Tag: Trump

Unification through a common enemy and a failure of leadership

Photo of Americans being sent to concentration camps
https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs

A sociologist friend and I were talking about how deeply entrenched it is for people to think in terms of in- and out-groups (Us v. Them), and he joked that the only thing that could unite humanity was an attack from outer space. And there’s something to that—in rhetoric, it’s sometimes called “unification through a common enemy.” The rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke, in 1939, published an article in which he pointed out that that was one of Hitler’s strategies for uniting Germans. It’s how a lot of families function—everyone is mad at each other until they can agree how much they hate Aunt Agnes. I’ve seen fractious departments unify against an upper administrator. Churchill unified a deeply divided country when its existence was threatened by Nazism—his speeches continually spoke to a common, shared identity, and a common effort (FDR was much the same).

Those four examples show that the impulses that cause us to unite in our shared division can range from the trivial (the family dislikes the aunt, the department dislikes the Dean) to somewhat more important (if the Aunt is trying to defraud the family or the dean is trying to defund the department) to the very existence being threatened (as in the case of the UK). But what of the missing fourth example—Germany?

Germany is a strange case, because many Germans felt deeply threatened by various things— a world economic collapse that threatened large numbers of people with poverty and unemployment. Many Germans also felt threatened by the secularization of education, losses of privilege, modernization of various kinds, and their sense of group was esteem was threatened by the disastrous outcome of the Great War. But their existence wasn’t threatened; their prestige as a nation was, but not their existence as a nation.

But they became persuaded it was. The irony, of course, was that this belief in existential threat was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Germans, persuaded that the Reichstag Fire demonstrated an existential threat, put in power a leader and party that would, actually, lead to the extermination of Germany as a nation, and the extermination of between five and eight million Germans (with about 500,000 killed as part of the racial and political purification programs).

Athens, in the fifth century BCE, was facing an existential threat in the form of the Spartans. Instead of uniting as a city-state to fight that threat, they were more concerned with the existential threat to their faction, to the possibility that the other faction might exterminate them, and so focused their energy on exterminating the other. And they lost the war to Sparta.

What I’m saying is that the existential threat doesn’t have to be real for it to be really effective at unifying, and having a real existential threat doesn’t necessarily unify. What makes the difference is the rhetoric of the leadership.

Churchill and FDR responded to existential threat with a rhetoric that tried to unify the entire country, even the political parties that had recently been their worst critics. Both had opposition members in their cabinets. Both listened to people who disagreed (Kershaw’s Fateful Choices describes their decision-making processes, and how much they relied on thoughtful attention to the opposition, elegantly.) FDR and Churchill used the existential threat to transcend factionalism. Hitler and the demagogues of Athens manufactured or used the existential threat in order to amplify the factionalism, to equate opposition groups and critics with the external threat, and thereby enable elimination of fellow citizens. Instead of trying to unify a people, their goal was purification through extermination of the opposition.

In a way, COVID-19 is the external threat my sociologist friend joked about. It could be the moment of unification, a moment when we transcend factional disagreement in order to unify against this disease. It could be that moment if political leadership decides to make it that.

Promoting unity is hard, and nobody does it perfectly, but some do it better than others. FDR allowed a rhetoric of internal purification to lead to massive race-based imprisonment, and Churchill treated India as only sort of unified with the UK (enemy enough for mass starvation). But they were better than Hitler or the Athenian demagogues, and they resisted even more extreme forms of internal purification.

We’re in a culture of demagoguery, in which every issue is not just us v. them, but treated as a zero-sum war of existential threat between us and them. Someone saying “Happy Holidays” threatens Christians with extermination because it’s part of the “war on Christmas.” Requiring vaccines is a war on liberty. Trying to reduce poverty is a war. Treating every issue as a war means treating people who disagree with our policy agenda as traitors. That’s a bad idea.

We do have a common enemy in the form of COVID-19; we need a leadership that enables us to transcend our differences to work together. The last thing we need is a leader who exacerbates internal animosity, who openly tries to exterminate dissent, who has a fragile ego that has to be stroked, who refuses to listen to anyone who disagrees, and who is now openly toying with exterminating democracy itself. We need someone even better than FDR, not someone even worse than Cleon.

Bad math, belief, and half Nazis

The above are two very popular tweets (as you can see from the likes), and they rely on a way of thinking about political choices that is often popular. The argument is that you shouldn’t vote for this person because s/he is still in a category of evil people.

You see it all over the political spectrum (we need to stop talking about either a binary or single-line continuum of political positions—it’s false and damaging, and it fuels demagoguery). In 2016, there were informational enclaves that said that people should vote against HRC because she was a socialist, fascist, neoliberal, and therefore no different from Stalin, Hitler, Thatcher.

It’s a way of arguing that eats its own premises, and yet it’s so often persuasive. For instance, the argument that you shouldn’t vote for Biden because he’s half the nazi that Trump is has the major premise that you should never choose the thing that is twice as good.

Of course you should choose the thing that is twice as good. You should buy the car that is twice as good, rent the apartment that is twice as good, take the job that is twice as good. When we’re deciding about a car, apartment, or job, we can do that math, but, when it comes to politics, suddenly people can’t see that half a fascist is twice as good as a full fascist, let alone whether Biden is half a fascist.

