Month: September 2016

If you spend as much time as I do crawling around the internet arguing with extremists, you quickly learn the “that source is biased” move. You present a piece of evidence, and the person won’t even look at it because, they say, that source is biased.

Let’s start with that isn’t what you do with a biased source. You don’t reject it; you look at it skeptically–you check its sources. Right now, a lot of people are refusing to look at claims that Trump hasn’t been as successful as he claims because, they say, that argument is from the Hillary camp. That’s called the genetic fallacy–it doesn’t matter where the claim originated; it matters if it’s true. Whether it originated with Hillary camp or not, it’s possible to check whether they are using Trump’s numbers about his own wealth. If they are, it’s a claim to take seriously.

But, for a lot of people, that isn’t how it works. They believe that you can reject anything said by what social psychologists call the “outgroup.” The basic premise is that the “ingroup” is “objective” and the “outgroup” is “biased,” so, to determine if someone is “objective,” you just ask yourself if they’re in the in or outgroup.

Let me explain a little about in and outgroups. An ingroup isn’t necessarily powerful—it’s the group you’re in. So, if someone asked you to talk about yourself, you would describe yourself in terms of various group memberships—you’re a Pastafarian, Sooner, essentialist feminist, neoliberal, knitter. Social psychologists call that group (the one you’re in) the “ingroup” and various groups you’re not in (it’s important to your self of identity that you’re not like Them) “outgroups.”

We all have a lot of ingroups, and we have a lot of outgroups, and the importance of any given one can heighten or lower depending on the situation. We are made aware of those many (even contradictory) group memberships when they’re under threat, unusual, or interesting. If you are an American, and you find yourself in a space where American is an outgroup, you’ll likely bond with other Americans. Sitting in a group of people in a classroom in Tilden, Texas, if asked to say something about yourself, you wouldn’t say, “I’m an American.” Sitting in a group of people in a classroom of mixed national origin in Belgium, you’d be pretty likely to say, “I’m an American.” If, in Tilden, another American said something critical about Americans, you’d be more likely to listen than if a non-American said it in Belgium. If you’re already feeling a little marginalized for your group membership, you’re more likely to be at least a little defensive.

And here is a funny thing about ingroup membership. There is a kind of circular relationship between your sense of your self and your sense of the ingroup—you think of yourself as good partially because you see yourself as a member of a group you think is good, and you think that group is good partially because you think it’s made up of people like you, and you think you’re good. Your group is good because you’re a good person, and you’re a good person because your group is good.

Because you’re good, and because your group is good, then you and other ingroup members necessarily have good motives. Duh.

Thus, we have a tendency to attribute good motives to members of the ingroup, and bad motives to members of the outgroup, for exactly the same behavior. An ingroup member who works long hours in order to make a lot of money is a hard worker; an outgroup member who does that is greedy. An ingroup member who gives a lot of advantages to family members is loyal; an outgroup member who does that is motivated by prejudice against outsiders. An ingroup member who says something untrue is mistaken; an outgroup member is deliberately lying. Politicians we like are motivated by a desire to benefit their community or country; politicians we don’t like are driven by a lust for power.

An example I use in teaching a lot is how we respond to a driver in a car with a lot of bumper stickers who cuts us off on the road. If the bumper stickers suggest the person is a member of an ingroup important to us—we like the politician they endorse, for instance—we’re likely to find excuses for what they’re doing. We might think to ourselves that they’re running late, or didn’t see us, or perhaps (as I once thought to myself) it’s actually an outgroup member who borrowed a car. If the bumper stickers show it’s someone we think of as an outgroup, we’ll think, “Typical.”

In other words, we rationalize or explain away bad behavior on the part of ingroup members as a temporary aberration, an accident, or something caused by external circumstances. But, bad behavior on the part of someone in an outgroup is proof that they are all like that—it’s an example of how they are essentially bad people.

If a member of the ingroup behaves well, then we say it’s the consequence of internal qualities—their essence. If the driver with all those bumper stickers we like does something really nice, we’ll think, “Typical.” It’s proof that ingroup members are essentially good people. If a member of the outgroup behaves well, then we say it was done for bad reasons, or done by accident.

