Month: September 2019

“Clinton opened the door, and Trump just walked through.”

One of the rhetorical puzzles in our current situation is how people who advocated impeaching Clinton now argue that impeaching Trump would be nothing more than trying to undo the 2016, and is therefore not a legitimate position. There was a similar puzzle during the Clinton impeachment trial as to how people who hadn’t wanted Reagan impeached (for the Iran-Contra decisions) did want to impeach Clinton. It’s a little hard to say that they had a principled position about impeachment, and there certainly was the accusation that it was nothing more than trying to undo the 1994 election.

While, with every case, there are and were people operating on the basis of principles they applied across faction, at play in every case were open statements of sheer factionalism on various sides, justified (sometimes pre-emptively) by the factionalism of “the other side.” Impeaching Clinton was justified because “Democrats” would do the same. Refusing to consider impeaching Trump, regardless of the evidence, is justified because “they did it too.”

In other words, “They did it too, and so it’s okay for us to do it” (with “it” being “pretending to have principles while acting out of purely factional motives”). Thus, factionalism is justified by factionalism (“it’s okay to be this factional because the other faction was this factional first or would be this factional if they had the chance”).

The line that I’m hearing (and reading) on this is: “Clinton opened the door, and Trump walked through.” Sometimes it’s “The Dems opened the door, and Trump walked through.” The argument is that the defense of Clinton was nothing but factionalism, as any principled person would have voted (or did vote for) conviction; thus, Trump supporters believe that they have a “get out of impeachment free” card since Dems did it first.

What’s interesting to me about this defense—it’s okay for us to do it because you did it first—is that it’s engaged in by people who raised children.

Anyone who had siblings, who raised more than one child, or even just spent an entire day with multiple children knows that it’s just a question of time till you have this conversation:

You: “Stop hitting Alex!”
Terry: “Alex hit me first!”
Alex: “Well, Terry stole my cookie!”
Terry: “Terry stole my bike yesterday!”

If you let it go on, they will be arguing about events that happened in the Pleistocene.

How many adults under those circumstances say, “Well, Alex, you opened the door and Terry walked through!”?

I’ll wager few or none.

No sensible parent would say that because saying that “you opened the door and Terry walked through” is either opens the door to a world of tit-for-tat, in which case that parent is going to have to go through that whole history of injuries to one another to determine what the score is. Or else they are saying  “Well, this kid hit the other, so now hitting is okay” is a family choosing to live in a world of violence, theft, and anarchy.

Sensible parents respond in one of two ways.
1) They say, “I don’t care who started it. It stops now.”
2) They try to look into situation and figure out the rights and wrongs, being fair to both children, and not immediately taking the side of one child.

Most parents do the former. Sometimes they say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” meaning that Alex hitting Terry doesn’t make Terry hitting Alex right, because hitting is still wrong.

Personally, I think Clinton should have been censured. But, I’m not Queen of the Universe. One thing that is true, though, is that the failure to convict was not factional. Five to ten Republicans voted against the articles of impeachment.

But, here is the more important point:
1) we can decide that Clinton (or Reagan) “opened a door” and that no President should ever be impeached;
2) we can admit that we only want out-group Presidents impeached, and that we reason entirely factionally;
3) we can look into the rights and wrongs, weigh the various things that Reagan, Clinton, and Trump did, and try figure out the math of the tit-for-tat;
4) we can say that we don’t care who started it; treating impeachment as a purely factional issue stops now.

The first and second put us in a world of hell, and it doesn’t matter if the other side does it too. That the other side reasons rabidly factionally doesn’t make our rabid factionalism okay—two wrongs don’t make a right.

We’re all still in a world in which we need sensible policies, and hating the other side doesn’t get us sensible policies.

The third is complicated, time-consuming, and, in the long run, does it matter? We can spend a lot of time arguing about the tits and tats of Reagan v. Clinton. But would that math change what we should do now? Would it change how you, as the adult in the room, managed the kids hitting each other?

I mentioned earlier that the “it” in this case is reasoning and acting entirely in service of our faction. If we choose to behave the way most sensible adults do, that would mean that we, all of us, assess carefully the accusations against Trump, and, if we like him, we hold him to the same standards we would hold an out-group President, and, if we don’t like him, we hold him to the same standards we would hold an in-group President. (So, Dems and Republicans should ask: if Obama had done these things, would we have advocated impeachment?)

Our whole political world right now is tainted by the genetic fallacy, in which you reject information on the grounds that it came from a “biased” source (by which you mean “the other side”). That’s is a fallacy with damaging political consequences—making a good decision should always involve listening to other points of view.

Making a reasonable decision about the accusations against Trump means reading “the other side”—directly, not relying on mediated versions (and not relying on the “other side” spokesperson on your otherwise factional media, so watching the clips that Rachel Maddow presents or watching Shepard Smith doesn’t count).

Neither Clinton nor Reagan opened a door. If what you’re doing is unethical, that someone else did it doesn’t magically transform it into ethical. Wrong remains wrong.

Why I think impeaching Trump now is not a good choice

I think Trump should be impeached. I’d think a Dem who had a similar history of violations of emoluments, security, dishonesty, relations with foreign entities should be impeached. (I’d want a Dem with this history of emoluments violations alone impeached.) Supporters of Trump would want a Dem impeached for far less than what Trump has done.

