence against men, saying they believed they were doing what Solanas wanted, or that they were inspired by her.
Whether a text incites a group to violence depends on the power and authority of the author (the extent to which the author has a base that will do what the author advocates), the extent to which inciting violence is one of several plausible interpretations, the size and makeup of the audience (is there a large audience primed for violence), the target of the violence (does the text reinforce and rely on the audience’s pre-existing belief that the target is a group or member of a group against whom violence is always justified), and a context of legitimation (this violence is framed as legitimate by the in-group). While one of several defensible interpretations of SCUM is that Solanas is advocating violence against men, none of the other characteristics apply. She had little or no power and an outlier argument that readers were (and are) unlikely to read anywhere else, let alone as a dominant narrative for a large community.
I should say that I don’t like the book. I don’t know whether or not Solanas was seriously calling for violence against men–I think she was a troubled and tragic person who may not have been entirely clear about what she wanted. I don’t think it’s funny; I think it’s painful to read. I can understand why some people would find it funny, and I can see it as a brilliant parody of manifestos (a genre I don’t much like). I’m not saying either of those is a bad reading–they just aren’t mine.
The SCUM manifesto is not responsible public discourse–there’s a sense in which hyperbole and satire often aren’t–but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has an immoral impact. And, again, not all public discourse has to be responsible.
Imagine that there had been an incident when a few thousand women felt inspired by SCUM to attack violently a gathering of men, and they said they thought she wanted them to do so. And imagine that people who liked her said that she wasn’t responsible for that behavior because what she said was satire, hyperbole, well-intended, and so on, although she had written something that thousands of people misunderstood. But, if her manifesto did result in a mass of people engaging in violence, then Solanas would need to take responsibility for that impact, as quickly as possible, and try to stop it. The longer she took to clarify her intention, the more irresponsible she was. Even (especially) if she didn’t intend the violence, it would be tragically irresponsible were she not absolutely clear about her intention as soon as the violence started.
If a person might trigger a violent attack they didn’t intend, they’re rhetorically irresponsible. If that attack happens, and they don’t immediately try to clarify their intention, they wanted the attack, didn’t care if it happened, or are outrageously irresponsible. If a few thousand women attack a gathering of men, believing they were doing what Solanas wanted, and a defender said it wasn’t her responsibility because her text was ambiguous, they’re saying she’s irresponsible. The ambiguity of her intention coupled with her audience’s response might be a reason she shouldn’t be prosecuted, but it would also be a reason she shouldn’t be trusted in a position of power.
(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids
[1] By “responsible way to argue” (or “responsible public discourse”) I don’t mean humorless, data-heavy, or anything especially complicated. I just mean discourse for which they take responsibility. So, they try to be honest and accurate and fair to the opposition, and they own up to what their intentions are (see, I said the issue of intentions matters–it just isn’t the only or most important issue).
[2] I don’t think everyone always has to behave responsibly in public discourse–that would be a very boring world–but because we should be wary of trusting the judgment of people who rarely are. We might take great pleasure in what they say and write, retweeting, reposting, sharing, rereading, but we wouldn’t give them the keys to the castle.
[2] It’s also important in personal relations. But, after a while, if a person keeps hurting you or people you love, you’re going to stop caring about whether they meant to, and worry more about how to protect yourself and others.
(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids
We’re at a point when we have clear evidence that the previous President lost reelection, knew he lost reelection, and came up with various plans whereby he could break the law and stay in power. When those didn’t work, he deliberately incited an insurrection that he was hoping would enable him to stay President. The wife of a SCOTUS justice was actively involved in that insurrection. The previous GOP-dominated Senate violated democratic norms by refusing to hold hearings to name a justice, claiming a principle they promptly violated when it would benefit them. Two SCOTUS justices lied under oath, and the highly factional GOP justices are openly intending to roll back constitutional protections for practices that violate their (very narrow) religion.
