Tag: demagoguery

Invitation to the Bores (Hitler’s “Table Talk”–RSA talk)

Hitler looking at a map with generals

To the extent that scholars in rhetoric are interested in Hitler (and that isn’t much) the attention is paid to his big rallies and major speeches, but, for purposes of thinking about our current problems with political deliberation, his smaller rhetorical situations are more instructive, specifically, his deliberations with his immediate circle.

The very effective Nazi propaganda machine promoted the “Hitler Myth:” that he (and he alone) had the sincerity, will, stamina, and judgment to lead Germany to the greatness it once had and was entitled to have again (Kershaw, Hitler Myth). His superior judgment enabled him to have brilliant insights—better than supposed “experts”—on topics ranging from interior design to economics. He was particularly prone to showing off this “universal genius” at meals, during which he delivered monologues for the benefit of his inner circle, his most devoted followers—the people most deeply committed to him, and most committed to promoting the myth of him as a universal genius. The paradox I want to pursue in this talk is that those were the people who, because of so much exposure to his opinions and processes of judgment, must have known that he wasn’t a universal genius at all. Yet, they seem to have believed and not believed in his perfect judgment.

Albert Speer, who maintained in his mendacious post-war writings that he avoided the mealtime monologues, describes an illustrative moment, when Hitler lied to his dining companions about having chosen all the marble personally for various buildings. Speer comments:”Hadn’t he noticed that I was sitting at an adjoining table? What so took me aback was and is the fact that he was still clutching at glory in such ridiculously trivial questions” (Spandau 118).

Speer says, “How intense and uncontrollable this man’s desire to show off must have been!” (Spandau 119). It wasn’t just Speer who must have noticed that quality. He mentions that “Hitler quite often presented as the fruit of his own reflections” information that Speer knew had been given him by other experts, and that all of the inner circle knew that Hitler lied when he claimed to read all of a treatise, since he also bragged about only reading the ends of books.

Speer, describing an evening that devolved into Hitler’s “lengthy expatiations on the role of the individual in history” (Spandau 58), says that Hitler’s “relationship to history was sheer romanticism and centered around the concept of the hero. He might well mention Napoleon or Old Shatterhand in one sentence” (Spandau 59). ‘Old Shatterhand’ was the hero of the German author Karl May’s Western novels, which Hitler loved, and which informed Hitler’s understanding of American history and culture (although May hadn’t been to the US prior to writing most of the Shatterhand series). Speer says that “Hitler would rely on Karl May as proof for everything imaginable” including what constitutes the ideal company commander (in the form of May’s fictional Winnetou, Spandau 347; see also Kershaw, Hitler 7, Hubris 15, ). Someone whose assessment of a major foe is grounded in popular novels is hardly a genius, let alone a universal one.

Many of Hitler’s lunch and dinner monologues were later published as a book called Hitler’s Table Talk (an obvious reference to The Table Talk of Martin Luther), or, more accurately, some version of those monologues was. The history of their publication is fraught, and there are reasons to doubt many of the passages (especially regarding religion). There is also reason to think that the published version is more coherent than what listening to them was actually like. Speer says of the published version that it “more or less filtered [Hitler’s] torrent of speech and subsequently smoothed and styled it” (Spandau 345). The book, Speer says, reduced Hitler’s repetition, “the slow, painful process of gestation which could be felt in the way phrases were formed [….] Vivid monologues have been produced out of agonizing long-windedness” (Spandau 346). It’s hard to imagine that the actual talk would have been even more long-winded and incoherent, since reading Hitler’s Table Talk is like reading the transcript of what a narcissistic sophomore in college who thinks he has smoked good weed would say to a room of people who have passed out long ago or are already getting at it on the bunk bed above. It’s hard to read them and not come to the conclusion that Hitler is a bloviating, self-deluded, thin-skinned blowhard.

It’s equally hard to believe that the people at the tables with him didn’t come to that conclusion as well.

There are similar problems with the transcripts of Hitler’s meetings with his generals (Hitler and His Generals). While the post-war narrative promoted by many of Hitler’s generals (that he continually got in their way, that they could have won the war if left to make their own decisions, that they didn’t know about the serial genocides, and that they continually resisted him, and so on) was simply untrue, the deliberations do show a leader not very good at deliberating. Like the meal-time monologues, they have passages of Hitler browbeating, rambling, and being more concerned with being right than with finding the right course of action. As his generals are pressuring him to make a decision, he might suddenly veer off into a windy digression about medals, the racial characteristics of troops, how right he was in some previous disagreement with generals, why his experience as a private means he understands strategy better than any general.

My point is that the people exposed to this blathering and bullshitting would have known Hitler was not a stable genius with universally valid insight. Yet they were the ones who most enabled him and enabled the Hitler myth. Why support him, why support the lie that Germans should trust him? What persuaded them to support him publicly? And the answer is: the way that the power relations inherent to charismatic leadership can inhibit not only deliberation, but doubt of any kind.

Charismatic authority is most famously described by Max Weber, who described it as one of three ways that a ruler can be perceived as legitimate. Charismatic authority comes from the beliefs of the followers, “how followers see things” (Economy and Society page 374). In the relationship of charismatic authority, “supernatural, superhuman, or at least exceptional powers or properties are attributed to the individual” (374). Ian Kershaw summarizes how charismatic authority relies on continually good outcomes for the followers: the power of the charismatic leader is “sustained by great deeds, resounding successes, and notable achievements, which provide the repeated ‘proof’ of the leader’s ‘calling’” (Hitler Myth 9). The charismatic leader must continually surprise his followers with his “universal genius”—that’s why Hitler would grasp at petty successes (like claiming to have picked the marble personally), and refuse to admit errors.

The question is why those obvious moves would work.

And they would work partially because they had to work. The power of the charismatic leader comes from self-confidence, which is necessary for the risk-taking. Thus, the dynamic of charismatic—the need for fawning followers, the need to impress those followers, the need for self-confidence—mean that the charismatic leader him (or her) self has to be the first and most fooled about their own supernatural abilities. And, it’s hard to maintain that level of self-delusion if the people immediately surrounding the leader are even dubious, let alone critical, of the leader. Thus, dissent is treated as disloyalty, and the consequence is that the leader has to be surrounded by people who are, or who believe themselves to be, not as insightful and charismatic.

Oddly enough, it was Speer (who was not and never had been as good at his job as his post-war autohagiographies would claim) who identified the problem with Hitler’s regime: that it put and kept in place people who were weak, corrupt, and just not very good (“inferior” is the term Speer used). Hitler’s “joy” at hearing “news which suited his course of action” and “anger at news which crossed him” (Overy Interrogations 226) meant that people didn’t give him the information, insights, and suggestions that would have led to better decisions (an important theme in Kershaw’s Fateful Choices). Hitler’s emphasis on loyalty, his need to be a universal genius, his faith in himself—all those characteristics meant that he didn’t want people around him who were smarter than he, better informed, or threatening to his ego in any way. As Speer said, Hitler’s “methods of necessity led to weak collaborators for his arbitrary method of choice brought no men with proper qualifications to the right positions” and the “inferiority” of his subordinates ensured that their subordinates would also be “inferior” (Overy 226). Speer draws the conclusion that “A system which makes the selection of the leading personalities dependent solely on the judgment, arbitrary discretion, and whims of the dictators inevitably leads to such results” (Overy 226). And that is the kind of system encouraged by the model of charismatic leadership.

Charismatic leadership, despite serious problems, remains the dominant model of leadership, especially in the popular culture of self-help books and management seminars. Americans’ persistent fascination with charismatic leadership is important for scholars of rhetoric because charismatic leadership is a theory of rhetoric and deliberation. Or, more accurately, it’s a theory of rhetoric that is anti-deliberation. The fantasy of charismatic leadership is that there are people whose ability to lead (that is, both make decisions and motivate others to go along with those decisions [deliberate and persuade]) is not discipline- or field-specific. It’s universal. People with field- or discipline-specific expertise inform these leaders who are then able to discern the correct course of action because they have a kind of judgment—extraordinary insight, vision, they’re great judges of people—that makes their assessment better than anyone else’s. This is an incipiently authoritarian model of power, in that power comes from the supposedly superior judgment of the leader. For a leader to admit error, uncertainty, or ignorance, then, is to reduce their power. Dissent, disagreement, and deliberation have problematic places in systems reliant on charismatic leadership, especially the more that the leader believes in their own charismatic leadership—they come to believe the myths about themselves (see especially Kershaw Hitler Myth 264)

Scholars in leadership have tried to manage the problem of leaders who lead organizations, corporations, and countries right off a cliff (sometimes called “the Hitler Problem,” Tourish and Pinnington 149). by distinguishing between good and bad charismatic leadership on the grounds of outcome and/or the leader’s intention. Both criteria lead one into the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy and survivorship bias.

If good charismatic leaders are ones that get good outcomes, then Hitler was a good leader until, at the earliest December of 1941; some Germans began to lose faith in November of 1943, with the encirclement at Stalingrad; and US intelligence reports said that 25% of Germans still believed in Hitler in 1945, as Allied troops were crashing into Germany (Kershaw The End, Gellately Backing Hitler, Evans The Third Reich at War). There is the same problem with assessing leaders of corporations in terms of outcomes–what if they are getting good outcomes through processes that guarantee eventual disaster? Ken Lay of Enron, Eckhard Pfeiffer of Compaq, Adam Neumann of WeWork, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, Travis Kalanick of Uber—they were all celebrated as excellent examples of transformational leaders until the moment they weren’t. Until news broke about fraud, dodgy accounting, misleading claims, cultures of bullying and harassment, they were, after all, getting good outcomes–being lauded in the press, successful at finding backers, and effectively silencing dissenters (through intimidation, NDA, nuisance suits). Their methods of leading didn’t change; the outcomes did because the methods became public.

