train wrecks in public deliberation Archives - Page 4 of 4

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.

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