demagoguery Archives - Page 2 of 17 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Why people who oppose Trump should stop saying “the Dems caved”

I had a busy day, and will be minimally (maybe not at all) on social media for the next few days. My taking the stance that people who oppose Trump should stop saying “the Dems caved” got enough disagreement from various people that I thought I should explain it more. I haven’t had time to write it out thoroughly, and I’m not going to be able to explain it very well, but I thought I should try. So, here’s the short version (without links–sorry).

“The Dems caved” is a statement involving two rhetorical figures, an assumed counterfactual, and two frames for thinking about politics that I think favor authoritarianism.

“Caved” is hyperbole. People who “cave” in a bargaining situation completely give in, and give the interlocutor everything that person wants. As many, many others have pointed out, Trump didn’t get everything he wanted, and he got a bunch he didn’t want (such as a vote on the ACA).

I’m all for hyperbole (note that I just used the rhetorical figure of hyperbole), but, like all rhetorical figures, it’s worth thinking about what the figure does in this situation—who does it help? I’m saying it helps Trump.

“The Dems” is a synecdoche. The claim that “the Dems caved” takes the behavior of eight Senators as “the Dems.” (A part stands for the whole.) As with many figures, if you look at them logically, it’s fallacious. Eight democrats is not “the Democratic Party.” Lots of Dem Senators didn’t cave; I vote Dem, and I didn’t cave. So, it’s a rhetorical figure, and using it is a rhetorical choice. And, as with most rhetorical choices, the important question is: what does it do? Who does it help to say that “the Dems” did something bad? Trump.

(Does that mean that we can never criticize the DNC, any Democratic political figures, or how Democrats vote? Posing that question is another use of hyperbole, and another one that helps Trump. We can and should criticize the DNC [of whom I am not a fan], various Dem political figures [such as the eight], Dem voters…we should talk about groups and people who actually exist rather than hobgoblins defined by othering. “Dems” are not a monolithic and univocal group.)

The assumed counterfactual is that “the Dems” could have gotten a better deal by continuing to enable Trump’s denial of SNAP and the shutdown in general. I have to admit that, while I’ve read a lot of things saying that the Dems caved, I’ve not read any that gave a plausible narrative for how continuing to hold out would have so guaranteed a better deal that it was worth letting Trump shoot the hostages. If there are good arguments that I’m wrong, and that holding out would have gotten a better deal, I’d love to see them.

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading and thinking about the role of counterfactuals in train wrecks in public deliberation. One of the persistent counterfactuals is: if the in-group had simply responded with more will, more aggression, more unity, and a refusal to compromise, it would have won (it was very popular among Germans after WWI, it’s regularly invoked in regard to inter-war negotiations with Hitler, and therefore used to argue for military intervention in almost every US military conflict since, it’s still used about what Truman should have done about Mao, and, well, too many to list them all). That’s an enthymeme with a very weak major premise. Plenty of groups, individuals, nations, parties have refused to compromise and lost.

What, exactly, is the evidence that refusing to compromise would have led to a better outcome? Right now I’m deep in the way that the very problematic counterfactual that responding to his remilitarizing the Rhineland with military force would have prevented WWII. That claim is regularly asserted, but not argued, because the narratives that tell how that would have prevented the war assume that a military response would not have increased the pacifist sentiment in France, the UK, and the US, so that the military buildup would have happened even later than it did, or not at all. There are other problematic assumptions in that narrative, and yet, the counterfactual of more aggression just seems to stop deliberation. So I’m twitchy about anyone invoking a counterfactual narrative without actually having to argue for why it’s the most plausible narrative.

So, I think the counterfactual that holding out would have been a better choice assumes a narrative I haven’t seen anyone reasonably explain (although, like the Munich counterfactual, I’ve seen people either assert or assume it).

Here’s the point about counterfactuals—we resort to them as a way of dragging events back into the controllable. Counterfactuals (if only I hadn’t left early from work) are especially attractive when there is a situation that threatens our sense that we can prevent bad things (the just world model). The example regularly used in studies about counterfactual thinking is that Joe leaves work, and gets killed in an accident caused by a drunk driver. The tendency is for people to imagine preventing the accident by counterfactuals involving Joe making a different decision, as though he’s the only one with agency. Why not the drunk driver? Because we don’t identify with the drunk driver (he is out-group), but we do identify with Joe.

We want to find narratives that enable us to believe that we could have stopped the accident from happening to us. We grasp at counterfactual about what the in-group could have done to prevent this–we try to imagine that we wouldn’t have made the choices Joe did. That makes us agents, rather than victims.