In effect, then, “good” charismatic leadership isn’t really a different management style from “bad” charismatic leadership as long as we measure by outcomes. It’s just leadership with accurate press.

There’s a similar problem with trying to distinguish good from bad charismatic leadership on the grounds of intent—if there is one thing about which people who met Hitler agreed, it was that he sincerely believed that what he was doing was right. Intending to do good, and doing good aren’t the same thing, and believing that one is on the side of good can contribute to exploitative and dishonest practices. The problem with much scholarship on charismatic leadership is that there is a “no true Scotsman” quality about it (leaders who are exposed as exploitative were never really charismatic leaders) as well as survivorship bias (only looking at leaders who seem to be getting good outcomes).

So, why am I talking to scholars of rhetoric about a leadership model backed by scholarship that is largely “no true Scotsman” and survivorship bias? Because, the rhetoric and ideology of charismatic leadership is probably second only to the just world model (in its most powerful form—prosperity gospel) in terms of frames from within which Americans imagine the possibilities, responsibilities, and stases of political discourse. Scholars who care about rhetoric as a critical project, as something that could help people deliberate better, need to understand the extent to which the rhetoric about charismatic leadership pathologizes (and sometimes feminizes) what scholars of deliberation promote as useful and effective deliberation.

Hitler’s rhetoric worked because the people in his inner circle made sure it worked, because he had a wickedly effective propaganda machine that continually presented him as someone who, as Rush Limbaugh said about Trump, “has excellent instincts,” despite all the evidence to the contrary. A large number of Americans think deliberation is unnecessary because the correct course of action (which just happens to benefit them or fulfill their political agenda) is obvious, and anyone who disagrees with them is villainous or the dupe of villainous entities (a way of thinking about politics not restricted to one position). A concerningly large number of Americans believe that the right course of action is to put in positions of power decisive people who get the real people, will refuse to compromise, and are willing to violate any norms of discourse, fairness, process, accountability, precedence, even legality in order to enact the policy every reasonable person knows is right. We are in a world in which “disruptive” is an end in and of itself.

In other words, a large number of people, all over the political spectrum, don’t want a democracy because they don’t want inclusive deliberation, compromise, negotiation, and accountability. They want their way, and they want violence if they can’t get it. Rhetoric is, at its best, the discipline of democratizing deliberation, the alternative to violence. The rhetoric of charismatic leadership is anti-deliberation; its cultural dominance explains a lot, I’m arguing, about our current culture of demagoguery. American worshipping (and I use that word deliberately) of charismatic leadership explains many otherwise odd things about our current political situation.

Speer’s insight was that charismatic leadership is always at least a little at odds with an administration of hiring the best people. The more that we value charismatic leadership as the best kind of leadership, the more that we sideline inclusive deliberation and accountability as political goods.

On being nice to Trump supporters

people arguing
From the cover of Wayne Booth’s _Modern Dogma-

Cicero, in De Inventione, said that, if you are presenting an argument with which your audience already agrees, you land your thesis in the introduction. If you are arguing for something your audience disagrees, you delay your thesis. Oddly enough, as I’ve taught a lot of workshops across the disciplines for scholarly writing, I’ve found that Cicero is right. When people are making an argument their audience doesn’t want to hear, they delay their thesis, even in scholarly arguments (they have a partition instead, or sometimes a false thesis).

I have always required that my students write to a reasonable and informed opposition, and that means delaying their thesis, delaying their claims till after they’ve given evidence, beginning by fairly representing the opposition, getting evidence from sources their opposition would consider reliable, giving a lot of evidence, and explaining it well. I don’t have those requirements because I think this is what all teachers should teach–we shouldn’t. Since student writing requires announcing a thesis, giving minimal explanation, starting paragraphs with main claims, and various other non-persuasive strategies, it is responsible for people teaching the genre of college writing to teach students how to do that. I’m describing that pedagogy because I want it clear that I understand the value of reaching out to an audience and trying to find common ground.

The hope of rhetoric is that we can avoid violence by talking.

We use violence when we believe that we are in a world of existential threat, when we believe that the out-group is engaging in actions that might exterminate us. Sometimes that belief is an accurate assessment of our situation—Native Americans through the entire nineteenth century, Jews in Nazi Germany, free African Americans in the antebellum era, powerful African Americans in most of the nineteenth and twentieth century, Armenians in Turkey, and so on. Whether violence or non-violence is the most strategic choice for the people being threatened with extermination is an interesting argument. For me, whether third-party groups should use violence to stop the extermination is not an interesting argument. The answer is yes.

Sometimes the rhetoric of in-group extermination is simultaneously right and irrational. Antebellum white supremacists correctly understood that abolition would mean that their political monopoly would end were African Americans allowed to vote. Their sense of existential threat was the consequence of so closely and irrationally identifying with white supremacy–with believing that losing that system was essentially extermination. It wasn’t; it was just losing the monopoly of power. Racist demagoguery enabled them to persuade themselves that, because they were threatened with extermination, they were not held by any bounds of ethics, Christianity, legality.

That’s how demagoguery about existential threat works, and that’s what it’s intended to do. It’s designed to get people to overcome normal notions that we should follow the law, be fair to others, listen to others, treat children well, be compassionate, behave according to the ethical requirements of the religion we claim to follow, and so on by saying that, while we are totally ethical people, right now we have to set all that aside–because we’re faced with extermination. When, actually, we’re just faced with losing privilege. That connection is sheer demagoguery.

Republicans now correctly understand that allowing everyone to vote would end their political monopoly. White evangelicals correctly realized that they were losing the political power they had with Bush and Reagan. Coal miners are faced with a world that doesn’t need a lot of people to have that job. Racists, homophobes, and bigots of various kinds are being told they need to STFU. None of these groups are faced with being actually exterminated, but they are faced with their political power being lessened. And too many people in those groups listen to media that has taken the Two-Minute Hate to 24/7 demagoguery about existential threat.

Trump supporters have spent years drinking deep from the Flavor-Aid of the pro-GOP Outrage Machine, and so they believe a lot of things. They believe they’re the real victims here, that the media is against them, that white people are about to be persecuted, that there is no legitimate criticism of their position, that libruls have nothing but contempt for them and think they’re racist,that they are so threatened with extermination that anything done on their behalf is justified.

And here I have to stop and say that authoritarians (regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, and authoritarians are all over the place, but at any given time they tend to congregate on a few spots) misunderstand the concept of analogy. If, for instance, I say that supporters of Hitler reasoned the same way that squirrel haters are now reasoning, I am not saying that they are the same people (or dogs) in every way. I am not making an identity argument; I am making an argument about reasoning.

But, all over the political spectrum, people who are, actually, reasoning the way that people who supported the Nazis reasoned, are outraged at the comparison. It isn’t a comparison about identity; it’s a comparison about methods of reasoning.

We aren’t in a crisis of facts. Everyone has facts. We’re in a crisis of meta-cognition. We have a President who is severely cognitively impaired and obviously declining rapidly, fires people who disagree with him, can’t make a coherent argument for his policies, doesn’t argue from a consistent set of principles. Trump supporters can find ways to support him, but none of those ways fit all the other ways, let alone are ways that explain their opposition to out-group members. The debacle about ingesting disinfectants is just the latest.

We are at a point when the defenses of Trump are that he doesn’t have the skills to be President–he is thin-skinned (he was so obsessed with impeachment that he couldn’t pay attention to anything else), lies all the time (his height, weight, the number of people at his inauguration, whether he was talking to Birx), forces other people to lie on his behalf (such as Trump supporters lying that he was so obsessed with impeachment he couldn’t do anything else, although he also said that wasn’t true), refuses to listen to anyone (which his supporters defend by blaming the disloyal people), gives briefings when he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about (every briefing), and often says things that aren’t what he meant (every defense of Trump).

What I’m saying is that Trump supporters grant all the criticisms of Trump–their argument is that he’s incompetent.

But their defenses of him show something about them–that they can’t put forward a rational defense of him. I mean “rational” in the way that theorists of argumentation use the term. They can’t put forward an argument for Trump without violating most of rules of rational-critical argumentation. (And, I’d love to be proven wrong on this, so if any Trump supporters want to show me an argument for him that follows that rules, I’d love to see it.)

In other words, support for Trump isn’t about any kind of rational support for his enhancing democratic deliberation, nor even his trying to ground his political decisions and rhetoric in a coherent ideology, but a “fuck libruls, we’re winning” rabid tribal loyalty that eats its own premises.

Trump happens to be the most obvious example right now, but, again, all over the political spectrum are people who can’t defend their positions in a coherent and consistent way. They can defend their positions—but by giving evidence that relies on a major premise they don’t believe, engaging in kettle logic, or whaddaboutism.

If we’re paying attention to Cicero, then we should find common ground with them, be fair to their representation of their own argument, and delay our theses. And, as I said, I think that is great advice.

But it isn’t useful advice when we’re arguing with people who, as soon as they sense you are going to criticize them, refuse to listen because they think they know what you are going to argue, and they know they shouldn’t listen. People well-trained in what the rhetoric scholars Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrecths-Tyteca called “philosophical paired terms” just assume that, if you’re saying Trump isn’t the best, then you are part of the ruling elite–just as Stalinists used to say that Trotsky must be a capitalist, since he criticized Stalin; Nazis said that anyone who criticized Hitler must be a Jew; anyone who opposed McCarthy was a communist; slavers said that anyone who criticized slavery must want a race war. If you aren’t with us, you are against us.

