Why Was Hitler Elected?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"


Despite the fact that invoking Hitler in arguments is so kneejerk that there’s even a meme about it, a surprising number of people misunderstand the situation. They misunderstand, for instance, that he was elected; he was even voted into dictatorship. So, why was he elected?

I want to focus on four factors that are commonly noted in scholarship but often absent from or misrepresented in popular invocations of Hitler: widespread resentment effectively mobilized by pro-Nazi rhetoric, an enclave-based media environment, authoritarian populism, agency by proxy/charismatic leadership.

I. Resentment

Resentment is often defined as a sense of grievance against a person, but grievances can be of various kinds, including motivating positive personal change or political action. Resentment is grievance drunk on jealousy. It’s common to distinguish jealousy from envy on the grounds that, while both involve being unhappy that someone has something we don’t, jealousy means wanting it taken from the other. If I envy someone’s nice shirt, I can solve that problem by buying one for myself; jealousy can only be satisfied if they lose that shirt, they are harmed for having the shirt, or the shirt is damaged. My jealousy can even be satisfied without my getting a shirt—as long as they lose theirs. Jealousy is zero-sum, but envy is not.

Resentment is a zero-sum hostility toward others whom I think look down on me. Although I feel victimized that they have something I don’t, I don’t necessarily want what they have. I do, however, want them to lose it; I want them crushed and humiliated for even having it. Resentment relies on a sense that others have things to which I am entitled, and they are not. In addition, resentment always has a little bit of unacknowledged shame.

Many Germans (most? all?) resented the Versailles Treaty, and they resented losing the Great War. They resented the accusation that they were responsible for the war, they resented that they lost a war they believed they were entitled to win, and they resented a treaty as punitive as the kind they were accustomed to impose on others.

Certainly, the Versailles Treaty was excessively punitive, but it was, oddly enough, fair—at least in the sense that it was an eye for an eye. Germans didn’t condemn equally punitive treaties they had imposed on others (e.g., the Treaty of Frankfurt or the 1918 Brest-Litvosk Treaty. They resented being treated as they felt entitled to treat others.

The war guilt clause was a particular point of resentment, and yet it was partially true. The notion that one nation and one nation only can cause a world war is implausible—few wars are monocausal—but certainly Germany held a large part of the responsibility. Yet Germans liked to see themselves as forced into a war they didn’t want—they were the real victims and completely blameless. Were the Germans actually truly blameless, I don’t think the Treaty of Versailles would have been as useful a tool for mobilizing resentment.

Sloppy pan-Germanism mixed with the even sloppier Social Darwinism promoted a narrative that victory always goes to the strongest, and that therefore whoever win deserved it. The German defeat in the Great War therefore was a massive blow to German ideology—if the best always win, and the winners are always the best, that loss was stuck in the craw. People who enjoyed Nazi rhetoric resented that they lost a war they felt entitled to win.

Important to Nazi mobilization of that resentment was continually reminding audiences of it—there are few (any?) Hitler speeches in which he didn’t remind his audience of the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, and of the way that other nations looked down on and victimized Germany.

Did everyone else really look down on Germany? The French probably did, but that’s just because they looked down on everyone. Some British and Americans did; some didn’t. But the Germans certainly looked down on everyone. So, like the resentment about punitive treaties, they weren’t on principle opposed to people looking down on others; they just resented when they thought they were being looked down on.

The Versailles Treaty didn’t actually end the fighting. Pogroms, forced emigration, violent clashes, and genocides raged through Eastern and Central Europe well after the war, causing a massive immigration crisis. And, as often happens, people resented the immigrants. They also resented liberals, intellectuals, Jews, and various other groups that they imagined looked down on them.

Resentment is an act of projection and imagination.

hitler smiling at a child


II. Enclave-based media environment

Weimar Germany had a lot of political parties (around forty, depending on how you count them), which can loosely be categorized as: Catholic, communist, conservative, fascist, liberal (in the European sense), and socialist. They all had their own media (mostly newspapers), and many of them were rabidly partisan in terms of coverage but without admitting to the partisan coverage. [The antebellum era in the US was much the same.]

The important consequence of this factionalized media landscape was that it was possible for a person to remain fully within an informational enclave: foundational narratives, myths, premises, and outright lies were continually repeated. Repetition is persuasive. Since factional media wouldn’t present criticism or even critics fairly (or at all), it was possible for someone to feel certain about various events and yet be completely wrong. Germany was not about to win the war when it capitulated.

Sometimes the narratives were specific (e.g.,The Protocols of the Elders of Zion documents the plot of international Jewry ), and sometimes about broader historical events, or history itself. One of the most important narratives was the shape-shifting “stab in the back” myth about the Great War. This myth said that Germany was just about to win the war, and would have, but the nation was stabbed in the back, and therefore had to accept a humiliating treaty. As Richard Evans has shown, just who stabbed the back, or when, or why, or even what back, varied considerably. Like a lot of myths, it was simultaneously detailed and inconsistent.

Another important narrative was a similarly specific and vague narrative about the course of history, as a survival of the fittest conflict undermined by liberal democracy. This narrative typically cast Jews as intractably incapable of patriotism, assimilation, or German identity. German exceptionalism denied the actual heterogeneity of

Of those six kinds of political parties, three were explicitly and actively hostile to democracy, either advocating a return to the monarchy (Catholic) or a new system entirely (fascist, communist). Some “conservatives” parties advocated a return to monarchy, some advocated some other kind of authoritarian government, and some at least seemed willing to accommodate democratic decision-making practices. Only the liberals and socialists actively supported democracy (communists wanted a Marxist-Leninist revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, whereas socialists agreed with Marxist critiques of unconstrained capitalism, but wanted reform via democratic processes; “liberals” believed in a free market and democratic processes of decision-making).

What’s important about this kind of media environment is that it undermines democratic practices because it enables the demonization or dismissal of anyone who significantly disagrees. Repetition is persuasive. If you are repeatedly told that socialists want to kick bunnies, and never hear from socialists what they actually advocate, then you’ll believe that socialists want to kick bunnies. That makes them people who shouldn’t be included in the decision-making process at all; it personalizes policy disagreements. Policy disagreements, rather than being opportunities for arguing about the ads/disads, costs, feasibility, and so on of our various policy options (even vehemently arguing) is a contest of groups.

Tl;dr If you only get your information from in-group sources, then chances are that you never hear the most reasonable arguments for out-group policies; therefore everyone who is not in-group will seem unreasonable. Not hearing the arguments leads to refusing to listen to the people.

Repetition coupled with isolation from reasonable counterarguments radicalizes.

Hitler looking at a map with generals


III. Authoritarian populism

One way to misunderstand how persuasion works is to imagine out-groups and their leaders as completely and obviously evil—by refusing to understand what some people find/found attractive about such leaders, we make ourselves feel more secure (“I would never have supported Hitler”), and thereby ignore that we might get talked into supporting someone like that.

Nazism is a kind of “authoritarian populism.” Populism is a political ideology that posits that politics is a conflict between two kinds of people: a real people whose concerns and beliefs are legitimate, moral, and true; a corrupt, out-of-touch, illegitimate elite who are parasitic on the real people. Populism is always anti-pluralist: there is only one real people, and they are in perfect agreement about everything. (Muller says populism is “a moralized form of antipluralism” 20).

Populism become authoritarian when the narrative that the real people have become so oppressed by the “elite” that they are in danger of extermination. At that point, there are no constraints on the behavior of populists or their leaders. This rejection of what are called “liberal norms” (not in the American sense of “liberal” but the political theory one) such as fairness, change from within, deliberation, transparent and consistent legal processes is the moment that a populist movement becomes authoritarian (and Machiavellian).

As Muller says, “Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people” (Muller 3). Therefore, any election that populists lose is not legitimate, any election they win is, regardless of what strategies they’ve used to win. Violence on the part of the in-group is admirable and always justified, purely on the grounds that it is in-group violence. The in-group is held to lower moral standards while claiming the moral highground.

Authoritarian populism always has an intriguing mix of victimhood, heroism, strength, and whining. Somehow whining about how oppressed “we are” and what meany-meany-bo-beanies They are is seen as strength. And that is what much of Hitler’s rhetoric was—so very, very much whining.

And that is something else that authoritarian populism promises: a promise of never being held morally accountable, as long as you are a loyal (even fanatical) member of the in-group (the real people).

In authoritarian populism, the morality comes from group membership, and the values the group claims to have—values which might have literally nothing to do with whatever policies they enact or ways they behave.