But Joe isn’t to blame for the situation. The drunk driver was. Stop beating up on Joe, and blame the drunk driver.

The synecdoche is, I think, not recognized as a rhetorical figure by many of the people who invoke it. We need to stop thinking about politics as a tug-of-war between the Dems (or “liberals”) and GOP (or “conservatives”). I’ve written books about how this frame for politics is both inaccurate and proto-authoritarian. I’ve never had anyone engage the argument that it’s inaccurate—instead, people say, “but that’s what everyone says.” Yeah, well, everyone said educating women would make their uteruses dry up, and everyone said that racial categories are ontological.

The frame for politics as a zero-sum conflict between two sides (rather than a world of deliberation and disagreement among many different people with many different perspectives) endorses the toxic and proto-authoritarian frame for politics as a zero-sum conflict between two sides.

Authoritarianism is an ideology that assumes that the ideal system is a hierarchy of domination and submission. There are a lot of reasons that various people support Trump. One of the most important—one that ensures he is free of accountability—is that he endorses an authoritarian model of government. Way too many people, not on some binary or continuum of “left v. right,” think that an “authoritarian” is someone who makes them do something they don’t want to do. So, for people like that, there are only out-group authoritarians. That’s not a useful way to think about authoritarianism. (The assumption is that when people force others to behave as you think they should, it’s fine, but when people with whom you disagree try to force you to behave as you think they should, it’s authoritariansm. That isn’t a helpful way to think about authoritaerianism.)

Authoritarianism is better understood as a system of in-group domination–it’s a system in which the in-group and out-group are not held to the same standards of accountability, ethics, law, intelligence. It’s one in which the in-group is held to lower standards (or no standards at all) because it is entitled to dominate out-groups. The law exists to protect and reward the in-group and control/punish out-groups.

Many of Trump supporters love him because they see him as dominating the people by whom they’ve felt dominated for years. Some of them are people who are mad that they can’t say racist, sexist, homophobic things or enact racist, sexist, homophobic policies. But, I think (being a person who intermittently drifts into those media worlds), many of them are worked up about some hobgoblin created by various media intends to dominate them—a hobgoblin “librul” who wants to force everyone into gay marriage, abort white babies, send Christians into camps (much like Alligator Alcatraz), and, well, so on. They, people who are Obviously Right, sincerely feel threatened by “libruls” (who are Obviously Wrong), and therefore support someone who is doing everything to dominate “libruls.”

For people who think about politics not as a world of complicated and difficult deliberation but a zero-sum battle between the Obviously Right and the Obviously Wrong (and, believe me, thinking about policy disagreements that way is not restricted to one place on the fantastical continuum or binary of political affiliation), then every policy disagreement is really about domination. That is a profoundly anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian ways of thinking about politics.

“The Dems caved” endorses that way of framing politics, and ensures that Trump supporters continue to believe that Trump is doing a great job.

I’m saying the “The Dems caved” is not accurate, and that it’s a statement that involves a set of rhetorical choices that doesn’t help deliberation, but does help Trump specifically, and damaging frames more generally.

Anytime you find yourself making a series of rhetorical choices such that you’re making the same ones Fox News is, you’re helping Trump. There are other choices. It’s possible to disagree with what the eight Senators did and condemn them specifically. It’s possible to emphasize that Trump didn’t get what he wanted, and say he’s caving if he signs off on this deal. It’s possible to condemn Trump and his supporters for making hostages of people on SNAP. There are so many ways to frame what happens. We have choices.

I think we shouldn’t make the rhetorical choices that help Trump. Blame the drunk driver.

Demagoguery, Algae, and BSAB (again)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BSAB: “Both sides” and the slavery debate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were at least eleven.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8) We should ban slavery, and recompense slavers.

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

10) We should ban slavery and not recompense slavers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arguing like an asshole: obvious problems, and obvious solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A more useful way to think about authoritarianism

train wreck — image from https://middleburgeccentric.com/2016/10/editorial-the-train-wreck-red/

When I found myself as the Director of the First Year Composition program, I also found myself in the same odd conversation more than once. A student would come to me outraged that they were being held to the same standards as the other students. At first I thought I was misunderstanding, but they meant it. They sincerely believed that, for reasons, it was “unfair” (that was the term they used) for them held to the same standards as other students. They weren’t claiming any kind of disability, but just … well…privilege.

I came across a similar argument when reading arguments for slavery, on the part of people who claimed to be Christian. They openly rejected “Do unto others as you have done unto you”—a way of behaving that would have made slavery impossible–in favor of some really vexed readings of Scripture. They rejected a law Jesus very clearly said in favor of problematic translations and comparisons. (In other words, they were antinomian when it came to Jesus’ laws.) For them, hierarchy was important, and the ideal hierarchy was rigid, with one’s place on the hierarchy determined by various criteria that were often regional (race, gender, wealth, source of wealth, religion, family standing, occupation, place of origin, political affiliation, and so on).

