train wrecks in public deliberation Archives

Snopes, Fox, and “Biased” Sources

showing full version of a Talarico quote

Fans of Fox News and various pro-Trump and pro-GOP pundits/media reject Snopes, PolitiFact, and various other fact checking sources as a reliable source. They say those sources are “biased,” since those sites make more corrections of pro-GOP/pro-Trump popular claims than of Dems, critics of Trump, or what they call “liberals.”

Here’s the important point: they don’t refute the fact checking. They don’t go into the data and show that the facts were actually correct, or that Trump (or whoever) didn’t actually say it, or that it was misrepresented, or in any way respond to the assertion.

Their only evidence is that those sources find more falsehoods among pro-GOP and pro-Trump pundits and politicians, and, therefore, those sources are biased.

Their only argument is “more cases”—that is, preponderance equals bias. Yet, that is a way of arguing that they themselves reject.

By that logic, Fox is biased, since it spends more time showing what’s wrong with “liberals” than with the politicians and party they support.

By that logic, every pundit, talk show, news source, video that doesn’t spend equal time correcting or condemning both parties is biased. By that logic, the police are biased, since they pull over a disproportionate number of people of color. They would conclude that all instances of disproportionate representation are instances of bias–arrest rates, gender in C-level positions, application of the death penalty. But they don’t.

People who trust media like Fox, and who reject sources like Snopes, aren’t applying the same standards of evidence for what constitutes a “biased source.” They don’t have a consistent way of assessing “bias.” They’re using motivated reasoning to dismiss information they are too threatened or too irrationally partisan to consider.

Motivated reasoning is when you “reason” that this evidence is objective, and that evidence is biased, purely on the basis of what supports what you already believe. What makes clear that it’s motivated reasoning, and not some actually reasonable position, is when people reject the conclusions that the same reasoning process offers if it means a conclusion they don’t like. For instance, were the “Snopes is biased because they mostly show pro-GOP lies” a reasonable position, and not just motivated reasoning, then that person would hold all media to the same standards. And would conclude that a disproportionate representation was a sign of bias.

In other words, either the argument that Snopes and so on are biased is an illogical argument, based on a way of reasoning even they themselves reject, or they have to accept that their own sources of information are biased, as are various systems such as policing.

They can’t play it both ways while claiming to be reasonable.

And, if anyone responds to this by refuting the argument that policing is biased by explaining why police pulling over more people of color with data or arguments, they’re proving my point that the rejection of Snopes and so on simply on the basis of numbers is a thoroughly indefensible. Why not respond that way to the specific instance Snopes et al. are describing?

When I point this out to someone who dismisses Snopes as “biased” on the basis of the numbers argument, they then retreat to “Well, the people who run it are liberals, so they’re biased.”

Okay, so that’s a new criterion for “bias”—that the source has a policy agenda. And, let me just say, this is one of the signs of a position that is not grounded in reason (and we all have some positions like that). If we say, “A is good because A is B” (all bunnies are good because they have floppy ears), and someone points out that not all bunnies have floppy ears, or that some floppy-eared bunnies are not good, they’re pointing out that we haven’t really thought out something we’re claiming is a principle. If we suddenly move the goalposts, it’s a sign of motivated reasoning.

And, again, an inconsistently applied criterion. If information from Snopes should be dismissed as biased because its owners are liberal, then everything from Fox should be dismissed as biased because its owners openly support the GOP and Trump. They are biased. When I’ve pointed this out to people, suddenly the meaning of “biased” changes. (I first learned this arguing with Stalinists when I was living in Berkeley.)

Suddenly, “biased” means perspectives with which I don’t agree, and that’s an unreasonable position. Saying that “anything that isn’t my viewpoint is biased” is biased–it’s refusing to consider potentially important information. It’s reassuring to maintain the pretense of having a political stance grounded in principle, but if the principle is abandoned on a regular basis, it isn’t really a principle. It’s just a handy thing to swat away uncomfortable information.

One of the qualities of train wrecks in public deliberation is that people attach themselves to a principle, and try to claim the moral highground because of that attachment, and then, when a contradiction is pointed out, they refuse to acknowledge the contradiction. Nazi ideology was comforting to people who could think of themselves as Aryan, but it was internally wildly inconsistent, and now groups that would not have been considered Aryan are pro-Nazi. Various forms of Social Darwinism (which is just an old wine in a new bottle—the basic principle predates Darwin, and it’s a philosophy he never endorsed) say that the triumph of a group is proof of its superiority, unless another group triumphs. And then… cue whining.

And that’s what’s going on with the claim that they reject Snopes without consideration as they have a principled objection to bias. They don’t. They like bias. They just don’t want to have their political commitment complicated.

They deflect uncomfortable information by rejecting the source (often a fallacy) purely on the basis of preponderance (always a fallacy, as they themselves recognize at other moments). What they’re saying is an interesting statement about them—that they’re incapable of responding reasonably to criticism, and so they deflect it. Maybe instead think about why it doesn’t seem possible to refute the claims reasonably? Maybe that’s a sign your position is unreasonable?

The trouble with necessary counterfactuals. Or, Hitler and Art School

I’ve become fascinated by a specific kind of counterfactual argument that is often made, but is constraining and damaging in deliberation. Let’s call it the “necessary counterfactual.” It’s structurally unstable, but people tend not to see that, and often find it compelling. And its weaknesses are hard to explain.

Just to be clear: I’m not arguing the counterfactuals are always bad—they’re inescapable in policy deliberations, whether personal or “political.” Any causal argument implies a counterfactual (if I say that you feel sick because you ate a party-size bag of knock-off chocolate-covered fried bananas, I’m implying that you wouldn’t feel sick if you hadn’t).

The problems arise when the connections are asserted and assumed to be so necessarily connected that all dissent or disagreement is delegitimated.

For instance: When confronted with an expansionist and aggressive leader (Hitler) decision makers (the French and British) chose appeasement. Appeasement didn’t work; therefore, it is obvious that maximum aggression would have worked. We are now in a similar situation (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq), so it is obvious that we must do what would have worked then, and engage in maximum aggression.

Here’s the structure of the logic:
In [Situation Z], policymakers adopted [Policy A], and [Policy A] went badly; therefore, the correct policy must have been [Not-A]. [Policy B] is not-A; therefore, it is obvious that [Policy B] would have worked. We are now in a situation similar to [Situation Z]; therefore, it is obvious that we must adopt [Policy B], since that would have worked the prior time.