In the 1830s, the major critics of slavery were predominantly Quakers and free African Americans who described slavery accurately, but that (accurate, it should be emphasized) description hurt the feelings of slavers.

Slavers and pro-slavery rhetors said that any criticism of slavery was an incitement to slave rebellion. Much like pro-Trump rhetoric that inadvertently gives away the game–their argument is that he doesn’t have the skillset to be a good President–this rhetoric gave away that slaves hated being slaves, and that the actual conditions of slavery were indefensible.

Many people tone-policed the anti-slavery rhetors (to the extent of having a gag rule in Congress, which is pretty amazing if you think about it). Oddly enough, some anti-slavery rhetors said that these (accurate) descriptions of individual slavers beating and raping slaves were inflammatory, and so some of them tried to write conciliatory anti-slavery tracts. They were accused of fomenting slave rebellion.

Individuals can be persuaded to change their ways on the basis of individual interactions, and there are a lot of anecdotes saying that can work. That’s how individuals leave cults, for instance. But conciliatory rhetoric to groups of people who are drinking deep from a propaganda well is a waste of time.

If you have a personal connection to someone who is a Trump supporter, then building on that personal connection might work, but it’s worth noting that the notion of being able to change people is why people stay in abusive relationships.

But, when we’re talking about relative strangers–the strange world of social media interlocutors–then I don’t think engaging the claims is as useful as pointing out the inability to follow the basic rules of rational-critical argumentation. When people are fanatically committed to an ideology that is internally incoherent and incapable of defended in rational-critical argumentation—and that’s where support of Trump is now—no level of “let’s be inviting to them” will persuade them. It’s worth the time to be precise in our criticisms of their position, but not because being precise will be more or less rhetorically effective. It’s worth the time to be right.

People in rhetoric need to understand that some people are engaged in good faith argumentation, and some aren’t, and we behave toward them differently.

It is impossible to defend Trump through rational-critical argumentation.

Shaming Trump supporters on that point is a good rhetorical strategy. Whether you do that through conciliation with individuals or through generally pointing it out is an audience choice.







Arguing with extremists

My first experience of the digitally connected public sphere was Usenet in the mid-80s, and since then I’ve spent a fair amount of time arguing with people, including arguing with extremists. Here are some notes I recently made about what I’ve learned by arguing on the underbelly of the internet.

Highly-educated people don’t necessarily argue better than people with a lot fewer degrees.

People reason associatively, grounded in the binary of some things are good, and some things are bad. If something is associated with a good thing, it can’t be bad in any way. (This explains why people, in response to substantive criticism of a public figure, say, “S/he couldn’t have done that because s/he did this completely unrelated good/bad thing.”

Some (many?) people think and reason in binaries and extremes (all or none, always or never) when they’re threatened (and some people are easily threatened). Not everyone does this, but the people who don’t are rare; I’ve seen it all over levels of education, ideological commitment, apparently calm demeanor, discipline. It’s about how people handle threats (hell, I’ve had people who self-identify as skeptics do this, and I’ve caught myself doing it).

Some people argue vehemently because they really want to be right, and that means that they want really good arguments on the other side, and they’re open to good opposition arguments; some people argue vehemently because they are swatting away any disconfirming information. Those two kinds of people can look really similar in terms of tone, vehemence, and even snarkiness. It takes time to figure out whether someone is open to argument.

On the other hand, people who claim to dislike argument and just want everyone to get along can be the most rigid thinkers and least open to new ideas.

Far too many people don’t know how to do research or assess sources, and much teaching on that subject makes this situation worse. Also, having access to good sources is expensive, and doing good research is time-consuming.

Instead of doing research on the basis of the quality of argument of sources, people tend to rely on gut instincts about trustworthiness, and that generally means confirmation bias and in-group favoritism. This, too, is all over the political and educational map.

People completely misunderstand the issue of “bias” and have an incoherent epistemology about perception—highly educated people might just be worse on this than people on the street. They’re certainly no better.

People use bad examples to stereotype out-group and good examples to stereotype in-group.

People confuse “giving an example” (a datum or quote) with proving a point.

People engage in motivism way too fucking much.

Extremists argue the same way, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, or even if it’s a political question at all.

People have bad stopping rules when it comes to research.

People pay too much attention to tone.

People tone police women and POC way too fucking much.

Charismatic leadership is a drug, and a lot of people are way too high on it.

People value loyalty to the in-group (and especially to the leader) more than truth because they redefine truth as loyalty.

No argument is too ridiculous if it enables you to say that you were right all along.

If a media source is in-group, makes their audience feel connected with them, makes their audience feel good about their beliefs and choices, then that audience will remain loyal no matter how many times that media source is just completely wrong.

Far too many people reason deductively from non-falsifiable premises, and think they’ve thereby proven a point to be true.

People are desperate to resolve cognitive dissonance, especially the dissonance created by being fanatically committed to a faction (or unwilling to consider any disconfirming information) and wanting to see ourselves as fair, compassionate, and rational.

People reason from identity way too fucking much.

“I sent you a rowboat:” Prosperity gospel and throwing others into the flood

chart of deaths from covid
https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en?fbclid=IwAR0ooEsBuC0WlYcZ3byJ1Sz7CA2WfFEuMSYp3rkvPuMHNDiN0otLnErBRA4

The fundagelical Governors of Mississippi and Alabama have decided to resist expert recommendations about COVID-19, with the Governor of Mississippi going so far as to prevent any cities or counties from enacting policies grounded in expert opinion. And many people are shocked that governors would reject expert opinion, but, from within those governors’ imagined world, it makes perfect sense.

I’ve spent a non-trivial amount of time arguing with fundagelicals, and they are yet another set of people who argue so badly that their consistent inability to argue well should make them reconsider their beliefs. But they don’t, because they think they’re arguing well.

They believe that they’re arguing well because they are making claims that they feel certain are true, and they can find evidence to support those claims. [As a side note, I’ll say that far too many high school and college courses in argumentation would confirm that sense of what it means to make a good argument.]

What fundagelicals can’t see (nor can other people who reason badly) is that their way of reasoning is one even they reject as a bad way to reason, but they only reject that way of reasoning when other people reason that way.

For the sake of argument, I’ll stick with fundagelicals, but this toxic approach to deliberation is all over the political spectrum (and also slithers through other fields in which people make bad decisions, such as people who keep having disastrous relationships that don’t make them rethink their way of thinking about relationships).

Fundagelicals believe that everything about your life can be changed if you have enough faith. New Age grifters who have killed people also advocate that narrative that, as do get laid quick and make money fast grifters. Nazis also made that argument. So did Maoists. And Stalinists.

Fundagelicals believe that Scripture is not just soteriological, but politically eschatological. That is, many Christians believe that Scripture tells us about the spiritual journey we as individuals must make (soteriology). Fundagelicals believe that Scripture tells the story of political history (political eschatology). For people who read Scripture as eschatalogical, Revelation is neither a time-specific political allegory, nor a celebration of individual faith, but a perfectly accurate narrative of what is yet to come. The notion that Revelation is a codebook that, if we read it correctly, will tell us when the world is ending, is much more controversial than many people realize.

Fundagelicals have an oddly flat reading of Scripture—Scripture means what it seems to mean, as long as that meaning supports the political agenda they now have. Thus, when conservative Christians supported slavery and segregation, they cheerfully dismissed “Do unto others” (fundagelicals still evade that one) and the very clear rules about treatment of slaves, and they equally cheerfully insisted on odd readings in order to justify racism. In my experience, fundagelicals opt for the literal reading, except when they don’t—there is no coherence to their exegetical method, except political. That is, when reading literally gets them the “proof” they want, they read literally; when it doesn’t, they read metaphorically (or dismiss the passage as a cultural blip).

For instance, arguing for Hell on literal grounds is more vexed than many people realize, and, so, people who want to argue for it have to read a fair number of verses in a non-literal way.  They’re literal (to the English translation, a serious problem when you’re talking about a literal reading) when it comes to “homosexuality” (neither a word nor concept that is in Scripture), but dismiss as “cultural” the equally clear proscriptions regarding women wearing makeup, people wearing mixed fibers, the death penalty.

When I’ve argued with fundagelicals about this point, the argument gets hung up at exactly the same place. For instance, on the issue of homosexuality, they cite the clobber verses, and I give them various links showing they’re relying on vexed readings of those verses, and they say, “That is what it says.” (In English, of course, not in Greek. Let’s set that aside.) I point out that they are citing one item from a list of behaviors that are condemned, and those lists always include behavior they allow, such as divorce, women wearing makeup in church, wearing mixed fibers, or benefitting from money loaned with interest). And they say, “Those are just cultural values of that moment.” And, then I say, “So were the practices you translate as ‘homosexuality,’” and they say, “No, those are universal.” They can’t say why they’re universal without engaging in a kind of simultaneously narcissistic and circular way of reasoning: they’re universal because I think they’re universal, and these other things are culturally specific because I think they’re culturally specific.

They can’t identify an exegetical method that they apply consistently, other than the narcissistic and circular one, because that’s how read Scripture in a politicized and narcissistic way: they approach Scripture expecting to see their political agenda confirmed, and so they treat every interpretation/meaning as real that confirms their political agenda, and dismiss every one as just an appearance that doesn’t. In rhetoric, this is called dissociation. In psychology, it’s considered an instance of “motivated reasoning,” and most of us do it. I’m saying that, in my experience, fundagelicals–again, like many people–won’t admit that’s what they’re doing, and that is the problem.