So, if an ingroup political figure kicks a puppy, she was mistaken, or meant well, the puppy deserved it, or we might even try to find ways to say it wasn’t really kicking. If an outgroup political figure kicks a puppy, it’s proof that he is evil and hateful and that’s what they’re all like.

If an outgroup political figure saves a drowning puppy, she just did it get votes. If an ingroup political figure does it, that incident is proof that people like us are just plain better.

We are more likely to empathize (or, in rhetorical terms, identify) with people who persuade us they’re members of an ingroup important to us. We’re more likely to be persuaded by them—that’s why salespeople immediately try to find some point of shared identification. They’ll also often try to bond by claiming to share an outgroup—rhetoricians call this “identification through division.” That is, the salesperson tries to get you to identify with her by sharing your dislike of “them.”

In Texas, where I live, there is a notorious rivalry between Texas A&M (the “Aggies”) and University of Texas (the “Longhorns”). My husband went to A&M, and wears an “Aggie” ring. When we go shopping for big-ticket items, the salespeople will often notice his ring and start talking trash about Longhorns, and how awful the University of Texas is. They’re trying to bond with us by showing that they share the Longhorns as an outgroup. Since I’m a professor at UT, it doesn’t generally go over very well.

If I get you to identify with me, to see yourself as like me in some important way, I’ve persuaded you that you and I are in the same ingroup. If I’m really successful, I get you to identify with me so much that you will perceive an attack on me as an attack on you. I now have your ego attached to my success. That’s an important part of demagoguery (but not every time someone does that is demagoguery—it’s a part, but not the whole).

One of the main goals of demagoguery is to persuade people not to listen to the outgroup (basically because the claims of the ingroup would fall apart if people looked at them critically). And it does so by saying, “They are biased; we are objective.”

But, again, you don’t reject a biased source; you look at it more carefully. Whether claims about his wife’s immigration status, his wealth, the lawsuits against him, his hiring of illegal immigrants, his screwing over little people, his poor financial record, his lying originated with the Clinton camp doesn’t matter–what matters is whether they’re true. And that can be determined by drilling deep into the sources of those “biased” sources. That is how you assess evidence.

People who support Trump do so because they believe that

• • politics is inherently corrupt, and politicians favor special interests because they depend on those “special interests” for campaign donations—Trump doesn’t owe anyone anything, and he is his own man;
  • Trump is authentic; normal politicians say what they’re supposed to say, and normal politics has gotten us into a state where normal people (aka, het white males) aren’t getting the things to which they’re entitled; therefore, we need an abnormal politician who will say that “normal” people are getting screwed;
  • all the criticisms of Trump come from biased sources;
  • Trump’s motives are good because he expresses kind thoughts about non-whites, and he is concerned about them—he has good motives; he is, therefore, not racist;
  • Trump’s arguments are rational because he can give evidence to support them—he makes a claim, and he gives an example or single piece of evidence that would look good to someone not especially informed on the issue;
  • Trump’s arguments are rational because his claims are endorsed by experts;
  • Trump’s arguments are rational because he gives specific datum, they support what people believe, and he doesn’t have an irrational affect;
  • Trump’s arguments are “objective” because he is speaking the Truth;
  • Trump’s arguments are good because someone uninformed about the topic on which he’s speaking can assess a good argument;
  • Trump has really good judgment, since he is a billionaire;
  • Trump, despite his problematic history regarding fidelity, child molesting, fraud, and lying, is a good person because he is one of “us.”

These aren’t just claims about Trump; these are grounded in premises in what it means to make a good argument. And where did people learn what it means to make a good argument?

In their rhetoric classes. And, although I loathe putting my thesis first (another way rhet/comp is gerfucked) I will say that these seem to be good arguments because we, as field, have said they are. We fucked up. We taught them that a person with literally no expertise in the subject can tell you whether you’ve made a good argument.