So, why do people who can take an imperfect apartment that is twice as good as their other option, when it comes to politics, reject taking an option that is twice as good as the other?

There are a lot of reasons. Here, I want to mention two. First, politics is tied up with identity in a way that getting an apartment usually isn’t (although, people I’ve known for whom their apartment is closely attached to their identity have the same bad math—an apartment twice as good as the other is just as bad as the other); second, people who reason deductively often have false narratives about the past, or don’t care about what has happened. A politics of purity is often connected to a belief in belief.

The first move in that argument is to treat everyone who disagrees with us as in the Other category. There are good arguments that Trump is fairly high on the fascism scale (although with some important caveats, particularly about individualism), but Biden is not a fascist. He’s a third-way neoliberal. But, really, when people are making this kind of argument—HRC is basically Stalin, Sanders is Castro, HRC is Trump—they aren’t putting the argument forward as some kind of invitation to a nuanced discussion about political ideologies. It’s a hyperbolic appeal to purity politics.

Like all hyperbole, the main function of the claim is that it is a performance of in-group fanatical commitment, a demonstration of loyalty on the part of the speaker. The point is to demonstrate that they think in terms of us or them, and they are purely opposed to them.

That seems like a responsible political posture because, in cultures of demagoguery, there are a lot of people (who are bad at math) who decide that being purely committed to the in-group is the right course of action, regardless of whether that has ever worked in the past. They believe that we can succeed if we purely commit to a pure commitment to a pure in-group set of pure policies. That way of thinking about politics—the way to win in politics is to refuse to compromise—is all over the political spectrum.

And, I just want to emphasize: the math is bad. A half-nazi is actually better than a full nazi. A leader who would have done half what Hitler did would have been better than Hitler. Unless you are thinking in terms of purity, and so you don’t actually care about how many people are killed, in which case you’ve fallen into what George Orwell, the democratic socialist, called the fallacy of saying that half a loaf is the same as nothing at all. If you’re hungry, half a loaf is still half a loaf.

A friend once compared it to the trolley problem, in which a person refuses to pull the lever that involves being a participant in an action they really dislike in order to prevent a much worse outcome. I’m not a big fan of the trolley problem as an actual test of ethical judgment, but I think the metaphor is good—it’s a question of whether a person who refused to act (pull a lever that would cause one person to die rather than five) feels that this failure to act is more ethical than acting. When I talk to people who are in this kind of ethical dilemma, it’s clear that they are balking at that moment of their grabbing the lever—they want the trolley to shift tracks; they don’t want Trump to get reelected; they just don’t want to pull the lever.

That was complicated, but all I’m saying is that it’s a question of whether people recognize sins of omission. They don’t object to Biden getting elected; they object to voting for him.

So, how has that worked out in the past? I can’t think of a time when refusing to vote because one candidate was half as bad as the other has worked to lead to a better political situation (but I’m open to persuasion on this), but I can think of a lot of times when it hasn’t. I’ll mention one. It happens to be a time that people could vote for half-nazis, and liberals tried to persuade voters to do exactly that.  

It’s important to remember that the Weimar Communists could have prevented Hitler from coming to power by being willing to form a coalition government, but they wouldn’t because, they said, every other political party (including the democratic socialists) were, basically, fascists.

I’m not saying that compromising principles is always a good choice; a lot of people made the mistake of thinking that they could work with Hitler, that they should stay in his administration (or on his military staff) so that they could try to control him or, at least, direct him toward better actions. They couldn’t. Within a couple of years of his being installed as Chancellor, all the people in his administration who were going to try to moderate him were either fired or radicalized. It took longer with the military, and in that case the people who tried to control him were fired, strategically complacent, or radicalized. But it was the same outcome. There was no working with Hitler—there was only working for him.

If we want to prevent another Hitler, then we have to vote against him.

Trump’s border rhetoric/policies and COVID-19

a small concrete ball with an entrance
A four-person bomb shelter in Munich

Right now, I’m seeing a lot of people say that the COVID-19 crisis proves that Trump was right in his controversial policies to shut down the borders. I’m seeing it in enough different places that it’s clearly become a talking point getting repeated as a truism in pro-Trump media and communities. It’s a really interesting argument because many people think it’s a clobber argument—one that should end the argument. But critics of Trump don’t find it all that persuasive. Why not?

There are a lot of reasons, including that some people won’t grant Trump credit for anything (just as there are Trump supporters who won’t acknowledge any criticism of him)—that’s just rabid factionalism.

Another reason has to do with how people think about politics (and lots of other things). Many people reason associatively. There’s a famous quiz for testing thinking processes that has questions like this:

There is a group of women, 30% of whom are librarians, and 70% of whom are nurses. Mary is one of those women, and she is 35. What are the chances that she is a librarian?

A. 10-40%
B. 40-60%
C. 60-80%
D. 80-100%

A fair number of people will pick 30%.