A lot of people are furious about this. Including me. And I’m finding myself reading a lot of social media memes and posts about how “The GOP is the Uvalde shooter, and Dems are the Uvalde police,” “Dems bring a knife to a gun fight, “Dems have done nothing to stop this from happening, and now they’re asking for money to continue to do nothing more.” The refrain is that there is an obvious course of action that Dems could have done for the last fifty years, and instead dithered. The people sharing these memes often say that they are so frustrated with our political situation that they’re done with deliberation, civility, peaceful protests, taking the high ground, and normal politics (as though those are all the same thing), since it isn’t working, and they want radical action.
That reaction is simultaneously sensible and mistaken. Since 2003, I’ve been worried about our already factional and fraught political culture sliding into actively destroying democracy, so I share the sense of urgency. But we haven’t exhausted the effectiveness of deliberation–we haven’t been able to engage in it for decades. And that’s what this post is about.
I’m going to try to summarize what I think the situation is and what to do about, a project that also involves explaining why I think the above reaction is both sensible and mistaken. It’s going to be cogent to the point of cryptic (I’m actually trying to write a book about it), and so it’s easy for me to express myself badly and/or for various reasons to be understood as making an argument I’m not making. So, bear with me, as I’m going to begin by listing many of the things I’m not arguing.
I’m not saying that “both sides” are just as bad, or endorsing any way of describing our policy options as a binary (or continuum) of the GOP (synonymous with “conservative”) and the Dems (synonymous with the DNC and “liberal”).
I’m not saying that we need to be more compassionate toward people who support the current GOP agenda and behavior, engage in a more conciliatory rhetoric with them, be more understanding of their concerns, try to win them over through empathy, or in any other way endorsing the fantasy that we just need to be “nicer.”
I’m not saying that we need to be patient and trust in the system, look on the bright side, and just get out and vote, or endorsing any other version of Micawberism.
I’m not saying that the Dems (or leftists, or liberals, or critics of the GOP) have ignored the obvious course of action we should have pursued, and I know what it is, or in any way endorsing any other version of anti-pluralism.
I am advocating that we try to work toward policy discourse that is deliberative and pluralist. But, by deliberation, I do not mean a slow, decorous process, in which people civilly examine all the possible data from all possible perspectives, allowing everyone to “have their say” and treating all opinions as equally valid. Discussing complicated issues that way is rarely deliberative (it’s usually very exclusive), and even more rarely useful. It’s also a lively glimpse of Hell to be stuck in an organization that treats deliberation that way.
By deliberation, I mean a process of decision-making that is inclusive, participants are open to persuasion (they can identify the conditions under which they would change their minds), all participants are held to the same rules of “logic,” “evidence,” and so on, there is an attempt to account for common cognitive biases, arguments are internally consistent, and people genuinely engage with the best arguments from other perspectives. It can be vehement (anyone who knows me knows that I go for the jugular), passionate, outraged, rude; it doesn’t have to fit reductive notions of “rationality” (but whatever counts as “rational” for one group counts as “rational” for the other groups).
It’s important for me to say that I don’t think all public and political discourse should be deliberative—there’s plenty of room for epideictic, in the form of marches, speeches, memes, jokes, stories. There should be expressive discourse too. In fact, I don’t even think the majority of our political discourse should be deliberative, but a lot should be. And right now we have pretty much none, anywhere on the political spectrum. So, one way that people are mistaken in saying that they’re done with deliberation, is that they aren’t done, because we haven’t engaged in it for decades.
I’m also in favor of a pluralist model of community. I don’t mean the voting mechanisms often called “pluralist” (I’m agnostic about them) but the first part of the Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies definition, that it is a perspective of politics which assumes “that society is divided into a broad variety of partly overlapping social groups with different ideas and interests. Within pluralism diversity is seen as a strength rather than a weakness” (499, emphasis added). Anti-pluralist models of community, disagreement, and politics assume that diversity of opinion weakens us because there is one right policy (ideology, belief, argument, language), and it’s the one we need to follow. And everyone who has a different policy (and so on) is a bad person who should be silenced.
Basically, there are three parts to the argument I want to make. As I said, although this is long, it’s a truncated version. If folks do want more explanation of some part, let me know.
