G.K. Chesterton has an article about how some event (if memory serves, it was a fire) was framed differently by media depending on what was most politically useful. He says that the sad state of their political world was that something like a fire would be covered differently purely on the basis of whether the incident could be used to excuse or beat up on the other side. He was right.
Chesterton was describing a world in which every incident is used as an example of how the in-group is good or the out-group is bad. There is an incident (a building burns down), and factionalized media deduce how to frame the incident on the basis of what most helps their faction. Factionalized media can deduce that identical behavior (a building burns down) is an inescapable tragedy (if the in-group is in power) or a sign of the deep corruption/incompetence of the out-group (if the out-group is in power).
In such a world, there are no actually principled political positions, just group factionalism. But the people engaged in irrational factionalism don’t like to see themselves (ourselves) that way, and so they/we instead claim that we are passionately committed to a principle–such as neoliberalism. But, when the behavior of an in-group politician violates the principle, then people whose political positions are deduced from loyalty to faction face cognitive dissonance: we are actually only engaged in irrational rationalizing grounded in-group loyalty, but we like to think that then we are principled people whose stances are logically consistent.
Thus, we might say we are enraged at the idea that a President would use his position as President for financial gain because that violates a principle for us (such as arguments about Obama or Clinton’s book deals). People whose outrage about Clinton or Obama’s book deals was grounded in principle would be outraged at Trump pushing people to stay in his hotels.
If they aren’t, then the outrage about Clinton and Obama was never about a principle.
It was about their being Democrats. (And, similarly, if people who defended Clinton’s groping but were outraged about Trump’s groping, it’s all about faction and not principle.)
There are few better examples of that deductive factionalism of our world than what is happening with Trump tweeting that “American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China,” and how his base has responded.
The first point to make is that, had Obama tweeted exactly the same thing–that he hereby ordered businesses to stop doing business with China–, the people defending Trump’s tweet would have chewed off their own arms in rage.
In a way, this post could end there. Unless the people now defending Trump say that they would have praised Obama for the same tweet (and behavior), then they’re admitting that they’re irrationally committed to the in-group, they don’t have political principles, but just factional commitment, and their arguments in favor of any policy are deductive factionalism.
One of the characteristics of rational political argumentation is that you hold all groups to the same standards—regardless of faction. If a trade war with China is good when a GOP does it, then it’s good when a Dem does it. If people think that the Economic Emergency Act gave Trump the power to tell businesses what to do, then they would not have objected had Obama done the same thing. If Obama had engaged in a tariff war with China exactly like Trump’s, the people with rational positions on Trump’s tariff war would have supported it.
If people currently defending Trump would not have defended Obama equally vehemently had he done the same thing, then they’re just unprincipled claques.
The second point is that one of the major arguments for Trump and his policies is neoliberalism —the notion that “the market” is self-regulating , and that all intervention or governmental control makes things worse.
Neoliberals (a term that doesn’t mean what much of Trump’s base think it means–neoliberals vote GOP and support Trump) argue that open markets are the best way for the world to work. Thus, if the commitment to a free market were a principled commitment, and not just motivated reasoning, they would express outrage at Trump ordering businesses to do anything.
What Trump did is a complete violation of neoliberalism. Reason, The Heritage Foundation, Fox News, and all the “the market is rational” politicians and pundits should be in a rage about Trump saying that he can issue an order to tell the market how to operate. But, as far as I can tell, they aren’t. None of them is supporting him (which is interesting) but they are not writing the pieces they would have written had Obama done exactly what Trump is doing.
It’s the same problem with Trump’s promise to use government power to force companies to stay in the US (which he hasn’t actually enforced) or to keep coal mines open (which he hasn’t done)—that’s government intervention in the market, which neoliberals claim they are, in principle, completely opposed to. Neoliberal media would have been so outraged their hair would have caught on fire had Obama said he would do those things. Where is the outrage about Trump?
Neoliberals’ failure to call out Trump for his telling businesses what they should do is an admission that they don’t actually think “the market is rational and will sort things out.” Or, to be more accurate, they only think that when it’s a convenient thing to think–when it supports their political faction. They’re loyal to the faction first and to the principle much later than that.
What I’m seeing are various FB acquaintances who have chuffily announced that Trump is taking a hard stance in regard to China (the preponderance of tumescence metaphors in politics really gets on my nerves) who previously endorsed the unleashed market model.
If neoliberals are arguing, as they are, that the market is the true judge of everything, except when it isn’t, then they’re either saying that their claim about the market is just motivated reasoning; or they have to admit that “the market is rational” doesn’t end arguments, and we have to engage in argumentation about whether this exception is valid.
As it stands, the neoliberal defense of Trump is: the market is magically rational except when it isn’t, and we aren’t willing to engage in argumentation about any of that. That isn’t a rational position.