The “logic” is something like this:

A –>B; therefore ~A –>~B.

(A led to B, therefore not-A leads to not-B.) Appeasement led to failure; therefore, not-appeasement would have led to success.

What makes the “logic” of this kind of argument so troubling is the degree to which it assumes necessary consequences and necessary implications—the way that it shuts down reasonable disagreement.

This kind of “logic” ignores several important points:

1) That A didn’t work doesn’t necessarily mean that this not-A would have worked.

That sentence has a lot of negatives (which is probably why it’s hard for people to grasp). But my point is that this way of thinking assumes two false binaries that are falsely assumed to be necessarily connected.

There are plenty of events/policies other than maximum aggression that might have prevented Hitler’s coming to power, starting WWII, engaging in the multiple genocides: his getting into art school, von Hindenburg and von Papen refusing to work with him, the Reichstag growing a spine and refusing to pass the Enabling Act, anti-Nazi parties making a coalition, one of the assassination attempts working, a treaty that wasn’t as punitive as the Versailles Treaty, the US joining the League of Nations, economic policies that would have meant the Great Depression didn’t happen, Germany refusing to back Austria’s play in 1914, a different response on the part of the French in May of 1940, Napoleon III not taking the bait and declaring war in 1870…

2) Evidence isn’t proof.

Counterfactuals are generally supported by telling a story about what would have happened had the other course been taken. That maximum aggression would have worked with Hitler is argued through the telling of a compelling narrative. But that it’s compelling doesn’t mean it was likely, let alone guaranteed.

One narrative is that a military response to Hitler’s remilitarizing the Rhineland would have led to a military coup that would have removed Hitler from power. But the only evidence that a coup was even considered are things said in self-serving and jaw-droppingly dishonest post-war memoirs on the part of Nazis military leaders, who lied about everything else (such as the Wehrmacht’s participation in genocide), so why suddenly decide they’re being honest about that coup plot? Particularly since there is no other supporting evidence. A military response, which Hitler thought was likely, wouldn’t have stopped him from regaining that territory (they were going to get it anyway in a few years), and it wouldn’t have persuaded him to change his mind about his long-term plans. What might have made a difference would have been a more successful response to the Nazi invasion of France, and there are counterfactuals about what would have been better responses, but even a compelling counterfactual is still a counterfactual.

3) Assuming best case counterfactual scenarios isn’t even evidence.

Richard Ned Lebow makes this point quite neatly in Forbidden Fruit. Counterfactual narratives often make one major change, and then assume that there are necessary consequences of that change, all of which are the consequences most favorable to the argument. So, a military response to Hitler’s actions in the Rhineland would have successfully deterred him, there would have been a coup, it would have been successful (a very weak link in the chain of events), the Nazi military leaders would have put in place a non-aggressive, non-expansionist, and pacific government that would not have tried to refight the Great War.

There are other stories one might tell that are also plausible: it might not have deterred him from invading Czechoslovakia; it might have increased anti-war sentiment in France and Britain; there probably wouldn’t have been a coup; it was very unlikely that a coup would have been successful; Nazis would still have been Nazis.

4) Policies have to be politically available.

Many scholars argue that going to war over the Rhineland was not politically possible for France or Germany. It would have seemed to be a repeat of the Great War, which was (in the 20s and 30s) often narrated as a massive overreaction to a minor incident with no real importance.

5) That A didn’t work doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a not-A that would have worked, one which must be our current choice.

I’m not making some argument about history being determined, or non-contingent; I’m making a point about argument, but I’ll get to that. I’m saying that history is contingent and options are contextual. For instance, there are counterfactuals that I’m persuaded would have prevented WWII, at least in terms of the form it took. I’ll mention two: if Hitler had gotten into art school; if the Franco-Prussian War hadn’t happened.

If we follow the logic of the necessary counterfactual, then the implication of the first is that we should let everyone into art school. Or maybe just all Nazis? Or something.

What are the policy implications of the second counterfactual? Don’t go to war against Bismarck? That’s probably pretty good advice, but unlikely to be useful, and certainly not something that might have helped people trying to figure out what to do about Hitler. Or Vietnam.

So, counterfactuals about the past, even very plausible ones, don’t necessarily determine our current policy choices. We’re not in the realm of obviously correct decisions, but in a world of deliberation.

The problem with necessary counterfactuals is not that they’re counterfactual, but that they’re presented as necessary at every step—this is necessarily what would have happened, and that narrative makes it clear what is necessary for us to do. My point is about how they shut down potentially useful disagreement. My crank theory is that’s exactly why people are drawn to them—they don’t actually reduce uncertainty, but they make us feel less uncertain about the past, present, and future. The narrative about obvious choices is comfortable, since it ends the need to acknowledge uncertainty and risk.

And, obviously, I’m not just talking about Vietnam. Or Hitler. There are a lot of discussions right now about what went wrong such that we have a political party that simply refuses to hold its members accountable, that is openly pursuing competitive authoritarianism and abandoning democracy, and the question is: what should opponents of authoritarianism do now? And that question means thinking about how we got here—it involves counterfactuals. And it should. But what won’t help is swearing fealty to a necessary counterfactual. I mean, it might help people feel less uncertain, but it won’t help figure out our various options.

Demagoguery (again)

demagogic books of various kinds and perspectives

Many years ago, when I was first teaching about demagoguery, a high school friend got in touch with me. He was angry that one of my course documents said that a politician he admired had engaged in demagoguery at some point. The friend said that was “unfair,” without giving any evidence that my clear definition of demagoguery did not apply to his hero. Even defenders of this politician characterize his early rhetoric as demagoguery.

But my high school friend’s reaction seems reasonable from within a popular understanding of demagoguery. The most common way to think about demagoguery is that it is something that demagogues do. It’s an identity issue: a political figure is, or is not a demagogue. And demagogues are bad people with bad motives who use bad rhetoric to persuade the gullible masses to support bad policies.

That’s a bad way to think about demagoguery. For one thing, it’s rabidly self-serving. If demagogues are bad people, and their followers are gullible, then we are never going to identify beloved in-group rhetors as demagogues.

They (out-groups) have demagogues; We (our in-groups) have excellent communicators.

I’ve described elsewhere how I ended up on demagoguery, and why I’m more interested in cultures of demagoguery than individual demagogues.

