Tag: rhetoric

Rough draft of the intro for the Hitler and Rhetoric book

[Much of this is elsewhere on this blog. I’m curious if I’m still having the problem of being too heady and academic.]

Martin Niemoller was a Lutheran pastor who spent 1938-1945 in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler. Yet, Neimoller had once been a vocal supporter of Hitler, who believed that Hitler would best enact the conservative nationalist politics that he and Niemoller shared. Niemoller was a little worried about whether Hitler would support the churches as much as Niemoller wanted (under the Democratic Socialists, the power of the Lutheran and Catholic churches had been weakened, as the SD believed in a separation of church and state), but Neimoller thought he could outwit Hitler, get the conservative social agenda he wanted, disempower the socialists, and all without harm coming to the church. He was wrong.

After the war, Niemoller famously said about his experience:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.[1]

Niemoller was persuaded that Hitler would be a good leader, or, at least, better than the Socialists. After the war, Niemoller was persuaded that his support for Hitler had been a mistake. What persuaded him either time?

Christopher Browning studied the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and its role in Nazi genocide, narrating how a group of ordinary men could move from being appalled at the killing of unarmed noncombatants to doing so effectively, calculatedly, and enthusiastically. German generals held captive by the British were wiretapped, and often talked about how and why they supported Hitler, many of whom had been opposed to him. In 1950, Milton Mayer went to visit the small German town from which his family had emigrated and talked to the people living there, writing a book about his conversations with ten of them, all of whom to some degree justified not only their actions during the Nazi regime, but the regime itself—even those who had at points or in ways resisted it. Melita Maschmann’s autobiographical Account Rendered, published in 1963, describes how she reconciled her Hitler Youth activities, which included confiscating property and helping to send people to camps, with her sense that National Socialism was idealistic and good. Robert Citino’s The Wehrmacht Retreats, David Stone’s Shattered Genius, and Ian Kershaw’s The End all describe how so many members of the German military elite not only reconciled themselves to working for Hitler, but to following orders that they believed (often correctly) meant disaster and defeat. Benny Morris’ Roots of Appeasement gives a depressing number of examples of major figures and media outlets that persuaded others and were persuaded themselves that Hitler was a rational, reasonable, peace-loving political figure whose intermittent eliminationist and expansionist rhetoric could be dismissed. Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland similarly describes American figures who were persuaded that Hitler wouldn’t start another war; accounts of the 1936 Olymplic Games, hosted by the Nazis, emphasize that Nazi efforts were successful, and most visitors went away believing that accounts of anti-Jewish violence and discrimination were overstated. Biographers of Hitler all have discussions of his great rhetorical successes at various moments, enthusiastic crowds, listeners converted to followers, and individuals who walked out of meetings with him completely won over. Soldiers freezing to death in a Russian winter wrote home about how they still had faith in Hitler’s ability to save them; pastors and priests who believed that they were fighting to prevent the extermination of Christianity from Germany still preached faith in Hitler, blaming his bad advisors; ordinary Germans facing the corruption and sadism of the Nazi government and the life-threatening consequences of Hitler’s policies similarly protection their commitment to Hitler and bemoaned the “little Hitlers” below him who were, they said, the source of the problems. The atrocities of Nazism required active participation, support, and at least acquiescence on the part of the majority of Germans—the people shooting, arresting, boycotting, humiliating, and betraying victims of Nazism were not some tiny portion of the population, and those actions required that large numbers walk by. Some people were persuaded to do those things, and some people were persuaded to walk past.

After the war, what stunned the world was that Germans had been persuaded to acts of irrationality and cruelty previously unimaginable. Understanding what happened in Germany requires understanding persuasion. And understanding persuasion means not thinking of it as a speaker who casts a spell over an audience and immediately persuades them to be entirely different. Rhetoric, which Aristotle defined as the art of finding the available means of persuasion, isn’t just about what a rhetor (a speaker or author) consciously decides to do to manipulate a passive audience. What the case of Hitler shows very clearly is that we are persuaded by many things, not all of them words spoken by a person consciously trying to change our beliefs. Rhetoric helps us understand our own experience, and the most powerful kind of persuasion is self-persuasion. What a rhetor like Hitler does is give us what scholars of rhetoric call “topoi” (essentially talking points) and strategies such that we feel comfortable and perhaps deeply convinced that a course of action is or was the right one. Rhetoric is about justification as much as motivation. That isn’t how people normally think about persuasion and rhetoric, and, paradoxically, that’s why we don’t see when we’ve been persuaded of a bad argument—because we’re wrong about how persuasion works.