IV. Charismatic leadership/agency by proxy

Authoritarian populism needs an authority to embody the real people. It’s fine if they’re actually elite (many people were impressed by Hitler’s wealth). Kenneth Burke talked about the relationship in terms of “identification”—they saw him as their kind of guy. They imagined a seamless connection with him. In charismatic leadership relationships, the followers attribute all sorts of characteristics to their leader (which the leader may or may not actually have): extraordinary health, almost superhuman endurance, universal genius, a Midas touch, infallible and instantaneous judgment, and a perfect understanding of what “normal” people like and want.

In general, people engage in intention/motive-based explanations for good behavior on the part of the in-group and bad behavior on the part of non in-group leaders and members, and situational explanations for good behavior on the part of the non in-group and bad behavior for the in-group.

So, if Hubert (in-group) and Chester (out-group) give a cookie to a child (good behavior), then it shows that Hubert is good and generous (motive/intention), but Chester only did so because he was forced by circumstances (situational).

If Hubert (in-group) and Chester (out-group) both steal a cookie from a child (bad behavior), then it was because Hubert didn’t see the child, the child shouldn’t have been eating the cookie, he had no choice (situational explanations), but Chester stealing the cookie was deliberate and because Chester is evil.

One sign, then, of a charismatic leadership relationship is whether the follower holds a leader to the same standards of behavior as non in-group leaders, or if they flip the intention/situation explanations in order to hold on to the narrative that the in-group is essentially good.

What we get from a charismatic leadership relationship is a fairly simple way of understanding good and bad—it reduces moral complexity and uncertainty. Since our group is essentially good, we are guaranteed moral certainty simply by being a loyal member. And that is what Hitler promised.

Because Hitler is like us, and really gets us, then we are powerful—we take pride in everything he does; we have agency by proxy.

But, because we identify with him, then our attachment to him means we will not listen to criticism of him—criticism of him is an attack on our goodness. Our support becomes non-falsifiable, and therefore outside the realm of a reasonable disagreement about him, his actions, or his policies.

Charismatic leadership is authoritarian. But oh so very, very pleasurable.



Sources:

There are still lots of arguments among scholars about Hitler, the Germans, and the Nazis, but nothing I’m saying here is either particularly controversial or something I’ve come up with on my own.

While it is a mistake to attribute magical qualities to Hitler’s rhetoric, and to attribute the various genocides and disasters to him personally (as though his personal magnetism was destroyed agency on the part of Germans), it is also a mistake to think the rhetoric was powerless. Germans elected him because they liked what he had to say.

There was a time when scholars were insistent that Hitler’s rhetoric wasn’t that great (an argument that Ryan Skinnell’s forthcoming book will show was an accusation made at the time, one that completely misses the rhetorical force of Hitler’s strategies), but that was partially a reaction to the immediate post-war deflecting of German responsibility for the war, the Holocaust, the various genocides (the argument was that Germans were overwhelmed by Hitler’s rhetoric, or secretly hated him—neither was true).

There are many excellent biographies of Hitler, the ones written after the opening of the records captured by the Soviets are the most useful. Kershaw’s writings are especially readable, but Volker Ullrich’s and Peter Longerich’s biographies have been able to take advantage of more recent research (If I were asked to recommend just one biography, it would be Longerich’s). Richard Evans’ three-volume study of Nazism (coming to power, in power, at war) is thorough and makes clear the enthusiastic participation of various other leaders.

Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction is a compelling and detailed analysis of the economy under the Nazis, and Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War shows the considerable support Nazis had throughout the war. There are a lot of books about the media and Hitler, but I think the best place to start is Despina Stratigakos’ Hitler at Home. Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished is a powerful discussion of the aftermath of the Great War.


Please stop using the horse race/selling frame to talk about this election

Book cover, Deliberating War, Patricia Roberts-Miller

Thomas Patterson has long criticized the “horse race” way of framing elections and politics more generally. It’s so dominant that people can’t imagine talking about elections in any other way. Briefly, the “horse race” frame treats elections as contests between two groups, rather than a call to discuss issues of governance.

Connected is the assumption that politics is about selling a candidate or policy; it’s all compliance-gaining. So, dominant coverage of proposed policies isn’t about whether they’ll work, what costs and consequences they might have, and so on—in other words, media doesn’t cover policy disagreements qua policies. Instead, candidates’ proposed policies are assessed in terms of their likelihood of attracting voters—i.e., whether the policies will help sell the candidate.

As Patterson and others have pointed out, the way of reporting on politics assumes (and therefore reinforces) the notion that political disagreements are identity conflicts—a conflict between two kinds of people. Obviously, policy disagreements are often conflicts among kinds of people, but not just two, let alone always the same two. People who disagree about abortion might strongly agree on the death penalty, bail reform, expanding Medicare, or all sorts of other specific policies. And there are few issues about which there are really only policy options. (Tbh, I can’t think of any, but I’ll hedge.)

The horse race/selling frame tragically limits our ability to talk about think usefully about the massive landscape of policy options.

There are two other damaging consequences of this frame. One is that it reduces intra-group deliberation about policies. If policy preferences are the consequence of identity, then we can’t treat intra-group disagreements about policies as reasonable disagreement—one of us must really be out-group (or duped by the out-group).

When a group fails, the impulse is purification of the in-group. People call for expelling the people who aren’t true believers, and blame them, when the real problem is the opposition.

and so in-group recriminations are about those intra-group disagreements or presumed failures in “selling” the product. We thereby double down on what damages policy discourse.

Right now, there are a lot of people blaming Harris or Dems for not selling the policies enough, or having the wrong policies, or in various other ways calling for a party purified of disparate elements. That is, to put it very clearly, anti-democratic and incipiently authoritarian. It’s also wrong.

People slip into calls for in-group purity after a failure or setback because it is reassuring. It is a way of thinking about the failure that keeps control within the in-group—it says we could have won, if we’d just done this thing. And it’s almost always the “thing” I think should have been done all along. So, it’s about maintaining the illusion of in-group control, denying the agency of the successful out-group, all while making myself seem prescient.

That kind of “I coulda been a contenduh” always happens after an unsuccessful war. Germans insisted they were about to win the Great War when they got stabbed in the back by a liberal and defeatist media, and I’ve recently been reading various books that argue that we were about to win in Vietnam when we a liberal and defeatist media caused us to give up, or we would have won if we’d just done this other thing.

It’s worth remembering: the enemy gets a vote.

What’s next?

sign saying "welcome to texas"

The short version is that the federal government will operate as red states like Texas or Alabama have for some time. It will do so in terms of policy agenda (reactionary, neoliberal, evangelical moral panic) and what might be called political structures and practices (competitive authoritarianism).

For some time, the GOP has claimed to be conservative, and to have a policy agenda grounded in principles. It isn’t, and it doesn’t. It’s a coalition taped together by a strategic rhetoric of resentment, demagoguery, and in-group favoritism (e.g., if you support drones, and look forward to nuclear war in the Middle East, you are not pro-life).

So, the policy agenda will have a lot of moral panic/purity items that the “evangelicals” advocate (federal ban on abortion, probably some kind of requirement for prayer in schools, restriction of marriage rights, public funding of sectarian education, etc.). Neoliberals (really just the latest incarnation of sloppy Social Darwinists) will get draining and redirecting of public funds to private profit, policies that buttress current wealth disparities, and deflecting or demonizing of any discussion of long-term or structural issues like racism of global warming, (e.g., much of “Project 2025”). Reactionaries will get unlimited access to guns, removal of restraints on police, and generally in-group exemption from prosecution for violence, corruption, and abuse of power (e.g., Kenneth Paxton).

At the Federal level, we’ll also have the kind of “competitive authoritarianism” that states like Texas have been establishing. Political scientists (and others) have been warning about competitive authoritarianism for twenty years. From a 2002 article:

“In competitive authoritarian regimes, formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.” (52)

More recently Levitsky and Way have defined it as “in which the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions and serious incumbent abuse yields electoral competition that is real but unfair.”

It’s interesting to me that scholars rarely mention the US South, but it’s a good example of competitive authoritarianism. There was a Republican Party, and, on paper, African Americans could vote. But, in fact, various structural and interpersonal practices (from lynching to refusing to register voters) ensured that neither African Americans nor Republicans were completely excluded from power. It was herrenvolk democracy. [1]

There are two ways that this will play out in the US. In purple states, it will mean gerrymandering, disparate access to polling places, formal and informal harassment of non-GOP voters, strategic voter registration requirements, and demagoguery about voter fraud rather than voter suppression. In other words, Texas.