This has made me ragey for my entire career, and it’s the basis of every single fucking program. We take students, usually literature students, and we tell them they are appropriate judges of whether someone has made a good argument on topics about which they know nothing. We tell them they can assess the credibility of a source on the basis of several rules that are pretty wonky (is it a peer-reviewed journal, is it a recent source, does the author have an advanced degree). We tell them either not to worry about the logic of the argument, or we encourage them to apply the rational/irrational split, a notion that muddles the argument someone is making with the posture they appear to be taking while making it. We tell them to teach their students that “bias” is easy to assess, and comes from motives, and, finally, we encourage them to infer bias/motive from identity. We can judge an argument on formal qualities. Teachers who have, literally, never taken a single course in linguistics, logic, argumentation, or rhetoric can tell students that their language, logic, or argumentation is bad.

Well, that’s what Trump tells his followers—you don’t know anything about this, but you can decide, without any knowledge, what’s true and what isn’t. You can tell them I am speaking the truth without looking at my sources. You can judge my argument by judging me.

And on the basis of what?

Their own sense.

Trump appeals to his voters’ “sense” about what is right and wrong. We have teachers—we have textbook authors—who are relying on their own “sense” about right and wrong in regard to topics on which there is actual research. So, who are we to say, “Well, I have no actual expertise on these issues, but you should rely on experts?” We can’t. So, we have spent generations telling students that “good” arguments are… ….well, really, what are they? Arguments that please the teacher?

We have spent many, many years telling people the wrong things about argument and argumentation, and all those wrong things are in Trump. (At this point, assuming people got this far, I’ve probably lost a bunch of folks. And that’s the consequence of the thesis-first method of arguing. We expect someone to put their argument at the beginning because our faith in persuasion is so small—and because we want to know whether we should put our guard up. A lot of people in rhetoric cite studies that supposedly show that people aren’t persuaded, but that isn’t what those studies actually show. That’s a different rant.)

There was a time when argumentation textbooks would have a section on fallacies and logic, but that is long past. And why? How many teachers of argumentation (or authors of argumentation textbooks) could pass a simple test on fallacies? What, for instance, is argumentum ad misericordiam (aka, appeal to pity)? Is it an appeal to emotions? Is an appeal to emotions an irrational appeal?

Short version of my argument: no person who says an appeal to emotions is irrational should be teaching argumentation. That is an actively harmful way to approach discourse.

Argumentum ad misericordiam is one of the fallacies of relevance—it is an irrelevant appeal to emotion; it is a kind of red herring. And you can’t judge whether a single argument is engaging in that fallacy without knowing the context of the argument—without knowing the larger debate in which that argument is happening. So, I’m not making the old argument that rhetoric teachers shouldn’t teach political topics because we aren’t political scientists; I’m saying that we shouldn’t assess arguments without knowing the context of that argument—the sources it’s using, the oppositions it’s establishing.

We stopped having lists of fallacies in argumentation textbooks because of a confusion between formal and informal logic (two related, but distinct, fields). Formal logic is, as its names implies, associated with the forms that a “logical” argument can take, so it assumes that you can talk about arguments the way you talk about a math problem, with symbols. Formal logic has little (or nothing) to do with how people need to argue about political, ethical, or aesthetic topics, since they aren’t usefully captured in forms. Informal logic (or argumentation) concerns the ways that we argue, and it emphasizes that an argument needs to be assessed in relation to the context and conversation (something is a false dilemma not because it only presents two options, but it reduces a variety of options to two—if there are only two options on the table, then it isn’t a fallacy).

Authors of the most popular comp textbooks appear to have known only about the former, and didn’t know about the latter. I know many of those teachers, and they’re good people, but they spent so much time writing textbooks that they stopped reading scholarship. So, most textbooks in composition and rhetoric are gleefully disconnected from scholarship in relevant fields. Again, if you think I’m being ugly, just look for footnotes or endnotes citing recent research. Not there.