If the example is:

There is a group of women, 30% of whom are librarians, and 70% of whom are nurses. Mary is one of those women, and she is 35 and wears glasses. What are the chances that she is a librarian?

A. 10-40%
B. 40-60%
C. 60-80%
D. 80-100%

Under those circumstances, a fair number of people will pick a higher percentage, as though the added detail “wears glasses” changes the chances of her being a librarian. But, that detail doesn’t change the chances—there are, as far as I know, no studies showing that librarians are more likely to wear glasses than nurses. Wearing glasses is something we associate with librarians, largely because of movies and TV. It isn’t logically related, but associatively.

Another example of that kind of thinking is to ask one group of people how many calories a meal has, such as a meal consisting of 6 ounces of poached chicken breast and 1 cup of rice, and to ask another group of people about the calories of a meal consisting of 6 ounces of poached chicken breast, 1 cup of rice, and a salad (4 ounces mixed green lettuces, 3 cherry tomatoes, and 1 tablespoon oil and vinegar dressing). A lot of people will give the meal with the salad fewer calories than the one without. (Sometimes even the same people will give the meal with the salad fewer calories than the one without.)

Of course, the meal with the salad has more calories, but people think it doesn’t because salads are associated with healthy food, and healthy eating is associated with consuming fewer calories.

A few years ago, I had a funny conversation with someone about McDonald’s—they said that they got the fried chicken sandwiches rather than any of the hamburgers (even though they liked the hamburgers more) because it had fewer calories than any of the hamburgers. Actually, it doesn’t. Again, it’s a question of association—chicken is associated with healthy food, and so this person was simply assuming that chicken sandwiches had fewer calories. I had a similar conversation with someone who bragged that she didn’t let her children drink milk for health reasons; she gave them fruit juice instead.

I once lived somewhere that, several years before, had had a series of burglaries that took place in the middle of the day, while people were away at work. Several of the neighbors responded by leaving very bright outdoor lights on all night, and that’s an interesting response. It wasn’t going to make any difference as far as preventing the burglaries—they happened during the day. But daytime burglaries are burglaries, and they’re associated with danger. And leaving lights on during the night is associated with safety, with safety against a different kind of burglary, but one that’s still associated with daytime burglaries.

So, did the policy of leaving lights on protect those neighbors against the burglars who were active in the neighborhood? No, but it protected them against something, and so seemed like a good policy.

When we’re frightened, we have a tendency to believe that protecting our borders (physical, biological, ideological) is a good plan, simply because it’s associated with protection—regardless of whether that particular way of protecting our borders will actually prevent the outcome about which we’re frightened. We protect our house against one kind of burglary, but not the one actually threatening us.

Trump’s policies regarding “borders” has as much logical relevance to COVID-19 as leaving lights on all night had for daytime burglaries. Trump’s policies were (and are) about blocking land-based immigration from Mexico and any immigration (or travel) from various Muslim countries. He never did anything about Americans travelling to and from China, and that’s how we got COVID-19. As Jeff Goodell says, “In fact, the travel ban was a failure before it began. “You can’t hermetically seal the United States off from the rest of the world,” Rice says. For one thing, the ban only applied to Chinese citizens, not to Americans coming home from China or other international travelers, or to cargo that was coming into the U.S. from China.”

His rhetoric associated various Others as evil and dangerous, but never in a way that would have kept the US safe from this virus. And, despite what many people who are repeating the talking point about his policies being right seem to think, Trump got his way with his travel bans. They went into effect.

So, this talking point is simply saying that Trump was right to make Americans fearful about our borders, but he didn’t make Americans fearful about borders. He made Americans fearful about Mexicans and Muslims, and now he’s trying to make us fear the Chinese. Viruses don’t have a race, and they don’t see race. Building the wall wouldn’t have prevented COVID-19. His travel ban (which was instituted) didn’t prevent COVID-19. His second travel ban (about which he bragged) was ineffective.

That Trump’s rhetoric is a rhetoric of fear of Others, and that his policies are associated with that fear, doesn’t mean his policies were effective. That two (or more) things are associated in our minds is not actually proof that they are either causally or logically connected. They’re just associated in our mind, and sometimes someone’s rhetoric.

Narcissism and bad political outcomes

Like many teachers trying to shift to online teaching and still provide a useful experience for students, I’m got way too much to do this week, and so I don’t have the time I’d like for writing about Trump’s putting a “strong” economy over the health of the people he is supposed to care for. I don’t even have the time to point out that his first moves were not to protect the economy, but the stock market. (They are not the same thing.)

All I have time for is to make a few quick points that others have already said. There are lots of ways that Trump could help the economy that would, in fact, raise all boats (something that boosting the stock market does not do)—FDR figured them out. This isn’t about fixing the economy; this is about fixing the perception of the economy (since so many people do associate “the economy” with “the stock market”).

I’m about to give an example of how that way of thinking of things worked out for another world leader in order to make the point that it isn’t a good way to approach the situation. I want to give an example in order to make a claim about process—whether this way or approaching a situation is a good one.