But the GOP is the party of Trump, and there is no reason to think that the GOP Senators will assess the evidence rationally or non-factionally. I see no reason to think the Senate will impeach Trump because, as many Senators and many Trump supporters say, there is literally no evidence that would cause them to support an impeachment conviction because he (and his supporting media) has persuaded many people they are at war, and so we are in a state of exception.

There are enough Senators who have made it clear that they would not support an impeachment conviction regardless of what comes to light that impeachment cannot win with this Senate.

Impeachment hearings could bring enough evidence forward to put pressure on Senators in purple states, but that pressure is most likely to work if the hearings are happening close to the election—before the GOP Propaganda Machine has time to spin the information. If the hearings end with a Senate that votes against impeachment, and the evidence is good enough, it might mean that people will vote out Senators who voted not to impeach Trump, but, again, that’s most likely to be effective if it’s just before the election.

As much research shows (much of it summarized in Democracy for Realists) a large number of people vote purely on the basis of in-group identification, and another large group votes purely on the basis of what happens just before the election. Thus, if we want the Senate’s impeachment vote to be representative of what Americans want, then we want it to happen close to the election when voters will hold the Senate accountable about impeachment.

If impeachment happens long before the election, then other issues will intervene.

I might be wrong on this, but I think I’m right.

I think people who are arguing for impeachment now are wrong, but their disagreeing with me doesn’t mean they must be irrational or have bad motives; I disagree with them, but I recognize it’s because of how they weigh various factors. I disagree thoroughly, deeply, and completely with people who think we shouldn’t impeach Trump at all, but there are versions of that argument that I think are legitimate and sincere—even if I think wrong. Democracy requires that we do that hard and unpleasant work of distinguishing between arguments that we think are entirely wrong, awful, offensive, even unethical and yet within the realm of arguments we need to consider, and arguments we think are entirely wrong, awful, offensive, and entirely in bad faith.

Being very clear that you’re right doesn’t require believing that no one else could possibly have good reasons or good motives. Believing that democracy requires deep and unpleasant disagreement doesn’t require that we abandon all standards of what arguments we consider.

We are, I believe, at an important point for democracy, but the urgency of our situation does not mean are exempt from the responsibilities of democratic deliberation regarding our policy options. We are not suddenly in a world with only one reasonable option.

This is policy argumentation 101: we might agree on the need, but that doesn’t mean there is only one possible plan.

Rational argumentation and whether Dems should impeach Trump

I’m getting really tired of lefties slamming Pelosi for not insisting on impeaching Trump. A far too common argument is that impeaching Trump is the obvious thing to do, and she is too corrupt, craven, cowardly, or corporate to take the obviously correct line of action.

This is a standard—and profoundly anti-democratic—position that people all over the political spectrum take about all sorts of policy disagreements: that the correct course of action is obvious, and anyone who disagrees with that position does so out of bad motives. This position assumes that politics is simple, that there is not legitimate disagreement (at least on this issue), that the person making this argument has perfect perception and knows everything necessary, that, in other words, there are not other legitimate needs or perspectives. That’s in-group authoritarianism. Democracy presumes that we have to argue together because no single individual (or group) can see an issue from every possible perspective—we need input from multiple perspectives.

I have no problem with people believing that impeachment is the right course of action. I have no problem with people passionately believing that they are right, and arguing with vehemence about how right they are. I have no problem with people getting frustrated at not getting their way. I also have no problem with someone coming to the conclusion that an interlocutor is a bad actor, acting in bad faith. But I do have a problem if people are arguing irrationally . The rationality of an argument is determined by how the argument is made, not the emotional state of the people making the argument, nor even (in general) what the argument is.

There are irrational ways of framing a debate, such as beginning with a false binary. One of my least favorite false binaries is the “do this now or do nothing ever.” There are not two sides on whether to impeach Trump, even among people who believe he has committed acts that should cause any President to be impeached.

The Dems could impeach Trump now, begin impeachment hearings now (and impeach any time between now and his reelection), begin impeachment hearings in January 2020, not begin impeachment hearings at all unless he gets reelected. Any one of those positions can be defended through rational argumentation.

What can’t be defended through rational argumentation is the argument that impeaching right now is so much the obviously right thing to do that anyone who disagrees must be corrupt.

Impeachment cannot succeed with this Senate. There aren’t the votes in the Senate, and there is no reason to think—at this point—that that will change in the near future. Even if you think Trump should be impeached (and I do believe that the GOP would be screaming for impeachment had a Dem President done what Trump is doing), that doesn’t mean impeaching him now is right.

If impeaching Trump would be a futile effort because the Senate would never convict, but it starts a cultural conversation about demagoguery and political corruption, it could be the right thing to do.

But, if it doesn’t start that conversation, costs a lot of money, and enables Trump to get reelected, then it isn’t necessarily the right thing, even from within the set of premises in which preventing Trump’s reelection is right. When you passionately (and perhaps rationally) believe that an end is absolutely right, you can get suckered into skipping arguing about the means–it can seem that doing something is better than doing nothing. But it isn’t; doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing. (There’s a wonderful part of The Phantom Tollbooth about exactly this.)

Doing  something doesn’t mean doing this thing. That’s how Bush argued for invading Afghanistan and Iraq–we had to do something. We did the wrong thing. For people who believe that Trump needs to be removed, that our political world needs to acknowledge the depth and consequences of his corruption, impeachment now is not the only option. It might be the right option, but it isn’t the only one. We were not in a world of invading Afghanistan and Iraq or doing nothing about terrorism. We are not in a world of impeaching now or doing nothing about Trump.