That’s how authoritarianism works. It’s a way of thinking about politics, organizations, families, and/or communities that says the ideal system is a rigid hierarchy of power (people have the “right” to dominate the people or groups below them) and privilege (people on a hierarchy should submit to those above them). That hierarchy of domination and submission means that people should not do unto others, and should not be held to the same standards. The paradox is that people who claim to be higher on the hierarchy because they are better people hold themselves and others like them to lower standards than people below them.

There are a few other interesting points about that hierarchy. People believed that the categories that justified the hierarchy were Real, created by some kind of higher power (Nature, Biology, God), and therefore Eternal.

That belief that the categories were Eternal meant that they took what were actually very recent practices and projected them back through history. For instance, pro-slavery rhetors could thereby ignore that the kind of slavery practiced in the US in the 19th century was relatively recent in almost every way, and not how slavery operated in Jesus’ time or before (the closest would be the Helots).

Another confusing paradox is that people who believe in a stable and Real hierarchy are saying, quite clearly, that they are born with certain privileges by virtue of family and so on—they will insist that they are entitled to getting better treatment and being held to lower standards—but they get very, very mad if you point out that they have privilege, so they are asserting and denying they have privilege.

At the end of this, I’ll explain my crank theory as to what’s going on with that asserting and denying of privilege, but I want to make a few other points about that hierarchy of submission and domination first. It’s very common, across various cultures, religions, organizations, businesses, but it isn’t universal. Many years ago, Arthur Lovejoy pointed out that what he called “The Great Chain of Being” has a long tradition in Western theology and philosophy. Although the term is medieval, the concept of all creation consisting of a hierarchy goes at least as far back as Plato’s Timaeus. Eighteenth century natural philosophy began the long and tragic tendency to insist on a “natural” hierarchy of ethnicities. Although Darwin was explicit that evolution was not necessarily progressive, and rejected the hierarchy of species, it was so ingrained after Linnaeus that he was largely ignored. “Darwinism” was weaponized to support a stable hierarchy of beings that was not at all what he meant.

The narrative that the hierarchy was ontologically grounded (that is Real) meant that any disruption in the hierarchy was “unnatural”—that is, a violation of nature. That claim has/had two odd consequences. It meant asserting that hierarchical systems are more stable, and less prone to conflict, which led to another backward projection: that there used to be a time of stable hierarchy, and it didn’t have social disruption.

The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages is sometimes cited as an example of such a stable hierarchy that was associated with a lack of rebellion—people will sometimes claim was stable and peaceable (Chesterton, for instance). In actuality, it was neither. While peasant revolts were fairly unusual until the 14th century, there was constant conflict in Europe, with various political and religious leaders disagreeing (quite violently) about just what the hierarchy was, all the time asserting that there was a Real and natural hierarchy, and claiming that they were enacting that Real one. And, keep in mind, these were Catholics killing other Catholics, or Christians killing other Christians. Sometimes they were major wars over religious issues (e.g., the 13th century Albigensian Crusade), sometimes executions and persecutions of heretical sects (e.g., various forms of Gnosticism), and sometimes they were political in nature. Christian troops sacked both Constantinople and Rome, after all.

Neither the political nor religious hierarchies were actually all that stable or peaceful. There were constantly heretical sects, internal conflicts—if the Catholic hierarchy created peace and order, why did the Pope have an army that was used against other Catholics?

The fantasy that there is no conflict in a rigid hierarchical structure is just that—a fantasy.

So, why do people simultaneously claim and deny that they have privilege? I think for similar reasons that people claim that there were long periods in history with no conflict. They need to believe (and claim) that hierarchy provides stability in order to feel better about their status and authoritarian politics. It’s about feelings.

The notion of a hierarchy of privilege makes people really comfortable (“I’m owed this”) and uncomfortable (because it isn’t something they did other than be born). They want to believe that they have privilege because they have earned it. But, oddly enough, they earned it by being born to their family. When they’re arguing for things to which they feel entitled because of privilege, then privilege is a useful concept, and they invoke it. But, when others point out that they might have privilege because of to whom they were born, they feel that they’re being accused of never having to work at all, and so they get mad.

But notice that I’m not saying that authoritarianism is far left, far right, or both. In fact, it’s the whole problem of authoritarianism that should make people stop trying to make politics a binary or continuum. At the very least, there are two axes—one about degree of governmental support for a social safety net (if we’re talking about domestic policy), and another one for commitment to authoritarianism. To what extent do we think people who disagree with us should be treated as we want to be treated. And it’s that second axis that is predictor of democracy ending.