For the nation as a whole, it will mean “The Great Divorce.” Purple states with the GOP in the dominant position will keep from going violet by passing laws that cause potential Dem voters to congregate either in cities (that can be gerrymandered out of power) or to leave the purple states entirely. If the latter happens, then high-population states may be overwhelmingly Dem (and the US as a whole might be overwhelmingly Dem), but the GOP will hold control of the Senate and Electoral College, and hence SCOTUS and the Presidency.

Levitzky and Ziblatt laid out the plan that Trump started to follow in his first term, and he’ll complete it this time. Important to competitive authoritarianism is control of the media, so we should expect that Trump will immediately go after Bezos (assuming he hasn’t already—hence WaPo’s refusal to endorse Harris). Putin used a combination of extortion and threats of prosecution for tax fraud to get rid of critical media—that’s probably the route it will take.

Not all critical media will be silenced; competitive authoritarianism is about looking like a democracy. But, they will certainly be corralled and underfed.

Friendly media will continue to promote a narrative of existential war (demagoguery), victimized “conservatives” (in-group favoritism), snobby elitists (resentment), and aggression/corruption as justified self-defense (projection).

Welcome to Texas.

[The wikipedia article says the term was first used in 1967, but Wilbur Cash used it in his 1941 Mind of the South.]

Why can’t you get Trump supporters to engage in a reasonable conversation about Trump and his policies?

Book cover, Deliberating War, Patricia Roberts-Miller

They believe that their support of Trump is reasonable, and that it isn’t reasonable not to support him for two reasons (so to speak): 1) their media gives them “reasons” to support him; 2) their media gives them “reasons” to refuse to listen to anyone who disagrees.

And all of those “reasons” are unreasonable. The lowest bar for having a reasonable position is: you are open to persuasion on it, you’ve considered the best opposition arguments, and you hold all positions on the issue to the same standards of proof, civility, logic.

Trump supporters fail every single one of those standards. So, why don’t they notice that failure? There are several relevant factors. One is a misunderstanding about what it means to be reasonable (aka, the rational-irrational split). The second, and the point of this post, is that they’re inoculated against being reasonable about their support of Trump.

“Inoculation” is a metaphor that scholars of propaganda use for the strategy of getting people not to listen to non in-group arguments. [The in-group isn’t “the group in power” but “the group you’re in.”] If I am trying to vote for Chester, and I’m worried you might vote for Hubert, then I will—like exposing someone to cowpox so that their body rejects smallpox—try to train you to reject pro-Hubert arguments by misrepresenting them, nut-picking (equating Hubert with some unhinged or extreme critic of Chester), motivism (saying all critics of Chester are jealous, sad, or have bad motives), taking quotes out of context, or just plain lying about Hubert. If I’m successful, then, when confronted with strong arguments for Hubert and his policies, you’ll reject them without even listening.

I’ll give two examples. Trump supporters believe that the 2020 election was stolen, although the legal cases making that claim (including before Trump-appointed judges) have overwhelmingly lost, generally on the grounds that they have little to no merit or evidence. Trump supporters don’t know the outcome of these cases because their media doesn’t tell them. (Trump supporters open to a reasonable discussion about this can email me. They aren’t. They won’t.)

Second, your Trump supporting family and friends are probably completely supportive of anti-DEI policies, which they conflate with CRT. And the argument against CRT is an illogical argument by association. It runs like this: All concerns about inclusion are really CRT, and CRT can be associatively (not reasonably) related to some Marxists; therefore, if anyone indicates concerns about inclusion, they’re CRT, and, therefore, you shouldn’t listen to them—they’re Marxist.

Argument by association is unreasonable. The CRT argument has the same logic as: God is love; love is blind; Stevie Wonder is blind; therefore Stevie Wonder is God.

Or, more to the point, Nazis believed in the Great Replacement narrative; Tucker Carlson advocates the Great Replacement narrative; therefore, Tucker Carlson is a Nazi.

But Trump supporters only consider argument by association reasonable when it confirms what they believe. That isn’t reasonable. They might provide data that look like reasons, but their argument isn’t reasonable.

When inoculation works, and it often does, it means that you are trained to listen to people in terms of a binary—are they with me, or against me. If they give any sign of not being fully supportive of Chester, then they must support Hubert, and that makes them a squirrel-loving communist who probably kicks little dogs for fun. And that binary thinking goes to the very source—they only get information from sources that support Trump, so they don’t even know what the best opposition arguments are.

Trump media, pundits, and rhetors aren’t the only people to engage in inoculation. A lot of demagoguery does, all over the political and cultural spectrum.

Political parties and figures, advertisers, salespeople, even manipulative individuals engage in inoculation only because they know that they’re unlikely to persuade people if their audience gives a fair hearing to the various opposition positions and critics. Inoculation is not only unreasonable; it is a pragmatic admission that the entire case is unreasonable. If you have to lie to make your case, you have a bad case.



Strategically Ambiguous Hyperbole

train wreck


On December 3, 2020, the Missouri Gateway Pundit promoted the conspiracy theory that originated with Trump’s legal team: that there was had video showing two Georgia election workers “secretly inject tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots into the vote count and process the fraudulent ballots for counting multiple times without detection, despite several machine hand recounts” (“First Amended” 51). Later that same day, Gateway Pundit named one of the workers, Ruby Freeman, and would later also name and give identifying information about her mother, Wandrea Moss. Despite the immediate debunking of the conspiracy, Gateway Pundit continued to promote the lie (and they’ve never retracted it). In December of 2021, Freeman and Moss sued the owners of the site—two brothers named James and Joseph Hoft, and in January of 2022 the Hofts replied. The goal of that response was to avoid accountability for what they did and are still doing, and what I want to explore in this talk is the role that the “it’s just rhetoric” strategy plays in that evasion.

The Hofts made six major “affirmative” arguments:
• The statements they made are true. “Defendants aver that all statements allegedly made by Defendants complained of by Plaintiffs are true […] Any complained-of statements allegedly made by Defendants that may happen to lack 100% factual veracity are substantially true, and thus treated as true as a matter of law. ( 18)
• The gist of the statements is true. “Any statements made by Defendants complained of by Plaintiffs that are not literally true are substantially true, in that the “gist” or “sting” of the statements is true” (18)
• The statements aren’t literally true, but are opinion or rhetorical hyperbole (i.e., “just rhetoric”). “The statements at issue in the First Amended Complaint are either statements of opinion based on disclosed facts or statements of rhetorical hyperbole that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.” (19)
• Moss and Freeman are public figures, so it doesn’t matter if the statements are true. “Due to the media scrutiny they received in connection with the 2020 presidential election, Plaintiffs are limited purpose public figures.” (19)
• Truth doesn’t matter because they were just repeating what reliable sources said. “Defendants’ statements were published in reliance on statements published by credible sources, including President Donald J. Trump and his campaign.” (19)
• Everybody was saying it. (“Incremental Harm”) “Defendants are far from the only persons to publish statements regarding Plaintiffs.” (20)

What’s striking about this set of arguments is the degree to which they contradict one another. Put simply, the Hofts are claiming that what they said is and is not true, and they did and did not believe it to be true, they did and did not want or expect their readers to take the statements literally. If what they said was literally true, and they believed it to be such, and they expected their audience to understand it as true, then it wasn’t hyperbole. The Hofts’ are using what I’m arguing should be called “strategically ambiguous hyperbole.”

Affirmative defenses are often contradictory because it’s legally acceptable to engage in “arguing in the alternative”—more or less a series of arguendo claims. Also known as throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. To claim that all of their statements were hyperbole is to say that they not only didn’t believe them, but didn’t think their audience would. Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones each tried this defense, and bungled it, Tucker Carlson tried it and succeeded. I want to talk briefly about the Carlson case, because it’s significant.

Carlson and his guest Alan Dershowitz had agreed that a woman who got hush money from Trump had committed “textbook extortion”—that is, a crime. She sued for defamation. Fox argued that the “extortion” accusation was hyperbole, and a judge agreed, saying that the “general tenor” (Memorandum 11, 17) and “context surrounding the statement” (14) would make it clear to any “reasonable” viewer that Carlson was not reporting facts, but engaged in opinion. Carlson’s “accusations of extortion are a familiar rhetorical device” of hyperbole (13). The judge said “that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes” (12), and “Carlson’s ‘dialogue was taking place on an animated, non-literal plane’” (16). The judge said that it didn’t matter whether some viewers took the statement as literally true; what matters is what a “reasonable” person would do, and that’s a common standard in law.