There is something odd to me about people who have never managed to get themselves elected to Congress deciding that they know that Pelosi is making the wrong move. She has her flaws, but she is better at politics than many of her critics. Does that mean she’s right? Nope, but it does mean that argument from person conviction that Pelosi is wrong is just that and nothing else—it is not an argument from authority, nor rational support for a claim.

I’m not saying that people who disagree with Pelosi are irrational. I’m not saying that people appalled by Trump’s corruption are obviously wrong to argue for impeachment now. I’m saying that we are not in a binary of the obviously right position and all other obviously wrong positions–about Trump, about raw dog food, about bike lanes, about much of anything.

I’m saying that we are in a world in which being passionately and rationally committed to your position (and it’s possible to be both at the same time)—about impeaching Trump, immigration, raw dog food, abortion, Billy Joel, bike lanes—requires acknowledging that the situation is not obvious, that it is not a binary, and that no one died and made you God.

If you believe that our policy options about Trump are a binary of your position and everyone else, and you believe that only your position about Trump is legitimate, and that the people who disagree with you are irrational people with bad motives, then whatever your position is about Trump, it is not coming from a place of respecting or protecting democracy.

Rational/Irrational argumentation

There are two different equally useful ways to think about how to distinguish rational from non-rational argumentation.

The low bar version (my preferred one) is that people engaged in a disagreement:
1) can articulate the conditions under which they would change their mind, and those conditions are plausible;
2) have internally consistent arguments (this amounts to their not contradicting their own arguments, and it’s generally about consistent major premises);
3) hold one another to the same standards in terms of logic, evidence, tone (so that if I appeal to personal experience, then I have to treat my interlocutor’s appeal to personal experience as equally valid).

A higher bar is the one set by the pragma-dialectical school. Their ten rules are set out in Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies.
1) Freedom rule
Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from casting doubt on standpoints.
2) Burden of proof rule
A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so.
3) Standpoint rule
A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.
4) Relevance rule
A party may defend a standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.
5) Unexpressed premise rule
A party may not deny premise that he or she has left implicit or falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party.
6) Starting point rule
A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.
7) Argument scheme rule
A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.
8) Validity rule
A party may only use arguments in its argumentation that are logically valid or capable of being made logically valid by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises.
9) Closure rule
A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting its doubt about the standpoint.
10) Usage rule
A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and a party must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible.

If someone says you did something racist, that is not an argument about your identity

When someone gets criticized for having done/said something racist, it’s too often framed as an identity issue—either by the person making the criticism, or by the person defending themselves. So, instead of saying, “That was a racist argument,” someone says, “You are a racist.” Or, when criticized for having made a racist argument, a person says, “I can’t have made a racist argument because I’m not a racist.”

And then you get the three defenses:
1. I’m not a racist because I have opposed racism in another context;
2. I’m not racist because I have friends of a race other than mine;
3. You’re the real racist because you made this about race.

Those are all irrelevant and fallacious responses.

As I argued elsewhere, if I drift out of my lane and hit your car, you would be furious if I responded by saying, “I can’t have hit your car because I’m a good driver” and then argued:
1. I’m not a bad driver because I have been a good driver in another context;
2. I’m not a bad driver because I have been complimented on my driving;
3. You’re the bad driver because your car got in my way.

It isn’t about whether someone is (or is not) a bad driver.

I think it is possible to decide that we shouldn’t allow someone to take the wheel because s/he has a history of bad driving, and it might be reasonable to conclude that the person is, on the whole, a bad driver. But we’re still going to get those same three defenses, and so it might be rhetorically wise to keep the stasis on the question of their pattern of bad driving.

Because, even if I really am, on the whole, a good driver, I’m still not off the hook for hitting your car.

I’m saying this because of a particular incident that has popped up in my field, but, really, it’s constantly a problem because we spend way too much time arguing about identity and not enough arguing about actions and policies.

#notallingroupmembers as sometimes doing useful political work

 

[Image from here]

A crucial concept in political science, sociology, social psychology, neuroscience and various other fields is that we maneuver through our world by identifying every person we meet as in-group or not. In-group doesn’t mean the group in power—it means the group we’re in. That is, as scholars of rhetoric would say, the first move when we meet someone is that we unconsciously try to decide what kind of rhetorical relationship we’re in—is this going to be a friendly, hostile, amorous, commercial, weird interaction? Do we need to be skeptical about this person, or should we assume good faith? And we intuitively answer those questions by categorizing the person as in-group (trustworthy) or out-group (untrustworthy).

In other words, is this someone with whom we identify (in which case we lower our guard) or not (in which case we raise our guard)? That’s a normal initial reaction.

It’s also normal to be in an ethical world in which we are called to treat others as we would want to be treated. Thus, if we’re ethical, we are open to reconsidering our initial impulse to categorize, we know we have it and resist, we don’t treat all non-in-group members as hostile or dangerous, we meet a non-in-group member and find that an inviting and interesting opportunity, we have more reasonable ways of assessing danger than just in- v. out-group. To be ethical means not to rely on our in- v. out-group impulses.

Some people, however, never move past that initial in- v. out-group response. I mentioned this incident in another post, but it’s relevant here too. Many years ago, I was at a wedding shower, and one of the guests was going on about Jewish women being pushy. I said (because I was raised by wolves and don’t know how to behave at wedding showers), that I thought she was being antisemitic. She said, “You’re just saying that because you’re Jewish.” I said I’m not Jewish. She said, “Oh you probably are and don’t know it.”