Arminianism, Antinomianism, and American Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seemed to me both antinomian and Arminian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recurrent terms in my posts

Authoritarianism. There’s a lot of scholarly debate about how to define authoritarianism, and it has to do with some scholars wanting to have a definition that includes ideology, epistemology, government, psychology, even parenting sometimes. And so there are different definitions because people are trying to do different things with those definition—nothing wrong with that. For purposes of thinking about rhetoric and train wrecks, I have found the most productive way to think about authoritarianism is as in-group favoritism on steroids, coupled with a sense that stability is the ideal and that only rigid hierarchies of dominance/submission provide stability.

Briefly, I use the term “authoritarians” for people who believe that societies should be controlled by people at the top of a pyramidal hierarchy (with, obviously, the person or the group at the top the purest in-group), with power and accountability flowing down. That is, people are only accountable to people above them in the hierarchy, and not to anyone below. An authoritarian system doesn’t imagine “justice” as something that should be applied to everyone the same way, nor that “fairness” is treating everyone equally. “Justice” is a system in which everyone “gets what they deserve,” meaning in-group members get more, and out-groups get less (if anything).

Therefore, people at different places in the hierarchy are treated differently. It’s kiss-up and kick-down. Subordinates are responsible for managing the feelings of superiors. Thus, “self-control” is equated with dominating those below; so, paradoxically, people at the top of the hierarchy are allowed to throw temper tantrums (that is, lose control) as long as the tantrums are directed downwards. Authoritarian systems put a lot of emphasis on control through fear.

Authoritarianism constrains public deliberation in several ways. Only in-group members are allowed to participate in deliberation, and even then only those toward the top. They might deliberate with each other in order to make decisions that are announced to those below them, who can only deliberate with others of a similar level about how to enact the dicta; they then tell those below what to do. In addition, authoritarianism tends to presume that there is an obviously correct answer to every problem; dissent and diversity of perspective/opinion are seen as destabilizing, as creating fractures in the stable hierarchy. Authoritarians therefore almost always emphasize the objective of education as instilling obedience, and that means they believe that education should never involve any criticism of the in-group (including facts about past in-group failures or unethical behavior). Authoritarians tend to think in binaries, and an important binary is shame v. honor. Criticism is always shame, and shame undermines obedience, so the “higher Truth” is always a version of events favorable to the in-group.

Authoritarianism isn’t particular to politics (cults are authoritarian), or necessarily connected to one specific policy agenda.

And here we have a moment of Trish Crank Theory time. I’ve read all sorts of authoritarians–from Alkibiades to the Weathermen (that’s alphabetical, rather than historical)–and what’s consistent is that they reason deductively from major premises about groups. That’s interesting.

Demagoguery. In Demagoguery and Democracy and Rhetoric and Demagoguery I define demagoguery as “discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric by framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and the means by which (not whether) the out-group should be scapegoated for the current problems of the in-group. Public disagreement largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the in-group, what signifies out-group membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the in-group); need (the terrible things the out-group is doing to us, and/or their very presence); and what level of punishment to enact against the out-group (ranging from the restriction of the out-group’s rights to the extermination of the out-group).”

Escape from freedom. Erich Fromm argued that freedom requires choice and responsibility, and inherently means making mistakes. For many people, that level of freedom (the freedom to) is terrifying, and so they escape from the responsibilities of freedom by becoming part of a kiss-up/kick-down hierarchy. They want a system in which they’re told what to do, so that they’re never responsible for bad outcomes. Being part of that hierarchy means they get the pleasure of ordering others around, while escaping the anxiety that comes from making decisions, and the accountability for any outcome.

In-group favoritism. We have a tendency to favor an in-group in various ways, most of which mean holding the in-group (and especially in-group leaders) to lower standards than out-groups (especially the Out-group) while claiming the moral highground. Because we believe that the in-group is essentially good, then we find ways to justify/rationalize anything in-group members do. For instance, we attribute good motives to in-group members and bad motives to out-group members for exactly the same behaviors. We explain the same behaviors differently:

people explain away good behavior on the part of the out-group and bad behavior on the part of the in-group

In-group favoritism always involve various kinds of bad math. An in-group political figure (Chester) might be caught having kicked twenty puppies, and an out-group political figure (Hubert) might be caught having kicked one puppy. Pro-Chester media and Chester’s supporter will treat Hubert’s one puppy-kicking incident as worse than Chester’s (despite the numerical difference) or use it to deflect discussing Chester’s puppy kicking. The one incident erases the twenty.

