I got interested in demagoguery, and panicky about democracy, in about 2000, when I acquired an acquaintance (call him Chester) who relied entirely on Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the National Academy of Scholars. That acquaintance was helpful for me to understand how some people think about what it means to be informed and how to make political decisions. For instance, it surprised me that, when he would make a claim to me, and I would always prove him wrong, it never made him reconsider his sources. Also, he would later never remember that interaction. He never remembered being wrong. That was interesting.
He was also interesting for letting me know what the new politically correct line was for the GOP. Political correctness originally referred to the way that Stalin would announce a shift in position (Nazis are enemies, Nazis are allies, Nazis are enemies) and people who wanted to have the correct line immediately adopted it. He went from ranting about how terrible Democrats are because they want to invade privacy to enthusiastic support for the PATRIOT Act.
His way of arguing was interesting. Sometimes, what he said was simply wrong, but more often, what he did was to give a datum that was true (“2 + 2 = 4”), and use that datum to support a claim it didn’t actually logically support (which was always “Democrats are evil”). Early on in our acquaintance, he made some claim about nuclear power plants that was simply wrong, and I cited an article in The Economist that showed he was. He didn’t admit he was wrong; he was simply astonished I read The Economist.
He couldn’t imagine that someone like me would read sources with which I disagree. That was projection on his part. He engaged in a lot of that. He never read anything, unless it was required for work, that might trouble his very clear, and very angry, worldview.
He taught me two things. First, people like him–who thought he understood what is a logical argument–really don’t. That the datum is true doesn’t mean the argument is true. The datum might not be logically related to the argument. But that is how a lot of people reason. It’s confirmation bias masking itself as rational argument. He was a complete sucker for any “This Democrat is evil because cars have engines” arguments—that is, arguments about Democrats being terrible supported by data completely unrelated to the claim. But, and this is interesting: he would have seen how bad the logic was had exactly the same argument been made about Republicans.
He was a person thinking himself rational when he was just drowning in confirmation bias and outrage flavor-aid. Confirmation bias means that we scramble around looking for data that support our beliefs, and accept any data that supports our beliefs as objective and true while rejecting as “biased” anything that contradicts what we want to believe. We can’t cite a principle (other than in-group fanaticism) that would explain why we take this datum as proof that They are bad, and exactly similar datum as not relevant to whether We are bad.
That doesn’t make him any different from most of us. And that is the problem. He thought his beliefs were rational and true because he could find evidence to support them. But, even when the data was true, the inference wasn’t. He sucked at logic, but he was fine at facts. It isn’t about facts; it’s about logic.
Second, his commitment to his group was nonfalsifiable. I sometimes (rarely) tried to bring that up, and he deflected the issue of his beliefs being nonfalsifiable by saying “They are just as bad.” Again, that’s completely illogical. His binary of us (people with his pretty narrow political agenda) versus them was illogical, in that it was nonfalsifable, and relied on arguments he would have rejected if applied to him. It was an unprincipled argument.
He couldn’t find a logical principle that would support his judgments, but his judgments were all supported by the ideological principle that They are terrible.
And that “They are terrible” is persuasive in the media sphere in which he was cocooned because of the math of demagoguery.
Imagine that there are two parties: Rottweiler and Pitbull. You vote Rottweiler, and you hate Pitbulls. If you are irrational in your commitment to the Rottweiler party, you will start to engage in a weird kind of accounting. Any instance of Rottweiler misbehavior is erased if you can cite any instance of Pitbull misbehavior. So, if a Rottweiler Senator is caught openly taking bribes from the Squirrel Conspiracy, you will think that doesn’t count because the Assistant Associate Assistant to the Mayor of Peculiar, Missouri is Pitbull, and once let someone buy him a milkshake.
That’s the math of demagoguery. That was Chester’s math.
As lots of people point out, if you falsely categorize the world into us v. them, and you live in the careful cocoon of what your in-group media tells you what they believe, then you are saying that rottweilers are the best because there was this one pitbull that attacked people. You are in the bizarre math of “us v. them” reasoning.
He never listened to anyone who disagreed; everything he knew about what “They” believe came from his in-group sources. He and I once had a conversation about a book that he’d never read, and yet which he was convinced was indefensibly bad. I tried to point out that maybe he should read it, but that went nowhere. That was how he reasoned–his in-group sources told him it was bad because it made [this argument], and even though I told him (and I’d actually read it) that it hadn’t made argument, he wasn’t willing to listen. And he also told me, on two occasions, that all leftists (including Chomsky and Orwell) don’t believe in any kind of realist notion about epistemology or language (they do—he admitted he’d never read either author).
Sometimes he said things that were actively false, and I’d send him links, and he would find ways to dismiss any evidence that his sources were bad. He is the angriest person I know, and the most misinformed.
If you thought this blog post was about how terrible Republicans are, then you’re reasoning like Chester.
I don’t think there are two sides, but I think there is demagoguery, and I think demagoguery is all over the political spectrum (but not equally so).
Demagoguery isn’t a rhetoric that powerful people use to seduce the clueless and powerless objects of persuasion. Demagoguery is how far too many people reason, and how far too much media frames issues.
In a culture of demagoguery, rhetors promoting demagoguery (all over the political spectrum, and in venues from political debates to neighborhood mailing lists):
• insist (and sincerely believe) that our political options are divided between the obviously right option and the one advocated by people with actively bad motives (and the dupes who are seduced into supporting the obviously bad choice) because they only consume media that tells them that is the case;
• argue deductively from in-group premises. So they say that, for instance, “high taxes decrease incentive, so they decrease innovation, so they hurt an economy” or “supporting a centrist candidate is wrong, so if we want a progressive political agenda, we should refuse to support centrists.” Neither of those claims is either falsifiable or empirically defensible.
• argue that they are right because they can find data to support their claims, even if the data is material out of context, actively false, or irrelevant.
• express outrage, pretending that their outrage is principled, when it’s really just outrage about out-group behavior, and not principled outrage about the action.
We are not in a post-fact world. Saying that we are is exactly what got us here. It’s suggesting that a good argument has true facts. Terrible arguments can have true facts.
Engaging in effective and reasonable political deliberation isn’t about whether you have facts. We all have facts.
It’s about whether your facts are relevant to the claim you’re making, whether they prove the point you’re making (as opposed to simply being an illustrative example), whether they mean what you say they mean in context, and whether that “fact” would be just as meaningful if it supported a claim you don’t like.
We aren’t in a post-fact world; we’re in a post-logic one.