That their exegetical method is politicized from the beginning is why they accuse their opponents of politicizing Scripture. Projection is the first move of people who can’t reflect on their own processes.

This discussion of exegesis might seem a long way from why fundagelicals are dismissing the advice of experts (except when they aren’t), but it isn’t.

What I’m saying is that fundagelicals are yet one more instance of conservative Christians for whom being conservative matters more than being Christian. Here’s the best evidence that they are in-group first, and thoughtful exegesis second: when people try to criticize their reading of Scripture, they dismiss those criticisms on the grounds that the critics are bad people. That isn’t Scriptural exegesis—that’s demagoguery. That’s an admission that they are thinking about protecting their political in-group more than being honest and reflective of their methods of reading Scripture.

Or, tldr; they cherry-pick data. They cherry-pick Scripture; they cherry-pick “science.” And, just as their interpretation of Scripture is not defensible as anything other than “whatever supports our political agenda is true,” regardless of method, so is their way of citing “science.” They’ll cite a bad study as true because it agrees with them, while critiquing a study with the same (or better) methodology—on methodological grounds (Family Research Association is a great site for seeing this contradiction).

This cherry-picking of data while pretending to have a principled stance is not restricted to evangelicals. (Do not get me started about raw foodies.) But their cherry-picking of data is important because fundagelicals are politically powerful right now, despite their perpetual and ridiculous whingeing about being victims (talk about “snowflakes”—another instance of projection).

What I think a lot of non-fundagelicals are having trouble understanding about our current political moment is the dominance of prosperity gospel (an example of the “just world model”).

Prosperity gospel is a non-falsifiable interpretive frame that says that, if you have enough faith, you can get anything you want. It’s non-falsifiable in two ways. First, if you don’t get what you want, then you didn’t have enough faith—there’s no way to disprove this explanation of success/faith. Second, if something happens that simply cannot be explained as a lack of faith, it’s just a temporary setback, just God testing our faith. (Although most people tie it back to 19th century movements, it’s close to the muckled 17th century New England Puritan doctrine of signs.)

Just to be clear: I am a person of faith, and I think faith enables us to do extraordinary things. It also enables us to put one foot in front of another through difficult times because faith is the belief that things will turn out all-right. I also tithe. But, I don’t believe that faith guarantees us the outcome we want—that we are entitled to all of our desires being fulfilled by having perfect faith (or giving enough money). Such a belief substitutes our will (our desires, really) for God’s; that seems blasphemous to me.

I’ve also seen that kind of faith, not in God, but in our ability to get our way if we have enough faith, do great damage. It’s the old joke about the person of faith who refused to heed warnings, with the “punchline” of a drowned person of great faith asking God, “Why did you let me drown–I had perfect faith in you?” and God answering, “I sent you a warning, a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter–what more did you want?”

Paradoxically, the just world model, especially when coupled with the notion that we can get whatever we want if we have enough faith, leads to tragedy. People don’t help others because we blame the victims. We ignore systemic failings on the assumption that any problem is always a failure of individual faith. Thus, people who believe in the just world model tend not to recognize systemic problems like poverty, racism, sexism, and they don’t support systemic solutions, such as communities supporting infrastructures (good schools, roads, healthcare). The just world model increases us v. them thinking, The paradox of the just world model is that it leads to an unjust world—whether religious or not (as mentioned above, the idea that you can get whatever you want if you have enough faith/will/confidence is the basis of philosophies as diverse as Libertarianism, Nazism, get rich quick schemes, pseudo-mystical success schemes).

Once a person or community has stepped into this ideology, it’s hard to get out. Rejecting the rowboat and helicopter becomes how one demonstrates faith. The difference between our situation and the guy who rejects the flood warnings is that he drowned; if we sit on the roof, and reject the epidemiologists, public health experts, social distancing, and ventilators to demonstrate our individual (or church’s) faith, we aren’t the only ones who drown. We may not drown at all. But health workers will. Police, EMT, the vulnerable.

We aren’t just sitting on the roof risking our lives. We’re throwing others into the water. Being Christian should mean we care for the vulnerable—we’re being given that chance. God sent us the epidemiologists; let’s listen to them.

Narcissism and bad political outcomes

Like many teachers trying to shift to online teaching and still provide a useful experience for students, I’m got way too much to do this week, and so I don’t have the time I’d like for writing about Trump’s putting a “strong” economy over the health of the people he is supposed to care for. I don’t even have the time to point out that his first moves were not to protect the economy, but the stock market. (They are not the same thing.)

All I have time for is to make a few quick points that others have already said. There are lots of ways that Trump could help the economy that would, in fact, raise all boats (something that boosting the stock market does not do)—FDR figured them out. This isn’t about fixing the economy; this is about fixing the perception of the economy (since so many people do associate “the economy” with “the stock market”).

I’m about to give an example of how that way of thinking of things worked out for another world leader in order to make the point that it isn’t a good way to approach the situation. I want to give an example in order to make a claim about process—whether this way or approaching a situation is a good one.

My rhetorical problem is that a lot of people (especially authoritarians) have trouble making that shift to the more abstract question of process. It has nothing to do with how educated someone is—I’ve known lots of people with many advanced degrees who couldn’t grasp the point, and many people with no degrees who could. It’s about authoritarian thinking, not education. (Expert Political Opinion and Superforecasting are two books about this phenomenon.)

To complicate things further, authoritarians (who exist all over the political spectrum) not only have trouble thinking about process, but understand an example as a comparison, and a comparison as an analogy, and an analogy as an equation.

For instance, imagine that you and I are arguing about whether Chester’s proposal that we pass a law requiring that everyone tap dance down the main street of town is a good one, and you point out that the notoriously disastrous leader of the squirrels, Squirrely McSquirrelface, passed a similar law, and it ended disastrously. If I’m an authoritarian, then I’ll sincerely believe that you just said that Chester is Squirrely McSquirrelface, and, in a sheer snitfit of moral outrage, I will point out all the ways he isn’t. For extra points, I will accuse you of being illogical.

All that I will have thereby shown is that I don’t understand how examples about processes work.

I’ll give one more example. I often get into disagreements with people about “protest voting” (or “protest nonvoting”). I think that’s a bad way to think about voting, since I don’t know of any example of a time it’s worked to get the kinds of political changes the people who advocate it want. And, instead of providing me with examples, the people with whom I’m disagreeing dismiss me for not having sufficient faith (a Follower move). They only argue about process deductively (from a presumption that purity of intent is not only necessary but sufficient for a good outcome—a premise I think is indefensible historically).

So, let’s get back to the question of privileging the stock market and “the economy” over what experts on health say. And there’s an example of that way of thinking. (There are a lot, but I’ll pick one.)

I think Trump, who didn’t want to be President, now can’t stand the idea of not being re-elected, because he is ego first and foremost (as indicated by all his lies, even on stupid stuff, like his height). And he believes that he can’t get reelected if the economy sucks in October. And that’s a reasonable assumption. People will vote against a President (Carter) or party (GOP in 2008) if the economy sucks at that moment, regardless of whether it sucks because the President did the right thing (Carter), or the economy tanked because of processes in which both Dems and GOP were complicit (2008). Hell, people vote on the basis of shark attacks.

There are many problems with Trump, but one is that he sincerely believes he is a “universal genius”—a person so smart he can see the right course of action, regardless of having no training in it. This is important to his sense of self, and that’s why he keeps firing people who make it clear that they are more knowledgeable than he is about anything. Not only can’t he be wrong, but he can’t have anyone in his administration smarter than he is.

This isn’t the first administration like that. It doesn’t end well. It can’t end well. The notion of “universal genius” is nonsense. Intelligent (as opposed to raging narcissist) people know that they don’t know everything, and so need people around them who know more than they do about all sorts of thing.

Intelligent people know that disagreement is useful. Raging narcissists fire people for disloyalty if they dissent, and then they make bad decisions. Firing people for “disloyalty” (i.e., dissent) doesn’t play out well in the business world (e.g., Enron, Theranos) in the long run (although it can in the short run), nor does it in the political world, nor the military.

Making decisions about the economy purely on the basis of how it will play out for a regime also doesn’t lead to good long-term outcomes. How Democracies Die shows how authoritarians shift from democracy to authoritarianism through disastrous manipulation of the economy.

There’s another example.

Germans, on the whole, never really admitted that they’d lost WWI. The dominant narrative was that they were winning, and could have won had people been willing to stick it out, but the willingness to stick it out collapsed for two reasons. First, there was the “stab in the back” myth—the notion that Jewish media lied to the Germans and said they couldn’t win. Second was the narrative that people on the homefront lost hope because they were suffering in basic ways, such as food, housing, and coal. And they were.

It’s important to note that the dominant narrative was wrong on both points. There wasn’t a stab in the back, and Germany didn’t lose the war because of homefront morale. The homefront morale could have stayed strong, and they would still have lost. It just would have taken longer and cost even more lives.

But Hitler believed that narrative, and both its points.

As Adam Tooze shows in his thorough book (that I can’t recommend highly enough), Hitler’s economic (and military) decisions were gambles. And those decisions were also at odds. He wanted to prevent the stab in the back by, as much as possible,  ensuring that his base was comfortable. He made bad decisions about the economy because he wanted to preserve his support and win a war he probably shouldn’t have taken on.

Hitler’s way of deliberating was bad. He wanted outcomes he wasn’t smart enough to realize were incompatible. And by “smart enough,” I mean “willing to listen to people more expert than he.” Hitler’s rejection of his military experts’ advice is infamous, as is his firing anyone who disagreed with him.

