Arguing with GOP Loyalists

I have a difficult time finding a good term to describe people who get all their information exclusively from what is sometimes called “the right-wing media sphere”—that is, Fox, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Drudge Report. I don’t like calling it “right-wing” because I think one of the reasons we’re in the mess we are is the false binary (or no less false continuum) of right v. left. And, as is often remarked, it’s hard to look over Limbaugh or Fox and infer a coherent ideology that they’re promoting. They claim they’re against big government, debt, government spending, corruption in government, but they aren’t against those in principle—they defend big government when it comes to regulations they like, debt caused by wars and tax cuts, self-paying if it’s done by Republicans.

Those media and pundits aren’t consistently conservative—sometimes they’re very radical. They often reject basic principles of conservative ideology, such as promoting free trade, so it seems to me an important misnomer to call them “conservative.” What they are consistent about is promoting the election of Republican candidates, supporting the GOP in Congress, deflecting any criticism of GOP political figures (unless those are figures who dissent from or criticize the most extreme members of the GOP, in which case those figures are condemned as not true Scotsmen, oops, I mean not really Republican).

Unhappily, most research in political science relies on the binary or continuum, and I think it seriously confounds the results. A lot of the research relies on people identifying as “conservative,” but that doesn’t mean that they have a “conservative” ideology. A lot of research shows that people endorse “liberal” policies, so you have lefties insisting that they could win elections by promoting progressive policies, but that’s the wrong conclusion. Most people don’t vote on the basis of a policy agenda, but identity (and sometimes shark attacks), and there are two kinds of identities that a lot of voters like: some like the image of a “conservative” person; some vote for “the outsider who will go into Washington and kick some ass.” Thus, there are a lot of people who endorse progressive Democrat policies, but vote loyally Republican (see especially Rationalizing Voter, Stealth Democracy, Politics of Resentment, Ideology in America).

Sometimes I use the term “people who self-identify as conservative” since that’s really what much of that research shows. And here is where scholars of rhetoric could intervene usefully in the discourse of political science. It seems to me that a lot of political science assumes a coherent identity (I am a liberal); more recent work is usefully complicating that assumption (such as the work showing that people like the identity of independent, but who vote GOP consistently), but it’s no surprise to scholars of rhetoric. It’s consubstantiation.

I sometimes use the term “rabid factionalism,” since I sincerely think that’s accurate. There are various problems with that term, though, especially if you’re actually trying to reach people in that hyperfictional bubble. Benkler et al. call it a “propaganda feedback loop”—another accurate term. The problem, of course, is that people in a propaganda feedback loop never see themselves that way.

My first experience of recognizing that I was talking to people in a propaganda feedback loop was at Berkeley, and it was, if I remember correctly, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (Stalinists). There were four communist groups at Berkeley when I got there (maybe five), each of which had a very small number of members, and they mostly spent their time breaking up each other’s meetings. There were the Stalinists (they didn’t call themselves that—they might have called themselves Leninists) who handed out The Daily Worker (as far as I can tell, a Pravda-supported publication) and defended the USSR to the hilt. There were the Trotskyites, who spent most of their time fighting the Stalinists. There were Maoists, and the anarcho-communists (they worked at the Writing Center, and, interestingly enough, listened to a lot of New Age music).

A propaganda feedback loop, as Benkler et al. define it, is one in which
“media outlets, political elites, and publics form and break connections based on the contents of statements, and that progressively lowers the cost of telling lies that are consistent with a shared political narrative and increases the costs of resisting that narrative in the name of truth.” (33)

What was interesting to me about the Stalinists is that their defenses of the USSR relied on two strategies: 1) having at their fingertips all sorts of accurate statistics and information about the wrongs of the US; 2) dismissing any criticism of the USSR as biased on the grounds that it was criticism.

Of course, many of the things for which the Stalinists were criticizing the US were things the USSR was also doing: pollution, oppression of minority groups, corruption, imperialism. More important, the logical problem with the first strategy is that the US being wrong doesn’t make the USSR right. But it was the second one that intrigued me—it seemed to me an open admission of irrational loyalty. It meant that they could never engage in good faith argumentation, or a rational assessment of their own positions.
They were in a propaganda feedback loop.

Nothing so reminds me of those Stalinists as talking to someone who gets all their information from the GOP propaganda feedback loop (Fox/Limbaugh/Breitbart and so on). They make those two moves—they have lots of information as to what’s wrong with Democrats, but it’s a logical fallacy to assume that (even if the information is right, and it often isn’t) the Democrats being bad means the GOP is good. Ethical behavior is not a zero-sum, in which bad behavior on one side necessarily means better behavior on the other.

It’s a rhetorical mistake (one I often make) to dispute about those claims. They don’t really matter—for the GOP Loyalist (which is what I’m now thinking is the right term), they’re just examples of how awful Democrats are. If you persuade them that that example (or information) is wrong, they won’t change their mind either about Democrats or about their sources of information. As with the Stalinists, it’s that second argumentative strategy that matters: they will reject any disconfirming information, criticism, or dissent on the grounds that it is criticism and therefore “biased.”

It’s an admission of deliberately irrational loyalty.

I’m not saying that that deliberate irrational choice to remain in a propaganda feedback loop is limited to one place on the political spectrum (see How Partisan Media Polarize America), or even limited to politics–one reason I dislike the “two sides” model is that it limits our ability to talk about that problem because it so quickly turns into “you do it too!” And, while it’s true that there are lots of propaganda feedback loops, it isn’t true that both sides are just as bad–people who self-identify as liberal (0r left) are more likely to believe in fact-checking, consume media that issues corrections and has norms of accountability, and get information from disconfirming sources.

A lot of people ask me about how to argue with relatives who get all their information from the GOP propaganda feedback loop, and one thing I would say is: don’t feel that you have to. If they say, “Trump is the most effective President ever” or “Clinton laughed about a rape” you can, if you want, show them the video (she wasn’t laughing that a woman was raped) or give the data about Trump’s failure. But you don’t have to. One response is to ask them, “Do you get your information from sources that would tell you if he isn’t?” And then you can shift the argument about Trump to a discussion about information and deliberation.

Or, just refuse to argue, on the grounds that they don’t know anything about politics; they just believe. As long as they stay in that feedback loop, as long as they refuse to take seriously sources that disagree with them, they aren’t capable of a rational argument about politics. You can argue with them if you want, but it’s also possible to find various kind ways of saying that you aren’t arguing with them because they’re in a propaganda feedback loop, and then invite them to have more pie. Everyone likes pie.