If I had time, I would talk about what it would mean to incorporate actual scholarship about reasoning and persuasion into our comp textbooks. Short version: Aristotle was right—it’s about enthymemes and paying attention to major premises. Ariel Kruglanski has argued that people tend to reason syllogistically—this is a dog; dogs hate cats; therefore, this dog must hate cats. And so, if we wanted to think usefully about logic, we would look at major premises—how reasonable is the assumption that dogs hate cats? Does the argument assume that premise consistently, or does it sometimes assume that dogs love cats?

As a culture, we oppose emotion and “rationality,” and that means that, to determine if an argument is “rational,” we try to infer whether the rhetor is “rational.” And we generally do that by trying to infer if the rhetor is letting his/her emotions “distort” their thinking. Or, connected, we rely on a definition of “logic” that is commonly in textbooks—a “logical” argument is one that appeals to facts, statistics, and data. [Notice that an argument might be logical in that sense—it makes those appeals—but completely illogical in the sense of its reasoning (what Aristotle actually meant by “logos”).] But, if we think of a rational argument as an argument made by a rational person, then we can look at a rhetor and judge whether s/he is the sort of person who speaks the truth, and who has data to support their claims. That’s a terrible definition of logic.

(As an aside, I’ll mention a better way to think about rationality—first, does the argument fairly represent its sources, including oppositions; second, does the argument appeal to consistent major premises; third, are standards of “logic” applied across interlocutors.)

But, let’s set that aside for a bit. Let’s talk about Trump. There are some issues regarding Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, but they pale in comparison to the issues regarding Trump and his “charitable” foundations. So, why do Trump supporters condemn Clinton about “corruption”, happily ignoring that their candidate has done worse?

They do so for three reasons, all of which fyc textbooks have taught them are good ways to argue.

First, they say any source that says the Trump Foundation did a bad thing is “biased.” (Okay, they usually say it’s “bias,” but you know what I mean.) They infer that bias by pointing out that the source is criticizing Trump (in other words, it’s a circular argument—you can reject all criticism of Trump on the grounds that it’s biased, and you can show it’s biased by pointing out it’s critical of Trump).

Second, and closely related, they say that any site with disconfirming evidence is written by someone with a bad motive. This too is inferred from the fact that someone is making a critical argument.

Third, perhaps (usually the stop at the first two), they show that there is a reason they’re right—data or statistics.

What all of this is assuming is that a good argument is something floating in space, unconnected to any other arguments—it has a certain form.

And Trump’s arguments have those forms—he is sincere, he really believes what he’s saying (even if it contradicts what he said recently), he can give an example to support what he’s saying, he has all the best experts, he is saying things his audience wants to believe. Trump’s arguments are appallingly apt examples of bad faith argumentation. He is a casebook in demagoguery. There is no rhetoric worse than his. And common methods of teaching argument would give him an A. This is our child. We taught generations of students that having a few (more or less random) experts supporting us, starting with your thesis, giving some examples, and leading with main claims, all of that makes a good argument. We taught them that a person with literally no expertise in the subject can tell you whether you’ve made a good argument. Because that’s how we graded them.

 Recently, there has been a lot of talk about populism and demagoguery in relation to the American presidential election, but also with the Brexit-vote in Britain. The terms populism and demagoguery are often used interchangeably. What’s the difference between the two? Are they used to describe the same thing, the one being used in a positive sense and the other in a negative?

Initially, a demagogue was simply a leader of the demes, the non-leisured class in democracies in ancient Greece–it was a political designation, like calling someone a Green, or Libertarian. Authors like Plato or Plutarch who were highly critical of democracy used the term negatively (as a Republican would use “Democrat” as a negative term, even a sneer). Plutarch seems to have been the one to make the demagogue v. statesman distinction. For Plutarch, a statesman looks out for his country, but a demagogue looks out for himself. That’s a useless way to try to make the distinction–political figures, even the nastiest (perhaps especially the nastiest), think they’re doing good.

Most people use the term simply to mean “an effective rhetor whose policy agenda I dislike.” It’s often associated with populism, but every effective politician in a democracy has to be populist.