Similarly, one example of bad behavior on the part of an out-group member is proof about the essence of the out-group, who they really are, but the same is not true of in-group members. The bad behavior or bad in-group member is an exception (or not really in-group).

That’s bad math. One is not the same as twenty.

In-group/out-group. The “in-group” is a group we’re in (not necessarily the group in power). We have a lot of in-groups, some of which are tremendously important to our sense of self (e.g., Christian, American) and some that only intermittently become salient (e.g., rhetoric scholars, Austin resident). There are groups that are not in-group, but not particularly important to our identity (I tend to refer to them as non in-groups), but there are groups against whom we identify ourselves. That opposition is crucial to our sense of what it means to be “American” or “Christian.” It’s almost as though we couldn’t have a sense of what it means to be “American” unless we had the concept of “foreigner” (out-group). We take pride in who we are because we are not Them. Sometimes there is an Out-group (an Other) who is, more or less, the evil twin of our in-group. For many evangelicals Christians, Muslims are the Other; for much of Christianity, it was Jews. That Other often has little or nothing to do with how members of that group actually are. Often, the Other is a hobgoblin—an imagined and non-falsifiable stereotype.

Just World Fallacy (aka “just world model”). The just world fallacy/model assumes and asserts that people get what they deserve, and people deserve what they get. If bad things happen to a person, they did something that caused it to happen. This cognitive bias is tremendously comforting and non-falsifiable. It’s also always ableist and victim blaming.

Motivism/motivistic (aka “appeal to motive fallacy”). We’re engaged in motivism when we refuse to engage a reasonable argument on the grounds that the person making the argument has bad motives. People only do this with opposition arguments (I don’t think I’ve ever run across a person dismissing an in-group argument on the grounds that the person making it has bad motives). It’s important to note that this is a fallacy when the interlocutor whom we’re dismissing has made a reasonable argument. I often give the advice that you don’t have to engage with someone whose position on the issue is non-falsifiable, who is not engaged in good faith argumentation. You can if you like rattling chains or poking fire ants’ nests, but it’s generally a waste of time. This fallacy is sometimes categorized as a kind of ad hominem (a fallacy of relevance).

So, for instance, if you’ve rejected everything I’ve said in this post on the basis that I’m an out-group member, then your position is fallacious. If I’m wrong, show I’m wrong through reasonable argument instead of flicking this away like something that scares you too much to engage.

PFunk fallacy. This is sort of unfair to PFunk, but I like the quote: “If you free your mind, your ass will follow.” People often seem to assume that things have gone wrong because we didn’t approach with the right theory. If we get our theory (or beliefs) right, then good actions will necessarily follow, and so they spend a lot of time trying to get everyone to agree on the principles. (It’s like a bad Platonic dialogue.) There’s nothing wrong with trying to make sure a group is oriented toward the same goals, at least in the abstract—to be able to answer the question, “What the hell are we trying to do here?” And it’s useful to try to figure out what caused a problem that we’re trying to solve. The problematic hidden assumption is that there is such a thing as getting the theory right (there is One Right Theory). There is one real cause for any problem (what’s usefully called “a monocausal narrative”). Such a claim is often in service of denying legitimate disagreement by saying that we can derive from the One Right Theory (or the One Right Narrative) the One Right Policy.

There was a time when people seemed to describe every bad incident as “a perfect storm,” and I realize that got tedious, perhaps because it’s almost always true that the big failures and disasters are multicausal. Were I Queen of the Universe, you couldn’t graduate from high school without understanding the concept of “necessary but not sufficient.” Widespread and deep hostility to Jews was necessary for the Holocaust but not sufficient. As Ian Kershaw said, “No Hitler, no Holocaust.” But, were it not for that deep and wide hostility, Hitler wouldn’t have risen to power.

I’m making two points. First, the solution to our problems is not to get everyone to agree on The One Right Theory—univocality can itself be a problem, and it’s unlikely that there is One Right Theory that gets it all exactly right. Second, what is probably more useful to talk about is what are the several necessary but not sufficient conditions or factors that led to this problem. Such a way of approaching problems implies that there is also a variety of possible policy responses to any situation—not that all are equally good, but that deductively determining The Right Policy from The Right Theory is both fallacious and harmful.

Politicide. The sociologist Michael Mann has an extraordinary, albeit depressing, book about mass killing (that is, mass killing based on group identity). One part of his argument is that, unhappily, people who are trying to create a new nation-state with an ethos choose to equate the national ethos with an ethnos. And that necessarily means purifying the new state of the people not in that ethnos. The non in-groups.