Part I. GOP re-fashioning of Cold War rhetorical strategies. Cold War rhetoric was a reapplication of a specific strain in white fundagelical discourse that was eschatalogical and apocalyptic. That is said that we are in an absolute war between two groups (one Good and one Evil) that is simultaneously risky and predetermined. Paradoxically, the Good group, because it is Good, is justified in anything it does; it claims and is given moral, rhetorical, and political license. And it can therefore behave exactly like the out-group, doings things for which the out-group is condemned, and still claim the moral high-ground (e.g., misrepresent the opposition, lie, try to steal an election). The rhetoric for exterminating Native Americans had exactly this structure–the extermination was “justified” because it’s what they would do to us. There was often a projection of evil (sometimes explicitly insisting the out-group was in league with Satan). Cold War rhetoric simply changed the characters in this narrative, saying we could engage in anti-democratic actions, and even undermine democracies, in order to save democracy, while condemning the USSR for being anti-democratic.
Claiming it’s a zero-sum battle between Good and Evil, and claiming moral license, are characteristics of demagoguery, and this reframing of a political conflict as an eschatalogical and apocalyptic war is a kind of demagoguery. It is a particularly destructive kind for two reasons. First, because this war is eschatological (meaning it is the conflict toward which all history has been heading), there are no neutrals. People are either fanatically committed to our side, or they are Evil (perhaps unwittingly, but still Evil). Thus, this is always a war of extermination of everyone who doesn’t fanatically agree with us. Second, because this is a war of ideologies (and there are only two ideologies), then including other points of view, valuing difference, wanting to take time to consider options—all of those things are truckling with Satan. So, a variation on “our” ideology, or criticism of anything we’re doing, let alone doing something else, are all attempts to exterminate “us.”
What happens when a community believes it is in a war of extermination, and, if it loses, it will be exterminated, is that norms of fairness, legality, honesty, and reason seem to be unimportant if not actively dangerous. (Think about how many action movies have a moment when the hero breaks all the rules to save his family, country, world.) So, what might start as a morally unconstrained war with another nation because of its ideology (the USSR) necessarily becomes a morally unconstrained political war with other members of our own nation who dissent from or criticize our actions during that war (as happened with Martin Luther King Jr). We start down a path of increasing purification.
This shift to seeing normal political disagreement (such as people disagreeing as to whether this war is a good idea) as an eschatological and apocalyptic war began in the 60s, with how critics of Vietnam were treated (whether “liberal” like Martin Luther King, Jr. or “conservative” like Hans Morgenthau). It became common in pro-GOP political discourse and propaganda in the 90s, with people like Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh engaging in and advocating it. As this kind of demagoguery became more normalized among pro-GOP pundits, politicians, and voters, any attempt at even pretending to engage in deliberation evaporated. This was most striking when GOP candidates didn’t even bother putting forward policy statements in which their policies were rationally argued (the most extreme being Trump in 2016).
So, what began as a foreign war to “contain” communism quickly became a domestic war of purification–exterminating “fifth columnists,” with “fifth columnists” increasingly broadly defined. In the last twenty years, the notion of a traitor to the cause has become so broadly defined, that it’s been a war of purification within the GOP. Normal dissent and disagreement over policies (intra- and inter-party) are treated as battles in that larger war of extermination. If disagreement is treason, then deliberation is impossible, and so is democracy. The GOP is at war with democracy, openly striving for competitive authoritarianism.
Both deliberation and normal politics require that the majority of political parties and actors are engaged in deliberating with one another and holding themselves to democratic norms. And the majority of pro-GOP media, pundits, voters, and candidates have done neither for decades. Thus, critics and opponents of the GOP aren’t “done with deliberation” or “normal politics” because we haven’t, as a political culture, been able to engage in them.
The best way out of this mess is for GOP voters to insist on deliberation and normal politics. But, as any of us who have been trying to deliberate (or argue) with Trump supporters know, that’s unlikely. So, many of the critics and opponents of the GOP say that we should fight fire with fire—that is, if it’s war, let’s win it.
