train wrecks in public deliberation Archives - Page 2 of 2

Our crisis of reasoning

We don’t have a constitutional crisis, or a crisis of civility. We have a crisis of motivated reasoning.

I am a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—times when communities decided, after much deliberation, and with many policy opportunities, to pursue a course of action they had plenty of evidence was a bad one. And then, usually, when they got evidence that it was a bad course of action, they recommitted to the clearly bad policy, but with more will—such as the Athenians’ decisions about whether and how to invade Sicily, the US commitment to slavery and then segregation, Hitler’s decisions regarding Stalingrad (and lots of others).

These aren’t just decisions I think are bad, but ones that the communities themselves regretted (sometimes, as with the commitment to slavery, by pretending they never made that decision).

It’s conventional for academics to say, “It’s more complicated than that,” but in this case it really isn’t complicated at all, and the ways people reason badly are well known.

Communities talk themselves into disastrous decisions, while ignoring all the reasonable criticisms of their position, when one position gets associated with loyalty to “us” (the in-group). When we are presented with complicated situations, and especially uncertainty (and, let’s be clear, every important political decision has a lot of uncertainty) we all have a tendency to manage our anxiety about the uncertainty by relying more on reasoning from in-group, and to be more defensive about our in-group. We are motivated to reason in a way that confirms our in-group is good, and all of our problems are caused by the out-group.

Imagine that you are watching your favorite team play, and there is an ambiguous situation, and the ref calls against your team, you will feel outrage on behalf of your team. The rational response (that is, one grounded in a sense that the data about the decision should be the same regardless of in- or out-group) would be to think, “Well, maybe that’s right.” But, if you are motivated to reason about the evidence on the basis of your in-group loyalties, then you’ll be outraged.

And, and this is important, your expressing outrage is also a way of performing in-group loyalty. Having a rational response (that is, one that assesses the call regardless of in- or out-group affiliation) would, especially in the case of a disputed call, show you to be not loyal to the in-group.

We are in a world of evading policy argumentation in favor of framing all policy issues as opportunities of performing in-group loyalty, which means that any argument or policy that makes Them mad is good for us. Political theorists talk about the fallacy of the “fixed pie” model—it’s the sense that the “goods” of our political world (police protection, health care, educational opportunities, infrastructure ranging from clean water to reliable bridges, being able to get political figures to take our concerns seriously) are a fixed amount, so anyone not like you getting a good must hurt you somehow. And, if you can’t get the good, then keeping them from getting a good is a kind of win.

The fixed pie model is part of making every issue an issue of in- or out-group identity. Democrats are framed as pro-immigrant and pro-government, and Republicans as anti-immigrant and anti-government, so, oddly enough, many people will vote Republican because they’re mad about a policy that Republicans enacted.

And that way of thinking about politics hurts everyone. Take, for instance, the issue of immigrants taking the jobs of “Americans” because they’re willing to work for less. The mainstream media (by which I mean Fox, which is the major source of information for a plurality of Americans) is used as an argument for being restrictive at our borders, in a way that means most of us could never have come to the US (and, no, not all the people who show up at our borders are illegal).

If the problem is that employers hire “illegal immigrants” rather than Americans, then a stricter policy at the border is not the sensible solution. If the problem is that Americans can’t get decent wages because “illegals” take the jobs, then the most obvious solution is to have high penalties for employers who hire “illegals.”

But, Trump, who hires a lot of “illegals,” isn’t arguing this point. He isn’t advocating a policy that would solve the problem he claims to care about (he never does). That’s because we aren’t in the realm of rational policy argumentation. We’re in the realm of politics as really about whether good or bad people will get their way, and simply making Them unhappy is as good as getting our way.

Middle income people caring that open borders will hurt their ability to earn a living wage is a legitimate concern. That concern is not solved by separating children at the borders. It’s better solved through various policies, including making it unprofitable for employers to exploit undocumented workers. Why aren’t we arguing about that?

The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’ and Hitler’s Rhetoric in Battle: “Where there is a will there’s a ferry”

Eighty years ago, almost to the day (April 28, 1939), Adolf Hitler gave a speech in the Reichstag (albeit directed at the world) in which he promised that he wanted only peace: [Slide 2] “Providence showed me the way to free our people from the depths of its misery without bloodshed and to lead it upward once again.” It was his second “peace” speech of the month; in both, he insisted he didn’t want war; he only wanted to make sure Germany got what it was rightfully due. And a surprising number of people believed him.

Benny Morris’ Roots of Appeasement shows that British policies of appeasement through the 20s and 30s came from the reasonable assumption that any rational person would know that the next war would be unthinkably devastating (largely because of the destructive capacities afforded by aircraft), and so various world leaders kept negotiating with Hitler as though he were a rational person working within what was thinkable. After the non-aggression pact was signed with Poland (April 6), even William Shirer—an American radio correspondent–believed that “this will halt Hitler for the time being” (Berlin Diary 163, a view he abandoned when Hitler tore up the agreement on the 28th). On April 23, Shirer said on his broadcast that, among other things, the Germans believed

that Hitler, whether they like him or not, will get what he wants in eastern Europe, and get it—as he got Czechoslovakia at Munich—without a war.[….T]here will therefore be no war, and that they—the German people at any rate—do not want war. And that war can only come if the “encirclement powers”, jealous of Germany’s success, attack the Reich (42)

In his 1984 memoir of his time in Germany, The Nightmare Years, Shirer would say of the spring of 1939,

Like almost everyone else I still clung to the hope for peace—despite what Hitler had said; despite what he had done, tearing up two more treaties; despite all his deceit. (403)

Hitler, who had, for years, spoken of war as a cleansing and necessary rebirth of Germany, was now saying he wanted peace. One of these two postures was a sincere and authentic expression of his values and the other was manipulative–and people had to decide which was which. A lot of people got the answer to the question wrong.

That same spring, while so many people were hoping for peace, and believed that Hitler shared that hope, Hitler was preparing for exactly the kind of war he had long said he wanted. And Kenneth Burke was writing “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’” his analysis of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric in the book Mein Kampf. Burke wasn’t fooled. He began from the premise of taking Hitler’s rhetoric seriously. And he got Hitler’s intentions right. This talk will take seriously Burke’s taking Hitler’s rhetoric seriously.

As Kathleen Hall Jamieson points out, the distinction between actual rather than apparent identity is a central topos in Americans’ assessment of political candidates, and it has a long history:

Resonant in Western culture at least since Plato’s well-known discussion of shadows in the cave, the appearance-versus-reality lens, in US politics, takes the form of questions about a candidate’s actual rather than presented self, real versus publicly expressed beliefs, diagnosed rather than self-proclaimed health, audited rather than feigned financial circumstances, and lived rather than conjured biography. (186)

A study of Hitler’s rhetoric isn’t just a study about Hitler, but, as Burke aptly said, a study of how he swung a great nation in his wake, and how such a person might come to power in the US. And we might wonder about the role of the appearance v. reality lens in such an ascent.

Part of Burke’s answer is straightforward: he lists the rhetorical strategies (some verbal, some not) that such a rhetor would use on the basis of what Hitler used. Another part is more complicated: he points out that Hitler’s rhetorical strategies were grounded in his and Germans’ ways of thinking and acting. Burke says, “The deployments of politics are, you might say, the chartings of Hitler’s private mind translated into the vocabulary of nationalistic events.” (210). Since Hitler’s rhetorical strategies and political actions were so aligned, Burke wonders, “Is such thinking spontaneous or deliberate—or is it rather not both?” (213) In other words, was Hitler authentic in his rhetoric, given that he lied so much but not always?

Robert Citino refers to the “common notion that the surface Hitler is false, that we must dig deeper to unpack his true motives” (406). But, Citino says,

He rarely lied about his intentions. Of all the world statesman of the twentieth century, he may have been the most honest of all. He proclaimed his goals to the German people and to the world, leaving a dense trail of written statements and public proclamations behind him that are still remarkable for their candor. (404).

He did lie, of course, but he was also absolutely truthful at times, including about his lying. Burke points out an odd paradox of Hitler’s “honesty” in Mein Kampf: he shows all his cards; he’s open about all his rhetorical strategies, including his willingness to lie and mislead. Yet, his being open about being a liar did not undermine his ability to gain and maintain trust: “He could explicitly explain his tactics in his book and still employ them without loss of effectiveness.” (212)

In “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Batttle’,” Burke identified various rhetorical strategies:

- Strategic misnaming
- Repetition
- Uniforms
- Having thugs beat up hecklers in the audience
- Unifying a diverse group by identifying a shared enemy
- Attributing any resistance to him or his ideas as the consequence of the critic being on the side of evil in the apocalyptic battle between good (Aryans) and evil (the Jew)
- Bastardization of religious forms of thought (i.e., Western European Christian eschatology and soteriology)
- Appealing to the notion of inborn dignity
- Describing Germany as in a symbolic rebirth
- Scapegoating/Projection
- Toggling between and intermingling material and spiritual explanations of events

In this talk, I want to pursue that question of spontaneous or deliberate by looking for these strategies in situations where there’s no obvious rhetorical gain from using them, where, in fact, they harmed deliberation: Hitler’s decision-making regarding the war he started. If repetition, scapegoating, and so on were cunning and strategic, then he wouldn’t have used them as bases of his decision-making when they hurt the war effort. But he did. And so did his generals, and so did many Germans. Burke didn’t just identify rhetorical moves, but ways of organizing and explaining the world.

Strategic misnmaming. Burke observes that in Mein Kampf, Hitler called his ideology of hate one of love. That strategic misnaming ran throughout his rhetoric: he called his invasions “counter attacks,” his war mongering “bringing peace,” and his chaotic polycratic system orderly. So did the Nazis generally, as in the now infamous Nazi language rules that Victor Klemperer describes so elegantly—language rules that Eichmann and his attorney were still following in 1960 as Hannah Arendt observed with some horror. One of Hitler’s most important misnamings was his persistent representation of himself and Germany as victims—something I’ll come back to later.