This book is about Hitler, and yet not about Hitler. It’s really about persuasion, and why we shouldn’t imagine persuasion as a magically-gifted speaker who seduces people into new beliefs and actions they will regret in the morning. It’s never just one speaker, it’s never just speech, it’s never even just discourse, the beliefs and actions aren’t necessarily very new, and people don’t always really regret them in the morning.

[1] There are various versions. This one is from here: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392

Arguing against injustice: Louis Goldblatt before the Tolan Committee

In 1942, after years of fear-mongering about “the Japanese,” the US was seriously considering race-based mass imprisonment of legal aliens and citizens of Japanese ethnicity. The Tolan Committee was formed by a progressive Congressman to have hearings on the West Coast about whether such imprisonment (euphemistically called “evacuation”) should happen. Louis Goldblatt, representing the California State Industrial Union Council, was one of few people to do a fiery anti-imprisonment speech. This is the record of the speech.

       

How trolls get played

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-8-prototypes-for-trumps-border-wall-photos

There are many ways in which working class people have the same political “interests” (the term used for goals, needs, policies). Concerns like good public schools, good roads, good police protection, affordable housing, affordable access to good healthcare, and so on aren’t limited to one kind of working class group. But they are necessarily class issues in two ways: first, rich people aren’t as dependent on the government to provide various services and so, if they only think in their short-term narrow self-interest, they can think that a strong social safety net isn’t a high priority. Rich people don’t need to care whether public schools are good, since they can send their kids to private schools. They can set up gated communities with good roads and private security forces. They don’t have to care whether there is low-income housing or affordable health insurance since they can pay for the expensive versions of both. Second, if all the working class got together—regardless of their membership in various sub-groups (religion, race, region)—it’s likely that they would advocate for stronger social safety nets, and it might end up with rich people and corporations having to pay higher taxes than either do now.

So, if rich people didn’t want to have to pay money to help working class people, what they would need to do would be to persuade working class people not to band together, not to think about their issues in policy terms. They would try to persuade some large part of the working class that their interests are the same as the rich.[1]

And the easiest way to do that (and the way it’s always been done) is to create an “out-group” (Those People) and persuade some large number of the working class that, as long as they’re doing something that harms Those People, they are winning. You can also tell them that their superiority over That Group would be threatened by [a policy that would actually benefit them]. It’s awful how well that works.

What a lot of people don’t realize about how slavery worked was that it enabled rich planters to exploit poorer whites. Proslavery rhetoric identified slaveholding with “being white,” as a wonderful life possibly available to every white man. Proslavery rhetoric also told poor whites that, no matter how poor they were, they were better than the richest or most successful non-white. Proslavery rhetoric guaranteed honor to every white man.[2] Conditions were pretty bad for poor whites in the South, with less access to public education, less industry, and various other issues, than people like them in some other areas, but proslavery rhetoric thwarted poor white political action by very rich people claiming solidarity with the poor whites they were underpaying, overworking, and often screwing over.

The same thing happened in prosegregation rhetoric (as the very Southern WB Cash pointed out in the 40s): rich whites could prevent any kind of labor action by pointing out that unions allowed non-whites to join. They created a kind of “herrenvolk democracy“–a race-based democracy that, instead of material gain, gave poor whites whiteness as a prize (a prize only meaningful if denied to others).  A lot of poor (and screwed-over) whites would rather get screwed over by rich whites than admit they had common cause with African Americans (a point Cash made). Segregation (white supremacist) rhetoric said that, no matter how poor you are, you are better than the richest or most successful non-white. In other words, pro-segregation rhetoric didn’t argue the really complicated policy issues about segregation (especially the significant harms for all working class people of the rejection of unions, hostility to support for public schools, aversion to good science education, and shoddy labor laws). It got assent by redirecting policy issues to simple zero-sum Us v. Them arguments.

In other words, white supremacist rhetoric (proslavery or prosegregation) meant that people voted on issues entirely on the basis of whether they were voting for something that would preserve their racial status. And, if the policy harmed the “other” race, that was good enough. Thus, they could often get tricked into voting for something that preserved their racial status, and harmed them in every other way—poor whites supported employment laws, laws about schools, restrictive laws about literacy that hurt them because they were happy that those laws hurt non-whites more. That’s the next step in this process of getting citizens in a democracy not to argue politics—reframe all policy issues into the question of whether the policy hurts (yay!) or helps (boo!) the out-group, regardless of what it does for the in-group.