She believed that only Jews object to antisemitism, so my objection meant she categorized me as Jewish (out-group). Instead of a counter-example causing her to rethink her premise (that only Jews object to antisemitism), she made the counter-example (me, a non-Jew objecting to antisemitism) something that proved her premise (I had been pushy by objecting to her comments). Of course, were I Jewish and didn’t know it, I wouldn’t have objected to her antisemitism, but that was a level of logic beyond her.

A disturbing number of people, all over the political spectrum, enter every political argument the way she thought about Jews. For her, you only object to slurs about your in-group, and no one applies standards of behavior across groups. Everyone is only out for their own group.

For many people our vexed and complicated political world is a zero-sum game between US and THEM, and every political issue or event is not something that challenges us to think inventively about our policy options, but an opportunity to prove that US is better than THEM. Instead of our arguing with people with whom we have a shared future and with whom we face multiple policy options, and, therefore, with whom we should be working together with our various perspectives to find the best policy option for all (which is a policy that hurts everyone in some way), we are people at a football game screaming at each other. If they gain ground, we lose; if they lose ground, we win. It’s as though all public discourse is a football game with refs who have wandered off for a beer.

For people like that, call them rabid factionalists, an in-group member behaving badly is almost an existential threat—it threatens the identity of the in-group as essentially better than the out-group. If being a dog-lover is important to me, I will want to find a way to manage that, by all accounts, Hitler was genuinely a dog lover. I might respond by saying that Hitler wasn’t really in-group (not a true Scotsman—Hitler didn’t really love dogs). Sometimes they respond by saying #notallingroupmembers—by which they mean that this bad behavior on the part of an in-group member shouldn’t be taken as indicative of the goodness or badness of the group (Hitler’s being a dog lover doesn’t mean much about all dog lovers).

That second move, Hitler isn’t indicative, is a much more complicated argumentative move than I think a lot of people realize, and more significant. It’s significant in that it signifies how someone is reasoning.

A passionate vegetarian might argue that Hitler’s vegetarianism shouldn’t be used to condemn vegetarianism, and that Stalin’s being an omnivore shouldn’t be used to condemn not being vegetarian. That’s a principled stance about how to reason. People who demonstrably and openly hold the in- and out-group to the same standards undermine our culture of demagoguery.

#notallingroupmembers can sometimes do important political work in another way. It can say that this person claiming to speak for all Christians/Republicans/vegetarians/Texans/teachers is not actually doing so. That kind of #notallingroupmembers can be important for times when the NRA claims to speak for all gun owners (it doesn’t), bigots claim to speak for all Christians (they don’t), some rando claims to speak for all Americans (no one does). By pointing out that demagogues who claim that all [group] support [policy] are lying, this argument can undermine our culture of demagoguery. 

But #notallingroupmembers can also just be another instance of our culture of demagoguery. A passionate vegetarian might argue that Hitler’s vegetarianism shouldn’t be used to condemn vegetarianism, but Stalin’s being an omnivore (or not vegetarian) is a relevant example for arguing that non-vegetarians are bad.

That’s motivated reasoning, and an irrational stance. That’s how people argue in a culture of demagoguery.

If you are willing to take a single example of bad behavior on the part of an out-group individual as indicative of the moral status/intelligence of the out-group as a whole, but don’t take a single example of bad behavior on the part of an in-group individual as indicative of the moral status/intelligence of the in-group as a whole, then you are not thinking about politics rationally. If Stalin proves that non-vegetarians are bad, then Hitler proves that vegetarians are bad.

Or, perhaps, arguing from single examples is a bad way to argue in general. Perhaps, even, treating politics as a zero-sum argument as to which group is better is a bad way to think about politics.

If you make the argument that this one guy proves that the out-group is bad, and yet you reject single examples of in-group behavior as irrelevant, then you aren’t engaged in policy argumentation. You are just some irrational fanatic in the stands cheering wildly for your team with no internal or external ref.

Be nicer to Hitler, and he’ll stop being Hitler: The Marquess of Londonderry’s Ourselves and Germany (1938)

In March of 1938, The Marquess of Londonderry published an argument that Britain had failed to respond to Germany’s often (and still) outstretched hand for peace, that Germany wanted nothing but that to which it was due, and that Hitler was a leader with reasonable goals that could be met (although Londonberry also mentions that he frequently asked German leaders to list their policy goals explicitly and clearly, and it never happened). Londonderry’s argument was that British foreign policy had caused Germans to be extremist because the British hadn’t been accommodating enough to the Germans who only wanted [keep in mind he’d never gotten German leaders to say what they wanted].

Londonderry published two versions of this book. One after the “Anschluss,” when Hitler forcibly annexed Austria (something Londonderry blames on Kurt von Schuschnigg, basically for resisting). While the annexation appears to have been popular in both Germany and Austria, the celebration consisted of extraordinary brutality toward the Jews. That violence was very public.

March 1938 was also long after the Nuremburg Laws (1935), after Hitler’s violations of various treaties and agreements and his going back on multiple promises, and over ten years after he published Mein Kampf, which clearly lays out his eliminationist, militaristic, and hegemonic goals. That agreement is generally considered a disaster, that emboldened Hitler, betrayed Czechoslavkia, and cemented his popularity with Germans.

Penguin published the book in October of 1938, with a new preface. On September 30, 1938, Chamberlain had signed the “Munich Agreement,” which gave Hitler a large chunk of Czechoslovakia because Hitler promised, for realz this time, that he wouldn’t try to get any more territory and wanted peace.

