As y’all know, I intermittently pay attention to what pro-GOP sources are saying about events. And it’s really worrisome. I’m so far left that I’m not in favor of any flavor of authoritarianism; that is, an anti-deliberative approach to policy questions. An anti-deliberative approach is always a politics of the obvious: the correct answer is obvious to all good people, and anyone who disagrees with this very specific policy is obvious not a good person.
I’m not saying this because I’m about to advocate some incoherent and irrational both sides are bad (all versions of BSAB are incoherent and irrational), or the hobgoblin of relativism (all ideologies are equally valid—a position I don’t think anyone has actually held). But I will say that I think conservatism is a legitimate political position, and should be included in the conversation, as should be lots of other positions with which I disagree (libertarianism, for instance). I believe in useful disagreement.
By useful disagreement, I don’t mean one in which people are nice to each other, or stay calm, or end up persuading one another, finding common ground. Useful disagreement can be vehement and frustrating.
The problem with pro-GOP media, and many media that are opposed to the GOP and its current turn toward authoritarianism is that they don’t believe in useful disagreement. There was a time when there were shows where people with different political identities shouted at each other, but that wasn’t useful disagreement because they just shouted slogans at each other, without actually responding to what the other was saying. It was like a staged fight in a not very good movie–what one is doing has nothing to do with what the other is doing.
As I’ve said many times, my area of scholarship is how communities wreck the train on which they (we) all live, and they (we) do so by refusing to acknowledge that disagreement is useful. If you define demagoguery as rhetoric that causes communities to wreck the train on which we live, then the first and most important characteristic is that demagoguery is anti-deliberative. It says that the correct course of action is obvious, and there is no reason to engage anyone who disagrees with Us about that correct course of action. It says disagreement is never useful.
Demagoguery says disagreement isn’t about people who have different ways of thinking, perspectives, values, experiences, goals, but a fight between people who are right and everyone else (people who are wrong). Demagoguery says that, for every and situation or problem, there is a perfect solution that all reasonable people recognize as the correct solution. And, therefore, politics is not about understanding why people disagree, but about persuading, coercing, or excluding everyone who disagrees.
Again, I’m not saying that all positions are equally valid, or even that all positions are valid. I’m saying that reasonable and inclusive disagreements hold all participants to the same standards of reason, proof, evidence, ethics. And I really wish people understood enthymemes, and major premises.
For instance, imagine that we’re disagreeing about whether policing is systemically racist, and that people of color are more likely to be pulled over or treated worse than white people.
One personal experience might be: a person of color getting seriously harassed by a police officer for a minor parking violation. The logic of that argument is: people of color are treated differently by the police because Terry (a person of color) was seriously harassed for a minor parking violation. The assumption is that Terry getting seriously harassed for a parking violation is a sign of police harassment for people like Terry.
That’s taking a single instance of a sign of a larger problem and, as even Aristotle said, that isn’t necessarily proof of the grander claim, but it is evidence. It is a datapoint. So the way to engage that argument, for someone who believed that policing is not racist, would be to argue about whether that datapoint is representative—whether, on the whole, police interactions with people of color are strikingly different from interactions with white people.
But, instead, at least as far as my drifting around in various spaces suggests, the most likely counter-argument is: I am a white person, and I have no trouble with the police because I am polite to them, and therefore the police are not racist.
That is missing the point of the disagreement entirely. That a polite white person has never had a bad interaction with the police is not proof that policing is not racist.
Here is my crank theory: people think it’s proof because they can’t imagine that other people have different experiences. They imagine that they are fully in control of what happens—their behavior, not their identity, caused the police officer’s reaction—and so they assume everyone has that level of control. To think otherwise would threaten their perception of a just world. I once had a bizarre conversation with someone who said that the government should not impose any controls about environmental policy. I asked if she would be okay if someone put a smelting plant next to her house, and she said then the neighbors should band together and buy out the smelting plant. I asked what should happen if the neighbors were poor, and she said, and I’m not kidding, they should stop being poor. She thought that was obvious—it’s a politics of the obvious combined with the (unjust) just world theory.
Rejecting a politics of the obvious means acknowledging that disagreement is useful. That doesn’t mean that people disagreeing have to be nice, or shouldn’t be emotional, or should always soft-pedal their arguments and avoid direct contradiction. It doesn’t mean every point of view is equally valid, or that every disagreement can or should be talked through. But it does mean advocating pluralism (not sloppy relativism). It means disagreeing by responding to the argument someone has actually made, holding all parties to the same standards (e.g., of tone, evidence, rationality), and trying to be internally consistent. It means disagreeing usefully.