My rhetorical problem is that a lot of people (especially authoritarians) have trouble making that shift to the more abstract question of process. It has nothing to do with how educated someone is—I’ve known lots of people with many advanced degrees who couldn’t grasp the point, and many people with no degrees who could. It’s about authoritarian thinking, not education. (Expert Political Opinion and Superforecasting are two books about this phenomenon.)

To complicate things further, authoritarians (who exist all over the political spectrum) not only have trouble thinking about process, but understand an example as a comparison, and a comparison as an analogy, and an analogy as an equation.

For instance, imagine that you and I are arguing about whether Chester’s proposal that we pass a law requiring that everyone tap dance down the main street of town is a good one, and you point out that the notoriously disastrous leader of the squirrels, Squirrely McSquirrelface, passed a similar law, and it ended disastrously. If I’m an authoritarian, then I’ll sincerely believe that you just said that Chester is Squirrely McSquirrelface, and, in a sheer snitfit of moral outrage, I will point out all the ways he isn’t. For extra points, I will accuse you of being illogical.

All that I will have thereby shown is that I don’t understand how examples about processes work.

I’ll give one more example. I often get into disagreements with people about “protest voting” (or “protest nonvoting”). I think that’s a bad way to think about voting, since I don’t know of any example of a time it’s worked to get the kinds of political changes the people who advocate it want. And, instead of providing me with examples, the people with whom I’m disagreeing dismiss me for not having sufficient faith (a Follower move). They only argue about process deductively (from a presumption that purity of intent is not only necessary but sufficient for a good outcome—a premise I think is indefensible historically).

So, let’s get back to the question of privileging the stock market and “the economy” over what experts on health say. And there’s an example of that way of thinking. (There are a lot, but I’ll pick one.)

I think Trump, who didn’t want to be President, now can’t stand the idea of not being re-elected, because he is ego first and foremost (as indicated by all his lies, even on stupid stuff, like his height). And he believes that he can’t get reelected if the economy sucks in October. And that’s a reasonable assumption. People will vote against a President (Carter) or party (GOP in 2008) if the economy sucks at that moment, regardless of whether it sucks because the President did the right thing (Carter), or the economy tanked because of processes in which both Dems and GOP were complicit (2008). Hell, people vote on the basis of shark attacks.

There are many problems with Trump, but one is that he sincerely believes he is a “universal genius”—a person so smart he can see the right course of action, regardless of having no training in it. This is important to his sense of self, and that’s why he keeps firing people who make it clear that they are more knowledgeable than he is about anything. Not only can’t he be wrong, but he can’t have anyone in his administration smarter than he is.

This isn’t the first administration like that. It doesn’t end well. It can’t end well. The notion of “universal genius” is nonsense. Intelligent (as opposed to raging narcissist) people know that they don’t know everything, and so need people around them who know more than they do about all sorts of thing.

Intelligent people know that disagreement is useful. Raging narcissists fire people for disloyalty if they dissent, and then they make bad decisions. Firing people for “disloyalty” (i.e., dissent) doesn’t play out well in the business world (e.g., Enron, Theranos) in the long run (although it can in the short run), nor does it in the political world, nor the military.

Making decisions about the economy purely on the basis of how it will play out for a regime also doesn’t lead to good long-term outcomes. How Democracies Die shows how authoritarians shift from democracy to authoritarianism through disastrous manipulation of the economy.

There’s another example.

Germans, on the whole, never really admitted that they’d lost WWI. The dominant narrative was that they were winning, and could have won had people been willing to stick it out, but the willingness to stick it out collapsed for two reasons. First, there was the “stab in the back” myth—the notion that Jewish media lied to the Germans and said they couldn’t win. Second was the narrative that people on the homefront lost hope because they were suffering in basic ways, such as food, housing, and coal. And they were.

It’s important to note that the dominant narrative was wrong on both points. There wasn’t a stab in the back, and Germany didn’t lose the war because of homefront morale. The homefront morale could have stayed strong, and they would still have lost. It just would have taken longer and cost even more lives.

But Hitler believed that narrative, and both its points.

As Adam Tooze shows in his thorough book (that I can’t recommend highly enough), Hitler’s economic (and military) decisions were gambles. And those decisions were also at odds. He wanted to prevent the stab in the back by, as much as possible,  ensuring that his base was comfortable. He made bad decisions about the economy because he wanted to preserve his support and win a war he probably shouldn’t have taken on.

Hitler’s way of deliberating was bad. He wanted outcomes he wasn’t smart enough to realize were incompatible. And by “smart enough,” I mean “willing to listen to people more expert than he.” Hitler’s rejection of his military experts’ advice is infamous, as is his firing anyone who disagreed with him.

What matters about Hitler, from the perspective of thinking about process, about the way an administration or leader deliberates, is how he decided. As Albrecht Speer said, Hitler sincerely believed himself to be a universal genius, and the paradoxical consequence was that he only allowed around him third-rate intellects. Hitler was obsessed with world domination and purifying the Germans. But he was even more obsessed with being the smartest person in the room, with having around him people who flattered him, with silencing dissent (on the grounds that it was disloyalty), with firing anyone who actually knew more than he did. He hired and fired on the basis of loyalty, not expertise.

That ended with people huddled in bomb shelters like the one in the photo.