Common definitions of hyperbole emphasize that it is an “obvious and intentional exaggeration” (dictionary.com), “a rhetorical trope by means of which statements are made that are obviously exaggerated and thus untrue or unwarranted” (Snoeck Henkemans 269) That is, a hyperbolic statement is obviously not true, and not meant to be taken as true. But that isn’t true, as one can see in the Hofts’ brief—it isn’t obvious at all whether they believe their claims to be literally true. They are ambiguous on that point.

This ambiguity has consequences for our ability to make policy decisions. If someone uses a textbook example of hyperbole—“my suitcase weighs a ton”—and a listener refutes it by weighing the suitcase and showing that it only weighs forty pounds, the critic just looks like a humorless jerk. There’s no point in refuting a textbook case of hyperbole. But the Hofts’ claims were ambiguously hyperbolic—they were absurd, and they were false, and they were and are obviously false to any reasonable person, but they were and are not obviously false to someone who lives in a world of hyperbolic claims about the villainy of Democrats. Large numbers of Gateway Pundit readers didn’t understand those claims to be hyperbolic—they thought they were factually accurate–which is why the women got death threats. Those supporters may not be reasonable people, but that’s a legal and not rhetorical standard.

Thus, the exaggerated and fabricated claims of voting fraud enable Trump supporters to persuade their base that violence, negating election results, and various other authoritarian and extreme responses are justified self-defense, while evading accountability for the consequences of their persuasion. The absurdity of the claims also enables potential Trump voters who might “dislike Trump’s rhetoric,” but like his policies to deflect criticism for what they are supporting. They see his inciting violence and calling for authoritarian policies as “just rhetoric.” The same claims are hyperbole when strategically useful to call them that, and true or substantially true when that’s the useful strategy. And that’s what I mean by strategically ambiguous hyperbole.

I mentioned earlier that hyperbole isn’t always oriented toward rousing an audience. Sometimes it’s a strategy of deflection, by shifting the stasis. When Trump characterizes immigration as an “invasion,” that strategically ambiguous hyperbole means we’re now arguing about just how dangerous or criminal immigrants are. We are arguing about whether Moss and Freeman introduced tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots—that is, just how big the fraud was. That immigrants are dangerous, and that the election was stolen, are part of the frame, not part of the argument. And so we don’t talk about whether Trump tried to incite a riot that would steal the election—even if he did, it seems justified by the fraud that never happened.

Strategically ambiguous hyperbole also aids in the deflection of responsibility on the part of voters who intend to support Trump even if they don’t “like his rhetoric.” A common way of deflecting reasonable discussion of Trump’s corruption, fraud, and lying is to respond with, “All politicians lie”—a hyperbolic statement not intended to rouse but deflect. “All politicians lie” is simultaneously true and false. All politicians do lie—all humans lie—but that statement is used, implicitly, to dismiss the degree and kind of lies that Trump tells. It’s hyperbolic in its implications.

In addition to evading accountability, this flipping in and out of defending their rhetoric as hyperbole enables them to forestall refutation. To be effective at rousing an audience (and hyperbole can have other functions), a hyperbolic statement has to resonate as “true” in at least two ways: plausibility of the overall thrust of the argument, and sincerity of the rhetor.

In this case, the base believed/s that Democrats can only win elections by cheating; even if Democrats didn’t cheat exactly as much as the Hofts said, or in the specific ways they said. Claudia Claridge calls this kind of hyperbole “emotional truth” versus “factual truth” (18), but I don’t think invoking the rational/irrational split is either accurate or useful here. The people who find this kind of hyperbole powerful think they’re relying on factually and literally true assertions about reality. They consider it a fact that the election was stolen; the details don’t matter. The data presented as proof (analysis of the video, claims about a fake flooding) don’t have a particularly important relationship to the conclusion, so it doesn’t matter if they turn out to be false (Jenny Rice’s book on conspiracy thinking describes this process elegantly). I want to emphasize this point—that there is no expectation of a logical relationship between major claims and supposedly supporting evidence means that the argument cannot be refuted. If it can’t be refuted, it can’t be deliberated.

The Hofts, like Alex Jones, Giuliani, and Trump, openly violate the norms, even of a legal case, as it is going on, and as they claim they are honoring them. Alex Jones continued promoting on his radio show the very conspiracy theories and false claims he was in the midst of a lawsuit about, during which he testified under oath that he had stopped making those claims, and for which he had apologized enough already. He has testified in court to facts about his wealth, mental health, and intentions that he promptly and deliberately contradicted on his radio show; Giuliani signed and contradicted an admission of lying. The Hofts, in a legal document, said their claims were true and untrue. The incoherence is the point.

In addition, for some people, wild exaggeration adds credibility to an argument because it shows the passionate and sincere commitment of the rhetor to the in-group. It is a kind of performative appeal to authority—you should trust me because my commitment to the in-group is unconstrained, as shown by my being rhetorically unconstrained–and that appeal to authority works in several ways. It shows passionate commitment to the in-group (“the power of the irrational rhetor”), as well as an authoritarian understanding of truth (the argument made by Robert Paxton). The “truth” of the statement might be the sincerity of the rhetor. It can be an instance of what Ryan Skinnell calls “deceiving sincerely,” a characteristic Skinnell (and others, like Paxton) have argued is present in fascism (Rhetoric of Fascism). The truth of the statement is that the speaker is truly committed to dominating, exterminating, or expelling the out-groups. And that makes everything they say, even if false, true because the “gist” (Democrats stole the election) is true.

Brad Serber has argued that Trump and his supporters don’t engage in “dog whistles,” but “howling.” Serber says, “Dog Whistling carefully avoids the direct use of epithets, calls for violence, and other more overt kinds of hate speech, [but] Howling drops all pretense of civility and political correctness” (194). The rhetor is willing to violate rhetorical norms, and so will be willing to violate other norms as well to get the policies the in-group wants. What Trump models and offers to his followers is the opportunity to participate, via agency by proxy, in grandiose violation of legal, moral, and rhetorical norms without accountability.

Finally, it isn’t just rhetoric. The strategically ambiguous hyperbole is in service of policies that cannot be deliberated because the affirmative case is made up of claims that cannot be refuted. Both the rhetors and the policies they advocate are rhetorically, ethically, and politically unmoored. As Mary Stuckey has shown, hyperbole tends to correlate to times of increased incivility—that is, violations of discursive norms, “a certain vagueness regarding means and ends” (that is, what I’ve called a depoliticized public sphere), “and a reliance on hope and nostalgia” (676). If being irrational and extreme becomes the criterion for having credibility, then deliberation, nuance, complexity, uncertainty, reciprocity, inclusion, are all deflected if not demonized. The point of strategically ambiguous hyperbole is to evade the responsibilities of rhetoric, and the requirements of democratic deliberation. When Trump says that, on his first day in office, “we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” it is tempting for people who like certain policies of Trump’s (overheating the economy, reducing environmental protection, ending gay marriage) to dismiss the anti-democratic and authoritarian policy agenda as hyperbole. That’s a mistake. It isn’t just rhetoric.