Londonderry says, in that preface to the October 1938 edition, that the disastrous Czechoslovakia agreement represented “the fulfillment of my hopes,” that “the international barometer […] is at ‘Set Fair’,” and “ I can only have a feeling of great happiness at this moment that all I have advocated has been brought about in a moment of time” (xi, xiii). He believed that the events of September proved he had been right all along. He had the outcome he had long wanted, the outcome he thought was success, and so he concluded the process—relentless appeasement on the part of Britain—was a good one.

Londonderry is a great example as to why what might be called “folk pragmatism” (“the proof is in the pudding”) is a disastrous way to think about policy deliberation.

Londonderry’s argument was that the Versailles Treaty dishonored Germany (he wasn’t making an economic argument), and denied Germany the right to be treated as an equal in regard to decisions about Europe. (t’s interesting to think about why Londonderry assumed that Germany was entitled to be treated as an equal to France and Britain.) There are, and have long been, lots of arguments as to why WWI (aka, “The Great War”) happened, and the scholarly consensus is that it wasn’t mono-causal, but the consensus is also that Germany bore a large portion of the responsibility. There is also a consensus that the conditions imposed on Germany were no worse than what Germany had imposed on Russia, in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty,  or on France, after the Franco-Prussian War.

Londonderry wasn’t the only major British political figure who supported the policy of appeasement, and the British policy of appeasement was supported for very complicated reasons (best explained by Benny Morris, Abraham Ascher, Tim Bouverie, and Ian Kershaw). But Londonderry’s argument wasn’t particularly complicated: Londonderry accepts the Nazi victim narrative that Germany being treated as it had treated France is so dishonoring of Germany that its putting Hitler in power is the fault of the British. Londonderry argues that Nazis want to be the friend of Britain. Nazi Germany can be an ally, and that we need to stop engaging in rhetoric that alienates them. Londonderry’s argument is, at its heart, an argument about feelings: the Versailles Treaty made Germans feel bad; Hitler is acting the way he is because he feels bad; if we make him and Germans feel better, they’ll have different policies. We can changes their policies by changing their feelings.

Londonderry postures himself as a reasonable person willing to look at both sides, but notice that France’s position is not one of the “sides” that needs understanding. He doesn’t need to understand the feelings of the French or the people opposed to his policies.

In fact, he argues that Germany and Britain have far more in common than Britain and France because “There are many points of similarities between our two countries [Britain and Germany], and there is a racial connection which in itself establishes a primary friendly feeling between us which cannot be said to exist between us and the French” (19).

Not only is that statement racist, but it’s typical of how incoherent racism is. “Racial” categories are always just politically useful ways of grouping people that racists want to believe are real. Madison Grant—the man who wrote “Hitler’s Bible,” whose arguments about race meant we sent away boats of Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany, and who was still being cited as an expert in the 1960s–was very clear that “race mixing” was bad, by which he meant a “Nordic” and a “Mediterranean.” For Grant, and people like him, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Romanians weren’t really white, so a Pole marrying a Brit would lead to the downfall of civilization just as much as a Brit and an African. I mention this just because I routinely run across people with Polish, Ukrainian, Greek, or Italian last names who claim praise Grant as a credible source.

White supremacists aren’t very good at reading comprehension.

But, back to Londonderry. He has two points to his argument. First, the current problems between Britain and Germany, he says, can “only” be solved “by a sympathetic understanding” of the German position.

As far as the first, Londonderry’s book makes clear something I’m not sure he himself saw—he repeatedly asked Nazis to say exactly what they wanted, and they never did. Yet, he insisted that Germany had continually extended the hand of friendship to Britain, and it had been rejected. In other words, Londonderry thought the world of politics was one in which people need to feel good about each other, and feel respected by one another. And that was his mistake. He thought the problem with Germany was not that its culture had a victim narrative of being entitled and encircled, that powerful political groups (including the Catholic party, communists, monarchists, fascists, and nationalists) wanted to make sure that democracy failed, but that Germans felt bad, and therefore they advocated aggression. If we treated them more honorably, they wouldn’t feel bad, and so they wouldn’t be so aggressive.

I’m all for understanding exactly what the other sides are saying. I believe to my core that effective deliberation—political, personal, professional—requires that people really understand the arguments that other people are making. Understanding those arguments doesn’t necessarily mean that you think they have any legitimacy; understanding how a bad argument works is like understanding how a bridge collapsed. But that isn’t what Londonderry means.

And it’s interesting to think about just what arguments he argued needed understanding. Hitler’s arguments about honor needed understanding. Arguments about Nazi genocidal policies didn’t. Londonderry exemplifies one way that people argue for a dodgy in-group policies. Londonderry argued for “fairness” regarding Nazis because he didn’t really have any problem with their political agenda, as far as he understood it.

He includes in his book, after a long description of how charming his 1936 visit to Germany was, a letter to Ribbentrop he wrote February 21, 1936. In that letter he says,

“As I told you, I have no great affection for the Jews. It is possible to trace their participation in most of those international disturbances which have created so much havoc in different countries, but on the other hand one can find many Jews strongly ranged on the other side who have done their best with the wealth at their disposal, and also by their influence, to counteract those malevolent and mischievous activities of fellow Jews” (97)

This is a perfect example of someone making what appears to a gesture of fairness, but is actually just a tone of fairness, all the while endorsing Nazis. Fairness shouldn’t be a tone, but an ethic.