When has it ended well?

Research on businesses says it doesn’t end well; I can’t think of a single historical example when it’s turned out well.

I’m making a falsifiable claim. I’m saying that Trump’s way of handling decision making is bad, and I’m using Hitler as an example.

When I pose this question to people who support the model of a “universal genius” who silences dissent, relies on his (almost always his) gut instinct, and who only get their information from in-group media, the response is always some version of “Hey, I’m winning—screw you for asking.” They say I’m biased for criticizing Trump, Obama was worse, abortion is bad. They say, in other words, because they like what they’re getting, they don’t care whether this has never worked out well in the past.

Guess who else thought that way.

What they don’t say is “here is an example of a leader who claimed to be a universal genius, who fired anyone who criticized him, who wouldn’t allow anyone in the room who was more an expert than he, who made every issue about him, who lied about big and small things, who used his power to reward people and states who were loyal to him and punish ones who weren’t, who openly declared himself above the law, and it worked out great.”

That’s because there is no such example.

In other words, they can’t come up with an example of a time when an administration that reasons that way has been successful. They are committed to a way that has never worked. They are committed to the way that people supported Hitler.

When Germany was finally conquered, 25% of the population thought it was right to have followed Hitler, and that he had been badly served by the people below him. 25% of the German population were so committed to believing that Hitler was their savior that no evidence could prove them wrong.

I’m not saying that Trump is Hitler.

I’m saying something much more troubling: I’m saying that the people who support Trump reason the way that people supported Hitler. I’m not talking about Trump. I’m talking about his supporters. I’m not saying they would have supported Hitler. I’m asking them to consider whether their way of supporting Trump is a good way to support a political figure.

This is two-part: can they give examples of times when this kind of support for this kind of leader has worked out well? And, can they identify the evidence that would persuade them their support for Trump is wrong? What is it?

And, if their answer is that there is nothing that would make them question their loyalty to Trump, and nothing that would persuade them to venture outside of the pro-Trump media, then they aren’t just admitting their political position is irrational, but they’re committing to a way of thinking about politics that has never ended well.

It wasn’t that long ago that that way of thinking about politics ended up with Germans huddled in concrete balls.

If the case for impeachment is so bad, why won’t Fox let you hear it?

Fox News showing Sekulow instead of House managers making case
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGVjBoE-zio

Aristotle argued that if people who disagree argue as hard as they can, and the people making the arguments have equal skill, then the truth will prevail. And that’s not a bad argument. It might be a little idealistic. After all, there are lots of situations in which the people arguing (the rhetors) might not have equal skill: a 300-dollar an hour attorney v. you. But, if you’re talking about rhetors who have all the money they need, then Aristotle’s argument makes sense.

People with lots of resources making true arguments don’t worry about their audience being exposed to false arguments because, on the whole, people are sensible, and if the audience is shown something true and something false, they can find the truth. So, a major media source, call it Chester News, doesn’t have to worry about people watching other media, unless watching other media will enable Chester News viewers to realize they’re being lied to. A lot.

People who are lying, however, need to make sure you don’t read other sources because then you’ll figure out they’re lying. So, they spend as much time telling you their lies as they do telling you not to tune in to anyone who might disagree.

Con artists (this book is really interesting about con games), like abusers and cult figures, first isolate you. They spend a lot of time telling you what They believe. The “They” here is a fabricated version of various out-groups that lumps them all into one false image that is both much stronger and weaker than any of the groups are—weaker in the sense that their arguments aren’t presented, but just straw man versions of them, stronger in the sense that They are presented as well-organized, powerful, and incredibly dangerous. Chester News might give cherry-picked quotes or data that, in context, don’t mean what they claim, and they don’t give you the sources so that you can see the full quote in context. Similarly, they give you the clip of This Person (who represents They) saying something outrageous, but they don’t give you a link where you could watch it in context.

And Chester news will, as Benkler et al. and Levendusky show, insist you not listen to anyone else, especially not to any They sources. Why?

It’s like the worst moments in junior high, when someone tells you, “Terry said this terrible thing about you, but don’t ask them about it, because I’ll get in trouble.” If you were sensible, you learned not to listen to them. Don’t believe what Fox tells you “liberals” believe, unless they link to direct sources, and you look at those sources in full context. And don’t believe what MSNBC tells you Fox is arguing, unless they link to direct sources, and you look at those sources in full context.

If the Fox case about impeachment were as good as they claim, they would give you all the sources. They would show you the whole videos, all the documents, all the speeches. They don’t. Fox, Trump, and the GOP are all admitting that they can’t defend themselves if all the evidence is open to their base. That’s important.

And, c’mon, we all know what it means when someone won’t let you look at the data. We’ve all had someone tell us, “Here’s the bill, and I won’t actually explain why I’m right.” And we know it means that they’re lying.

We aren’t talking about someone prying into potential irrelevant details. We’re talking about testimony regarding what Trump said in a phone call. If Trump did nothing wrong in the phone call, then all the people privy to that phone call could testify and he would be exonerated. If they can’t testify, then why not? If Fox won’t let you see that evidence, or the arguments about it, why not? If they had a slam dunk for their interpretation, you know they would share it. They won’t because they’re afraid of it.

