For some time, we’ve been in a world in which far too much media (and far too many political figures) defenestrate public deliberation in favor of treating every policy decision as a war of extermination between two identities.[1] When a culture moves there, it’s inevitable that some group engages in what might be called “pre-emptive self-defense.” We’re there. It’s a weird argument, and profoundly damaging, but hard to explain.
The first time I ran across the proslavery argument, “We must keep African Americans enslaved and oppressed, because, if they had power, they would treat us as badly as we are treating them,” I thought it was really weird. I’ve since come to understand that it isn’t weird in the sense of being unusual. But it’s weird in the sense of being uncanny—it’s in the uncanny valley of argumentation in two ways. First, it’s turning the Christian value of doing unto as others as you would have them do unto you into a justification of vengeance: do unto them as they have done unto you, (which is a pretty clear perversion of what Jesus meant). Except, just to make it weirder, it isn’t what they have done unto you, but what they might do in an alternate reality. And that alternate reality requires that they are as violent and vindictive as you.
The argument is something like, “Yes, I am treating other people as I would not want to be treated, and as they have not treated me, but it’s justified because it’s how I imagine they would treat me in a narrative that also is purely imagined.”
This weird line of argument turns up a lot in arguments for starting wars. Obviously, wars start because some group attacks another; someone is the aggressor. So, when you think about pro-war rhetoric, you’d imagine that the side that is the aggressor would justify that aggression. They don’t. Instead, they present themselves as engaging in self-defense. They claim that their aggression isn’t really aggression, but self-defense because the other nation(s) will inevitably attack them. It’s self-defense against something that hasn’t happened (and might never). Pre-emptive self-defense.
For instance, Hitler invaded Poland because he intended to exterminate it as a political entity, exterminate most of its population, use it as a launching spot for a war of extermination against the USSR, and then make it (and other areas) a kind of Rhodesia of Europe, with “Aryans” comfortably watching “non-Aryans” act as serfs. But that isn’t how he justified it in his public rhetoric. In his September 1, 1939 speech announcing an invasion that had already started, he said the invasion was an act forced on him, that he had engaged in superhuman efforts to maintain peace, but Poland was preparing for war. Invading Poland was self-defense because Poland was intending to invade Germany, and had already fired shots (they hadn’t). [2] The various wars against the indigenous peoples of what is now the United States, even when they openly involved massacres, were rhetorically justified as self-defense because the indigenous peoples were, so the argument went, essentially hostile to “American” expansion, and therefore an existential threat.
In other words, pre-emptive self-defense says, we are going to invade this other nation while claiming that it isn’t an invasion but self-defense (although we’re the invaders) because they were going to be invaders or would be invaders if they could. That’s nonsense. That’s saying I’m justified in hitting you because I think that, were I in your situation, I would hit me.
It’s such an unintelligible defense that it isn’t even possible to put it into writing without ending up in some kind of grammatical moebius strip. Yet it’s obviously persuasive, so the interesting question is: how does that rhetoric work?
As I’ve often said, I teach and write about train wrecks in public deliberation, what are sometimes called “pathologies of public deliberation.” While there is a lot of interesting and important disagreement about specifics regarding the processes, on the whole, there’s a surprising amount of agreement among scholars of cognitive psychology, political science, communication, history of rhetoric, military history, social psychology, history, and several other fields about some generalizations we can make about what ways of reasoning lead people to unjust, unwise, and untimely decisions. And, basically, that agreement is that if the issues are high-stakes and the policy decisions will have long-term consequences, then relying on cognitive biases will fuck you up good. And not just you, but everyone around you, for a long time.
As it happens, deciding about whether to go to war, how to conduct a war, and whether to negotiate an end to a war are decisions that activate all the anti-deliberative cognitive biases. (Daniel Kahneman has a nice article explaining how some cognitive biases are pro-war.) So, there’s an interesting paradox: cognitive biases interfere with effective decision-making, arguments about whether to go to war (and how to conduct it) have the highest stakes, and those decisions are the most likely to trigger the cognitive biases. We reason the worst when we need to reason the best.
And what I’m saying is that we bring in that bad reasoning to every policy decision when we make everything a war. When people declare that a political disagreement is a state of war (the war on terror, war on Christmas, war on drugs, culture war, war on poverty), they are (often deliberately) triggering the cognitive biases associated with war. The most important of those is that our sense of identification with the in-group strengthens, and our tolerance for in-group dissent decreases. Declaring something a war is a deliberate strategy to reduce policy deliberation. It is deliberately anti-deliberative.