Repetition. Hitler was notorious for repeating himself in his meetings and speeches —something about which even his generals complained —but, more importantly, his military strategy was itself grounded in the notion of repetition. [Slide 5] His overall plan was to engage in a short, sharp war, in which Germany would retain the initiative, encircle entire divisions of the enemy, and capture massive amounts of land and material immediately. This is the traditional German/Prussian way of war, which military historians point out was Germany’s strategy dating back to Frederick the Great. In Hitler’s version, it relied on mastery of the air, a version that worked tremendously well through 1940. Hitler insisted on repeating that strategy long past the point when it was no longer working—when, for instance, the Luftwaffe was too weak to provide significant air support (really, any time after 1943), and he was in a defensive war of attrition (on both fronts after June 1944, but much earlier on the eastern front). For example, on December 28, 1944, he told his generals “Militarily, it’s critical that in the West we transition from this unproductive defensive posture to offensive warfare. Offensive operations alone can turn the war in the West in a successful direction” (557)

More important, WWII was itself a repetition of The Great War.
Losing a war should cause a country to reconsider its processes of deliberation—the disastrous outcome should cause a country to try to understand how it made that bad decision, and how to prevent a similar decision in the future. Unhappily, the opposite is likely to happen. Effective deliberation about going to war is stymied by the nearly universal sense that admitting a war was a mistake dishonors those who fought in it, by making their sacrifices all in vain. Thus, we are likely to try to refight a war we’ve lost with an increased commitment to the very policies and values that got us into the war in the first place. WWI was caused by nationalism, irrational optimism, desire for European hegemony and, in the case of France and Germany, the desire to relitigate the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Many German rhetors (Hitler was just one of them) proposed as a solution to Germany’s losing that war an increased commitment to nationalism, militarism, the desire to refight an old war, hopes of European hegemony, and irrational optimism.

Uniforms. Hitler paid careful attention to uniforms, with help from Hugo Boss, but not necessarily for the motives Burke infers (to convey authority)—I think he really liked uniforms. During his January 27, 1945 meeting with his generals—a time when the Soviets are rolling over German forces in the East and Anglo-American forces are rolling over them in the West, a time when careful thinking was desperately necessary—General Alfred Jodl mentions that Cossacks would participate in an action in the Papuk mountains (in Croatia), and Hitler responds:

The Cossacks are good. But why do we have to put them in German uniforms? Why don’t we have those beautiful Cossack uniforms?
Jodl: Most of them have Cossack uniforms.
Guderian. Red fur hats.
[Hitler]: Do they still have those?
Jodl: They have red trousers with silver stripes.
[Hitler]: We have to leave that. It’s wonderful. (Heiber, 650)

I think we have to consider that the brownshirt uniforms were so carefully designed not because Hitler had a cunning reason, but because Hitler really cared about uniforms, even when that concern was irrelevant, and possibly distracting.

Violence. Hitler continued the practice of public beatings of dissenters, intended to make his base feel like winners and intimidate potential critics.
Unification through common enemy. He unified Germany by making most of the major world powers his literal enemies (which worked up to a point—his popularity probably hit its height in 1941, with many people remaining or becoming loyal to Hitler and the Nazis because of the Allied bombings).
Accusing all dissenters of being Jewish. He, and the Nazis, characterized anyone who disagreed with them as either Jewish (their explanation of Roosevelt’s hostility) or controlled by Jews (their explanation of Churchill’s opposition).

Symbolic rebirth. The trope of symbolic rebirth turned up in virtually every speech, usually at the beginning (as it does in Triumph of the Will), but was also the basis of his remilitarizing Germany.

Inborn dignity. Hitler’s notion of inborn dignity—that Aryans/Germans are divinely entitled to world domination because of inborn superiority—informed his military decisions, to his detriment. As late as 1944, Hitler thought that he just needed one good win to get the US to sue for peace; David Stone says that Hitler

believed that the American soldiers were generally of poor quality, with potentially fragile morale, and were therefore vulnerable to a decisive counterstroke delivered as a complete surprise once they had over-extended the lines of supply upon which they depended. (Shattered Genius 328)

Hitler’s tendency to make bad military decisions on the basis of racist and nationalist stereotypes was shared with others. The Wehrmacht wildly underestimated the USSR because Nazis “looked down on Russians as untermenschen, racially inferior and therefore incapable of outsmarting the master race. As a result, the Wehrmacht continually fell for Soviet deception and was wrong-footed by most major Red Army offensives” (Dick 105-6).

That’s important: the Nazis’ (not just Hitler’s) belief in inborn dignity caused Nazis to make bad decisions, and the bad outcomes of those bad decisions never caused them to reconsider their racist premises.

Projection/scapegoating. Racist and nationalist premises directly relate to Hitler’s, Nazis’, and Germans’ propensity for projection and scapegoating. Germans were drawn to scapegoating Jews for the loss of The Great War partially because they couldn’t imagine that the Allies had superior military forces and strategies. Hitler’s tendency toward projection also meant that he assessed a situation in terms of what he would do, believing that everyone thought exactly like him—thus, the whole basis of Germany’s aggression (the terror of encirclement) assumed that all other countries had the same aspirations for European hegemony, and the same war-mongering goals.

Crucial to Nazi success was that the Nazi party relentlessly promoted a popular and comfortable narrative about its current problems. Germany’s decision to back Austria’s move in regard to Serbia (the catalyst of WWI) was grounded in aspirations for intra-European hegemony and a profound underestimation of their opposition. It was probably unwinnable for Germany the moment it became a war of attrition (after the failure to win the Battle of the Marne, or once the race to the sea turned into a stalemate), but definitely after the 1918 “Spring Offensive” failed (McElligott 21). Although Erich von Ludendorff had come to the conclusion that the war was unwinnable in September of 1918, he later—like Hitler and far too many other Germans–blamed the loss of the war on the mythical “stab in the back” (a reference to the ending of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods) on the part of a liberal/Marxist/Jewish press and conspiracy.

In other words, projection and scapegoating about WWI were not just rhetorical moves on the part of Hitler in Mein Kampf, but ways of thinking that formed the bases of actions on the part of people long before Hitler even began speaking in beerhalls. Burke identified ways of thinking that informed individual and national behavior not just limited to Hitler.
This leaves the materialization/spiritualization move—the one my students find most difficult and yet, once they get it, most powerful. And, again, Hitler’s shifting and mingling material and spiritual explanations wasn’t just a rhetorical move that Hitler himself sometimes cunningly chose in order to deceive, deliberately, his audience. When he shifted, it was because the shift confirmed a basis of belief beyond argument.

In “Rhetoric of Hilter’s ‘Battle’” and War of Words, Burke mulled over the way that people alternate between spiritual and material explanations of phenomena, and he identified something it would take cognitive psychologists thirty years to acknowledge. Essentially, what Burke noticed is that we can deflect disconfirming evidence and/or resolve cognitive dissonance by reframing our explanations (involving what Wayne Booth would later call “motivism”).

Burke points out the “ominous” temptation of transforming “material interests” into “their corresponding ‘ideals’” (76). This toggling between material and ideal explanations, and the deflecting of material considerations by reframing them as really idealistic, was typical of Nazi rhetoric, perhaps most notoriously in Heinrich Himmler’s “Posen” speech—when he tries to reframe concentration camp sadism as courage and idealism.

Hannah Arendt aptly described the Nazi explanation of the war:

the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of ‘the battle of destiny for the German people’ […] which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and, third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated. (Eichmann 52)

Although she doesn’t use the terms, she’s pointing to deflection through idealization.

Hitler’s careful calculations of material conditions (such as the need for oil, tungsten, and consumer goods) persuaded him that he had to have won the war within three years, and that could only happen if he could avoid a two-front war, or, if worse came to worse, if he could dispatch the USSR within six months. By the summer of 1942, it was clear that he had failed on all three points. He hadn’t won in three years, he had a two-front war, the USSR was holding a line, and, even worse, the US was now involved.

Initially, Hitler’s mastery of material conditions and factors was impressive (from 1933 to 1941)—but, as those conditions deteriorated (1941-1945), he shifted more and more to spiritual explanations, to the point of absurdity.
On December 12, 1942, Hitler discussed with his generals the very grim situation of the Sixth Army encircled in and near Stalingrad. His generals tried to persuade Hitler of the serious material problems in order to get him to order, if not a fighting retreat of the army as a whole, at least a series of strategic retreats that would reduce the number of vulnerable salients. At one point, General Kurt Zeitzler tells Hitler “we have received from here reports of deaths caused by exhaustion—14 cases within 6 days” (19).

Zeitzler goes on to explain that relieving troops wouldn’t be able to get there anytime soon (if at all), and that, despite Goering’s assurances, even the Luftwaffe wasn’t able to solve the issue through delivering supplies. He tells Hitler,

[T]hey have to sit on this narrow front day and night, and they’re on the alert all night and have to get out. An example: the men don’t even take off their pants anymore; they just leave them on. (37)

Hitler responds by giving a lecture about the relative value of the troops in terms of their racial purity (that is, inborn dignity), whingeing about how he was right when his generals were wrong (scapegoating and projection—he had been wrong), and ends with, “I have to say one thing in all of these cases, I get too few suggestions from the Army for the Knight’s Cross” (37).

Hitler appears to believe that the material problems of the 6th Army (cold, severe shortages of food, fuel, and supplies) could be solved if they were given more medals. Material conditions could be overcome with sufficient will (spiritual) which could be fostered by medals (material and spiritual?)