It’s a really Machiavellian way to go about getting support for a policy, and it works far too often. If you persuade your base that every political issue is us v. them, and that the world is a zero-sum of us v. them, then you can persuade your base to support policies that hurt them as long as they believe it hurts “the other group” more.

The term for this is a “wedge” issue. You get a wedge into a group that really should be allied (such as the Irish and the freed African Americans in the early 19th century), and you separate them, and race is a great way to do that (so is religion). Poor people (regardless of race or religion) generally have the same policy goals; working class people have the same political needs regardless of race. It wasn’t just the South that did this. In the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats gained the support of the poor Irish for policies that didn’t help them purely on the grounds that those policies hurt African Americans more.

Putting politics in terms of us v. them enables the screwing-over of people rests on first creating a lot of resentment of the out-group, and often scapegoating, including scapegoating the out-group for the consequences the in-group policy will have. Sources on every side of the American political spectrum agree that the American skilled working class has been hurt, and sensible sources agree that the causes are complicated. Mechanization, globalization, and union-busting have significantly hurt the skilled working class, and yet immigrants are scapegoated for unemployment (immigrants didn’t cause jobs to leave the US, and immigrants didn’t take union jobs). But, once that resentment against immigrants (or any other group) is created, and a base is persuaded to think that it’s a zero-sum between Us and Them, then all a party has to do is get its base to vote and behave in ways that hurt Them.

Under those conditions, it seems unnecessary to argue policies, and that may even be the intent. Slaveholders didn’t want slavery debated—at all. They wanted it to appear that you either fully supported slavery in every possible way or you were actively advocating race war against whites. Any restriction of slavery would hurt them after all, and any reasonable and thorough debate of the institution of slavery would lead to restriction. And so, slaveholders were so committed to prohibiting deliberation of slavery that they talked themselves into unnecessarily aggressive policies that alienated people who didn’t really care about slavery (through things like the Gag Rule, Bleeding Kansas, assaulting a Senator in the Senate, the Fugitive Slave Law, the war with Mexico, the Dred Scott decision, pushing “black codes” on “free” states, the open advocacy of forcing “free” states to allow slavery). The South would have done better to have allowed open debate about slavery. But even people who didn’t own slaves were persuaded that it was either “us” (advocating unrestricted slavery) or “them” (rabid abolitionists who wanted race war). So, any violence against “them,” any policy they hated—that was good enough.

There are lots of examples in history when communities were dominated by this kind of “as long as it makes Them unhappy, I’m good with this policy” thinking. That’s worth considering—if this is a good way for people to make decisions, we should be able to point to times it worked out well. And I yet to find an example of a time it did work well for any length of time as a way of a large group making policy decisions. I can think of lots of examples of times it was disastrous—it’s what motivated Athenians to send troops on campaigns that were guaranteed failures, or support campaigns that were failing (as in the Sicilian Expedition). The whole philosophy is captured in the saying, “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

But, in the short run, it can seem like a good idea. It’s a great way for a TV channel, organization, radio show, politician, or political party to build a base (after all, you probably said to yourself, “THEY DO IT TOO!”), and it’s more fun to engage in the two-minute hate about the other group than get into the weeds of the various political options available. In the long run, though, if you make decisions purely on the basis of whether it pisses someone you hate off, you’re making bad decisions, often ones that hurt you.

And, if all you try to do in social media is piss off the other side, you were persuaded to do that by someone who knows how useful it is for them. Trolls think they’re just doing it for the lulz. They aren’t. They think they aren’t earnest. Their refusal to think very clearly about their actions is carefully and earnestly encouraged by media, political parties, and interests that find their mindless resentment of Them very profitable. Trolls might think they’re in it for the lulz, but someone is into their activity for the bucks. Bucks the trolls aren’t getting.

Trolls think they’re playing earnest people earnestly involved in political deliberation; on the contrary, they’re getting earnestly played.

 

 

[1] What’s interesting about the current attempt to keep working class people from seeing their concerns as shared with others in their economic system is that it’s only in the short-term narrow self-interest of corporations and rich people to thwart discussion about what would help the working class. After all, it benefits everyone in a nation if the populace is well-educated, scientifically literate, if they have access to good healthcare, a strong infrastructure, low crime, and public servants (teachers, fire fighters, police, public defenders, social workers) who are well-paid, well-trained, selectively hired, and enjoy helping the public regardless of class, race, religion, and so on. That’s a good world for everyone.

[2] Another thing a lot of people who admire the institution of slavery and the CSA don’t realize is that whiteness was actually not what we now imagine it to be—for instance, neither eastern Europeans nor Italians were considered white, and Catholics also had a shaky claim on the term.