My argument is that there are always individuals engaged in demagoguery; when demagoguery is likely to lead to authoritarian figures or disastrous policies is when there is a culture of demagoguery—when it’s common for major sources of information to frame policy disagreements as really a zero-sum existential, even apocalyptic, battle between Us and Them, when inclusive deliberation is treated as a trap set by villains, a weakness, a step down the slippery slope to [dogs lying with cats! Tattoos being legally required! The in-group being forced into FEMA camps!].

The important point about a culture of demagoguery, whether it’s how a neighborhood mailing list treats issues, or a nation faced with thinking about going to war, is that such a culture prohibits reasonable policy deliberation in favor of mobilizing a base to hate some hobgoblin. That mobilizing consists of rhetoric that says that:
1) the situation is simultaneously dire and simple; the urgency of the situation means that we should not deliberate.
2) our situation is not a complicated one in which there are various options we should consider, but a simple and urgent situation in which the right course of action is obvious to every and any reasonable and good person.
3) therefore, every manly, faithful, and reasonable person knows what the right course of action (i.e., policy) is.
4) because “the ill” or “need” is so obvious, anyone asking that we engage in deliberation about the proposed plan (in terms of feasibility, solvency, unintended consequences, costs) is a weak, overly-intellectual, effeminate, indecisive, cowardly villain or dupe who isn’t taking the “ill” seriously.
5) Therefore, when They argue plan, We argue need. Over and over, exaggerating or fabricating the threat if necessary.
6) And,because the situation is dire, and there are villains out there trying to seduce you into believing their lies, you should only get your information from in-group sources. Any rhetor, source, or information that complicates or contradicts what in-group media is saying is “biased.”

Because what matters is the culture of demagoguery, the solution is not deeper commitment to a purer and more fanatical in-group and its preferred policy, relying even more on in-group sources, or getting defensive about political figures we like, but doing the work necessary to have a broader understanding of policy options. We respond to demagoguery by getting out of demagogic cultures.

How I ended up defining demagoguery as I do

train wreck — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montparnasse_derailment

Why does demagoguery matter? And why does it matter how we define it?

Those two questions are actually in reverse order of importance. People sometimes seem to think that the meaning of a word was baked into the physical matter of the universe, and so has One Meaning To Rule Them All. But, very few terms have only one meaning, and concepts often have disputed meanings. So, what are we trying to do by defining a term.. Often, it’s just so we can agree on referents and thereby communicate more clearly.

If we share a definition of cats that makes them different from dogs, then your story about a “cat” climbing a tree is plausible and maybe even boring. If I think the word “cat” refers to dogs, I might find your story unbelievable and shocking. I would also be dubious about your story if I thought you were referring to a “Cat”—that is, a Caterpillar tractor.

There are consequences of definitions. How terms like “citizen,” “murder,” “minor,” “disabled” are defined can have life-changing consequences.

So, what are we doing when we try to define demagoguery?

For many people who write about demagoguery, it’s about trying to understand how a bad person came to power, mobilize a base, and overthrew democratic norms. So, they look back through history at individuals of whom they disapprove who did those things (or nearly did), and try to see what they had in common. They start with the individuals already on their list of “bad people who did bad things” and then look at the rhetoric. (This is also true of a lot of the political scientists who write about populism.)

I came around to demagoguery via a different route.

I was the kind of kid who turned over rocks to see what was there. My father was a pathologist, and sometimes took me to his lab that had various samples in jars of problematic specimens. I think he was trying to persuade me to become a doctor, but he unintentionally persuaded me that looking at how things go wrong is necessary for understanding what it might mean for things to go right.

I’ve said this elsewhere, but, when I was a graduate student in rhetoric (I have four degrees in it), most scholars seemed to be focused on times that rhetors changed history in positive ways. I unintentionally followed the footsteps of my father, and looked at a debate that should have been a clear win for the group that lost. The decision to dam and flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley was a bad decision; it violated the principles of a national park; it was the most expensive option; the arguments for why it was good not only involved lying about the costs of the various options, but imagined physically impossible improvements. They weren’t bad people, but those were bad arguments.

It was a moment of a complete failure in public deliberation. It was a train wreck because the frame for policy deliberation at the time (efficiency) didn’t allow for the kind of argument that John Muir was trying to make. His arguments about the sacrality of some spaces, the importance of spaces of renewal, the notion that beauty was itself a public good, and even a different sense of who should benefit and how from publics lands were just dismissed, often on the grounds of the kind of person he was.

And the disagreement was much more complicated than either he or the major advocates of the dam acknowledged. It wasn’t two sides. It could look like it was two sides, since it was, ultimately, whether San Francisco should be allowed to dam and flood the valley or not, but it was actually a lot of groups (a corrupt water company, Progressives who hoped to make a point about public ownership of basic needs, a fairly loony and thoroughly dishonest [or maybe incompetent] engineer tasked with providing numbers that no one checked, boosters who wanted a splashy exposition, conservationists v. preservationists).

When I was writing my dissertation about John Muir and the Hetch Hetchy Valley debate, the dominant narrative about American policies in regard to nature was by a really, really sloppy scholar who had a binary narrative in which Christians and Christianity were the cause of American exploitation of nature. So, since I didn’t have great mentors at that time, I decided that my first book would be a refutation of his argument by writing a history of American attitudes toward nature, showing that it wasn’t a binary, let alone that Christians and Christianity were the villains.

I started with the 17th century American Puritans (where he started), and it turned out that not only was their attitude toward nature pretty complicated, but that they wrecked a lot of trains.

I’ll spare you the whole narrative, but what it comes down to is that my area of expertise ended up being times when communities had all the information they needed in order to make good decisions, and they didn’t. They wrecked the train.

It was never the case of a spell-binding individual who hypnotized a passive public into supporting policies they would never otherwise have supported. It was never about a rhetor who swept a people in his wake.

While there often were powerful people who did mobilize a base, they were just the scum on the top of a wave that wasn’t caused by any single individual. In many cases (e.g., eugenics, anti-immigration legislation, slavery, segregation, Japanese internment, various unnecessary wars), there wasn’t an individual primarily responsible for the bad decisions. The go-to example of a demagogue (Hitler) was notoriously uninventive in the claims he was making about Jews, WWI, and so on. These disastrous decisions weren’t one forced by the masses over the objections and resistance of the elite or experts. In the cases when individuals did end up front and center (when the culture of demagoguery enabled a charismatic leadership situation, as in the case of Hitler), that leader rose because they had elite support. They also always had experts on their side.