In May of 1943, Hitler’s generals pointed out that there were difficulties getting Nazi troops from Sicily to the Italian mainland because of the destruction of the ferries. Hitler said, “the decisive element is not the ferry, but the will” and “Where there is a will there is a ferry” (137).

Hitler made bad military decisions because he sincerely believed in the power of the will—the spirit’s ability to triumph over material conditions. And he wasn’t alone in that belief. Citino describes the leadership of the Wehrmacht:

One of the characteristics of Prussian-German field commanders over the centuries had been their notion that they were capable of mastering even the most difficult strategic situation, the worst imbalance of men and materiel, and they could do it through sheer force of will (Retreat 26)

One of the odder instances of Hitler’s mingling of material/spiritual frames is the literalizing of metaphors through historical/religious typology.

Burke’s argument is that Hitler’s rhetoric worked because it was a bastardization of religious forms of thought, and I completely concur. Burke didn’t mention typology, another religious concept bastardized by demagogues. Typology is a way of reconciling the Hebrew Bible and New Testament by saying that characters in the Hebrew Bible are types that will be re-presented in the New Testament, and in the end times of Christianity. Oddly enough (or perhaps not), it’s long been a way to rationalize unethical behavior on the part of political and religious figures. For instance, 17th century American Puritans justified genocidal policies toward the indigenous peoples through identifying their in-group figures as the same type as some Hebrew Bible figure who had killed other peoples—such as Joshua or David. And think of the number of religious figures caught in adultery who claim to be David (a seriously flawed use of typology, as even conservatives admit).

Nazi typology regarding Hitler made him religious and historical: he was Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Jesus . As things got materially worse for the Nazis and Germany was clearly losing the war, Hitler seems to have started believing that the comparison to Frederick the Great was not just an analogy, or even metaphor, but a matter of fact—so true that Hitler could make plans based on Frederick the Great’s military career being a perfect prediction of his own. Because the Russian Empress Elizabeth’s death in 1761 caused the coalition of allies to fracture as they were advancing on Berlin (as part of what is commonly known as the Seven Years War), thereby saving Frederick from defeat, Hitler’s strategies for the war in 1945 were to hold out until Roosevelt’s death would cause the same fragmenting of the allies.

Speer describes the scene in Hitler’s bunker April 12, 1945 (less than a month before Berlin was over-run) when Hitler got news that Roosevelt had died:

Hitler caught sight of me and rushed toward me with a degree of animation rare in him these days. He held a newspaper clipping in his hand. “Here, read it! Here! You never wanted to believe it! Here it is!” His words came in a great rush. “Here we have the miracle I always predicted. Who was right? The war isn’t lost! Read it! Roosevelt is dead!”
He could not calm down. He thought this was proof of the infallible Providence watching over him. Goebbels and many others were bubbling over with delight as they exclaimed how right he had been in his reiterated conviction that the tide would turn. Now history was repeating itself, just as history had given a hopelessly beaten Frederick the Great victory at the last moment. The miracle of the House of Brandenburg! Once again the Tsarina had died, the historic turning point had come, Goebbels repeated again and again and again. (Inside the Third Reich, 549)

It’s as though they lost track of the comparison to Frederick the Great being a typological interpretation—an idea—and saw it instead as a material fact.
As an aside, I should mention that much of his understanding of America came from the cowboy and Indian stories of Karl May, just as his understanding of German destiny was drawn more from Wagner than any historian—the real and ideal were more than a little muddled for Hitler and his followers.

I have to say that the most irritating aspect of this project for me has been Nazis’ persistent propensity to feel sorry for themselves. Eichmann, the Nazis on trial in Nuremberg, the generals in their self-serving and fundamentally dishonest post-war memoirs, Goebbels in his diaries, and Hitler at every opportunity—they all whined. Even Albert Speer, who at least had the grace to be genuinely shocked at the films of concentration camps shown at his trial, whined during his sentence in Spandau Prison, without ever acknowledging that, as boring as his incarceration was, no matter how bad the Russian food, how ugly the paint on the walls, or how petty the rules, it was worlds better than the conditions under which the slave laborers in his factories lived, let alone the conditions of victims in the concentration camps he helped to build.

Arendt remarked on that same “trick” (her term): “So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” (Eichmann 106).
While I think that some of the victim posture is related to what Paul Johnson has called “the rhetoric of masculine victimhood,” I think that most of it is what Burke calls deflection. And deflection works by breaking one association and creating another.

Ernesto Laclau argued that populist reason works by “equivalential chains”—the demands of various people who are identified as “the people” perceive “an accumulation of unfulfilled demands” as essentially equivalent. Clean water is much like good wages is much like good schools (73). And, as he noted, as we move along the chain, the connections among the links might be tenuous, such as between clean water and good wages (75). He also observes that the creation of equivalential chains is part of a three-part process, including, as the second step, “the constitution of an internal frontier dividing society into two camps” and the third step is “the consolidation of the equivalential chain through the construction of a popular identity which is something qualitatively more than the simple summation of the equivalential links. “(77). That is, the in-group.

It’s that second step—the two camps move—that Laclau didn’t follow up in his discussion of equivalential chains; but it’s important. Equivalential chains, or the associations and identifications that Burke noted, aren’t just about who we are—it’s about who we are not. That insight is acknowledged, but also not really pursued, in Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s explanation of dissociation. To show dissociation, they have pages of maps of the paired terms that someone dissociates—they’re more interested in the dissociation, but I think the concept of paired terms deserves more attention.

What The New Rhetoric notes, although just in an aside, is that a valued term is valued because it is asssoiated with another valued term and it is not the devalued term. [Slide 10] For example, Jamieson describes the rhetoric of the 2016 pro-Trump trolls:

Those who endanger us include Muslims, illegal aliens, Black Lives Matter activists, atheists, demanding women, those who oppose gun rights, and Hillary Clinton, to name a few. Among those cast as ‘we’ were white males, Donald Trump, Christians, veterans, and workers whose jobs are threatened by bad trade deals and job-stealing ‘illegals’. (45)

That’s paired terms.

There are, as Laclau says, terms that are tenuously connected—advocates of the MOAR GUNZ NRA rhetoric are not particularly likely to be Christian, and there are feminist Christians, BLM activists are not necessarily opposed to gun rights, and atheists have little to do with Muslims—out-group terms only share that they are opposed to some value associated with the in-group.

When people make judgments simultaneously by association and opposition, then all sorts of odd things get connected. Burke notes the paradox that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, condemns Jews as both communists and capitalists—that association works because, for his audience at the time, capitalist (meaning people who oppress the working class) and communist (meaning anything to the left of Hitler) were both on the “them” side of paired terms. They aren’t logically associated with each other, but only associated through a similar place in the associational/binary method of reasoning in which we too often engage. I think one of the best examples of this associational/binary method of reasoning is the German/Nazi victim stance.

The set of paired terms that enables that stance is:

Because there are only two possible positions—victim or persecutor—and those two are completely opposed, if you can show that you are, in any way, a victim, you have shown that the other side must be the persecutor.

What the Nazis did, prior to every invasion, was publicize or fabricate acts of aggression against “Germans” (such as discrimination against speakers of German in Czechoslovakia, the faked attack in Poland, lies about the number of Soviet tanks on the border). Any action against any “Germans” (such as German-speaking Czechs) justified any violent response on the part of Nazi Germany—regardless of provocation, regardless of proportion. It’s interesting to me that, even after the war, when every reasonable person would have concluded that the Nazis lied, and nothing they said should be believed, many people still cited Nazi claims of victimizations as justifications for what Germany did. And that included people who believed that they had rejected Nazism and seen the light.

Hannah Arendt argued that language was important for self-deception, and that one kind of self-deception was the failure to think. Her argument on that point was misunderstood and misrepresented—she never said that Adolf Eichmann was an automaton, or mindless, and certainly not stupid. In Life of the Mind, she described what she saw at the trial:

It was not stupidity but thoughtlessness. [….] Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality (Life 4).

Eichmann thought—he thought very carefully about what trains to use, where to send them, how to rob Jews more effectively, how to send as many as possible to camps. He thought a lot about his career. Hitler thought very carefully about how to conduct a war of annihilation, what weapons should be developed, what troops should be sent where. And his generals also thought very carefully about how to do their jobs.

But, as far as Arendt was concerned, Eichmann wasn’t thinking because he had an “almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view” (48). He, like Hitler, thought he knew what others were thinking, but he didn’t, because he just assumed they thought the same things he did. For instance, he whinged to his Jewish guards about his failure to advance as far in the SS as he had hoped, and he expected the guard to sympathize. He engaged in projection.

The strategies that Burke identified weren’t just deliberate rhetorical strategies of Hitler’s: they were ways of thinking shared with enough people to put and keep him in power. And the notion that Hitler was authentic, despite, or perhaps even because of, his persistent inaccuracy and dishonesty, was important to that success. When we ask if Hitler was sincere or manipulative we ask the wrong question because we falsely assume that there is a distinction between being authentic and being deceptive, and there isn’t.

Jamieson points out the importance of the perception of Clinton as disingenuous and Trump as authentic for voters in 2016:

Unlike Trump, whose freewheeling rhetoric was consistent with the assumption that ‘what you see is what you get,’ Clinton’s wariness of the press, caution when speaking extemporaneously, and discomfort with personal narrative all invited audiences to read between the lines while also asking, what wasn’t she saying. (206)

I’m saying that the concept of paired terms explains the paradox of someone deciding that someone who has a book in which he talks about his reliance on dishonesty to get good deals would seem authentic and trustworthy. Telling someone that you lie to others should make you less reliable, but, as Burke said, by including you in the scam, the scammer might get you to think that he wouldn’t lie to you. A self-confessed liar can seem authentic as long as s/he seems to care, sincerely, about the in-group, and that is signaled through having the right paired terms.