What matters about Hitler, from the perspective of thinking about process, about the way an administration or leader deliberates, is how he decided. As Albrecht Speer said, Hitler sincerely believed himself to be a universal genius, and the paradoxical consequence was that he only allowed around him third-rate intellects. Hitler was obsessed with world domination and purifying the Germans. But he was even more obsessed with being the smartest person in the room, with having around him people who flattered him, with silencing dissent (on the grounds that it was disloyalty), with firing anyone who actually knew more than he did. He hired and fired on the basis of loyalty, not expertise.

That ended with people huddled in bomb shelters like the one in the photo.

When has it ended well?

Research on businesses says it doesn’t end well; I can’t think of a single historical example when it’s turned out well.

I’m making a falsifiable claim. I’m saying that Trump’s way of handling decision making is bad, and I’m using Hitler as an example.

When I pose this question to people who support the model of a “universal genius” who silences dissent, relies on his (almost always his) gut instinct, and who only get their information from in-group media, the response is always some version of “Hey, I’m winning—screw you for asking.” They say I’m biased for criticizing Trump, Obama was worse, abortion is bad. They say, in other words, because they like what they’re getting, they don’t care whether this has never worked out well in the past.

Guess who else thought that way.

What they don’t say is “here is an example of a leader who claimed to be a universal genius, who fired anyone who criticized him, who wouldn’t allow anyone in the room who was more an expert than he, who made every issue about him, who lied about big and small things, who used his power to reward people and states who were loyal to him and punish ones who weren’t, who openly declared himself above the law, and it worked out great.”

That’s because there is no such example.

In other words, they can’t come up with an example of a time when an administration that reasons that way has been successful. They are committed to a way that has never worked. They are committed to the way that people supported Hitler.

When Germany was finally conquered, 25% of the population thought it was right to have followed Hitler, and that he had been badly served by the people below him. 25% of the German population were so committed to believing that Hitler was their savior that no evidence could prove them wrong.

I’m not saying that Trump is Hitler.

I’m saying something much more troubling: I’m saying that the people who support Trump reason the way that people supported Hitler. I’m not talking about Trump. I’m talking about his supporters. I’m not saying they would have supported Hitler. I’m asking them to consider whether their way of supporting Trump is a good way to support a political figure.

This is two-part: can they give examples of times when this kind of support for this kind of leader has worked out well? And, can they identify the evidence that would persuade them their support for Trump is wrong? What is it?

And, if their answer is that there is nothing that would make them question their loyalty to Trump, and nothing that would persuade them to venture outside of the pro-Trump media, then they aren’t just admitting their political position is irrational, but they’re committing to a way of thinking about politics that has never ended well.

It wasn’t that long ago that that way of thinking about politics ended up with Germans huddled in concrete balls.

Rhetorical radicalization and white identity politics

57% of white Americans believe “that discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities” (2) and 49% of Americans believe “discrimination against Christians has become as big a problem in America today as discrimination against other groups” (16, 77% of white evangelical Christians believe that, 17), It is a cliché in various circles that there is a “war on men,” and the organizers of “Straight Pride” events insisted that cis-het men (and, given that they often displayed Confederate flags—racists) are the real ones whose rights are under attack. Michelle Malkin and other have argued that there is a “war” on conservative speech, and Fox News positions itself as opposed to “mainstream media” (suggesting it is marginalized in some way).

The Congress elected in 2018 broke records in terms of diversity, yet the vast majority are still het, white, male Christians. 75% of Senators are men, as are 77% of members of the House. 78% of Congress is white, and only 10% are openly LGBTQ. 88% of Congress self-identifies as Christian. The 2019 list of Fortune 500 CEOs also broke records in terms of diversity, with 33 women (or 15%).  59 of the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 CEOs are non-white (around 12%). In 2017, the Republicans had all three branches of government; and both chambers in 32 states. 26 of US governors are Republican.

Fox News, relentlessly supportive of the Republican Party (and especially Donald Trump), had record numbers of viewers in 2019, “making it the top-rated basic cable network.” It is “the most trusted name in television news” (Berry and Sobieraj 111). Talkers Magazine in 2019 listed the top three “most influential talk show personalities” as the openly pro-GOP Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Dave Ramsey.  Christians are doing well, too. As Rachel Laser says, “Trump is conferring unparalleled privilege on one narrow slice of religion”–conservative white patriarchal self-described “evangelicals” (I think the term “fundagelical”—not a term I invented—is more accurate). Their mission is to remake the US government into a democracy of the faithful, in which their policy agenda is the only religious agenda to benefit from the notion of “religious freedom”—an agenda of homophobia, patriarchy, and racism. In short, the reins for government, economic, and cultural power are firmly in the hands of cis-het white Christian male Republicans.

Not just firmly, but disproportionately so: 65% of Americans self-identify as Christian, 49% are men, and 60% are white. In other words, Christian white men are over-represented in positions of power. 35% of Americans self-identify as conservative (26% self-identify as liberal), while the number that self-identify as Republican (29%) is about the same percentage that self-identify as Democrat (27%).

So why are they whining so much? Why do members of the disproportionately powerful groups see themselves as victims?

Ashley Jardina, in her extraordinary White Identity Politics, quotes a man at a rally for Trump: “If you just put everything aside and talk about it rationally, it’s not racism when you’re trying to maintain a way of life and culture” (21). It’s notable that he isn’t talking about economic power, but a way of life and culture—that is, his privilege. Jardina quotes Bill O’Reilly, who said,
“For a long time, skin color wasn’t really much of an issue, in the 80s and 90s we didn’t her a lot. Yeah, you always had your Farrakhans and your Sharptons. We always had those people but—Jackson—they were race hustlers [….] But now, whiteness has become the issue. [….] So if you’re a white American you are a part of a cabal that either consciously or unconsciously keeps minorities down. Therefore, that has to end and whiteness has to be put aside. That’s what the border is all about.[….] Let everybody in. [….] That would diminish whiteness because minorities then would take over [….] That’s what this is all about. Getting whiteness out of power.” (220)
Note that, again, this isn’t about jobs, disease, crime—it’s about whiteness. It’s about whether “whiteness” (by which O’Reilly means loyal Republican white Christian men) will continue to be able to dominate politically, economically, and culturally. My whole talk is summarized in that quote.

This argument, oddly enough, gives away the game—that we have “a way of life” in which whiteness is dominant, and people feel themselves in existential threat because conservative Christian white masculinity is not quite as hegemonic as it once was.

Noel Ignatiev’s formulation of whiteness emphasized the rhetorical and political deflective power of “whiteness” (an aspect lost in many current discussions of “privilege” such as “privilege walks”). Whiteness, he argued, is presented to some people as a “privilege” that invites people to hurt themselves in material ways—good wages, job security, reasonable healthcare, good public schools, good roads—in order to get the “privilege” of being on the good side of American racism. Once someone has been invited to climb into whiteness, they are likely to be very protective of the privileges of whiteness; they are not only drawn to kicking the ladder out from behind them (that is, support abandoning the very policies and processes that enabled them to get to where they are), but to be among the most vocal and active opponents of the people who materially look very much like them (the Irish hating on other Irish, people on public assistance hating on other people on public assistance, second-generation immigrants hating on the latest group of immigrants). Ignatiev’s argument is that the invitation to the privilege of whiteness depoliticizes politics by deflecting discussion away from working conditions, infrastructure, social safety nets to whether your privilege is threatened.

Research in in- v. out-group relations makes it clear that people are willing to hurt themselves in order to keep an out-group from gaining. In various studies, if people are asked to choose between an outcome that gives the in-group and out-groups the same amount, they will choose to take a hit just in order to hurt the out-group more. Sometimes called “Vladimir’s Choice,” it is “the tendency for people to choose to disadvantage others, even when doing so comes at the cost of disadvantaging themselves” (Sidanius et al. 257,  see also Koomen and van der Pligt 122).

As long ago as 1941, the deeply-problematic (aka racist, although sometimes categorized as moderate white) W.J. Cash noted that race-baiting was effectively used to keep poor whites from engaging in the political action that would have meant sense materially. Giving poor whites “white privilege” (also known as herrenvolk democracy) meant they didn’t demand good jobs, good schools, good roads, good healthcare because the system guaranteed them that they could feel a kind of identification with the richest white person (even if it was the one who screwing them over in material ways). LBJ famously said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

One irony of the political power of that rhetorical invitation to whiteness is that it involves the simultaneous claim that whiteness is ontologically grounded and a new group can see themselves as white. That new group can see itself as only now and yet always already white. This material and political persuasion is fundamentally rhetorical. People are persuaded to depoliticize policy questions—instead of arguing about our rich and varied policy options in terms of questions like feasibility, solvency, unintended consequences, we frame policy questions in terms of in-group benefit and loyalty (and, sometimes openly, hurting the out-group).

Jardina argues that “white identity […] is a product of the belief that resources are zero-sum, and that the success of non-whites will come at the expense of whites” (268). I would modify that to say that it isn’t a question of resources, but of privilege—that people who strongly identify as white, and who feel threatened, don’t feel threatened in material ways, but in terms of privilege. They see, probably correctly, that white privilege is a zero-sum, and the more that whiteness is not privileged, the more whites lose…privilege. As Jardina says, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” (21).

Jardina argues that this anxiety about white privilege is the consequence of increased immigration of non-whites allowed by Reagan’s immigration policies, an explanation that assumes a material cause. But whiteness has always been threatened by the immigration of “non-whites” (or non-WASPs), as early as the immigration of Irish and German Catholics in the first part of the 19th century. Whiteness has long maintained its privilege by giving white cards to another group—a group always defined against African and Native Americans (and, until recently, against Jewish and Asian Americans—this seems to be changing, in complicated ways).

