Patricia Roberts-Miller

What do we do now?

2009 Irish tug of war team — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tug_of_war#/media/File:Irish_600kg_euro_chap_2009_(cropped).JPG

I’ve spent thirty years worried that our media environment would either create a civil war or a fascist overthrow of democracy. In the midst of the pro-Iraq invasion demagoguery I was researching pro-slavery demagoguery, and I realized in both cases, the problem wasn’t demagogues. The problem was a culture of demagoguery.

In both cases, complicated policy options were reduced to a single-axis binary or continuum of identity (a person is pro- or anti-slavery, or pro- or anti-invasion). So, the frame for politics was identitarian.

In both cases, that was a completely false way of representing the policy options. In both cases, it was a way of framing the conflict that benefitted the authoritarians. The very complicated set of policy options that the United States had in regard to slavery were reduced to a binary of identity: pro- or anti-slavery. That helped slavers (there is no distinction between slaveholders and slavers—the institution of slavery was profitable because “slaveholders” bought and sold slaves; they were all slavers). It helped slavers because the “anti-slavery” position could be fallaciously equated with advocating slave rebellion.

It’s the genus-species fallacy. Since some people who are anti-slavery advocate slave resistance (e.g., David Walker), and slave resistance is the same as slave rebellion (as a famous court decision concluded), then anyone who criticizes slavery is advocating slave rebellion. (That’s the summary of actual arguments made by people who were taken seriously.)

It was the same fallacy that showed up in regard to Iraq—terrorists oppose the war (actually, they didn’t), therefore people who oppose the war are terrorists. The genus-species fallacy is repeated thrice over in the claim that “anyone who says racism is systemic is advocating CRT because that’s what CRT says and CRT is Marxist, so they’re Marxist.”

The genus-species fallacy is built in to any identitarian model of politics. Identitarian models of politics say that the world of policy disagreements isn’t actually about individual (or small group) concerns, needs, problems, goals and therefore different policy commitments (e.g., an anti-choice soybean farmer) . It says that our policy world is really a zero-sum tug-of war of people along a single axis, or even a binary (that soybean farmer is far right).

Just to be clear: we all are members of many social groups, some of which are important to our sense of identity. Chester might be a Lutheran, 49ers fan, parrot owner, parcheesi fanatic. Those are Chester’s “in-groups” if they are how he defines himself. We also all have a lot of groups we are in that aren’t important to our sense of identity—the way you can tell whether your group identification is in-group is if you get defensive if someone criticizes that group. So, if someone said parcheesi sucks, and they prefer chess, Chester would only care if his sense of himself as a parcheesi player was important to him.

In-groups always have out-groups. In fact, in-groups are generally defined by their not being out-group. Unhappily, self-worth tends to be comparative. We can think of ourselves as good, or justified, or successful, or whatever, if we can compare ourselves to others around us and say we’re better. (“Maybe parcheesi players do yell at kittens, but that’s nowhere as bad as what chess players do, so I’m not going to feel bad about it.”) So, out-groups help us feel good about ourselves because they’re so much worse than we are.

Because people have a lot of in-groups, there are a lot of ways that we can be called on to identify ourselves, and a lot of policy commitments we might have. Media that promote the identitarian model evade discussions of the various policy options, instead narrating the zero-sum conflict along that continuum of identity (this is also called the “horse race” frame).

In all my research of train wrecks in public deliberation—from the Sicilian Expedition to Bush’s failure to plan for an occupation—a major factor is identitarian politics. Identitarian politics makes disagreement about policies seem pointless, trivial, or even distracting. It thereby fosters authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is a model of society, culture, and government that assumes that politics is a question of identity, with one identity entitled to dominate the others.

All authoritarian politics are identitarian. All ethnic cleansings are identitarian. All train wrecks in public deliberation are identitarian.

We are in what might be end times for democracy. The way we should respond to this crisis is NOT to engage in purity wars, although that’s the impulse. We don’t stop authoritarianism by being more authoritarian about our allies (i.e., condemning people who haven’t take a strong enough stance), or purifying the in-group and insisted that everyone “get on the same page;” we stop it by forming alliances. There has never been a time when opponents of authoritarianism successfully prevented an authoritarian takeover by fighting among ourselves.

We shouldn’t spend our time (and social media) mobilizing resentment about potential allies. If your impulse is to respond to what I’m saying is that I’m telling you that you can’t criticize Dems, then you’re completely misunderstanding. Absolutely criticize the Dems. But do so in a way that is likely to have impact without mobilizing resentment. Email the DNC. Email the Dem politicians who are taking stands you think are wrong.

The DNC and Dem politicians care about what email they get. They don’t know, and therefore don’t care, about what you or I post on FB. But posting about how the Dems suck (especially when it’s reposting something that is just wrong about how Congressional practices work) helps authoritarians.

Keep in mind that it’s documented that Russian trolls spent much of their effort, not promoting Trump, but mobilizing resentment about “liberals” and the Dems. So, just to be clear: criticize the Dems, but do so in ways that are likely to get the Dems to change, and not in ways that help authoritarians.

My final point is: don’t try to create alliances of identity, but of policy.

I often attend the Texas TribFest, and it’s where policy wonks wonk together. They make an effort to bring in people with different points of view. And one of the most moving panels I saw was two Texas state legislators who both self-identify as Christian, and one is a Dem and the other GOP. And they talked about their going together to Death Row, and praying with the people there, their working together on abolishing the Death Penalty, and their failure to get any pro-Death Penalty legislators to come with them. They said they disagree vehemently with one another about all sorts of issues, but they agree on this. Alliances can be policy specific, and yet effective and important.