If Fox won’t let you see the evidence, their case sucks.

That’s rhetoric 101.

There is no principle here to which any GOP wants to commit. Had HRC won, and had all of this played out, but with HRC substituted for Trump, y’all would be screaming for blood.

And that is how democracies die. They die when people value faction over principle. If we value democracy, we hold our party to the same standards we hold the other party. Otherwise, we’re looking at Athens as it imploded. We’re valuing party loyalty above anything— the truth, fairness, the law, any principles. And if we’re supporting a party whose claims are so weak that they have to make sure their base doesn’t have any direct contact with the opposition arguments, then we’re in real trouble.

Why I think impeaching Trump now is not a good choice

I think Trump should be impeached. I’d think a Dem who had a similar history of violations of emoluments, security, dishonesty, relations with foreign entities should be impeached. (I’d want a Dem with this history of emoluments violations alone impeached.) Supporters of Trump would want a Dem impeached for far less than what Trump has done.

But the GOP is the party of Trump, and there is no reason to think that the GOP Senators will assess the evidence rationally or non-factionally. I see no reason to think the Senate will impeach Trump because, as many Senators and many Trump supporters say, there is literally no evidence that would cause them to support an impeachment conviction because he (and his supporting media) has persuaded many people they are at war, and so we are in a state of exception.

There are enough Senators who have made it clear that they would not support an impeachment conviction regardless of what comes to light that impeachment cannot win with this Senate.

Impeachment hearings could bring enough evidence forward to put pressure on Senators in purple states, but that pressure is most likely to work if the hearings are happening close to the election—before the GOP Propaganda Machine has time to spin the information. If the hearings end with a Senate that votes against impeachment, and the evidence is good enough, it might mean that people will vote out Senators who voted not to impeach Trump, but, again, that’s most likely to be effective if it’s just before the election.

As much research shows (much of it summarized in Democracy for Realists) a large number of people vote purely on the basis of in-group identification, and another large group votes purely on the basis of what happens just before the election. Thus, if we want the Senate’s impeachment vote to be representative of what Americans want, then we want it to happen close to the election when voters will hold the Senate accountable about impeachment.

If impeachment happens long before the election, then other issues will intervene.

I might be wrong on this, but I think I’m right.

I think people who are arguing for impeachment now are wrong, but their disagreeing with me doesn’t mean they must be irrational or have bad motives; I disagree with them, but I recognize it’s because of how they weigh various factors. I disagree thoroughly, deeply, and completely with people who think we shouldn’t impeach Trump at all, but there are versions of that argument that I think are legitimate and sincere—even if I think wrong. Democracy requires that we do that hard and unpleasant work of distinguishing between arguments that we think are entirely wrong, awful, offensive, even unethical and yet within the realm of arguments we need to consider, and arguments we think are entirely wrong, awful, offensive, and entirely in bad faith.

Being very clear that you’re right doesn’t require believing that no one else could possibly have good reasons or good motives. Believing that democracy requires deep and unpleasant disagreement doesn’t require that we abandon all standards of what arguments we consider.

We are, I believe, at an important point for democracy, but the urgency of our situation does not mean are exempt from the responsibilities of democratic deliberation regarding our policy options. We are not suddenly in a world with only one reasonable option.

This is policy argumentation 101: we might agree on the need, but that doesn’t mean there is only one possible plan.

Does Trump have a coherent policy agenda? Or is it really just a very long two-minutes hate?

One argument is that Trump doesn’t have a coherent policy agenda—he never intended to be President, and he was always out for himself, and he is now just engaged in doing whatever the people who fawn on him say is the right policy, as well as whatever benefits him or his family.

The second argument is that Trump represents a new kind of conservatism. According to John Burtka, this national conservatism has these policy goals:

In economics, it would aim to strengthen the middle class, reduce income inequality and develop an industrial policy to ensure economic independence from China for essential military supplies.

Policy proposals could include incentivizing investment in capital equipment and research and development; ending tax advantages for shareholder buybacks; federal spending on infrastructure; promoting skilled trades and vocational programs; busting up inefficient monopolies through antitrust enforcement; slowing immigration rates to tighten labor markets and raise wages for the working class; holding universities liable for student loan debt in cases of bankruptcy; and raising tariffs across the board while slashing taxes on the middle class.

As relates to culture, national conservatives would aim to support families by being pro-life for the whole life. Policy ideas might include paid family leave, increasing the child tax credit, federally funded prenatal and maternal care, reducing or eliminating income tax on families with three or more children, and working toward a society in which a mother or father can support a family on a single income. America’s Judeo-Christian roots would be celebrated, and churches and charitable organizations would be given preference in caring for the poor.

In foreign affairs, national conservatives’ goal is to protect the safety, sovereignty and independence of the American people. America’s regime-change wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen would be recognized as imperial hubris, and anyone involved in their promotion exiled from future positions in Republican administrations. Presidents who ignore congressional authorization for war would be impeached, and members of Congress who eschew their constitutional duties would be stripped of committee assignments and “primaried” in the next election. We would command the seas and space, bring the remaining troops home, secure our own borders and rebuild America.