What paired terms enable is the deflection that Burke noted is done through shifting between spiritual and material explanations. Clinton’s admission of saying different things to different audiences is given a different spiritual explanation—it’s a sign of who she is; it’s a consequence of her being a bad person. Trump’s admission of saying different things to different people is explained as made necessary by external factors, as coming from sincere concern for in-group members. Clinton’s deceptiveness means she can’t be trusted; Trump’s means he can.

For in-group members, a logically incoherent argument that plays the paired terms effectively—that signals a shared understanding of in-group and enemy, through what terms are associated, and which ones are set in opposition—resonates with a base looking for someone who really gets them. Whether that leader is being accurate doesn’t matter—his shared in-group identity is authentic, and that’s enough.

There is a conventional view of Hitler as a magician with a word wand who hypnotized, seduced, or scammed passive Germans. He wasn’t. He was a grifter who made millions from Mein Kampf and never paid taxes, who said he would use his personal wealth to pay for various government expenditures (he didn’t, but people might have thought he did), and who persuaded the conservative (left-phobic) elite and middle class that he unapologetically believed in the inborn dignity of whites to dominate in Germany and for Germany to act without restraint on the part of the goals of other countries.

Hitler didn’t magically convert people to that point of view—he gave expression to what a lot of Germans thought. Nazi rhetoric provided ways of thinking about German actions that made people more comfortable with something they already wanted to do. Persuasion is always really self-persuasion, and deception is always self-deception—the rhetoric of others just gives us the tools we can choose to use to persuade ourselves. [Slide 13] In regard to the 2016 election, Jamieson says, “When voters integrate their own assumptions into content, they become accomplices in their own persuasion” (83). Or, in Burke’s words, “

Our job, then, our anti-Hitler Battle, is to find all available ways of making the Hitlerite distortions of religion apparent, in order that politicians of his kind in America be unable to perform a similar swindle (219)

Demagoguery; Or, the Pleasures of Outrage

Trump is commonly accused of being a demagogue. So were Obama, Reagan, FDR, Lincoln, and, well, pretty much every rhetorically effective President, and so are Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michael Moore, Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones. MLK was frequently condemned as a demagogue, which is interesting, since he’s now presented as the civil and moderate choice. I’ll come back to that.

In other words, the term “demagogue” is what scholars of rhetoric would call a “devil term”—it’s a term meaning you don’t like that person.

Using it that way is profoundly factional—demagogues are the political leaders of that party. That use of the word demagogue, I’ll argue, fuels demagoguery. In this talk, I want to consider what it would mean to think about demagoguery in a way that would enable us to identify demagoguery in our leaders, in our way of thinking about politics, in how we argue. And I want to point to some more productive ways to do all of those.

In this talk, I’m going to emphasize three concepts: in-group/out-group thinking; policy argumentation; and demagoguery.

When I began this talk, or perhaps even when you heard I would give this talk, you paid attention to cues as to whether I agree or disagree with your politics. If you decided, on the basis of various cues about my group identity (I’ll explain that in a bit), that I’m in your in-group, then you relaxed, your shoulders might have dropped, and you prepared to listen to what I have to say. If you decided I’m in an out-group, you invoked all of your critical thinking apparatus, you sat up straighter, making even your body reject what I was going to say.

That’s called in-group/out-group thinking.

In social psychology, the “in-group” is not the group in power; it’s the group you’re in. If being vegan is important to your sense of identity—if it’s something you tell others about yourself—then “vegans” is one of your “in-groups.” (We all have many in-groups.) It doesn’t matter that, in terms of cultural and political power “vegans” is a very marginal groups; it’s an in-group for you.

If being a “vegan” is an important identity for you (an in-group) then you probably have some group (or groups) you think of as being opposed to you—an out-group. Perhaps it’s omnivores, Romaine eaters, Nancy Pelosi, Republicans, people you’ve decided are “unhealthy,” lizard men. What matters is whether the pro-vegan groups in which you hang out share a sense that you are an “us.” And that “us” implies some “them” Sometimes there is more than one out-group. At U of Texas, it’s the Aggies (Texas A&M) and Sooners (U of Oklahoma). At A&M, it’s the Longhorns (U of Texas) and the Tigers (LSU). So, they aren’t always perfectly symmetrical.

We attribute far too much importance to in-group and out-group identities—we’re more likely to trust someone we perceive as “in-group” even if the issue at hand has nothing to do with that group. Whether someone else is vegan shouldn’t influence your willingness to buy a car from them, find their stance on immigration more credible, rely on their judgment about technical issues, but perception of shared group membership does exactly that: a person who shares one in-group with us is likely to be more trusted on irrelevant topics. People are more likely to trust and prefer others who share a birthday (Finch &Cialdini 1989; Burger et al. 2004; Walton et al. 2013), a first name (Burger et al. 2004), first-letters of a name (Hodson et al. 2005), facial similarities (Bailenson et al. 2008), even an invented category like sharing a rare “fingerprint type” (Burger et al. 2004) when deciding how to vote, how to distribute money, whether to invest with or buy something from a person—and those shared characteristics are all completely irrelevant.

The in-group is partially constituted by the out-group (we are who we are because we are not them). And someone can activate in-group favoritism by signaling that they feel animosity toward an out-group. My husband is an Aggie, and I teach at U of Texas. More than once a salesperson has seen my husband’s Aggie ring, and said something to both of us about how awful the Longhorns are. One of the more entertaining times this happened, it was when we were buying a car for me. The salesman simply assumed my husband hated Longhorns, and that my husband did the thinking for both of us.

We have a tendency to reason from identity—to look at someone and make a quick assessment as to whether they are reliable, credible, intelligent, ethical. And then, having made that determination, we process other information about them differently. That determination, however, is likely to be largely on the basis of in-group favoritism. And, once we’ve decided they’re in-group and reliable and so on, then we’ll use what social psychologists call “motivated reasoning” in order to try to confirm our initial perception. Our sense of ourselves as good people, and a good judge of people, is now tied up in confirming that our initial assessment of them was correct.

It would be uncomfortable to admit that we were wrong in our assessment of our in-group; it is pleasurable to feel that we (and people like us) are, if not always entirely right, at least never as bad as the out-group.

The dominant model of how we reason is what is often called “naïve realism.” It says that, if we’re going to make a decision, we should first try not to have any preconceptions (this isn’t possible, by the way). We should first look at the data, perceive the information, then reason. You can make sure that you’re right by going through this process again.

That isn’t how it actually works.

Imagine that we meet someone, call him Chester, and we want to figure out if he is ethical and reliable.

This is probably what the process is.

Something happens—you meet Chester. You have various prior attitudes—such as your beliefs about the topics Chester brings up, and the affect you’ll have about Chester/the incident that are incidental (that he reminds you of someone you like, that he looks like you, shares your birthday, you are hangry). These non-conscious factors lead to considerations about which you might be aware (Chester seems nice; Chester seems like a jerk; Chester seems to have the opposite of your politics). You might deliberate about Chester, all the time unaware of the way that your evaluation of Chester is so heavily influenced by those non-conscious factors.

Our determination isn’t emotional, exactly—it’s closer to what Aristotle called “intuition” and what many cognitive psychologists call “System 1” thinking.

Research is clear that we can’t suppress or ignore those non-conscious factors because we can’t do anything about them as long as they are non-conscious. Some cognitive psychologists (including Lodge and Taber) have tried telling people to think carefully, to take their time, to check their reasoning, and yet they still find that people are still significantly (and non-consciously) relying on motivated reasoning that is largely confirming the beliefs and affects that come from the non-conscious signals (triggers, or frames, depending on what metaphor you want to use). I’m much more hopeful about it, because I think Lodge and Tabor are right insofar as they are testing whether people will quickly give up important beliefs—that is, in a single sitting—but that isn’t how political reasoning necessarily works.

A lot of the experiments on these issues about people changing their minds involve bringing people into a psych lab, determining their hot commitments, giving them disconfirming information of those beliefs, and then noting that people don’t change their beliefs (or don’t change them on the basis of rational argumentation). But it wouldn’t be rational to abandon an important belief because someone in a pysch lab gave you new information. People do change our beliefs, for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of ways, and some of those narratives of personal change involve rational argumentation (such as those in How I Changed My Mind About Evolution).

Let’s set that aside, and talk about demagoguery.

Demagoguery works by appealing purely to those kinds of non-conscious considerations, ratcheting them up with dog whistles, claims of existential threat to the in-group, reframing all policy issues into a war between the in- and out-group that is best won by pure loyalty to the in-group (and whatever leaders happen to best embody the in-group).

Politics is about policies. Ultimately, political determinations are decisions about which policies we should pursue, and it’s relatively clear what is a helpful way to argue about policies—policy argumentation.

Policy argumentation can (and probably should) happen any time people are deliberating a new course of action. There are, loosely, two kinds of cases that participants might make: affirmative (arguing for a particular course of action) or negative (arguing against a course of action someone else has advocated).

The affirmative case has two parts: the “need” (showing we have a problem and need a solution), and the “plan” (where a plan is described and defended.)

Within each part, there are certain “stock issues” (sometimes called “stases”—the traditional term for them).

Need:

- - there is a problem (ill or need);
  - it’s very serious;
  - it is caused by X;
  - it will not go away on its own.

Plan:

- - here is my plan;
  - my plan solves the problem (ill or need) I identified in the first part of my argument (solvency);
  - my plan is feasible (feasibility);
  - my plan will not cause more problems than it solves, or cause a worse problem than it solves.

A negative case refutes the argument on any (or all) of those stases.

What happens in a culture of demagoguery is that rhetors spend a lot of time on the need part of the case—and the “ill” (or problem) is that there is an out-group who is the cause of our problems. They are dangerous. We are, this argument runs, faced with extermination, and we don’t have time to deliberate (this is what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “the state of exception”).