[A friend sent along this vid, which makes a similar argument.]

Demagoguery and Emotions

Demagogic books from various perspectives

I’ve been writing about demagoguery for twenty years, and I think just today I’ve figured out how to explain something that has long bothered me about the “demagoguery is an appeal to emotions” notion. In addition to the problems I’ve mentioned before—that assumes it’s possible to have a stance on politics that is devoid of emotion (a person who didn’t care about anything would have no basis for preferring one outcome over another and hence no policy preferences), the rational-irrational binary is itself irrational, people should be emotional about politics—there is a performative contradiction in saying that demagoguery is bad and demagoguery is emotional.

Many of the condemnations of demagoguery that assume the problem is that it’s an emotional appeal talk about the dangers, immorality, damage, and threats that a specific demagogue presents—they appeal to fear. And many of them are pretty dang emotional in doing so. Often by “emotional rhetoric” people mean style or tone (e.g., highly figurative language, especially such figures as hyperbole, superlatives, binaries). But, it’s quite possible (and often very moving) to make a fear-mongering irrational argument in plain style and an “unemotional” tone.

More important, the identification of someone as a demagogue tends to be grounded in emotion; that is, whether they like or dislike the rhetor and/or the rhetor’s agenda. Only out-group rhetors are demagogues.

So, if emotions are bad in public discourse, and appeals to emotion are demagogic, then it’s always demagogic to call someone a demagogue.

And that’s why I think we should focus on demagoguery rather than demagogues, and why I have a chapter in the book on demagoguery about Earl Warren’s very unemotional tone.

What should opponents of authoritarianism do?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

[I posted this on FB, but I should have posted it here also.]

People keep asking me what opponents of our authoritarian administation should be doing, and it’s pretty straightforward in the abstract but very much up for argument in the specific:

DO WHAT HAS WORKED IN THE PAST, AND DON’T DO WHAT HAS NEVER WORKED.

Things that, as far as I know, have worked in the past under similar circumstances:
-have a big tent, make alliances, work together on the shared goal of saving democracy, make some compromises if necessary.
-try to crack the hardshell of the informational bubble that Trump supporters are in. Just try getting the information in front of them. If you have Trump supporters in your social media, post double-checked facts about Trump, ICE, and so on.
-make it personal; show how they’re supporting someone who is hurting people they love.
-you can try to point out that they’re rejecting Jesus, that they hold out-groups to much, much higher standards than they hold themselves or in-group members. (They know, and don’t care, but you can try.)
-you can try pointing out that they don’t really know what’s going on because they get their information from sources that misrepresent the situation. If you tell them something that they don’t want to hear, and they say it’s “fake news,” you can ask them if they get their information from a source that would tell them if it was true.
-support the groups who are filing the lawsuits.
-block walk, make phone calls, put up signs, subscribe to, and otherwise personally help opposition organizations and individuals, even if you disagree with them on many things.
If there are other things that you are aware have worked, do them (and tell others about them).

Here’s what, as far as I know, has never worked under these circumstances:
-violent protests;
-various versions of purifying the in-group (refusing to compromise, insisting on univocality or unanimity in terms of ideology, strategy, or policy), refusing to support anyone who isn’t fully in line with our policy agenda/rhetoric
-talking and thinking about policy disagreements in the pro-authoritarian “right/center/left” binary or continuum (a single axis)
-giving up

I’m open to persuasion about the specifics. But I’ll point out, if your response is that this post shows I’m a centrist/librul/whatev for making this argument, look again at the “what hasn’t worked” list.

Writing is hard: this week’s work

a very marked up draft of one page of writing

When I started trying to write scholarly articles/books, it was SO hard. Writing doesn’t come easily to me—it never has—but this was unusually hard. I always assumed that some day scholarly writing would come easily to me. It hasn’t.

I started yoga at 50. There’s a reason people don’t start yoga at 50. It’s really, really hard. It’s been sixteen years, and it’s still just as hard. But, recently I realized that, although it’s just as hard, I’m doing things I couldn’t do five years ago, let alone fifteen.

And then I realized that’s how it is with scholarly writing.

Why people who oppose Trump should stop saying “the Dems caved”

I had a busy day, and will be minimally (maybe not at all) on social media for the next few days. My taking the stance that people who oppose Trump should stop saying “the Dems caved” got enough disagreement from various people that I thought I should explain it more. I haven’t had time to write it out thoroughly, and I’m not going to be able to explain it very well, but I thought I should try. So, here’s the short version (without links–sorry).

“The Dems caved” is a statement involving two rhetorical figures, an assumed counterfactual, and two frames for thinking about politics that I think favor authoritarianism.

“Caved” is hyperbole. People who “cave” in a bargaining situation completely give in, and give the interlocutor everything that person wants. As many, many others have pointed out, Trump didn’t get everything he wanted, and he got a bunch he didn’t want (such as a vote on the ACA).

I’m all for hyperbole (note that I just used the rhetorical figure of hyperbole), but, like all rhetorical figures, it’s worth thinking about what the figure does in this situation—who does it help? I’m saying it helps Trump.

“The Dems” is a synecdoche. The claim that “the Dems caved” takes the behavior of eight Senators as “the Dems.” (A part stands for the whole.) As with many figures, if you look at them logically, it’s fallacious. Eight democrats is not “the Democratic Party.” Lots of Dem Senators didn’t cave; I vote Dem, and I didn’t cave. So, it’s a rhetorical figure, and using it is a rhetorical choice. And, as with most rhetorical choices, the important question is: what does it do? Who does it help to say that “the Dems” did something bad? Trump.