Works Cited

Claridge, Claudia. Hyperbole in English: A corpus-based study of exaggeration. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
“Defendants’ Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Petition and Counterclaims.” https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2023.01.16-Defs-Answer-to-Pltffs-2nd-Amended-Petition-Counterclaims.pdf
Fioroni, Sarah. “Following Public Individuals for News in 7 Charts.” Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/506084/following-public-individuals-news-charts.aspx
“First Amended Complaint.” Case: 4:21-cv-01424-HEA Doc. #: 33 Filed: 01/14/22. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21315827-tgp_amendedcomplaint
Gerstein, Josh and Kyle Cheney. “‘He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob’” Politico 12/14/2023 01:03 PM EST https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/14/rudy-giuliani-jury-georgia-election-00131796 Updated: 12/14/2023 05:06 PM EST
(Giuliani) Nolo Contendre [sic] Stipulation. Case No. 1:21-cv-03354 (BAH). https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Defendant-Giulianis-Superseding-Nolo-Contendre-Stipulation-Conceding-to-Default-Liability.pdf
Henkemans, A. Francisca Snoeck. “Strategic manoeuvring with hyperbole in political debate.” Contextualizing pragma-dialectics 12 (2017): 269-280.
“Hyperbole.” Dictonary.com https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hyperbole
Kreider, A. J. “Argumentative Hyperbole as Fallacy.” Informal Logic 42.2 (2022): 417-437.
Levine, Sam. “Jury in Rudy Giuliani Defamation Trial Urged to Send Message: ‘Don’t Do It’” Thu 14 Dec 2023 15.05 EST https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/14/rudy-giuliani-testimony-federal-defamation-case-atlanta-election-workers
Memorandum in Support of Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss. McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC, No. 1:2019cv11161 – Document 39 (S.D.N.Y. 2020). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/
McFadden, K. “Hyperbole.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, 4th ed., Princeton UP, 2012, p. 648. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2388000525/GVRL?u=txshracd2598&sid=bookmarkGVRL&xid=776ca8ac.
Memorandum in Support of Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss. McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC, No. 1:2019cv11161 – Document 39 (S.D.N.Y. 2020). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/
Paxton, Robert O. The anatomy of fascism. Vintage, 2005.
Rice, Jenny. Awful archives: Conspiracy theory, rhetoric, and acts of evidence. The Ohio State University Press, 2020.
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Fanatical schemes: Proslavery rhetoric and the tragedy of consensus. University of Alabama Press, 2010.
Skinnell, Ryan. “Deceiving Sincerely: The Embrace of Sincerity-as-Truth in Fascist Rhetoric.” Rhetoric of Fascism. Ed. Nathan Crick. 2022.
Stuckey, Mary E. “American elections and the rhetoric of political change: Hyperbole, anger, and hope in US politics.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs. (2017): 667-694.
Trump, Donald. ”We Will Begin.” Right Side Broadcasting Network https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GF_SRHFlmc

How to argue badly: assume that need = plan

Two bunnies
Image from here: https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/understand-mammal-behaviour-rabbits

Imagine this. You and I are house-mates having trouble making rent, and I say, “We should get a bunch of bunnies.” You say, “I think getting bunnies would be spending more money, when our whole problem is that we don’t have enough money.” And I say, “You just think we should get evicted?” And then I go on about how disastrous it would be to get evicted. I accuse you of not caring about whether we get evicted.[1]

You’d recognize my response as unreasonable. Because it is.

Yet, that is exactly the pattern of our public discourse about politics. Too often, we assume that there is only one “plan” (solution, policy, approach), so if someone rejects our preferred plan, it’s because they don’t acknowledge the need. Therefore, our political discourse is all about need, and how horrible (irrational, corrupt, stupid) everyone is who disagrees with our plan. I’ll come back to that, but let’s start with what a good disagreement looks like.

And here’s where some concepts shared by folks in conflict resolution, policy argumentation, and a bunch of other fields come in. It’s useful to think about a problem in terms of seven questions:
1) What is the problem?
2) How bad is this problem? (What are the consequences of not solving it? Will it go away on its own?)
3) What caused this problem? How did this problem arise?
4) What are our options for solving this problem? (What are the various plans we might adopt?)
5) Which plans solve the problem we’ve identified?
6) What is the likelihood of success, ads/disads, costs/benefits for the most plausible plans? How do they compare to one another?
7) What are the likely consequences of the various plans? Is there a possibility of unintended consequences worse than the problem we’re trying to solve?

1) For you and me, the problem is that we can’t make rent, and 2) that’s a bad problem, since if we can’t solve it, we’ll get evicted.

3) So, what caused it? Our problem might be that the rent has gone up astronomically, or that I lost my job and haven’t tried to get another one, or that I’ve been spending money recklessly.

Here’s why the narrative as to how we got here matters: each of those causes implies a different kind of solution.

4) If the only reason is that the rent has gone up astronomically, then one approach might be to see if that was legal—did the landlord violate the lease? Laws regarding rent? If the only reason is that I lost my job and haven’t tried to find another, then it would make sense for me to try to find another job, or it might make sense for you to evict me, and get a new house-mate. If I’ve been spending recklessly, then I should stop doing that, and you might have some trouble figuring out how to get that to happen.

It’s possible that there are several contributing factors, in which case the approaches most likely to be successful might be combinations—I try to get a job and get my spending under control; you give me a deadline by which I’ve gotten a job or you’ll evict me; I try to get a job and we get a third room-mate.

One option is for us to get bunnies; it isn’t necessarily a good option, but it’s an option. And so the question is: why do I think that would solve the problem? How is that related to how we got here? If I am unable to pay rent because I keep getting involved in MLM, and I’ve become enamored of a bunny MLM, it would be reasonable for you to point out that I’m repeating exactly the behavior that caused the problem.

I might argue that I’ve always wanted bunnies, or that getting evicted is making me sad and bunnies will cheer me up—getting bunnies might solve some problem (my desire, my sadness), but not this problem: our facing eviction. In fact, since there would be added expenses, it might make the problem worse.

It’s also possible that there is no solution—that I can’t get a job that would enable us to afford the astronomical rent. In that case, it might make sense to try to find a way to break the lease that doesn’t involve eviction (so we don’t have an eviction on our financial record).

6) Winning the lottery would solve the problem, but that doesn’t mean that spending all our money on lottery tickets is a good plan; the likelihood of success is small. Advocating that we spend all our money on lottery tickets presumes that it’s a successful plan—people sometimes advocate a plan on the grounds that it would work, when in fact it might not. Seeing if the landlord has violated the lease (or the law) might work, but adopting that plan would mean getting expert advice (which might cost). Getting a job might also require expenditures, or be difficult in various ways. Every possible plan has advantages and disadvantages, and some plans are incompatible. We can’t spend all our money on lottery tickets and spend money to get expert advice on the lease. If I’m spending all my time job hunting, I wouldn’t have time to talk with experts about the lease.

7) Talking about unintended consequences is that hardest, I think. It’s basically worst case scenario thinking (how might this go wrong), and many people are superstitious about worst case scenario thinking. But thinking about it ahead of adopting a plan can mean that we put things in place to prevent the worst case from happening (e.g., have a backup plan), or that will let us know things are going south. Hiring an attorney to fight the rent increase might cost a lot of money and simply enrage the landlord, guaranteeing our eviction. Getting bunnies might be a violation of the lease, another way of guaranteeing our eviction.

My basic point is that acknowledging that there is a need is not necessarily associated with one solution. Similarly, disagreeing about what we should do (the plan) doesn’t mean disagreeing that there is a need. You might believe that we should have a lemonade stand, or cut back on what we’re spending in various areas, or get a loan—we have a lot of policy options, and we need to talk about them.

What happens in too much political discourse, though, is the bunny move. We have a problem, and disagree about the plan, and then instead of going through the various questions, we stay on the first. We either accuse the opponent of not really caring about the problem. Or, if we don’t like what we think are the only possible plans, or have no idea what to do, we deny that there is a problem. Neither tactic gets us reasonable disagreement or effective policies.


[1] For added unreasonable points, I might accuse you of being a bunny hater, communist, fascist, or some other group I hate.

Our political discourse sucks because it’s gerfucked by the rational/irrational split

Books about demagoguery

Once again, people are bemoaning the morass that is our political discourse, and, once again, blame is placed on the lack of civility. Then the conversation follows a deeply-rutted path: what civility is, whether there’s less of it than there used to be, and “which side” is more incivil, or who is justified in their incivility. It’s a route that can’t get us out of the morass, let alone toward better political disagreements, because incivility is the consequence and not the cause of what is really the problem.

The problem is the extent to which people think and talk about politics in terms of the rational/irrational split—a binary that is wrong in so many ways. To explain some of these ways, I need to start at a place the civility road evades: what is political discourse supposed to do in a democracy?

One answer is that political disagreements don’t actually do much of anything—it’s just a right: democracy is supposed to allow people to express their beliefs, so the ideal public discourse is one in which everyone is allowed to express whatever they think with no constraints.[1] This is sometimes called the “expressive” model of democracy. Another, sometimes called the “marketplace” model, is that public discourse is a bunch of people selling their policies—just as the marketplace always inevitably rewards the best product, so a free-for-all of people making whatever arguments will persuade others always results in the best policies.[2]

What if we instead imagined political disagreement as policy disagreement? What if we saw the purpose of public discourse as enabling us to come to decisions that are the most reasonable, given our very different needs, values, perspectives, opportunities; policies that distribute the burdens and opportunities of our shared lives in a reasonable way?