So, as both Kenneth Burke (in “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”) and the Wizard of Oz (in Wicked) point out, one very straightforward way of unifying a disparate group is to find a common enemy.[1] Mann notes that it isn’t always an ethnic group. Mass killing might happen to a religious minority (religicide, as in the Spanish Inquisition), an economic or social class (classicide, Khmer Rouge in Cambodia), or political group, politicide (mass killing of people whose politics present a threat, as in Argentina and Chile).

Power of belieeeeeving. This is the one that makes people way mad at me when I mention it. It’s a kind of magical thinking, and maybe a subset of the just world model. It’s also complicated because there’s a bit of truth to it (the more that a person thinks in binaries, the more truth there seems to be). It’s promoted in a lot of dodgy self-help rhetoric (not all self-help rhetoric is dodgy–I’ve found a lot of it tremendously helpful), scams, heartless policies. It says that you can succeed at anything if you just belieeeeeeve enough.

The sensible version is that you should adopt policies you believe can work–whether it’s about personal change, military action, policies–but having faith doesn’t exempt you from taking practical action to achieve your ends: “Trust in God but keep your powder dry.”

There’s a kind of narcissism in thinking that God will rearrange the world because of your faith, as though the people opposing you don’t also have faith. I’m not against praying (I do it every day), but history shows that radical and fanatical faith is not a guarantee of success. Hitler was wrong when he said, “Where there’s a will there’s a ferry.” He was wrong to think that sheer will could enable the soldiers to withstand Russian winters.

Social Dominance Orientation. This is a way of describing the preference that some people have for hierarchical systems. People with a social dominance orientation tend to be Social Darwinists (which is neither Darwinian nor social).

[1] I’d like to believe that this is not the first time that Kenneth Burke and a musical have been cited together.

Consumerism and Democracy

Marjorie Taylor Greene saying she voted for a bill she neither read nor understood

At various moments in my career, I was the Director of the first-year composition program, and so dealt with grade complaints. My sense was that about 1/3 of the complaints were misunderstandings; in about 1/3 the instructor had really screwed up. For both of those, I was grateful that a student (or several) had complained, since it was an issue that needed to be resolved at the institutional level.

But the other third was … something. There were all sorts of odd things. But MTG’s defense of her failure to do her job competently reminds me of something I ran across when responding to some students in that other third. More than once, I found myself talking to a student who had not read the assignment sheet (let’s forget reading the syllabus) or paid attention in class, and who therefore failed to meet the assignment criteria. They were complaining to me because they sincerely believed that their not having met the assignment criteria was the fault of the teacher. They didn’t dispute that the information was in writing that they had been given and told to read, nor that other students understood the assignment just fine. In other words, there was never any claim that the information (about due dates, grading criteria, and so on) hadn’t been communicated. They admitted that they hadn’t read/listened. But, their argument was that the instructor was at fault for the student having ignored the information they’d been given, because the instructor’s rhetoric wasn’t good enough.

That narrative of causality–the student failed to meet the criteria of the assignment because the teacher/rhetor wasn’t persuasive enough–is an instance of the transmission model of communication (a good rhetor transmits the message effectively to a passive recipient). It’s also a consumerist model of education: students are consumers, passively waiting to be sold a product. The teacher’s job is to sell the product effectively.

But students aren’t consumers, and teachers aren’t selling a product. You can talk and think about education this way, but that doesn’t make it good.

I used to use this analogy with my students. Imagine that you’re a server in a restaurant, and your boss says, “Those people over there need water.” And you aren’t clear what table your boss means. If, later, your boss asked whether you’d given that table water, and you said that you weren’t sure what table, so you didn’t do anything, what do you think would happen? And they said, “I’d get fired.”

Learning something–anything–doesn’t mean being a passive container into which information is poured; it’s an action that requires agency.

This way of thinking is often applied to politics, both the consumerist model of relationships and the transmission model of communication.[1] It’s a train wreck way of thinking about communication of any sort, but especially politics.

The consumerist model of going to a restaurant does apply to the actual customers—the consumers of what the restaurant offers. They can choose to come back to that restaurant or not on the basis of whether that restaurant gives them what they want. If you choose not to buy a car because the advertising doesn’t really speak to you, or you choose to buy a car because you love the rhetoric about that car, well, you do you. You can buy (consume) whatever car you choose on whatever bases you choose.

Currently, the dominant model for thinking about politics is that voters are consumers. This is a recent model, from the mid twentieth century, as far as I can tell. [2] The argument is that if voters like the “message” a party portrays, then they should vote for that party. It’s up to the party and political figures to provide an appealing product (policies, rhetoric). Voters are passively sitting at the table waiting to be sold a product. Like the student who doesn’t feel obligated to read the syllabus or assignment sheet, voters aren’t seen as responsible for educating themselves about the issues.