There are people (and I try to be one of them) who can say, “I disagree completely with this argument, but it is a valid argument.” This is kind of old-school logic: being true and being valid aren’t the same. That appeal to fairness is wildly different from what Londonderry is here doing. He is engaged in the kind of bothsidesism that nurtures genocide. He is saying that, on the whole, the logic of the Nazis genocidal policy is legit, but don’t go overboard.

Londonderry argued for listening to Nazis, not because he was, in principle, committed to listening to all groups, let alone holding all groups to the same ethical or rhetorical standards—he didn’t try to be fair to the French, let alone to Churchill. He didn’t argue for listening to Nazis in order to understand how to argue against them. He argued for sympathizing with Nazis because he didn’t really have a problem with their wanting a country free of Jews.

As it turns out, being nice to Hitler didn’t change Hitler’s policies. It rarely does. Hitler’s rhetoric (public and interpersonal) was all about feelings; he was all about making “Germans” (his supporters) feel that he was looking out for them, and he enacted policies that got his supporters short-term benefits. He was like a con artist who seduces someone by wining and dining them, all the time on the credit cards he’s stolen from the mark. What mattered about Hitler wasn’t how he felt about Germany, whether he made people feel proud to be Germans, or even, really, how he felt about Jews or Poles or Sinti or Slavs—what mattered is that his policies ensured that Germany would find itself in a two-front war, a kind of war it couldn’t win, unsustainable economic policies, serial genocides. As they say, fuck Hitler’s feelings.

When someone says we should be nicer to Nazis as though that will persuade Nazis to be less Nazi, they’re saying they don’t really have a big problem with Nazi policies. What’s wrong with Nazis isn’t how Nazis feel; it’s the policies they support. We should stop arguing about Nazis’ feelings, and just oppose policies that help Nazis. Fuck their feelings.

The SF Resolution, the NRA, and our culture of demagoguery

A really smart friend recently asked me about the SF Board of Supervisors Resolution about the NRA.  Her question was:

While I think this is a really unhelpful designation that just feeds into the persecuted minority identity I think the NRA likes to use, I’m actually also really interested in this idea of what terrorism/inciting violence actually is. By creating a brand/identity/environment that’s welcoming to white right-wing terrorists, are they effectively inciting violence?

Great question. Technically, four great questions–exactly the questions to ask.

The portions of the resolution (pdf) relevant to the NRA are:

• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association musters its considerable wealth and organizational strength to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence, and
• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association spreads propaganda that misinforms and aims to deceive the public about the dangers of gun violence, and
• WHEREAS, The leadership of National Rifle Association promotes extremist positions, in defiance of the views of a majority of its membership and the public, and undermine the general welfare, and
• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association through its advocacy has armed those individuals who would and have committed acts of terrorism
[…]
• WHEREAS, The United States Department of Justice defines terrorist activity, in part, as, “The use of any…explosive, firearm, or other weapon or dangerous device, with intent to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property;” and
• WHEREAS, The United States Department of Justice further includes any individual or member of an organization commits an act that the actor knows, or reasonably should know, affords material support, including communications, funds, weapons, or training to any individual has committed or plans to commit a terrorist act…

My friend was really asking four questions: 1) whether this designation contributes to the NRA fantasy of being gun owners being a persecuted minority; 2) whether the NRA is a domestic terrorist organization; 3) whether this designation is helpful; 4) whether the NRA incites violence.

As far as the first, a major theme in NRA rhetoric is victimization (if you want to get pedantic, masculine victimhood). Gun owners (who are dog whistled as white males in NRA rhetoric) are victimized by crime, Obama kicking down their doors and taking their guns (in 2008 and 2012), not being able to own all the guns, criticism. Those claims of victimization are disconnected from actual events, so nothing the SF Board of Supervisors could make NRA’s base supporters feel more victimized. They’ve already got that turned up to eleven.

The question of whether the NRA is a domestic terrorist organization because it supports domestic terrorism is interesting because it points to how vague (perhaps strategically) the definitions of terrorism are. Technically, the NRA does fit the definition presented in the resolution. Of course, the resolution hasn’t presented all the characteristics that constitute the DOJ definition, but that’s typical of how arguments work in our culture of demagoguery: if you can find one characteristic of a definition or historical analogy that the out-group fits, then you can declare them that thing. Hitler was a charismatic leader, so the out-group charismatic leader is Hitler (but not our in-group leader).

We could consider more criteria than the SF resolution does. And it’s still plausible to argue that the NRA fits the DOJ definition.

The other criteria are:
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping;

We are in a world of domestic terrorism, and the NRA is engaged in actions that could argue enable that terrorism, and so, technically, the NRA does fit the DOJ definition, and that’s why the DOJ definition is a bad definition. It’s much too broad, and would mean that, for instance, the truck driver who drove through protestors was a domestic terrorist, and therefore his employer was a supporter of terrorism and could be condemned as such by an over-active prosecutor. What he did was assault (perhaps even attempted murder), and his employers should be subject to civil suits.

This designation of the NRA as a domestic terrorist organization is sheer political theatre (unless it’s in service of arguing that the DOJ definition is too vague), a performance of in-group loyalty that is about looking right rather than being effective. So, as far as the third part of the question, no, this isn’t effective.

People think this kind of political theatre is “effective” because they have weird (and generally false) narratives about political change and how it happens.