The third argument is that the pro-Trump media is scrambling to defend the deeply incoherent GOP policy agenda, one that can’t be defended rationally because it isn’t rational, and so they’re deliberately deflecting from affirmative policy arguments to “virtue signaling” and fear-mongering about the Other.

The fourth argument is that ideology doesn’t matter, just outcome. It doesn’t matter if Trump is personally racist, corrupt, senile, as long as he is getting a good outcome for the US. I’m going to leave this one aside, since it’s an actively dangerous argument—it is how democracies die. (Also businesses, but that’s a different post.)

Let’s focus on the second, since it’s the only one that claims that Trump’s actions aren’t either coming from his personal sense of perpetual injury/need for reassurance/greed or from his having done whatever the last person who flattered him said he should do.

And I think it’s helpful to spend a moment to notice that even his defenders rarely try to defend his actions as rationally grounded in a coherent policy agenda that is logically connected to defensible goals. Most pro-Trump rhetoric is that what he is doing is good because it hurts libs, the economy is good, and his demagoguery is great because he’s stigginit to the libs by not being politically correct. In other words, most pro-Trump rhetoric is openly irrational and “HAHAHA WE’RE WINNING.”

That’s interesting.

That’s interesting because the argument of many scholars of rhetoric and political science is that support for Trump is not a rational commitment to an affirmative set of political goals connected to set of policies that can be rationally defended as achieving those goals as much as an affective and tribal framing of politics as whether “we” are better than “them.”

Thus, Trump defenders responding to this criticism by saying, “Democrats do it too” supports that interpretation of Trump supporters: that they can’t defend their policy case(s) affirmatively, but think entirely in terms of a zero-sum between their reductive notion of our political options.

That’s why the second argument matters so much: this is claiming to be a coherent statement of principle on the part of Trump conservatism.

So, let’s take it seriously.

How many of those things has Trump actually done?

In other words, the strongest argument for Trump having a coherent political ideology fails on its face.

That’s interesting.

Trump’s racist tweets

Donald Trump said:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run… Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

And the question is: is that racist? And the answer is yes. The more important point is that this is a great moment for talking about how racism actually works, since racism continues because people don’t know it when they see it.

A lot of people look at what he said, and say, “This isn’t racist, because he never mentions race, and he’s talking about culture of origin, not race.”

The notion that something isn’t racist as long as you don’t explicitly mention race is like saying it isn’t cancer as long as you don’t say that word out loud.

A lot of people believe that a racist action happens because a person (who is racist in every single encounter) gets up in the morning and says, “I sure do have an irrational hate of X race. How can I be more racist toward that group every day and every way?” And, when that person engages in a racist action, s/he says, “I am doing this to you purely because you are X race.” Thus, as long as someone isn’t deliberately hostile, or their hostility isn’t irrational, or they don’t explicitly mention race, they didn’t do something racist.

In that world, someone saying that what you did is racist is accusing you of being that kind of really awful person. And so you are offended, and then the conversation shifts to how you feel about getting accused of getting up every morning and ironing your hood. (This is called “white fragility.”) So, you point out that you didn’t use racist terms, you have friends of X race (which might or might not be true), you have done un- or anti-racist things. None of that–your feeling of having been disrespected, your avoiding racist terms, your friends, your past behavior–is actually evidence that this you just did was not racist.

Think about it this way. You’re driving along, and someone (call him Chester) changes lanes into you and causes y’all to crash. Your car is really damaged. And Chester gets out of his car and you have this conversation:

You: You just changed lanes into me.
Chester: No, I couldn’t have done that because that would make me a bad driver and how dare you call me a bad driver! I am a good person. I foster blind owls, and teach a literacy class at the local public library, and pick up trash on the road.
You: Um, that’s all great, but you did change lanes into me.
Chester: I couldn’t have done that because I’m a good driver. I have never been given a ticket (because I treat police officers with respect, unlike some people), I think terrible things about very unsafe drivers, and I always check my blindspots. And I think the real issue here is that you’ve accused me of being a bad driver.

You wouldn’t say, “Oh, wow, well, yeah, that’s all evidence that you are a good driver, so you can’t possibly have just changed lanes into me.” That would be an absurd conclusion. You would say, “I don’t really care if you’re normally a good driver. I don’t care who you are–I care about what you just did.”

Yet, when someone does something racist, and someone else points it out, we have the “I can’t have changed lanes into you because I’m a good driver” argument.

And that’s how this argument about Trump is going.

But, let’s take seriously the argument that he isn’t racist, but xenophobic. He isn’t xenophobic—his wife, in-laws, and father are or were all immigrants—he is not opposed to immigrants. He’s perfectly fine with engaging in chain immigration, which he has condemned in the abstract, for his family, and his wife’s visa is problematic. And, this isn’t really about immigrants—this is about what counts as a real American.

Keep in mind that all of the women he criticized are Americans. That’s the country they’re from. So, he just said the US has a government that is a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.

Perhaps we should take him at his word. Or, in other words, paging Dr. Freud.