So what struck me in the various cases was that, while they didn’t have in common some individual rhetor who transmogrified a public, they did have a similar rhetorical culture—they had similar ways of framing deliberation (sometimes in general and sometimes just about one topic). There was no such thing as a complicated problem. The conflict was between good people who saw what the obvious right answer was and people who were stupid, corrupt, duped, or just plain spit from the bowels of Satan. Much of the rhetoric was about decision-making—that what was needed was not some kind of careful review of the information, inclusive deliberation, consideration of long-term consequences but strength of will, fanatical loyalty to the in-group and in-group representatives, silencing or expelling/exterminating) the Out-group and its stooges, mobilizing (or silencing) any non in-group members, and full commitment to whatever policies seemed to most oriented toward domination and extermination. These communities emphasized believing rather than thinking, let alone listening. They were also communities in which it was easy to remain in a monologic informational world—so, even if there were diverse media options (that is, not all media advocated the same message), it was difficult and sometimes nearly impossible for an individual to hear them all. People were in informational enclaves, perhaps by choice, and perhaps because of region or access or something else.

Once I started looking at it this way, it became clear that it was a question of degrees of several factors (described at the beginning of Rhetoric and Demagoguery). So, a community might drift into this kind of rhetorical culture briefly or on one issue, with no particular harm, and possibly even benefit (as John Muir did with his article on the Hetch Hetchy Valley). Demagoguery isn’t necessarily insincere (in fact, I’d guess it’s most often very sincere), and not restricted to bad people (Earl Warren did a lot of good things). Looking at demagoguery is part of what persuaded me of the fundamental toxicity of the left/right way of talking about politics. Where would one put Theodore Bilbo, Earl Warren, or LBJ on that continuum?

Because I am constitutionally averse to inventing new terms, I not tocome up with a new term for the kind of rhetoric and rhetorical culture, but instead to adopt the existing term closest to what I was describing: demagoguery. (I sometimes regret that decision.)

That’s why I’m not interested in demagogues, I don’t think people who engage in demagoguery are necessarily evil, I don’t even think demagoguery is always bad. The more that a culture is demagogic, the more that powerful rhetors engage in demagoguery, the more that there is a dominant demagoguery about a specific group, and the more that people are in informational enclaves, the more likely that train is headed to the station. And not in a good way.
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What should opponents of authoritarianism do?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

[I posted this on FB, but I should have posted it here also.]

People keep asking me what opponents of our authoritarian administation should be doing, and it’s pretty straightforward in the abstract but very much up for argument in the specific:

DO WHAT HAS WORKED IN THE PAST, AND DON’T DO WHAT HAS NEVER WORKED.

Things that, as far as I know, have worked in the past under similar circumstances:
-have a big tent, make alliances, work together on the shared goal of saving democracy, make some compromises if necessary.
-try to crack the hardshell of the informational bubble that Trump supporters are in. Just try getting the information in front of them. If you have Trump supporters in your social media, post double-checked facts about Trump, ICE, and so on.
-make it personal; show how they’re supporting someone who is hurting people they love.
-you can try to point out that they’re rejecting Jesus, that they hold out-groups to much, much higher standards than they hold themselves or in-group members. (They know, and don’t care, but you can try.)
-you can try pointing out that they don’t really know what’s going on because they get their information from sources that misrepresent the situation. If you tell them something that they don’t want to hear, and they say it’s “fake news,” you can ask them if they get their information from a source that would tell them if it was true.
-support the groups who are filing the lawsuits.
-block walk, make phone calls, put up signs, subscribe to, and otherwise personally help opposition organizations and individuals, even if you disagree with them on many things.
If there are other things that you are aware have worked, do them (and tell others about them).

Here’s what, as far as I know, has never worked under these circumstances:
-violent protests;
-various versions of purifying the in-group (refusing to compromise, insisting on univocality or unanimity in terms of ideology, strategy, or policy), refusing to support anyone who isn’t fully in line with our policy agenda/rhetoric
-talking and thinking about policy disagreements in the pro-authoritarian “right/center/left” binary or continuum (a single axis)
-giving up

I’m open to persuasion about the specifics. But I’ll point out, if your response is that this post shows I’m a centrist/librul/whatev for making this argument, look again at the “what hasn’t worked” list.

Reasonable policies can be reasonably advocated

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in front of a map of VN — Photo from here: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html

Why does having a “reasonable” argument matter?

Some people are claiming that the reason so many people are supporting a political figure they dislike is that our education system is bad. And it is, but not in the ways people think. Our problem has long been that we teach argument, but not argumentation. An argument is a claim with a supporting reason (what Aristotle called an enthymeme); it’s a thing you fling at someone with whom you disagree. It’s very effective for making a person feel confirmed in what they already believe, and therefore also useful for confirming the beliefs of in-group members (or moving them very slightly), but it doesn’t really do much for helping people deliberate together about complicated and controversial problems and policies.

The most popular argument textbook confirms (see what I did there?) the false binary of the rational/irrational split—that one’s position on an issue might be rational (i.e., logical) or emotional (i.e., illogical). That split is itself illogical, and very much an emotional response (the desire to feel that one is rational, and to feel that others are irrational). The false assumption is that a “rational” (aka, “unemotional”) stance on an issue is “unbiased.” I’m not advocating that understanding of reasonable deliberation–I think it’s unmitigated bullshit.

The irony is that this way of describing how people think is wrong, as is shown by so very, very many studies. It is, logically, indefensible (but it feeeeels so good to think of oneself as “rational,” as having a viewpoint that is obviously right and objectively true).

People are biased. Everyone is biased. All humans (and probably other animals) rely on cognitive biases when considering information and making a decision. That’s what the research shows. So, if you tell yourself that people who disagree with you are biased, and you aren’t, what you’re showing is that you’re so deep into confirmation bias and in-group favoritism that you are fifty years late to the party of what research on decision-making actually says. You’re too biased to admit that you’re biased.[1]

Argumentation is a set of strategies that tries to help people disagree productively with one another (not necessarily nicely, unemotionally, persuasively, or in ways that make everyone comfortable), but the strategies are ways of correcting for the biases to which we’re all prone. Argumentation is oriented toward productive and inclusive deliberation, and not just coercion or what one scholar of rhetoric called rhetrickery.