My point is that Ignatiev’s argument—that the rhetorical and political invitation to whiteness is a way of neutralizing a potentially radical opponent—is something we’re seeing now. The inclusion in whiteness is how people forget class, it’s how people redefine our own ancestors. More important, it’s how people are persuaded to oppose, passionately, policies that would help them.

Jonathan Metzl’s heartbreaking chapter about sick white men in Tennessee who opposed the expansion of Medicaid or any aspect of “Obamacare”—policies that would have helped them—shows that they did so because they believed that those policies would have enabled “a lot of people that’s not sick…to use the shit out of it, and then when somebody really needs it, they ain’t there for you to get” (Dying of Whiteness 149). They were willing to sacrifice themselves just to make sure an out-group didn’t get benefits.

People can be persuaded set themselves on fire just to make the out-group uncomfortably warm. When an out-group is stereotyped as lazy, and that out-group is getting the same benefits as the in-group, the in-group will reject the benefits. A famous instance of this is the refusal of working-class whites in many areas to join unions, if the unions would have non-white members who would also benefit from union negotiations. But, it’s also, as Metzl observes, a reason that the poor white men he studied in Tennessee will refuse Medicaid—because of the perception that doing so would benefit an out-group whom they saw as lazy and parasitical. These men were making Vladimir’s choice.

How are people persuaded to hate some group so much that they will set themselves on fire in order to make the out-group uncomfortably warm? The short answer is that they are persuaded that they are in a zero-sum apocalyptic battle with the out-group, that the out-group benefitting in any way is yet one more step toward the extermination of the in-group. Their greatest fear is that the previously marginalized out-group will treat them as badly as they treated that out-group.

This is an old argument, the “wolf by the ears” argument that Thomas Jefferson made about African Americans: treatment of slaves had been so bad that it was like having a wolf by the ears. If the US freed slaves, they would turn on whites in a race war. This was the argument made in such different places as a Supreme Court decision about Japanese internment, arguments against releasing innocent people from GITMO, defenses of displacing Native Americans.

The short answer is that they get radicalized by their media of choice.

The first step of radicalizing an audience is to say that we are facing an existential threat. Sometimes the threat is that everyone is threatened; sometimes it’s just the in-group. And here I have to point out that radicalizing an audience, at least to some extent, is not always bad. Sometimes we are facing an existential threat. We can have democratic deliberation and existential threat. In this case, however, the in-group’s existential threat is the loss of privilege, as though people cannot be white and equal.

The second step is to say that this existential threat has an obvious cause, and an equally obvious solution. This is the point at which media say we need to stop arguing about our policy options and go for this one because it is the only right option. This step toward radicalization is an explicit rejection of democracy and democratic deliberation.

The third step follows from the previous two. If the solution is obvious, why are some people unpersuaded? This step says that our complicated world is really just a zero-sum battle between two groups. The third step appeals to our tendency to frame issues in terms of in- and out-groups. We are all prone to categorize people we meet—she’s a Missouri Synod Lutheran, so she must be a Calvinist; he’s got a neck beard, so he must be a douche; they’re from Alabama, so they must racist; he’s black, so he must like rap; she’s a Sanders supporter, so she must be a jerk; he’s a Biden supporter, so he must be a tool of corporate America. Those initial impulses toward categorizing are inevitable, and not necessarily harmful, if they’re open to revision.

The third step toward radicalization is to keep those categories—stereotypes, really—safe from disproof, and that is best done by framing the characteristics of our mental stereotype as essential. What I’ve noticed about stereotypes—the racist Southerner, good-at-math Asian, caring female teacher, hardass white male teacher, lazy POC, corrupt politician—is that, for many people, they exist in a weird space of simultaneously ontologically-grounded and non-falsifiable Platonic forms. Although those beliefs can be shown to “true” by giving evidence, they aren’t shown to be “false” if the evidence turns out to be false or irrelevant, or if there is counter-evidence. All counter-examples are instances of “no true Scotsman.”

Crucial to this step is the assumption (and talking point) that there is no good-willed disagreement of any kind—disagreement, dissent, or even skepticism about the in-group ideology/policy—is not a legitimate point of view to be considered, but proof that the person disagreeing is Them. That they disagree is proof that they are Them, or a stooge of Them. This step is not just a complete rejection of democratic deliberation, but an active move toward fascism (or some other kind of authoritarianism).

These three steps—there is an existential threat; the solution is obvious; only They disagree with us—lead neatly to the fourth step: purifying the in-group. At this point in radicalization, we’re in a world grounded in a lot of claims that a few minutes of sensible googling would show to be wrong: there is never only one possible policy option, the entire world of political positions is not usefully reduced to us v. them.

We are so deeply immersed in a culture of demagoguery, that, when I make this argument, people often say, but there are evil groups. And there are. But, even if we agree that there is an existential threat doesn’t mean there is only one possible response. We really shouldn’t disagree as to whether we should fight Nazis and fascists, but it’s fair to disagree about the best way to do that. We have a lot of options, and it might be most effective for us to adopt a lot of different strategies at the same time. Radicalization, however, says that there is only way to fight Them, and it is to for all in-group members to be more purely loyal to the in-group, committed to purifying the in-group.

The tendency to believe that the only response to existential threat, failure, or uncertainty is a purification of the in-group is well-documented (Koomen and Van der Pligt, and Hogg et al.). This call for purity is always a call for remaining pure in your sources of information, and that’s the fifth step in radicalization: inoculation against dissent, disagreement, disconfirming evidence. If in-group members who have been radicalized this far look at information from other sources—even non-radicalized in-group sources—then they might realize that they’ve been lied to. The more extreme that in-group propaganda becomes, the more vulnerable it is to disproof, and the solution is to persuade its audience that they shouldn’t even look at other media, except in radical in-group media’s abridged, edited, and sometimes actively falsified form.

Inoculation is the rhetorical move of giving your audience a weak version of an argument they will later confront, and it’s something people in rhetoric should study much more. It’s how far too much of our media works (and pretty much all political youtube videos). Propaganda doesn’t work if it looks like what people think propaganda is—what They listen to. Propaganda is most effective when it looks “fair.”

Oddly enough, then, radicalization only works if it looks as though it’s being “fair” to “the other side,” if it looks “objective” and “unbiased.” And, so, here we are at the paradoxical situation that radicalizing an audience has to look as though it isn’t radicalizing, but being “objective.” This step in radicalization is greased by how bad our cultural discourse is about “objectivity” (a slide greased by how far too many fyc courses talk about “objectivity”). Even in academia, the whole discussion of “objectivity” is muckled by binaries. I want to set aside that hobby horse, however, and go back to the question of radicalization. Here I’ll just say that we shouldn’t be looking for proof, but disproof.

Willem Koomen and Joop van der Pligt, in their book The Psychology of Radicalization and Terrorism, argue that radical groups operate most effectively within certain social contexts (such as relative deprivation) and to the extent that they can foster the ideological processes that rationalize (even seem to make necessary) intergroup violence (or the support of violence).

The first of those processes, isolation, Koom and ven der Pligt describe in terms of groups like the Weathermen that physically isolated recruits, but I want to suggest that we should think of the rhetorical process of inoculation as functionally the same kind of isolation. According to Berry and Sobieraj (The Outrage Industry), as well as Benkler et al. (Network Propaganda), much of our current media spends as much time trash-talking “the other” as it does promoting its own side. The point of all that trash-talking is that the “other” media is dangerous, corrupting, and should be avoided.

Research is clear that “cross-cutting” in terms of political discourse—talking to people who disagree, reading or viewing opposition points of view (and not hate-watching)—is beneficial. Inoculation prevents precisely that approach; that’s what it’s intended to do.

That isolation enables group think, a phenomenon that leads to ingroup amplification: “the convictions of moral superiority, in combination with extreme forms of us-versus-them thinking helps to legitimize violence against all adversaries, including innocent children” (Koomen and van der Pligt 179). And here I’m thinking of all those arguments about why putting children in cages is moral.

I mention that political position, but this is a process, facilitated by media, that can happen anywhere on the political spectrum (think anti-vaxxers, flat earthers).

Jardina, as mentioned before, argues that the rise of white identity politics is the consequence of increased immigration under Reagan, largely because of the timeline, but I’m dubious. That timeline also fits the rise of hate-talk radio and radicalizing cable “news,” and social media—including youtube—fuels a cycle of self-selection, self-censorship, and self-radicalization.

Hanna Pitkin once said that what she called “free citizenship”—what I think might more usefully called “responsible political action”—requires “the ability to fight—openly, seriously, with commitment, and about things that really matter—without fanaticism, without seeking to exterminate one’s opponent” (266). My argument is that, through a process of rhetorical radicalization, far too many sites of political discourse not only depoliticize politics, but seriously limit and sometimes completely stifle political discourse itself. Instead of fighting, we exterminate.

So what do we do? Make better media choices. As Benkler et al. show, not all media are the same. While almost all media is driven by the profit motive to engage in damaging frames for politics: us v. them (in other words, zero-sum), elections as horse races, the kind of sloppy psychologizing that displaces policy argumentation with motivism, some media are better than others at fact-checking, issuing corrections, avoiding disinformation campaigns (see especially 381-387). But, as they say, “The pessimistic lesson of our work is that there is no easy fit for epistemic crises in countries were a political significant portion of the population does occupy a hyperpartisan, propaganda rich environment” (386).