Because the problem is the presence and power of an out-group, the solution is, at least, their exclusion from policy discourse, and perhaps their exclusion from our community, or even their extermination.

The “plan” such as it is (and it isn’t much) is that you should throw all of your support behind me, or behind my party, or behind the plan I propose. Instead of arguing solvency or feasibility, demagoguery shifts back to need, or attacking critics as necessarily “them.”

Let me give an example.

In 428 BCE, Athens was in the midst of a long and nasty war with Sparta. Mytilene, a city-state on the island of Lesbos some distance from Athens, was an Athenian ally that had a pro-Sparta revolt. Athenian had been warned that a revolt would happen (by pro-Athenian Mytileneans), and was able to send Paches, a general, with a fleet to put down the revolt. He succeeded. The leader of the revolt was executed. Paches took prisoner people that seemed to have been the main ones involved in the revolt. The question was what Athens should do.

Athens had various options. One option not on the table was to do nothing—they’d already enacted execution. They could, however,

- - Do nothing further, and restore Mytilene to its somewhat privileged status as an ally
  - Do nothing further, but reduce Mytilene to a client-state
  - Execute everyone associated with the revolt, and restore Mytilene to its somewhat privileged status as an ally
  - Execute everyone associated with the revolt, and reduce Mytilene to a client-state (Diodotus’ argument)
  - Execute all the men of Mytilene, including those who had alerted Athens to the pending revolt, and sell all the women and children into slavery (Cleon’s argument)

Thucydides, a historian living at the time, gives us his version of the debate that occurred in Athens. He says that, initially, the Athenians opted for the third, but woke up the next morning from a kind of rhetorical hangover, like texts from last night on papyrus, and had doubts. The debate was reopened.

Thucydides’ work is the beginning of a shift in the word “demagogue,” from a neutral term (leader of the demes—essentially the middle and working classes) to a negative term meaning a rhetor who argues a particular way. Thucydides didn’t much like Cleon, but he had no objection to leaders of the demes—the hero of his history is Pericles, who was also a leader of the demes. Thucydides’ opposition to Cleon came from his belief that Cleon’s way of arguing was disastrous for democratic deliberation. Aristophanes and Aristotle seem to have thought so too, and they have the same criticisms of how Cleon argued.

Cleon’s argument for mass killing relies on five claims:

1. Athenians are soft, spend too much time deliberating, think too much, and don’t understand that an empire is based in terror;
2. mass killing will terrorize all the other Athenian city-states into submission (the first recorded instance of genocide conceived as a rhetorical act). Once they see how brutally Athens responds to revolt, no one will ever dare revolt again;
3. the Mytileneans hurt Athens and the only way to respond to injury is violence; to do nothing (which he claims is what his opposition is advocating) is to reward Mytilene for hurting Athens;
4. his argument is so obvious that the only explanation for people arguing against it is that they are secretly in the pay of enemies of Athens;
5. Athenians might be tempted to fall for those corrupt rhetors’ arguments out of feeling compassion for people who want to kill them.

If you map this argument back on to the “stock issues” of policy argumentation, you can see the problems with his argument.

Need:

- - there is a problem (ill or need); his ill isn’t about the Mytileneans—it’s about how Athenians are weak-willed, too kind, too moved by argument, too prone to thinking about things, don’t act from anger (in other words, Cleon is telling a democracy that their problem is that they are a democracy);
  - it’s very serious; he says Athens will lose its empire unless it toughens up and terrorizes everyone;
  - it is caused by X; it’s caused by Athens having people who like deliberation;
  - it will not go away on its own; he never mentions this.

Plan:

- - here is my plan; he can assume that people know his plan from the arguments on the previous day—mass killing and enslavement;
  - my plan solves the problem (ill or need) I identified in the first part of my argument (solvency); his plan does nothing as far as solving what he identified as the “ill”—that Athenians like to deliberate—the implied solution to that problem is that Athens should become a tyranny with him the tyrant; as far as the problem Athens is actually facing—what to do about its allies and client-states in the long war, he asserts, but doesn’t argue, that mass killing will terrorize the client-states;
  - my plan is feasible (feasibility); nothing;
  - my plan will not cause more problems than it solves, or cause a worse problem than it solves; nothing.

In other words, Cleon isn’t engaged in policy argumentation. Not even a little. Cleon isn’t even really arguing about the case at hand—he just asserts he’s right, and that anyone who disagrees with him is a traitor. Cleon’s argument isn’t about Mytilene—it’s about how Athenians should deliberate, and, he says, they shouldn’t—they should stop thinking and just listen to him. And notice that Cleon makes people who want to deliberate—the basis of democracy—a traitor to a democracy. That’s what demagoguery always does.

His argument isn’t about policy, but about identity. He divides the issue into an us (angry, manly, dominating, clear, decisive, realistic) and them (dithering, too compassionate, wanting to do nothing, deliberating). The first kind of person is right; the second has no legitimate argument to make, and should be silenced.

Cleon is arguing that politics isn’t about policies, but is a zero-sum battle between good (strong, manly, punitive, angry and yet in control, decisive, realistic) people who think in black and white terms and bad (people who believe in the processes of democracy). Cleon’s argument is an argument against democracy itself.

Cleon was trying to pretend his argument was rational, realistic, and clear-thinking, and that the opposition argument was fuzzy and compassionate. He was wrong on both counts.

Cleon’s entire argument was based on two fallacies: a false binary, and straw man (two fallacies often connected in demagoguery). [Go back to slide 7] As I mentioned earlier, Athens had many possible options in regard to Mytiline—no one was arguing for the position Cleon represents as “the opposition.” And Cleon never answers the argument that Diodotus actually makes.

That’s typical of demagoguery—turn a complicated array of possible policy options into a binary of “my way or nothing.”

Diodotus’ argument was for a more punitive position than anything done previously by Athens. Cleon represents it as doing nothing. That’s the straw man fallacy.

It’s also lying about his opposition. In general, when people engage in straw man fallacy, it’s either because they’re ignorant of the opposition argument (that is, they live in an informational enclave) or they know what it is and they choose to lie about it. And, if they lie about it, it’s because they don’t really have a good argument against what the argument actually is.

There was nothing compassionate or soft about the opposition argument. Personally, I find it heartless. Diodotus, his opponent, was arguing for execution of the people plausibly associated with the revolt. Diodotus, argued entirely on the grounds of policy argumentation (he hit the marks, which Cleon didn’t).

And, at least as Thucydides tells us, and is reasonable to infer from history, Cleon was wrong and his opponents were right. As Athens became increasingly punitive and authoritarian toward other members of its empires, it created enemies for itself, and allies for its enemies.

More important, Cleon’s kind of rhetoric became the norm. The most disturbing passage in Thucydides is his description of how the zero-sum factionalism of Greek city-states corrupted deliberation.

Thucydides says that the things previous valued in democracies—fairmindedness, inclusive deliberation, being willing to compromise, listening to various points of view, trying to argue well, striving to think things through, making party less important than polis—have all been lost. Instead, all that anyone cares about is their faction (we’d use the term “party”) winning, at any cost. Things we would find outrageous behavior if done by them we think perfectly fine if we do them; compromise, looking at various sides—that’s just dismissed as being a girly girl; wanting to take the time to think things through and get information, that’s just cowardice; not wanting to take the most extreme action right now—that’s just wanting to do nothing at all. They wanted leaders who were angry, unwilling to compromise, committed to the most extreme proposals, and refusing to work with anyone who disagreed. Blocking the actions of your opponent was just as good as actually getting anything done.

The democracies of this era had become cultures of demagoguery.

This tendency to frame all policy issues as a zero-sum choice between the two major factions would lead to Athens’ just plain dumb decision to invade Sicily, and to do so in such a way that it opened itself up to attack from Sparta. It would be the end of the Golden Age of Athens. That’s what happens in a culture of demagoguery. That’s what it did in Rome; that’s what it did in the various Italian republics; that’s what it’s done in many other democracies—from Germany in the 1930s to Venezuela now—abandoning inclusive policy argumentation in favor of reducing every argument to how your party can trounce the other destroys democracies. And we’re in that culture, and we have been for at least twenty years.

So, what do we do?

Well, there are a few things.

The notion that we can do anything useful about this by creating a third or fourth party won’t work. I used to think that, but reading more about Weimar Germany (which had over six parties) nipped that notion in the bud. Nor will ending straight-ticket voting do anything useful. It isn’t the parties that matter—I’m not even sure it’s how people vote that matters.

It’s how people argue that matters. It’s how you argue.

If you listen to me and think, “Oh, yeah, Those People do this all the time—they’re just Cleon,” you’re missing my point. You’re still engaged in demagogic reasoning. What matters is whether you are engaged in demagogic reasoning.

So, how do you stop that?

First, stop putting all issues into left v. right. That’s like trying to categorize all people as at this moment using their left hand v. at this moment speaking French. Some people are doing both, most people are neither, and it varies from moment to moment.

Second, get out of your informational enclave, and, when you put that with the first recommendation, that means don’t just flip between Maddow and Hannity, or Mother Jones and the Drudge Report. Toggling between highly partisan media doesn’t make you more informed; it just makes you more angry. Every reasonable political position has someone smart making a smart argument for it—find those smart arguments.

Instead of thinking left v. right, think about the array in regard to the relevant axes. For instance, for some issues this is my set of go-to sites.

I’d have a slightly different list for something about immigration, or religion, or the environment.

Third, simply asking yourself if you have reasons for your position doesn’t make you reasonable. Thinking you are not motivated by feelings doesn’t make you rational. It’s more useful if we think about a rational stance as one that meets two standards:

1. you can imagine the circumstances under which you would change your mind—could your mind be changed by new data? what would that data be?
2. you have listened to smart versions of opposition arguments. can you summarize your opposition’s argument in a way they would say was fair and accurate? have you looked at the data they’ve provided?