If we think about the purpose of public disagreement that way, then what matters isn’t whether someone is particularly nice when they make their argument, but whether their argument is reasonable. An argument that is dishonest, misleading, and fallacious isn’t transmogrified into an honest, accurate, and reasonable argument if it’s presented politely. It’s still a bad argument, and probably in service of a bad policy—if you can’t advocate your policy with accurate information, a fair representation of the opposition, and reasonable connections among claims, then there are probably better policies out there.

The incivility of our public discourse isn’t the cause of being able to have productive disagreements—it’s the consequence of our tendency to characterize anyone who disagrees with us as “irrational,” and that tendency is the consequence of how we think (or don’t think very clearly) about what “rational” should mean.

After all, what does it mean to have a reasonable policy argument? We often use terms like “rational,” “reasonable,” and “logical” interchangeably (although there is a reasonable argument for making a distinction—I’ll get to that in another post), and all three of those tend to part of a binary: rational/irrational; reasonable/unreasonable, logical/illogical.[3]

Definitions tend to be circular, depend on negation (being “rational” means not being “irrational” and vice versa) and muddled. Webster’s, for instance, defines “rational” as “having a reason” or “reasonable.” Notice that those two are actually very different. If I say, “You should be opposed to nuclear power because my I have a bunny named Fluffy,” I’ve given a reason. But we wouldn’t say that’s a reasonable argument. My statement gives a reason—it has the form of “claim because reason”—but the reason isn’t logically connected to my claim.[4] Even were the “because clause” true (I do have a bunny, and it is named Fluffy), I doubt any of us would say that’s a reasonable argument.[5]

But if “rational” means “reasonable,” what does it mean for something to be “reasonable”? Webster’s again offers two definitions that are relevant: “being in accordance with reason” and “not extreme or excessive” (I’ll come back to the second). “Reason” is “a statement offered in explanation”—so back to a form definition (and, once again, the nuclear power argument is reasonable); or “a rational ground or motive.” We’ve come full circle.

This simultaneously contradictory and circular definitions of “rational” isn’t the consequence of some failure on the part of Webster’s. The point of a dictionary like Webster’s is to show common usage, and common usage of the term “rational” has those qualities. For instance, we tend to use the term rational to describe some very different things: an argument, a claim, a person, a way of arguing, a way of thinking. For some people, a “rational” argument is not necessarily true—it just has a particular form—but the term is also sometimes used to imply that the argument is true. Some people use the term “rational” to mean an amoral assessment of means and costs (so, the argument runs, Hitler invading the USSR was “rational” insofar as it was the only way to achieve his ends). The most common sense about rationality is that it is not its opposite—a rational argument is not irrational, and “irrationality” is associated with emotion. So, a rational argument is not emotional, a rational policy is not grounded in feelings. That’s how one gets to the argument that Hitler’s invasion of the USSR was “rational”—considering the devastation to peoples, the morality of the cause or means are all deflected as about “feelings,” and therefore “irrational.”

And, of course, Hitler’s desire to invade the USSR was all about feelings. That’s pretty typical of the attempt to characterize rationality as an amoral and unemotional determination of the most effective means—it’s all in service of deflecting, suppressing, or ignoring the very present feelings. I have had more than one person shout at me that we needed to be “rational” about this situation rather than emotional. Since I wasn’t particularly far away, and therefore would have no trouble hearing them if they spoke in a normal tone of voice, there was no reason to shout, other than that they were very, very emotional at the moment.

Sometimes rational/irrational is described as a binary, meaning that the slightest bit of emotion taints the argument, person, policy, and so a “rational” person (etc.) has no emotion. And, obviously, that’s never the case. We wouldn’t be arguing about the policy or issue unless we had feelings that it’s important.

Policy decisions involve feelings of honor, hope, care, compassion, fear, anger, and they should. So, let’s just set aside the muddled notion that a rational argument is one devoid of feeling. A person devoid of feeling wouldn’t be rational; they’d be dead. (Even sociopaths have feelings—they just don’t have feelings of compassion for others.) It wouldn’t be rational to ignore feelings completely; if I am miserable any time I’m near the beach, it would be rational to take those feelings into consideration before buying a house on the beach.

Another way of thinking about rationality is in terms of the form of the argument. Some people assume that a rational argument has data, and they may even have a strong desire to privilege some data over others (e.g., numbers). Defining a “rational” argument as “one that has statistics” has the same problems as the bunny named Fluffy—that it has a particular form (claim plus statistics) doesn’t necessarily mean the statistics are valid. They may be fabricated, misleading, or irrelevant. A lot of arguments in which people cite statistics have the correlation/causation problem—according to the wonderful website “Spurious Correlations,” automotive recalls for issues with the air bags strongly correlates to the popularity of the first name “Killian.” There is, by the way, no causal relationship between those two phenomena.

The idea that rationality is a trait that some people have is singularly pernicious and consistently anti-democratic. It’s often the consequence and cause of stereotypes about groups we don’t like: the dumbass “Southerner,” corrupt Irishman, skinflint Scot…and so on. In the 1830s it was common to argue that Catholics were incapable of independent reasoning (“rationality”) since they would just do whatever the Pope said, and so should be denied the vote. A similar argument was made about the Japanese Americans in 1942—that Shintoism meant they were incapable of independent thought and were therefore essentially traitors—an irrational argument on two grounds, including that not all Japanese Americans were Shintoist.

There have been moments when people assumed that “experts” are more rational about their own subject than non-experts (Walter Lippmann’s argument), a claim belied by “expert” witnesses whose testimony turned out to be tremendously biased and completely wrong (see especially Junk Science).

This isn’t to say that experts shouldn’t be treated with any credibility—this whole post is about rejecting a binary, and so I’m not arguing we should substitute another (there isn’t a binary between experts and non-experts, or reasonable v. unreasonable–both are more like a color wheel than a binary or continuum). It isn’t possible to reason without cognitive biases, but that isn’t to say all people (or all experts) are equally biased.

Because the rational/irrational binary is a…well…binary, if we value “rationality,” then we’ll attribute rationality to ourselves and our in-group (i.e., people like “us”), and “irrationality” to Them (people not like us).[6] We will consider it “irrational” to support an opposition candidate or policy, and therefore believe we shouldn’t listen to them. If They are irrational, then we should try to purify our media of Them; it’s even justified to silence them (since there is no merit to anything they have to say). We don’t have to take seriously anyone who disagrees with us.

Being “civil” about how completely irrational everyone is who disagrees with us doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got a public sphere in which we don’t listen to anyone who disagrees. It’s that assumption that every and anyone who disagrees with us is an irrational, immoral, doofus that causes the incivility.

The final way to think about rationality I want to mention is about rules. I’ll be clear: I’m on team rules. Sometimes. What matters is what the rules are—there are some ways of thinking about the rules that are just as harmful as any of the other problematic definitions above. For instance, rules of “civility” have often been used to silence important information, as when pro-slavery politicians voted for a gag rule about criticism of slavery–it was considered a violation of civility to criticize slavers. Neo-Aristotelians believed that a rational argument had to be derived syllogistically from a universally valid major premise; that was a kind of training not provided to women, so women were, by definition, incapable of a rational argument.

The “rules of logic” can be either usefully inclusive, or irrationally exclusive.

Scholars of argumentation still argue about what the rules should be (there’s an entire journal devoted to that topic), but there are a few points of agreement that will surprise the Logic Nazis out there.

Attacking someone’s character is not necessarily a fallacy, and attacking how they argue rarely is. Saying “You are lying” or “You are misrepresenting that source” is not ad hominem.[7] “You” statements do not constitute ad hominem. Ad hominem is a fallacy of relevance—it’s a way to change the subject. Saying that Trump is a bad candidate because he has a gold toilet is ad hominem (especially since he doesn’t and never has), but saying that he hasn’t put together a coherent healthcare plan in eight years is not. Saying that Harris is a bad candidate because she cackles is ad hominem; saying that she plans to reinstate a high capital gains tax is not.

Similarly, appeal to emotions (ad misericordiam) and appeal to expert opinion (ad verecundiam) are only fallacies if the appeals are irrelevant, such as that the cited person does not have relevant authority.

I’ll be clear: I’m on the side of thinking that we should not define rationality in terms of identity, affect, tone, kind of data, but on the relation of claims to one another and to the context of the disagreement. And I think those rules should be up for argument.