Part II. Kinds of war. And that raises the second point: what kind of war is it? I find the 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz helpful on this point. He argued that most wars have political objectives, and so they can be ended when that objective has been achieved—gaining territory (US war with Mexico), getting or protecting access to a resource (many of Queen Victoria’s “little wars”), enforcing an agreement (Napoleon’s invasion of Russia), secession or independence (US Revolution), and so on. The other kind of war, “absolute” war, is intended to “destroy the adversary, to eliminate his existence as a State” (qtd in Clausewitz, A Very Short Introduction 17). Absolute war has the goal of ensuring that the opponent can never again be a threat, and so it requires, if not physical extermination, then political extermination—the complete destruction of political power.
If we assume that our political landscape is usefully mapped the way that people used to map the “free v. communist” world—that is, if we see politics as a zero-sum battle between two ideologies—then we’re necessarily imagining absolute war. Since that’s how pro-GOP pundits have been describing politics since the 90s (not just war, but an absolute war between “conservatives” and “liberals”), it makes sense that they would describe their goal as reduction of “Democrats” (which means everyone not fanatically pro-GOP) to a powerless party that wins a few elections in a few places. Political scientists call that kind of government “competitive authoritarianism,” and that is, for instance, what Dinesh D’Souza argues for in the unintentionally ironically titled The Big Lie.
The temptation is to decide that, since the GOP has more or less already declared war, and used that declaration of war to gain moral, rhetorical, and political license from its base, then we should do the same. And, so, we should help the GOP destroy democracy in the name of saving it. That strategy didn’t work particularly well in Vietnam—we never did actually save a village by destroying it—and it doesn’t work with democracy.
I’m not arguing that we should just pretend this isn’t happening, and engage in normal politics. That would be like playing tennis with someone, and holding ourselves to regulation tennis rules, when they refuse to acknowledge any faults, refuse to play if it’s our serve, and lie about the score. And they justify their behavior on the grounds that we would do the same if we could, we’re terrible people, they’re on God’s side, no one who plays against them deserves to win, and we probably already did all that.
So, if it isn’t normal politics, is it war? I’m not sure, but I am sure that, if we’re talking war, we need to talk about what kind of war it is. Because here’s the danger: if we decide that it’s war, and we assume that means an absolute war of extermination, and so we are justified in declaring us free from all democratic norms and constraints, who is “we”? And who is exterminated?
The US deciding that it was in an ideological zero-sum war of extermination with the USSR led to it treating its own citizens as enemies, and silencing legitimate dissent. The GOP persuading its base that they were in a similar war led to, first, it declaring Democrats to be traitors, then declaring anyone in the GOP who wanted dissent and deliberation to be the enemy, then anyone not fanatically committed to Trump being the enemy. The GOP is in a Stalinesque purge, essentially an internal war, and the pro-Trump faction is winning. That isn’t good for anyone.
So, who is “we”? Is it everyone who is critical of the current GOP regardless of political affiliation? Do we determine it by practice (that is, only people who reliably vote Dem), ideology (if so, what beliefs?), people who might vote Dem if approached in the right way? Who will decide who really counts as a Dem, and whose views can be dismissed as treason?
If we decide that we’re in an absolute war of two ideologies, then we have to have a pure community with one ideology. And so now we’re anti-pluralist. We’ll end up saying that there is one right policy (ideology, belief, argument, language), and it’s the one we need to follow, and everyone who has a different policy (and so on) is a bad person who should be silenced. I think we’ll end up yelling “SPLITTER!!!” at each other rather than winning elections.
Or, maybe, we could decide it isn’t an absolute war of extermination, and then we don’t have to decide who gets silenced and purged.
Part III. Obvious Politics. When people are frightened, having recently had a big failure or setback, and the situation is uncertain, there is a natural impulse to believe the solution is a more unified in-group; that is, to believe we need to purify it of dissent and doubt. (Much of this research is summarized and cited in Hoagg’s Extremism and the Politics of Uncertainty.) The greater the threat, the more that we are likely to believe that unity is necessary, as is action. If we fall for the false binary of action v. deliberation, then we’re likely to become authoritarian in our decision-making process, refusing to compromise, negotiate, or deliberate with each other.