(Does that mean that we can never criticize the DNC, any Democratic political figures, or how Democrats vote? Posing that question is another use of hyperbole, and another one that helps Trump. We can and should criticize the DNC [of whom I am not a fan], various Dem political figures [such as the eight], Dem voters…we should talk about groups and people who actually exist rather than hobgoblins defined by othering. “Dems” are not a monolithic and univocal group.)

The assumed counterfactual is that “the Dems” could have gotten a better deal by continuing to enable Trump’s denial of SNAP and the shutdown in general. I have to admit that, while I’ve read a lot of things saying that the Dems caved, I’ve not read any that gave a plausible narrative for how continuing to hold out would have so guaranteed a better deal that it was worth letting Trump shoot the hostages. If there are good arguments that I’m wrong, and that holding out would have gotten a better deal, I’d love to see them.

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading and thinking about the role of counterfactuals in train wrecks in public deliberation. One of the persistent counterfactuals is: if the in-group had simply responded with more will, more aggression, more unity, and a refusal to compromise, it would have won (it was very popular among Germans after WWI, it’s regularly invoked in regard to inter-war negotiations with Hitler, and therefore used to argue for military intervention in almost every US military conflict since, it’s still used about what Truman should have done about Mao, and, well, too many to list them all). That’s an enthymeme with a very weak major premise. Plenty of groups, individuals, nations, parties have refused to compromise and lost.

What, exactly, is the evidence that refusing to compromise would have led to a better outcome? Right now I’m deep in the way that the very problematic counterfactual that responding to his remilitarizing the Rhineland with military force would have prevented WWII. That claim is regularly asserted, but not argued, because the narratives that tell how that would have prevented the war assume that a military response would not have increased the pacifist sentiment in France, the UK, and the US, so that the military buildup would have happened even later than it did, or not at all. There are other problematic assumptions in that narrative, and yet, the counterfactual of more aggression just seems to stop deliberation. So I’m twitchy about anyone invoking a counterfactual narrative without actually having to argue for why it’s the most plausible narrative.

So, I think the counterfactual that holding out would have been a better choice assumes a narrative I haven’t seen anyone reasonably explain (although, like the Munich counterfactual, I’ve seen people either assert or assume it).

Here’s the point about counterfactuals—we resort to them as a way of dragging events back into the controllable. Counterfactuals (if only I hadn’t left early from work) are especially attractive when there is a situation that threatens our sense that we can prevent bad things (the just world model). The example regularly used in studies about counterfactual thinking is that Joe leaves work, and gets killed in an accident caused by a drunk driver. The tendency is for people to imagine preventing the accident by counterfactuals involving Joe making a different decision, as though he’s the only one with agency. Why not the drunk driver? Because we don’t identify with the drunk driver (he is out-group), but we do identify with Joe.

We want to find narratives that enable us to believe that we could have stopped the accident from happening to us. We grasp at counterfactual about what the in-group could have done to prevent this–we try to imagine that we wouldn’t have made the choices Joe did. That makes us agents, rather than victims.

But Joe isn’t to blame for the situation. The drunk driver was. Stop beating up on Joe, and blame the drunk driver.

The synecdoche is, I think, not recognized as a rhetorical figure by many of the people who invoke it. We need to stop thinking about politics as a tug-of-war between the Dems (or “liberals”) and GOP (or “conservatives”). I’ve written books about how this frame for politics is both inaccurate and proto-authoritarian. I’ve never had anyone engage the argument that it’s inaccurate—instead, people say, “but that’s what everyone says.” Yeah, well, everyone said educating women would make their uteruses dry up, and everyone said that racial categories are ontological.

The frame for politics as a zero-sum conflict between two sides (rather than a world of deliberation and disagreement among many different people with many different perspectives) endorses the toxic and proto-authoritarian frame for politics as a zero-sum conflict between two sides.

Authoritarianism is an ideology that assumes that the ideal system is a hierarchy of domination and submission. There are a lot of reasons that various people support Trump. One of the most important—one that ensures he is free of accountability—is that he endorses an authoritarian model of government. Way too many people, not on some binary or continuum of “left v. right,” think that an “authoritarian” is someone who makes them do something they don’t want to do. So, for people like that, there are only out-group authoritarians. That’s not a useful way to think about authoritarianism. (The assumption is that when people force others to behave as you think they should, it’s fine, but when people with whom you disagree try to force you to behave as you think they should, it’s authoritariansm. That isn’t a helpful way to think about authoritaerianism.)

Authoritarianism is better understood as a system of in-group domination–it’s a system in which the in-group and out-group are not held to the same standards of accountability, ethics, law, intelligence. It’s one in which the in-group is held to lower standards (or no standards at all) because it is entitled to dominate out-groups. The law exists to protect and reward the in-group and control/punish out-groups.

Many of Trump supporters love him because they see him as dominating the people by whom they’ve felt dominated for years. Some of them are people who are mad that they can’t say racist, sexist, homophobic things or enact racist, sexist, homophobic policies. But, I think (being a person who intermittently drifts into those media worlds), many of them are worked up about some hobgoblin created by various media intends to dominate them—a hobgoblin “librul” who wants to force everyone into gay marriage, abort white babies, send Christians into camps (much like Alligator Alcatraz), and, well, so on. They, people who are Obviously Right, sincerely feel threatened by “libruls” (who are Obviously Wrong), and therefore support someone who is doing everything to dominate “libruls.”