Argumentation requires that participants (usually called interlocutors, a term I like since it sounds as though people are locked together) follow these rules:
1) there is an agreement on the “stasis”—what the hell we’re arguing about. (This rule prevents deflection, and various fallacies like motivism, ad hominem, ad baculum.)
2) all the rules (of logic, civility, citation practices, and so on) apply equally to all parties. (This rule ensures that it is good faith argumentation, rather than just a wanking performance to the in-group or another form of ad baculum.)
3) interlocutors engage the smartest and best opposition arguments. (This rule prevents another kind of deflection, as well as bad faith posturing in front of the in-group.)
4) interlocutors cite their sources when asked to provide them, and, as said above, hold their and opposition sources to the same standards of credibility. (In other words, “this is a good source because it agrees with me, or is in-group,” is not good faith argumentation. It’s performatively admitting that you’re full of shit.)
5) Assertions are not evidence, let alone proof. They’re just assertions. That someone can find a source that asserts that bunnies are not fluffy is not evidence that bunnies are not fluffy; it’s evidence that someone has asserted it. (Were I Queen of the Universe this is a distinction everyone would have to understand before they finished middle school.)

Notice that following these rules wouldn’t lead to a pleasant, comfortable, conflict-free discussion, and that someone who insisted on these rules might be seen as a person creating conflict.

This next paragraph is very pedantic. I’ve spent over forty years studying how communities make very bad decisions when they had all the information they needed to make better ones, and this is a list of the approaches to policy disagreements that go badly. The short version is that they engaged in various methods of argument and not argumentation.

There are a lot of ways that people imagine the ideal way that a community might make a decision. One is that everyone would advocate for their preferred course of action without disagreeing with anyone else (expressivist); another is that people would try to make the best case possible for their preferred policy ignoring all norms of ethics and the one that won the most adherents was the best (sloppy social Darwinism applied to decision-making), another is providing all the data necessary for the public to make a reasonable decision (dreamy informationalism), another is for an elite to decide what is best and to give the public (or their audience) the information that will gain their compliance (rhetorical authoritarianism), another is to provide “both sides” of an argument to people and see what they decide (expressive deliberation, sometimes called by scholars agonism).

I was once an advocate of agonism, but then I looked at how advocates of slavery talked themselves into a lot of bad decisions, and realized that a public sphere in which opposing arguments were expressed don’t do shit in terms of helping communities make good decisions. It can, in fact, foster fanatical commitments, especially if the disagreement about policies is falsely reframed as a conflict among identities (e.g., pro- v. anti-slavery). And, really, every disagreement about an admitted problem that is framed as a conflict between two identities (or a continnum between the two extremes) is gerfucked.

And so I abandoned agonism in favor of argumentation.

It’s important that I’m not advocating unemotional public discourse (which is neither possible nor desirables—demonizing the expression of feelings is also a contributor to train wrecks, but that’s a different post). Reasonable and emotional are not in conflict; if anything, they’re necessarily connected.

One of the reasons is that I realized that the various policy advocates who advocated ultimately disastrous policies refused to follow the rules of argumentation. Sometimes they did so calmly, with lots of data and quantification (e.g., McNamara), sometimes they did so dramatically and hyperbolically (e.g., Hitler). Their style, platform, set of policies, personal merits, ethical standards and all sorts of other things might be very different, but what was shared was that they couldn’t argue for their policies following the rules of argumentation because their policies were bad. Their arguments were paper tigers, that looked fierce attacking even frailer paper oppositions, and so often felt compelling, but they were bad arguments in favor of bad policies.

And that’s the important point. If you have good policies, you can engage in good argumentation. If you can’t engage in good argumentation, it might be because you have bad policies. There might be all sorts of other reasons (access to resources, for instance).

It isn’t that every individual has to be able to put forward a reasonable argument that engages the smartest opposition for every decision they (we) make at every moment. It isn’t even that every individual who supports a particular policy has to engage in reasonable argumentation in favor of it. But someone should. If there is a major public policy being advocated and no one can advocate it using reasonable argumentation, then it’s a bad policy.

[1] I’m being generous by saying someone is only fifty years late. In fact, various philosophers have noted many of the biases, such as in-group favoritism and confirmation bias, albeit not by those terms. John Stuart Mill is just one example.

Some thoughts on persuasion

A friend asked a question about whether there is research on whether some people are more receptive to some communication styles and more resistant to others.

And there short answer is: a lot. There are scholars working on that question in advertising, political communication, health communication, political psychology, social psychology, argumentation, cognitive psychology, logic, interpersonal communication. Hell, Aristotle makes claims about what styles are more appropriate for various audiences (and rhetors).

These different scholars don’t all come to the same conclusions, and that’s interesting. My crank theory is that it isn’t because one group is more scientific than another, but because it depends upon whether we’re thinking about persuasion as a rhetor (Chester) who is trying to get someone (Hubert) to believe something new or change his mind on something (“compliance-gaining”), Hubert is looking at a lot of data and trying to figure out what to make of it (“reasoning” or “self-persuasion”), Chester is trying to strengthen Huber’s commitment to a belief, group, policy agenda (“confirmation”) so much so that Hubert might be willing to engage in actions more aggressive or extreme than before (“mobilizing” or “radicalizing”), Hubert and Chester together are trying to figure out the best course of action (“deliberating”).

Because of how research tends to work, people usually examine or set up (in the case of lab research) scenarios that looks at only one of those kinds of persuasion. Of course, in the wild, it’s all of them, sometimes fairly mixed up. So, the research doesn’t always apply neatly to how persuasion actually works (or doesn’t).

A lot of the research doesn’t pose the question the way my friend did—they draw conclusions about ways that people are persuaded, rather than beginning with the reasonable hypothesis that individuals don’t all respond the same way, and that people might have styles of reasoning that would make them more or less receptive to styles of communication. Still and all, some of that work turns up interesting data, such as that people tend to prefer teleological explanations of historical or physical events/phenomena. (We don’t like chance.) (Right now I’m working on the rhetoric of counterfactuals, and there’s some interesting work about that—it also turns up in scholarship on why people keep trying to make evolution into a teleological process.)

It’s common for people to cite studies that conclude that people aren’t persuaded by studies.

Think about that. People who are persuaded that people aren’t persuaded by studies cite studies to others to show they’re right. That’s a performative contradiction.