Because the most frightening kind of tragedy is the one that we could have caused, or that couldn’t have been prevented, we are tempted to believe that this tragedy came about because people didn’t do the obviously right thing. Believing that every problem has an obvious solution, and tragedies only happen because people in power do something that is obviously wrong and refuse to do what is obviously right (because they’re lazy, corrupt, self-serving) is self-serving, anti-deliberative, anti-pluralist, and wrong.
People are suggesting a lot of policies for dealing with the very real threat that Trump and the current GOP present for democracy, and arguing vehemently and passionately for them, and that’s great. But it isn’t great if we do so assuming that the policy we want is the only defensible one, that there are no arguments against those policies or for other ones—that is, if we are anti-pluralist. If we deliberate well, none of us will get what we think is the best policy. Deliberation can’t be oriented toward finding the One Right Policy without ceasing to become deliberation and instead becoming some purging of the unworthies. It seems to me that deliberation involves trying to identify the policies and arguments that are good enough.
If our goal is to get the GOP to go back to behaving like a responsible political party, engaged in normal political discourse and behavior, then we have to make sure their current strategy doesn’t win elections. I don’t see how our (their critics and opponents) engaging in their strategy will do that. I do think that the most effective strategy is probably some version of creating a coalition—that’s what’s worked in the past. But creating a coalition is hard because it means that we compromise with each other on policies.
My preference is that we should talk policy, but I might be wrong. One way to make an effective coalition is to agree on a policy agenda that ensures everyone gets something, although no one gets exactly what they wanted, and no one gets everything. That kind of compromise means that everyone will hate something on the final slate of policies. My concern is that that kind of specific discussion of policy goals is throwing something low and slow over the plate for pro-GOP ads– “Why should you pay for some kid to get a college degree in basket weaving?” “Why should you pay so some lib can drive an electric car?” All they’d have to do is show that one policy is something a voter might hate.
You may have noticed that I haven’t been using the term “conservative” for pro-GOP, and I haven’t assumed that everyone who is not “pro-GOP” is Dem. That isn’t because I think there’s a continuum (there isn’t—that’s just as false as the binary), but because I think the first mistake—and the one that enables the pro-GOP claim that “the libs” are at war with us, and so we’re justified in throwing off the shackles of moral norms—is thinking of our politics as a binary of two groups. It’s false. I’ve talked with more than one self-identified lefty who wanted no restrictions on the sale of guns of any kind, on the grounds that third-world revolutionaries needed all the weapons. If our policy commitments can be described as a binary or continuum of identity, and advocating gun control is a characteristic of “the left,” where do those people fit? I know self-identified “conservatives” who want easy access to birth control and safe abortions–where are they?
That binary/continuum model of our political world assumes that our disagreements with one another are all on a single line, so it’s assuming what’s at stake—that we have a conflict of identity. If we make that mistake, and see the war as between two implacably hostile identities, then we can never have a strategic war about specific achievable policy goals. In fact, if we argue about policy, we’ve got a lot of common ground with people all over the political spectrum, as well as disagreement. Immigration policies, bail reform, decriminalizing addiction, access to health insurance, restrictions on gun ownership—all of these issues don’t actually break neatly into a binary or continuum of identity.
And that’s why I keep coming back to the question of what kind of war. People appalled at what the GOP is currently doing do not have the same ideology or policy agenda. We disagree with each other, passionately and sincerely, and not because everyone except me (or you) is a stooge of some corrupt entity, not really thinking things through, a milquetoast or irresponsible firebrand. We disagree with one another because politics is uncertain, multi-causal, ambiguous, and we really have different interests. If the people critical of the GOP and what it’s doing decide that the solution is for us to be a purer group more radically committed to destroying democratic norms in service of the one course of action that is obviously right, then, at best, we’ll destroy democracy.
And I think we’ll lose even more elections. For one thing, people likely to vote Democrat don’t particularly value in-group loyalty, as both history and Jonathan Haidt suggest, and are unlikely to be motivated by war rhetoric. Non-violent protests (which aren’t necessarily civil at all) tend to be more effective than violent protests or rioting, and that’s a datapoint (for more on that see Chenoweth Why Civil Resistance Works). I also can’t help but note that wars tend to be won by the group with the largest war chest, and the GOP has a lot of billionaires.