For people who think about politics not as a world of complicated and difficult deliberation but a zero-sum battle between the Obviously Right and the Obviously Wrong (and, believe me, thinking about policy disagreements that way is not restricted to one place on the fantastical continuum or binary of political affiliation), then every policy disagreement is really about domination. That is a profoundly anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian ways of thinking about politics.

“The Dems caved” endorses that way of framing politics, and ensures that Trump supporters continue to believe that Trump is doing a great job.

I’m saying the “The Dems caved” is not accurate, and that it’s a statement that involves a set of rhetorical choices that doesn’t help deliberation, but does help Trump specifically, and damaging frames more generally.

Anytime you find yourself making a series of rhetorical choices such that you’re making the same ones Fox News is, you’re helping Trump. There are other choices. It’s possible to disagree with what the eight Senators did and condemn them specifically. It’s possible to emphasize that Trump didn’t get what he wanted, and say he’s caving if he signs off on this deal. It’s possible to condemn Trump and his supporters for making hostages of people on SNAP. There are so many ways to frame what happens. We have choices.

I think we shouldn’t make the rhetorical choices that help Trump. Blame the drunk driver.

Demagoguery, Algae, and BSAB (again)

Recently, yet another scholar used me as an example of someone who says that demagoguery is always bad, while acknowledging that I explicitly say it isn’t. Today, a friend asked me whether Mamdani’s speech was demagoguery, since there does seem to be an us v. them. So, she asked, is demagoguery sometimes necessary for in response to demagoguery?

At base, there is the same question: is demagoguery always bad? And, as I’ve often said, the answer is no. What I say is:

Demagoguery isn’t a disease or infection; it’s more like algae in a pond. Algae can be benign—in small amounts, even helpful. But if the conditions of the pond are such that the algae begins to crowd out other kinds of pond life and ecological processes, then it creates an environment in which nothing but algae can thrive, and so more algae leads to yet more. (79)

(Also, a pet peeve is that scholars, in scholarly articles, don’t look at my scholarly version of the argument. Sheesh.) Granted, I assumed too much as to what folks knew about algae—it is necessary in a pond. So, the answer is right there: demagoguery is not always bad; it can be good, and it can be benign.

But that leads to the question: when is it benign, and when is it good?

Before I go there, though, I should first point out that it’s easy to over-identify demagoguery. What’s important about the various characteristics I’ve argued constitute demagoguery is that they’re each necessary but not sufficient. (I really wish we explicitly taught that concept—if people were more familiar with that concept, so many bad arguments would evaporate rather than persuade.) So, for instance, someone talking about Us, or Them, isn’t necessarily demagogic/demagoguery. The us v. them of demagoguery is a binary that claims to capture all possible identities into a homogeneous Us and an equally homogeneous and essentially hostile group (Them) determined on the political, civil, or physical extermination of Us.

These two groups are defined by double negation. The “Us” is the group of people hostile to Them, and Them is the group of people not Us.

That’s a confusing sentence (because I’m trying to describe a way that people are confused about politics). Imagine that Chester believes that there are two kinds of dogs: Us (dogs who hate squirrels) and Them (who are allies of squirrels). What is the proof that some dog is “Them”? That the dog is not fanatically opposed to squirrels and to anyone who doesn’t hate squirrels.

In the most worrisome form, the “us” is a group fanatically determined on the political, civil, or physical extermination of Them because They are already essentially and implacably determined on our extermination. So, any action, including preventive war, violating all the principles we claim to hold, or whatever, are justified “self-defense” based on nutpicking (using the most extreme or fringe members/statements to characterize the whole group), and/or hypotheticals (what They will do if they get the chance), projection and/or scapegoating.

So, condemning a politician (Snorg) for advocating Soviet-style communism, and saying that person is so dangerous that no one should vote for them, is not demagoguery iff Snorg really is advocating Soviet-style communism, and not some sloppy guilt by association smearing of categories. If Snorg’s policies fit the criteria set by the majority of scholars of Soviet-style communism, then, as much as that characterization might hurt the feelings of Snorg’s followers, or feel like an insult, it isn’t demagoguery.

Further, it isn’t demagoguery for critics of Snorg to condemn Snorg’s supporters for being Soviet-style communists. It isn’t demagoguery to criticize people—even vehemently—for supporting policies they actually support. If, however, Snorg’s major opponent, Flurb, characterizes the political situation as either pro-Flurb or Soviet-style communism, there are potentially problems—that is, a rhetoric of “you’re either fanatically committed to me, or you’re a Soviet-style communist.” That’s almost certainly a false binary; hence, probably demagogic.

FDR’s speech calling for war against Japan, which had already declared war on the US, was not demagoguery. It wasn’t rational-critical argumentation either, but that genre never is, and doesn’t need to be. Similarly, Churchill’s WWII speeches weren’t demagoguery (at least not the ones I’ve read) for two main reasons. First, neither Churchill nor FDR engaged in projection or scapegoating. They were condemning the self-declared enemy for what the enemy had done or was doing. Second, they were accurate in their attribution of responsibility. They talked about Hitler, the Nazis, Japan, Germany.

For instance, when FDR referred to “the Japanese” he didn’t mean some vague out-group; he meant, and said, Japanese troops, representatives, forces, political figures—people who were knowingly acting on behalf of the nation-state of Japan. When Earl Warren talked about “the Japanese,” he meant an undefined and villainous out-group, scapegoated for Pearl Harbor, and on whom all sorts of evil traits could be projected. It was demagoguery. What’s important about that distinction is that with the way FDR was using the term, whatever claim he was making could be falsified (the Japanese representative didn’t say that; Japanese troops didn’t do that). Warren’s claims about the danger of “the Japanese” in the US couldn’t be falsified because it wasn’t even clear to whom they applied.