And a rational argument is one that argues in a way that you apply consistently– so, if your argument about one Constitutional amendment is grounded in the intentions of the people who wrote it, is that how you read all of them? If not, your argument isn’t rational.

Would you consider your way of arguing rational if made by your opposition—if you think your argument must be accepted because you can describe a personal experience to support it, would you abandon it if your interlocutor told you a personal experience of theirs to refute it? In other words, are you consistently treating personal experience as sufficient support?I’ve been going on a long time, so I’ll just mention a few resources that can be helpful. I really like the ten rules of two philosophers—Fran van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (1984).

1. Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or casting doubt on standpoints.
2. A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if the other party asks him to do so.
3. A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.
4. A party may defend his standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.
5. A party may not falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party or deny a premise that he himself has left implicit.
6. A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.
7. A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.
8. In his argumentation, a party may only use arguments that are logically valid or capable of being validated by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises.
9. A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it, and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting his doubt about the standpoint.
10. A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and he must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible.
  By the way, this isn’t saying that you have to treat everyone discussion this way—it’s just the set of rules for a rational argument. If you’re talking to someone who consistently violates the rules, you aren’t in a rational argument, regardless of what you do. This is a relationship that takes two. In addition, there are really worthwhile conversations that aren’t like this—a time you can’t persuade each other, but you can learn from each other.

The book Superforecasting has a great list of how to counteract the various cognitive biases we have. Philip Tetlock has listed those rules as the “Ten Commandments for Aspiring Superforecasters.” One of the most important premises of his work is that there is not a binary between being certain and being clueless. Pure certainty is a personal feeling, not a cognitive state—be willing to acknowledge that we live in a world in which we range from being able to be pretty certain to not at all certain, and we need to think about where on that continuum a decision is ranges. Tetlock says, there is a big difference between the amount of justifiable confidence we can have about who will win the 2019 World Series than who will win the 2050 one.

The last point I’ll mention is something that Diodotus says. Diodotus began his speech, not by talking about Mytilene, but by talking about talking. Diodotus said, “The good citizen ought to triumph not by frightening his opponents but by beating them fairly in argument.”

[slides by Alexander Fischer]

Citations

Applegate, Kathryn et al. (2016) How I Changed My Mind About Evolution: Evangelicals Reflect on Faith and Science. IVP Academic.

Bailenson, Jeremy N., et al. (2008). “Facial similarity between voters and candidates causes influence.” Public Opinion Quarterly 72.5, 935-961.

Burger, J. M., Messian, N., Patel, S., Prado, A. del, & Anderson, C. (2004). “What a Coincidence! The Effects of Incidental Similarity on Compliance.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(1), 35–43.

Eemeren, F.H. van, & Grootendorst, R. (1992). Argumentation, communication, and fallacies: A pragma-dialectical perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hodson, G., & Olson, J. M. (2005). “Testing the generality of the name letter effect: Name initials and everyday attitudes.” Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(8), 1099-1111

Kahneman, Daniel. (2013). Thinking Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Poehlman, T. et al. (2013). “The name-letter-effect in groups: sharing initials with group members increases the quality of group work” PLoS one, Vol. 8 , Issue 11

Tetlock, Philip. https://fs.blog/2015/12/ten-commandments-for-superforecasters/

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars. (1998). Trans. Steven Lattimore. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Walton, G. M., Cohen, G. L., Cwir, D., & Spencer, S. J. (2012). “Mere belonging: The power of social connections.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(3), 513-532.

Folk rhetorical theory and the “argumentum ad Hitlerum”

[This is a talk–a revised version of one I posted earlier–so it doesn’t have links.]

Wayne Booth once complained that, when he mentioned he was an English teacher, people on trains wanted to talk about commas. If he had told them he taught rhetoric, they would have said something about Hitler. In papers in argumentation classes, Hitler references are as common, and as welcome, as dawn of time introductions. Like dawn of time introductions, Hitler references aren’t unwelcome because they’re always wrong, but simply because they’re so easy, so thoughtless, and so rarely relevant. In politics, it’s even worse; hence the argumentum ad hitlerum fallacy, or Godwin’s law. Despite the miasma of Hitler references in politics, and Hitler’s reputation as the most powerful rhetor, teachers and scholars of rhetoric tend to avoid him.

We do so for various reasons, but at least one is that the popular (and even, to some extent, scholarly) understanding of Hitler’s power is far more simplistic than the case merits that it seems hopelessly complicated to try to get in and untangle it. I want to argue that is why Hitler should figure more in our teaching and scholarship. The popular (let’s call it folk) explanation of Hitler’s success is simplistic and inaccurate, but it’s powerful in that it fits with the folk explanation of persuasion, which fits with the folk explanation of what distinguishes ethical from unethical persuasion, which fits with folk notions about what constitutes good versus bad citizenship.

Talking about Hitler is a way of talking about the problems with all those mutually confirming, and similarly damaging, folk explanations.

And here a note about terminology: when I proposed this paper, I was strongly influenced by Ariel Kruglanski’s discussion of lay epistemology—that is, the common sense way that non-experts think thinking works. But, the more I worked on the issue, the more I realized that it isn’t a question of experts v. non-experts—Kenneth Burke, various scholars of demagoguery, some historians, and other experts assume the explanations I’m talking about. I came to think the better analogy is Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels’ discussion of what they call the “folk theory of democracy” which, as they point out, serves as the basis for a lot of scholarly work on political science and theory.

Here are the four folk explanations:

- The folk explanation of what happened in Germany is that Hitler is the exemplar of a magician rhetor because he “swung a great people in his wake” (Burke 164), hypnotized the masses (and his generals, the generals claimed post-war). The disasters of Nazism are thereby explained monocausally: Hitler was a pure rhetorical agent, whose oratorical skill transformed the German people into his unthinking tools.
- This explanation appeals to the folk explanation of persuasion, in which a rhetor determines an intention, identifies a target audience, and then creates a text that contains the desired message (often presented visually as an arrow) and shoots it at the target. If it hits, the target audience now believes what the rhetor wanted them to believe, and it was effective rhetoric. (Obviously, this reduces all public discourse to compliance gaining.)
- Ethical rhetoric is one in which the rhetor, and the message the rhetor is sending, are ethical. And that is determined by ethical people asking themselves if the message is ethical (sometimes by whether the rhetor is ethical); Hitler’s rhetoric was unethical because it was intended to do unethical things. This is the folk explanation of the ethical/unethical distinction.
- There are unethical rhetors out there, and, therefore, good citizens are ones who think carefully about the message being shot at them.. That is, the dominant popular way of describing and imagining participants in public deliberation is as consumers of a product—they can be savvy consumers, who think carefully about whether it really is a good product, or they can be loyal consumers, who always stick to one brand, or they can be suckers, easily duped by inferior products (and so on). Good citizens think carefully about the political messages they consume. Ethical citizens recognize an unethical rhetors and unethical messages, and resist them.

These are powerful narratives in that they enable the fantasy that each of us is a good citizen, an ethical person, who recognizes unethical arguments, and would, therefore have opposed Hitler, and continues to oppose anyone like Hitler. (Hence argumentum ad Hitlerum—it isn’t about the political figure in question; it’s about a performative of being an ethical person with good judgment.)

These models are refuted by theoretical work (e.g., Biesecker’s 1989 “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation”) or empirical work on political reasoning (e.g., the work summarized in 2013 The Rationalizing Voter). They aren’t just wrong; they’re importantly wrong. They rely on a pleasurable but entirely indefensible othering of Germans.

That’s wrong, as I’ll discuss, but it’s importantly wrong because this explanation of what happened in Nazi Germany can make people feel good about themselves while they’re replicating the errors that Germans made. It says that, if you believe you are thinking critically about what a rhetor says, you are making sure it fits with what you think is ethical, and you only put your trust in someone you think is ethical, then you will never make the mistake Germans did.

This explanation of what happened in Germany is partially the consequence of post-war renarrrations of pre-war events. Large numbers of Germans post-war claimed they didn’t know about the genocides, they had nothing to do with it, and they resisted Hitler in their hearts. The Wehrmacht officers claimed they were just following orders (sometimes unwillingly), didn’t know about the genocides, and couldn’t break their oath to Hitler. Officials of churches claimed they were the real victims, and had resisted the Nazis all along.

None of that was true. Christopher Browning (Ordinary Men), Robert Gellately (Backing Hitler), Ian Kershaw (Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution), Michael Mann (Fascists) and various other scholars have shown that participation in, support for, or pragmatic acquiescence toward the genocides, imprisonment, and war-mongering of the Nazis were considerable and often strategic and instrumental. People were not swept up by Hitler’s rhetoric. Support for the Enabling Act was a strategic gamble. Support for Hitler and the Nazis increased after he took power because people liked the improved unemployment rate, the remilitarization of Germany, the rejection of various treaties, the reassertion of German’s entitlement to European hegemony, the conservative social agenda. Ian Kershaw says,

“The feeling that the government was energetically combating the great problems of unemployment, rural indebtedness, and poverty, and the first noticeable signs of improvement in these areas, gave rise to new hopes and won Hitler and his government growing stature and prestige.” (Hitler Myth 61)

They either liked or didn’t care about the antisemitism, jailing of political opponents, politicization of the judiciary. They didn’t think Hitler was unethical, and they didn’t think his policies were unethical. Many thought he was a decisive leader who was getting things done, and many thought he was chaotic and unpredictable, but getting them what they wanted.