When we’re frightened, we want a clear course of action, and I haven’t provided one, and I won’t. That would be a contradiction of everything I’m saying. There have been people who have been predicting this outcome—someone like Trump, a SCOTUS like this, a GOP that would endorse insurrection–for years. This isn’t new. The one thing about which I’m sure is that, at times when a nation was threatened with an authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist party and government who clearly indicated they would support a forcible coup in order to gain or stay in power, the more their opponents refused to build a coalition because they instead insisted on in-group purity, the more likely that democracy was over.
At this point, democratic deliberation is radical action.
Imagine that we work at a charity together, and I advocate a policy that will actively hurt what we claim we’re trying to do—and the research is clear on that—and I say that I’m advocating this policy because it will get me in good with the boss. Actually making our world better and helping the people we claim to want to help is less important to me than getting in good with the boss. You’d decide I’m a narcissistic jerk. That would be a correct inference.
People who want to criminalize abortion, who have never advocated the policies that actually reduce abortion, aren’t actually concerned about abortion. We could reduce abortion if we offered easy access to cheap and effective birth control, offered accurate sex education, had universal health care, publicly supported childcare, reasonable parental leave. When I point out to people who advocate criminalizing abortion (and birth control) that there are other methods more effective at reducing abortion, they say that they are more opposed to those policies than they are to abortion.
I want to stop here for a moment. They pass by that quickly, but it’s actually really important. They’re fine with women dying from unsafe abortions. They’d rather have that outcome than women having access to effective to birth control.
So, let’s do the math. Reducing abortion is not their highest priority. They aren’t actually trying to reduce abortion. They are only opposed to safe abortions. More concerning, they are more opposed to women having access to safe birth control (and the various social safety nets) than they are to abortion.
In my experience, what they say is that they are more concerned with doing what God wants than with actually reducing teen pregnancy (Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming talks about this, see especially 135-6). They think God wants them to lie (that is, say things that are factually untrue but true to their policy agenda), and that God doesn’t care if that lying means people get pregnant, spread STD, or otherwise suffer in ways they wouldn’t have if they had been given good information and good healthcare.
As a Christian, I’ll engage in an aside, and say that, when I argue with people like this, they can never reconcile what they’re doing with Jesus saying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” They can’t imagine a God who wants everyone held to the same standards; they seem to imagine God as someone just like them, with all their petty hatreds, grievances, and in- out-group affiliations but with superpowers. They think God wants them to reward their in-group and punish their out-group; that is, treat the out-group in ways we would never want to be treated.
And, just to be clear: they want to criminalize abortion, not reduce it. This is about people wanting to believe that what they’re doing is so right that it will get them good with God, even if it means tragedy for all sorts of people. They don’t care about those other people. They think God doesn’t. They think God only care about them. Their personal relationship with Jesus is an eighth-grade Mean Girl relationship that involves bonding with God on how much they hate someone else.
I think they’re wrong about God giving them moral license. I think God cares about the people they want punished and the tragedies they know they’re causing. I think they’re narcissistic fucks just looking out for themselves, so concerned about their own salvation that they are sociopathic about the people their policies hurt. I think they’re worse than the people more concerned about their own purity than they were about helping a bleeding stranger.
Once again, a mass shooting, and, once again, a committed unwillingness or inability to deliberate sensibly about our policy options regarding gun violence. The most common narrative–and most damaging–is that we are at impasse because the issue is a zero-sum battle between two essentially hostile groups (“pro- v. anti-gun” or “pro- v. anti-gun control). The NRA, for instance, says that this (actually complicated) issue is a binary of people who are pro- or anti-gun. They claim that “pro-gun” is the same group as “gun owners.” They tell their base that gun owners are facing a binary: either support the NRA, or Obama personally kicks down your doors and takes all your guns.
All major media endorses that false binary and the resulting false narrative.
To the extent that media frame issues about gun ownership as pro- or anti-gun (or gun control), they endorse the NRA narrative.
This binary is false, and doesn’t describe our situation at all. The more we think our world is made up of two groups–people who want all the guns in all the hands and all the places, and a group that wants no guns of any kind for anyone or anywhere–the more we are going to stay caught in a trap we’ve set for ourselves. And that benefits the NRA, and guarantees lots more mass shooters.