There are lots of circumstances in which demagoguery is benign—in the book I mention Muir’s demagoguery during the Hetch Hetchy debate. As far as it being actively good, I also elsewhere mention one group engaging in demagoguery about another in service of a charity (“Let’s raise more money than those losers at Michigan!”), but also when trying to mobilize a disenfranchised and dispirited group. I don’t think that good intentions necessarily justify demagoguery—everyone thinks they’re justified. (That horrifies people when I say it, but, seriously, Hitler thought he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t, but he’s proof that thinking you’re on the side of good doesn’t mean you are.) And, mostly what I’m concerned with aren’t the individual acts of demagoguery, but what happens in a culture of demagoguery.

One last caveat: because of in-group favoritism, we tend to minimize or dismiss in-group demagoguery, saying that it was a joke, or just rhetoric, or it was justified by out-group demagoguery. We engage in a kind of bad math—as though anything even mildly demagogic by an out-group member (no matter how marginal) cancels out anything demagogic (even extremely demagogic) by an in-group member (no matter how central and powerful).

What I’m saying then is that we have to hold everyone to the same standards, but among those standards is: how much impact does this demagoguery have? How much power does this rhetor have?

If Snorg and Flurb are both Presidents or Presidential candidates, or leaders of their respective parties, then they should be held to exactly the same standards, and both should be condemned. If Snorg is a President or Presidential candidate, and Flurb is the Assistant to the Assistant Dog-Catcher in Northnorthwest Nowhere, then whatever Flurb said doesn’t mean “both sides are bad,” let alone that Snorg’s demagoguery is cancelled out. Snorg matters.

When and how have you been persuaded on a big issue?

Great Dane mix (Chester) with the red ball

This is a question I used to ask my students, and only now realized I should ask FB friends. What’s a major political issue/narrative/belief/commitment on which you changed your mind, and what made you change your mind?

For me, there are so very many, and I’ll mention one. For reasons too complicated to explain, I ended up being the person sent with a dog to a dog training class. I was 12? It was all the (literally Nazi) dog training method of tricking a dog into behaving badly and then punishing it by yanking on the choke collar.

About 25 years later, I got two dogs, and read all sorts of studies and books and took classes. This was a moment in my life when I was seriously considering leaving academia and either becoming a dog trainer or a lawyer.

Being an academic, I researched the issue. Except for Ian Dunbar, there was almost no actual research on the issue of what dog training works. The dominant advice was still “you must dominate your dog.” I had a Malamute/Lab and a Dane/Shepherd mix and the dominance method only sort of sometimes worked with the Malamute/Lab (if you squinted), and didn’t work at all with the Dane/Shepherd. It was disastrous with him (Chester, for those of you who’ve known me for a while). Ian Dunbar’s advice worked with both, as did Vicki Hearne’s advice. Dunbar and Hearne were oriented toward getting your dog (or horse, in the case of Hearne) to do the right thing and then rewarding them.

Even the most “dominate your dog” rhetoric advised that you give your dog a job, and that was great advice–the only useful part of that whole approach.

So, I changed my mind on the whole “you must dominate your dog” approach, but not because I read one study, or had one conversation; it was because of a lot of things. The most important was that I cared enough about my dogs that I was willing to fling my theory of dog obedience out the window if it didn’t seem to be working for the dogs in front of me.

Only after my personal experience made me dubious did I look more carefully at the arguments and evidence for the dominance model. While that argument was familiar to me, and initially seemed normal, the more I looked at it, the more it was clear that they hadn’t actually done the kind of “research” that would have gotten an honorable mention in a 6th grade science fair.

Ian Dunbar’s advice was grounded in far better research than any of the alpha dog bullshit, although it was still just observational.

(In case you’re wondering, the whole alpha male thing is bullshit, although there is a good argument for a more “leadership” model.)

I mentioned I asked students about times that they changed their minds on a big issue (they didn’t have to tell me what the issue was, or narrate the process in any detail), and I generally got a similarly complicated narrative about a long process involving some studies, personal experience, noticing the flaws in in-group arguments. Sometimes it was a very dramatic life event, and sometimes a particularly good book or documentary.

I have said before, I think that we’re at a point when we need to persuade people who aren’t alarmed about what’s happening in a one-to-one way. I’m not sure how to do that. But I think it might be useful to think about how we were persuaded on big issues. (And, if you know me, you know that dog training is a big issue for me).

So, I think it might be helpful if we shared conversion narratives. Either yours, or references to famous ones.

If you don’t want your FB id (or name) associated with it, DM or email me, and I’ll post it without identifying information.

My hope is that we can come up with a better model of persuasion than what we get from psych studies or focus groups.

Reasonable policies can be reasonably advocated

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in front of a map of VN — Photo from here: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html

Why does having a “reasonable” argument matter?

Some people are claiming that the reason so many people are supporting a political figure they dislike is that our education system is bad. And it is, but not in the ways people think. Our problem has long been that we teach argument, but not argumentation. An argument is a claim with a supporting reason (what Aristotle called an enthymeme); it’s a thing you fling at someone with whom you disagree. It’s very effective for making a person feel confirmed in what they already believe, and therefore also useful for confirming the beliefs of in-group members (or moving them very slightly), but it doesn’t really do much for helping people deliberate together about complicated and controversial problems and policies.

The most popular argument textbook confirms (see what I did there?) the false binary of the rational/irrational split—that one’s position on an issue might be rational (i.e., logical) or emotional (i.e., illogical). That split is itself illogical, and very much an emotional response (the desire to feel that one is rational, and to feel that others are irrational). The false assumption is that a “rational” (aka, “unemotional”) stance on an issue is “unbiased.” I’m not advocating that understanding of reasonable deliberation–I think it’s unmitigated bullshit.

