My area of expertise is how communities make bad decisions—train wrecks in public deliberation. These are times that big and small communities made a decision that resulted in an unforced disaster.
And the way this happens is oddly consistent. From the Athenians deciding to invade Sicily to Robert McNamara refusing to listen to good advice as to what to do in regard to Vietnam, individuals and communities that make disastrous decisions have a similar approach to disagreement:
• The most persuasive/powerful rhetors persuaded large numbers of people that this actually complicated issue is really just a just a question of dominance between Us and Them (and Them is always a hobgoblin).
• The more that oppositional rhetors accept that false framing of policy questions—Us v.Them—the more that they help (unintentionally or intentionally) those who hold the most power in the community. They’re helping to prevent thorough deliberation about the complicated situation.
• Once things are framed this way, then legitimate questions of policy can’t get argued in reasonable ways. If you disagree about in-group policy, then you’re really consciously or unconsciously out-group. Public disagreements aren’t about whether a proposed policy is feasible, likely to solve the problem, worth what it’s likely to cost, might have unintended consequences—they’re really about who you are and where your loyalties are.
• Instead of trying to give voters useful information about the policy agenda of various groups, media accepts the frame of policy disagreements as really a conflict between two groups and proceeds to treat policy disagreements through a motivistic and race horse frame because it seems “objective.” It isn’t. It’s toxic af, and depolitizes politics.
• Even worse is the rhetoric that reframes policy disagreements as an issue of dominance. As though, instead of people who can work together reasonably to find good solutions, politics is some kind of thunderdome fight.
What I’m saying, and have tried to say in so many books, is that the first error that makes a train wreck likely is to deflect the responsibilities of reasonable policy argumentation by saying that there is no such thing as reasonable disagreement about this issue. In those circumstances, to ask for reasonable policy deliberation on this issue is taken as proof that you’re not really in-group, and therefore you can be ignored. Under those circumstances, we too often end up with a politics of purity.
There’s an unfortunately expensive book Extremism and the Politics of Uncertainty that is a collection of essays from a symposium of political psychologists. And what turns up again and again in that book is that, when faced with an uncertain and complicated situation, people have a tendency to become more “extreme” in their commitment to the in-group. I would say that the scholars are describing a desire for more in-group purity—that the in-group should expel or convert dissenters, members of the in-group should be more purely committed, the in-group should refuse to work with other groups, and the policies should be more pure. While I understand why the scholars in the book describe this process as more “extreme,” I think it’s more useful to think about it in terms of purity. After all, it’s very possible for people to believe that we must purify ourselves of everyone who isn’t a centrist.
By “politics of purity” I mean a rhetoric (and policy agenda) that says that our problems are caused by the presence in the in-group of people who are not fully committed to an individual (the leader), a specific policy agenda, or the group. In any of three forms (and they’re not fully distinct, as I’ll explain below), the attraction of this approach to politics comes, I think, from its mingling ways of thinking about the power of belieeeving, what I think of as the P-Funk fallacy, the just world fallacy, what Eric Fromm calls “escape from freedom,” social dominance orientation, and the process(es) described by the political psychologists in the collection mentioned above. (Probably a few others.)
If you take all that and create a politics of purity oriented toward an individual (people must have a pure faith in the leader), then it’s charismatic leadership. The advantage to a leader of creating a politics of purity about an individual is that, as Hitler observed, policies can be completely reversed without losing followers. It’s worth remembering that, even as Allied troops were crashing through the west and Soviet troops through the east, and the horrors of the Holocaust were indisputable, about 25% of Germans still supported Hitler. They believed he’d been badly served by his underlings. For complicated reasons, this is pretty common–admitting that one’s commitment to a leader is irrational, let alone a mistake, is incredibly difficult for people. Often, in-group members don’t even know what the leader’s policies are, and are therefore completely wrong about what the leader has done, is doing, or intends to do.
It’s also important to note that charismatic leadership is never on its own. People enter a charismatic leadership relationship because there is an effective media promoting a particular narrative about the leader. In fact, refusing to pay attention to criticism of the leader is one of the ways that people keep their commitment pure.
Insisting on a pure commitment to a policy agenda has a pretty clear history of factionalism, splitting, heresy-hunting, and even politicide, generally to the detriment of the group, and, paradoxically enough, to their ability to get their agenda through. There’s so much purifying of a group (i.e., expelling heretics) that there isn’t time for making strategic alliances with partially compatible individuals or groups. And, often, such alliances are demonized (often literally, as in the history of Christianity–just think about the wars of extermination engaged in against other Christians).
The second (purity of commitment to a specific policy agenda), I think, tends to morph either into the first (charismatic leadership, as happened with Stalin) or the third (a pure commitment to the group). It seems to me that, in the latter case, it’s a charismatic leadership relationship, but oriented toward the group, and it has all the dangers of charismatic leadership. “Believe, obey, fight,” as Mussolini said–he didn’t say, “Reason. Listen. Deliberate.”
There’s inevitably a move to retell history in terms of what will enhance obedience and fanatical loyalty rather than accuracy. Instead of hagiographies about the individual leader, the history(ies) of the group are entirely positive, triumphalist, and dismissive of criticism. Orwell talked a lot about this in various writings, especially Homage to Catalonia and his journalism.
What all three politics of purity do is depoliticize politics, by expelling, criminalizing, demonizing, or dismissing reasonable disagreements about policies. They characterize disagreement as a failure on the part of some people to see what is obviously the correct course of action.
We disagree about policies not because there are people who have gone into Plato’s cave and emerged knowing the true policies we all need to have, and others who are looking at shadows on the wall, but because any policy affects different people in different ways. While not all positions are equally valid, I don’t think there is a policy on any major issue that is the only reasonable one. We disagree about policies because, as Hannah Arendt says, political action is always a leap into the uncertain and unknown.