In a democracy, voters aren’t sitting at a table wanting to be given the most pleasing product in the most timely manner.

Voters are the servers.

[1] One of my many crank theories is that the transmission model of communication is necessarily tied to consumerist models of interactions, but I’m not sure why that is the case.
[2] Prior to that, voters were described as needing to be able to deliberate—you can see that in The Federalist Papers, for instance. The reasoning behind the electoral college, and indirect election of Senators, was that voters didn’t have enough information to deliberate about the competence of people they didn’t know.)

Make politics about policies, not high stakes tug-of-war

2009 Irish tug of war team — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tug_of_war#/media/File:Irish_600kg_euro_chap_2009_(cropped).JPG

Pro-GOP media and supporters have long committed themselves to a view of politics as a zero-sum battle between the fantasy of an “Us” and a hobgoblin of “Them.” This rhetorical strategy goes at least as far back as McCarthyism, but Limbaugh was relentlessly attached to it, as is Fox News. They aren’t alone in this (I first became familiar with this way of thinking about politics when arguing with Stalinists, Libertarians, and pro-PETA folks many, many years ago). It’s working better for the GOP than it is for critics of the GOP, or Dems, or various groups for various reasons.

1) Demagoguery posits an Us (Good Persons) and a Them (Bad People With Bad Motives), and says that the correct course of action is obvious to every and any Good Person. While there are rhetors all over the political spectrum (it’s a spectrum, not a binary or continuum) who appeal to the false Us v. Them, the most anti-democratic and dangerous demagoguery relies on there being a third group—one that is unhuman (associated with terms and metaphors of animals or diseases)—and one of the things that characterizes Them is that They don’t recognize the danger of the animalistic group.

For Nazis, Romas and Jews were the dehumanized group, and liberals and socialists were the Them that didn’t recognize the danger. For proslavery rhetors, enslaved people and freed African Americans were the dehumanized group, and abolitionists and critics of slavery were the Them that didn’t recognize the danger. PETA used to dehumanize farmers and ranchers, and the Them was people who continued to buy animal products.[1]

Regardless of who does it–whether in- or out-group–, we need to object when rhetors dehumanize humans.

2) The media has long promoted a (false, incoherent, but easy and profitable) framing of policy questions as a horse race or tug-of-war between two groups. The “continuum” model is just as inaccurate, and just as incoherent. When I point out that it’s false, I’m told, “But everyone uses it.” That’s a great example of the “bandwagon” fallacy. “Everyone” used the substance v. essence distinction for hundreds of years. “Everyone” bled people to cure diseases for over a thousand years.

Our world is not actually two groups; our world is a world of people with different values, needs, and policy agenda. Media treating policy disagreements as a fight between two groups is a self-fulfilling description insofar as it teaches people to treat policy options as signals of in-group commitment rather than …well…policy options.

A person might be genuinely committed to reducing crime in an area. That commitment doesn’t necessarily mean they should be opposed to or in favor of more reliance on “Own Recognizance” rather than bail, or decriminalizing various activities, increasing infrastructure expenditure in that area, increasing punishment, privatizing prisons, applying the death penalty more often. The relationship between and among those policies is complicated in all sorts of ways, and data as to which policy strategy is most likely reduce crime is also complicated. Each of those topics is a policy issue that is complicated, nuanced, and uncertain, and something that should be argued as a complicated, nuanced, and uncertain issue and not a tug-of-war between good and evil.

Not everyone who believes that abortion should be criminalized also believes that our death penalty system is just, for instance. Despite how many media portray issues, neither of the major parties has a consistent policy agenda from one year to the next—keep in mind that as recently as the overturning of Roe v. Wade major figures in the GOP said there would not be a federal ban on abortion. They were not speaking for every member of their party, as was immediately made clear. Republicans disagree with each other about whether bi-partisanship is a virtue, gay rights, tariffs. Dems disagree with each other about universal health care, the death penalty, how to respond to climate change. As they should.

Talking about politics in terms of a contest between two groups means we don’t argue policies. Policies matter.

Most important, a person persuaded that the death penalty should be applied more often, but who believes that people who disagree have a legitimate point of view—a pluralist (which is different from a relativist)—enhances democracy, whereas a person who believes that every and anyone who disagrees with them is spit from the bowels of Satan is an authoritarian, regardless of whether they’re pro- or anti-death penalty.