The irony is that this way of describing how people think is wrong, as is shown by so very, very many studies. It is, logically, indefensible (but it feeeeels so good to think of oneself as “rational,” as having a viewpoint that is obviously right and objectively true).

People are biased. Everyone is biased. All humans (and probably other animals) rely on cognitive biases when considering information and making a decision. That’s what the research shows. So, if you tell yourself that people who disagree with you are biased, and you aren’t, what you’re showing is that you’re so deep into confirmation bias and in-group favoritism that you are fifty years late to the party of what research on decision-making actually says. You’re too biased to admit that you’re biased.[1]

Argumentation is a set of strategies that tries to help people disagree productively with one another (not necessarily nicely, unemotionally, persuasively, or in ways that make everyone comfortable), but the strategies are ways of correcting for the biases to which we’re all prone. Argumentation is oriented toward productive and inclusive deliberation, and not just coercion or what one scholar of rhetoric called rhetrickery.

Argumentation requires that participants (usually called interlocutors, a term I like since it sounds as though people are locked together) follow these rules:
1) there is an agreement on the “stasis”—what the hell we’re arguing about. (This rule prevents deflection, and various fallacies like motivism, ad hominem, ad baculum.)
2) all the rules (of logic, civility, citation practices, and so on) apply equally to all parties. (This rule ensures that it is good faith argumentation, rather than just a wanking performance to the in-group or another form of ad baculum.)
3) interlocutors engage the smartest and best opposition arguments. (This rule prevents another kind of deflection, as well as bad faith posturing in front of the in-group.)
4) interlocutors cite their sources when asked to provide them, and, as said above, hold their and opposition sources to the same standards of credibility. (In other words, “this is a good source because it agrees with me, or is in-group,” is not good faith argumentation. It’s performatively admitting that you’re full of shit.)
5) Assertions are not evidence, let alone proof. They’re just assertions. That someone can find a source that asserts that bunnies are not fluffy is not evidence that bunnies are not fluffy; it’s evidence that someone has asserted it. (Were I Queen of the Universe this is a distinction everyone would have to understand before they finished middle school.)

Notice that following these rules wouldn’t lead to a pleasant, comfortable, conflict-free discussion, and that someone who insisted on these rules might be seen as a person creating conflict.

This next paragraph is very pedantic. I’ve spent over forty years studying how communities make very bad decisions when they had all the information they needed to make better ones, and this is a list of the approaches to policy disagreements that go badly. The short version is that they engaged in various methods of argument and not argumentation.

There are a lot of ways that people imagine the ideal way that a community might make a decision. One is that everyone would advocate for their preferred course of action without disagreeing with anyone else (expressivist); another is that people would try to make the best case possible for their preferred policy ignoring all norms of ethics and the one that won the most adherents was the best (sloppy social Darwinism applied to decision-making), another is providing all the data necessary for the public to make a reasonable decision (dreamy informationalism), another is for an elite to decide what is best and to give the public (or their audience) the information that will gain their compliance (rhetorical authoritarianism), another is to provide “both sides” of an argument to people and see what they decide (expressive deliberation, sometimes called by scholars agonism).

I was once an advocate of agonism, but then I looked at how advocates of slavery talked themselves into a lot of bad decisions, and realized that a public sphere in which opposing arguments were expressed don’t do shit in terms of helping communities make good decisions. It can, in fact, foster fanatical commitments, especially if the disagreement about policies is falsely reframed as a conflict among identities (e.g., pro- v. anti-slavery). And, really, every disagreement about an admitted problem that is framed as a conflict between two identities (or a continnum between the two extremes) is gerfucked.

And so I abandoned agonism in favor of argumentation.

It’s important that I’m not advocating unemotional public discourse (which is neither possible nor desirables—demonizing the expression of feelings is also a contributor to train wrecks, but that’s a different post). Reasonable and emotional are not in conflict; if anything, they’re necessarily connected.

One of the reasons is that I realized that the various policy advocates who advocated ultimately disastrous policies refused to follow the rules of argumentation. Sometimes they did so calmly, with lots of data and quantification (e.g., McNamara), sometimes they did so dramatically and hyperbolically (e.g., Hitler). Their style, platform, set of policies, personal merits, ethical standards and all sorts of other things might be very different, but what was shared was that they couldn’t argue for their policies following the rules of argumentation because their policies were bad. Their arguments were paper tigers, that looked fierce attacking even frailer paper oppositions, and so often felt compelling, but they were bad arguments in favor of bad policies.

And that’s the important point. If you have good policies, you can engage in good argumentation. If you can’t engage in good argumentation, it might be because you have bad policies. There might be all sorts of other reasons (access to resources, for instance).

It isn’t that every individual has to be able to put forward a reasonable argument that engages the smartest opposition for every decision they (we) make at every moment. It isn’t even that every individual who supports a particular policy has to engage in reasonable argumentation in favor of it. But someone should. If there is a major public policy being advocated and no one can advocate it using reasonable argumentation, then it’s a bad policy.

[1] I’m being generous by saying someone is only fifty years late. In fact, various philosophers have noted many of the biases, such as in-group favoritism and confirmation bias, albeit not by those terms. John Stuart Mill is just one example.

Some thoughts on persuasion

A friend asked a question about whether there is research on whether some people are more receptive to some communication styles and more resistant to others.