In fact, the NRA does not represent gun owners–it has much more extreme stances on all sorts of policy questions about access to guns than most gun owners–but gun owners do tend to believe NRA demagoguery about the opposition wanting to take all their guns. Thus, to the extent that media describe our policy discourse about gun ownership as pro- or anti– (and especially pro- or anti-“guns”), it helps the NRA in its demagoguery.
There is a tendency to assume that, when it comes to gun violence, we have a polarized public. One side is reasonable, principled, and caring, and the other is irrational, intransigent, and extremist. Oddly enough, everyone agrees that’s the situation (it isn’t), but, if we agree that’s the situation then we just fight about who is sensible.
In pro-NRA rhetoric, gun owners are reasonable, and anyone who wants any kind of restrictions on gun ownership is in the group of irrational and fearful extremist. NRA rhetoric characterizes “gun control advocates” as “anti-gun,” who want to criminalize all gun ownership and repeal the Second Amendment. Any change in gun policies other than more guns is a step on a slippery slope to the world of Obama kicking in your door to take your guns. Many critics of the NRA accept the false premise of two groups, and simply flip the characterizations. They paint gun owners as irrational extremists who need guns because they are fearful and fragile, whereas gun control advocates are rational and realistic. As long as we begin with the false assumption that “the” gun debate is a battle between two groups, we’ll waste all our time arguing which one is the irrational one instead of reducing gun violence.
That media, all media, frame our complicated disagreements about policies as a binary of identities means that they are endorsing the NRA argument that this is an existential battle between people who own guns and people who want them banned.
If we focus on policies instead of thinking about this issue about identity, then two things immediately become clear. First, in terms of policy affiliation, there is not a zero-sum war between a group that wants no restrictions on gun ownership and another that wants no gun ownership at all. In fact, the majority of gun owners are advocates of gun control.
As numerous polls show, gun owners overwhelming support some restrictions on gun ownership. A 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center (“Views on gun policy”) shows that approximately 80% of the gun owners polled support background checks, preventing the mentally ill, people on watch lists, and people on no-fly lists from buying guns. Only 33% of gun owners endorsed permit-less concealed carry. Michael Siegel and Claire Boine’s The Meaning of Guns to Gun Owners in the US(2020) shows similar levels of support for restricting gun ownership for the mentally ill, as well as for people at risk for suicide, or with certain kinds of criminal records; A majority support “red flag” laws, and background checks. As Boines and Siegel say, “The majority of gun owners supported every policy for which they primary aim was to keep firearms out of the hands of people at high risk for violence.”
In other words, most “gun owners” are “gun control advocates.” It isn’t a binary.
The second point follows from the first. The NRA’s policy agenda of responding to gun violence by getting more people to buy more guns does not represent the views of gun owners. Gun owners and the NRA are not a homogeneous group, despite what it (and too many of its critics) say. The binary of irrational gun owners who want all the guns for all the people in all the places versus sensible people who want some restrictions is also a false binary.
If most gun owners are gun control advocates, why don’t we have the policies about which there is so much disagreement? And the answer is demagoguery. While the majority of gun owners reject the NRA’s policy agenda, they believe its representation of the Other.
According to Boines and Siegel, “the majority of gun owners have accepted the NRA’s rhetoric that the ultimate aim of firearm violence prevention advocates is to take away their guns and eliminate the Second Amendment.” If gun owners believe that there are only “two sides” on “the” issue of gun violence, then they are unlikely to advocate the policies they actually want, since those policies would seem to be letting anti-gun extremists win a skirmish. And, to the extent that advocates of restrictions on gun ownership accept the false binary of identity, the fears of gun owners are confirmed.
We don’t step out of this trap by trying to understand the Other side better, or attributing better motives to Them, or any other approach that assumes the problem is hostility and misunderstanding between two groups of people. We stay out of the trap by understanding that reducing gun violence means enacting policies and funding programs about which we can agree.
[There’s a longer, and more sourced, version of this argument in Rhetoric and Guns.]