The label demagogue is seemingly used in a negative whenever someone is able to captivate the masses. Does the term demagogue have an inherent element of resentment or distrust of “the people”/”the masses” by the establishment? That is: In a democratic society, shouldn’t the “will of the people” be something positive? Is the labeling someone a demagogue anti-democratic?

Common uses of the term are what rhetoricians call a “devil” term–what George Orwell would have called “double plus ungood.” There’s rarely anything very specific about it, and it’s never used to describe an ingroup political figure. They follow demagogues; we follow states(wo)men.

Some scholars have tried to identify a more precise and useful way to think about demagoguery–they (we) usually identify certain recurrent characteristics: scapegoating, projection, simplifying complicated issues in a binary, authoritarianism, condemning of deliberation and thinking, and policies of purification.

Ypu’ve written: “Demagoguery,” rather than being a specific kind of rhetoric, is simply a term of abuse that people apply to rhetors with whom they disagree.” Is demagoguery inherently negative? Or can it be used in a positive sense? If demagoguery is to captivate “the masses” through emotional appeals, couldn’t the same definition be used for, say, Obamas “hope and change” message in 2008? Does a demagogue always lie?

What I was trying to say there is that’s how it’s often used. And that’s useless.

Demagoguery isn’t inherently damaging. No scholar defines it as captivating the masses through emotional appeals–that’s also a useless definition. (Who doesn’t do that?) If “demagoguery” is going to be a useful term, then we have to distinguish between leaders we think led their followers astray or seriously damaged their communities and ones who opened up opportunities.

My area of scholarship is train wrecks in public deliberation–times when communities came to bad decisions, after a lot of argument, then got feedback that their decisions were wrong, and recommitted. If you look at those times and infer characteristics about the public discourse at the time, then you see the problem is never populism (sometimes it’s very elite discourse), nor is it emotionalism, but scapegoating, projection, and those other characteristics listed above are very important.

Demagogues are more often than not perfectly sincere; while they are inaccurate, they do not intend to lie.

You write in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2005, pp. 459-476, that “It is notable, however, the extent to which this scholarly project lapsed; journals in rhetoric show few or no articles on the subject since Steven R. Goldzwig’s 1989 piece on Farrakhan.” Why do you think there have been little scholarly interest in demagoguery in recent years? Is it because there have been relatively few demagogues in recent years? If so, why/what is needed for a demagogue to gain support? Do you think there will be an upswing in interest with the recent political climate?

The most common definitions emphasized populism and emotionalism, and those aren’t connected to communities making bad decisions. But a lot of scholars have talked about the issue, just not with that term. Berlet and Lyons use the term “toxic populism;” Niewert talks about “eliminationists;” Kenneth Burke (in a brilliant 1939 analysis of Hitler’s rhetoric) doesn’t use the term demagoguery, but that’s what he’s talking about.

I think the focus on demagogues is part of the problem. Demagoguery tries to reframe all issues as ones of ingroup membership (us v. them); focusing on demagogues means we’re still arguing about identity. Instead, we should be arguing about policy.

I just wanted to clarify one point. You write:

“Demagoguery isn’t inherently damaging”, but also “If “demagoguery” is going to be a useful term, then we have to distinguish between leaders we think led their followers astray or seriously damaged their communities and ones who opened up opportunities.”

I don’t understand how you can square those two. If demagogues are “leaders we think led their followers astray or seriously damaged their communities” doesn’t that mean that it is inherently damaging? Or have I misunderstood you?

Good point. If you look at leaders who led their followers astray or seriously damaged communities, you can see that they didn’t do it by some kind of magic rhetoric they cast a spell over a populace. They didn’t do it alone; they had a lot of people who not only followed them, but all of whom were participating the same kind of rhetoric. Demagoguery is damaging when it’s normal political discourse. There’s always going to be someone out there going on and on about how we need to purify our group of this or that kind of person. A community is in trouble when there are lots of people who accept that’s a good way to argue–that we should be trying to figure out who is and isn’t loyal to the ingroup and then we’ll have solved our problems.

Donald Trump is the consequence of normalized demagoguery; not the cause.