And there short answer is: a lot. There are scholars working on that question in advertising, political communication, health communication, political psychology, social psychology, argumentation, cognitive psychology, logic, interpersonal communication. Hell, Aristotle makes claims about what styles are more appropriate for various audiences (and rhetors).

These different scholars don’t all come to the same conclusions, and that’s interesting. My crank theory is that it isn’t because one group is more scientific than another, but because it depends upon whether we’re thinking about persuasion as a rhetor (Chester) who is trying to get someone (Hubert) to believe something new or change his mind on something (“compliance-gaining”), Hubert is looking at a lot of data and trying to figure out what to make of it (“reasoning” or “self-persuasion”), Chester is trying to strengthen Huber’s commitment to a belief, group, policy agenda (“confirmation”) so much so that Hubert might be willing to engage in actions more aggressive or extreme than before (“mobilizing” or “radicalizing”), Hubert and Chester together are trying to figure out the best course of action (“deliberating”).

Because of how research tends to work, people usually examine or set up (in the case of lab research) scenarios that looks at only one of those kinds of persuasion. Of course, in the wild, it’s all of them, sometimes fairly mixed up. So, the research doesn’t always apply neatly to how persuasion actually works (or doesn’t).

A lot of the research doesn’t pose the question the way my friend did—they draw conclusions about ways that people are persuaded, rather than beginning with the reasonable hypothesis that individuals don’t all respond the same way, and that people might have styles of reasoning that would make them more or less receptive to styles of communication. Still and all, some of that work turns up interesting data, such as that people tend to prefer teleological explanations of historical or physical events/phenomena. (We don’t like chance.) (Right now I’m working on the rhetoric of counterfactuals, and there’s some interesting work about that—it also turns up in scholarship on why people keep trying to make evolution into a teleological process.)

It’s common for people to cite studies that conclude that people aren’t persuaded by studies.

Think about that. People who are persuaded that people aren’t persuaded by studies cite studies to others to show they’re right. That’s a performative contradiction.

I think that contradiction happens because we know that people aren’t necessarily persuaded to change their mind about X by having a study (or set of studies) cited at them, but we also know that having studies cited might be a set of datapoints on one side of a scale. Persuasion on big issues happens slowly and cumulatively. People who’ve changed their minds on big issues often describe a long process, with a variety of kinds of data—studies, logic, personal experience, narratives (fiction or film), in-group shifts. Kenneth Burke long ago pointed out that repetition is an important method of persuasion—even repetition of an outright lie or logically indefensible claim (he was talking about Hitler). Repetition as persuasion is a basis of much (most?) advertising.

I think some of the most useful work on persuasion is in the work on cognitive biases. People who are prone to binary thinking are more likely to be persuaded by arguments that can be presented as a binary; people drawn to cognitive closure like arguments that deny uncertainty or complexity. (When frightened, most everyone likes simple binaries—that’s a Trish crank theory.)

In addition to binary thinking, I think a few other really important biases are: confirmation bias, in-group favoritism, and naïve realism.

Confirmation bias is pretty much what it says on the label. People are more likely to believe something that confirms what they already believe. We will hold studies, arguments, claims, and so on to different standards: lower standards of proof/logic for what confirms what we already believe, and higher standards for something we don’t believe. That isn’t necessarily a terrible way to go through life—Kahneman (who did a lot of the great work on cognitive biases) argued that we probably should do that for most of getting through the day. But, on important issues, we need to find ways to minimize that bias.

Confirmation bias also works at a slightly more abstract level—we are more likely to believe a narrative, explanation, judgment, cause-effect argument, and so on if it confirms a pattern we believe is how the world works. If, for instance, we are authoritarians, then we’re more likely to be persuaded by an argument that presumes or advocates authoritarianism.

The just world model is another example of that process. People who believe that everyone gets what they deserve are more likely to believe that a victim of a crime, accident, or disease did something to cause that crime, accident, or disease.

You can see how the just world model causes people to place blame on the reddit sub r/mildlybaddrivers all the time—it’s kind of funny the extent to which some people will strive to place blame on the victim. The more that we’re uncomfortable with the possibility that bad things can happen to people who’ve done nothing wrong—the more that we want to believe in a world we can control—the more we are drawn to a narrative that shows the accidents could have been prevented. We want to believe that accidents wouldn’t have happened to us.

It’s all about us.

In-group favoritism is well described here. Basically, we have a tendency to believe that the in-group (the group we’re in) is better than other groups, and therefore entitled to better treatment and more resources, the benefit of the doubt in conflicts, forgiveness (whereas out-group members should be punished for the same behavior), and just generally lower standards. We don’t see them as lower standards—we think “fairness” means better treatment for us and people like us. So, we’re more likely to be persuaded by narratives, arguments, explanations, and so on that favor our in-group. We’re likely to dismiss criticism of the in-group or in-group members as “biased.” We are likely to hold in-group rhetors and leaders to low (or no) standards of proof and reasonableness, especially if we’re in a charismatic leadership relationship with them.

The third, and related, bias that’s important for style of thinking and style of persuasion is “naïve realism.” “Naïve realism” refers to the belief that the world is exactly and completely as it appears to me. If you’re a binary thinker, then it would seem to be right, because you believe the only other possibility is that there is no reality at all. That’s like saying that this animal must be a cat because otherwise there are no categories of animals. We spend most of our day operating on the basis of naïve realism—that the world is as it looks—as we should. But, there are times we have to be open to the idea that the world looks different to others because they’re looking at it from a different perspective, that there are parts of the world we can’t see, and that we might even be misled by our own biases. We might be wrong.