For instance, the Wehrmacht was not constituted of innocent victims of Hitler’s rhetoric or hopelessly bound by their oaths. As Robert Citino says, “The officers shared many of Hitler’s goals, however—defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, rearmament, restoration of Germany’s Great Power status—and they had supported him as long as his success lasted” (Last Stand 205). The officer class helped Hitler come to power in 1932-33 because

“They saw Hitler as a fellow nationalist, a bit crude, but one who could win the masses to the nationalist and conservative cause. His opposition to Marxism, his plans for German rearmament, his anti-Semitism: all these things harmonized well with the essentially premodern world view of the officer corps.” (Citino, Last Stand 211)

That he would later destroy Germany, enable the USSR to gain territory, and destroy the German officer class meant that post-war they could try to present themselves as having been victims all along—but they had helped him get into power, supported him in power, knew about the genocides, and engaged in them.

Similarly, that Hitler did, as he said he would, disempower the churches and imprison those who resisted Nazi control of the churches means that some people now try to claim that the two major confessions—Catholic and Lutheran—resisted Hitler and Nazism. But they only resisted Nazi interference in Church power, and then only fairly late. There was criticism of the euthanasia program, and some criticism of the extermination of converted Jews, but it was little and it was late. The Church Wars were about issues of Church autonomy, not genocide. Like the officer class, many Catholic and Lutheran church officials would regret having supported Hitler (many would claim that the problem wasn’t Hitler, but Nazi administrators acting on their own initiative), but support him they did. Had the Catholic party (the Centre Party) not unanimously voted for the Enabling Act, it would not have passed.

Catholics and Lutherans were concerned about reinstating the privileges reduced by the Socialist Democrats (who believed in a separation of church and state) and the political agenda they believed was the core of being “Christian”—opposition to birth control, homosexuality, abortion, pornography.

Germans were persuaded during the Nazi regime—people came to accept and act on policies they would have balked at before 1930—but not because they heard a Hitler speech and were magically hypnotized. They did so, largely for instrumental reasons.

Culturally, our discussions of Hitler are dominated by what Ian Kershaw calls “the Hitler myth”—that he was a magically charismatic leader who overwhelmed Germans’ capacity to judge. That isn’t what happened: Germans judged, and they liked what they saw.

My point is that these four folk explanations–of Hitler, persuasion, ethical rhetoric, and good citizenship– are not just inaccurate, but are inaccurate in ways that reinforce factionalism, obstructionism, and politics as performance of in-group loyalty. Talking. more about Hitler is a way to talk about what’s wrong with those explanations.

I read Goebbels’ 1945 diary entries so you don’t have to.

The 1978 edition (ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper) of Goebbels’ Final Entries begins in late February 1945. By that time, the Battle of the Bulge was over, and it had failed. At this point, Germans have lost Budapest, Breslau is encircled, they’re calling up women, Dresden has been firebombed, bombings of major German cities are a nightly event, American troops have reached the Rhine. It goes downhill from there.

28 February. Goebbels’ reading of the situation is that Western countries are facing a “profound political crisis” with strikes “the order of the day”–so, any minute now, the Allies will collapse.[1] That same day he expresses outrage at “bolshevist atrocities” and, after a conversation with General Vlasov about the USSR in 1941, concludes, “The Soviet Union has had to weather precisely the same crises as we are now facing and that there is always a way out of these crises if one is determined not to knuckle under them.” [Thereby ignoring that USSR got through 1941 by having moved factories, still having access to resources, getting help from the US, and having a much larger potential military force. It was not just the will.]

2 March. “We can count on major operations in the east German area being possible by the end of March” and “if all goes well we can anticipate enormous success” [which is a nice example of a tautology, and summarizes Nazi strategic thinking at this point]. Also, the situation “is not reassuring” and “In the East too operations have not gone through as we expected.” But, meanwhile, he got a lot of letters telling him he made a great speech. Oh, and he condemns Roosevelt for megalomania.

3 March. Anglo-American troops are making progress. “We had never really visualized such a course of events.” [He did another speech that went over well, though.]

4 March. The population in the West is welcoming the Anglo-American troops. “This I had really not expected.” [Later he would—in many entries– blame this problem on the Nazi leadership rejecting his argument that they should openly abrogate the Geneva Convention.] He’s reading Carlyle on Frederick the Great, and that proves it will all be fine. Oh, and a lot of people thought “four weeks ago the situation was such that the majority of military experts had given us up for lost” but Hitler sure showed them! Hitler has a bullet-proof plan: “we must somehow succeed in holding firm in the West and the East.” Hitler also hopes to open talks with some one of the Allies, but, before they could start talks, “it is essential that we score some military success.” So, it’s a clear plan: hold the line everywhere, have some major military successes, and then open talks with one of the Allies. That’ll work.

7 March. [And a lot of other entries.] Goebbels is puzzled that publicizing Soviet atrocities isn’t turning world opinion in favor of the Nazis. [This is a common plaint: why can’t people see that Nazis are the real victims here?] He’s also grumpy that a lot of the “Germans” coming in from the East don’t really look German to him. At this point, he begins to blame Goering for all of the Nazis’ problems [a nice instance of projection—yes, it’s true that Goering screwed up, but Goebbels has screwed up just as much if not more].

8 March. Goebbels makes fun of Churchill for saying the war would end in two months. [VE-Day was 8 May.] “Our sole great hope at present lies in the U-boat war.” And “Rendulic has now put things in order in East Prussia.” So, really, everything is fine.

13 March. Hitler says there are new airplanes, so it’s all good (and, besides, Hitler had been right all along about what kind of aircraft Germany should have been producing) [This topos–what really matters here is who was right–runs throughout Hitler’s deliberations with his generals, and, less so, through Goebbels’ diaries. That’s interesting.][2]

14 March. “I refuse to be deterred by reports of so-called eyewitnesses.” [Germans in the west are cheerfully welcoming Anglo-American troops.]

21 March. He and Hitler have a long talk and agree “that we must hold firm at the front and if possible score a victory in order to start talking to the enemy.” Well, as long as he and Hitler have decided that the people at the front should hold firm, it’s all good. [It’s fascinating how often Goebbels and Hitler decide that the problem can be solved by telling people to be more steadfast. Sometimes they take a lot of time to yell at people to be more steadfast. ]

22 March. “The military situation both in East and West has become extraordinarily critical; during the course of the 24 hours it has changed noticeably to our disadvantage.” [Because up to that point it was pretty good?]

23 March. “I think that my work too is no longer being totally effective today.” He was getting a lot of reports of people surrendering instead of fighting to the death for Hitler. This might cause some people to think that perhaps things were getting a little bleak for Germany. But, no, his reading of Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great shows that, although Frederick “too [who else is feeling this? Goebbels or Hitler?] sometimes felt that he must doubt his lucky star, but, as generally happens in history, at the darkest hour a bright star arose and Prussia was saved when he had almost given up all hope. Why should not we also hope for a similar wonderful turn of fortune!” So, the fact that things were going badly was proof that things would be fine! As long as you continue to beleeeeeve.

30 March. “This is the beginning of the catastrophe in the West.” He and Hitler agree on the military strategy: “we must now make every effort to re-establish a fresh front.”

31 March. He’s getting letters that are a little “despairing.” Some of them even suggest Hitler might be at fault. He blames it on Goering.

1 April. People in France, he says, must really be regretting the Allies’ success because they are facing a serious food shortage. [Did he really not know that Nazis had always been starving occupied countries? He mentions, approvingly, Hitler’s decision not to try to feed POW. He has several entries where he says that the liberated peoples must be miserable now, so maybe he really didn’t? On the other hand, he knew about Nazi extermination policies, and the extraordinary atrocities, and yet he expresses outrage at Soviet atrocities, so is all just in- v out-group?]

4 April. “We must act at once if it is not to be too late.”

It was too late in November 1941.

In other words, this is how an administration steeped in charismatic leadership and blind loyalty who believes it’s all about marketing responds to failure. They never learn. They never start behaving rationally.

Never. They will take everyone down with them.

[1] Editors of Goebbels’ diaries always have to decide what to do about the fact that he is writing the next day about what happened the previous. So, on February 28, he wrote about what happened on the 27^th(“yesterday” in Goebbels’ words). Some editors (e.g., Fred Taylor, who edited Goebbels’ 1939-41 entries) keep Goebbels’ dates, but Trevor-Roper doesn’t. I’ve used Trevor-Roper’s dates.

[2] This is also the entry where Goebbels makes clear that it was genocide, and he knew it, and he was happy about it: “Anyone in a position to do so should kill the Jews off like rats. In Germany, thank God, we have already done a fairly complete job. I trust that the world will take its cue from this.”

Making sure the poor don’t get any food they don’t deserve

“But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind”

In a recent interview, Kellyanne Conway said that “able-bodied” people who will lose Medicare with the GOP health plan should “go find employment” and then get “employee-sponsored benefits.” Critics of Conway presented evidence that large numbers of adults on Medicaid do have jobs, as though that would prove her wrong. But that argument won’t work with the people who like the GOP plan because their answer is that those people should get better jobs. The current GOP plan regarding health care is based on the assumption that benefits like health care should be restricted to working people.

For many, this looks like hardheartedness toward the poor and disadvantaged—exactly the kind of people embraced and protected by Jesus, so many people on the left have been throwing out the accusation of hypocrisy. That the same people who are, in effect, denying healthcare to so many people have protected it for themselves seems, to many, to be the merciless icing on the hateful cake.

And so progressives are attacking this bill (and the many in the state legislatures that have the same intent and impact) as heartless, badly-intentioned, cynical, and cruel. And that is exactly the wrong way to go about this argument. The category often called “white evangelical” tends to be drawn to the just world hypothesis and prosperity gospel, and those two (closely intertwined) beliefs provide the basis for the belief that public goods should not be equally accessible (let alone evenly distributed) because, they believe, those goods should be distributed on the basis of who deserves (not needs) them more. And they believe that Scripture endorses that view, so they are not hypocrites—they are not pretending to have beliefs they don’t really have. This isn’t an argument about intention; this is an argument about Scriptural exegesis.