I think that contradiction happens because we know that people aren’t necessarily persuaded to change their mind about X by having a study (or set of studies) cited at them, but we also know that having studies cited might be a set of datapoints on one side of a scale. Persuasion on big issues happens slowly and cumulatively. People who’ve changed their minds on big issues often describe a long process, with a variety of kinds of data—studies, logic, personal experience, narratives (fiction or film), in-group shifts. Kenneth Burke long ago pointed out that repetition is an important method of persuasion—even repetition of an outright lie or logically indefensible claim (he was talking about Hitler). Repetition as persuasion is a basis of much (most?) advertising.

I think some of the most useful work on persuasion is in the work on cognitive biases. People who are prone to binary thinking are more likely to be persuaded by arguments that can be presented as a binary; people drawn to cognitive closure like arguments that deny uncertainty or complexity. (When frightened, most everyone likes simple binaries—that’s a Trish crank theory.)

In addition to binary thinking, I think a few other really important biases are: confirmation bias, in-group favoritism, and naïve realism.

Confirmation bias is pretty much what it says on the label. People are more likely to believe something that confirms what they already believe. We will hold studies, arguments, claims, and so on to different standards: lower standards of proof/logic for what confirms what we already believe, and higher standards for something we don’t believe. That isn’t necessarily a terrible way to go through life—Kahneman (who did a lot of the great work on cognitive biases) argued that we probably should do that for most of getting through the day. But, on important issues, we need to find ways to minimize that bias.

Confirmation bias also works at a slightly more abstract level—we are more likely to believe a narrative, explanation, judgment, cause-effect argument, and so on if it confirms a pattern we believe is how the world works. If, for instance, we are authoritarians, then we’re more likely to be persuaded by an argument that presumes or advocates authoritarianism.

The just world model is another example of that process. People who believe that everyone gets what they deserve are more likely to believe that a victim of a crime, accident, or disease did something to cause that crime, accident, or disease.

You can see how the just world model causes people to place blame on the reddit sub r/mildlybaddrivers all the time—it’s kind of funny the extent to which some people will strive to place blame on the victim. The more that we’re uncomfortable with the possibility that bad things can happen to people who’ve done nothing wrong—the more that we want to believe in a world we can control—the more we are drawn to a narrative that shows the accidents could have been prevented. We want to believe that accidents wouldn’t have happened to us.

It’s all about us.

In-group favoritism is well described here. Basically, we have a tendency to believe that the in-group (the group we’re in) is better than other groups, and therefore entitled to better treatment and more resources, the benefit of the doubt in conflicts, forgiveness (whereas out-group members should be punished for the same behavior), and just generally lower standards. We don’t see them as lower standards—we think “fairness” means better treatment for us and people like us. So, we’re more likely to be persuaded by narratives, arguments, explanations, and so on that favor our in-group. We’re likely to dismiss criticism of the in-group or in-group members as “biased.” We are likely to hold in-group rhetors and leaders to low (or no) standards of proof and reasonableness, especially if we’re in a charismatic leadership relationship with them.

The third, and related, bias that’s important for style of thinking and style of persuasion is “naïve realism.” “Naïve realism” refers to the belief that the world is exactly and completely as it appears to me. If you’re a binary thinker, then it would seem to be right, because you believe the only other possibility is that there is no reality at all. That’s like saying that this animal must be a cat because otherwise there are no categories of animals. We spend most of our day operating on the basis of naïve realism—that the world is as it looks—as we should. But, there are times we have to be open to the idea that the world looks different to others because they’re looking at it from a different perspective, that there are parts of the world we can’t see, and that we might even be misled by our own biases. We might be wrong.

You can see how someone who believed that they see the world without biases (not possible, by the way) would only pay attention to rhetors, information, narratives that confirm what they already believe.

All these things make being open to reasonable persuasion actively scary; we’re “open” to persuasion only if it fits what we already believe. So does authoritarianism, but that’s a different post.

BSAB: “Both sides” and the slavery debate

cover of book on the slavery debate — https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817381257/fanatical-schemes/

As I’ve said many times, as soon as a public, media, or person frames our complicated world of policy options as either a binary or continuum of two sides, then it’s all about in- and out-groups, and our shared world of policy disagreements isn’t the kind of disagreement that can help communities come to pragmatic solutions. It’s some degree of demagoguery. Maybe it’s a horse race, maybe it’s a full-throated call for political or physical extermination. But it’s never useful for effective deliberation, about anything. Because there are never just two sides about any policy. And while one can describe our political situation as a binary or continuum, one can also rate all political figures on the basis of whether they agree with your narrow policy agenda. One can also arrange all candidates on the basis of how much they use the letter ‘E’ in their messaging. One can find a lot of ways of categorizing political figures and group commitments—that doesn’t mean those categories are useful ways to think about what policies are best for our shared world.

What framing our complicated world of policy options as a binary or continuum does is to fame is it as us v. them. And so we engage in motivism, the genus-species fallacy, and various forms of ad hominem.

Once political disagreements are framed as conflicts among various identities (either a binary or continuum), then we don’t deliberate together, and that is what is supposed to happen in a democracy. Democracy thrives for everyone when people try to work together to solve problems. They can argue, vehemently, petulantly, emotionally, but with each other.

And, really, this is something we all know to be true. The moment that a conflict in your church, family, workplace, garden club, D&D game, neighborhood mailing list, or whatever is framed as a conflict of two sides is the moment that people stop deliberating and start taking sides. They might still debate, but they aren’t deliberating. And the train is wobbling on the tracks.

Here’s an example of a time that binary/continuum was (and is) both false and poisonous: antebellum debates about slavery, and postbellum narratives about what happened. [If you want me to cite sources for everything I’m saying, go here. ]

There weren’t two sides to the debate about slavery, yet that’s how the issue is described, in everything from textbooks to popular understandings.

There were at least eleven.

1) Slavery should be expanded to all states, so that there should be no such thing as a non-slave state. In other words, they didn’t believe in states’ rights.

2) If you enslaved someone in a pro-slavery state, you should be able to take them into any state, and ignore whatever laws that state had about slavery. Again, a stance that made clear that it wasn’t about states’ rights.

[So, let’s stop pretending that slavers were pro- states’ rights. They didn’t recognize the right of a state to ban slavery. If you think I’m wrong, cite sources that show that pro-slavery rhetors thought states had the right to ban slavery. Good luck with that. Also Dred Scott. Also you’re saying that the people who called for secession were liars, since they said it was about slavery.]