There are only two ways to interpret what he said—either he is unintentionally showing what he thinks of his own government, or he believes that those women should be seen as coming from the countries from which their parents came. Three of them, after all, were born in the US. And he sees their ethnicity—their parents’ country—as what matters about them. And that is what makes it racist. That is how racism works—as seeing some groups as not really American.

That’s really common among racists. Americans gleefully put Americans of Japanese descent into camps (as they were called at the time) because the assumption was that, if you were second generation Japanese you weren’t really American, an assumption not made about the Italians, Germans, Romanians, or other Nazi countries in the 1940s (but made about all of those groups at some point). That was a political, and not biological, decision. All the decisions about who gets to be white have always been political and not biological.

Again, that’s how racism works. Until the rise of biological racism, “race” was always country of origin. Even after the rise of biological racism, there was a lot of “science” that showed that people from various countries (or continents) were inferior—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians–, biological racism never had a coherent biological definition of race.

Some scholars use the term cultural racism, but I’m not wild about that term, since all racism is and always has been about country of origin (sometimes going back pretty far, as with Latinx whose families have been in the US far longer than Trump’s, or Native Americans who are oddly framed as not native to the US). The Jews are not a race.

So, saying that Trump was talking about country of origin and not race means he’s perfectly in line with how racism typically works.

Trump has had a lot to say about what’s wrong with America, and how the government is awful. In fact, a lot of his base believes there is a Deep State trying to work against him. Trump and his supporters are the ones telling everyone how the government should be run.

So, Trump and his supporters have no problem with someone going on and on about how awful the government is—they think that’s great. That’s what makes them love Trump.

And, really, if you want to have an example of viciously telling people things, Trump’s tweets would be up there.

Again, that’s how racism works. When an in-group member engages in a certain behavior—let’s say disrupting coffee shops with protests—you defend it as required by external circumstances, and the consequence of good internal motives. When an out-group member disrupts coffee shops with protests, you say it wasn’t necessary, and it was the consequence of bad motives.

If you believe that disagreement is useful for a democracy, if you believe that people really disagree, if you believe that we should argue with one another—in other words, if you believe in the values on which the US is founded—then you would attribute someone’s disagreement to their disagreeing.

Either criticizing the government is okay, or it isn’t. And if it’s okay for you, then it’s okay for others. And if you say that someone’s argument should be dismissed because of their race, ethnicity, or country of origin, you’ve made a racist argument.

Trump, Clinton, and Epstein

Here’s what clear about Jeffrey Epstein: he has had many plausible accusations of participating in underage sex trafficking, the kind of accusations that would have landed anyone else in jail for a long time, but got him a light sentence because he has powerful  connections.

Epstein has very clear ties to Trump, even more to Trump’s appointee Alex Acosta, who negotiated a deal with Epstein no one else would have gotten. Epstein, in that deal, admitted to sex trafficking. In a later interview, he was clear he had no regret about any of it. (footnote on page nine)

So, as a culture, here’s what we should be arguing: Acosta should resign, and Trump should grovel for appointing him.

Instead, we’re engaged in some kind of weird “Well, Clinton is implicated, so Trump is innocent.” Or, the even weirder, “Trump told someone that he knew Epstein was a child rapist, and so banned him from Mar-a-Lago,” so Trump is in the clear.

The people who are making those arguments would never consider those good arguments if made by Clinton supporters.

And that is what is wrong with our current political world. That’s how far too many political arguments play out. We make arguments we think would be terrible if made on behalf of out-group political figures. We look at every issue from within the frame of “this is a zero-sum contest between us and them” and then only consider evidence that shows we are winning that contest, or they’re losing (which means we’re winning). In that world, if you or an in-group political figure is shown to have done something wrong, you can wipe the slate clean by showing that an out-group person did the same thing.

[Thus, the complaint that SJW are engaged in identity politics is sheer projection. People all over the political spectrum are reasoning from their identity. Not everyone reasons that way, but every position has someone doing it–some have lots.]

When I say this to people supporting Trump, I often get the response, “Well, liberals do it too.”

That would be proving my point.

(It’s a bit more complicated with people who don’t like Trump, because they aren’t all liberals—many of them are self-identified conservatives, some are progressives or Marxists (who hate liberals), some are anarchists—being opposed to Trump does not mean you’re “liberal”. Supporting Trump doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “conservative.”)

Imagine a world that was not people hiding in their enclave throwing reasons at one another like bricks. Imagine a world in which people held all groups to the same standards. That is a world in which people preferred one group over others, but in which simply being in-group didn’t exempt someone from prosecution, let alone criticism.

In that world, anyone with ties to Epstein would be investigated fairly and thoroughly, and we would see anyone who argued anything else as enabling a child molester.

This isn’t about Democrats v. Republicans (to be honest, no issue ever really is); this is about people who enabled Epstein in his sexually assaulting underage women. It should be non-partisan.

We can have a world in which Americans agree that anyone involved in underage sex trafficking goes to jail. Or we can have a world in which we decide that accusations of involvement in underage sex trafficking on the part of our political figures shouldn’t be fully investigated, but their involvement is criminal.

I’d like the former.