Democracy depends upon values like pluralism, fairness, equality before the law. Media needs to talk about extremism in regard to those values, not one’s stance on a policy. The continuum model falsely conflates the two–a person who believes in universal health care is not more “extreme” in terms of their commitment to democracy than someone who believes that anyone who wants a change to our system is a dangerous radical who should be silenced, if not deported. The media would call that latter person a centrist. They aren’t.

Treating politics as a conflict between identities mobilizes an audience, and is therefore more profitable, but it is, at least, proto-demagogic, and it inhibits (and often prohibits) reasonable deliberations about our complicated policy options.

(And, just to be clear, so does a “let’s all just get along” way of approaching politics—if we think that “civility” is being nice to each other, and refraining from saying anything that hurts the feelings of anyone else, then we’re still avoiding the hard work of reasonably, and passionately, arguing about policy.)

So, if we want less demagoguery, we need to abandon a demagogic way of talking about politics. Stop talking about two sides. Talk about policies.

3) Mean girl rhetoric. A junior high mean girl (Regina) who wants to be friends with Jane is likely to do it in three steps. First, she tells Jane that Sally says terrible things about Jane. She’ll pick things about which Jane is at least a little insecure. “Jane keeps making fun of your acne.” “Jane says you’re fat.” Then she’ll badmouth Sally, thereby creating a bond between herself and Jane—they are unified against the common enemy (Sally). Sally may or may not have said those things—Regina might have entirely lied, taken something out of context, or even been the one to say the crappy things to Sally. Regina will continue to strengthen the bond with Jane by continually telling her about crap Sally is supposed to have said. Regina thereby creates resentment against Sally—“who is she to say I’m fat?”

The insecurity is necessary for the bonding, so, oddly enough, it’s Mean Girl who has to keep making Jane insecure by repeating what Sally may or may not have said. She has to keep fuelling that resentment.

If you pay attention to demagogic media, they spend a lot of time talking about the terrible things They say about Us. Sometimes someone in the out-group did say it, but often it’s a misrepresentation. Most often it’s cherry-picking. We tend to see the in-group as heterogeneous, but out-groups as homogeneous. So, while We are all individuals, any member of the out-group can stand for all of Them. That means demagogic media can find some minor out-group figure and use it to foment resentment against the out-group in general.

Find the best opposition arguments on policy issues before dismissing the Other as blazing idiots. Don’t rely on entirely in-group sources.

4) Demagogic media holds the in- and out-group to different standards. In fact, it holds the in-group to no standards at all other than fanatical commitment to the in-group.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine that we’re in a world that is polarized between Chesterians and Hubertians, and we’re Hubertians. Hubertian media finds some Assistant to the Assistant Dog Catcher in North Northwest Small Town who has said something terrible about Hubertians, perhaps called for violence against us. If our media is going to use that as proof that Hubertians are out to exterminate us, then if there is any Hubertian who has ever called for exterminating Chesterians, we are (if we have a reasonable argument), then we have to admit that we are out toe exterminate Chesterians.

If one what one member of the non in-group can be used to characterize what everyone other than the in-group says—if that’s a reasonable way to think about political discourse—then it’s reasonable for Them to characterize Us on the basis of what any in-group member says, no matter how marginalized.

If we don’t hold the in- and out-group to the same standards, then our position is unreasonable. We’re also rejecting Jesus, but that doesn’t generally matter to followers of demagogic media.

Hold in- and out-group media, rhetors, and political figures to the same standards: of argument, ethics, legality, accountability. If you won’t, then you’re an authoritarian.

Pro-GOP media isn’t the only media doing these things. (I’ve seen exactly this rhetoric in regard to raw food for dogs.) But if someone replies to this post by telling me that “Both Sides Are Bad,” I will point out that they have completely misread my argument. They are applying the false model of two sides that enables and fuels demagoguery. Saying “both sides are bad” is almost always in service of deflecting criticism of in-group demagoguery and is thereby participating in demagoguery.

If you don’t like demagoguery, stop engaging in it. That means stop talking about our political situation as a tug-of-war between two sides. Argue policies, acknowledge diversity and complexity, and seek out the smartest opposition arguments.

[1] There are various anti-GOP rhetors whom I cannot watch now that I’ve retired (studying demagoguery is my job, not something I do for fun), and I used them in classes as examples of demagoguery, but even I will admit that they don’t openly dehumanize some group the way that many pro-GOP rhetors dehumanize immigrants. They irrationalize “conservatives” and engage in a lot of motivism, but don’t equate “conservatives” with animals, viruses, and so on to the same extent. I’ve been told that dehumanizing metaphors don’t play as well with people who self-identify as “conservative,”and that’s why such rhetors avoid them, but I don’t know.