This hope that “if we take an irrational stance and commit to it passionately that will have an important impact” appeals to the false narrative that political change happens because an individual or small group stands up and says, “This is wrong.” That makes great theatre, fiction, and movies, but that hope is harder to defend historically. Political theatre, that is, the political power of taking an irrational and anti-pragmatic stance, works very well on behalf of parties in power.

The Birmingham bus boycott didn’t happen because Rosa Parks suddenly one day decided she was done with segregation refused to change her seat. It happened because there was an organization that had made pragmatic plans about how and when to have a boycott. That doesn’t make her individual protest any less brave or important—she risked a tremendous amount, and her actions cost her (and the other protesters) a lot—it makes her protest smart. The Stonewall riots were part of an arc of gay rights political action. Again, they were crucial, and brave and dangerous, but they neither began nor ended the struggle for gay rights.  the beginning of a political movement. Martin Luther may or may not have nailed his theses to a door, but what caused the Reformation wasn’t Luther’s standing tall before the Diet—Jan Huss had done the same thing and been killed for it—but that he had important political support. What Luther did was brave and risky, and it worked because he had a movement behind him, not because he engaged in political theatre. Political theatre is effective when it’s part of an effective political movement.

Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail protesting the Mexican-American war, rightly recognizing it as being a war fought so that slavery could expand. And he wrote a great essay. And no one else spent a night in jail. And he only spent a night. And most people reading his essay don’t even know it was about slavery. There was very little cost to him for this protest—it wasn’t even that bad a jail. His piece had little or no impact on American history until it was picked up much later, the 1900s.

The SF resolution isn’t a Rosa Parks moment. I don’t even think it’s a Thoreau moment. This resolution has no cost for the SF Board of Supervisors. The resolution is demagoguery.  And while demagoguery isn’t always harmful, this one might be, but not because it could alienate supporters of the NRA.

It does, however, aid the rhetorically cunning strategy of the NRA to try to get “gun owners” and “NRA” equated. The NRA  has a lot of problems, including that it really isn’t a political organization as much as representative of manufacturers. The political base of the NRA is shrinking, so they’re trying to expand it by persuading gun owners that everyone is out to get them—that gun owners face existential threat. The NRA rhetoric is that it represents all gun owners. It doesn’t. It represents a minority of gun owners.  Their claim that the world is divided between gun owners who agree with them and people who want Obama to kick down their doors and take all the guns is sheer demagoguery. The NRA’s extremist policies don’t represent all gun owners, even ones who are very pro-GOP and pro-gun, and gun owners aren’t necessarily supporters of the NRA all guns all the time solution to everything.

This leaves the fourth question of whether the NRA incites violence. And that’s complicated. NRA rhetoric has long involved claims of apocalypses that didn’t happen, demagoguery, fear-mongering. (I was going to link to those claims, but I’m really not comfortable doing that–you can go onto the NRA site and go back in their archives or google Obama take our guns). The NRA can’t support its arguments with rational argumentation, and so it doesn’t even try. The NRA never accurately represents opposition arguments.

The NRA isn’t alone in that move. We’re in a culture of demagoguery and an economy of attention, in which our dominant political imaginary is that every side can be reduced to two sides (good v. bad people, aka us v. them), and, therefore, the best way to get vote, donations, clicks, likes, and shares is to say that there are only two options–us or them.

Trump advocated a second amendment solution in regard to Clinton. Anyone who can get two neurons to fire and is not wrapped in a mummy cocoon of ideology knows he was approving of someone shooting Clinton. But here is what is important about what Trump said: had Clinton said there was a second amendment solution to Trump, Trump supporters would have eaten their own heads off in rage. As would have the NRA talking heads. Did Trump really mean it? That doesn’t matter. What matters is that his supporters would have condemned exactly the same behavior on the part of Clinton.

NRA rhetoric is irresponsible, rabidly demagogic, blazingly tribal, voraciously demagogic, and gleefully evasive of what Christ said we should do. That kind of rhetoric, especially when it’s culturally dominant, fosters violence against the outgroup(s) insofar as it encourages people to believe that violence is an appropriate strategy for dealing with every conflict. But the NRA is hardly alone in its demagoguery, and it’s scapegoating to pretend it is.

That’s what makes the SF resolution political theatre, or virtue signalling, or performance of in-group loyalty, or whatever term you want to use. But the NRA condemning the SF Board for engaging in propaganda and sound-bite (sic) political action is such unprincipled in-group factionalism it could make a cat laugh.

The best evidence is that mass shootings are performances of in-group loyalty on the part of people who live in rhetorical swamps that breed toxic masculinity, the disease of notoriety , our culture of rage.

Does that mean the NRA is off the hook for their demagoguery? Not at all. The NRA might not be directly and explicitly responsible for persuading someone to shoot up a temple , synagogue,  baseball game, places with women but it is doing everything it can to persuade anyone who will listen to them that the people who do want to shoot up places should have access to all the guns.

Whether the NRA incites violence is complicated, especially given how violent our everyday rhetoric is (as it always is in a culture of demagoguery) all over the political spectrum. But the NRA does enable mass shootings insofar as every mass shooting enabled by a weapon the NRA wants to make sure is easily available is additional evidence for how damaging the NRA is. (And the “we just need to have a more Christian nation and should enact policies” is an irrational stance and a great example of bad faith argumentation.)  But that doesn’t make the SF resolution right. We are not in a zero-sum world of politics in which “the other side” being wrong means this side is right.