3) Slavery should be allowed in current slaver states, and every additional state should be balanced in terms of slaver or not, so that anti-slavery states couldn’t have more than 50% of the Senate. (The 3/5th clause pretty much guaranteed them the House.) The electoral college also did (again, 3/5th clause), so this was not a compromise, but a pro-slavery policy, and a violation of states’ rights.

4) We should restrict slavery to current slaver states, and not let it expand.

5) Slavery will die out for economic reasons, and so there’s no reason to try to resist slavers’ actions.

6) Slavery will die out, and result in large numbers of ex-slaves, so we should “re-colonize” freed slaves (this persisted until the 20th century, since it’s essentially Theodore Bilbo’s argument).

7) We should institute a slow ban on slavery, giving slavers the opportunity to sell their enslaved people to areas where slavery was still legal. (This was done in many states).

8) We should ban slavery, and recompense slavers.

9) We should institute a slow ban slavery, recompense slavers, and return all freed slaves to Africa (not a party they were from; sometimes this proposal included second or third generation Americans).

10) We should ban slavery and not recompense slavers.

11) We should ban slavery, and fully integrate African Americans as we have other ethnicities.

Notice that five and six are not anti-slavery, but also not pro-slavery. I have trouble characterizing three or four as anti-slavery, since they were allowing slavery to continue. Pro-slavery rhetors treated those polices as anti-slavery because slavery as an economy was about buying and selling the enslaved people, so, i slavery didn’t expand, then there wouldn’t be a market, and then slavery wouldn’t be profitable. (If you want the chapter and verse on that argument, it’s here.)

Even the positions that could be characterized as anti-slavery (8-11) or pro-slavery (1-3) were substantially different from one another in important ways.

This isn’t a case where, sure, there were subtle distinctions within each of the “two sides,” but there were basically two positions. There weren’t. And, oddly enough, had the pro-slavery rhetors been willing to think and argue pragmatically about the long-term ethical and economic consequences of slavery, they wouldn’t have started an unnecessary war. (Had slaver states taken the most expensive option—free and colonize the enslaved people and be recompensed—it would have cost them less than the war they started.)

And, if at this point, you decide I’m wrong and won’t check my sources because you’ve decided I’m out-group, then you’re making the same mistake that pro-slavery rhetors did.

Because pro-slavery rhetors decided that the complicated world of possible policy options about slavery was actually a binary, they murdered people who criticized slavery, instituted a gag rule in Congress, criminalized criticism of slavery, and started a war they lost.

Pro-slavery rhetors should have taken seriously the criticisms of their position. They should have been open to pragmatic discussions about policies, instead of turning a complicated situation into a binary of identities.

What does all this have to do with the BSAB (Both Sides Are Bad) position? I’ll get to that in the next post.

Arguing like an asshole: obvious problems, and obvious solutions

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with assholes. Because I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with all sorts of people.

I was at Berkeley for many years, and argued with all sorts of people–anarchists, Democrats, environmentalists, evangelicals, feminists, Libertarians, Maoists, Moonies (they were terrible-car–crash-can’t-look-away bad at arguing), Republicans, Stalinists, Trotskyites, vegetarians. If you’re paying attention, then you’ve noticed I argued with everyone, including people with whom I agreed, but I disagreed with them on some point that seemed important to me. And some of them, even people with whom I agreed, argued in a way that I’ve come to call “arguing like an asshole.” By the way, so did I from time to time (and not everyone with whom I disagreed argued like an asshole).

Then I got on Usenet, and got to argue with (or watch arguments among) all sorts of people about all sorts of issues, from fairly trivial things (arguments about cooking methods, or dog training) to scammy (get laid fast, make money fast) to the biggest (genocide deniers or defenders). And then I drifted into other social media sites, and I took to arguing with all sorts of people with various alts. And I learned a lot about argument by doing that (also about how algorithms work, and many scams).

One of the things I learned is that, while there are some arguments that are never argued reasonably (e.g., make money fast, or get laid fast), there are assholes everywhere, albeit not evenly distributed. And that is the important point. Arguing like an asshole isn’t about what position you hold, but how you argue.

During all this time, for complicated reasons having to do with a Great Blue Heron, I was becoming a scholar of bad arguments, or, as I like to say, a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation. And by train wrecks, I don’t mean that people made decisions that turned out disastrously because they didn’t have the information they needed (e.g., they didn’t know how cholera works), but when they had enough information to make a good decision, and they rejected it. What made (and makes) them assholes is how they rejected that information they could and should have considered.

It wasn’t necessarily because they were stupid, or corrupt, or villainous. Often they were very smart and good people who were sincerely trying to do what they believed to be the right thing.

And it was interesting to me that the train wrecks involved the same ways of disagreeing that assholes at Berkeley or in social media argued.

If, at this point, you want me to tell you the simple solution to the problem of how people (often very good people, and people whom we should admire) made disastrously bad decisions, and you want me to put it into 25 words or less, you can skip to the end. If you skip to the end and decide I’m wrong because you don’t agree with my conclusions, then you win the first gold star of assholery. Let’s call it the McNamara medal.

There are two parts to this error. First is believing that all complicated problems can be cogently and clearly summarized, and then persuasively communicated to any person, without having to go through the data; and that good and smart people can instantly recognize whether an argument is true without having to work through the reasoning. (In other words, that no situation is so complex that it can’t be easily and quickly communicated to smart people.)

Second, and related, is that the cogent and accurate summary of a problem necessarily leads to an equally cogent and easily communicable solution. The correct solution to any problem—no matter how apparently complicated—is obvious to smart and good people.

This is one of the most popular ways that countries, political leaders, business leaders, and others wreck a train: assume that every problem has a straightforward solution that is obvious to reasonable people (i.e., them). The problem is exactly as it looks to them, and the solution is the one that seems obvious to them. And if you can’t articulate the problem and solution in such a way that it’s obvious to any and everyone, then you have no clue what you’re doing. If the McNamaras of the world get pushback, oppositions, or counterarguments, they conclude that their opponents/critics are too stupid to understand an obviously true argument or too corrupt to accept it. Or both.