Real people really disagree

bumper sticker sanders real peopleI should begin by saying that I think there are good reasons for supporting Sanders, and many of his supporters make good arguments for their preferring him over other candidates. But, I also think there are good reasons for supporting other candidates, and for not supporting Sanders. Some of those good reasons involve people having different priorities from one another, different assessments of risks, or different predictions about various uncertainties about our political situation. That I feel certain I’m right is not the same as having the only legitimate political position.

I’m not saying all arguments are equally valid, or it’s all just personal preference, or there’s no difference among the candidates. I am saying that intelligence and reason are not restricted to only one candidate’s supporters. Further, I’m saying that insisting that there is only one reasonable position to have, that my political beliefs are the only rational beliefs, and that anyone who doesn’t support my candidate does so because they are corrupt, stupid, biased, or the stooge of a corrupt entity is engaging in a damaging form of demagoguery. It is damaging to democracy.

People are sharing this post as though it’s a smart argument, and it’s really objectionable berniesplaining. And, let’s start with saying that if berniesplainers explain in comments that their telling me that I have never seen berniesplaining, but I have simply misunderstood my own experience, they are berniesplaining.

Mansplaining is when a man explains something to a woman assuming she is ignorant, and she’s actually quite well-informed, perhaps an expert. It’s particularly irritating when a man explains to a woman what it’s like to be a woman, when he tells us that we don’t really understand our own experience as women, and that he knows what we should want, what policies we should support, because our own understanding of our experience is biased and irrational, but his is unbiased, rational, and objective. Whitesplaining is when a white person tells POC that they don’t really understand their experience as POC because POC are biased, irrational, and subjective, but this white person really knows how they should think, behave, vote.

Bernisplaining is when Sanders supporters explain to people who don’t support Sanders that any position other than supporting Sanders doesn’t come from a legitimate difference of opinion, or a rational assessment of the situation, but from being corrupt or a stooge of corruption. Berniesplainers explain that the people who disagree with them don’t understand our own political views, needs, or positions.

Everything that is wrong about Sanders’ rhetoric is in this post. The article says that Sanders’ showing on Super Tuesday–that a lot of people didn’t vote for him–“doesn’t mean that voters are mindless robots taking orders from above”(why would that even need to be said unless there are people in the article’s audience who would give that explanation?), but because anyone who voted against Sanders did so because they voted on the basis of a cognitive bias. ORLY?

In other words, had they not been relying on a cognitive bias, they would have voted for Sanders. So, there is no good reason for supporting anyone other than Sanders. And I am incredibly tired of bernisplainers beginning every argument from that assumption.

[Speaking of cognitive biases, that article is a great example of two cognitive biases: asymmetric insight, and in-group favoritism.]

More important, leftists are supposed to reject the notion that we are all the same, that there is some position from which unmediated perception of the truth is easy. We are supposed to be the group that says that people have genuinely different experiences, that the world is uncertain, and disagreement is okay.

Yes, not all Sanders supporters assume that they are the only people with a legitimate point of view, and attacks on Sanders can be patronizing  and just plain stupid, and, as Jamieson showed pretty clearly, much of the intra-group hostility in 2016 was ginned up by pro-Trump forces. And it’s in Trump’s best interest to have potential Dem voters hate each other more than we want to get him out of office.

But this article–one that said that people who voted for anyone other than Sanders did so because they were dupes to a cognitive bias–was not a meme created by a pro-Trump troll. And Corey Robin shared it. This is not a fringe pro-Sanders’ position. This patronizing, dismissive, and anti-democratic attitude is central, not just to Sanders, but to the left.

We should be better than this.

Not all Sanders supporters are berniesplainers. But all berniesplainers do not actually support democracy.  And that’s a problem. Democracy is premised on the notion that disagreement is productive because people really disagree, because as various people have pointed out, advocating a political policy is a leap into the unknown. Democracy presumes that we have genuinely different and legitimate values and interests.

To the extent that pro-Sanders rhetoric says that anyone who doesn’t support Sanders only does so without legitimate reasons—they do so because they’re falling prey to a cognitive bias, they’re stooges to the DNC or media—is the extent to which pro-Sanders rhetoric is patronizing, arrogant, and anti-democratic. It’s berniesplaining.

Democracy is premised on the notion that no individual or group (or faction, as the founders would have said) has God speaking in their ear. The founders did intermittently argue that some individuals reasoned from a position of universal knowledge, and leftists are supposed to reject that epistemology.

Democracy is about acknowledging that people disagree because we really disagree. There is not just one solution that is obvious to all right-thinking people. Democracy presumes that there is legitimate disagreement. People who think there is not legitimate disagreement, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, are anti-democratic. They are not leftists. They are political and epistemological narcissists.

Why we spend more time hating on heretics than we do on hating infidels

Why all the Warren/Sanders hate?

Imagine that the politicians Chester and Hubert agree that there is a squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball. Chester thinks that little dogs are part of the squirrel conspiracy; Hubert thinks they aren’t. The squirrels would stir up as much shit as possible between Chester and Hubert about little dogs, an issue that is actually much less important than the squirrel issue.

Squirrels would create social media accounts promoting memes and snarky posts about how Hubert was nice to a little dog, about how Hubert supporters don’t have legitimate reasons for their support of him (they like him because he has a cool coat, he petted a puppy), but Chester supporters have good reasons for supporting Chester. Squirrels would work to create a wedge between Chester and Hubert supporters, since the political success of either of them would be disastrous for squirrels.

There are various ways of doing that, but everything the squirrels would do would involve keeping Chester and Hubert from working together. If Chester and Huber work together, regardless of the issue of the little dogs, the squirrels are toast.

A pro-squirrel media campaign in a balkanized media sphere would condemn Chester and Hubert as anti-squirrel in all the pro-squirrel media. What would the squirrels do in the anti-squirrel media world?

They would try to get a purity argument between Chester and Hubert, one that would keep them from working together.

That happened. In the early 19th century, Irish- and African-Americans had similar material interests—there was no social safety net, there was racism (Catholicism was framed as a race), and abusive working conditions for both groups. It would have been sensible for Irish- and African-Americans to work together, but they didn’t. They didn’t because—to make a complicated situation simple—Jacksonian Democrats (who needed a base of voters in a non-slaver state to support slavery) put a wedge between the Irish- and African-Americans, and that wedge was the ability to invite the Irish-Americans to believe themselves as essentially better and different from African Americans.

The original sin of political deliberation is that we reason from identity, rather than applying principles across identity. And the wedge enabled the Irish to feel good about themselves because they weren’t African. That’s also how the planter class in the South prevented unionization—segregation helped keep poor whites poor because it ensured they wouldn’t join forces with poor African Americans.

It makes perfect sense that people would create a wedge issue to keep potential allies apart, but why do we fall for it?

Sure, the squirrels would create memes intended to make Chester and Hubert supporters so angry with each other that they won’t collaborate, but why would Chester and Hubert supporters share the memes, posts, and links that help the squirrels?

We fall for it because people are always more worked up about heretics than infidels. In theory, we hate infidels more than heretics, but in practice, that isn’t what happens. It has to do with a cognitive bias about decision-making.

If we are faced with a decision between two pretty similar things, we are likely, once we’ve made the decision, to exaggerate the differences between the two in order to make us feel better about the decision we’ve made. Ambiguous decisions are more threatening to our sense of self than clear-cut ones because they are the ones we can get wrong. Our need to make ourselves feel that we’ve made the right decision means that we will not acknowledge that we were even unsure, let alone that the other option might be more or less equally good.

Our hostility toward infidels doesn’t raise any uncertainty; that we have chosen between two similar choices does. When people are presented with uncertainty, we have a tendency to retreat to purity and in-group loyalty. We pass along the memes planted by trolls because they tell us that our decision is entirely right, and that the solution is in-group purity. And that feels good.

What Trump needs, as he needed in 2016, is to get potential Dem voters to get into purity fights with one another. What his considerable Russian support is doing, as it did in 2016, is to persuade large numbers of potentially anti-Trump voters to stay home if they don’t get their candidate. And they way to do that is to make Dems angrier with each other than they are with Trump, and it’s happening through memes that say things like, “A friend says she supports Chester because Chester wears such a great sweater, but I support Hubert because he’ll give us all real protection against the squirrels.”

[Since I crawl around pro-Trump sites, I can say that is exactly their strategy there too—Dems support policies out of fee-fees but Trump supporters are interested in real solutions for real problems.]

The more that Hubert supporters share that meme, the more they help the squirrels.

I’m not saying that the differences between Hubert and Chester are trivial—they’re real, and they matter. And we should argue about those differences, instead of framing the other side as being irrational and corrupt. I’m saying that, whatever our differences, sharing memes about how awful the other is ensures that neither Hubert nor Chester will succeed.

Obviously I’m talking about Warren and Sanders, but I’m also not—I’m talking about all the other times that potential allies were and are deliberately wedged apart. We can disagree with each, and we can believe that other people are backing the wrong candidate, but we shouldn’t hate other people for voting differently from us.

What happens when we abandon norms of accountability? (Penn talk)

Austrian Jews being deliberately humiliated by Nazia

My area of expertise is what I’ve taken to calling “train wrecks in public deliberation.” I’m interested in times that communities used rhetoric to talk themselves into disastrous decisions—ranging from the Athenian decision to invade Sicily in 5th century BCE to LBJ’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War in the summer of 1965. I came to notice patterns–not of political personalities or even policies but of cultures of discourse— what I came to call demagoguery.

All political issues are policy issues, and we always have a variety of policy options available to us. In these cultures of demagoguery, that rich and nuanced world of policy options was and is denied in favor of framing our cultural problem as a question of a zero-sum battle between two groups: us and them. When we’re in a culture of demagoguery, when everything is framed as two sides, those two sides appear to be on opposite sides of every issue, but they actually agree about quite a lot.