The set of rules I prefer isn’t particularly controversial—it’s pretty close to what anyone engaged in conflict resolution advocates. And, in my experience, it’s held up pretty well to historical cases (to my surprise). The shortest version of that set of rules is:
1) Whatever the standards of proof are (whether citation of religious texts, personal experience, myths, personal credibility, for instance, are allowed), they apply to all participants. That is, rules apply across groups. So, if I cite a relevant personal experience as evidence, then the relevant personal experiences of others are also evidence. If I condemn an out-group political figure or rhetor for shouting at babies, then I need to condemn in-group political figures and rhetors who shout at babies. I need to rely on evidence, and not signs.
2) People represent opposition arguments fairly and accurately, and people try to find the smartest opposition (no cherrypicking of outlier statements or rhetors, and no genus-species arguments about non in-group members).
3) Participants use data that can be falsified (not that they are falsified, but that it’s theoretically possible to imagine what data would contradict them, and therefore show the claims to be wrong).[8]
4) People are open to explaining their arguments and strive for reasonable relationships among claims, avoiding the major fallacies of form and relevance.

These are my preferences, largely the result of looking at train wrecks in public deliberation, but they’re open to argument. Whatever standards we have should enable judgment—they should help us identify the ways of arguing that tend to lead to train wrecks—while still being inclusive. There’s no point in setting standards only angels can meet, or restricting policy deliberation to a narrow set of experts. And the standards we set need to be based in the faith that there are often legitimate reasons for disagreement, that policy determination is complicated and uncertain, and that not every person who disagrees with us is a benighted irrational dupe.

[1] Actually, no one thinks that—it only takes a few examples before people start making exceptions. We all agree that some kinds of speech can be restricted in public and that private entities can greatly restrict speech; we just disagree about which restrictions should apply where. And we’re particularly protective of in-group speech.

[2] Yes, I’m being snarky.

[3] The rational/irrational binary is a relative newcomer to philosophy, running from Descartes and reaching its height among the logical positivists. Plato and Aristotle are often read as advocating it, as are various Enlightenment philosophers, but it’s worth remembering that Plato describes feelings—such as admiration of beauty or love—as ways of perceiving Truth. Aristotle’s logos v. alogos similarly doesn’t have the exclusion of affect or emotion that are part of our current rational/irrational binary.

[4] It’s theoretically possible that my overall argument is reasonable (there might be connections I could make if pressed, although none occur to me right now) but not in its current form.

[5] A lot of public arguments have exactly that form, and that logical flaw: “You should vote for Chester because 2 + 2 =4.” For reasons I’ve never entirely figured out, that sort of very unreasonable argument tends to be most persuasive when the “because clause” involves statistics. Even if the statistics are true—and sometimes they are—they’re often either irrelevant or only tangentially related to the main claim. As it happens, I don’t have a bunny, let alone one named Bunny.

[6] Sometimes people accept the idea of the binary, but flip the privilege, so they think “rationality” is bad, and “irrationality” is good—the Beats, Romanticists of various kinds. They tend to describe “rationality” as cold, number-driven, and passionless.

[7] Because I have a sick sense of humor, I think it’s hilarious when someone says, “You’re engaged in ad hominem because you’re attacking how I argue” since, by their definition, that statement is ad hominem. (It isn’t—neither is the original attack.) Or, sometimes they’ll say, “By engaging in ‘you’ statements, you’re engaged in ad hominem.” Notice the pronouns.

[8] And here the language needs to get a little precise. Many of my policy commitments come from my religious faith, and religious faith is, by definition, not falsifiable. So, my religious faith is not rational. My policy commitment to school lunches is grounded in Jesus’ commandment to care for the children, but the claims I make about free school lunches should be falsifiable—how many are provided, how many children need them, the consequences of providing lunches.

Another way to think about this “rule” is: are there any conditions under which you would change your mind about this? So, it’s whether there is any point in having a disagreement on that issue.





Primary v. Secondary Sources

image of down escalator with "Deliberating War" Patricia Roberts-Miller

Early in my career as a writing teacher, I had a confusing conversation with a student about sources—it taught me a lot about how people think about evidence and fairness. Imagine that the student was writing about whether little dogs are involved in squirrel conspiracy to get the red ball. This situation was a hypothetical example I used in order to help students think about structure, logic, and argumentation without triggering hot cognition by using a more controversial issue. The basic premise was that the squirrels were conspiring to get to my dogs’ red ball, something on which my two Great Danes agreed, but they disagreed as to whether little dogs were involved in the conspiracy (one of my dogs loved little dogs, and the other was afraid of them—which is pretty hilarious for a Great Dane).[1] So, call one group Hubertians and the other Chesterians.

The student was making an argument about what Hubert supporters believed, and cited a rabidly (so to speak) pro-Chester source. I was trying to explain that the assignment required that students use primary sources—if he wanted to make an argument about what Hubert supporters believed, he needed to cite a pro-Hubert source. He kept saying he was, because the article by a rabidly pro-Chester author in a rabidly pro-pro-Chester media outlet had a direct quote. Why would he need any other source? It was a quote, he kept saying.

It took me a long time to understand the misunderstanding. It’s a complicated one, on both our parts, and has a lot to do with how people think about evidence and proof. But here I want to pursue one part of the misunderstanding—about fairness.

Even if there is a quote, it isn’t necessarily what Hubert said, let alone meant. And here’s it’s necessary to say something about partisan sources.

As I’ve said many times, and in many places, the tendency to take our rich and nuanced world of policy options and divide them into a binary (or continuum) of identities is false, fallacious, proto-demagogic, and guarantees we can’t discuss policies reasonably. There are self-identified “conservative” Christians who object to the death penalty and abortion, self-identified “conservative” Christians who object to one but not the other, self-identified “progressive” Christians who object to both, others who object to one but not the other. Thinking in terms of identity means we end up arguing about who is really Christian, or really conservative, or really whatever. Thinking in terms of policy raises the possibility of a coalition on one issue even though we disagree about others. And that doesn’t require anyone converting to a new identity.

So, thinking about politics this way means trying to find different points of view on policies in order to understand the arguments. This is a long way of saying that looking at politics as policies means trying to get information from a variety of perspectives on a policy disagreement, not just two.[2]

And what I learned by doing that myself was that Hubert might or might not have actually said what the pro-Chester article quoted. If you read sources from multiple perspectives, you learn that misrepresenting the out-group happens in all sorts of ways in all sorts of sources.

Imagine that the quote in question is, “Bunnies are fluffy.” Hubert might not have said anything like that—it might have been something a pro-Hubert pundit said, or something a pro-Chester pundit simply invented. Hubert might have said, “Bunnies are not fluffy,” and the article edited the quote without even showing ellipses. Hubert might have said, “Bunnies have fur” which someone badly paraphrased, and that paraphrase got turned into a quote. Hubert might himself have been quoting someone before he went on to show he didn’t agree with it. He might have been engaged in a “some say” argument. He might have said it sarcastically. In context, it might have meant something completely different from what the pro-Chester article was representing. He might have said it when he was a puppy, and he’s since retracted it and advocated a different position.

In-group rhetors often misrepresent what out-group members have said, and what out-group members believe.[3] They don’t necessarily intend to do so—sometimes it’s just that they’re writing in a rush, and sometimes they themselves didn’t read the whole article, and sometimes they think it’s “more or less true.”

It isn’t just related to politics. I’ve seen article on non-political technical issues that made the same mistake—I’ve seen scholarly articles that misrepresent an argument I’ve made by taking it out of context; I’ve later discovered I did it to others.

And all of us have had it happen in personal situations—people take something we’ve said out of context, and thereby mislead others about us. And we don’t like it when it happens to us.

We’d like people to represent what we’ve said accurately, and we’d like others to check with us about what we’ve said or believed.

So, it’s a question of fairness. If we’d like others to ensure that we and our in-group are being accurately quoted, then we should make sure we’re doing that to others. It’s useful if we try to get outside of our informational bubble.


[1] The student wasn’t actually writing about this topic, but I think it’s useful for purposes of my argument here to stay away from hot cognition topics.

[2] Which is a basic flaw in my basic hypothetical scenario, but we tended to complicate it as time went on.