Assholes, regardless of the political, religious, or whatever affiliation, decide that an argument is right or wrong on the basis of whether it confirms what they already believe. Their beliefs are non-falsifiable, not in the sense that they’re so true that no one can prove them false, but in the sense that their attachment to those beliefs is not up for reconsideration. (What’s funny is that they do actually change their minds, as well as have a lot of contradictory beliefs, as well as beliefs they believe they have, but that have no influence on their behavior—we all have some of those–but I’ll get to that much later.)

There’s still debate as to whether the US could have won in Vietnam without paying an unacceptable moral, political, and economic cost, but there isn’t debate about whether McNamara’s strategy of limited war with limited means for a limited time could have worked. It didn’t. It couldn’t. Even he later admitted that. But, when he did, he failed to mention that he was told so at the time, and given all the evidence necessary to come to that conclusion as early as January of 1963.

McNamara wasn’t particularly vehement in his arguing, and he always had lots of data, but he argued like an asshole.

A more useful way to think about authoritarianism

When I found myself as the Director of the First Year Composition program, I also found myself in the same odd conversation more than once. A student would come to me outraged that they were being held to the same standards as the other students. At first I thought I was misunderstanding, but they meant it. They sincerely believed that, for reasons, it was “unfair” (that was the term they used) for them held to the same standards as other students. They weren’t claiming any kind of disability, but just … well…privilege.

I came across a similar argument when reading arguments for slavery, on the part of people who claimed to be Christian. They openly rejected “Do unto others as you have done unto you”—a way of behaving that would have made slavery impossible–in favor of some really vexed readings of Scripture. They rejected a law Jesus very clearly said in favor of problematic translations and comparisons. (In other words, they were antinomian when it came to Jesus’ laws.) For them, hierarchy was important, and the ideal hierarchy was rigid, with one’s place on the hierarchy determined by various criteria that were often regional (race, gender, wealth, source of wealth, religion, family standing, occupation, place of origin, political affiliation, and so on).

That’s how authoritarianism works. It’s a way of thinking about politics, organizations, families, and/or communities that says the ideal system is a rigid hierarchy of power (people have the “right” to dominate the people or groups below them) and privilege (people on a hierarchy should submit to those above them). That hierarchy of domination and submission means that people should not do unto others, and should not be held to the same standards. The paradox is that people who claim to be higher on the hierarchy because they are better people hold themselves and others like them to lower standards than people below them.

There are a few other interesting points about that hierarchy. People believed that the categories that justified the hierarchy were Real, created by some kind of higher power (Nature, Biology, God), and therefore Eternal.

That belief that the categories were Eternal meant that they took what were actually very recent practices and projected them back through history. For instance, pro-slavery rhetors could thereby ignore that the kind of slavery practiced in the US in the 19th century was relatively recent in almost every way, and not how slavery operated in Jesus’ time or before (the closest would be the Helots).

Another confusing paradox is that people who believe in a stable and Real hierarchy are saying, quite clearly, that they are born with certain privileges by virtue of family and so on—they will insist that they are entitled to getting better treatment and being held to lower standards—but they get very, very mad if you point out that they have privilege, so they are asserting and denying they have privilege.

At the end of this, I’ll explain my crank theory as to what’s going on with that asserting and denying of privilege, but I want to make a few other points about that hierarchy of submission and domination first. It’s very common, across various cultures, religions, organizations, businesses, but it isn’t universal. Many years ago, Arthur Lovejoy pointed out that what he called “The Great Chain of Being” has a long tradition in Western theology and philosophy. Although the term is medieval, the concept of all creation consisting of a hierarchy goes at least as far back as Plato’s Timaeus. Eighteenth century natural philosophy began the long and tragic tendency to insist on a “natural” hierarchy of ethnicities. Although Darwin was explicit that evolution was not necessarily progressive, and rejected the hierarchy of species, it was so ingrained after Linnaeus that he was largely ignored. “Darwinism” was weaponized to support a stable hierarchy of beings that was not at all what he meant.

The narrative that the hierarchy was ontologically grounded (that is Real) meant that any disruption in the hierarchy was “unnatural”—that is, a violation of nature. That claim has/had two odd consequences. It meant asserting that hierarchical systems are more stable, and less prone to conflict, which led to another backward projection: that there used to be a time of stable hierarchy, and it didn’t have social disruption.

The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages is sometimes cited as an example of such a stable hierarchy that was associated with a lack of rebellion—people will sometimes claim was stable and peaceable (Chesterton, for instance). In actuality, it was neither. While peasant revolts were fairly unusual until the 14th century, there was constant conflict in Europe, with various political and religious leaders disagreeing (quite violently) about just what the hierarchy was, all the time asserting that there was a Real and natural hierarchy, and claiming that they were enacting that Real one. And, keep in mind, these were Catholics killing other Catholics, or Christians killing other Christians. Sometimes they were major wars over religious issues (e.g., the 13th century Albigensian Crusade), sometimes executions and persecutions of heretical sects (e.g., various forms of Gnosticism), and sometimes they were political in nature. Christian troops sacked both Constantinople and Rome, after all.

Neither the political nor religious hierarchies were actually all that stable or peaceful. There were constantly heretical sects, internal conflicts—if the Catholic hierarchy created peace and order, why did the Pope have an army that was used against other Catholics?

The fantasy that there is no conflict in a rigid hierarchical structure is just that—a fantasy.

So, why do people simultaneously claim and deny that they have privilege? I think for similar reasons that people claim that there were long periods in history with no conflict. They need to believe (and claim) that hierarchy provides stability in order to feel better about their status and authoritarian politics. It’s about feelings.

The notion of a hierarchy of privilege makes people really comfortable (“I’m owed this”) and uncomfortable (because it isn’t something they did other than be born). They want to believe that they have privilege because they have earned it. But, oddly enough, they earned it by being born to their family. When they’re arguing for things to which they feel entitled because of privilege, then privilege is a useful concept, and they invoke it. But, when others point out that they might have privilege because of to whom they were born, they feel that they’re being accused of never having to work at all, and so they get mad.

But notice that I’m not saying that authoritarianism is far left, far right, or both. In fact, it’s the whole problem of authoritarianism that should make people stop trying to make politics a binary or continuum. At the very least, there are two axes—one about degree of governmental support for a social safety net (if we’re talking about domestic policy), and another one for commitment to authoritarianism. To what extent do we think people who disagree with us should be treated as we want to be treated. And it’s that second axis that is predictor of democracy ending.