They both agree that there is no legitimate disagreement with their position; they agree that politics is a zero sum battle between us and them. They just disagree as to who is whom. They agree that for every problem there is one solution and that disagreement is the consequence of the presence of people with bad motives. This agreement that disagreement is useless can come from several different positions, but two are important in our era: political narcissism, and political sociopathy.

For some people there is only one legitimate understanding of the common good (mine) and everyone who disagrees is blinded by self-interest, duped by the media, or knowingly advocating a bad policy. To say that there is only one political good, and that I and only I am the one oriented toward that good on every issue[1] is a kind of political narcissism.

Another position is that there is no legitimate political disagreement because none of us is really interested in the common good—there is no common good at all. We are all our for ourselves, and no position is ethically superior to any other–there are just winners and losers, and any political or rhetorical strategy is allowed if it’s oriented toward winning. This is a kind of political sociopathy.

Those aren’t all of the positions possible, but they’re two that I hear a lot when people are arguing for a no-holds barred wrestling match between us and them. I think the people who advocate those positions are sincere. I think that people who argue that they and only they are advocating the one political good in every situation believe that is true; they cannot imagine that any other position might have any legitimacy in any circumstance. They believe that everyone sees the world exactly as they do.

And those who believe that everyone is out for their own good are out for their own good, and they think everyone else is too.

What neither of those two realize is that not everyone is like them—they universalize from their own position, posture, and ideology.

I think we disagree about politics because we disagree. People who privilege disagreement, who see disagreement as an important step toward the best agreements do so for all sorts of reasons, and from all sorts of different positions–such as various forms of relativism, perspectivism, fallibism, and lots of others.

I want to set all that aside in order to talk about what happens in a culture in which all disagreements are framed as a zero sum battle between us and them. And spoiler alert: it isn’t pretty.

This culture of demagoguery often begins as a cunning rhetorical framing of political disagreements as a zero sum battle between two groups because that frame is more motivating and mobilizing for voters, donors, and consumers. But it can easily become what people believe is an accurate description of our political landscape and our policy options.

So, initially, something like the confirmation of a supreme court justice is framed as a battle between us and them because that frame is more likely to get people to contact their representatives, donate to their party, and support their party’s decision. It’s also more likely to motivate people to read articles, watch the news, click on links. This false binary of our political choices benefits political parties and a for-profit media.

The zero-sum battle means that not only is disagreement delegitimated but, eventually and inevitably, disagreement is demonized. Compromise, bargaining, finding common ground — from within this false binary, those are way of trucking with the devil, and I don’t mean in the Grateful Dead sense. One doesn’t compromise with the devil after all; one exterminates him.

So, unless this rhetoric is stopped, the zero-sum us v. them frame for politics results in a rhetoric of extermination. And then the train wrecks.

Once disagreement is demonized and political disagreements are framed as a battle between good and evil, the appointment of the supreme court justice can easily be described as simply one battle in a war of political extermination and existential threat. As soon as one side makes claims of wanting to exterminate the other, then both sides can frame the political situation as one of existential threat.

And once we are in a situation of existential threats, then we are justified in anything we do. We are in Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” in which we honor the law by suspending or abrogating it. The narrative that enables the suspension of law is that the one group that genuinely honors the law is forced into a situation in which the law must be suspended or violated due to the evil machinations of the other side —the plot of about 80% of Law and Order episodes.

Now, it would seem that once a political party has used the rhetoric of existential threat to get into power, that rhetoric would lose its force. The rhetorical challenge becomes, once you are in power, how do you maintain the rhetoric of threat and victimization that enabled you to gain power?

Paradoxically, the acquisition of power enables this supposedly victimized group to use its propaganda machine, as well as the forces of government, to justify the removal of all checks and balances on the in-group executive, and to transform the government into a single party government by declaring the executive above judicial restraint, exempt from charges of criminal behavior, allowed to use their position not only to protect themselves from accountability, but to profit financially, even obscenely, to use the financial resources of the government to reward loyal political allies, and to use all the financial, investigative, prosecutorial, and coercive resources of the government to exterminate powerful sites of dissent.

Once the procedural constraints have been defanged, and “neutrality” of any institution is falsely politicized as part of a hostile out-group conspiracy, once an executive has made it clear that he refuses to be restrained or held accountable, that he is personally profiting, and openly trying to institute a one-party government (of which he is the head), then it becomes possible to factionalize all parts of the government–especially traditionally neutral parts, such as the military and police forces.

At this point even members of his own party, and his own base, should recognize the danger, and work to check to the overreach of power, and, if they do, as happened with FDR and packing the Supreme Court, we step back from the brink. But, as both How Democracies Die and Why Nations Fail (written from very different political perspectives) both show, the very people who could stop the overreach—that is, the in-group political figures and media, the judiciary, the military, or the base—often don’t. The people who could stop the overreach often choose not to if the executive is doing whatever is necessary to keep the economy benefiting his base, keep his base from listening to criticism of him, continuing to promote — through his loyal propaganda machine–the narrative that all of their problems are caused by Them (the party he is eliminating).

If his propaganda machine can persuade his base of that, then they will believe that they are flying when really he’s just persuaded them to jump out of a window with him.

I’m talking in the abstract, but I think everyone in this room knows that I have a particular political figure, situation, and era in mind: Hitler, and what he did between March 1933 in 1939.

There’re lots of other cases–someone rising to power on the waves created by the cultural demagoguery: Ceaușescu, Stalin, Mugabe, Chavez, and others. Sometimes the structures of checks and balances were weak, sometimes they were strong, and people chose not to enforce them. But in all cases, there was a culture of demagoguery.

[1] We should be passionate about politics, and so a person can be passionately committed to a community solving a problem, and convinced it must be solved, and that isn’t political narcissism, but passionate commitment to a problem. Even if they are passionately committed to one solution to the problem, that’s just passionate commitment. It’s the assumption that their group or political position is right about everything that makes it skid into political narcissism.

If the case for impeachment is so bad, why won’t Fox let you hear it?

Fox News showing Sekulow instead of House managers making case
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGVjBoE-zio

Aristotle argued that if people who disagree argue as hard as they can, and the people making the arguments have equal skill, then the truth will prevail. And that’s not a bad argument. It might be a little idealistic. After all, there are lots of situations in which the people arguing (the rhetors) might not have equal skill: a 300-dollar an hour attorney v. you. But, if you’re talking about rhetors who have all the money they need, then Aristotle’s argument makes sense.

People with lots of resources making true arguments don’t worry about their audience being exposed to false arguments because, on the whole, people are sensible, and if the audience is shown something true and something false, they can find the truth. So, a major media source, call it Chester News, doesn’t have to worry about people watching other media, unless watching other media will enable Chester News viewers to realize they’re being lied to. A lot.

People who are lying, however, need to make sure you don’t read other sources because then you’ll figure out they’re lying. So, they spend as much time telling you their lies as they do telling you not to tune in to anyone who might disagree.

Con artists (this book is really interesting about con games), like abusers and cult figures, first isolate you. They spend a lot of time telling you what They believe. The “They” here is a fabricated version of various out-groups that lumps them all into one false image that is both much stronger and weaker than any of the groups are—weaker in the sense that their arguments aren’t presented, but just straw man versions of them, stronger in the sense that They are presented as well-organized, powerful, and incredibly dangerous. Chester News might give cherry-picked quotes or data that, in context, don’t mean what they claim, and they don’t give you the sources so that you can see the full quote in context. Similarly, they give you the clip of This Person (who represents They) saying something outrageous, but they don’t give you a link where you could watch it in context.

And Chester news will, as Benkler et al. and Levendusky show, insist you not listen to anyone else, especially not to any They sources. Why?

It’s like the worst moments in junior high, when someone tells you, “Terry said this terrible thing about you, but don’t ask them about it, because I’ll get in trouble.” If you were sensible, you learned not to listen to them. Don’t believe what Fox tells you “liberals” believe, unless they link to direct sources, and you look at those sources in full context. And don’t believe what MSNBC tells you Fox is arguing, unless they link to direct sources, and you look at those sources in full context.

If the Fox case about impeachment were as good as they claim, they would give you all the sources. They would show you the whole videos, all the documents, all the speeches. They don’t. Fox, Trump, and the GOP are all admitting that they can’t defend themselves if all the evidence is open to their base. That’s important.

And, c’mon, we all know what it means when someone won’t let you look at the data. We’ve all had someone tell us, “Here’s the bill, and I won’t actually explain why I’m right.” And we know it means that they’re lying.

We aren’t talking about someone prying into potential irrelevant details. We’re talking about testimony regarding what Trump said in a phone call. If Trump did nothing wrong in the phone call, then all the people privy to that phone call could testify and he would be exonerated. If they can’t testify, then why not? If Fox won’t let you see that evidence, or the arguments about it, why not? If they had a slam dunk for their interpretation, you know they would share it. They won’t because they’re afraid of it.

If Fox won’t let you see the evidence, their case sucks.

That’s rhetoric 101.

There is no principle here to which any GOP wants to commit. Had HRC won, and had all of this played out, but with HRC substituted for Trump, y’all would be screaming for blood.

And that is how democracies die. They die when people value faction over principle. If we value democracy, we hold our party to the same standards we hold the other party. Otherwise, we’re looking at Athens as it imploded. We’re valuing party loyalty above anything— the truth, fairness, the law, any principles. And if we’re supporting a party whose claims are so weak that they have to make sure their base doesn’t have any direct contact with the opposition arguments, then we’re in real trouble.