[3] “In-group” is not the group “in” power; it’s the group we’re in. So, for Chester supporters, Chesterians are the “in-group” and Hubertians are the “out-group.” “Hubertians” are the in-group for Hubert supporters, and Chesterians

What’s wrong with calls for “civility”

A dozen or so 19th century books on etiquette

Our current political and public discourse is in a bad way, and a lot of people are proposing that the solution is a re-embrace of “civility” as a cultural norm. The problem with these arguments is that its advocates use civility as a “God” term—meaning it isn’t very precisely defined, but is always good. That vague understanding combined with a passionate commitment means we can’t talk usefully about the times that civility was used to exclude, dismiss, and even criminalize valid criticism of people and institutions.

Civility, like its evil twin demagoguery, is sometimes defined in terms of intention, sometimes word choice, the feelings of the critic, the feelings of the rhetor, imagined norms, or whatever happens to be useful to condemn out-group rhetoric and praise in-group rhetoric. The shifting definition means that there is no such thing as out-group civility or in-group incivility (or if in-group incivility is admitted, it’s justified in some way).

I’m really tired of well-intentioned calls for “civility” that are most likely to have no impact other than increasing in-group self-righteousness.

Too many calls for civility don’t actually define civility (or they define it through a double negative—it’s not incivility); they never give examples of a civil argument with which they disagree, so “civility” and “incivility” are just terms to describe in- v. out-group rhetoric; their narratives of when politics became uncivil are unintentional exposures that they don’t really know much about the history of rhetoric or public discourse; they don’t acknowledge that a speech they insist was civil was, in its reception, seen as incivil; their notion of civility muddles reception (incivility hurts feelings), word choice (incivil rhetoric uses prohibited words, boosters), and argumentation (incivility misrepresents the situation, relies heavily on fallacies of relevance and deflection).

If you have an incoherent description of the ill, then it’s unlikely you’re going to find a good plan to solve that ill. If central to both your ill and your plan is a term you can’t define, you’re gerfucked.

Slavers whined about the incivility of their critics, and, in fact, passed a gag rule in an attempt to silence criticism of slavery in Congress. Critics of slavery in many states might be expelled, lynched, fined, their businesses ruined–southern civility did not extend to allowing criticism of slavery. As William Chafe long ago showed, civility worked against civil rights and in favor of segregation. When people argue for censoring textbooks, prohibiting discussions of genocide, slavery, segregation, and racism, they do so on the grounds of “civility.” We have to decide what we want to civility to do—strengthen or undermine current hierarchies? Enable genuine disagreement or make it more difficult?

There are a lot of ways of thinking about civility. Two are particularly important for our current situation: civility as rules of deference that vary depending on where the rhetor is in a hierarchy; or, civility as equal treatment regardless of any hierarchy of power or position. The hierarchical way of thinking about civility assumes that civility is deference (especially verbal), and that the civility rules should always be stricter for the person/group lower in the hierarchy. A professor calls students by their first name, but the students use title and last name for the professor. A boss can shout at an employee, but the employee can’t shout at the boss. There are rules of civility for the person higher in the hierarchy, but there are fewer of them, and the penalties are minor if they are violated.

Another way of thinking about civility is egalitarian. The rules of civility apply equally to all—it is just as much a violation of civility for a manager to shout at an employee as vice versa. Whatever exceptions are made for rules about shouting apply to all equally.

So, how should we define civility? I’d suggest it’s useful to think of civility as “politeness rules about who can say what to whom in what circumstances.” If we define it that way, then it isn’t necessarily good. It can be used for silencing dissent, justifying injustice, enabling violence. If we think of it that way, then it isn’t even something absent from our current situation. The problem isn’t that civility is absent; the problem is the implicit model of civility people are using: doubly hierarchical.

What we’re experiencing right now is a doubly hierarchical model of civility. In-group rules of civility are weaker than they used to be, but there are still hierarchies (and the more SDO a group is, the more the group has an internal hierarchical approach to civility). But the main hierarchy is in- v. out-group. The out-group is held to higher standards of civility than the in-group. Rhetoric with which we agree is held to lower standards of civility than rhetoric with which we disagree.

In a demagogic culture, standards of “civility” are determined by in- or out-group membership. Anything any in-group rhetor or group does is civil, and exactly the same rhetoric on the part of out-group rhetors is incivil. Rarely is that disparate standard acknowledged. When it is, people try to justify it on the grounds that we are in an existential war, a way of framing policy disagreements that is disastrous for democracy (the argument made here: the only book of which I am unashamably proud).

Unless we can separate standards of civility from in-group membership, then even if we do somehow manage to increase “civility,” it will simply make our current situation worse.









Mission Statements and War

red scare ad for Dewey

I’m reading Donald Stoker’s hilariously (and justifiably) grumpy Why America Loses Wars (2019). One of the points he makes is that American politicians and pundits have been enamored with “limited war” since Korea, without any precise definition of that term (or even of war more generally). He argues that “limited war” is defined (to the extent that it’s defined at all) by military means rather than political objective. Political objectives enable the determination of “win” conditions (e.g., we are fighting in order to gain control of this territory), whereas defining a war by military means (e.g., we will rely purely on bombing) doesn’t.

He says that no President since FDR who has advocated going to war has laid out clear “win” conditions, and that, without those conditions (without knowing the political objective), the military can’t determine effective strategies.

That’s an argument similar to one I make in Deliberating War—that the rhetoric for the war matters, since a necessary war should be rhetorically defensible, as far as need and objectives. If political figures and pundits can’t name a specific political objective, then they’re effectively advocating endless war. My interest is in public deliberation about policy, whereas Stoker’s is military deliberation about strategies, tactics, logistics, operations, and so on. But, what’s shared is the argument that vague objectives (or, more precisely, vague rhetoric about objectives) constrain deliberation.

Stoker argues that political figures from Truman to Obama have advocated war (which Stoker defines as combatants using violence to achieve a political aim, 15) while denying that it’s war and describing the objectives in vague terms or not describing them at all.

Stoker is arguing against the post-war fascination with “limited war”—a fascination that continues to trouble public discourse about military actions.

To be fair, LBJ was clear that the goal was a non-communist South Vietnam, and Truman was clear that the goal was getting North Korean troops out of the area below the 38th parallel. Granted, those are negative goals, and it took Truman a minute to decide that was the goal, but the pro-war rhetoric of Truman and LBJ doesn’t seem to me much vaguer than what Wilson set out as goals for WWI. So, I’m not convinced that the problem Stoker identifies is entirely new. But, I agree it’s a problem, and I agree it’s now the norm. With the exception of the First Iraq War (the Persian Gulf War), military actions have been advocated with arguments no more complicated than what can be a slogan on a bumper sticker. FDR had a lot of bumper sticker moments, but he also had specific goals—there were win identifiable conditions.[1] But, what is victory in a “war on terror”? What does it mean to “destroy” a non-state entity like IS? How do you know you’ve won? How do you know whether you’re winning?

So, here’s something I’ve been wondering about: Stoker’s quotes from various Presidents and what they’ve said in favor of war sound like mission statements. I’m not opposed to mission statements on principle (it isn’t my mission to reject mission statements) but they’re often sententious platitudes oriented toward signalling in-group loyalty. For years, there have been sites that generate a mission statements, and they don’t seem that different from the ones for which institutions paid consulting firms millions.[2] So, I’m not convinced that mission statements do much of anything. The process of deliberating a mission statement can be, but, since mission statements are often determined by websites or consulting firms, I’m not sure what they do other than signal. They don’t imply objectives (which are often equally vague and sententious), let alone policies.

But they have a rhetorical impact. In addition to signalling in-group loyalty, they’re just vague enough that it’s difficult to disagree with them. And, really, that’s how so many wars in the 21st century have been advocated. If a war is for “freedom,” how can you be against it? If it’s a war on drugs, how can you be in favor of drugs?

I found myself wondering: is there a relationship between the obsession with sententious mission statements and wars advocated via sententious mission statements?

I know there is no monocausal narrative that would be accurate, so I’m not wondering if the tendency toward mission statements is the cause for vague and vapid military mission statements. But I’m wondering if there’s something that has created a trend for sententious mission statements, and it’s affected all institutions equally (business, non-profits, academia, politics), or if there is some complicated causal relationship?

[1] I’m not certain this vagueness about win conditions is entirely new, but I can’t think of a war when they were as vague as they were with the Second or Third Iraq War, the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, or the “wars” that Trump has asserted are already declared on the US, such as the trade war with China.

[2] I’m not dismissing or even criticizing the practice that Covey advocated—of taking some time every once in a while to ask yourself questions like: “WTF am I trying to do?” “What do I want to achieve?” I think that some corporate mission statements are meaningful, and the process of developing one can be useful.