Progressives will keep losing the argument about public policy until we engage that Scriptural argument. People who argue that the jobless, underemployed, and government-dependent should lose health care will never be persuaded by being called hypocrites because they believe they are enacting Scripture better than those who argue that healthcare is a right.

1. The Just World Hypothesis and Prosperity Gospel

There are various versions of the prosperity gospel (and Kate Bowler’s Prosperity Gospel elegantly lays them out), but they are all versions of what social psychologists call “the just world hypothesis.” That hypothesis is a premise that we live in a world in which people get what they deserve within their lifetimes—people who work hard and have faith in Jesus are rewarded. In some versions, it’s well within what Jesus says, that God will give us what we need. In others, however, it’s the ghost of Puritanism (as Max Weber called it) that haunts America: that wealth and success are perfect signs of membership in the elect. And it’s that second one that matters for understanding current GOP policies.

In that version, in this life, people get what they deserve, so that good people get and deserve good things, and bad people don’t deserve them—it is an abrogation of God’s intended order to allow bad people to get good things, especially if they get those good things for free. For people who believe that God perfectly and visibly rewards the truly faithful, there is a perfect match between faith and the goods such as health and wealth. People with sufficient faith are healthy and wealthy, and, because they have achieved those things by being closer to God, they deserve more of the other goods, such as access to political power. Rich people are just better, and their being rich is proof of their goodness. So, it’s a circular argument–good people get the good things, and that must mean that people with good things are good.

I would say that’s an odd reading of Scripture, but no odder than the defenses of slavery grounded in Scripture, nor of segregation, nor of homophobia. All of those defenders had their proof-texts, after all. And, in each case, the people who cited those texts and defended those practices had a conservative (sometimes reactionary) ideology. They positioned themselves as conserving a social order and set of practices they sincerely believed intended by God as against liberal, progressive, or “new” ways of reading Scripture.

[And here a brief note—they often didn’t know that their own readings were very new, but that’s a different post.]

Because they were reacting against the arguments they identified as liberal (or atheist), I’ll call them reactionary Christians for most of this post, and then in another post explain what’s wrong with that term.

In some cultures, political ideology and identity are identical, so that a person with a particular political belief automatically identifies everyone with that belief as in the category of “good person,” and anyone who doesn’t share that belief is a “bad person.” We’re in that kind of culture.

That easy equation of “believes what I do” and “good person” is enhanced by living within an informational enclave. In informational enclaves, a person only hears information that confirms their beliefs—antebellum Southern newspapers were filled with (false) reports of abolitionist plots, for instance,—so it would sincerely seem to their readers as though “everyone” agrees that abolitionists are trying to sow insurrection. In an informational enclave, “everyone” agrees that the Jews stab the host for no particular reason (the subject of the stained glass above–a consensus that resulted in massacre).

Informational enclaves are self-regulating in that anyone who tries to disrupt the consensus is shamed, expelled, perhaps even killed. By the 1830s, it was common for slave states to require the death penalty for anyone advocating abolition, and “advocating abolition” might be understood as “criticizing slavery.” American Protestant churches split so that Southern churches could guarantee they would not have a pastor that might condemn slavery (the founding of the SBC, for instance), and proslavery pastors could rain down on their congregations proof-texts to defend the actually fairly bizarre set of practices that constituted American slavery.

As Stephen Haynes has shown, the reliance of those pastors on an odd reading of Genesis IX became a Scriptural touchstone for defending segregation.

Southern newspapers were rabidly factional in the antebellum era, and (with a few exceptions) pro-segregation (or silent on segregation) in the Civil Rights eras. (This was not, by the way, “true of both sides,” in that the major abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, often published the full text of proslavery arguments.) Because those proof-texts were piled up as defenses, and reactionary Christianity was hegemonic in various areas, many people simply knew that there were three kings who visited the baby Jesus, that those three kings related to the three races, with the “black” race condemned to slavery due to Noah’s curse.

If you’d like to see how hegemonic that (problematic) reading of Scripture was, look at older nativity scenes, and you will see that there is always a white, someone vaguely semitic, and an African. Ask yourself, how many wise men visited Jesus? Try to prove that number through Scripture.

That whole history of reactionary Christianity is ignored, and even the SBC has tried to rewrite its own history, not acknowledging the role of slavery in their founding. My point is simply that, when a method of interpreting Scripture becomes ubiquitous in a community, then people don’t realize that they’re interpreting Scripture through a particular lens—they think they’re just reading what is there.

For years, the story of Sodom was taken as a condemnation of homosexuality, but there is really nothing about homosexuality in it—the Sodomites were more commonly condemned for oppressing the poor. There are rapes in it, and one of them would have been homosexual, but there is no indication that homosexuality was accepted as a natural practice in the community. Yet, for years, the story of Sodom was flipped on the podium as though it obviously condemned all same-sex relationships.

For readers of The New York Times, The Nation, or other progressive outlets, the Scriptural argument over homosexuality was under the radar, but it was crucial to how far we’ve gotten for the civil rights of people with sexualities stigmatized by reactionary Christians. The Scriptural argument about queer sexuality was always muddled—Sodom wasn’t really about gay sex, the word “homosexuality” is nowhere in Scripture, people who cite Leviticus about men lying with each other get that sentiment tattooed on themselves while wearing mixed fibers, Paul was opposed to sex in general.

Reactionary Christians managed to promote their muddled view as long as no one raised questions about exegesis, and the Christian Left raised those questions over and over. And now even mainstream reactionary churches who argue that Scripture condemns homosexuality have abandoned the story of Sodom as a proof text. That success can be laid at the feet of progressive Christians.

One thing that turned large numbers of people, I think, was the number of bloggers, popular Christian authors, and pastors making the more sensible Scriptural argument: there isn’t a coherent method of reading Scripture that demonizes queer sexuality and allows the practices reactionary Christians want to allow (such as non-procreative sex, divorce, wildflower mixes, corduroy, oppressing the poor).

Similarly, an important realm in the Civil Rights movements was that in which progressive Christians debated the Scriptural argument. One of the more appalling “down the memory hole” moments in American history is the role of reactionary Christians in civil rights. Segregation was a religious issue, supported by Genesis IX, and various other texts (about God putting peoples where they belong, and all the texts about mixing). Even “moderate” Christians, like those who opposed King, and to whom he responded in his letter, opposed integration.

That’s important. The major white churches in the South supported segregation, and all of the reactionary ones.The opponents of segregation (like the opponents of slavery) were progressive Christians, sometimes part of organizations (like the black churches) and sometimes on the edge of getting disavowed by their organizations. And that is obscured, sometimes deliberately, as when reactionary Christians try to claim that “Christianity” was on the side of King—no, n fact, reactionary Christianity was on the side of segregation.

Right now, there is a complicated fallacy of genus-species among many reactionary Christians, in that they are trying to claim the accomplishments of people like Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael on the grounds that King was Christian, while ignoring that their churches and leaders disavowed and demonized those people (and, in the case of Jackson and Carmichael, still do).

Reactionary Christianity has two major problems: one is a historical record problem, and the second, related, is an exegesis problem. They continually deny or rewrite their own participation in oppression, and they have thereby enabled the occlusion of the problems their method of exegesis presents. If their method of reading got them to support slavery and segregation, practices they now condemn, then their method is flawed. Denying the problems with their history enables them to deny the problems with their method.

Reactionary Christianity’s method of reading of Scripture begins by assuming that the current cultural hierarchy is intended by God, that this world is just, that everything they believe is right, and then goes in support of texts that will support that premise. And there is also a hidden premise that the world is easily interpretable, that uncertainty and ambiguity are unnecessary because they are the signs of a weak faith, and that the world is divided into the good and the bad.

2. The Scriptural argument

The proof-text for the notion that poor people don’t deserve health care or other benefits is 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you: that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

Thessalonians may or may not have been written by Paul (probably not), but it certainly contradicts what both Paul and Jesus said about how to treat the poor. There are far more texts that insist on giving without question, caring for the poor, tending to people without judging, and for humans not presuming to be God (that is, we are not perfect judges of good and evil, and our fall was precisely on the grounds of thinking we should be).

That we have a large amount of public policy wavering on that single wobbly text of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 is concerning, but it isn’t new—the Scriptural arguments for slavery, segregation, and homophobia were and are similarly wobbly. Prosperity gospel has a very shaky Scriptural foundation, and the whole notion that Scripture supports an easy division into makers and takers isn’t any easier to argue than the readings that supported antebellum US practices regarding slavery.

Their reading of Scripture says that they should feel good about health insurance being restricted to people who have jobs (which is why Congress is cheerfully giving themselves benefits they’re denying to others—they see themselves as having earned those benefits by having the job of being in Congress). They can feel justified (in the religious sense) in cutting off people on Medicaid, those who are un- or underemployed, and those with pre-existing conditions because they believe that Scripture tells them that those people could simply stop being un- or underemployed, or have made different choices that wouldn’t have landed them on Medicaid, or could have prayed enough not to have those pre-existing conditions. They believe that they are, in this life, sitting by Jesus’ side and handing out judgments.

I think they’re wrong. But calling them hypocrites won’t work.

This is an argument about Scripture, and progressives need to understand that, as with other policy debates, progressive Christians will do some of the heavy lifting. And progressive Christians need to understand that it is our calling: to point, over and over, to Jesus’ passion for the poor and outcast, and to his insistence that the rewards of this world should never be taken as proof of much of anything.

http://theexperimentpublishing.com/tag/patricia-roberts-miller/