We are in a world in which we should be arguing policy, not engaging in competitions about who is more loyal to the in-group or arguments about which group is better.

Gun violence in the US is a major problem, and treating this issue as though it’s a zero-sum argument between the two political parties is like the crew of the Titanic making a decision about navigation on the basis of who won the on-board shuffleboard competition.

Defenders of Trump’s China policies are avoiding rational policy argumentation, and his critics aren’t doing much better

I study train wrecks in public deliberation, and they’re all times when the people making decisions lived and breathed a world of demagoguery.  In that world, the media says, “This policy is right because there is a legitimate need, and if you disagree with this policy then you don’t acknowledge the severity of the need.”

At one point in time, my husband and I lived in a part of Kansas City we knew had issues with the water supply. We asked a water filter salesperson to come out and talk to us about their filter. The salesman went on and on about how bad the water was, but was struck dumb when we asked about how and whether his filter would solve the problem better than other filters available to us.

That the water was bad doesn’t mean his company’s product was the right solution.

And, really, that’s what people need to understand about decision making. That there is a legitimate need doesn’t mean that this policy is the solution.

In a culture of demagoguery, we argue about only two points: whether there is a need, and the moral quality of the two groups. So, there is the bizarre (and disastrous) assumption that, once you’ve identified the need, then you decide to hand the problem over to the people who seem trustworthy–in other words, appearing to be authentically in-group.

What I’ve come to believe is that, when you put together those two ways of thinking about political deliberation—we only argue need; we dismiss any criticisms of the in-group policy as “biased—you get train wrecks.

I think Trump’s stance regarding China is just such a train wreck. There is a legitimate need, but neither Trump nor his supporters have put together a good argument as to how his plan solves the problem, is feasible, and doesn’t have unintended consequences worse than the problem he’s solving (which is the major critique of his flopping around), and even his critics aren’t arguing policy.

Trump doesn’t have a coherent plan, so it’s hard to argue why it’s a good one, and it’s hard to argue against it, but his critics could point that out. Instead, most anti-Trump media seem engaged in two-minutes hate about Trump, Republicans, and conservatives.

And that is a culture of demagoguery.

But, it’s important to note that people all over the political spectrum (there aren’t two sides) agree that the need argument is strong. It’s an observable fact China engages in and allows intellectual property theft , and that’s what this trade war is about . The arguments for being tougher with China involve violations of copyright —things that have nothing to do with working class people. There are reasonable arguments that the US needs a different set of policies regarding China.

The water in our part of Kansas City really was bad. That didn’t mean this product was good.

What China is doing is bad, but that doesn’t mean Trump’s policy is right. So, what are the arguments for how what he is doing will solve the problem?

I’ve really tried to find arguments defending his policies, and they’re all need arguments—that what he’s doing is right because China is bad. That is, his policy is right because the need is real.

That’s an irrational argument, and an evasion of policy deliberation.

I’m finding a strong consensus that he’s handling foreign affairs, especially economic, badly, even among normally GOP- standard bearing sites. Here’s Foreign Affairs.  Here’s the Cato Institute. And even American Enterprise, which supports a “tough” stance, says Trump’s policy goals are unclear, and advocates other policies (click on the links). The Wall Street Journal says Trump is losing the trade war with China, partially because it’s working from a “shopping list.”

The very conservative organization Heritage says Trump’s policies are bad. What’s odd is that while many pro-Trump media are arguing Trump’s policies are correct because the need is real (an evasion of rational policy argumentation) many reactionary, free-market, and self-identified conservative sites are the ones engaged in policy argumentation, arguing that Trump’s policies are the wrong strategies–they’re engaged in policy argumentation.

And even media that defend getting “tough” on China aren’t defending his current strategies.

The only defenses I’ve found are along these lines—that his policy must be right because it’s punitive.  That’s interesting since George Lakoff long ago argued that “conservatives” (I would say “reactionaries”) always assume that the correct policy solution to every political problem is to identify and then punish the people who are behaving badly. That is a worldview operating in realm free of falsification, relevant evidence, and rational policy argumentation.

As far as I can tell, no one is engaged in rational policy argumentation defending Trump’s policies regarding China, and that’s important.

And, equally important, the anti-Trump public sphere is not engaged in policy argumentation attacking his policies. This is an exception.

I’ve prowled around various anti-Trump sites and found all sorts of arguments about how Trump’s tariffs are bad because is bad, his policies are grifting since he’s protected his daughter, and other evasions of policy argumentation.

What’s wrong with our political situation is not that GOPpers, who are evil, are in control, nor that Liberals, who are evil, are in control. Nor is our political situation bad because “both sides are just as bad.”

There is, of course, the “horse race” coverage, that reframes policy issues as a race between the two side, and engages in motivism—thereby accepting the demagogic premise that politics is a zero-sum battle between two sides.

There aren’t two sides. Our world is not one in which there is a side that says that China is just fine so we need to do nothing and another side that says China is bad so we need to support Trump’s actions.

The world of politics is a world of uncertainty, nuance, and luck that says we should engage in rational policy argumentation about our various policy options regarding China and not reduce every political issue to “liberals” v. “conservatives”—aka, “us v. them.”

As citizens in a democracy we are not faced with the issue of whether Trump is a good or bad person, whether Democrats are better or worse people than Republicans. We are faced with the issue of how to deliberate effectively about issues that aren’t usefully reduced to us v. them.

What matters about Trump’s policies is that they are policies. Let’s argue about them.