And one of the anti-deliberative strategies we bring in is pre-emptive self-defense. In war, that strategy consists of months of accusing the intended victim (the country that will be invaded) of intending to invade. Then, once the public is convinced that the country presents an existential threat, invasion can look like self-defense. In politics, that strategy consists of spending months or years telling a political base that “the other side” intends an act of war, a complete violation of the rule of law, extraordinary breaches of normal political practices (or claims they already have), then “us” engaging in those practices–even if we are actually the aggressor–looks like self-defense. Pre-emptively. Thus, pro-slavery rhetors insisted that the abolitionists intended to use Federal troops to force abolition on slaver states, pro-internment rhetors argued that Japanese Americans intended to engage in sabotage (Earl Warren said that there had been no sabotage was the strongest proof that sabotage was intended).
I think we’re there with the pro-Trump demagoguery about “voter fraud” (including absentee ballots, the same kind that Trump used–there is no difference between “absentee” and “mail-in” ballots)–it’s setting up a situation in which pro-Trump aggression regarding voting will feel like pre-emptive self-defense.
I asked earlier why it works, and there are a lot of reasons. Some of them have to do with what Kahneman and his co-author said about cognitive biases that favor hawkish foreign policy:
“Several well-known laboratory demonstrations have examined the way people assess their adversary’s intelligence, willingness to negotiate, and hostility, as well as the way they view their own position. The results are sobering. Even when people are aware of the context and possible constraints on another party’s behavior, they often do not factor it in when assessing the other side’s motives. Yet, people still assume that outside observers grasp the constraints on their own behavior.”
In the article, Kahneman and Renshon call these biases “vision problems,” but they’re more commonly known as “the fundamental attribution error” or “asymmetric insight” with a lot of projection mixed in.
The “fundamental attribution error” is that we attribute the behavior of others to internal motivation, but for ourselves we use a mix of internal (for good behavior) and external (for bad behavior) explanations. So, if an out-group member kicks a puppy, we attribute the action to their villainy and aggression; if they pet a puppy, we attribute the action to their wanting to appear good. In both cases, we’re saying that they are essentially bad, and all of their behavior has to be understood through that filter. If we kick a puppy, the act was the consequence of external factors (we didn’t see it, it got in our way); but petting the puppy was something that shows our internal state. In a state of war, even a rhetorical war, we interpret the current and future behavior of the enemy through the lens of their being essentially nefarious.
And we don’t doubt our interpretation of their intentions because of the bias of “asymmetric insight.” We believe that we are complicated and nuanced, but we have perfect insight into the motives and internal processes of others, especially people we believe below us. Since we tend to look down on “the enemy,” we will not only attribute motives to them, but believe that we are infallible in our projection of motives.
And it is projection. I’m not sure whether the metaphor behind “projection” makes sense to a lot of people now, since they might never have seen a projector. A projector took a slide or movie, and projected the image onto a screen. We tend to project onto the Other (an enemy) aspects of ourselves about which we are uncomfortable. If there is someone we want to harm, then projecting onto them our feelings of aggression helps us resolve any guilt we might feel about our aggression.
These three cognitive processes combine to mean that, quite sincerely, if I intend to exterminate you (or your political group, or your political power), I can feel justified in that extermination because I can persuade myself that you intend to exterminate me, since that’s what I intend to do to you.
Pre-emptive self-defense rationalizes my violence on the weird grounds that I intend to exterminate you and so you must desire to exterminate me. Therefore, all norms of law, constitutionality, Christian ethics are off the table, and I am justified in anything I do. It’s a dangerous argument. It’s an argument that justifies an invasion.
[1] And, no, “both sides” are not equally guilty of it. For one thing, there aren’t two sides. On which “side” is a voter who believes that Black Lives Matter, homosexuality is a sin, gay marriage should be illegal, we need a strong social safety net and should increase taxes to pay for it, abortion should be outlawed, the police should be demilitarized and completely changed? What about someone who believes there shouldn’t be any laws prohibiting any sexual practices or drug use, there shouldn’t be a social safety net, taxes should be greatly reduced, abortion should be legal, we shouldn’t intervene in any foreign wars? Those are positions held by important constituencies (in the first case many Black churches, and in the second Libertarians). Some environmentalists are liberals, some social democrats, some Republican, some racist, some Libertarian, some Third way neoliberal. The false mapping of our political world into two sides makes reporting easier and more profitable, and it enables demagoguery.
In addition, not all media engage in demagoguery to the same degree. Bloomberg, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Nation, New York Times, Reason, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post are all media that sometimes dip a toe into demagoguery, but rarely. Meanwhile, The Blaze, DailyKos, Fox, Jacobin, Limbaugh, Maddow, Savage, WND and pretty much every group named by SPLC are all demagoguery all the time.
[2] Hitler was claiming that “Germans” who lived in Poland were oppressed. But, he said, “I must here state something definitely; […]the minorities who live in Germany are not persecuted.” In 1939.