You can see how someone who believed that they see the world without biases (not possible, by the way) would only pay attention to rhetors, information, narratives that confirm what they already believe.

All these things make being open to reasonable persuasion actively scary; we’re “open” to persuasion only if it fits what we already believe. So does authoritarianism, but that’s a different post.

BSAB: “Both sides” and the slavery debate

cover of book on the slavery debate — https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817381257/fanatical-schemes/

As I’ve said many times, as soon as a public, media, or person frames our complicated world of policy options as either a binary or continuum of two sides, then it’s all about in- and out-groups, and our shared world of policy disagreements isn’t the kind of disagreement that can help communities come to pragmatic solutions. It’s some degree of demagoguery. Maybe it’s a horse race, maybe it’s a full-throated call for political or physical extermination. But it’s never useful for effective deliberation, about anything. Because there are never just two sides about any policy. And while one can describe our political situation as a binary or continuum, one can also rate all political figures on the basis of whether they agree with your narrow policy agenda. One can also arrange all candidates on the basis of how much they use the letter ‘E’ in their messaging. One can find a lot of ways of categorizing political figures and group commitments—that doesn’t mean those categories are useful ways to think about what policies are best for our shared world.

What framing our complicated world of policy options as a binary or continuum does is to fame is it as us v. them. And so we engage in motivism, the genus-species fallacy, and various forms of ad hominem.

Once political disagreements are framed as conflicts among various identities (either a binary or continuum), then we don’t deliberate together, and that is what is supposed to happen in a democracy. Democracy thrives for everyone when people try to work together to solve problems. They can argue, vehemently, petulantly, emotionally, but with each other.

And, really, this is something we all know to be true. The moment that a conflict in your church, family, workplace, garden club, D&D game, neighborhood mailing list, or whatever is framed as a conflict of two sides is the moment that people stop deliberating and start taking sides. They might still debate, but they aren’t deliberating. And the train is wobbling on the tracks.

Here’s an example of a time that binary/continuum was (and is) both false and poisonous: antebellum debates about slavery, and postbellum narratives about what happened. [If you want me to cite sources for everything I’m saying, go here. ]

There weren’t two sides to the debate about slavery, yet that’s how the issue is described, in everything from textbooks to popular understandings.

There were at least eleven.

1) Slavery should be expanded to all states, so that there should be no such thing as a non-slave state. In other words, they didn’t believe in states’ rights.

2) If you enslaved someone in a pro-slavery state, you should be able to take them into any state, and ignore whatever laws that state had about slavery. Again, a stance that made clear that it wasn’t about states’ rights.

[So, let’s stop pretending that slavers were pro- states’ rights. They didn’t recognize the right of a state to ban slavery. If you think I’m wrong, cite sources that show that pro-slavery rhetors thought states had the right to ban slavery. Good luck with that. Also Dred Scott. Also you’re saying that the people who called for secession were liars, since they said it was about slavery.]

3) Slavery should be allowed in current slaver states, and every additional state should be balanced in terms of slaver or not, so that anti-slavery states couldn’t have more than 50% of the Senate. (The 3/5th clause pretty much guaranteed them the House.) The electoral college also did (again, 3/5th clause), so this was not a compromise, but a pro-slavery policy, and a violation of states’ rights.

4) We should restrict slavery to current slaver states, and not let it expand.

5) Slavery will die out for economic reasons, and so there’s no reason to try to resist slavers’ actions.

6) Slavery will die out, and result in large numbers of ex-slaves, so we should “re-colonize” freed slaves (this persisted until the 20th century, since it’s essentially Theodore Bilbo’s argument).

7) We should institute a slow ban on slavery, giving slavers the opportunity to sell their enslaved people to areas where slavery was still legal. (This was done in many states).

8) We should ban slavery, and recompense slavers.

9) We should institute a slow ban slavery, recompense slavers, and return all freed slaves to Africa (not a party they were from; sometimes this proposal included second or third generation Americans).

10) We should ban slavery and not recompense slavers.

11) We should ban slavery, and fully integrate African Americans as we have other ethnicities.

Notice that five and six are not anti-slavery, but also not pro-slavery. I have trouble characterizing three or four as anti-slavery, since they were allowing slavery to continue. Pro-slavery rhetors treated those polices as anti-slavery because slavery as an economy was about buying and selling the enslaved people, so, i slavery didn’t expand, then there wouldn’t be a market, and then slavery wouldn’t be profitable. (If you want the chapter and verse on that argument, it’s here.)

Even the positions that could be characterized as anti-slavery (8-11) or pro-slavery (1-3) were substantially different from one another in important ways.

This isn’t a case where, sure, there were subtle distinctions within each of the “two sides,” but there were basically two positions. There weren’t. And, oddly enough, had the pro-slavery rhetors been willing to think and argue pragmatically about the long-term ethical and economic consequences of slavery, they wouldn’t have started an unnecessary war. (Had slaver states taken the most expensive option—free and colonize the enslaved people and be recompensed—it would have cost them less than the war they started.)

And, if at this point, you decide I’m wrong and won’t check my sources because you’ve decided I’m out-group, then you’re making the same mistake that pro-slavery rhetors did.

Because pro-slavery rhetors decided that the complicated world of possible policy options about slavery was actually a binary, they murdered people who criticized slavery, instituted a gag rule in Congress, criminalized criticism of slavery, and started a war they lost.

Pro-slavery rhetors should have taken seriously the criticisms of their position. They should have been open to pragmatic discussions about policies, instead of turning a complicated situation into a binary of identities.

What does all this have to do with the BSAB (Both Sides Are Bad) position? I’ll get to that in the next post.